Trump puts his stamp on the Ukraine-Russia war
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This truly shocking statistic reveals the depth of Trump's deception
We’re all familiar with Trump’s famous deportation flights of Venezuelans and Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a concentration camp in El Salvador in violation of a court order.
But did you know there have been over 1,000 such flights in the past few months, some to absolute hellhole countries?
On top of that, the Washington Post reports that ICE is planning to open or expand 125 new “detention facilities” across the country, including ones to hold families, giving America the largest prison system in the world.
The paper notes:
“The documents outline the strategy behind ICE’s breakneck expansion, a chaotic effort that has already triggered lawsuits and accusations of cruelty.”
Are Americans being conditioned by our media to become “Good Germans”?
For several decades I did international relief work for a nonprofit based in Germany; my family and I even lived at the organization’s headquarters in Stadtsteinach for much of 1986/1987. One of my closest co-workers and mentors was a man 25 years my senior, Horst Von Heyer, who’d been a teenage member of the Hitler Youth when WWII ended.
I started working with Horst in the late 1970s after his assistant was eaten by a crocodile in southern Africa. For example, we went into Uganda together to deal with the post-Idi Amin 1980 famine and set up a program for orphaned kids that continues to this day. When we lived in Germany, Horst and I used to have lunch together nearly every day when we were both in town. He became one of my closest friends (he’s now passed away).
So, of course, I asked him how Germans (and he, as a teenager) could possibly have been okay with the Nazis rounding up millions of Jews and other “undesirables” to ship via boxcars to the death camps.
His answer was frankly shocking in its simplicity:
“We didn’t know.”
The concentration camps within Germany were, he explained, for “the worst of the worst” criminals and “traitors” who’d tried to overthrow the country. The Republican Great Depression and the chaos that followed WWI, he told me, had created a massive problem of street crime and homeless people, so most middle-class Germans, feeling unsafe, enthusiastically supported Hitler’s “law and order” agenda.
Those “innocent” Jews, Gypsies, and others removed from local areas were being moved, Horst said he was told, because their residences were slated to be part of what we’d call “urban renewal” efforts. They were simply being resettled, and it would end up better for them and the communities they were leaving.
“I remember how shocked we all were when the pictures came out from the Polish death camps like Auschwitz at the end of the war,” he told me. “You Americans and the rest of the world were shocked, too. Hitler’s men and the German media had done a really good job of keeping it all under wraps.”
In that, I discovered by reading William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and other research, Horst was right.
By the end of 1933, Hitler had largely neutered Germany’s free press; not by market competition, but by bankrupting writers and outlets with libel lawsuits, unleashing police raids for “slander” claims, vigilante “Brownshirt” militia violence against reporters, arrests of publishers for “publishing anti-German propaganda,” the outright seizure of progressive newspapers, and a sweeping Schriftleitergesetz “Editor’s Law” which criminalized journalism that exposed government excesses.
Nazi loyalists and party-friendly oligarchs took over the press outlets that remained in a massive media consolidation project, ensuring that every headline and every radio news report served the regime much like Fox “News” and rightwing hate-radio/podcasts do today for Trump.
When stories were published about Jews and others being transported, they were couched in euphemisms such as Umsiedlung (“resettlement”) or Evakuierung (“evacuation”) and Arbeitseinsatz (“labor deployment”) in official communications, press coverage, and public speeches.
These terms fit neatly into propaganda narratives about “urban renewal,” war-effort labor needs, or “population transfers” from “overcrowded” and “crime-ridden” cities. There were literally no public reports in Germany about mass killings or illegal detentions between 1934 and the end of the war in 1945.
Today in the U.S., the lack of coverage of Trump’s brutal treatment of immigrants, lack of due process, and hundreds of monthly deportation flights to hellhole countries or foreign concentration camps isn’t due to a Schriftleitergesetz legal ban but rather to billionaire owners sucking up to Trump, partisan political framing, and the media’s tendency to underplay ongoing, systemic human rights abuses once they’ve been normalized.
We saw something like this in the early days of the Iraq war when the Bush administration tried to normalize and justify the black sites, torture, and murders that were later exposed to the horror of Americans and the world.
In both 1940s Germany and today’s America, the effect is similar: the public is shielded from the human scale of state-led actions against targeted groups, making it easier for those policies to continue without mass pushback.
In the first week of Trump’s second term, 7,300 people were put on military flights and deported from the US. The numbers have only grown since then, with virtually no oversight and little by way of due process. Since he took power, over 100 immigration judges (about 15%) have been fired nationwide; as Chicago’s former Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Jennifer Peyton noted.
She added:
“Since January 2025, the immigration courts under EOIR are no longer honoring or offering due process like they did when I was appointed. The court system has been systematically and intentionally destroyed, defunded, and politicized by this administration. I don't know why this has happened, but I fear for our country and for justice.”
Meanwhile, American media has engaged in a 1940s-German-like scheme to downplay the horrors of these disappearances.
When I heard a guest on CNN mention in passing that there’d been over 1,000 deportation flights in recent months, I was shocked. Why didn’t I know?
Every day I read at least a dozen different news outlets and am a voracious consumer of cable news. Yet, like most Americans, I thought deportation flights to foreign horror chambers were the exception — like with Abrego Garcia — rather than the rule. After all, the Biden administration was also running deportation flights; the difference is that they only happened after due process had been granted the deportees, and they were never sent to foreign concentration camps or dumped in hellholes like South Sudan.
In 1944, as questions were being raised by stories leaking into the foreign press about the boxcars of people traversing the countryside, the Hitler administration produced a slick PR effort around a concentration camp in Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. It served as a way-stop on the routes to the death camps, but Goebbels had the barracks painted, gardens planted, and the grounds beautified.
He then organized “social and cultural events for the visiting dignitaries” and the press, and made a documentary film of their one-day visit with the simple title Theresienstadt that played in theaters across Germany.
The international press bought it hook, line, and sinker, reporting to the world that the Nazi detention camps weren’t all that bad and were just part of rebuilding and cleaning up Germany after WWI and the Great Depression.
Which raises the question: How long will it be before we start seeing films and made-for-TV events with Kristi Noem or Pam Bondi telling us how “humane” the new private, for-profit “detention centers” are that are being built by Trump’s donors and cronies?
I give them about a month to get their propaganda routine together. In the meantime, they seem to be doing everything they can to make sure we don’t really know the full scope and brutality of their efforts to push brown and Black people out of the United States.
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Dear America, Nobody makes a deal like Trump. NOBODY
Dear Americans Who Can’t Stop Rooting For Me No Matter What,
First, I just want to say I am still a little jet logged from flying around the world and back and climbing on top of that incredible summit in Alaska with the great President Putin and looking down on people. So I hope you will bare with me, as you read this Very Important Letter today.
Thank you in advance, and you are welcome in the future.
To begin with, you should know that my oxygen levels are incredibly high, and even the Russian diplomats couldn’t believe how hot my ankles looked after that grueling meeting in which I brought peace back to Alaska, hope to Russia, and only a tiny bit of hurt to Ukraine — much, much less then anybody could have ever expected.
One of the diplomats who couldn’t stop looking at my ankles, a very pretty blonde girl may I say, said through an interrogator that they expected to see my ankles swollen up like a balloon after the press reports from our dirty, rotten, disgusting media here in the states. Instead, she told me through that interrogator that she saw a champion of a man, whose ankles looked no older than 50, and probably even less than that. And remember: She has a diploma.
I took this as a great compliment after climbing that summit, and meeting their leaders on equal footing with my incredibly trim ankles.
Right off the top, I want to inform you that I will have to keep this Very Important Letter short today, because I want to concentrate on everything I did at this grueling summit, and keep the emphasis away from what didn’t happen with Jeffrey Epstein and all those girls. I think we’ve all heard enough about that. Besides, I prefer screwing President Zelensky instead.
That’s a joke.
Or maybe not.
You can never tell with me, because I make a point of never smiling. Even though I should be happy, I see smiling as a tremendous weakness. You’ll notice that after everything I said in that terrific summit, Vlad was doing all the smiling. The last time I smiled on top of that summit was when Vlad got off the airplane.
That should tell you everything you need to know about how it went.
So I’d talk and Vlad would do all the smiling. He didn’t know what to make of it. Even when he told me that he felt sorry for me that the 2020 election was stolen, I didn’t smile. I did thank him for the sediments, but I made sure not to smile about it.
Truth is, I was happy that a man of such sensational stature and incredible power saw the election in 2020 exactly as I did. This is a man who constantly wins elections by tremendous margins, so I think he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to other people winning elections by tremendous margins like I do.
We have this and many, many other things in common. Except I am taller than him. Much, much taller, and a little bit smarter. Not a lot smarter, but a little, and I think that incinerates him.
I could tell the sexy Russian girl with the diploma, who was admiring my slim ankles felt the same way, too — I mean about the elections. This has all been so incredibly unfair to me, but I told her I am working my hardest to make sure our elections are as fair as Russia’s in the future. This brought a smile to her face, too, but I didn't blink.
On that note, when I am done with this letter, I will be talking with Governor Costello in Texas to jerrystander things there so we never lose the Senate again.
Everybody can thank me for that later.
But for now, you are welcome.
Because of national security emotions, I can’t get too much into what Vlad and I discussed for three hours at the top of that summit, but rest assured, he was smiling the whole time, because he isn’t as strong as I am. Without devolving too much here, I think it’s safe to say Zelensky won’t be smiling very much when I tell him how little of his country I want him to give to Vlad, so we can bring peace to the world, and I can win another Noble Peace Prize.
Basically, I just want him to give Vlad a little corner of Ukraine that’s no bigger than North Carolina or New Jersey. He won’t even notice it’s gone. In exchange, Vlad will agree not to attack Ukraine as long as I am in office. And given the terrific shape of my ankles that could be a very long time.
It is incredible that nobody thought of this before. Vlad couldn’t believe what a terrific deal it was. I’ve never seen him smile like that. Meantime, I just pouted, but inside I was jumping around like a man with 27-year-old ankles.
Nobody makes a deal like me. NOBODY.
I did tell Vlad that Russia could keep shooting and bombing Ukrainians until this fantastic deal is finalized, because that was only fair. You couldn’t believe how much he was smiling after that one. I even threw in attacking my own capital with armed troops as a bonus just to show him how serious I was.
At that point, I knew I had him right where I wanted him.
Well … I really do have to wrap this Very Important Letter up. My incredible stamina is running out of gas.
But before I meet Marco on the golf course, after talking with Governor Costello, I want to make sure to thank the men of our armed forces for their incredible job rolling out the red carpet for not one, but two powerful world leaders. Nobody’s ever asked our military men to do that before, but I had great confidence that as their Commander inside their Chief, that they could perform this tricky, dangerous duty.
Needless to say, this made Vlad smile, while I kept that powerful pout on my rigid military face. There’s no way Vlad expected red carpet treatments on my beautiful runway. Right then and there, I knew he would be eating out of my hands.
I still am shivering in my spine when I think of how powerful I was during this summit. While talking with Sean in front of 227 million people on Fox Friday night, I almost cracked a smile. Sean told me it would be OK if I smiled just a little, but I told him that wouldn't be appropriate given that I never let one smile out in front of Vlad, even though he deserved one.
Sean didn't know how to take that, but he never asked me one question that I couldn’t answer after that, and everybody I’ve talked to seemed pretty happy about it.
So that's it for now, average voters of America.
I hope you are as proud of me as I deserve. All I ever do is think about you, and how you can help keep me in office for as long as possible to make great deals on your behalf.
May God get around to blessing you and your families, long after he’s done blessing me.
DONALD J. TRUMP
- (D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and in addition to finishing up this latest letter, finished a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)
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This masterful trolling has finally exposed a Trump myth
You may have noticed something. I used to talk about the president’s dementia pretty regularly, but haven’t in months. That’s because I’ve lost faith. I used to believe the Washington press corps would see the plainly obvious. I no longer believe that. The hypocrisy is too baked in.
The double standard that prevents political reporters from seeing Donald Trump’s totalitarianism is the same double standard that prevents them from seeing his dementia. He doesn’t make choices. Only Democrats do. He can’t be held responsible for what he says.
President Joe Biden tried to get his facts straight, because he believes in speaking truthfully and because he took seriously his role as an honest broker. But he sometimes stumbled over this or that word. He’s old. He’s a stutterer. Old stutterers sometimes mangle what they say. He was held responsible, anyway, and ultimately driven from office.
Trump can’t be a--ed when it comes to facts. He lies with confidence and “authority,” though what he says is often insane. No one says he has dementia. No one asks. Anyone who has seen it up close likely wonders why it seems like no one sees what’s plainly obvious.
In the absence of questions about his brains falling out of his ears, Trump looks strong. That’s his MO: do whatever you want, whenever you want, to whomever you want, safe in the knowledge that no one has the will to stop you. Therefore, if no one in the press corps has the will to doubt his mental fitness, then – voila! – he’s mentally fit, and every single unchallenged confabulation stands like a pillar of truth.
As long as the Washington press corps looks away from Trump’s dementia, he will never seem demented. And they will continue to look away, because they are incentivized to. They need attention. Trump brings attention, even when, or especially when, his statements are insane. As long as they do that, his insanity will seem like strength.
'Clearly trolling the president'
This is where Gavin Newsom comes in. I know virtually nothing about his record, but I do know the California governor has been pursuing a media strategy that is a model for other ambitious Democrats to follow. It also has the potential to expose the president’s weakness.
And Newsom doing that by unlikely means: copying Donald Trump.
First, some context. Last week, Newsom held what he called a “big beautiful press conference” in which he announced his intention to ask voters in California to approve a plan to redraw that state’s congressional districts in response to Texas’ bid to do the same.
He put the coming midterms in the context of insurrection.
“We’re here, because Donald Trump on January 6 tried to light democracy on fire, tried to wreck this county, tried to steal an election,” he said. “And here we are, in open and plain sight, before one vote is cast in the 2026 midterm elections, and here he is, once again, trying to rig the system.”
Newsom added: “He doesn't play by a different set of rules. He doesn't believe in the rules. And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done. It's not enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be. We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt.
“We have got to meet fire with fire.”
While Newsom was making these remarks, the president’s secret police showed up outside. ICE agents reportedly arrested at least one person. The LA Times would later call the episode a “show of force.”
“Right outside, at this exact moment, are dozens and dozens of ICE agents,” Newsom said at the presser. “Do you think it's coincidental? … He's a failed president. Who else sends ICE at the same time we're having a conversation like this? Someone who's weak. Someone who's broken. Someone whose weakness is masquerading as strength."
After the presser, Newsom took questions from reporters. One asked about the ICE agents outside.
“It's pretty sick and pathetic,” the governor said. “It's everything you need to know, the setting we’re under. They chose the time, manner and place to send [ICE’s] district director outside, right when we’re about to have this press conference.
“It’s everything you know about Donald Trump's America,” Newsome said. “It was top-down. You know that for a fact. They’ll deny it, I’m sure. Maybe they won’t deny it. It’s everything you know about the authoritarian tendencies of the president of the United States. … Wake up, America. You will not have a country if he rigs this election. You will see a president running for a third term. Mark my words.”
But it was only at the end of the presser that Newsom’s media strategy came to light. It was when a reporter asked about “posts on X that are clearly trolling the president?” As the redoubtable Jamesetta Williams said, it was a brilliant strategy.
“He knows if he trolls the president by posting the way he does, the press will give him scrutiny that Trump escapes, allowing him to give this kind of compelling answer," she said.
Sounding like a demented old man
What answer?
“I hope it’s a wake up call for the president of the United States,” he said. “I’m just following his example. If you have issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns with what he’s putting out, as president. To the extent that it’s gotten some attention, I’m pleased, but I think the deeper question is how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets and Truth Social posts over the course of the last many years to go without similar scrutiny and notice.”
Governor of California Gavin Newsom talks to U.S. President Donald Trump in Los Angeles, California. REUTERS/Leah Millis
See what’s going on here?
First, let’s note what he’s not doing. Newsom is not playing by the old playbook saying Democrats should not go low, where the Republicans always go, for fear of bringing every discussion down to their level. Newsom is playing two levels at the same time: calling for America to wake up before a despot completely takes over as well as mercilessly mocking said despot by using the same tone and tenor he uses daily.
Second, Newsom is counting on the press corps to be exactly what it is: an amoral group of attention-seekers that is happy to play along with Trump’s authoritarianism if it’s convenient, even if that means sacrificing their credibility by holding the Democrats to the highest standard while holding the Republicans to none at all.
For the last week, Newsom’s office has been trolling Trump (see the top image for an example), as Trump trolls everyone, and yesterday, a reporter wanted to know why, which is a question Newsom can predict will come from reporters who are oblivious to their double standard.
Third, he can comment on that double standard and raise awareness of it not only among people who consume the news but among people who produce it. It’s one thing for Newsom to say Donald Trump is weak and “broken” (that’s Newsom’s code word for dementia), and that his “weakness is masquerading as strength.” It is another to level those allegations while suggesting reporters have conspired for years in the masquerade. He suggests: You notice my trolling? You notice it sounds like I’m a demented old man yelling at clouds? But not Trump? Why?
And while all that is happening, Newsom is demonstrating what real strength is by calling on voters to defend their democracy while the president sends his goons to silence him. To be honest, Newsom could not have bought better staging of the message he was trying to send.
And with this trolling, I think Newsom paves the way for something even more powerful. Trump has convinced lots of Americans that the press corps is against them, because the press corps is liberal, and lots of reporters do backflips trying to prove they are not. But by trolling Trump — by speaking in the voice of an old man who has lost his mind — and by baiting the press corps into asking him about it, Newsom creates conditions in which it’s possible to see that the press corps protects Trump from the people by hiding the truth about him.
Donald Trump wants people to see the media through the lens of us-versus-them. Newsom is flipping that around, and I’m all for it.
Indeed, I think he should drop the other shoe.
Show up for his next press conference wearing a suit that’s too big, a tie that’s too long, pants that are pulled up too high, and a tan that obviously comes out of a spray can, all while bragging about how he’s the manliness man to ever walk the earth, despite falling in love with any man who flatters him, or chickening out at the sight of conflict.
I would love to hear questions about that.
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These groveling crackpots will be Trump's downfall
Monica Crowley, a former Fox News personality who is now Trump’s chief of protocol, apparently left behind in a public area of an Alaskan hotel documents describing confidential planned movements of Trump and Putin during their Friday meeting in Alaska.
That’s nothing compared to Emil Bove, Trump’s new nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who reputedly told subordinates at the Department of Justice that they should tell the courts “f--k you” and ignore any court order blocking the deportations of Venezuelan migrants declared to be gang members.
Then there’s Billy Long, a former auctioneer and Republican congressman who Trump nominated less than two months ago to head the Internal Revenue Service, with little background in tax policy beyond promoting a fraud-riddled tax credit. Long has already been fired after clashing with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Long was the seventh person to head the IRS this year.
Let’s not forget E.J. Antoni, whom Trump just nominated to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing former BLS chief Erika McEntarfer for presiding over a disappointing jobs report earlier this month.
Antoni is that rarity who has drawn harsh criticism from economists on the right as well as the mainstream for being ignorant, unprincipled, and incompetent. He recently called it “good news” that “all of the net job growth over the last 12 months has gone to native-born Americans.”
I haven’t even mentioned the towering ineptitude of Trump’s Cabinet picks, such as Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kristi Noem. Or the flagrant cruelty and wild negligence of Trump assistants Russell Vought and Stephen Miller.
How to explain the rise of so many inept and unprincipled people?
Easy. They could never succeed on their own merits. As soon as their brainless incompetence became apparent — likely as soon as they took the first job that required some degree of intelligence and integrity — they were fired.
So they learned that, if they wanted to be rewarded with promotions, money, and power, they could not rely on the normal processes and systems of recognition for jobs well done. If they were to make anything of themselves, they must instead become a---lickers, lapdogs, and sycophants.
They must latch onto someone who values loyalty above integrity or competence, someone for whom fawning obsequiousness is the most important criterion for being hired and promoted, ideally someone who cannot tell the difference between a groveling toady and a knowledgeable adviser.
Enter Trump.
History is strewn with the wreckage of dictatorships that have attracted and promoted incompetent lapdogs lacking talent or integrity. As Hannah Arendt explained in her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism:
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Early in his career, Trump apprenticed himself to Roy Cohn, an unprincipled lawyer who taught the young Donald how to gain wealth and influence through ruthless bullying, profane braggadocio, opportunistic bigotry, baseless lawsuits, lying, and more lying.
Yet as Trump’s “fixer” with politicians, judges, and mob bosses, Cohn remained utterly loyal to Trump and his father, Fred.
Years later, in his first and bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, Trump drew a distinction between integrity and loyalty. He preferred the latter, and for him, Roy Cohn exemplified it. Trump contrasted Cohn with "all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who made careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty …. What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite."
Cohn died a disgrace, disbarred by the New York State Bar for unethical conduct after attempting to defraud a dying client by forcing him to sign a will amendment leaving Cohn his fortune.
People who climb upward by sacrificing their integrity to slavish subservience almost always fall on their faces eventually. Blind ambition trips them up. They cannot explain or defend their behavior by relying on principled competence because, like Roy Cohn, they are unprincipled and incompetent to their cores.
The people they latch onto meet similar fates but for a different reason.
Leaders who value loyalty above all else find themselves surrounded by sycophantic crackpots and fools who will not provide leaders objective or useful feedback about their actions — no warnings beforehand and no criticism afterward. All they get are ass-licking commendations —“Wonderful idea, sir!” “Brilliant execution, sir!”
These cocoons of flattery seal off such leaders from the real-world consequences of what they do — which inevitably leads them to make grave mistakes. Some of those mistakes eventually cause their downfalls.
This perverse symmetry — the certain demise of grovelers because they’re incompetent and unprincipled, and the inevitable downfall of those to whom they grovel because they never receive useful and accurate feedback — marks the endpoint of all totalitarian systems. It’s the path on which Trump now treads.
This is not necessarily cause for hope. If history is any guide, many innocent people will suffer before the incompetent grovelers and the vain objects of their groveling meet their inevitable fates. America and the world are already suffering.
- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com
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Trump’s checkered past proves this massive move was smoke and mirrors
As a life-long and serial violator of law and order – both civil and criminal – and likewise constitutionally, as president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, the Outlaw and Extorting Commander-in-Chief, is someone criminologists would commonly label as a “career criminal.”
Accordingly, Teflon Don or the Houdini of White-collar Crime, as he is known in criminological circles, possesses an unmatched or unique expertise in fraud, corruption, and lawlessness. And ever since the Boss narrowly defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and even before he returned to the Oval Office in 2025, he has been ratcheting up his dictatorial lawlessness and amplifying his corruption more than in his first term.
As Anand Giridharadas writes on Substack, or as he stated August 12th on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, “DC’s real crime problem is the insurrectionist fraudster crime family boss who wants to take it over.”
Unfortunately the rest of the nation’s crime problem is the same one that plagues DC.
To believe for one moment that this enduring and persistent lawless criminal cares one bit about either law and order or crime and justice — other than to exploit them — is like believing in the tooth fairy. That or a stickup man guarding the bank, the police policing the police, an inmate running the asylum, a president pardoning 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists, or Trump’s Department of Justice or Immigration and Customs Enforcement doing anything according to the rule of law.
Trump could care less about whether crime is getting worse or better and whether or not people are safe and secure. His deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles earlier this year had absolutely nothing to do with curbing civil unrest or political violence. Similarly, the deployment of nearly 800 troops to D.C. for 30 days will have no lasting or even temporary impact on preventing or deterring violent, property and other garden variety crimes.
If Trump and company were sincere about addressing the very real but hardly out of control crime problem in D.C., then instead of having no plan or merely providing “back-up” for the Metropolitan Police Department as a “show of military force,” the administration should have been targeting specific habitual offenders and places by redeploying senior officers into the poorest wards.
Instead, Trump’s inappropriate and disruptive deployment of the National Guard is just another performative and assaultive exercise in cruelty, like the exporting of noncriminal migrants to an El Salvadoran prison or to home-grown places in violation of the Eighth Amendment like “Alligator Alcatraz,” the detention facility in the Florida Everglades.
The mass deployments of the National Guard are also emblematic of an emerging police state and the testing of the boundaries — of an authoritarian strongman’s desire for ever-increasing executive power and central control of institutions across society.
Trump’s fake descriptions of “roving mobs,” “caravans of mass youth,” or “bloodthirsty criminals” being “out-of-control” in Democratic-run cities, as contrasted with supposedly safe Republican areas, only divides the American people further. It stokes the fears and anxieties of mostly white people who have never lived in any of those urban communities.
Likewise, as Giridharadas correctly points out, “more generalized anxiety that the country is ungovernable” will not only “be given flesh by exaggerated tales of cities overrun [with] junkies and criminals,” but such tales will also help to negatively represent nonwhite Christian others as threatening criminals.
As for reactions to Trump taking control of the D.C. police and his “crackdown” on crime and homelessness in the capital, local protesters led by Black Lives Matter activists spoke out against the federal intervention of some 800 National Guard members into their neighborhoods.
‘Suite’ vs ‘street’
Even if Trump wanted to apply his expertise to stopping or preventing “suite” crimes, as opposed to “street” crimes, within his first seven months in office the president and his administration of quackery have pretty much done everything within their legitimate and illegitimate power to exacerbate the very real world nature of both sorts of crime.
Before turning to Trump 2.0’s massive reductions in expenditures for law enforcement and to the mismanagement of criminal justice for social control purposes, as well as to Trump’s upward trends of unproven corruption and lawlessness, allow me to set the stage by underscoring how the president and his network of well-organized disciples have been engaged in an ongoing treasonous enterprise to kill U.S. democracy.
With plenty of toxic masculinity and thanks mostly to the blessings of the 6-3 MAGA Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. the United States, the new administration has been busy sabotaging the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the application of “the one-person, one-vote rule.”
This administration has also been suppressing any person, place, or point of view that upsets the president’s false narrative, renders Trump’s dystopia and repressive America as merely authoritarian hoaxes, or challenges any fraction of his antidemocratic and anti-constitutional agenda as being un-American or anti-patriotic.
The MAGA extortionists have been coming for the attorneys, the judges, the inspector generals, the regulators, the whistleblowers, the consumers, the CEOs, the scientists, and the historians. In brief, they are doing their worst in real time to whitewash, rewrite, and reshape both Trump’s ubiquitous criminality and the nation’s cultural and social history.
MAGA has been coming for the Fourth Estate, National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Station, Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Institute for Peace, the Smithsonian Institution, the Voice of America, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Library of Congress.
MAGA and Trump 2.0 are also doing their darndest to weaken or break altogether the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, 10th, 13th and 14th amendments.
Finally, with respect to the civil arenas or the public commons, the Trump administration has done its uneven best to divide them by truncating as much as possible citizen rights, civil rights, consumer rights, employment rights, environmental rights, human rights, immigrant rights, reproductive rights, and taxpayer rights. That pretty much wipes out “liberty and justice for all.”
‘Eviscerate due process’
According to the Council on Criminal Justice, here are some key cuts and reductions reported in May of this year:
- In April, Trump terminated 373 grants from the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP) amounting to more than $300 million after $500 million was restored by a judicial decision.
- These terminated grants provided federal support for violence reduction, policing and prosecution, victims’ services, juvenile justice and child protection, substance use and mental health treatment, corrections and reentry, justice systems enhancements, research and evaluation, and other state- and local-level public safety functions.
- The cuts affected grantees from mostly not-for-profit organizations across 37 red and blue states alike as well as in urban, suburban, and rural areas.
- About 40% of those cuts involved references to diversity, equity, race, gender and so on, while the deepest cuts were to organizations that provided training and technical assistance to OJP grantees.
With respect to D.C., we learned from several news outlets including Fox News that three days after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the formation of the Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force Law Enforcement Working Group, the Fiscal Year 2025 Homeland Security Grant Program slashed D.C.’s security funding by 44%, to $20 million.
We have also learned from the Prison Policy Initiative that with respect to federal prisons, Trump has “taken actions to eviscerate due process and the rule of law, worsen prison and jail conditions, expand the use of harsh sentences and law enforcement tactics, eliminate oversight, undermine solutions that reduce incarceration and make communities safer.”
Assertions or claims of often overlapping corruption and/or lawlessness by Trump and company have been far too numerous to count.
The allegations of corruption include:
- Undermining oversight by dismantling checks and balances, as in the firing of the head of the Office of Government Ethics and more than 15 Inspectors Generals.
- Numerous conflicts of interests stemming from the president maintaining ownership of his businesses like those involving his bitcoin, media, and real estate ventures at home and abroad.
- Extorting the legal profession, universities, and other corporate businesses.
- Targeting Trump’s political opponents for doing their lawful jobs.
- Selling access and influence for personal gain as in the use of presidential one-on-one meetings for $5 million a pop or conducting global trade talks to benefit his personal businesses or selling more than $100 million in Trump merchandise.
- Suppressing ongoing anti-corruption prosecutions like those of New York mayor Eric Adams as well as ending police reform agreements and halting the ongoing investigations into police abuse, mismanagement, and civil rights violations.
- Turning the Department of Justice into an extension of himself vis-à-vis the purging of senior career civil servants as well as any of those FBI agents or U.S. attorneys affiliated with the criminal prosecutions of Trump.
The allegations of lawlessness include:
- Executive orders targeting law firms in violation of the first amendment.
- Mass firings or layoffs of federal workers across multiple agencies without due process of law.
- Undermining regulatory agencies as in the closing down of the Consumer Protection Agency or Trump’s EPA’s move to repeal the landmark “endangerment finding” that allows for climate regulation by scientific expertise.
- Ongoing false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and taking baseless actions targeting organizations perceived as adverse to the president’s repressive and authoritarian agenda.
- Numerous executive orders including limiting birthright citizenship, imposing travel bans, and restricting access to mandated health regulations as well as federally contracted grants that were immediately legally challenged.
Even if the Republican sycophants in Congress unanimously support Trump’s fearmongering on behalf of supposed “crime control” and extend the president’s takeover of the D.C. police beyond the original 30 days, per some kind of fake emergency, it will have no sustainable impact on the prevention and deterrence of crime and violence in the capital city.
This is because of the administration not treating gun violence in general as a public health crisis, in addition to its criminalizing and stigmatizing of Black and brown urban communities by unnecessarily sending in federal troops.
By the end of its stay, the federal intervention into local policing will prove of dubious value for law and order. It will turn out to be more wasteful, costly, and unproductive than were Trump’s original cuts and reductions to law enforcement while ICE’s resources and manpower have been boosted to the tune of $150 billion.
And worse yet, the “deployment of FBI agents to deal with local crime puts agents from counterintelligence, public corruption and other divisions with minimal training out on the streets in potentially dangerous encounters, diverting them from their typical jobs at the bureau.”
But what else would one expect from a know-nothing administration and its odious, lawless and corrupt Criminal-in-Chief?
Trump is the same self-dealing fraudster who made $600 million in 2024 from his various properties, licensing deals, crypto holdings, and private golf clubs. And as David Kirkpatrick has maintained in The New Yorker, Trump’s profiteering to the tune of $3.4 billion since 2017 would never have occurred without his becoming the president for a second time. That figure also represents more money than Trump ever earned between the years 1973 to 2016.
- Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm elections.
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This despicable move just exposed what really drives Trump
In 1989, Donald Trump purchased full-page ads in four New York newspapers, including the New York Times, calling for the return of the death penalty after a white jogger was brutally attacked in Central Park. Five Black and Latino teens were arrested for the assault, and, after confessions later determined to have been coerced by the police, they were convicted, even though there was no physical evidence linking any of them to the crime.
In 2002, after the five young men had spent years in prison for a crime they did not commit, their convictions were vacated when DNA evidence linked a serial rapist, Matias Reyes, to the crime. Reyes ultimately confessed, and provided an accounting of the crime that matched details prosecutors already knew, and forensics confirmed he had acted alone.
After the crime was solved, the case became symbolic for systemic injustice, police brutality, and racial profiling. Trump never apologized to the five men, and has never acknowledged what would have happened to them had his death penalty campaign succeeded.
He wants to hate
Trump’s vitriol has percolated in the intervening decades since the Central Park Five. After his full-page ads claimed “roving bands of wild criminals” were controlling NYC streets in 1989, this week he claimed “roving mobs of wild youth” were terrorizing streets in D.C.
Again using inaccurate claims to portray soaring violence, Trump announced on Monday that he was deploying the National Guard and federalizing the D.C. police department in order to rein in “complete and total lawlessness.”
Trump’s falsified charts with selectively outdated D.C. crime statistics were so patently wrong he was factchecked by the BBC, NPR, NYT, PBS and the Justice Department, whose data show that violent crime in Washington is at a 30-year low.
Trump’s addiction to hate and division, promoted through falsehoods, has persisted since the Central Park crime. When then-Mayor Ed Koch called for public healing, seeking to unite rather than divide his city, Trump wasn’t having it. His ad shot back, “"Maybe hate is what we need… I want to hate these muggers and murderers... They should be forced to suffer … Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will…”
Trump has been true to his word at least on this, and has continued ratcheting up false portrayals of dystopian urban hellscapes riddled with crime. Experts have shown a link between Trump’s language, trickle-down racism, and an increase in hate crime.
Support for police brutality
Trump’s early death penalty ads also revealed his thirst for police brutality. He wrote in 1989 that police should be “unshackled” from the constant threat of being called to account for “police brutality,” a sentiment he has echoed ever since:
- In a 2017 speech, Trump said police should not to be “nice” to suspects and encouraged arresting officers not to shield suspects’ heads as they loaded them into squad cars
- In 2020, he celebrated the police killing of Micael Reinoehl, a community activist
- In 2020, in response to protests over police brutality in the George Floyd case, he asked his staff if the protestors couldn’t “just be shot”
- In 2023, he said police should respond to shoplifters by shooting them
- In 2024, he said that one day of “violent policing” would end crime, suggesting that if police could brutalize the population, crime would disappear
- In April, he issued an Executive Order “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement” promoting aggressive police tactics and making it more difficult to punish brutality
- On August 11, announcing his “federal takeover” of Washington D.C., Trump said police and military forces could “do whatever the hell they want” to people on the streets, expressly encouraging brutality.
The problem with getting “tougher” on crime, without addressing community needs, is that it doesn’t work, and often leads to an increase in crime.
Trump’s ineptitude also undermines police accountability efforts, further eroding trust between police and communities. By encouraging police to use excessive force, Trump spreads distrust of police among the public, needlessly endangering the lives of both citizens and police officers.
He may get the violence he craves
It is widely assumed that Trump is using D.C. as a test run for the federal occupation of other Democratic-led cities. During the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, when Trump still had adults in the room to advise him, Trump also wanted to “take over” D.C., but officials warned that such a heavy-handed approach could backfire. This year, in the absence of competent advisors, Trump is indulging his most dangerous impulses.
We now know that, aside from the D.C. “takeover,” Trump is developing a National Guard “strike force” to confront and quell protests, demonstrations, and civil dissent. This “strike force” will act as Trump’s personal militia to crush constitutionally protected speech, in Democratic-run cities, located in Democratic-run states.
Setting aside the glaring unconstitutionality of his plan, military service members aren’t trained to de-escalate tensions, manage crowds, or solve crimes. They are trained to kill. That is why the Posse Comitatus Act forbids using military forces against civilian populations, except in cases of rebellion or insurrection.
The purpose of Trump’s “takeover” of Washington D.C. isn’t to address escalating crime, because D.C. crime isn’t escalating. It isn’t to deal with potholes, beautification, or anything else Trump mentioned in his incoherent August 11 press conference.
Trump is “taking over” D.C., sending in federal troops just as he did in Los Angeles, to normalize an expanded police state. He hopes to keep control of D.C. until it’s time for a J6 rerun, as he scales his 1989 declaration of hate, control, and brutality nationwide.
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free
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This glaring weakness could bring Trump to his knees
President Donald Trump has left his opponents an opening, one with which Democrats can claw away at his seemingly unbreakable hold on power in Washington. It is just not necessarily one that jumps to mind.
In the entirety of Trump's term, nothing has galvanized interest and controversy like the fate of the Epstein files. Yet despite righteous fury over what appears to be an obvious cover-up of historic proportions, there is nothing to indicate that scandal alone, no matter how big and worthy, can threaten Trump's governing coalition and backing in Congress.
So without giving so much as an inch on the Epstein matter, Democrats must prove that they handle two priorities at once by focusing on the vast numbers of voters Trump has left behind in an economy starting to teeter on the brink of a serious downturn.
The Left needs "Project 2026: An economy for all Americans."
For all his wretched racism, his shocking authoritarianism, the never-ending scandals, even increasing concerns about his cognitive decline, Trump and MAGA still poll at their historic average — somewhere between 42-45 percent approval.
But without regard to the baggage, Trump has never had to defend himself amidst serious economic worry. Additionally, he's given no indication to anyone, supporters or otherwise, that he prioritizes working wages, has a plan to fight inflation, or a way to defend the average American's standard of living. Trump has left his entire flank exposed by favoring the fate of his billionaire buddies and crypto-bros.
"No tax on tips" isn't even the tip of an iceberg when it comes to policies promoting working and middle-class voters, definitely not with Medicaid cuts, inflation, and weak job growth.
But that is not Trump's only problem. The choice to fire someone over the release of a moderately disappointing jobs report, as well as a history of trying to create his own reality, demonstrates a preference to conceal that which Americans already feel rather than put forth a plan in response.
It says, "I don't care."
Fitting, because nothing indicates he does.
And that is the flank Democrats must attack. Fortunately, such an action plan need not come at the expense of shedding any values. Democrats can and must still defend equality across all lines. Protect the environment. Investigate Epstein. And hold tight to democracy over authoritarianism. The good news is that it can be done without much difficulty. The ground is that wide open.
Trump's absolute power depends wholly on a subservient Congress, something made infinitely easier during relatively good economic times. Democrats must force Congressional Republicans to continue to do Trump's bidding on Epstein, militarizing cities, tax cuts for billionaires, and tariffs, but now make them own it while dancing backward in a spiraling economic symphony.
Make them defend the Trump economy, knowing he has nothing to offer as Americans lose ground by the month.
We know Trump feels vulnerable. He claims numbers are hoaxed while fighting to shamelessly redistrict Congress. Anything and everything to create an illusion while avoiding a plan. But Americans know that prices aren't hoaxed, and their vote remains theirs without regard to district. The question falls to Democrats: do they have a plan? Can you dance?
Trump taught us all that branding matters in meme-based minds. So brand it.
"Project 2026: An Economy for All Americans."
It is true that much of Trump's appeal to his base rests on racism, misogyny, nativism, and theocratic urges, but consider all that as baked in the base and immovable — sad as it is. Americans are even supporting his militarization of Washington. The only opening lies in pure economic self-interest, the part Trump overlooks as politically unimportant. Maybe it's not to MAGAs … in a good economy.
I pound this all the time. Trump has never had to defend himself amidst bad economic news. The concerning reports are just now starting to trickle in, and the predictions are that it will get worse. Create a plan to be on top of it as the problems snowball, slowing the economy further. All power means all blame.
Yes, the fact the federal government is suppressing evidence of Trump's ties to the world's most notorious child sex-trafficker is important, and every Democrat in Congress needs to press the issue. But no one better rely on a scandal to sufficiently smash Trump's 2026 numbers. He is already accusing the victims of being nothing more than "Democrats." His true base will buy it.
But they won't be buying homes, cars, or even beef in the coming year. Sad as it is, perhaps only that realization will allow Democrats to pick off perhaps one-third of Trump's supporters, now looking at him with a more critical eye. One wishes that the racism, the rape allegations, the authoritarianism, vulgarity, all of it, were enough. It hasn't been so far and, infuriating as it may be, there's no reason to think it ever will be.
But backing down in quiet rage isn't an option. Fortunately, the flank that Trump left exposed is really exposed.
He has nothing on the horizon, and his hard work for billionaires leaves a soon-to-be convenient opening. Democrats need only to prioritize economic action for all and then sell it. Propose an immediate increase in minimum wage, affordable daycare, give tax breaks to employers who pay higher wages and salaries, and stack real numbers into a real plan of action to really get a message across.
One message focused on one election.
For God's sake, start now to have it in place as we go back to school, to the holidays, all leading into 2026. Juxtapose "the Trump economy" with "Project 2026: An economy for all Americans." Talk "trickle up," invest in working Americans, rescind the "tariff tax," and bring it up all the time, every time.
Trump's entire professional and political career is composed of backpedalling from scandal and panic, but never amidst growing economic angst. He is defenseless.
Attack that flank and watch how fast everything else starts to finally matter.
- Jason Miciak is an American attorney, political writer, and author, and can regularly be found at Politizoom.
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One whiny little brat in Congress shows how Trump keeps Republicans on a leash
I think it’s worth dwelling on a small comment made by a small man who thought it was a good idea to sacrifice his dignity as a man, on live TV, for the sake of a dictatorial president and his dictatorial ambitions.
I’m talking about Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett. In a side comment in an interview this morning CNN’s John Berger, he said: “You don’t want to go out on the streets at night in Washington, D.C. … That’s one of the reasons I live in my office at night … It is too dadgum dangerous, brother. It’s too dangerous and everybody knows it.”
Burchett’s goal is convincing us that crime in Washington, D.C., is so bad that Donald Trump is completely justified in taking over the duties of the city’s police department, and in ordering the National Guard, the FBI and the Secret Service to commandeer the enforcement of law.
To be believable, however, we must ignore the fact that Washington, as well as every other major city in America, is seeing historically low rates of crime.
“Homicides, robberies and burglaries [in D.C.] are down this year when compared with this time in 2024. Overall, violent crime is down 26 percent compared with this time a year ago,” per the AP.
“A recent Department of Justice report shows that violent crime is down 35 percent since 2023, returning to the previous trend of decreasing crime that puts the district’s violent crime rate at its lowest in 30 years. That report shows that when compared to 2023 numbers, homicides are down 32 percent, armed carjackings are down 53 percent and assaults with a dangerous weapon are down 27 percent.”
So when Burchett says everybody knows it’s too dangerous to walk the streets at night, clearly, not everybody knows. If asked, however, I’d imagine the congressman would suggest we can’t believe what we’re told by the D.C. police, or even by the president’s Department of Justice.
After all, if “the deep state” can conspire with America’s enemies, foreign and domestic, to cover up evidence of the secret conspiracies contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop, it can conspire to cover up a crime wave so massive that Trump has no choice but become a dictator.
In asking us for our trust, Burchett is tapping into his carefully cultivated image as a man of honor in a city without it. He illustrated that two years ago when recalling a time when former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy came up from behind Burchett while he was talking to a reporter and allegedly elbowed him with “a clean shot” to the kidney.
Never one to let a sucker punch go unanswered, Burchett gave chase, but failed to catch his assailant. He later suggested, however, that the episode was a lesson: a real man looks you in the eye and tells you straight up. If there must be violence, so be it. He doesn’t hit and run.
“[McCarthy] is a bully with $17 million and a security detail,” Burchett said. “He’s the type of guy that, when you’re a kid, would throw a rock over the fence, and run home and hide behind his mama’s skirt.”
I think Burchett understands the situation he’s in.
On the one hand, he wants us to believe he’s a man who lives by his own rules, circumstances be damned, and that those rules stand against rich men like McCarthy, who is too chicken to say what he means and who need other men (“a security detail”) to defend him.
On the other hand, however, he wants us to believe that normal life in Washington is so riven with violence and crime — is so dangerous and “everybody knows it” — he’s justified in never leaving the safety of his office, and in hoping the president of the United States will save him.
And I think he understands that he can’t have it both ways on account of using that little word: “It is too dadgum dangerous, brother.”
That’s a word men sometimes use in solidarity with other men, especially men so similar in appearance and background that it justifies using the word “brother,” which, in this case, is another white man, who on hearing the word might decide to play along, for selfish reasons, in a game in which one man tells the other, you’re still a real man even though you’re admitting you’re too scared to go out at night.
And in using the word “brother,” Tim Burchett suggests what’s really important to him is not manliness, but the appearance of manliness, and, in the context in which he has used the word, he suggest what’s more important than that is the price of that appearance, which is to say, he’s happy to sell off his “code of honor” in exchange for power.
You might say Burchett didn’t hate McCarthy so much as envy him, as Burchett is indeed the type of guy who would throw a rock over the fence, then hide behind his president’s suit. He just hadn’t yet figured out how to be a bully with $17 million and a security detail.
All this smallness is worth dwelling on because authoritarianism depends on whiny little brats like Tim Burchett getting together with other whiny little brats to convince themselves they are big and strong when they are actually small and weak, in the hope their whiny little complaining grows large enough and loud enough they won’t ever have to do the hard work of looking for the inner courage to be men.
When we stop tolerating their cowardice, things might change.
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One powerful remedy would rid us of Trump — and he's scrambling to hide it
It has become increasingly apparent that Donald Trump is turning his presidential administration into the most corrupt in U.S. history. Nothing that comes from the mouth of Trump or his loyalist appointees can ever be trusted.
Trump appointees John Radcliffe, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth, heads of the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon respectively, reiterated Trump’s lie that the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities “obliterated” the country’s nuclear program.
Damage assessments by the Pentagon Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) proved the claim to be patently false.
Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, had testified to Congress that there was no evidence Iran was building a nuclear weapon. Since that assessment ran contrary to Trump’s reason for bombing Iran, Gabbard reversed course, lying that she had been wrong.
Trump’s Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, lied to the Senate Appropriations Committee that massive cuts in employee numbers are not intended to reduce the role or effectiveness of the DOE. In reality, McMahon is doing her intended job: to oversee the dismantling of the department at Trump's behest, to eliminate the federal government’s support for public education.
Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed months ago that she had the list of people associated with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein sitting on her desk. Since such a list would embarrass Trump at the least or implicate him at the worst, she later contradicted herself and said that she was referring to all Epstein documents, not a specific associates list.
After releasing several monthly reports citing positive U.S. job growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported much slower growth for July. Since the report didn’t support Trump’s claims of a booming US economy, Trump attacked BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer, falsely claimed the numbers were rigged, and fired her. No doubt she will be replaced by a Trump loyalist, the veracity of the BLS jobs report never again to be trusted.
Trump’s consistent modus operandi is to attempt to alter reality whenever the truth doesn’t suit him and to get rid of anyone who doesn’t go along.
Trump continues to lie that the 2020 presidential election was fixed, that he had no role in inciting the violent January 6 Capitol riot, that he had no role in the fake presidential electors' scheme, that he didn’t attempt to coerce the governor of Georgia to “find votes,” and that he had the right to abscond with highly classified documents after leaving office in 2021.
His illegal acts earned him two DOJ indictments and potential prison time had he not been elected president.
Of course, Trump’s lying never ceases. To support his demand that the Fed lower interest rates, Trump lied that there is no inflation when the last report indicated a worrisome spike.
To humiliate Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell, Trump ambushed Powell on TV, lying that the Fed had grossly overrun its renovation costs by throwing in a building that was renovated five years ago. Powell called out Trump on the lie and reversed the humiliation, his days as board chair assuredly numbered.
The corruption at the core of Trump’s being has permeated the Republican-controlled federal government. The understood charge of all Trump appointees is to peddle his lies, gloss over his failures, and put their agencies and departments at his disposal. The vast majority of Republican congressmen share in the corruption, either by allowing Trump and his appointees’ lies to go unchallenged or by reinforcing them.
Think tariffs are a boon to Americans? That Trump has the gravitas to bend Putin and Netanyahu to his will? That greater consumer spending will reduce America’s gigantic deficit? That ICE is only going after immigrants with criminal records?
If so, the Trump administration’s perpetual lying machine along with a complicit Republican Congress is accomplishing its purpose.
When a democratic government loses the trust of the people, there is one powerful remedy: turning out the scoundrels who betray the American people with their every dishonesty. But Trump and his servile allies are banking on Americans being so dupable that we will continue swallowing their every deceit.
If they are right, we are fast approaching a totalitarian future where the truth is whatever guileful lie the government fabricates. If they are wrong, we the people will unceremoniously sweep them from office, beginning in 2026, and restore Americans’ trust in our democratic government.
- Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor.
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This secret greedy deal proves Trump's summit is a cynical farce
This is what happens when cynical, greedy, amoral billionaires and psychopaths run a country.
The Times of London (Murdoch-owned) is reporting that billionaire Steve Witkoff, billionaire Donald Trump, and billionaire Vladimir Putin have worked out a model behind the scenes to solve the Ukraine problem: just make it like Gaza.
They’re planning, according to this reporting, to fully respect the borders of Ukraine and the country’s sovereignty, but with one catch. Just like Israel did with Gaza, Ukraine can “self-govern” but all political and economic decisions will be made or approved by Moscow, all funds flowing through Moscow, just like the governments of Gaza and the West Bank are subservient to the whims of Netanyahu and the Israeli Knesset.
It's essentially a plan to return Ukraine to the subordinate status it had when it was part of the old Soviet Union, which Putin appears committed to reestablishing, country by country.
Trump’s Senior Director for Counterterrorism, former Sinclair Broadcasting commentator Sebastian Gorka, went all “peace for our time” Neville Chamberlain with his apparent endorsement of the idea:
“We recognize the reality on the ground and we have one priority above all else, whether it’s the Middle East or whether it’s Ukraine. It’s to stop the bloodshed. Everything else comes after the bloodshed has been halted.”
Meanwhile, NBC News reports that Netanyahu is now moving to Stage Two of his apparent Gaza plan: shipping the citizens of Gaza, who’ve lived there for millennia, to the hellhole of South Sudan.
I say “hellhole” from personal experience. I was working in South Sudan about a decade ago with an international relief organization, 15 miles from the Darfur border, distributing food, medicine, and tents to refugees fleeing the Janjaweed murderers.
We could see the villages burning on the horizon as desperate people — nearly all women, children and the elderly, as the military-age men had all been killed — flooded into the region. Here’s an excerpt from the diary I kept during that trip:
“The land here in South Sudan is vast and flat. The 45,000 people around me share one single hand-pumped well (drilled a decade ago by the United Nations), and no other infrastructure beyond that. No buildings, no roads, no septic or sewage, no schools, no clinics or hospitals, no stores or even storehouses, nothing. Most live on a patch of hard-packed reddish dirt about ten feet square with a few of their possessions marking the perimeters of their ‘home,’ sleeping on the dirt, or on a ragged piece of cloth or, the lucky few, a piece of salvaged tarp from some previous relief mission. Stick-thin women and children with bellies swollen by malnutrition outnumber the men, whose peers were murdered by the Janjaweed or taken as slaves to the north.
“The air is so hot and dry that even smells of body odor vanish. My nose is encrusted with dust. The land is barren of any vegetation at all other than the occasional large tree with roots deep enough to reach into the water table thirty or so feet below us. Dust devils blow up and around, tiny cyclones that seem to erupt from nowhere amidst air that is so hot and dry it feels as if we’ve been wrapped in glass wool insulation and tossed into a furnace’s heating duct.
“One relief worker I met on the way here, who was leaving the Darfur area via Juba (the capital city with only three short paved streets) on the same small plane that brought us in, said, ‘If there is a hell, it is much like South Sudan.’
“This being a refugee community, it is thick with disease, as refugees not only bring diseases with them but are among the most vulnerable of all populations to disease. There’s Buruli ulcer, a flesh-eating and incurable (other than by surgery) disease caused by a bacteria related to leprosy: I saw a case of it yesterday in a little girl who had just arrived from Darfur. She had a hole in the side of her shin that was about four inches long, two inches wide, and three-quarters of an inch deep, nearly down to the bone.
“Ebola was first discovered here and in nearby Zaire. Eighty percent of the world’s cases of Guinea Worm disease are here in Southern Sudan: the microscopic eggs are in the guts of tiny, almost invisible sand fleas that infest food and water, and about three months after eating one, the worms hatch. Over the course of the next year they grow throughout the body, often boring out through the skin causing an ulcer that can take months before the worm fully emerges, causing dreadful and incapacitating pain. There is no cure.
“In South Sudan sleeping sickness — caused by a parasite named trypanosoma that’s transmitted by the bite of local flies — kills more people than AIDS. This is also the world epicenter of onchocerciasis — another worm that grows more than 1 1/2 feet long inside the body and spreads thousands of eggs to all the organs — soon to become more worms — over the decade or so it takes to kill a person. Sometimes the smaller worms work their way into the cornea, causing blindness which gives this parasite its common name: ‘River Blindness.’
“There’s also visceral leishmaniasis, tuberculosis, leprosy, yellow fever, dengue fever, various bacteria and mycoplasma that cause severe and deadly forms of pneumonia, and many, many of the people in this village are infected with malaria (a particularly nasty, drug-resistant, and usually fatal form, P. falciparum, is the most common here in Southern Sudan).”
Following Netanyahu’s advice, Trump is also negotiating with South Sudan to take in America’s “illegals” in exchange for cash. They’ve already taken in eight people — none of them even Africans — who Trump shipped over there last month.
Nice guys, those two leaders of Israel and America. Along with Putin, “the three caballeros” show what happens when countries are run by entirely self-interested and morbidly rich sociopaths.
Forget about commitments, duty, or loyalty: Trump has never, in his entire life, been big on keeping a promise; just ask his three wives or the thousands of small businesses, workers, and customers he’s screwed.
So, it makes perfect sense that he and his billionaire land developer buddy Witkoff, who’s now negotiating with Putin and Netanyahu even though he has zero diplomatic experience, would go along with Putin’s Great New Idea to Gaza-ize Ukraine.
In fact, in 1994 the US, Ukraine, Great Britain, and Russia signed the Budapest Accord, an agreement that promised America and Britain would defend Ukraine’s borders in exchange for them giving up to Russia what was then the third-largest nuclear weapons arsenal in the world, left over from the old Soviet Union. Putin violated it when he took Ukraine’s Crimea region, and Obama doubled down on the betrayal by largely ignoring the annexation. Biden only reluctantly gave Ukraine aid, and Trump has blocked US military aid for eight months now.
Thus, for the first time since Germany invaded Poland and kicked off World War II in 1939, one European nation has invaded another, seized territory, and claimed it as their own.
This violation of international law and national sovereignty clearly doesn’t bother Trump or his Republican toadies; just look at his talk about annexing Greenland or making Canada the 51st state in a dime-store imitation of Hitler and Putin.
Neither Trump nor the GOP that enables him have any moral compass or core values beyond reestablishing white supremacy, enriching the morbidly rich, and moving women, racial and religious minorities, and the queer community into second-class status subordinate to white “Christian” men.
How else could you explain their behavior?
I get it that Trump’s former lawyer just this week acknowledged that Katie Johnson had alleged Trump raped her when she was only 13 years old, and he helped deep-six the case. As an adult, she gave sworn testimony in multiple court cases, one transcript published by Politico:
“Defendant Trump initiated sexual contact with Plaintiff at four different parties. On the fourth and final sexual encounter with Defendant Trump, Defendant Trump tied Plaintiff to a bed, exposed himself to Plaintiff, and then proceeded to forcibly rape Plaintiff. During the course of this savage sexual attack, Plaintiff loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop but with no effect. Defendant Trump responded to Plaintiff’s pleas by violently striking Plaintiff in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted.
“Immediately following this rape, Defendant Trump threatened Plaintiff that, were she ever to reveal any of the details of the sexual and physical abuse of her by Defendant Trump, Plaintiff and her family would be physically harmed if not killed.”
(After her testimony, Johnson received a series of death threats from Trump supporters and has since vanished.)
But will sabotaging Ukraine with a Gaza-like deal (and possible eventual resettlement to South Sudan) be enough to get us to stop talking about the possibility that the current President of the United States is a child rapist? Or is Trump just selling out Ukraine to get another billion-dollar real estate deal, this time one in Moscow and St. Petersburg?
With this administration and the entire Republican Party having lost any semblance of a moral core, commitment to democracy, or respect for the rule of law, the responsibility for the preservation of American values falls to us and the Democratic Party.
Join your local Democrats to shift the Party toward activism, join Indivisible, and any other groups dedicated to restoring democracy to the United States and defending our allies, including Ukraine.
Get out in the streets this Saturday.
And let your elected officials know where you stand (the Congressional switchboard number is 202-224-3121).
Tag, you’re it!
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This GOP senator told his Mississippi constituents to 'get a life'
When 34-year-old Thad Cochran arrived in Washington after his first election in 1972, the Republican felt it important to document what he’d heard and learned from Mississippians on the campaign trail and share it with his young staff.
He sat down at a typewriter and wrote a memo titled “General Responsiveness" and dated March 14, 1973:
During the campaign I detected a very strong animosity among the people toward government and those associated with government bureaus and agencies. This included elected officials and those associated with them. Part of the cause of this attitude was due to a lack of feeling or understanding by government people for the needs and opinions of the average citizen. We are all in a job to represent all our constituents. We are not the bureaucracy. A constituent who asks us for help should be assured to be in need of help with our office as his last resort. A constituent who writes a letter should be made to feel by our response that he is glad he wrote us. A constituent who claims to have been wronged by the government should be assumed to be correct. Everyone should guard against developing the attitude that we are better than, smarter than or more important than any constituent. We do not hold a position of authority over any constituent. We are truly servants of the people who selected us for this job.
Every year from 1973 through 2018, over his three U.S. House terms and six U.S. Senate terms, Cochran shared that memo with every staffer who worked in his offices. The guidance, he said all those years, was a necessary reminder to show respect to the people who offer feedback or need help. He never wanted his staff or himself to forget who sent them to Washington.
The memo, like so many other things, serves as a stark reminder that Cochran was among the last in a bygone era of American politics. The perspective he wrote and shared is a far cry from what Mississippians have been getting recently from our current U.S. senators.
“Surely everybody else has better things to do with their time,” senior U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker said to a room full of constituents earlier this month when asked about calls and emails his office has been getting. After half-heartedly explaining that he does see a list of names of people who reach out to his office, he quipped: “Get a life.”
Wicker, who typically chooses his words a little more carefully, perhaps was trying to match his junior colleague's energy.
“Why is everyone’s head exploding?” U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith said in April to Mississippi constituents who had expressed concerns over slashing federal Medicaid spending. “I can’t understand why everyone’s head is exploding.”
There are many kind staffers working for Republicans Wicker and Hyde-Smith who are helpful to Mississippi constituents in any number of ways privately or behind the scenes. These people care deeply about serving their home state and they do it well, and they cannot help how their bosses address the public. But, boy, their phones must be blowing up more than ever since the senators made these comments.
Consider, for a moment, what it means that we have devolved from having a leader who believed that “a constituent who claims to have been wronged by the government should be assumed to be correct” to one who thinks telling constituents to “get a life” is appropriate. Think about the fact that we replaced a leader who regularly reminded his staff that “we are truly servants of the people who selected us for this job” with one whose gut response to legitimate concerns from constituents is that their “heads are exploding.”
Just … wow. To call it alarming doesn't fully encapsulate the gravity of their behavior. It’s enough to discourage even the most optimistic among us about the present and future of our state and our nation.
It’s enough to inspire you to ponder, in this intense political climate when unprecedented and harrowing federal government decisions are being made and going largely unchecked every day, whether our current U.S. senators even remember why they're in Washington, why we sent them there.
It is necessary, in the shortest possible order, to ask and answer for ourselves what we should expect of our elected officials and whether we should feel OK about being dismissed or ignored outright like this.
You don’t have to be a Democrat to think that this behavior is out of line. Plenty of Republicans — some publicly and many privately — are increasingly disturbed by what’s happening in Washington. Regardless of your own personal political beliefs, be honest with yourself about whether you can read these comments from our senators and still feel that your best interests are being represented.
Sadly, we can no longer ask Cochran to help us answer these questions, but it sure seems clear where he’d stand. What about you?
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Even Trump's top toady is warning this appalling move risks disaster
Something treacherous looms today on the Alaskan horizon.
As Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet to hammer out their version of a Ukrainian-Russian “peace” plan, it could portend one of the darkest chapters in the history of American foreign policy. That’s not hyperbole.
I don’t pretend to have the chops to analyze a matter so grave. So I’ll be turning to an expert in this space.
But first, let’s review the basics. Trump’s friendship with Putin is warm and longstanding, most revealed — speaking of dark chapters — by his shocking statement in 2018 at Helsinki that he trusted Putin more than 18 intelligence agencies of his own administration.
We also know of Trump’s bitter history with our courageous ally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In 2019 — just a year after Helsinki — Trump attempted to extort dirt about political rival Joe Biden in exchange for release of military assistance desperately needed by Ukraine. He was impeached for that.
Trump more recently scolded and attempted to humiliate Zelensky in a shameful scene that defiled the Oval Office. It’s an indictment of our times that it did not receive more universal condemnation.
But that’s just the common knowledge piece of the story. To do full justice to the background about Putin, Trump, Ukraine and American foreign policy, I’ve decided to call upon a real expert.
His deliberate words provide clear context to why summitry between Trump and Putin poses such a grave danger to the world:
Vladimir Putin is a thug. He is a murderer. He is not someone to be admired. He is someone who has jailed and killed journalists, political opponents. He bombed a schoolhouse full of children. This is not a leader, this is a gangster.
There is no moral equivalence between the United States of America and Russia. I don’t understand people who say, well, America’s not perfect, so who are we to criticize Putin? We are not in the same category.
When you give someone like Vladimir Putin a propaganda win by standing next to him and treating him like an equal, you empower every anti-democratic movement across the globe. You demoralize our allies and you send the worst possible message to the world.
Russia is not just another country. It is an active adversary of the United States. It interfered in our elections, it continues to attack our institutions, it backs brutal dictators like Assad, and it has invaded and illegally occupied parts of Ukraine and Georgia.
When leaders in our own country excuse or even praise Putin, it tells our allies they can’t count on us — and it tells our enemies they can walk all over us.
Donald Trump is a con artist … It’s time to pull off his mask so people can see what we are dealing with here. We must not hand the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual.
We cannot have a president who looks at Vladimir Putin and sees a role model. This is someone who poisons his political opponents, assassinates defectors on foreign soil, and jails dissidents.
Some people say, well, Putin’s strong. He’s decisive. That’s like admiring the mafia for its discipline. The question isn’t whether he’s effective. The question is: What is he effective at doing? The answer is crushing freedom and destabilizing the world.
We know Putin lies. We know he manipulates. And we know that when you stand next to him and suggest he’s telling the truth over our own intelligence agencies, it does enormous damage. It weakens our democracy.
The people of Ukraine are fighting and dying to resist Putin’s imperial ambitions. If we abandon them now, we won’t just be betraying an ally — we’ll be inviting more aggression, more chaos, and more suffering around the globe.
Supporting Ukraine isn’t charity. It’s in our national interest. If Russia can invade and conquer its neighbors without consequence, what message does that send to China? To Iran? To North Korea?
There are leaders in the world today who do not believe in freedom. They do not believe in elections. They believe in power, fear, and control. Vladimir Putin is one of them. We should never make the mistake of treating him as anything else.
When our own leaders parrot Russian propaganda or downplay Russia’s crimes, they’re not just being naive. They’re helping our enemies.
The minute you stop defending truth, the minute you decide it’s acceptable to ignore facts or excuse tyrants because it suits your politics, you’re no longer leading. You’re enabling.
In these perilous times, I hope every American takes these powerful words to heart from a man who today is a leading voice on U.S. foreign policy.
That would be Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Every word above is a direct quote from Rubio’s past public commentary over a 15-year period. He spoke them forcefully during his tenure as a U.S. Senator from 2011 through 2024, as well as his 2015-16 run for the Republican presidential nomination.
Now? Not so much.
Little Marco, as Trump called him during that campaign, has shrunken in stature to the sniveling, groveling member of Trump’s cabinet that we see today rendering a tragic parody of North Korean President Kim Jong-un’s sycophants. Rubio has sold his soul — in plain view of the world — to a degree that’s arguably unprecedented.
Now Rubio prattles about Trump being the peace president. He speaks with great restraint about Putin. The old Rubio fire applies now only to Zelensky.
But Marco Rubio’s real beliefs — his real words — cannot be erased by Trumpian revisionist history.
Unlike their author, they continue to stand for something important.
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