Trump slaps his face on another plummeting asset
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
One GOP senator could shed light on Epstein's finances. Why won't he do it?
Early in 2024, during the Biden administration, Sen. Mike Crapo, (R-ID), had a chance to provide the world with financial information about disgraced sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein.
It only recently became known that Crapo was asked to join the senior Democrat on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee in a subpoena for the Epstein material held by the Treasury Department. For some reason he refused.
For years, and particularly before it became standard practice to refuse to work on virtually anything with anyone in the other party, Crapo and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), now the ranking member of the Crapo-led Finance Committee, have annually teamed up to pass legislation to provide funding to rural schools. They did so again in June in an increasingly rare example of bipartisan legislating.
But bipartisanship clearly doesn’t extend to information the government, particularly the treasury department, has on Jeffrey Epstein. Crapo, it seems clear, has been stonewalling any effort to force release of material that members of his staff reviewed more than 18 months ago.
One of many mysteries about Epstein, who was in prison in 2019 awaiting trial at the time of his death, was how the guy amassed a fortune estimated at $550 million, as well as several lavish estates and a private island.
Where all that money came from and for what purpose are central questions in understanding Epstein’s crimes. Wyden has been on the case for months. When he asked Crapo to help him, Crapo refused.
After the New York Times recently reported that JP Morgan Chase, “arguably the world’s most prestigious bank,” had long treated Epstein as a “treasured client,” while essentially ignoring mounting questions about the vast sums of money flowing into and out of his accounts, Wyden insisted the bank provide information. The Oregon senator demanded an explanation as to why the bank continued to cover up Epstein’s “suspicious transactions for six years after firing him as a client.”
Earlier Wyden introduced legislation that would compel Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett to turn over his department’s Epstein record, while Crapo voted against a separate effort to compel release of Epstein documents.
But before Wyden introduced his Epstein legislation a curious thing happened, way back in February 2024, while Joe Biden was still president. As the Oregon Capital Chronicle reported earlier this month:
“For several hours on Valentine’s Day in 2024, staff from Oregon U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden’s office and the Senate Finance Committee sat in a room in the U.S. Treasury Department reviewing, thousands of suspicious financial transactions made by deceased and disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The transactions totaled more than $1 billion and included payments to women from eastern European countries where many of Epstein’s alleged victims are from. Along with Wyden’s team, staff from the offices of Republican Sens. Mike Crapo of Idaho and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee reviewed the documents, according to Wyden. Spokespersons for Crapo and Blackburn did not respond to requests for comment from the Capital Chronicle.
The Senate staffers we allowed to look at document and take notes but not allowed to make copies.
“And because you can’t take that stuff out of the room,” Wyden said, “I asked, particularly, if the Republicans would be willing to join me in a subpoena that would get the rest of the information that was crucial, and they wouldn’t do that. And that was during the Biden years.”
In a Sept. 2, 2025, letter to Bessent, the Treasury secretary, Wyden elaborated on one document his staff and Crapo’s reviewed in 2024.
“One of the documents,” Wyden wrote, “indicates that between 2003 and 2019, there were more than 4,725 wire transfers totaling $1.08 billion involving Jeffrey Epstein and his associates … These documents also contain details of hundreds of millions in payments to Epstein from Wall Street financiers, including $170 million Leon Black paid Epstein for purported tax and estate planning advice.”
Leon Black is a billionaire private equity investor. In 2023 Black reached a $62.5 million settlement with the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands that, as the Times reported, released Black “from any potential claims arising out of the territory’s three-year investigation into the sex trafficking operation” of Epstein. Black contends he did nothing wrong, but he sure did pay a lot of money to avoid further investigation of ties to Epstein.
“Furthermore,” Wyden wrote to Bessent, “records show that Epstein used correspondent accounts at multiple Russian banks, to process hundreds of millions of payments related to potential sex trafficking. Several of these Russian banks are now under U.S. sanctions and many of the women and girls Epstein targeted came from Russia, Belarus, Turkey and Turkmenistan. These records outline specific names of women and girls, correspondent bank account numbers in Russia used to process the payments, as well as details on Epstein associates who had signatory authority over Epstein’s accounts and signed off on payments related to sex trafficking.”
So why hasn’t Mike Crapo joined Ron Wyden in a quest to get this information from the Treasury Department? Why has Crapo put on ice his committee’s oversight jurisdiction over the Treasury Department? Why wouldn’t he pursue Epstein documents while Biden was in office?
I emailed Crapo’s press office, as well as person who handles communication for the Finance Committee. No response. Nothing.
Specifically I asked:
- Did Crapo’s staff review the Epstein documents?
- Who specifically was involved in the review?
- Why has Crapo not joined Wyden in pressing for the release of these materials?
I wanted to know — perhaps his constituents would like to know — why Crapo wasn’t demanding answers about Epstein’s finances. Opinion polls clearly indicate the American public, people in both parties, believe answers are necessary.
There are at least three plausible reasons Crapo refused when he had the chance to get Epstein information to the public.
Perhaps he thinks it’s not important.
Perhaps he thinks there is some privacy question involved, even though Epstein is long dead and his chief accomplice is in jail.
Or perhaps those records Crapo’s staff saw in 2024 get too close to someone Crapo doesn’t want to offend, a big campaign contributor or Wall Street banker or CEO.
Had Crapo agreed to that subpoena last year, we’d likely know a whole lot more about Jeffrey Epstein today.
- Marc C. Johnson is a former Idaho broadcast journalist and was a top aide to Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus. His most recent books include "Mansfield and Dirksen; Bipartisan Giants of the Senate" and "Tuesday Night Massacre: Four Senate Elections and the Radicalization of the Republican Party."
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These brutal firings and closures mean Trump is flying blind — and heading for a crash
Flying blind is dangerous, but it’s what Trump and his lackeys are forcing America to do.
For starters, the current government shutdown means that critical economic statistics — such as job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that normally would have appeared last Friday — are delayed. No one knows when they’ll appear.
The BLS also produces data on inflation and wages — also delayed.
At a time when there’s reason to worry that the American economy is weakening — when Trump’s tariffs (import taxes) are pushing prices higher, his ICE dragnet is causing labor shortages, and he is asserting control over the Fed’s interest-rate decisions — turning the lights off on the economy is a particularly bad idea.
But even if the government weren’t shuttered, Trump is still turning out the lights.
His firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, on the basis of a jobs report showing a dramatic slowdown in the number of new jobs created under Trump’s watch, has caused many to wonder whether Americans will ever know the truth about how the economy is doing.
Once Trump completes his takeover of the Fed, there will be no inflation cop on the beat, with the result that no one can have any confidence that inflation will be controlled in the future.
Trump intends to replace quarterly earnings reports by publicly traded companies with twice-annual updates. This would put investors in the dark.
Trump and the sycophants surrounding him don’t mind turning the lights off on the economy because they’d rather Americans not know how badly it’s doing under Trump.
Besides, Trump doesn’t like data. He eschews facts. He wants investors and consumers — and everyone else — to be in the dark, because then he can lie without fear of factual contradiction. He can create even more of a fantasy world. He can pretend that he’s been wildly successful even when he’s been a terrible failure.
Trump’s concealment extends beyond the economy. He’s been misrepresenting evidence on vaccines. He’s slowing or stopping data collection on climate change and on bird flu.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently announced it was defunding its annual survey on food security. This is the nation’s longest-running and most consistent measurement of whether American families are meeting their basic nutritional needs.
Without this information, policymakers and researchers can’t track how many Americans are hungry and how many children are failing to receive adequate nutrition.
Trump doesn’t mind, because he and his Republican enablers in Congress just enacted the largest cuts to food assistance ever to hit American families. Meanwhile, his tariffs — combined with lack of antitrust enforcement — are making food prices soar.
In April, the Trump administration laid off all the analysts at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) responsible for updating the federal poverty guidelines used to calculate eligibility for more than 40 programs, such as the National School Lunch Program and Low-Income Home Energy Assistance and parts of Medicaid and Medicare.
I doubt Trump wants Americans to know that poverty is rising on his watch, as it surely is. Nor is he especially concerned about updating eligibility for programs that keep Americans out of poverty — programs he’s actively and illegally cutting.
In March, DHHS suspended data collection for the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a database on maternal mortality. In April, the full PRAMS team was put on administrative leave.
Trump doesn’t want Americans to know that women are very likely getting sicker and dying at higher rates due to his (and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s) absurd policies limiting access to drugs and vaccines, his bonkers announcement that pregnant women shouldn’t take Tylenol (even if they’re running a fever), and policies denying women abortions — such as ending Medicaid payments to reproductive health care clinics that offer abortions.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in May that it will no longer be updating its Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters data, which tracks major weather and climate disasters that have total damages or costs of $1 billion or more.
I’m sure Trump is fine with this because he believes climate change is a “hoax.” He’s stopped funding wind and solar energy and instead given carte blanche to the oil companies. Of course he doesn’t want to track large climate disasters.
The lights are going out across America.
The problems that we as a nation have sought to illuminate, so that we can remedy them, are disappearing — not because the problems are disappearing or have been remedied, but because we will no longer know about them.
It is impossible to protect American consumers, workers, investors, families, and children without adequate data. Trump and his lackeys have little or no interest in protecting them — and even less in allowing Americans to know how little they care.
When this Trump daymare is over, one of our first priorities must be to restore all the ways of knowing what’s happening to Americans — and dedicate ourselves and the nation to sharing the truth.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.
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Are Trump's masked thugs the new Ku Klux Klan?
Masked, armed law enforcement agents who regularly violate the law and strip people of their constitutional rights is nothing new in America. They have, in fact, a long and well-documented history, including states — after years of abuse by masked men — passing laws specifically to prevent them from concealing their identities when performing law enforcement operations.
In this era, we call them Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. In the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries they called themselves the Klu Klux Klan. They often operated with the blessing of both federal and state governments, often deputized and given badges and guns, and “enforced the law” while wearing their famous white hoods to conceal their individual identities.
ICE operates today with a level of anonymity, impunity, and intimidation that closely parallels the Ku Klux Klan’s tactics as masked, semi-official enforcers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both used legal or quasi-legal authority, masked identities, and violent or coercive tactics to carry out their missions, all without individual accountability while targeting vulnerable minorities and subverting legal norms to do so.
Because their violence and brutality so often broke the law, the Klan’s hoods prevented victims from identifying them. This allowed them to operate with near-complete impunity, knowing that individually they’d never be held to account.
To this day, we generally only know the names of their public leaders or of those who’d taken over regular law enforcement bureaus, like the five Klan members who murdered three voting registration/civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964.
Operating under the authority of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s office, Edgar Ray Killen, a local Ku Klux Klan organizer, planned and orchestrated the murders; Cecil Ray Price, a Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff and Klansman, arrested the three men on a fabricated speeding charge; Alton Wayne Roberts was the Klansman who shot and killed Schwerner and Goodman; Samuel Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of Mississippi’s Klan, ordered the killings; James Jordan was the Klansman who confessed to shooting Chaney.
Today — to avoid the accountability that Killen, Price, Roberts, Bowers, and Jordan faced — ICE agents routinely conduct operations while masked, concealing faces and badge numbers. This is framed as a “safety” measure, but it’s pretty clear that the real motive is to shield agents from accountability, mirroring practices by the Klan, who wore hoods to intimidate, avoid arrest, and facilitate mob violence without risk of personal consequence.
The Klan’s power was rooted in violence without accountability. And the mask was its shield. When historians write about the so-called “Second Klan” of the 1920s, they point out its members’ obsession with law and order and masked morality enforcement.
Some jurisdictions openly deputized them to “assist” in enforcing segregation laws and even liquor laws — principally raiding Black-owned speakeasies — during Prohibition. In Indiana and Oregon, the Klan effectively ran the entire state’s politics.
Eventually, states had enough and outlawed Klan members from wearing hoods or kerchiefs, even when executing the law. New York, a “free state,” was an early adopter. In 1845, before the Klan was formed, the state made it a crime for a law enforcement officer or anybody else to appear “disguised and armed.”
An Indiana version of that law was overturned by an Indiana Federal District judge who found that forcing Klan members to remove their hoods could subject them to harassment and impinge on their “right to anonymity when past harassment makes it likely that disclosing the members’ [identities] would impact the group’s ability to pursue its collective efforts at advocacy.”
It’s Tom Homan and Kristi Noem’s argument today.
In addition to New York and Indiana, 17 states passed laws against armed men wearing masks to conceal their identities, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Oklahoma, Texas, Connecticut, Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee (law later struck down), Arkansas (local ordinances), and Maryland (various forms).
California has an 1872 ordinance that outlaws “mask, false whiskers, or any personal disguise (whether complete or partial)” when “evading or escaping discovery, recognition, or identification in the commission of any public offense.”
Connecticut law (1949) makes it illegal to wear a mask “with the intent” to deprive another of “any rights, privileges or immunities” on account of race, something it appears that ICE officers are doing daily, particularly since Brett Kavanaugh said they can racially profile people in so-called “Kavanaugh Raids.”
Delaware outlaws (1953) wearing masks “while congregating in public and depriving another of rights.” DC outlaws wearing masks “to avoid identification” while committing a dangerous or violent crime, theft, or “threats to do bodily harm.”
Florida outlaws (1951) wearing a mask “while intimidating others.” Ditto for Georgia, Massachusetts (“while obstructing police”), Michigan (“in commission of a crime”), New Mexico (“while obstructing police”), North Dakota (“while in commission of a crime”), Ohio (“while in commission of a misdemeanor with others so masked”), and Oklahoma (“while in commission of a crime or to harass”).
Most of these laws could be used to prosecute ICE officers when they wear masks while committing assault, kidnapping, and vandalism, should any state or city governments choose to make the arrests.
The most recent and most specific law was passed this year by California’s legislature, called the No Secret Police Act (SB627). It’s main author, State Senator Scott Weiner, notes:
“As this authoritarian regime seeks to demolish our constitutional rights and engages in a straight up terror campaign, California is meeting the Trump Administration’s secret police tactics with strength and defiance. …
“ICE’s secret police tactics, under Trump and Stephen Miller, are raining fear and aggression down on California and requiring us to adapt in real time. …
“No one wants masked officers roaming their communities and kidnapping people with impunity. As this authoritarian regime expands its reach into every aspect of daily life — including terrorizing people where they work, where they live, where they go to school, where they shop, where they seek health care — California will continue to stand for the rule of law and for basic freedoms.”
So far, Governor Gavin Newsom has chosen not to enforce the law that he pushed through his own legislature, although ICE seems to be focusing their “Kavanaugh Raid” abuses of Black and Hispanic people on Chicago — where they’ve already shot two people, killing one — and Portland right now.
The question isn’t whether ICE agents today share the Klan’s ideology. Some may not, although recruiting pitches seem directed toward those sympathetic. The question, instead, is whether our government has once again created a Klan-like system in which anonymous armed men can break into homes, detain people, and abuse families without being individually answerable to the law.
That is what the hood and mask have always symbolized in America: they mean rightwing thugs can do whatever they want and walk away untouched, no matter how heinous their crimes.
We’re told that if we have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear. But when armed officers of the government hide their identities from the public they claim to serve, they’re telling us exactly what to fear.
History has already written the first draft of this story once before. We’d be fools to let it play out again.
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The lies have it: how Trump's most loyal trooper reached a new low
It’s a shame they don’t play entrance music for witnesses at U.S. Senate hearings.
Attorney General Pam Bondi came to the Senate Judiciary Committee to praise Donald Trump — and make sure no one tried to bury him — and she spent four defiant hours doing just that. Bondi, famous for choreographing her endless Fox News cameos, surely wishes she could have rolled out more production values on Tuesday.
Just imagine the potential.
“Pam Bondi strolled to the witness chair wearing a MAGA hat to the beautiful sounds of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” Sean Hannity could have reported. “If that didn’t bring tears to your eyes, you’re some radical leftist or squish. Definitely not human.”
Unfortunately, Bondi had to settle for lip syncing the words. But in a MAGA movement so sexist as to publicly embrace submissiveness as a special virtue for its women — even though the men are just as pathetic — Bondi outdid herself.
Bondi “dodged questions on 14 topics” — which you have to admit is pretty impressive — according to the Washington Post’s scorecard. Here’s just a smattering of Bondi’s groveling devotion to her man:
- Bondi stated, “My attorneys have done incredible work advancing President Trump’s agenda and protecting the Executive Branch from judicial overreach” — arguably the most blatant rejection of any pretense of DOJ independence from the presidency ever recorded in the Senate.
- When asked by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) if the Epstein investigation files included incriminating photos of Trump with half-naked young women, Bondi didn’t say no — she chose to attack the senator instead.
- She told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL): “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump. And, currently, the National Guard are on the way to Chicago. If you’re not going to protect your citizens, President Trump will.”
- When questioned about reports that former FBI Director James Comey’s indictment came shortly after President Trump publicly called for his prosecution, Bondi refused to discuss any conversations she had with the White House, repeatedly stating, “I am not going to discuss any internal conversations with the White House.”
- Bondi declined to discuss internal conversations with the White House about National Guard deployments or DOJ decisions — then turned and attacked Democrats for politicizing law enforcement.
- Declined to answer Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) about whether she was firing career prosecutors solely because they worked on January 6 cases Trump doesn’t like.
- When pressed by Sen. Whitehouse on $50,000 in cash delivered to Trump border czar Tom Homan, she wouldn’t confirm or deny — instead telling him, “Senator, you’re welcome to talk to the FBI.”
Confrontational hearings between officials of any administration and senators are hardly new. But the degree to which Bondi disrespected the process — apparently in keeping with Trump’s new playbook in which witnesses attack the character of adversarial senators rather than respond to their questions — is in a league of its own.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) afterwards called it “possibly a new low for attorneys general testifying before the United States Congress,” saying, “Her apparent strategy is to attack and conceal. I have never seen anything close to it in terms of the combativeness, the evasiveness and sometimes deceptiveness.”
It really shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. October marks the 12th anniversary of Bondi’s first act of public fealty to Trump. Back then, she was Florida’s attorney general and he was just a famous guy whose Trump University happened to be getting sued by the state of New York as a fraudulent “sham.”
Here’s how a Palm Beach Post editorial described what took place in October 2013:
Just days after Ms. Bondi’s office announced that it might join a lawsuit against Mr. Trump and his school, Mr. Trump’s foundation cut a $25,000 check to a Bondi re-election committee. Despite the timing, the political committee found nothing amiss. It kept the money and Ms. Bondi decided not to participate in the lawsuit.
Twelve years later, it was hardly Bondi’s first Trump rodeo when she bent the knee at the Senate hearing. It won’t be the last.
But she’ll be hard pressed to surpass the unintended irony she displayed in personally attacking Trump nemesis Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) rather than answering any of his questions.
“If you worked for me, you would have been fired because you were censured by Congress for lying,” Bondi told Schiff, without a hint of self-awareness.
Talk about a government shutdown. If Trump’s inner circle was subjected to that standard, he would be obligated under the Bondi standard to utter his famous “You’re fired!” to every single one of them.
Including, most definitely, Pam Bondi.
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Trump is clearly mentally diminished — Dems must target these people pulling his strings
On Friday, the president changed his mind. He decided that he is not going to break the law by withholding $187 million in federal funding for an intelligence and counterterrorism initiative in New York City.
And you should be grateful.
“I am pleased to advise that I reversed the cuts made to Homeland Security and Counterterrorism for New York City …” he said. “It was my Honor to do so. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
But Donald Trump didn’t change his mind. Not really. He just wants us to think so. Fact is, he wasn’t part of the decision to (illegally) cut off the money. Someone in the regime decided for him. Here’s the Times:
The cuts, which represented the largest federal defunding of police operations in New York in decades, were made by the Department of Homeland Security, without explanation and without the approval of President Trump, White House officials said.
Indeed, President Trump was blindsided by the decision to defund the police, not learning of the cuts until Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York called him on Sunday to protest the change after the fact, according to three people with knowledge of the call.
If the cuts had gone through, Trump would have defunded the police more than anyone, ever. That would not have been a good look for a president who bills himself as the great champion of law enforcement, and here’s the thing about that: someone in the White House knew it.
They knew it would hurt Trump to be seen as the president who kneecapped New York cops, seemingly making it harder for them to stop the next 9/11. Yet this someone went ahead and did it anyway, in the knowledge that Big Daddy is preoccupied with other matters.
I don’t want to belabor the obvious, but this sometimes happens when the father of the family, as it were, is old and doddering, and can no longer be trusted to tell the difference between reality and television. This sometimes happens when a “family member” really hates Big Daddy and wants to expose him. That way, everyone sees the truth!
I kid, but only slightly. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s someone in the White House who really hates Trump, despite working for the hate regimes, and actively seeks ways to humiliate him. (Consider the unknown aide responsible for putting makeup on his hand to cover up whatever ailment he has. The makeup’s color and his skin color are so mismatched that you can’t help thinking it was done on purpose!)
More important is that it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s someone – or a group of someones – that recognizes the chance to seize the reins of power for themselves and if it goes sideways, Trump can take the fall.
The president very often doesn’t seem to know what’s going until an outsider tells him. It could be a congressional Democrat. For instance, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump didn’t understand the coming spike in insurance premiums, the result of him and the Republicans failing to renew federal subsidies.
“We laid out to the president some of the consequences happening in healthcare, and by his face and the way he looked, I think he heard about them for the first time,” Schumer said.
It could be a Democratic governor. After watching a Fox segment that made Portland look like a hellscape, Trump planned to send National Guard troops there. Then he talked to Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, who, like New York’s Kathy Hochul, set him straight.
Trump told Kotek: “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’”
But mostly, Trump learns about what his regime is doing when the press corps asks about what it’s doing. This is an ongoing pattern but most recently, Trump did not know that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had convened a meeting of the top military officials until questioned. The AP: “The president's participation was not part of the original plan for the meeting but that he decided that he wanted to go.”
His speech there was word salad. As I wrote, he twaddled on about Biden’s autopen; about the unfair media; about tariffs; about the border; about “the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner”; and even the “Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.”
Then, amid the outpouring of words, there was a moment of clarity, and Trump seemed to remember what his people had been telling him.
“It’s a war from within,” he said. “It’s really a very important mission. We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military ... because we’re going into Chicago very soon.”
(Subsequently, the regime ordered Texas National Guard troops to Illinois against the wishes of JB Pritzker. The Illinois governor has filed suit to stop it.)
Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey told MSNBC the speech was “one of the most bizarre, unsettling events I’ve ever encountered.” And: “The president sounded incoherent, exhausted, rabidly partisan, at times stupid, meandering [and] couldn’t hold a thought together.”
(In fairness, Trump isn’t too far gone yet. As Jen Psaki noted, he is still aware enough to put the kibosh on any plan to defund the police.)
This pattern is so frequent and so public that the Washington press corps really should be asking, as Dan Froomkin recently suggested:
- “Is he a confused old man?
- “Is he being manipulated by his staff?
- “Is he delusional? Is he gaslighting us?
- “Who’s in charge?”
On Friday, I argued that the growing awareness of the president’s dementia (so far primarily due to Pritzker’s use of the d-word) could present an opportunity for coalition-building – between anti-Trump partisans who always believed him to be a threat to democracy and non-partisan swing voters who supported him in the mistaken belief that he’d solve pressing problems, like inflation and the cost of living.
The main obstacle to building a coalition is changing minds, namely, that indie voters are not going to admit they were wrong to choose a fascist. It hits different, however, when the same fascist appears to have dementia and, as a result, is doing weird stuff, like trying to defund the police while ordering troops to do the work of the police. At that point, the lift is less heavy. Liberals are not asking swing voters to stand up for democracy, just to stand against demented chaos.
It also hits different when, in the context of dementia, it seems that someone – or a group of someones – is pulling the strings and that Donald Trump is more puppet than president.
That framing could also have a powerful effect on swing voters in joining an anti-authoritarian and pro-democracy coalition. They would not have to blame the president, thus blaming themselves by implication. Instead, they could blame the unelected liars and cheats – Russ Vought and Stephen Miller spring to mind – who are conspiring behind his back. Indies might even be encouraged to take the moral high ground. At least some of the power-grab involves humiliating a demented old man in public.
In this light, I think Project 2025 becomes something bigger than the authoritarian playbook that liberals go on and on about, and that indie voters tend to tune out. It becomes a stand-in for the schemers pulling Trump’s strings. They know their policies are so unpopular that they would never become reality if Vought and Miller couldn’t whisper in the ear of a doddering old man who can no longer be trusted to tell the difference between reality and television.
For independent voters who may be looking for an off ramp, it’s not Project 2025. It’s Puppet 2025.
To be sure, I don’t trust the press corps to do the work that democracy needs. Reporters are happy to show a live feed of Trump seemingly not knowing what’s going on, but that’s the extent of it. They are not going to ask for the names of the puppet masters. They are not going to hold Trump to the same ageist standards that they held Joe Biden to. (They are certainly not going to flirt with the same conspiracy theories.) The hypocrisy is so baked in that, for now, I have no hope of it changing.
(And to be sure, all my talk of Trump’s dementia might give the impression I don’t think he’s an evil man who’s capable of committing his own atrocities. Let me be the first to disabuse you of that notion.)
But the news media isn’t the only thing that swing voters experience. They also experience the pain and the chaos of unpopular policies pursued by this regime: tariffs, inflation, healthcare cuts, not to mention masked thugs ripping families apart. The more pain and chaos they feel, the more they might be open to the argument that the pain itself is proof that the democratically elected president isn’t in charge.
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Squealing GOP hypocrites know they aided a coup — only relentless truth will expose them
Everyone remembers. We watched it live on TV. After a fairly mundane election, in which Donald Trump simply wasn't capable of accepting a loss, he chose instead to fire everyone who dared to tell him he came up short, fair and square, then proceeded to collude with others to attempt to overthrow the government. Trump set his sights on the Capitol in a last-ditch attempt at a coup, attacking Congress just as it certified that pathologically intolerable loss.
Trump's utterly reckless and brazen behavior on January 6th, 2021, led even some of his most hardened supporters to shake their heads. Some resigned their positions. He was done, finished. Finally, everyone agreed the man wasn't fit, a threat to all the nation holds dear. Social media banned him: too dangerous. The world crawled across the line, finally able to see it all clearly. The movement was exposed.
That lasted for about a month, in which Mitch McConnell stood at the podium of the Senate and waved away his "not guilty" vote on the second impeachment, ensuring us Trump was now a matter for law enforcement, not voters.
Subtext: "Trump will be investigated and perhaps indicted."
History will come down hard on former Attorney General Merrick Garland for unforgivably slow-walking the investigation, leaving sufficient time for the great whitewashing that started with small meetings at Mar-a-Lago with Kevin McCarthy, then GOP leader in the House, and from that seed growing to a forest of outrageous and self-righteous rallies. In just two-and-a-half years, January 6th went from MAGAs' lowest moment, a national timeout, to a rallying cry, setting the stage for Trump's reelection in 2024. (Also as an anti-vax movement, anti-science, anti-modernity, anti-NATO, pro-Russia...)
It was only about three years in that Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Department of Justice finally got around to filing charges. Unbelievable. The moment had passed.
Now, with the release of files showing that Smith subpoenaed telephone records from various members of Congress, the right feels at home as the ultimate victims, crying that Smith was "tracking calls," as if the goal was blackmail and not to investigate a possible conspiracy on January 6th — remember, the crime we saw on TV?
Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) is just one of many crying out:
Jack Smith tracked my private communications and those of my colleagues during his witch hunt to investigate [Trump]. This is exactly the type of political weaponization of the federal government under Presidents Obama and Biden that Republicans and President Trump have been calling out for years. We will get to the bottom of this, but every American should be shocked to see what happened here."
"Witch hunt?" He means the investigation of the vicious attack on Congress, of which he's a member, now subject to a whitewash so shameful that his memory seems wiped politically clear.
Again, Hagerty is just one of many.
Left unsaid is that Smith investigated many reports that members of Congress both knew of the "alternate electors" and the plan to attack the Capitol. And yet Hagerty is here acting as though Smith "tracked his calls" to set the senator up.
Brazil went through something similar — it imprisoned its president for years. It is a more mature democracy.
In Washington, the monstrous crime necessitated a massive investigation. This wasn't some spontaneous uprising, with Congress hapless bystanders. No, Trump invited everyone to congregate and asked members of Congress to speak. The Electoral College had voted, it was over, and yet Trump continued to hold rallies, promising this one would be "wild," with a wink.
People like Hagerty and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) conveniently forget that MAGA "troops" were in position on January 5th. Steve Bannon (who refused to testify to Congress about the plot), all but laid out the scene:
“All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It’s all converging, and now we’re on, as they say, the point of attack.
“I’ll tell you this: It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. It’s going to be quite extraordinarily different, and all I can say is strap in.”
But this is a hoax witch hunt, according to many.
Everyone close to Trump knew the attack was coming. "Strap in" leaves no room for doubt, and surely some in Congress knew. Hawley wasn't pumping his fist about a vote. This was an attack on Congress, an attempt to steal the presidency, a crime at the absolute highest possible level. It would have been malpractice had Smith not sought the phone records of damn near everyone, Democrats included.
So powerful is Trump's ability to reverse reality, so willing are the followers to absorb an alternate history, the subpoena revelation has become a rallying point, crying about the fact that Garland's Justice Department took action against them, and yet Obama, Hillary Clinton, Smith, and other usual suspects remain free.
The MAGA crowd likes to spout out, "What if Trump and Pam Bondi 'tracked' the calls of Democratic senators?" To which the obvious retort is, "Had Democrats attacked the Capitol and a later Democratic president pardoned them all, Democrats wouldn't have a lot to complain about."
Therein lies the difference. The right is ever willing to bend reality to fit their need to prosecute the investigators, their raison d'etre. Prominent Democrats must be imprisoned for reasons traced to conspiracy theories, Pizzagate and Q-Anon. Meanwhile, the left knows that if reality were let loose, nearly everyone in the current executive branch would face a grand jury.
There is an obvious example, one of dozens.
What if Joe Biden was associated with Jeffrey Epstein but had Garland and then FBI Director Chris Wray send 1,000 FBI agents to pore through the records and flag all mentions of Biden? What if Biden then publicly stated there was nothing to see, it's a Republican hoax? What if he then promoted Ghislaine Maxwell to "Club Fed,” a prison way cushier than any sex offender ever would normally see? Oh, and we'd be supposed to ignore the birthday card with a naked woman mentioning friends with secrets, too.
The right would take up pitchforks.
The Epstein matter is a cover-up of the highest order. But January 6th need not even be covered up — it's now a point of pride. They fought the righteous fight, and anyone investigating it is the criminal. We are in upside-down world.
The Republican-controlled government will now investigate the investigators (they have experience with this), and they will assert that criminal Democrats were looking to "trap" innocent Republicans by "tracking" their calls, conveniently forgetting the attempted coup as if it were a wholesome, peaceful protest — or simply never happened, even though we all saw it live on TV.
That is where it gets especially dangerous.
Like so many dictators before him, Trump doesn't even pretend to serve the whole country. He openly leads and favors all who slavishly support him. All others have become "the enemy within." Somewhere, Stalin is nodding.
In 2020, democracy handed Trump a loss he was unable to psychologically process. Democracy itself became his enemy, one to be attacked on January 6th.
He campaigned in 2024 that he would be here to finish the job. He may voluntarily step down in 2028. He will be old. But he'll be damned if he ever subjects himself to democracy again. (You know he plans to run somehow — he's building a ballroom and it's not for JD Vance.)
And so it goes, the right will now initiate criminal investigations into those who investigated them. The key difference is that Trump and his followers committed a real crime. It was live on TV.
After the murder of Charlie Kirk, the right likes to say that only the left resorts to violence. Wrong. In 2000, the Democrat Al Gore had a legitimate case that the Supreme Court cut off counting the vote in Florida that would have made him the next president. Yet Democrats accepted events. They didn't attack the Capitol.
In 2020, Trump clearly lost — it wasn't that close. And yet, as president, Trump literally sought fake votes from a "friendly" Republican Secretary of State in Georgia ("All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, give me a break."). Then he sent the mob to sack the Capitol. The right is not "peaceful" when threatened.
So we're entering even more dangerous territory. Trump must avoid the Epstein issue. So he cries that the enemy within is stronger than any international adversary (Imagine China's smile.) Thus, Texas appears to be on the verge of invading Illinois. The stage is now set for a series of arrests, with Trump criminalizing any opposition to the regime.
Just like any regular dictator — just like Putin.
Changing voting mechanisms, altering districts, eliminating mail-in ballots, having the National Guard at polling stations — all of it tightens the noose. Hopefully, people don't start falling out of buildings. Don't laugh.
Bannon said "Strap in," but now it appears all too likely that Democrats must strap in for a fight to prevent 40 years of Republican rule, taking us straight from the first world to the second, that of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and India.
We are watching it in real time. The fact the FBI released information already known (the subpoenas for calls from the members of Congress around Jan. 6th) is of no matter. They have the Epstein files from which to distract. It seems to be working all too well.
Trump supporters are demanding investigations — we're used to that, it's a given. But against arrests properly made as a result of a vicious attack on the Capitol, they won't be satisfied. As James Comey can attest, nothing but arrests will satisfy this crowd, nor this president.
Everyone remembers watching the battle for democracy live on TV on January 6th, 2021. But, really, who could've known that we were merely observing the first skirmish in a war?
Left with no choice, we must fight back — but not violently. Fight back with the weapon they most fear. The truth. Sure, they will ignore it. Many in the teetering middle won't. It is not irrelevant. Ultimately, the truth is the toughest army for them to subdue. So get it out there because, setting aside lone-wolf violent attacks, the truth is, actual criminalization of politics is wholly one-sided.
A battle for truth is a fight for democracy, and it also needs to be fought live on televisions, phones, computers, and the streets. No self-respecting democratic resistance would do otherwise.
They will be the ones playing victims, pointing at clouds, always creating a fact-free reality. But have no doubt, the consequences are all too real.
- Jason Miciak is a former Associate Editor at Occupy Democrats, author, American attorney, and can be found regularly on Politizoom. He can be reached jasonmiciak@gmail.com, Twitter @JasonMiciak, and follow on Bluesky @jasonmiciak.bsky.social
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How Trump's Supreme Court lackeys pushed us to the brink of one-man rule
By Graham G. Dodds, Professor of Political Science, Concordia University.
President Donald Trump set the tone for his second term by issuing 26 executive orders, four proclamations and 12 memorandums on his first day back in office. The barrage of unilateral presidential actions has not yet let up.
These have included Trump’s efforts to remove thousands of government workers and fire several prominent officials, such as members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the chair of the Commission on Civil Rights. He has also attempted to shut down entire agencies, such as the Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
For some scholars, these actions appear rooted in the psychology of an unrestrained politician with an overdeveloped ego.
But it’s more than that.
As a political science scholar who studies presidential power, I believe Trump’s recent actions mark the culmination of the unitary executive theory, which is perhaps the most contentious and consequential constitutional theory of the past several decades.
Potent presidency
In 2017, Trump complained that the scope of his power as president was limited: “You know, the saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI, I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”
The unitary executive theory suggests that such limits wrongly curtail the powers of the chief executive.
Formed by conservative legal theorists in the 1980s to help President Ronald Reagan roll back liberal policies, the unitary executive theory promises to radically expand presidential power.
There is no widely agreed upon definition of the theory. And even its proponents disagree about what it says and what it might justify. But in its most basic version, the unitary executive theory claims that whatever the federal government does that is executive in nature — from implementing and enforcing laws to managing most of what the federal government does — the president alone should personally control it.
This means the president should have total control over the entire executive branch, with its dozens of major governmental institutions and millions of employees. Put simply, the theory says the president should be able to issue orders to subordinates and to fire them at will.
The president could boss around the FBI or order the U.S. attorney general to investigate his political opponents, as Trump has done. The president could issue signing statements — a written pronouncement — that reinterpret or ignore parts of the laws, like George W. Bush did in 2006 to circumvent a ban on torture.
The president could control independent agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The president might be able to force the Federal Reserve to change interest rates, as Trump has suggested. And the president might possess inherent power to wage war as he sees fit without a formal authorization from Congress, as officials argued during Bush’s presidency.
Constitutionally questionable
A theory is one thing. But if it gains the official endorsement of the Supreme Court, it can become governing orthodoxy. It appears to many observers and scholars that Trump’s actions have intentionally invited court cases by which he hopes the judiciary will embrace the theory and thus permit him to do even more. And the current Supreme Court appears ready to grant that wish.
Until recently, the judiciary tended to indirectly address the claims that now appear more formally as the unitary executive theory.
During the country’s first two centuries, courts touched on aspects of the theory in cases such as Kendall v. U.S. in 1838, which limited presidential control of the postmaster general, and Myers v. U.S. in 1926, which held that the president could remove a postmaster in Oregon.
In 1935, in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the high court unanimously held that Congress could limit the president’s ability to fire a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. And in Morrison v. Olson the court in 1988 upheld the ability of Congress to limit the president’s ability to fire an independent counsel.
Some of those decisions aligned with some unitary executive claims, but others directly repudiated them.
Warming up
In a series of cases over the past 15 years, the Supreme Court has moved in an unambiguously unitarian, pro-presidential direction. In these cases, the court has struck down statutory limits on the president’s ability to remove federal officials, enabling much greater presidential control.
These decisions clearly suggest that long-standing, anti-unitarian landmark decisions such as Humphrey’s are on increasingly thin ice. In fact, in Justice Clarence Thomas’ 2019 concurring opinion in Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, where the court ruled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s leadership structure was unconstitutional, he articulated his desire to “repudiate” the “erroneous precedent” of Humphrey’s.
Several cases from the court’s emergency docket, or shadow docket, in recent months indicate that other justices share that desire. Such cases do not require full arguments but can indicate where the court is headed.
In Trump v. Wilcox, Trump v. Boyle and Trump v. Slaughter, all from 2025, the court upheld Trump’s firing of officials from the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.
Previously, these officials had appeared to be protected from political interference.
Total control
Remarks by conservative justices in those cases indicated that the court will soon reassess anti-unitary precedents.
In Trump v. Boyle, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, “whether this Court will narrow or overrule a precedent … there is at least a fair prospect (not certainty, but at least a reasonable prospect) that we will do so.” And in her dissent in Trump v. Slaughter, Justice Elena Kagan said the conservative majority was “raring” to overturn Humphrey’s and finally officially embrace the unitary executive.
In short, the writing is on the wall, and Humphrey’s may soon go the way of Roe v. Wade and other landmark decisions that guided American life for decades.
As for what judicial endorsement of the unitary executive theory could mean in practice, Trump seems to hope it will mean total control and hence the ability to eradicate the so-called “deep state.” Other conservatives hope it will diminish the government’s regulatory role.
Kagan recently warned it could mean the end of administrative governance — the ways that the federal government provides services, oversees businesses and enforces the law — as we know it:
“Humphrey’s undergirds a significant feature of American governance: bipartisan administrative bodies carrying out expertise-based functions with a measure of independence from presidential control. Congress created them … out of one basic vision. It thought that in certain spheres of government, a group of knowledgeable people from both parties – none of whom a President could remove without cause – would make decisions likely to advance the long-term public good.”
If the Supreme Court officially makes the chief executive a unitary executive, the advancement of the public good may depend on little more than the whims of the president, a state of affairs normally more characteristic of dictatorship than democracy.
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Donald Trump has ordered red states to invade blue — that's no exaggeration
The direction we’re going is either martial law or civil war.
Americans from so-called “red” states, with the backing of their Republican governors and legislatures, are on the brink of using lethal force against Americans in so-called “blue” states, whose Democratic governors and legislatures strongly oppose the moves.
I pray we don’t come close to this, but Trump has now ordered the deployment of 400 members of the Texas National Guard to several states, including Oregon and Illinois — ostensibly to protect ICE agents and facilities from protesters. The first group of Texas Guard troops is expected to arrive in Chicago on Tuesday.
The troops are under the control of the Pentagon, with Trump as commander-in-chief. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that “the orders will be effective immediately for an initial period of 60 days.”
Less than an hour after Trump’s order, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, responded that he “fully authorize[s]” such a move by Trump. “You can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let Texas Guard do it,” Abbott said in a post on X.
The Democratic governors of Oregon and Illinois have sought emergency injunctions against these and similar deployments.
Late Sunday night, a federal judge in Oregon (appointed by Trump) temporarily blocked the mobilization of any state National Guards to that state. Today, a federal judge in Illinois declined to block the deployment of National Guard units there.
On Monday Trump said he was considering invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. That act would allow him to deploy troops despite any court orders stopping him.
“We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” Trump said, adding, “I’d do that if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”
What is Trump’s plan? What is the troika behind him (Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Russell Vought) seeking to accomplish, and how?
Sad to say, I believe Trump and his enablers have worked this out in advance. At the Pentagon on Sept. 30, Trump pitched the plan to use American soldiers for the purpose of punishing his political enemies.
He told hundreds of United States military leaders that they must prioritize “defending the homeland” against the “invasion from within” in American cities run by “radical-left Democrats.” He stated his intention is to use certain cities “as training grounds for our military.”
The first step has been for the Department of Homeland Security to deploy ICE agents to use aggressive tactics in targeted cities.
ICE has sent masked and armed federal agents into cities with Democratic mayors to do the following:
- Arrest and detain people outside immigration courtrooms.
- Fire tear gas and chemical munitions on city streets without warning.
- Raid homes and apartments in the middle of the night and arrest their occupants willy-nilly, including Americans, people legally in the country, and children.
- Use racial profiling to stop anyone looking Latino and demand proof of citizenship without warrants.
- Detain people they believe are here illegally, and do so without due process.
The second step is for such aggressive tactics to provoke demonstrations, and for Trump to exaggerate the scale and severity of them.
Trump has described Portland as a “war-ravaged” city “burning to the ground” with “insurrectionists all over the place.” In fact, demonstrations there had been muted and rarely expanded beyond a one-block radius of the immigration detention facility in the city.
On Sept. 6, Trump posted on social media an image of the Chicago skyline in flames with the words “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR” and a depiction of himself in the image of the fictitious warmonger character Lt. Col. Kilgore from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, titling the post “Chipocalypse Now.”
Yesterday, he described Chicago as a crime-ridden “war zone.”
The third step is for Trump and Hegseth to deploy federalized National Guard troops to control the demonstrators, an act that’s already enflaming the public and provoking some actual violence.
Until Trump’s announcement that he was sending troops into Portland, protests rarely numbered more than two-dozen people. Since his announcement, clashes have become more violent.
The fourth step will be for Trump and Hegseth to invoke the Insurrection Act.
He said as much today. The Insurrection Act empowers a president to deploy the U.S. military and to federalize the National Guard units of the individual states to suppress civil disorder, insurrection, or armed rebellion against the federal government of the United States.
It is a statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the president’s power to deploy the U.S. military within the United States.
The Insurrection Act requires that after invoking it but before exercising its powers, a president must formally order the dispersion of people committing civil unrest or armed rebellion.
The major clause of the Insurrection Act reads:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory, where it is lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection, or of causing the laws to be duly executed, it shall be lawful for him to employ, for the same purposes, such part of the land or naval force of the United States, as shall be judged necessary, having first observed all the pre-requisites of the law in that respect.
As I said, I hope we don’t come near to this. I hope the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, stop Trump’s plan. But I believe it is Trump’s plan (the details of which have been worked out by the troika of Vance, Miller, and Vought), and they are implementing it as quickly as they can.
I don’t want to unduly alarm you, but you need to be aware of this imminent danger. It’s unfolding very rapidly.
Please share.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.
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This is who's next on Trump's list. It's horrifying
Remember the old TV crime/drama shows? A cop would bang on a suspect’s door and the suspect would say, through the door, “Do you have a warrant?” The officer would then walk away, promising to come back later with the requisite paper signed by a judge.
No more. Now they’re kicking in doors, shooting pepper-gas balls into the open windows of cars driven by reporters, smashing windows and furniture, and concealing their faces and identities like the Klan did in days of old. In Chicago, they’ve shot two unarmed people, killing one. And there wasn’t a warrant signed by a judge to be seen anywhere.
People ask, “Are we there, yet? Has America gone fascist? Are we now in a militarized dictatorship?”
Last week’s illegal, unconstitutional military assault on an apartment building in Chicago argues “Yes.” And if it doesn’t stimulate a similar level of public outrage as the Jimmy Kimmel suspension did, we’re all screwed.
And by “all” I mean you, too. None of us are safe if all of us aren’t safe. We have to stand up and speak out now.
Trump, Vance, Hegseth, and Noem carefully selected a low-income apartment building filled with Black and Hispanic people, correctly believing that the American mainstream media wouldn’t give it the coverage they would if ICE and our military had instead kicked in the doors of a building full of middle-class white people.
Soldiers rapelled from Black Hawk helicopters as some 300 masked agents ran throughout the apartment building kicking in doors, dragging American citizens out (including near-naked children) into the street and zip-tying them for hours.
They then trashed multiple apartments, ripping up furniture, smashing windows, breaking and scattering possessions, and removing and carting away phones and laptops. No warrants signed by judges were presented and one ICE thug, when asked about the shivering American citizen kids standing in the freezing cold, said, “F--k the children.”
This is the exact same sort of thing that British forces did against the colonists in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
MAGA is delighted; puppy-killer Noem claims people were “clapping in the streets,” although there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of that. MAGA folks seem to think that because they’re white they’re safe from attack by this regime.
But when they’re done with the brown folks, they’ll be coming for the white people next. They’ll start with Democrats — Trump called them “Satan” last week — but history shows they won’t stop there.
It’s already started, with Trump’s most recent National Security Directive that instructs the 200-plus local police/FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces all across the country to begin investigating anybody or any group that exhibits or has ever given a donation to any group showing “indicia of terrorism” including being anti-Christian; anti-capitalism; extremism on migration, race, or gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional views on family, religion, or morality.
Do you have a queer kid? A Black or Hispanic friend? Are you a union member? Have you failed to attend church over the past few years? Are you Jewish or Muslim? Unitarian? Ever donated to a civil rights group? Voted Democratic? Or voted for a Republican who Trump despises, like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger?
You’re next.
They may have already started surveilling you, tapping your phone, reading your emails, collecting your browser and location history.
This isn’t the first time masked, armed agents of the government have terrorized American citizens. In the late 1870s and the 1920s, in Portland, Oregon (among other cities) armed, hooded members of the Klu Klux Klan were deputized and unleashed against racial minorities, Catholics, Jews, union members, and other “criminals and undesirables.”
Oregon had been so taken over by the Klan that in the election of 1876 their electoral college votes were challenged by both parties in Congress, leading, in part, to the election being handed to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.
Eventually, Oregon and the rest of America rejected masked secret police and vigilantes in our streets. Now, in this generation, it’s our turn.
Christopher Armitage, on his Existentialist Republic Substack newsletter, argues forcefully that masked federal agents committing crimes should be arrested by state and local police:
“Here’s what you need to know: Federal agents are committing state felonies every day. Breaking and entering. Kidnapping. Assault. When they kick down doors without judicial warrants, when they detain citizens without probable cause, when they point guns at children, these are crimes under state law. And Democratic governors have the power to prosecute those crimes …
“When ICE agents face potential state prosecution for breaking down doors, they’ll start getting real warrants signed by real judges. When pointing guns at families could mean assault charges, they’ll think twice. When detaining U.S. citizens could mean kidnapping prosecutions, they’ll check IDs more carefully.” (emphasis added)
And Trump can’t pardon state crimes; those convicted end up in state prisons. It’s probably why, like the Klan of old, they conceal their identities.
ICE isn’t bothering to get the kinds of warrants required by the Fourth Amendment, instead they’re using “administrative warrants” signed by ICE officials; these are just window-dressing paperwork and are not legal warrants.
Armitage points out:
“So when ICE breaks down a door with only administrative paperwork, that’s burglary under California Penal Code 459. When they haul away citizens without probable cause, that’s kidnapping under Penal Code 207. When they point weapons at unarmed families, that’s assault under Penal Code 245.”
He correctly tells us all to contact our state and local elected officials and demand that they enforce the laws of our states.
You can duckduckgo.com search for your town’s mayor’s office, your state representative and senator, and you can call your House and Senate members at 202-224-3121.
This brutal, illegal attack on American citizens last week was the Trump regime’s most visible “crossing the Rubicon” moment. If it stands, it will become normal and none of us are safe.
When the government becomes the criminal, silence is complicity. The Fourth Amendment is not a relic or a privilege; it’s the firewall between freedom and tyranny. If we allow it to burn, we’re setting fire to the idea of America itself.
Every citizen, every journalist, every elected official who still believes in the rule of law must speak out, organize, and demand accountability before this becomes irreversible. History does not forgive those who stayed quiet while justice was destroyed in plain sight.
The time to speak out and demand action is now.
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Maybe Trump's war room needed Jane Goodall's touch
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Top Dems finally see Trump has given them the fight of their lives — here's how to win it
As many of you know, I have been critical of what passes for the Democratic leadership gasping for air and a clear message in the toxic exhaust of the immoral Trump/Republican efforts to drive the United States of America off a cliff.
Their insistence on pushing lightweights like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to lead us during these dangerous days has been tone deaf and insulting. At a time we so clearly need fighters, and patriots who can effortlessly and forcefully articulate easy-to-digest talking points, we instead have timid letter-writers, monotone men who inspire sleep, not action.
Somehow the party still doesn’t understand that legislation and political backroom brawling have been replaced by public street fighting, and doing everything possible to seize the message, and win and win again in the court of public opinion.
Unfortunately, perception is everything in the Cell Phone Era, and right now most Americans do not like what either party is dialing up.
Forgetting the Democrats’ failures to break through, I still admittedly have a damn hard time with anybody who can’t see the differences between party that wants to poison our air and drinking water, and a party that wants to protect these things … a party that wants to release the names of the lowlifes who befriended a child-rapist, and the other that wants these people (and one orange one in particular) protected at all costs.
The stark differences between the two major parties in America are endless, and any failure to see this is intellectually lazy at best, and willingly ignorant at worst.
And while it is correct to say they both lean on the dirty money from all these corporate thugs to keep them in work, it is equally correct that America has never been more politically polarized. This has nothing do with the differences in the colors blue and red, and everything to do with the gaping distance between what is right and what is wrong.
Democrats are not perfect, but they are vastly more honest, moral, and decent than Republicans, too many of whom I have absolutely no problem classifying as racist liars.
In fact, I just described their president right there.
Fact-check it.
We are in the early days of this Trump/Republican shutdown of our government, and it feels to me like Democrats have stiffened their upper lips, are unified, and have finally found a hill worth dying on. By allowing Trump and his Republican majority to shut down the government they so clearly hate, Democrats have been given a platform and a megaphone to take a bold message to the American public, and win that battle of public opinion.
Finding themselves on an equal perch to make their case has rarely happened the past decade or so, because Trump — even while he was out of office — has been afforded the opportunity to suck the oxygen out of every room thanks in large part to a corporate media that is run by right-wing billionaires, who are more interested in profits than the truth.
Every hour the Trump shutdown continues, more people will learn just how badly Republicans are screwing them, while they stand up for billionaires, and against the working folk in this country. (Oh … and that they will do literally ANYTHING to keep us from seeing the Epstein Files, because once the government opens again, it could well be there is finally enough votes in Congress to release them.)
Trump and his pathetic Republicans have overplayed a really bad (bruised) hand, and Democrats must make them pay.
Poll after poll shows Americans are blaming Republicans for yet more needless pain in their lives. As more and more of them learn that nine years later, Republicans’ only alternative to Obamacare is a diabolical scheme that will double their healthcare premiums, support for the grotesque Republicans will only continue to erode.
A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll revealed that a whopping 78 percent of Americans say Congress should EXTEND enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits due to expire at the end of the year, including … are you ready for this … 57 percent of MAGA.
As always, Republicans are making it harder on the families they allege to care about, not easier.
Just ask any farmer ....
We are coming off a week in which Trump somehow outdid himself as the most repulsive man in the world. His ugly, anti-American Mussolini act at Quantico last week was another one of those five-alarm fires that should have ended it for this sickening man. You should never get a second chance to publicly rally our military against the citizens they are supposed to defend and serve.
Of course, he never should have gotten a second chance after violently attacking us on Jan. 6, 2021, either.
The man is a traitor, and completely unfit for any duty outside of stiffing some caddie on one of his garish golf courses, which is exactly where he was yet again Saturday, showing just how little he cares about his job or Americans.
He is in declining mental and physical health, and this, too, is becoming more apparent every day.
He is a blowhard gasping for air.
America and her hard-won democracy are in the same peril they were before Trump’s shutdown began last Wednesday, but more and more Americans finally seem to be seeing they have a helluva lot more to lose than to gain with Republicans in leadership.
This shutdown is the Republicans’ doing. They have the House, the Senate, and the presidency. They are being exposed for their insistence to extend tax cuts for the rich, while doing their level best to screw everybody else.
By not caving to these vandals, Democrats are on the right side of the fight, yes, but more important: They have claimed the coveted high ground from which they can finally take their message to the American people, and the fight to Trump’s pathetic Republicans.
- (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.)
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This clear scale shows how American democracy is in terminal decline
For generations, Americans have been taught that the United States is the world’s beacon of democracy. Politicians across the spectrum speak of the nation as a “shining city on a hill,” a place where freedom and the rule of law set the standard for the rest of the world. But the truth is harder to swallow: the U.S. is drifting away from liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism.
A survey of more than 700 political scientists conducted by Bright Line Watch in 2020 found that the vast majority believe the U.S. is rapidly moving toward some form of authoritarian rule. Scholars rated American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After Donald Trump’s first election in November 2016, they gave it a 67. Several weeks into his second term, the score had plunged to 55.
Elections, rights, and freedoms are under attack — and America is running out of time to save its democracy. The experts’ warnings are not abstract; they reflect a country where voter suppression, gerrymandering, corporate influence, a compliant Supreme Court, and executive overreach are eroding the foundations of democratic governance. When citizens are uninformed — or choose not to vote — the systems of power tilt toward elites, making it easier for authoritarian forces to consolidate control. Authoritarian forces also thrive on fear — fear of immigrants, political opponents, or anyone deemed an outsider — turning Americans against one another and eroding the inclusive ideals that once defined the nation as a melting pot.
One of the hallmarks of authoritarian systems is the concentration of power in a single office. In the US, the presidency has been steadily amassing authority for decades. Presidents of both parties have expanded executive power — from Woodrow Wilson, who during and after World War I oversaw a massive expansion of federal authority, centralized control over the economy, and signed the Espionage and Sedition Acts to suppress dissent, to more recent administrations.
After September 11, 2001, Congress handed the executive branch sweeping powers through the Authorization for Use of Military Force, essentially giving presidents a blank check for war. Since then, presidents have increasingly governed through executive orders and “emergency” declarations, bypassing Congress altogether.
Barack Obama further expanded executive authority through extrajudicial drone strikes, targeting individuals abroad without judicial review or due process, demonstrating that executive power can be exercised unilaterally and with limited accountability.
Meanwhile, Congress has been paralyzed by polarization and gridlock, leaving lobbyists and corporate donors to fill the vacuum. The Senate’s structure, which gives Wyoming and California the same representation despite a 70-fold population difference, allows minority rule to dominate national policy. Gerrymandering and voter suppression further hollow out electoral accountability. A government that concentrates power in the executive while undermining the voice of ordinary citizens is not functioning as a democracy.
Authoritarian governments also justify extraordinary powers in the name of “security.” The U.S. is no exception. The National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, revealed a government that watches its citizens on a scale once unthinkable. At home, local police departments increasingly resemble military units, rolling out armored vehicles and tear gas against peaceful protesters.
We saw this during Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter uprisings. The deployment of force against citizens exercising their constitutional rights should alarm anyone who values democracy. Yet the normalization of militarized policing has created what philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote as a “state of exception” — where emergency measures become everyday tools of governance.
Yes, Americans still enjoy constitutional rights — but too often these rights exist more on paper than in practice.
Free speech? Tell that to whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Snowden, or Reality Winner, who were prosecuted under the Espionage Act for revealing government misconduct.
Voting rights? They’ve been under relentless attack, especially since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted protections for minority voters. States have since imposed strict voter ID laws, purged voter rolls, and closed polling places in Black and Latino communities.
Even fundamental rights like reproductive freedom are being stripped away. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, unleashing a wave of state-level abortion bans. Millions of women and people who can become pregnant no longer have control over their own bodies. That’s not democracy; that’s state control of private life.
Another clear sign of authoritarian drift is the domination of politics by wealthy elites. Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, corporations and billionaires have been able to pour unlimited money into elections. Political campaigns are dominated by super PACs and billionaire donors. Our democracy is no longer guaranteed — from Wall Street to the White House, power is slipping into the hands of a few.
Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found in 2014 that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” leaving ordinary voters almost powerless to shape the laws that govern them.
The authoritarian character of the United States cannot be understood solely within its borders. With more than 750 military bases worldwide and a defense budget larger than the next ten nations combined, the United States functions as a global empire. Military interventions — from Iraq to Afghanistan to drone strikes across the Middle East and Africa — have often been launched without meaningful Congressional approval.
Empire abroad normalizes authoritarianism at home. Militarized policing, mass surveillance, and a bloated national security state are justified by the logic of “permanent war,” which also benefits defense contractors, private security firms, and other corporate interests that profit from endless conflict. As Hannah Arendt wrote, imperialism abroad often requires repression at home. That warning has become reality.
The United States still holds elections and maintains a written constitution, but appearances are misleading. The US still calls itself a democracy, but in practice, authoritarian forces are calling the shots. What makes American authoritarianism distinctive is its velvet glove: it is not a dictatorship in the classical sense but a regime where democratic symbols cloak undemocratic realities. Its most effective disguise is the illusion of freedom itself — an ideology of free market capitalism that promises choice while consolidating power in the hands of a few.
Americans are told they live in the land of opportunity, yet the choices available to them — whether in the marketplace or at the ballot box — are increasingly constrained by corporate monopolies and two political parties beholden to the same economic elites. Recognizing this drift is the first step toward reversing it. Unless structural reforms are undertaken — curbing corporate power, restoring voting rights, protecting civil liberties, and demilitarizing both foreign and domestic policy — the United States risks cementing its place not as the defender of democracy but as an exemplar of its decline.
It is a bitter irony that 66,000 living World War II veterans — who risked everything to fight authoritarianism abroad — now witness the creeping authoritarianism at home and the steady erosion of the freedoms they fought to secure. Their sacrifices are a reminder that democracy is fragile and must be actively defended.
Democracy is not self-sustaining. If Americans care about preserving freedom, they must act: vote in every election — from school boards to city councils to state legislatures — and recognize that their power extends beyond the ballot box. As consumers and shareholders, they can choose carefully which corporations they support, amplifying businesses that align with democratic values while withdrawing support from those that undermine them.
Citizens can also engage directly with elected officials, starting meaningful discussions to make their voices heard, and volunteer with nonpartisan nonprofit advocacy organizations and watchdog groups that protect the democratic process, civil rights, and corporate and government accountability and transparency. Pushing for structural reforms that rein in executive power and corporate influence, challenging fear-mongering narratives, and defending the rights of marginalized communities are all essential steps to reclaiming and preserving democracy.
We each have a role to play. Wake up, America! It’s one thing to recognize the nation’s slide toward authoritarianism and complain about it — it’s another entirely to take action. Be no bystander; democracy depends on participation. We ignore its demise at our peril.
- Martina Moneke writes about art, fashion, culture, and politics. In 2022, she received the Los Angeles Press Club’s First Place Award for Election Editorials at the 65th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards. She is based in Los Angeles and New York.
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