Opinion
This appalling move shows Trump is in collapse — and may take us all down with him
There’s no sugarcoating the truth: as fascism‘s grip tightens under Donald Trump and the GOP, America’s government no longer operates as a constitutional republic.
The ostensible oaths to “support and defend the Constitution” are hollow, a ghost script read aloud while the regime marches America toward authoritarian collapse in the mode of Russia and Hungary.
Every federal institution now performs in synchronous mimicry of Dear Orange Leader’s unraveling psyche: false justifications, lop-sided pretenses of accountability, cosplay theater designed more for emotional spectacle than legal legitimacy, accelerating escalation at every turn.
Nothing — literally nothing organized or passed by Republicans in the last 44 years — was built to uplift average Americans. It’s all been engineered for power consolidation, GOP single-party rule, the wealth of the morbidly rich, and narrative control.
Consider the Justice Department. Once the nation’s arbiter of lawful conduct, it’s now Trump’s personal legal hit squad. Pam Bondi, who claimed she would end “weaponization” of the DOJ, created the novel “special prosecutor” role and appointed Ed Martin — an extremist QAnon promoter and January 6th fan — to target political enemies like Letitia James and Adam Schiff under what appear to be bogus pretexts.
The resulting spectacle, the parade of propaganda on rightwing TV and the circumvention of norms are all unconstitutional fascist grandstanding.
Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., a carjacking narrative involving two Black minors and a far-right hacker nicknamed “Big Balls,” boosted by Elon Musk and Fox, has been seized upon to manufacture a crime panic.
It’s strikingly defiant of DOJ data, which confirms a 30‑year low in violent crime in the capital city. Trump harnessed the stunt to justify mobilizing ICE, the FBI, and the National Guard, weaponizing fear and fabrications to execute a federal coup on the city’s civil fabric.
This isn’t safety, it’s occupation.
At the FBI, Kash Patel is purging anyone not MAGA‑approved: long‑serving agents loyal to the institution, or even just connected to cases that charged Trump or January 6th insurrectionists, are being run out.
Patel’s attack on federalism reached a chilling new level when the FBI agreed to hunt down Texas Democratic state lawmakers who had fled to prevent mid‑cycle gerrymandering. No federal crime was under investigation, just a brazen attempt to subvert state sovereignty and tilt an election.
This is not law enforcement; it’s authoritarians seizing our nation’s legal infrastructure.
And then the propaganda arm roars in lockstep. Jesse Watters didn’t even bother to murmur coded dog whistles. He publicly declared the GOP must “kick illegal aliens out of the census,” gerrymander “to the hilt,” and lock Democrats into a “permanent minority.”
It’s open advocacy for one‑party rule rooted in gaslighting and cultural hatred. There are no quiet parts anymore: every word is a confession.
Public health and science have also been hijacked. Bob Kennedy oversaw the cancellation of 22 federal mRNA vaccine projects — including promising research into cancer and bird flu — with half a billion dollars cut. mRNA vaccines have already saved millions: Stopping that research amid emergent threats isn’t policy, it’s mass eugenics masquerading as public health.
Within the military, Pete Hegseth, a Trump loyalist, is rewriting history and norms: he wants Confederate base names restored, monuments to the traitors resurrected, public prayer institutionalized, and the values of supremacist preacher Doug Wilson — who believes women don’t deserve the vote and empathy is Satanic — amplified throughout the military.
That this is being done under the flag of “service” is a grotesque betrayal of the constitutional order.
ICE is being transformed into Trump’s personal masked, unaccountable, violent paramilitary. Official tweets now celebrate postings that solicit thugs — no degree required, no age limit — and glorify sadistic enforcement. This isn’t border control; it’s paramilitary recruitment for a fascist secret police force.
And now come the arrests.
Yes, the political arrests have already begun. In Newark, Mayor Ras Baraka attempted to participate in a congressional oversight visit to Delaney Hall, an ICE concentration camp. Federal agents arrested him. Charges were later dropped, and he is now suing for malicious prosecution and defamation, but the precedent was established.
At the same event, Congresswoman LaMonica McIver was indicted on three counts of assaulting, impeding, and interfering with federal officers, charges that carry up to 17 years. Her crime? Trying to protect the mayor and uphold legislative oversight. Multiple lawmakers and faith leaders have condemned the prosecution as politically motivated intimidation.
At the same time, Senator Alex Padilla was forcibly detained — assaulted, handcuffed, and violently dragged out — after attempting to question DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. He identified himself as a sitting senator; no charges were filed. Still, the message was clear: dissent has been criminalized and there will be a next time.
Add to that the targeting of a Wisconsin judge, Hannah Dugan. The FBI arrested and indicted her after she tried to help an undocumented immigrant evade arrest. She’s been suspended by the state Supreme Court. This is a judge facing prison for expressing compassion.
And let’s not forget the investigations aimed at AG Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff. Trump’s federal authorities are now targeting elected officials over their political stances, without a shred of legal basis. These investigations are not about justice: they’re about vengeance, performative brutality, and raw power.
When institutional coercion becomes the norm, when political arrests replace constitutional rule, the democratic state has collapsed. Authoritarian regimes don’t wait until they hold 100% of power; they erode the system until the system can no longer resist them and democracy collapses. That’s exactly what we’re witnessing.
History echoes in every violation.
Remember Hitler writing Mein Kampf in prison, outlining Lebensraum, cloaking aggression as defense and reunification, always positioning himself as the reluctant warrior. He broke treaties, grabbed territory the way Trump is now threatening Greenland and Central America, and used the language of “peace” — always claiming that was his only goal — to mask aggression.
Churchill warned early in the 1930s, but was dismissed as a warmonger. Chamberlain chose to believe he could negotiate with a tyrant, and, as Churchill predicted, war followed.
Trump’s playbook is nearly identical: aggressive power grabs framed as patriotism, defenses against imaginary threats, mythmaking that declares “they made me do it.” And like in the 1930s, the enablers are eating it up.
But here’s the crucial difference: this fight isn’t a continent away; it’s in our towns, our courts, and our statehouses.
The Greatest Generation fought fascism overseas. Now we must fight it at home, in the institutions built on their sacrifice.
For that, we must act.
We can’t expect the courts to help: they’re stacked and the Trump administration has ignored roughly a third of the court orders that have gone against them.
We can’t expect Congress to help: they’re under the control of Republicans completely subservient to their billionaire overlords.
We can’t expect the media to save us: they folded under Trump‘s threats and even handed him tens of millions of dollars for his personal use. CBS has even installed a “bias monitor” to make sure they don’t offend Trump or his people.
We can’t expect our corporate overlords to rescue our republic: they’ve already sold out for tax breaks, subsidies, and an end to limitations on their monopoly power.
We must become this century’s Greatest Generation: no passive hope, no waiting for saviors. Organize, protest, support independent journalism, call your representatives incessantly, primary the handful of craven “problem solver” Democrats, and support those who are willing to fight.
In Blue states, support those governors and legislators who are willing to gerrymander and otherwise use partisan power, including voter purges in Republican areas, when that’s what it takes to rescue our country.
The Republicans never waited for fairness: Democrats have to fight fire with fire.
When they go low, we mustn’t go high: we must fight ferociously, methodically, and effectively. Like the soldiers who landed on Normandy Beach and burned swastikas, we must disrupt, dismantle, and hold accountable every authoritarian ambition.
Trump is in collapse, his psyche fracturing, his infrastructure mirroring his breakdown, his institutions weaponized around his rage.
The rupture is real, and it’s here, now. There will be no more subtle signals. It’s confrontation or collapse.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light they are trying to force upon us.
Trump's massive gamble has a fundamental flaw
It’s happening.
This morning, President Donald Trump took the largest step since he took office to test the limits of his power. And he did it in a way calculated not to alarm most Americans.
Trump announced that he was essentially supplanting the D.C. police with the National Guard and — most inappropriately — FBI agents to address what he termed an “emergency” crime problem in the nation’s capital.
It’s a perfect testing ground for an unprecedented expansion of presidential power. And understand that it’s a guardrail test, not a response to an actual crisis.
The residents of Washington D.C. face neither an emergency nor a crisis — and Trump fully understands that. Crime is empirically down, and even if it were not, nothing has transpired in the past seven months that would remotely rationalize this seizure of police power.
Trump views Washington D.C. as a petri dish.
Given that most Americans have long harbored an irrational distaste for D.C. — which happens to have an overwhelming Black majority population — it provides the ideal backdrop for Trump to invoke the national fear of crime. Any action advertised to fight crime in D.C. can count on a warm embrace from millions of Americans.
And in this case, the fact that Trump can declare a crime emergency where there is none — and get away with it — is a feature, not a bug. Because if he can do it in Washington D.C., he can eventually branch out federal police power to cities like Los Angeles, New York City, Minneapolis, Chicago and beyond.
The bluer the state, the better.
Trump’s action today also provides a test for a principle that we’ve seen unfold in alarming ways: He used his mastery of social media — and his mind control over a feared and powerful political base — to introduce false crises and invented issues that never occurred before he took office.
Just consider how many times Trump has successfully unleashed some bizarre new premise that had never been contemplated — much less debated — in the past presidential campaign. Or anytime, in any serious way, in the nation’s discourse.
Here are just a few examples:
- Instituting a vicious trade war with our closest neighbor, Canada. As well as other erstwhile allies across the globe.
- Repurposing ICE as a secret police force and using it to arrest judges and politicians.
- Invading and annexing Greenland.
- Re-seizing the Panama Canal.
- Renaming the Gulf of Mexico, which, by the way, is still the Gulf of Mexico.
That list goes on. This isn’t an abstract debate.
The seizure of D.C. police fits an ominous pattern of Trump unilaterally declaring an emergency based on nothing but the reach of his megaphone — and a grip of power over Congress, sanctioned by a partisan U.S. Supreme Court, that is arguably unprecedented in U.S. history.
What makes this particular move ominous is that Trump has launched it without the slightest provocation or even the remote appearance of a crisis. He doesn’t need a fig leaf.
Trump initiated his seizure of police power against a backdrop of falling crime in the nation’s Capitol:
- Violent crime: Down 26% in D.C. year-to-date
- Homicides: Down 12%
- Robberies: Down 28%
- Aggravated assaults: Down 20%
- Total crime: Down 7%
(Source: Metropolitan Police Department data)
Regionally, the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area has seen overall crime drop 13%, with homicides down 30%. The picture is clear: the “crime surge” is political theater, not statistical reality.
It’s almost incidental that the takeover undermines Home Rule and local democracy. It’s such an obviously false pretext for federal overreach that his MAGA apologists might as well admit that the best defense is that Trump’s doing this because he wants to.
And he can.
Trump is counting on a very specific bet: that much of the country either dislikes Washington, D.C., on instinct or simply doesn’t care what happens there.
This is a trial balloon. It’s a calculated test of guardrails.
If we as a nation allow it to stand, we do so at our own peril.
This public shaming left the GOP with an appalling mess
There’s a word for what happened to Lenexa City Council member Melanie Arroyo, and it begins with an “r” and ends with “ism.”
Go ahead. Take a wild guess.
Arroyo was forced to prove her citizenship to city police after someone left a voicemail with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. We subsequently learned that the KBI deleted the message after informing local law enforcement of its contents. That could well conflict with document retention rules, but let’s save that for later. Instead, let’s scrutinize what the statewide crime-fighting agency told Lenexa police via email.
Their words suggest that Kansas has a long way to go in treating residents respectfully and equally.
According to a KBI agent, a man “called with a question regarding the citizenship of a member of the Lenexa City Council. He stated that in February of 2025 Melanie Arroyo (possibly Melanie Arroyo-Lopez), a representative for Ward 3, gave testimony wanting to give illegals more benefits. During this testimony, she acknowledged that she came to this country illegally as a child, but never acknowledged naturalization. He stated that this testimony was posted to the internet. He stated that to be a qualified elector, they had to be registered to vote and be born here or naturalized. He wanted to report this information for investigation.”
Big problems come to mind immediately. Namely that the KBI has passed along a bunch of patently false information.
Not a good look for the agency we depend on to keep Kansans safe.
First off, Arroyo’s full last name is Arroyo Pérez, not Arroyo-Lopez. Those two names actually sound quite different!
Secondly, “gave testimony wanting to give illegals more benefits” patently misstates Arroyo’s testimony. She argued for the continuation of current Kansas policy, not extending or expanding any policy.
Third, the email states that Arroyo “came to this country illegally as a child” based on her legislative testimony. That’s also untrue. She writes that she grew up as an undocumented migrant, but that doesn’t mean she or her family entered the United States illegally. Indeed, in a Kansas City Star op-ed published March 6, Arroyo notes that she came here legally but overstayed a visa.
Finally, the email claims that she “never acknowledged naturalization.” Actually, both the testimony and column state that her undocumented status had been “resolved.”
To summarize, the information that the KBI forwarded to the Lenexa Police Department contains four factual errors. These aren’t the kind of mistakes that take time or effort to uncover, either. You literally just have to read Arroyo’s actual words, as submitted to lawmakers and as published in the region’s newspaper of record.
Did no one at the KBI do this?
Did no one on the Lenexa police force do this?
If not, why?
Taken as a whole, I see clear signs of racism. You can see it in the confusion of last names. You can see it in the use of the word “illegals.” You can see it in the automatic assumption that anyone who looks a certain way, sounds a certain way, comes from a particular background, necessitates scrutiny. As I wrote last week, there’s just as much reason to ask Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach about his citizenship status. (That is, none.)
State and local law enforcement also failed to think critically. Ponder this: Would a Lenexa resident of distinction — a city council member, no less — give public testimony about benefits for undocumented Kansans and not have her own papers in order? Officers were asked to believe Arroyo was somehow willing to risk prison time, removal from office and deportation just so she could voice her opinion on a proposed bill.
The KBI and the Lenexa police force probably didn’t set out with an explicit intention of harming Arroyo. Yet they did not give her the benefit of the doubt, either. They did not consider publicly available sources. They did not treat the recorded words from a “Johnson County man” with the appropriate amount of skepticism or critical thought. They decided that shaming a public official made more sense than questioning their own motives.
Take it from your friendly neighborhood journalist. Public officials in Kansas need to do a better job of checking their sources.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
This is the simple act that will cripple Trump
Many of you responded to my “What You Can Do Now” post last Thursday with additional initiatives and ideas.
Here’s a particularly important one.
As you’re painfully aware, Trump’s ICE is rapidly morphing into a national police-state — targeting legal immigrants as well as the undocumented, some of them awaiting their asylum hearings, others working with approved green cards. Many have been hardworking members of their communities for decades.
Soon, 10,000 more ICE agents will join the ranks of this federal police force — covering their faces with masks, wearing no identification badges, and driving unmarked cars — taking people from their homes and jobs and sending them to crowded and unsanitary prison camps like Florida’s new “Alligator Alcatraz” or to prisons in other countries.
How can we fight this? The Trump regime is threatening sanctuary cities and towns with loss of federal revenue. Some states, such as New Hampshire, have passed laws making it illegal for cities and towns to provide sanctuary for immigrants and others.
But the Trump regime cannot prevent us from joining together with other citizens to become a Sanctuary Community — providing assistance to families whose lives and well-being are threatened by Trump’s federal police.
Sanctuary Communities — which are being organized around the country — simply announce themselves publicly and take steps such as:
- monitoring and documenting ICE raids,
- establishing an early-warning system to announce where ICE is making arrests,
- witnessing and videotaping arrests and disappearances,
- providing information to national and state media,
- meeting with state and town officials to oppose local law enforcement collusion with ICE,
- speaking with community groups, houses of worship, libraries, hospitals and clinics, veterans groups, schools, and colleges about ICE mistreatment of citizens and immigrants,
- raising funds for emergency assistance, and
- joining other Sanctuary Communities across the nation to stand against the proliferation of police-state tactics that do not represent our shared values as Americans.
Taking a stand against Trump’s emerging police state is not just about immigration and community. It’s a stand against fascism.
The courts alone cannot thwart fascist rule. The media alone cannot do it. But large numbers of American citizens rising up to oppose this police state can. Sanctuary Communities provide a means of protecting the rule of law and salvaging our democracy.
It’s not complicated to organize a Sanctuary Community. As I said, they’re being organized all over America. They don’t require national coordination or national leadership.
You can start one by reaching out to friends and neighbors. Together, you announce you have formed such a community and will take necessary steps to resist the demise of human rights and democratic principles.
Doing this is not without risk. The Trump regime has been willing to trample on civil rights and civil liberties in pursuit of its goals. Some Americans who have sought to protect vulnerable people have been arrested.
But if there was ever a time for citizen action, it is now.
- 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
This evil villain's death would bring a glimmer of hope
If anyone deserves to hang by the neck until dead, it's the person who assassinated a Democratic lawmaker, murdered her spouse and shot two more people.
Unfortunately, he likely won't. This horrific crime was committed in Minnesota, which abolished capital punishment in 1911 after a botched hanging.
But state and federal prosecutors are looking at bringing the accused, Vance Boelter, up on federal charges. Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering an insurance executive in Manhattan in broad daylight, faces a similar fate. Like Minnesota, New York abolished capital punishment. If Mangione is convicted on federal charges, a jury could sentence him to death.
In Boelter’s case, there is an opportunity that would be obvious to liberals if we were not so squeamish about revenge killing at the hands of the state. This opportunity would be obvious to Democrats, too, if we were not so deferential to the impartiality of the court system.
What opportunity? If convicted, make an example of Vance Boelter. Turn his story into a story in the national interest, in which the good guys beat the bad guys, clean up corruption, restore the peace and revive faith.
In that story, this is the evil villain who symbolizes the waves of darkness that have rolled across America over a decade, undermining the common good, shattering values and perverting virtue. And in the telling of that story, liberals and Democrats can tell a story of hope. Donald Trump’s reign will end one day, just as a convicted Boelter’s life would end.
Justice won’t prevail on its own, though.
We have to make it happen.
A violent and evil end
What I’m suggesting is what the enemies of liberal democracy do.
Donald Trump, his party and their allies regularly pluck some random person out of obscurity and turn him into a character in a story about the battle between good and evil.
Few know who Zohran Mamdani is, but they will soon, as the rightwing media apparatus is turning the New York mayoral candidate, who has a foreign-sounding name and calls himself a democratic socialist, into the greatest perpetrator of a great evil. Recently, a Fox talking head said the city is “on the verge of electing an open communist who believes in blowing up buses and cafes.”
The same could be said of child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Over time, he went from mere creep to monster when he became shorthand for a conspiracy theory about “the deep state” — a secret cabal of (Jewish) super-elites that controls the government, businesses and the media. The cabal is so powerful it can commit any crime, including pedophilia and even cannibalism, and get away with it, all while conspiring with allies, foreign and domestic, to bring America down.
Say what you will about QAnon (that’s the name of the conspiracy theory about “the deep state” and, indeed, we have had a lot to say about it here at the Editorial Board), but at the heart of the story is something noble, a longing for justice and the restoration of trust.
Yes, it’s a longing felt by people who believed that Trump would win the election and destroy a phony conspiracy of Jewish monsters like Epstein, who were raping (and eating) children. (Trump has sabotaged that belief by not releasing the Epstein files.)
But they are not wrong to long for justice, or for the restoration of trust, as there really is a conspiracy against the American people. It can be seen in the president’s bid to hide his own involvement in Epstein’s sex-crime syndicate, to crush the middle class, corrupt government and profane the law. And it can be seen in Vance Boelter’s assassination of a former speaker of the Minnesota House.
Trump represents the rightwing reaction against liberal democracy.
Vance Boelter is accused of taking that reaction to its logical, violent and evil end.
Burn them all
Meanwhile, the forces of darkness continue to roll over America.
- The Air Force announced Thursday it would “deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits,” according to the AP. Such betrayal raises doubts about the trustworthiness of the federal government to future recruits and almost certainly ensures that those who do sign up to serve won’t give the necessary sacrifice.
- NPR reported Thursday that a former Jan. 6 defendant who is now working as a senior adviser for the Department of Justice urged insurrectionists to “kill” Capitol police officers who repelled the attempted paramilitary takeover. In testimony, Jared Wise “acknowledged that he repeatedly yelled ‘kill 'em’ as officers were being attacked ... Wise was not convicted of any crimes related to Jan. 6, due to President Trump's order to end all Capitol riot prosecutions.” Wise was later given a job at the Justice Department. A wanna-be cop-killer is now a cop.
- US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday that he would end the government’s development of vaccines, including the kind that saved us from the COVID. “Everything [Kennedy], the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are doing seems to be intended to ensure that sick people simply die off, which presumably would make those who survive healthier on average, thus achieving his ‘MAHA’ goal,” healthcare policy expert Charles Gaba told me.
These are but three examples of what seem like daily moral offenses, and as they pile up, we must consider what’s necessary in the future.
In this, I think former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is right. He told NPR recently that the Epstein scandal that’s enveloping the Trump White House speaks to a larger pattern of “breakdown in social trust.” I think he’s also right to say the Democrats can’t restore trust by restoring the status quo to where it was before Trump tore it down.
Some of the Democrats seem to get it. They are embracing the idea of creating a new social order, even if it means sacrificing some of their own. Those on the House Oversight Committee forced their GOP counterparts to subpoena records and testimony in association with the government’s investigation of Epstein. Trump is notably absent from the list, but otherwise, the panel wants to talk to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Merrick Garland, Bill Barr, Alberto Gonzales, Jeff Sessions, Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder, James Comey and Robert Mueller.
Burn them all, I say.
Lousy with criminals
I think the most ambitious Democrats are warming up to the idea, because after Trump is no longer in the White House, whenever that day comes, there must be a long period of purging in order to rid a government of, by and for the people of the stink of Trumpism.
The FBI, the US Department of Justice, the US Department of Health and Human Services and especially the US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the regime’s project of disappearing immigrants without due process, are all lousy with criminals whose greatest loyalty is to Trump, not morality, law or the Constitution. (I name four agencies, but virtually the entire government is rotten.)
They must be purged.
If they are not, they will sabotage from the inside whatever new status quo the Democrats try to build up from the rubble Trump left behind.
To do that, however, we need to begin telling the story, right now, in order to justify any future purge, a story that’s just as powerful as the one told by the enemies of democracy, in which the good guys defeat the bad guys, clean up corruption, restore the peace and revive faith.
If sacrificing the old guard of the Democratic Party is necessary to that, so be it. If calling for the death of an assassin is needed, so be it.
Trump's enablers are close to dumping him — and it's threatening a real disaster
The worst crimes of Donald Trump and dangers to America from the unstable, monomaniacal, lying outlaw in the White House have yet to come. He is not satisfied with tearing apart our country’s social safety net for tens of millions of Americans (e.g., Medicaid and food program cuts); wrecking our scientific/medical systems, including warning people about pandemics. He is, by wrecking FEMA et al, failing to address the impact of mega-storms, wildfires, and droughts; and allowing cybersecurity threats to increase while giving harm-producing big corporations immunities from the law, more subsidies, and more tax escapes. Recall how he always adds to his attacks on powerless people that “This is just the beginning.”
He just took the next step in his march to madness and mayhem by announcing more concentration camps holding immigrants, arrested without due process, for deportation to foreign countries that want U.S. taxpayer cash for each deportee.
Recent immigrants are crucial to millions of small and large businesses. Consider who harvests our crops, cares for our children and the elderly, cleans up after us, and works the food processing plants and construction sites. Already, businesses are reducing or closing their enterprises – a political peril for Dangerous Donald.
If all immigrants to the U.S. from the last ten years, documented and undocumented, went on strike, our country would almost shut down. Yet Trump, who hired 500 undocumented workers for just one of his construction sites in New York, and had similar laborers at his New Jersey golf course, promises deportations of millions more.
Always bear in mind the self-defined characteristics of corporatist Trump’s feverish, hateful, outlaw mind: (1) He has declared he “can do whatever he wants as President,” proving his serial violations of law and illegal dictates every day; (2) He always doubles down when indicted, convicted, caught, or exposed, falsely accusing his accusers of the exact transgressions they are reliably charging him with; (3) He brags about lashing out at criticism with foul defamatory invectives; (4) He never admits his disastrous mistake; (5) He boasts that he knows more than leading experts in a dozen major areas of knowledge (see, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All”); and (6) He asserts that every action, policy, or program he launches is a spectacular success – the facts to the contrary are dismissed.He is gravely delusional, replaces realities with fantasies, breaks promises that are made to defer any reckoning or accountability, and, like an imaginary King, finds no problem with saying “I rule America and the world.”
His ego defines his reactions, which is why every foreign leader is advised to flatter him. Nobody flatters better than the cunning genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu, who at his last regal White House dinner, held up his nomination of convicted felon, woman abuser, Trump for the Nobel Prize. Netanyahu’s preening comes from a politician whose regime has dossiers on Trump regarding his past personal and business behavior. This helps explain why Trump is letting the Israeli government do whatever it wants in its Gaza Holocaust, the West Bank, and beyond with our tax dollars, family-killing weaponry, and political/diplomatic cover.
The approaching greater dangers from Trump will come when he pushes his lawless, dictatorial envelope so far, so furiously, so outrageously, that it turns his GOP valets in Congress and the GOP-dominated U.S. Supreme Court against him. Add plunging polls, a stagflation economy, and impeachment, and removal from office would become a political necessity for the GOP in 2026 and beyond. In 1974, the far lesser Watergate transgressions by President Richard Nixon resulted in Republican Senators’ demanding Tricky Dick’s resignation from office.
Further provocations are not far-fetched. Firing Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, sinking the dollar, and angering the fearful, but very powerful bankers are all on the horizon. Will the sex-trafficking charges involving Jeffrey Epstein and vile abuses of young girls finally be too much for his evangelical base, as well as for many MAGA voters? This issue is already starting to fissure his MAGA base and the GOP iron curtain in Congress. Subpoenas have just been issued to the Justice Department by the GOP Chair of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky – a close friend of Senator Mitch McConnell.
There is always SERENDIPITY. Trump, the mercurial egomaniac, offers old and new transgressions to stoke the calls for his impeachment. Does anyone believe that Trump would not start a military conflict, subjecting U.S. soldiers to harm, to distract attention from heavy media coverage of unravelling corruption investigations? Draft-dodging Donald has Pete Hegseth, his knee-jerk Secretary of Defense, waiting to do his lethal bidding, despite possible opposition from career military.
If Trump were to be impeached and removed from office, would he try to stay in office? Here is where a real constitutional explosion can occur. He would have to be escorted from the White House by U.S. Marshals who are under the direction of toady Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution grants “the sole Power” to try impeachments in the Senate and nowhere else. Thus, the courts would provide no remedy to a lawless president wanting to stay in power.
Then what? The country falls into extreme turmoil. The Defense Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security are in the Trump Dump. Tyrant Trump can declare a major national emergency, invoke the Insurrection Act, and hurl these armed forces and police state muscle against a defenseless Congress and populace. (Recall the January 6, 2021, assault on Congress.) The abyss would have been breached.
With our society in a catastrophic convulsion, the economy collapsing, what would be the next steps? Like the Pentagon that anticipates worst-case domestic scenarios on possible violent “blowbacks” against U.S. military actions abroad, Americans should start thinking about the unthinkable. Such foreshadowings may make us far more determined NOW to thwart, stop, and repeal the fascist dictatorship which Der Führer Donald Trump is rooting ever more deeply every day. Little restraint on lawless Trump from the Congress and the Supreme Court, and only feeble, cowardly responses by the flailing Democratic Party (and the Bar Associations for that matter) thus far, make for the specter of violent anarchy and terror.
Trump has fatalistic traits. Armageddon shapes his ultimate worldview. Ponder that for a dictator with his finger on more than the nuclear trigger.
Again, Aristotle got it right over 2300 years ago, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.” (See, Bruce Fein’s report: Congressional Surrender and Presidential Overreach).
This is who will finally bring Trump to his knees — and he knows it
As a man who slings opinion, and is an expert on all that is wrong, I am often asked what we can do to stave off all this evil, and make things right?
Occasionally, I’ll have a pretty good answer, but more times than not, I am just a writer with a leaky pen, who can spell out a problem with no real idea how to cross it out.
When seemingly everything’s wrong, the only selfish answer I have to fight off what afflicts us is to write.
This admittedly seems wholly inadequate while we stare down this relentless, wicked attack from the dark forces that have assembled seemingly out of nowhere, and with blinding speed to turn out our light.
If you are reading this piece, the chances are better than reasonable that you care about the condition of your wounded country and the millions of people who are suffering in it.
This is both a curse and a precious gift.
It’s a curse, of course, because wherever you are, our nation’s menacing shadow chases you. Try as you might, you can’t escape it, at least not for long.
Taking it all in as the sky-blue ocean kisses some sun-splashed beach is chased away by the thought of what we are doing to our oceans and that sky, because of the lifeless corporate raiders, who think of nothing but profits and themselves.
Mother Nature’s vivid colors temporarily turn to black before, like the tides, they recede from our mind, and return anew so we can enjoy these magic moments.
You are a humanitarian, and a lover of life — all life. If you are like me, you grieve the loss of a random animal more than you do the random person. That’s not a slam on people necessarily, but let’s face it, too many of them are rotten to the core. They take, and give nothing back. They support evil, instead of suppressing it. They talk without thinking. They follow without looking, and refuse to stop long enough to see the damage they are doing, or much of anything on this Earth that is truly worth the time.
Not only do they lack the sixth sense of our beautiful animal friends, they seem to lack any sense at all …
So for all your caring, you are rewarded with a world of hurt.
You know it would be easier to just say the hell with it, and join the millions on the sidelines who take things as they come, and just as much as they can for themselves.
Well, I thought today that you should know you are not alone, and that you are loved for your soulfulness, fight and compassion.
You are loved because people make the mistake of thinking you are weak for crying, when the truth is you are enormously brave for letting it all in. You are loved because processing all this hell and trying to spin it into hope is a hero’s chore, and we’ve never needed heroes more.
I take heart that you are out there, my friends, and more than you can possibly know. You are the very best among us. You are a friend and advocate to the animals, and the good people who are scared and suffering alone. You are a shoulder to lean on.
Together we form the line, that will never be crossed ...
We must continue to remind people, but mostly each other, that there are millions of us, and we aren’t going away. We are proliferating … strong.
We’ll have our day, I swear to God we will, but for now we have each other, and that, good people, is a blessing.
- (D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)
This jilted ally has a long-term plan for revenge — and Trump's already feeling the pain
The latest version of Trump’s mood-contingent tariffs took effect Thursday, prompting Trump to post-boast two minutes before midnight that “BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN TARIFFS” are now pouring into the US. He skipped the part where American companies pay those tariffs, which soon will trickle down to consumers in the form of higher prices.
The vast majority of economists and CEOs reject Trump’s market mayhem and predict that his tariffs will have disastrous consequences on the US economy. Outside Fox News, where Trump’s economic illiteracy is celebrated, economists are aghast. In April, dozens of top economists, including two Nobel laureates, signed a letter advising that Trump’s tariffs have “no basis in economic reality,” calling Trump’s tariff policy ‘misguided,’ and warning it could cause a “self-inflicted recession.”
Hard data mapping the tariffs’ effects won’t be available immediately; if Trump can help it, judging by his handling of the jobs report, that data won’t come out at all. But it’s already clear, contrary to his promise of creating more factory jobs, that Trump’s tariff threats coincided with job losses nationwide.
Trump has purposely upended domestic and world trade, leading both the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development to downgrade their predictions for global economic growth. Economists John Silvia and Brad Jensen argue that Trump’s tariffs will slow the economy, resulting simultaneously in fewer jobs and lower real wages. They predict the economic erosion will be a slow, steady process rather than an immediate collapse.
Oh Canada!
While some US trade partners are shocked at the lack of pushback from Trump’s allegedly “pro-business” Republican Party, no trading partner has been jilted quite so ignominiously as Canada.
Despite having only about 11 percent of the population of the US, Canada was the single largest importer of U.S. goods, and our second-largest foreign investor. Trump’s mean-spirited tariffs and rhetoric gutted that symbiosis for good. Trump hit Canadian steel and aluminum with up to 50 percent tariffs, and slapped Canadian pharmaceuticals and autos with 35 percent tariffs, depending on where components are made. The tariffs have already triggered Canadian layoffs, including at General Motors Canada, a subsidiary of American GM, and will soon jack the prices of $3 billion worth of Canadian pharmaceuticals consumed in the US annually.
Doug Ford, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, urges forceful pushback. Instead of rolling over to please an irrational Trump, Ford wants Canada to “Hit that guy back as hard as we possibly can.” Trained economist and banker–turned–Prime Minister Mark Carney, however, takes a more measured approach. He recently noted that Trump, in effect, is now charging for access to the US economy, causing trading partners to look elsewhere.
Carney’s response has been a diplomatic and classy middle finger. Instead of tit for tat, Carney is pivoting Canada with precision toward alternative trade blocs like Europe and the Pacific rim. He’s also seeding more self-reliance manufacturing, re-targeting billions into Canadian manufacturing investments as he approaches other nations where “free trade is a commitment, not a condition.”
Thanks to Trump, what was once one of the most stable, peaceful, and lucrative relationships in the world has been destabilized. One in four Canadians now views the U.S. as an enemy, while 76 percent hold an unfavorable opinion of Trump and consider him “dangerous.”
Impatient Canadians are taking matters into their own hands, boycotting U.S. products and promoting “Made in Canada” goods. A majority of Canadian provinces are boycotting certain American products altogether. US-made beer, wine, and spirits have disappeared from Canadian shelves, leading the CEO of Jack Daniel to call the boycott “worse than tariffs.”
Angry Canadians are also boycotting American foods, especially fast food chains like McDonald's, Burger King, Subway, Wendy's, and Domino’s. Other American owned restaurants including Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell, and Popeyes, are also facing boycotts, while US coffee chains Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Keurig have already reported losses of Canadian sales. Canadians are buying local and rejecting American products like butter and dairy spreads, prepared bakery foods, pizza, pastries, and even US-made condiments, and tourists are skipping US destinations, with Forbes reporting a 33 percent reduction in June.
A mature contrast
As Canadians sour on the US under Trump, anti-American rhetoric is spreading and Canadian nationalism is surging. Aside from the tariffs, Canadians are triggered by Trump’s repeated insults against Canadian sovereignty as he urges them, like a sarcastic mob boss offering protection, to become the 51st state. Disgusted Canadians are calling for further trade retaliation against the US, with over 60 percent of all Canadians urging Carney to adopt retaliatory counter-tariffs.
But instead of responding impulsively, Carney is playing the long game. Lamenting that Canada can “no longer count on” the US, which had been its “most valued“ trading partner, Carney is shifting Canada away from US customers, helping affected Canadian companies find new buyers, forge new partnerships, and develop new products.
In contrast to Trump’s bluster-filled, roulette approach to tariffs, Carney stresses that he “will apply tariffs where they have the maximum impact in the United States and minimum impact in Canada.”
Suggesting he will study the facts in product-specific markets before he acts — another marked contrast to Trump — Carney said he would not respond quickly but would adjust after the facts come in, and develop a strategy that is industry specific.
This embarrassing Gufus and Gallant study in contrasts has led an unprecedented number of Americans to research how to export an entirely new product to Canada: themselves.
- 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.
This leaked memo exposes an agenda so awful even Trump wants it kept secret
After a couple of wannabe carjackers punched out the DOGE operative known as “Big Balls” in DC, Trump used it as an excuse to threaten to take over the city and bring in the National Guard to police it, in a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. This despite the fact that crime in Washington DC is at a 30-year low and the city already has the largest police force, per capita, of any municipality in America.
None of that matters; Trump wants to turn America into a police state, just like every other dictator does when they get ahold of a democracy. They steal from the people, enrich their cronies, break laws with impunity, and then use police agencies to terrorize the general populace, judges, and legislators into docility and submission when they object.
In fact, they told us this was their goal. They showed us. They planned it in writing.
A leaked memo from inside the Department of Homeland Security reveals what many of us feared but hoped we were wrong about: that the military is no longer a last resort in American governance. It’s now a first tool. A central player. A political weapon, just like in Russia.
And they’re not even hiding it anymore.
This isn’t some vague speculation or dystopian what-if. This isn’t a shadowy plot hatched in secrecy. The document was written, circulated, and discussed at the highest levels of DHS and the Department of Defense and it spells out, in clinical, terrifying language, a plan to normalize and expand the use of the United States military within our own country, on our own soil, against our own people.
The memo, obtained by The New Republic, outlines a coordinated strategy to embed military forces into immigration enforcement not just at the border but across American cities. It calls for replicating the recent Los Angeles deployment “for years to come.” It uses phrases like “homeland defense” and paints immigration threats as akin to al-Qaeda or ISIS. It pushes for “new ideas” on how DHS and DoD can work together on “national security” threats inside the United States.
- This isn’t about law enforcement. It’s about militarization.
- This isn’t about safety. It’s about power.
- This isn’t about stopping crime. It’s about building a political machine with boots and guns that can intimidate or even subdue any opposition.
And it’s already happening. America is rapidly turning into an authoritarian police state.
Over the past two months, Trump has done what no modern president has dared. He sent 4,000 National Guard troops — federalized, not state-controlled — into Los Angeles to back up ICE raids. He followed that with 700 active-duty Marines.
These weren’t weekend warriors. These were combat-trained infantry troops deployed to performatively surround federal buildings and “support” immigration enforcement while pro-democracy protestors filled the streets.
Marines. In American cities. In June and July. “Guarding” federal offices and intimidating demonstrators.
And now, we’ve learned that smaller units have been sent to Florida and are prepping for deployment to Texas and Louisiana. The memo wasn’t a warning. It was a blueprint. A playbook for turning the world’s most powerful military force inward and turning constitutionally protected First Amendment political dissent into a “national security threat.”
Don’t believe Trump’s PR spin or the media’s pretending this isn’t as illegal and anti-democracy as it is. Don’t let the uniforms fool you into thinking this is routine.
This is not normal.
This is not legal.
This is not American.
This memo, which Pete Hegseth and friends didn’t intend you and I would ever be able to read:
- Urges DHS to persuade top military brass to view immigration enforcement as a “homeland defense mission.”
- Seeks to embed armed, kill-trained military personnel inside ICE and CBP to “increase information sharing” and support “nationwide operational planning.”
- Frames transnational gangs and cartels as equivalent to al-Qaeda, a dangerous, dishonest leap that pretends to justify extreme, deadly force.
- And it admits, in its own words, that due to the “sensitive nature” of the meeting it documents, “minimal written policy or background” should be preserved.
Translation: They know what they’re doing is legally and morally criminal. So they’re minimizing the paper trail.
Carrie Lee, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, put it bluntly:
“This speaks to the intent to use the military within the United States at a level not seen since Japanese internment.”
I’d add, also not seen since the Civil War, when Americans turned their guns on each other and 700,000 of us died. And outlawed a decade after that war with the Posse Comitatus Act. And after the Kent State massacre, we resolved, “Never again.”
Joseph Nunn at the Brennan Center warned that this could create a permanent “domestic Forever War,” a campaign of endless militarization justified by fear and manufactured crises. Soldiers — including armed, masked ICE agents answerable only to the president — terrifying civilians on their own streets and in their own homes: a military occupation of the United States of America.
And that’s exactly the point. It’s all part of the classic dictator’s playbook.
You gin up fear about migrants and minorities. You call them invaders, terrorists, cartel assassins. You blur the line between protest and insurrection. You say cities are out of control. Then you send in the troops. Not to protect, but to occupy. And you call it “national security.”
This isn’t just Trumpism. This is textbook authoritarianism in the mold of Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary. It embodies the early stages of all the horror stories of 1930s Europe.
And let’s not forget the power grab embedded in all this. When Trump federalized the California National Guard, he did it against the will of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The state fought back in court. A federal judge ruled in California’s favor, but the administration appealed, and for now, the troops can remain under federal control.
That’s not just a skirmish over jurisdiction. That’s an open attack on the sovereignty of states, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. That’s a president saying, “Your Guard is my army now.”
This moment is a test. Of our Constitution. Of our institutions. Of our will.
Because if we let this stand — if we normalize Marines in our cities, Guard troops on our streets, soldiers surveilling residential communities — then we’ve already surrendered.
What happens when the next protest erupts? What happens when a city pushes back against federal immigration policy? What happens when a journalist, a mayor, or a movement becomes “too disruptive”?
Do we really think they’ll hesitate to send in the troops again?
And what kind of soldier will say no, when DHS and DoD have spent months telling them they’re defending the “homeland” against “enemy cells” within?
The line between foreign combat and domestic suppression is being erased. On purpose. By design.
The Founders of this country were obsessed with avoiding a standing army for precisely this reason.
It’s why they wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution requiring a “well regulated militia” at the state level and that same Constitution, in Article 1, Section 7 bars Congress from appropriating money for the Army for any period longer than two years. (“The Congress shall have Power To … raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”)
They had seen what happened when monarchs used soldiers to police dissent. They knew the threat; not just to liberty, but to the very idea of a democratic republic. They wanted to keep the military on a very, very short leash.
So they built guardrails. Laws. Norms. Civilian command. Posse Comitatus. State control over Guard units. Strict separation between military and police roles.
All of that is being unraveled right now.
You may not see it in the headlines. But if you read the memos — and watch the deployments — you’ll see it plain as day.
The military is no longer on the sidelines.
It’s here.
And unless we act — loudly, urgently, relentlessly — it will become a permanent force in American civic life. Not a protector of freedom, but a tool of control, just like in Orbán’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia.
We are not at war with ourselves, at least yet. But our democracy is under siege.
And the troops have already landed.
This is the utterly chilling reason Republicans act like elections don't matter
If you consume mainstream news, you might think the Republicans are in trouble ahead of next year’s congressional elections. In a recent report by CNN, for instance, Republican Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska is met with a barrage of boos and jeers at a town hall.
They should be in trouble. Though the president’s policy agenda is dramatically unpopular, Flood and the Republicans have gone along with him. Donald Trump’s net approval is now -15 percent, according to the latest numbers by The Economist, with 55 percent disapproving. Gallup’s are worse. His rating among independent voters is 29 percent.
You’d think a congressman like Flood, who represents a district evenly split, would at the very least pretend to be contrite, knowing that being on the good side of voters is the key to remaining in office. You’d think he would behave like he knows he’s in trouble.
But he’s not. In that CNN report, Flood gives the impression that the opinions of his constituents, whose outrage is abundantly clear, are immaterial to his goal of staying in power — which is to say, he’s behaving as if he has no fear of democracy holding him accountable.
In that, he’s following the president’s lead. In a recent CNBC interview, as Joe Walsh put it, Trump said he “won the 2020 election (he didn’t). He has a 71 percent approval rating (he doesn’t). The jobs numbers were rigged (they weren’t). I could say something funny here, but I won’t. It’s just so damn dangerous to have him in the White House.”
In the same interview, Trump said he would “probably not” run for office again, understanding full well that the Constitution limits presidents to two terms, whether or not those terms are consecutive.
Walsh is often right, but here he’s doubly so. It’s so damn dangerous when a president and his party act like democracy doesn’t matter.
In 2009, after they passed the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama and the Democrats faced the prospect of a wipeout in the following year’s midterms. The law started out unpopular and grew more unpopular by the day. But they didn’t try to change the rules of democracy to avoid the consequences of their choices, even though the consequences were catastrophic. The Democrats lost 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate. Obama’s presidency never recovered.
Trump and the Republicans are trying to change the rules of democracy to avoid the consequences of their choices. I don’t think there’s any one source of disapproval, like the ACA used to be for the Democrats. Instead, public ire seems to have multiple layers, with the deepest being the gigantic sales tax, in the form of tariffs, that the president has unilaterally imposed on everyone. And Trump knows it. That’s why, in anticipation of a wipeout, he asked legislators in Texas to redraw its congressional districts to give his party five more seats.
This should be damning. And the Republicans should be running from the idea, in the same way that some Democrats ran from Obamacare. But most are doubling down.
Texas is going to try gerrymandering its districts to give Trump the advantage, as likely will any state controlled by the GOP that has at least one big blue city in it. (Perhaps this is why Mike Flood can shout down constituents with impunity. Nebraska Republicans could choose to redraw his district to ensure reelection.)
But the Republicans are doing more than changing the rules of democracy. They are creating the conditions for criminalizing it.
Democratic legislators in Texas left the state to deny a quorum for Republican efforts to redraw its congressional districts. The state’s attorney general declared the move illegal. The state’s governor ordered state law enforcement agencies to arrest and return them. Texas has no jurisdiction in Illinois, where some Texas Democrats decamped, but that didn’t stop vigilantes from issuing bomb threats.
This is in addition to the Justice Department opening an investigation into alleged tampering of the 2016 election by Obama and his administration. (The allegations are completely imaginary.) There is, moreover, the fact that two Democrats have been arrested and are pending trial; two Democrats were manhandled and arrested; one Democrat was assassinated; not to mention the president ordering the (short-lived) military occupation of the city of Los Angeles. More recently, three House Democrats were “in essence, incarcerated,” after a masked ICE agent locked them in a room at a detention center.
The goal is silencing dissent, and elected Democrats are not the only targets. All of us are. Even as Trump and the GOP do things that make people angry — like taking away their food money, taking away their vaccines, taking away their jobs, all while forcing them to pay more and more for the essentials of life — people can’t vent their anger.
The heart of democracy is our ability to petition the government for a redress of grievances. But the Republicans are creating conditions nationally, after having done so locally, in which that’s not possible.
They are either gerrymandering voters out of existence, their judges are narrowing the right to vote to the point of extinction, or they are preparing to prosecute people for their opinions. At the rate we’re going, it won’t be long before being a liberal is a criminal offense.
The only Republicans acting rationally are those who represent districts in blue states.
“What Texas is doing is wrong and I’m opposed to it,” New York Rep. Mike Lawler told Politico, adding that “he’s sponsoring a bill with fellow blue state Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley of California that would ban gerrymandering nationwide.”
But they are only acting rationally because their party cannot change the rules of democracy to avoid being held accountable by their constituents for their choices. Blue states like New York and California are now considering redrawing their congressional maps in reaction to potential moves by Texas, Florida and others to do the same.
In other words, blue-state Republicans have an immediate incentive to behave themselves while the rest of the GOP, including its leader, does not.
That fact alone should be damning.
This MAGA hero may be the one to finish off Trump
Joe Rogan built an empire on being the guy who asked the questions nobody else would. That’s why millions of Americans — especially younger men — trust him more than they trust the nation’s media, Congress, or the Supreme Court. They believe he sees through the spin. He talks to conspiracy theorists and scientists alike, grills politicians, mocks the media, and makes it all feel like truth-telling.
But now, Rogan is at a crossroads. The question isn’t whether Joe Rogan will change the country. The question is whether power is changing Joe Rogan.
The Trump administration is deep in the middle of its biggest credibility crisis since they sent troops into the streets of Los Angeles. And it’s not about inflation, immigration, or international war. It’s about the long-promised release of the Epstein files, something candidate Trump used as a political weapon in 2024, vowing to expose “elite pedophiles” and “drain the deepest part of the swamp.”
He won votes on it. He fired up his base with it. And now, seven months into his second term, his same administration is walking it back. Slowly, clumsily, but unmistakably.
On July 24, Attorney General Pam Bondi released a heavily redacted summary of the Epstein investigation, meant to satisfy the public hunger for transparency. Instead, it sent up a flare: no client list, no blackmail, no follow-up indictments. It was all information already publicly available with a simple Google search.
The Department of Justice claimed the “case was closed,” the evidence exhausted, and Epstein’s 2019 death during Trump’s last administration was once again ruled a suicide. What followed was backlash not from liberals, but from the hard-right Trump base itself.
And Joe Rogan was at the center of that backlash. “Do they think we’re babies?” he said in a scathing segment just days after the release. His tone wasn’t one of performative outrage: it reflected a true sense of betrayal. The tone of someone who’d believed the government would finally tell the truth.
He questioned whether the administration had buried the real story. Whether the American people had once again been gaslit by elites pretending to clean house while shielding their own.
Now, the Trump administration is trying something unprecedented: CNN reports they’re discussing looking to Joe Rogan to help fix the mess. Not by spinning it through Fox News. Not by putting Bondi on Meet the Press. But by putting Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — Trump’s own criminal defense lawyer — on The Joe Rogan Experience, in what Trump aides are calling a “high-profile truth-telling interview.”
That alone should shock anyone who cares about democracy.
Let’s not forget: Rogan’s show has become the most powerful media platform in America. It bypasses traditional scrutiny. There are no time limits, no fact-checking in real time, no editors. Just vibes and persuasion and the illusion of transparency. It’s where millions go to “hear both sides,” but in reality, it’s where narratives are shaped in long, charismatic monologues and interviews.
That’s what the Trump team is counting on, and the implications are massive.
If Rogan accepts the interview with Blanche, he becomes part of the administration’s containment strategy. If he then softballs it — if he lets the White House rewrite history through his mic the way Fox “News” is now downplaying Epstein — he doesn’t just sell out his listeners. He becomes a tool of state power. The very power he built his brand opposing.
Rogan isn’t stupid. He knows this. Which is why this moment is so critical.
He’s already voiced doubts. He’s asked the obvious questions: Why would Epstein record everything if there’s nothing to hide? Why is there no official questioning of the men who flew on his plane dozens of times? Why is Ghislaine Maxwell in prison for trafficking girls to ... nobody? These questions have been asked for years, and yet the Trump administration wants to pretend that the final word is in. Case closed. Let’s move on.
If Rogan turns his studio into a soft landing pad for Trump’s damage control, it means something profound has shifted. It means even the loudest, most powerful “outsiders” can be absorbed by Trump’s deep-state machine.
That matters. Because democracy doesn’t die in big dramatic explosions. It dies when truth becomes just another version of events. It dies when public watchdogs become platforms for official spin. It dies when those who claim to speak for the people get so close to power, they forget who they’re supposed to be speaking to.
This isn’t about Joe Rogan being a Republican, or about hating Donald Trump. This is about whether the largest independent voice in the media landscape can resist the gravitational pull of power when it needs him most.
Rogan once warned us about this kind of thing. He talked about the CIA’s ties to the media. He aired claims about elite sex trafficking rings and called for radical transparency. Now, the Trump administration is banking on the idea that they can weaponize his credibility to bury the very narrative he helped popularize.
That should set off every alarm.
If Rogan presses Blanche — if he demands un-redacted documents, if he calls out the inconsistencies, if he challenges the entire narrative being pushed from the White House, if he interviews victims instead of toadies — then there’s hope.
As one victim wrote to the Department of Justice in a public letter:
“You protect yourself and your powerful and wealthy ‘friends’ (not enemies) over the victims, why? The victims know the truth, we know who are in the files and now so do you.”
If Rogan helps with the whitewash instead, then it confirms something darker: that the administration knows what we all suspect. That the truth doesn’t matter as long as the story feels good coming out of someone you trust.
There are people in Trump’s inner circle who understand the stakes. They know they’ve lost control of the Epstein narrative. They see the fury building online from their own supporters. They know that Rogan has the power to calm it down or to inflame it. That’s why they’re courting him. That’s why they’re hoping he’ll play ball.
But this is not a game.
This is about the credibility of justice in America. About whether billionaires and presidents and media personalities get to decide what’s real. About whether we still have independent truth-tellers, or only influencers whose truth depends on who’s in office.
In the coming days, we may see that interview happen. We may see Blanche sit across from Rogan and explain away the gaps, the redactions, the implausible conclusions. And we may see Rogan nod along, crack a few jokes, and let it slide. Or we may see him fight for the truth, press harder, dig deeper, platform the victims, and hold the most powerful man in the country accountable.
The future of media credibility — of citizen trust — may hang in that balance because the most dangerous lie isn’t the one politicians tell. It’s the one the public stops questioning.
So now the real question becomes: Will Joe Rogan help or harm democracy?
These deranged imbeciles have replaced heart disease as America's biggest killer
Heart disease, step aside. There's a new number-one health hazard to Americans.
That would be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The vacuous anti-vaxxer has proven just as dangerous as his own family members warned the United States Senate he would be. That was in late January after he was nominated as Secretary of Health and Human Services by President Donald Trump. He was confirmed, shamefully.
Kennedy squeaked through by placating Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy with the brazen lie that he wouldn’t dismantle the nation's vaccine safety systems or take down government vaccine guidance. And I do mean brazen: Kennedy specifically promised to respect the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, only to fire all 17 of its members.
Perhaps for not wearing tinfoil hats.
This week, things took a sharp turn for the worse. We got the answer to that age-old question, “What would happen if a deranged imbecile controlled America’s public health system?”
Kennedy canceled $500 million in contracts for projects to develop vaccines using mRNA technology. The medical community — not to be confused with Kennedy’s crackpot community — considers the emerging technology to be critical to the nation’s health and security.
It prompted a firestorm of uncommonly strident protests from some of the nation’s leading medical experts, as reported at NPR.
"This may be the most dangerous public health judgment that I've seen in my 50 years in this business," says Michael Osterholm, who runs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
"It is baseless, and we will pay a tremendous price in terms of illnesses and deaths. I'm extremely worried about it."
Dr. Peter Hotez, who runs the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, described mRNA as “a proven technology for emerging respiratory viruses or respiratory virus pandemics. It is extremely safe and has been incredibly effective."
And there was this from Jennifer Nuzzo, Director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University.
"This is a profoundly disappointing development. When there's the next pandemic, we're going to be caught flat-footed. It absolutely leaves the country vulnerable."
Speaking of pandemics, the one person most undermined by Kennedy was Trump, who either didn’t care to comment or was too cognitively declined to notice. It turns out that the attack on mRNA technology doubled as a kneecapping of the one (1) good thing Trump did in his first term.
Here’s how AP reported that:
“Trump once hailed mRNA vaccines as a ‘medical miracle.’ Now, his health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is halting the vaccine technology's advancement.”
This marks a sharp policy reversal — mRNA vaccines, developed under Operation Warp Speed during the Trump era, were lauded for saving millions and fast-tracking pandemic recovery by delivering safe and highly effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time.
Now, it would be a miracle if someone could determine why Trump has unleashed this charlatan on the world. Most of the president’s appointees can be understood in the context of the administration’s known priorities.
You know, like ending American democracy, enriching the Trump family and repaying unspecified debts to Vladimir Putin. But what’s in it for Trump by destroying the nation’s health and security to appease Kennedy?
The most widespread theory is that Trump made a deal with Kennedy to plague the nation with this guy as HHS secretary — and maybe start a plague in the process. But, Mr. President, why does this have to be the first time in 79 years that you’ve kept your word about anything?
It’s hard to understand Trump’s ulterior motive here. And that’s the only kind he has.
The Washington Post noticed the contradiction inherent in Kennedy’s treachery:
Kennedy’s resistance against mRNA vaccines is without evidence. In fact, the technology — which instructs the body’s cells to produce a harmless bit of virus that is then used to train the immune system, as opposed to using weakened or dead versions of a virus — delivered arguably the most important achievement of Trump’s first term: the production of effective vaccines against the novel coronavirus within the span of a few months.
Such speed was practically unheard-of in biomedical research. Thanks to the urgency created by Operation Warp Speed, the federal government was able to mount an impressive vaccination rollout that boosted the population’s immunity to the coronavirus just when it was needed.
Now, if we could only find some way to boost the population’s immunity to RFK, Jr.
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