Pam Bondi's Epstein hearing brag backfires
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This gross display showed Trump's contempt for honor, service and decency itself
Donald Trump has offended us in so many ways, we should have built up immunity to his acrid tongue and distortive actions. Most react by calling whatever he’s said or done now “a new low point,” or asking, “Does it ever end?” But no, it doesn’t, and it always seems to get worse. Shockingly worse. There is no bottom.
One of Trump’s most offensive and blasphemous moments came this weekend, when his hypocritical deportment spoke louder than any savagery in his words.
On Saturday, Trump traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to attend the dignified — emphasis on dignified — transfer of six U.S. Army Reserve soldiers killed by an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait.
The visit was intended to honor the first American service members killed in the escalating conflict with Iran, with a ritual Trump himself has described as one of the “toughest” duties of a commander-in-chief.
Instead, he faced sharp criticism for wearing a white “USA” campaign hat during the solemn ceremony — criticism so severe that Fox News, Trump’s personal propaganda service, appeared to try to pretend it all never happened, broadcasting old footage of a hatless Trump at such a ceremony and passing it off as new.
At least Fox said sorry. When Saturday’s ceremony was over, Trump hopped back on his plane and flew to Florida to play golf and mingle with the rich and entitled at Mar-a-Lago, proving he couldn’t give a rat’s ass about his war or its deadly consequences.
But that white golf hat went far beyond bad taste. It desecrated the memory of the fallen troops.
The hat was grossly inappropriate. It had Trump’s trademark gauche gold lettering, the numbers 45–47 emblazoned on the side. Those numbers, that gold, signaled that everything is ultimately all about him. He never took it off.
This is a man who wormed his way out of military service during the Vietnam War with “bone spurs.” Whether as Cadet Bone Spurs or Commander Cankles — could the conditions be linked? — he has never experienced the hell of war or, frankly, any real discomfort.
Well, that’s not entirely true. He has had to endure the burden of flying on the cheap and dingy behemoth that is Air Force One, but that hardship will soon be relieved when Qatar’s most luxurious plane in the world comes into U.S. service.
Trump will no longer suffer the indignities of having to fly on the world’s most recognizable aircraft. Phew.
What made Saturday at Dover so sickening is that Trump has spent the better part of a decade degrading and dismissing America’s military — spitting in its face.
What he did Saturday was not mourning. Trump doesn’t have an empathetic bone in his body. If you know Trump, you know he thinks anyone who loses their life in war is beneath him. So what exactly was going through his mind?
He stood before flag-draped coffins, holding the bodies of men and women killed in a war he started without a clear strategy, without congressional authorization, without serious accounting of the lives that would be lost. That alone was breathtakingly disrespectful.
He looked somber for the cameras. But if Trump felt even an ounce of genuine grief, he would do something he has never once done: apologize, over and over and over again.
- Apologize for calling Sen. John McCain, a man who endured five years of torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, “not a war hero” because he was captured.
- Apologize for attacking Gold Star families, most infamously the Khan family, who lost their son Humayun in Iraq and were rewarded with petty attacks from a man who received five draft deferments.
- Apologize for reportedly calling American war dead at the Aisne-Marne cemetery in France “suckers” and “losers” — men who gave everything so Europe and the world could be free.
- Apologize for skipping a D-Day commemoration at that cemetery because it was raining. The men in those graves marched into machine gun fire. Their commander-in-chief didn’t want to get wet.
- Apologize for gutting Defense Department leadership and treating the armed forces like a personal militia.
- Apologize for purging career military officials, and replacing experienced defense leaders with loyalists whose primary qualification is devotion to one man.
- Apologize for nominating a defense secretary who treats women and LGBTQ+ soldiers as risks on the battlefield and who claims the media is trying to make Dear Leader Donald “look bad” by honoring those killed in Iran.
This past week, Trump told the New York Post that unlike everyone else, he doesn’t get “the yips” about sending ground troops into Iran.
What a flippant choice of words: a golfing term, grotesquely trivial when applied to the gravest decision a president can make.
The reason presidents and military commanders agonize over committing troops, the reason they lose sleep, consult, study history, and weigh every option, is because they understand what it means when you put boots on the ground: you are putting human beings in the crosshairs.
You are signing death warrants. The “yips”? It’s called having a conscience. It’s called making the decision with immense seriousness. It’s called understanding the weight of the office you hold and the choices you make.
Donald Trump, you give us all a disgusting case of the “yips.”.
Trump’s behavior at Dover on Saturday was not an honor to those six fallen service members. It was an insult. A man who has made a career of demeaning those who serve does not get to associate himself with their sacrifice.
He does not get to stand before their coffins and claim grief he has never earned or shown.
Every American who has served, who has lost someone who served, who believes this nation owes its military the most solemn respect, should be furious. Not just at the white hat. All of it.
At the years of contempt. At a war with no plan. At the cavalier talk of sending ground troops into battle and risking their lives.
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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Here's how the Iran war is becoming very dangerous indeed
By Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin.
The conflict in the Middle East continues, and is showing no sign of letting up. Israeli and US warplanes have continued to strike targets inside Iran, which has prompted retaliatory attacks throughout the region. An American submarine has also sunk an Iranian navy ship off the coast of Sri Lanka, killing at least 80 people, while Nato defences intercepted a missile heading towards Turkey.
US officials, who initially envisioned the conflict in Iran lasting four to five weeks, are now warning it may go on far longer. “We are accelerating, not decelerating,” Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on March 4, adding that “more bombers and more fighters are arriving just today”. We asked Middle East expert Scott Lucas how dangerous the situation has become.
You’ve called this ‘uncontained war’. What do you mean by that?
Once the Iranian regime retaliated, hours after initial US-Israel airstrikes that it was later revealed killed Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, this was no longer just an American-Israeli war on Iran. Tehran, which had refrained from retaliation beyond Israel in the 12-day war in 2025, was taking this across the region.
This was a war in the Gulf states, where Iran fired not only on American bases but also industrial areas, ports and tankers. This was a war in Lebanon, where Israel responded to Hezbollah rocket fire with airstrikes and an expansion of its occupation in the south of the country. This was the possibility of war spreading to Iraq, where the US military and CIA may be supporting Iranian Kurds for a cross-border incursion.
It is now possibly also a war beyond the Middle East. A drone attacked the UK’s RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus and an Iranian missile has been intercepted flying towards Turkey. Drones have struck an airport and school in Azerbaijan. Iran has denied responsibility but the Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev, has put his armed forces on high readiness.
How dangerous a moment is this?
War is always dangerous, of course, but this conflict is compounded by the shattering of any international “rules of the game”. The US and Israel have blatantly violated international law. They have assassinated the head of another country and his senior officials.
The United Nations can condemn the strikes, but this will be easily disregarded by Israel and the US. Donald Trump has historically taken little notice of UN criticism, and said in January that his power is limited only by his “own morality”. European countries can call for deescalation, but almost all have now prioritized working with the US on the defense of positions threatened by the Iranians.
China is maintaining a cautious position and Russia will be grateful that attention is being taken away from its invasion of Ukraine. If the Iranian regime does not surrender, there does not appear to be anyone or anything capable of checking the US and Israeli attacks — and thus the retaliatory shocks across the region and beyond.
Is there a risk that Nato will be drawn in?
Nato is already drawn in. Once Iran went beyond the Middle East to threaten Cyprus and Turkey, then the bloc had to take action. However, while Nato forces downed the missile heading towards Turkish airspace, the alliance is not yet discussing invoking Article 5 (the agreement that an attack on one Nato member is considered an attack on all).
The alliance has also become involved in the conflict verbally to ensure the Trump camp does not abandon Ukrainian and European security at a sensitive point in talks to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nato secretary general Mark Rutte, already known for calling Trump “daddy”, has given fulsome praise to the war even as some Nato members like Spain condemn it.
In a recent interview with a German television channel, Rutte said: “It’s really important what the US is doing here, together with Israel, because it is taking out, degrading the capacity of Iran to get its hands on nuclear capability.”
Where are the Gulf states in this? What happened to Qatar’s attempts to mediate?
The Gulf states are likely to be happy that Iran’s supreme leader and others in his circle have been assassinated. For decades, Khamenei had pursued a strategy of expanding Iran’s influence across the Middle East — directly threatening Gulf monarchies. However, they are loathe to see regime change, fearing the disorder and instability that marked Iraq after the 2003 US invasion.
They have been trying to pull back the Trump administration — an initiative by Qatar to persuade Trump into finding an off-ramp is notable — but they have to do so quietly. Open opposition to the US president risks even more serious disruption of the political and economic situation, with no guarantee that a triggered Trump will listen.
There is a further complication because of division among the Gulf states. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait put some of the blame for the rising hostilities in the Middle East on the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, for their policy of normalising relations with Israel. They claim this has emboldened the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
So far, the quiet push for deescalation does not appear to have succeeded. Without naming Qatar or another Gulf partner, Trump said on March 3 there will be no talks with Tehran.
The US and Israel are reportedly arming Kurdish groups. How could that change things?
With Plan A for regime surrender not succeeding so far, the Trump camp has had to consider what to do next. More bombing and an incursion by ground forces are two options, as is supporting an insurrection by Iranian Kurds.
It appears the US president and his senior advisers (along with their Israeli allies) may opt for the Kurdish option. According to reports, Trump has in recent days called Kurdish minority leaders to offer them “extensive US air cover” and other backing if they enter the conflict.
But the Iranian regime will undoubtedly unleash its military against the insurgents, throwing the west of the country into further turmoil. And it will have a justification to rally Iranians around the nation, despite the mass protests that were crushed in January.
Even if the US can support the insurgency in splitting off part of Iran, what happens to the rest of the country? What does Plan B offer other than instability and fragmentation that could parallel post-2003 Iraq?
This does not bring an assurance that the regime’s retaliation will be halted soon. Meanwhile, the US military is facing a shortage of interceptors which — if Iran’s firepower has not been expended — maintains the threat facing the Gulf states.
- Scott Lucas joined University College Dublin in 2022 as Professor of International Politics, having been on the staff of the University of Birmingham since 1989. He began his career as a specialist in US and British foreign policy, but his research interests now also cover current international affairs — especially North Africa, the Middle East, and Iran – New Media, and Intelligence Services. A professional journalist since 1979, Professor Lucas is the founder and editor of EA WorldView, a leading website in daily news and analysis of Iran, Turkey, Syria, and the wider Middle East, as well as US foreign policy.
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There's one question that makes me vow to fight Trump even harder
It happened again, the other morning.
I was in the locker room of a local gym when someone I didn’t know asked me: “So, are you retired?”
I mumbled something indecipherable and looked away.
I hate that question. Just as bad is: “So, you still working?”
They make me feel ancient. Why would anyone ask them of a complete stranger unless the stranger looked like a small dried-up fossil?
I admit I’m an an older person, but I don’t like to think of myself as old. Old and retired? Old and not working? S---, man.
It’s okay that they don’t read my Substack or watch my videos. I’m not insulted. But if they feel entitled to approach me as if they know me, I’d at least hope for some tiny recognition that I’ve been busting my ass.
Besides, the word “retired” conjures up someone who’s been put out to pasture. Or plays golf.
I don’t mean to demean older golfers. My father retired when he turned 65 and played golf for the next 30 years. When I phoned him on Sundays I asked about his game and he was eager to tell me. When he was 95 he made a “hole in one” — when he teed off, his golf ball sailed through the air and onto the green and then rolled directly into the hole on the green. At which point he promptly and happily retired from the game.
Thereafter, he stopped talking about golf. When I asked how he was doing, he always said cheerfully “still here!” He was still there until two weeks before his 102nd birthday, and then he wasn’t. I miss him.
But I don’t play golf.
When my grandfather — my father’s father — retired, he spent his days watching television (yes, there was television in the mid-1950s). He watched baseball during the day and at night watched Lawrence Welk, Jackie Gleason, and Danny Thomas. When I spent weekends with him and my grandma Minnie, I was bored to tears.
I watch almost no television.
I don’t recall my mother or grandmother ever being asked if they were retired or “still working.” Even women my age seem to avoid these questions. Is it because of a sexist assumption they don’t or didn’t have careers outside the home? Or fear they’d be insulted if thought old enough to formally retire?
The term is applied to angry players who leave a match before its scheduled conclusion, as when Buffalo Bills cornerback Vontae Davis “retired” at halftime in a game against the Los Angeles Chargers, taking off his jersey and leaving the stadium in a huff.
Well, I’m not an angry player, and I’m not leaving this match before it ends. As long as Trump continues to try to pull America into a s---hole, I’m fighting back.
I’ll keep fighting Trump and all other authoritarian scumbags until my last breath.
Meanwhile, the next person who asks me if I’m retired or “still working,” I’m going to ask if they still have all their marbles.
- 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/. His 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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The party of 'family values' just covered up unspeakable crimes
If this week has proven anything, it’s that the entire Republican Party (minus Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky) is guilty of treason and manufacturing a war with Iran to deflect from being accessories to the sexual assault of women and children.
Several new bombshell releases from the Epstein Files brought even more allegations about President Donald Trump, including testimony from a woman who said that as a young victim, she fought back by biting him on the penis.
Another Epstein document details “underage sex parties” allegedly hosted at Trump's golf course. Trump vehemently denies wrongdoing, of course, but it’s still weird that a lot of his clown cabinet talk about the “Sinaloa Cartel” when it comes to the immigration discussion, and how ICE is only going after “the most violent criminals” — when NO, they aren’t, said everyone who’s seen the footage of the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good — when they could just read the Epstein Files.
THIS is what Republicans are refusing to address:
And all of this is apparently fine with Trump’s Republican enablers, who are ritualistically shredding our democracy because — checks notes — WE DO NOT KNOW WHY, actually.
The reason you missed this, Dear Reader, is that a manufactured Distracto-War is happening in Iran, and possibly another one is about to pop off in Ecuador. Also, Trump finally fired puppy killer Kristi Noem for lying about her $220 million cosplaying ad campaign and replaced her as Secretary of Homeland Security with someone even less qualified: Markwayne Mullin, the junior senator from Oklahoma.
I wonder if Mullin will be obligated to offer Corey Lewandowski free rides on that tricked-out DHS jet now Kristi’s been grounded as a “Special Envoy,” which also sounds like a gross thing to make her husband super-embarrassed.
If you’re not familiar with Mullin, he’s a former pro Mixed Martial Arts fighter who Democrats nonetheless allege wasn’t so brave on January 6th, and who needs to stand on a box to feel like a Big Boy whenever he finds himself next to an actual grown-up.
None of this has to be happening. But both Senate and House Republicans used their razor-thin majorities to VETO bipartisan war powers resolutions and the public release of sexual misconduct reports involving members of Congress.
So, to reiterate, the Republican Party, which calls itself the party of “Family Values,” which claims to be “Pro-Life” in the pursuit of “protecting children,” and which wants America to be a “Christian Nation,” is helping cover up unspeakable crimes against women and children by bombing children in Iran. Trump doesn’t care about those deaths, the deaths of our servicepeople, or the impending deaths of Americans ON AMERICAN SOIL if Iran retaliates here.
GOP: Works for us, Boss!
I’m old enough to remember when the Republican Party behaved mostly like human beings who understood the assignment. They had informed and intelligent political discourse with their Democratic colleagues, without devolving into grade-school bullying, insults thrown in public.
I contend that without social media, Trump would still be pulling focus on the New York social scene by acting like the chauvinist and womanizer he’s always been, the highlights of his life beginning and ending with giant headlines in the New York Post.
Remember when Republicans spoke truthfully about Trump? I do! It’s on video and everything!
- YouTube www.youtube.com
They KNEW what he was. And, Dear Reader, I posit that every one of them still knows what he is.
Remember when the Russians hacked the DNC and RNC servers but only released what they found about the Democrats and held onto kompromat on the GOP? Guess who got his tiny hands on all that blackmail? Why, Putin’s Puppet, that’s who! One by one, Republicans running for president in 2016 started dropping out of the race, even those still polling pretty well against Trump.
You know the timeline. Trump should’ve been held accountable by the media, but they let him bully them instead. The RNC should’ve yanked him from the campaign when he mocked a disabled reporter. He should’ve been stopped after the Access Hollywood tape, but James Comey agreed with Susan Sarandon that Trump would just be more interesting and released Hillary’s emails. Trump should’ve been stopped a million other times and he still hasn’t been stopped, and look where we are now.
His tariffs have tanked the American economy. The February jobs report showed a dramatic drop in new jobs created and boosted the unemployment rate to nearly 4.5 percent.
It’s fine, we don’t need a functioning society if you can “own the libs,” right?
Every decision Trump makes comes with a body count. All Americans should be asking why the Republicans refuse to stand up to him, because their fealty is glaringly obvious. Is the kompromat on them as bad as what’s been found about Trump in the Epstein Files?
There’s nothing you could do to make me turn against my country, no amount of blackmail or bribery. But then again, I didn’t participate in the world’s biggest and most abhorrent cover-up. I never met Jeffrey Epstein, and I don’t hang out with anyone who knew him.
However, I AM a taxpaying American citizen, as well as a member of the indie media, so please join me in demanding all Republicans be forced to say under Congressional oath whether they’re loyal to Trump or to America, because it’s painfully and abundantly clear that it’s impossible to be both.
Trump has never been a “take one for the team” guy. He’s a “make the team take one for ME” guy.
It’s time for that to STOP.
- Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com
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A cruel irony sits at the heart of Trump's holy war
When church and state overlap, brutality follows and justice bends with the whip. Blurred lines between religion and government produced the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the Crusades, the Huguenot persecutions, and the brutality campaigns of the Holy Roman Empire, to list an easy few, all featuring sadism, torture, and bloodlust in the name of religion.
The centuries have proved that entangling religious dogma with state power always leads to brutal oppression. That’s why founders of our republic, who keenly understood the danger, wrote, as the very first Constitutional guarantee, that church and state would remain forever separated.
So when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. military commanders pressure U.S. troops to conform with their own Christian fundamentalist beliefs, they not only spit on the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold, they beckon history’s darkest years with a blind compulsion to repeat them.
Armageddon in Iran?
Religious extremism has taken Iran back to the seventh century, yet somehow, even as Trump tries to topple Iran’s brutal theocracy, his own Christian nationalists can’t see that their own agenda leads to the same place.
Hegseth, a far-right Christian zealot with extremist views and tattoos, is now running the DOD and spreading a dangerous message. Hegseth airs monthly prayer meetings on loudspeakers and televisions throughout the Pentagon. Attending his prayer meetings in person is “voluntary,” but apparently listening to them isn’t. Hegseth proselytizes evangelical Christianity throughout the upper ranks of the U.S. military, so it comes as no surprise that his commanders are now doing the same.
Right after the U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran, several commanders in the U.S. military started framing the war as biblical, spreading the message throughout every branch. According to more than 200 complaints filed with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), first reported by Jonathan Larsen, U.S. combat-unit commanders urged officers in more than 50 separate military installations to tell U.S. troops that the war in Iran is “all part of God’s divine plan,” specifically citing the Book of Revelation on “Armageddon” and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.
The commanders want U.S. troops to know that Trump has been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” While this may finally solve the mystery of why Trump took us to war with Iran in the first place, proselytizing — using the military to spread Christian nationalism — blatantly violates the Establishment clause of the First Amendment. It also propels the U.S. toward theocracy, just as we’re fighting a war in Iran against it.
Is it too much to expect such irony to announce itself?
A teachable moment for MAGA?
Life under theocratic rule has always been dark, and Iran is no exception. If Trump, Hegseth and his commanders took a moment to study their targets, they would know that Shia Islam law permeates Iran’s entire political system, and it won’t be easily undone.
In Iran, all laws and regulations conform with the official interpretation of Sharia (Islamic law). A body of clerics and jurists known as the Guardian Council reviews all proposed legislation for conformity with Islamic principles, subjecting all aspects of Iranian life to religious control, including the legislative process, judicial system, banking, education, commerce, the military, and politics whether local, regional or national.
Ayatollahs, mullahs, and clerics interpret the law. They do not tolerate differences in opinion. Under the Islamic Penal Code, adulterers can be publicly stoned to death. Women can be executed for showing their hair or too much skin, and any conduct that amounts to “corruption on earth,” including peaceful activism, is punishable by death.
Enforcement on the streets is carried out by roving bands of armed thugs called Morality Police or “Guidance Patrols,” radicals who enforce the rules, meet out punishment, and haul the accused away. Is a comparison with ICE, Trump’s own street militia, unfair?
Dissent viewed as heresy
Hegseth, Trump, and MAGA’s Christo-nationalists want to tear down the Constitutional wall between church and state because, like centuries of monarchs and bad actors before them, they think citing God’s “divine will” excuses their illegal conduct and adds legitimacy to their mission of oppression. Domestically, they have already begun to use extreme violence and the suppression of personal freedoms. If they are not stopped, torture and public executions will follow.
Trump is already seeking to outlaw political dissent, criticism, and opposition, just as Iranian extremists have done. He is also increasing Christian nationalist messaging throughout the White House, as Karoline Leavitt and Pam Bondi brandish crucifixes and Hegseth’s commanders claim God wants them to bloody Iranians.
It all looks like a sick dress rehearsal for when Trump claims the divine right to imprison (or worse) critics and political opponents at home.
Right after reports of American casualties in Iran started peppering headlines, Hegseth urged the media to stop “obsessing” over fallen U.S. soldiers, suggesting they focus instead on the “death and destruction” being wrought by U.S. air power. The ghoulish subtext: Troops dying in Iran is expected, and violence is entertainment. It’s all part of God and Trump’s plan.
For the rest of us, it’s also a real time illustration of why the First Amendment must be protected at all costs.
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the Substack, The Haake Take.
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This Trump ghoul's original sin wasn't shooting her dog
Kristi Noem will no longer be the face of the Department of Homeland Security, labeling peaceful citizens defending liberty as “domestic terrorists.” President Donald Trump is appointing her to a new position, of “special envoy in the Western Hemisphere.”
Wherever she goes next, we should remember her DHS debacle wasn’t her first deception rodeo. It turns out that Noem has a long history of twisting the truth to serve the powerful.
In 2017, nearly a decade ago, we caught then-Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD) telling a whopper fib about her family’s experience with the estate tax — or what Noem called the “death tax.”
The estate tax, our nation’s only levy on the inherited wealth of multimillionaires and billionaires, has been in place since 1916. In its first half-century, it helped put a brake on the build-up of concentrated wealth and power, discouraging dynastic fortunes that threatened democracy.
But for the last 30 years, the estate tax has been under right-wing assault, including a steady drumbeat for its repeal. And one tactic they’ve used is to claim the tax applies to small farmers and other working Americans, rather than the tiny percentage of extremely wealthy estates it actually targets — exclusively multimillionaires and billionaires, the top 0.01 percent.
Noem’s personal political narrative, repeated at town hall meetings during her 2010 campaign for Congress, is a yarn about a rapacious and greedy federal government imposing an estate tax on her struggling family.
In a 2015 speech on the House Floor and in a 2016 op-ed for Fox News, Noem repeated the estate tax story. After her father died, Noem claimed, “We got a bill in the mail from the IRS that said we owed them money because we had a tragedy that happened to our family.”
“We could either sell land that had been in our family for generations or we could take out a loan,” Noem said, adding that “it took us 10 years to pay off that loan to pay the federal government those death taxes.”
Noem says the episode was “one of the main reasons I got involved in government and politics.”
In December 2017, Noem was appointed by then-House Majority Leader Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to the joint committee working to reconcile the 2017 Trump tax bill — which at the time included a proposal to eliminate the federal estate tax altogether.
That month, I published a widely circulated op-ed about Noem in USA Today arguing that “her sad family saga doesn’t add up.”
My commentary surfaced several simple facts: The federal estate tax has a 100 percent exemption for spouses. In other words, if a spouse dies, the estate’s assets go to the surviving spouse without any estate tax. Corinne Arnold, Kristi Noem’s mother, was alive during these years. (In fact, she is still alive now at 78 years and was active in Kristi’s second campaign for South Dakota governor in 2022.)
Estate tax attorney Bob Lord noted at the time: “It’s hard to believe the estate of a farmer who died in 1994 and was survived by his spouse was subject to the tax. It easily could have been deferred. That would have been a no-brainer.”
Moreover, the process of filing a return can be extended for years, especially for operating farms.
The combination of family tragedy and populist outrage makes for a potent partisan story, but veers from the truth. In the years she campaigned as a victim of the estate tax, Noem’s family actually cashed millions in government farm subsidies. Between 1995 and 2024, her family’s Racota Valley Ranch in Hazel, South Dakota deposited $4.9 million in government subsidy checks.
A few days after my USA Today article, the Argus Leader, South Dakota’s biggest statewide newspaper, wrote an editorial: “Time for Kristi Noem to Get Her Tax Story Straight.“ In her now well-known deflective fashion, Noem fired back that it was ”fake news.“
If Noem’s estate tax story is true, she could easily put our doubts to rest. She could explain why her family didn’t use a spousal exemption, share a redacted “bill” from the IRS, or disclose who provided the loan she allegedly received. But she hasn’t.
In the meantime, Noem has helped gut the estate tax, contributing to the growing concentration of wealth that threatens our economy and democracy.
Under the Trump tax bill Noem worked on, the federal estate tax now exempts the first $15 million of wealth for an individual and $30 million for a couple. And as governor of South Dakota, Noem fortified the state’s role as a trust haven, attracting billionaires interested in forming dynasty trusts to hide wealth and use loopholes to avoid federal taxes.
The Trump administration and its allies have blamed immigrants for all manner of social ills — including struggling schools, expensive housing and health care, and more. In reality, the blame more often lies with extremely wealthy people who won’t pay their fair share of taxes to support public programs.
So it’s strangely fitting that Noem, who now slanders law-abiding immigrants and the citizens defending them as “domestic terrorists,” played a big role in gutting those taxes on the rich.
These lies — about the estate tax, about immigrants, about protesters — have something in common: They protect the powerful. As lawmakers attempt to hold Noem accountable for the reckless activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and consider her for future jobs — they should keep this early story in mind.
- Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org. His newest book is Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power is Ruining Our Lives and Planet (The New Press). His near future novel Altar to An Erupting Sun explores one community’s response to climate disruption. He is author of numerous books and reports on inequality and the racial wealth divide, including The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Spend Millions to Hide Trillions, Born on Third Base, and, with Bill Gates Sr., of Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why American Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes. See more of his writing at www.chuckcollinswrites.com.
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Congress has stopped presidents from waging wars — so it can stop Trump now
By Sarah Burns, Associate Professor of Political Science, Rochester Institute of Technology.
Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, not the president. But most modern presidents and their legal counsel have asserted that Article 2 allows the president to use the military in certain situations without prior congressional approval — and have acted on that, sending troops into conflicts from Panama to Libya with no regard for Congress’ will.
Congress has for the most part registered only feeble and ineffective opposition. The current move in Congress to deny President Donald Trump the ability to continue the war with Iran — led by Democrats but with some Republican support — failed, as have efforts during other conflicts.
But there was a time when Americans saw Congress stand up to a president who unilaterally took the country to war.
It was at the tail end of the Vietnam War, when Congress passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973, asserting that it was legislators — not the president — who had the power to declare war.
Once it passed both houses, President Richard Nixon vetoed it, claiming it was unconstitutional.
In response, the legislative branch overturned the veto with the two-thirds majority vote needed.
Compared to Congress’ limp response to Trump’s actions in Iran, and its similar failure to assert itself during Trump’s military action in Venezuela, it was a breathtaking act of legislative assertion.
Congress asserts itself
When they debated the War Powers Resolution, members of Congress were seeing the erosion of their control over the decision to engage in military operations large and small. With a strong bipartisan consensus, they determined they had to collectively use their powers, including the power of the purse, to thwart executive overreach.
Congress’ actions came in response to the growing protests against the Vietnam War in general and Nixon’s decision to expand the war by sending U.S. troops to invade the neutral country of Cambodia, to disrupt the supply lines of the Viet Cong, the communist guerrilla force that accounted for a large number of the 58,000 Americans killed in the war.
Nixon had begun covert carpet bombing of Cambodia in 1969, and then announced in 1970 that he would send ground troops into the country the next year.
Congress — and the country — reacted extremely negatively. Members of Congress collaborated across party lines to draft legislation in an attempt to assert their power. It was a slow process, however, involving long periods of deliberation.
They used many different methods to attempt to constrain the president. Within months of the introduction of troops to Cambodia, Congress attempted to pass amendments that would restrict his ability to invade neighboring countries. Prompted by protesting and the illegal actions in Cambodia, Congress began crafting legislation that would draw down troops in Vietnam.
With these moves, lawmakers placed immense pressure on the president. This eventually led to the drafting and eventual signing of the peace agreement ending the Vietnam war in 1973.
This was not enough for Congress, however.
Rules — and flexibility
Congress wanted to create a document ensuring presidents could not unilaterally make war. They wanted legislative consultation.
They intended the War Powers Resolution to act as a permanent constraint. So, in the resolution they spelled out the specific actions in which presidents can start a conflict:
- First, if there is an invasion of the United States, the president can respond. In this instance, the president can act prior to congressional authorization.
- Second, if Congress provides an “Authorization for the Use of Military Force,” the president can assume he has authorization — but only as long as it is in effect.
- Finally, if Congress declares war, the president can act.
Lawmakers did, however, provide some flexibility. In the War Powers Resolution, they said a president can initiate and carry out hostilities for 60 days and has a further 30 days to draw down the troops. Once the executive has initiated hostilities, Congress must receive information about that action within 48 hours.
This opens the door for presidents to engage in smaller-scale or short operations without stepping outside the lines set in the law.
Presidents from both parties have availed themselves of this flexibility. As far back as 1975, when President Gerald Ford rescued the SS Mayaguez, the merchant ship captured by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, presidents have acknowledged the law and dutifully reported their military actions to Congress.
Like his predecessors, Trump sent a letter to Congress after his June 2025 missile attacks against Iran, as well as at the start of the currently open-ended conflict.
Presidents since the passage of the War Powers Resolution have not, however, acknowledged that they have to get congressional approval of their actions, with few exceptions. Predominantly, without congressional approval, they limit their actions to the 60-to-90-day window.
President Barack Obama attempted to circumvent the window when his bombing campaign in Libya in 2011 dragged on, as well as when he bombed the Islamic State group in 2014. In the first instance, he claimed the War Powers Resolution did not apply. In the second, he claimed each bombing campaign was discrete, rather than part of a larger campaign.
Exploiting authorizations
The balance of power between the legislative and executive branches changed considerably with the passage of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force that gave legislative permission for President George W. Bush to invade Iraq.
Because Congress did not put sunset dates into these authorizations, subsequent presidents Obama, Trump and Joe Biden used those same authorizations for a host of military actions in the Middle East and elsewhere.
And legislators were deeply divided in the current discussions about demanding the cessation of hostilities against Iran.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said that limiting the president at this time was “dangerous.” Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene — who has fallen out of favor with Trump’s MAGA base and the president himself — took the opposing view, posting on social media, “Now, America is going to be force fed and gas lighted all the ‘noble’ reasons the American ‘Peace’ President and Pro-Peace administration had to go to war once again this year, after being in power for only a year.”
Has the U.S. entered a moment when members of Congress reassert themselves the way they did at the tail end of the Vietnam war?
It is possible that they will follow James Madison’s advice about the power relationship between Congress and the president. Writing in the Federalist Papers, Madison said that “ambition” has “to counter ambition.” He continued, “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.”
As I explain in my book about congressional war powers, the constitutional system creates an invitation to struggle. Now, as the U.S. wages war on Iran, Congress must decide whether it wants to struggle, as it did during the Vietnam War, or remain compliant and in the president’s shadow.
- Sarah Burns is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rochester Institute of Technology. Her research examines the intersection of political liberalization and American constitutional development with an eye toward policy implications for democratization across the globe. She has written on war powers, American foreign policy, democratic peace theory, elections, and Montesquieu’s constitutionalism. Her book, The Politics of War Powers, examines the theoretical and historical development of war powers. She demonstrates how the constitutional system creates an invitation to struggle that the political branches increasingly ignore. Her forthcoming book, Losing the Good War (with Rob Haswell), examines Obama's decision making in the Afghanistan war.
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The Trump MAGA media monopoly is here — but you can still stop it
Last Sunday, CBS’s erstwhile flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, opened with an extended adulatory interview of Reza Pahlavi, son of the late exiled Shah of Iran, whom Trump presumably is auditioning to be Iran’s post-invasion leader.
Although Pahlavi is in Paris and hasn’t lived in Iran for nearly a half-century, CBS’s Scott Pelley fed the exiled prince softball questions and allowed him to avoid talking about his father’s record of brutal repression. Pelley even added, in a wishful voiceover, that “Pahlavi told us that there are units within the military and the police that would turn on the hardline government. He says that many but not all troops could be given amnesty in a process of national reconciliation.”
This isn’t news. It’s pablum from the White House. 60 Minutes was once a reliable source of tough reporting. Now it’s becoming a shill for the Trump regime.
It soon could get far worse. CBS News is on the verge of becoming part of the largest pro-Trump media monopoly in America.Two of the nation’s biggest news organizations — CBS and CNN — along with CBS entertainment (home to Stephen Colbert) and Comedy Central (home to Jon Stewart) and HBO (John Oliver) and TikTok (where 1 out of 5 Americans now get their news) — are all about to become one giant mega-media monopoly under the control of Trump allies and suck-ups: multibillionaire Larry Ellison and his son, David.
It’s not too late to stop this, and I’ll tell you how in a moment, but I’d like you to pause and imagine how readily this new pro-Trump media giant can mislead America about what Trump is doing and silence criticism of Trump.
It could make Rupert Murdoch’s media empire of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post look scrupulous by comparison.
Trump cares more about TV news than he does about his presidency. In fact, TV news is his presidency. He chose his cabinet members on the basis of their total loyalty to him and how they look and sound on TV. He spends all day watching coverage of himself on TV. And now he’s on the verge of having effective control over a gigantic media monopoly.
I don’t believe Stewart or Oliver will be silenced, but their contracts may not be renewed. After all, look at what CBS did to Colbert, whose show will end in May.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the algorithm on TikTok is adjusted to reduce Trump criticism.
And a small army of producers and correspondents at CNN are likely to be more careful about what they report. Stories critical of Trump may be axed, as is now occurring at the late, great CBS News.
How did this happen? Think greed, money, power, and Trump.
Trump and the Ellisons take over Warner Bros. Discovery
When the dark history of this sordid era is written, among the most shameful culprits — who put making humongous amounts of money for themselves above the common good — will be Larry and David Ellison; Shari Redstone, former owner of Paramount; and David Zaslav, the current CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Zaslav is now being lauded by the business community as a genius for selling Warner Bros. Discovery (in turn the owner of CNN, CNN International, and HBO) to the Ellisons’ for $111 billion, more than double its valuation in September. But he’s couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the common good. (Zaslav filed to sell just over $114 million worth of Warner Bros. stock less than a week after Warner Bros. clinched the deal.)
Why would the Ellisons spend billions (and go deep into debt) to buy Warner Bros. Discovery? Wealth and power — along with additional wealth and power that Trump can deliver.
Larry Ellison is the second-richest person in America. He owns Oracle, which runs much of the digital backbone of the nation’s commerce and government.
But the Ellisons, per et fils, couldn’t have created their new right-wing media empire without Trump. They needed Trump just as Trump has needed Larry Ellison (who’s been one of Trump’s strongest backers, dating back to the early days of Trump’s presidency).
Even before the Ellisons sweetened their offer for Warner Bros. Discovery and pushed Netflix out of the running, they proclaimed their “confidence in the speed and certainty of regulatory approval” for the deal. Translated: Don’t worry that we’re creating a gigantic media monopoly. Antitrust laws won’t touch us. We’ve got Trump’s Justice Department in the bag.
Trump and the Ellisons got several Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to join in the deal (making me wonder whether such funding will complicate, or compromise, CBS News’s and CNN’s coverage of Trump’s war in Iran and of the Middle East in general).
Trump takes over CNN
For years Trump has blasted CNN as “fake news” and publicly demanded it be bought by new owners. “It’s imperative that CNN be sold,” Trump said in December, signaling he favored the Ellisons’ takeover proposal.
In December, according to the Wall Street Journal, “David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner Bros. Discovery, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.”
To be sure, CNN was moving rightward even before the Ellisons got their hands on it.
In 2022 Zaslav put Chris Licht in charge, who told CNN’s staff he wanted less criticism of Trump and the Republican right — instructing them to stop referring to Trump’s “Big Lie” because he thought the phrase sounded like a Democratic talking point, telling producers to downplay coverage of the first hearing of the congressional committee investigating January 6, and arranging Trump’s infamous CNN town hall, which gave the twice-impeached felonious ex-president a platform to make his comeback.
CNN’s rightward lurch caused CNN’s primetime show ratings to fall 25 percent and contributed to Licht’s firing after just 13 months.
Since then, CNN has undergone rounds of cuts under a series of owners seeking to reduce debt. Paramount and the Ellisons (and Trump) will be its fourth corporate parent in under a decade.
Trump takes over CBS
Last summer, as Redstone and other of Paramount’s previous owners sought federal approval to sell Paramount (owner of CBS) to the Ellisons, they sucked up to Trump by settling Trump’s baseless lawsuit against CBS News for $16 million. (He had sued over how 60 Minutes had edited an interview with former vice president Kamala Harris.)
Late night host Stephen Colbert called the settlement a “big fat bribe,” which it was.
To win further support from Trump for the sale, they announced the end of Colbert’s show (which, as I said, will finish its run in May). They cited economics, but Colbert’s has been the top-rated late night show on network television. The real reason for the cancellation was obvious: Colbert’s biting satirical criticism of Trump.
To cinch the deal, David Ellison promised to end diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at CBS. He hired a right-wing “ombudsman,” Kenneth Weinstein, the former head of a conservative think tank. And he named as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News Bari Weiss, founder of the center-right opinion and news site The Free Press.
Trump was delighted. “They’re friends of mine. They’re big supporters of mine. And they’ll do the right thing,” he said, praising the acquisition and adding that CBS News had “great potential” with Weiss in charge and that he expected it to be “fairer.”Fairer? Since Weiss took over, almost half of CBS News producers have walked, including legendary veteran Mary Walsh, who began her career under Walter Cronkite. As Walsh explained, “We’ve been told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum. Honestly, I don’t know how to do that."
Weiss named a bunch of new contributors — many of them retired military or ex-intelligence officials or conservative pundits, including the anti-aging influencer Peter Attia (who has subsequently resigned over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein).
Weiss declared “We love America” a guiding principle and changed the CBS style guide to replace “assigned sex at birth” with “biological sex at birth” when referring to trans people.
She’s also defanged 60 Minutes. In December, Weiss axed a report about Venezuelans being deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison hours before it was set to air — a move that Sharyn Alfonsi, the long-standing correspondent who reported the segment, claimed was for “political” reasons. (The segment later aired on Jan. 18, drawing more than 5 million viewers.)
Weiss replaced Evening News anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois with Tony Dokoupil — best known for hassling the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for his “extremist” belief that apartheid is morally wrong.
As Trump told Dokoupil recently in a rambling nearly 13-minute interview, had Kamala Harris won the presidential election in 2024, “you probably wouldn’t have a job right now.” Exactly. (Moments after that rambling interview, not incidentally, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt conveyed Trump’s threat that “if it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.”)
How you can help stop this
All this has happened so suddenly that most Americans still haven’t noticed the emergence of this new pro-Trump media empire — CBS, CNN, HBO, Comedy Central, and TikTok — all under the control of Trump cronies Larry and David Ellison.
Billionaires are flipping media companies like playing cards. They don’t give a fig for the common good, or about the producers, correspondents, journalists, and investigative reporters whose lives are being turned upside-down. To them, it’s all about accumulating more wealth and power.
But it’s bad for the economy, bad for our democracy, and bad for America.
The Ellisons’s new mega-media monopoly would never pass muster if America still had antitrust enforcers. Media mergers and acquisitions deserve even stricter scrutiny than normal deals. But Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice is as likely to stop this deal as she is to enforce criminal laws against ICE agents.
So who can stop this?
State attorneys general. They can go to federal court to enforce federal antitrust laws. They have legal standing and necessary resources to challenge this monstrosity.
California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, has already made clear he will take it on.
“The California Department of Justice has an open investigation, and we intend to be vigorous in our review,” he says.
Good luck to him.
I hope other state attorneys general join in. You can help by contacting your state AGs and suggest they join this lawsuit. Contact information for your state’s AG is here.
Please do. The last thing America needs is a giant pro-Trump media monopoly.
- 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/. His 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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Trump's new DHS pick can't stop embarrassing himself — and he hasn't even started
There just might be a second reason — besides the constant fawning praise for Dear Leader — why Donald Trump chose Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) as his new Secretary of Homeland Security.
Trump has floated the idea of hosting a UFC fight on the White House grounds on July 4th, trampling the memories of John-John and Caroline Kennedy playing on those lawns, and presidential dogs Rex, Barney, and Beau scampering about.
So what could top an ultimate marquee match between Mullin and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth? Let’s call it the “Cabinet Clash:” two Trump testosterone toadies, going mano a mano.
Because if you actually look at Mullin’s qualifications for his new role, there isn’t much that recommends him, other than that he compiled a 5–0 record in professional Mixed Martial Arts.
There was a time when the Secretary of Homeland Security was perhaps the most serious and consequential cabinet post. The job was created after 9/11 to coordinate intelligence, secure our borders, and manage the immense responsibility of protecting 330 million Americans.
Prestigious names have led the department: Tom Ridge, Janet Napolitano, Jeh Johnson. During Trump’s first administration, Gen. John Kelly. Serious people for a serious job.
Then the gravitas of the position took a nosedive when Kristi Noem rode in on her horse. Only this week was she thrown off, for being far less than forthright.
And now there’s Sen. Mullin, a man whose most notable pre-politics credential is that 5–0 MMA record.
Politically speaking, Mullin’s MMA stands for Macho Mixed-Up Ass.
Let’s start with the “mixed-up” part.
This week, Mullin pulled an Abbott and Costello routine, simultaneously arguing regarding strikes on Iran that the U.S. is and is not at war.
First he declared, “This is war, and we’re taking out the threat.”
Then he tried to clarify: “What I was saying was that they’ve declared war on us, but war is ugly. It always has been ugly.”
He finished with this gem: “We haven’t declared war. So if we haven’t declared war, then I don’t see that. The president hasn’t asked us to declare war yet, but they have declared war on us.”
Who’s on first, what’s on second, “I don’t know” is on third, and somewhere on that field of battle Mullin is still milling around, trying to decipher his own explanation.
If you thought Hegseth had captured the trophy for inauthentic and immature machismo, Mullin may give him a run for his money.
In November 2023, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Famously, Mullin challenged him to a fight.
“This is the time, this is the place,” Mullin said. “If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here.”
Sure sounds like a sane, responsible adult to me.
This year, at the State of the Union, Mullin grabbed a protest sign from Rep. Al Green (D-TX). Frankly, Mullin would make a fine ICE agent. He’s had practice roughing up a person of color.
And if you’re a member of the media, take note.
In April last year, Mullin posted a video recounting an 1890 incident in which a reporter was shot by a congressman in the U.S. Capitol. Mullin suggested “fake news” might decrease if modern disputes could be handled that way. He said it was a joke. Haha.
Mullin does enjoy “joking” around on Fox News, where he has made something of a habit of embarrassing himself.
In one segment, he waxed poetic about how war has a particular smell and a particular taste. The only problem was that Mullin has never served a single day in uniform.
Even back home in Oklahoma, he has hardly been a profile in integrity.
Mullin ran for Congress on a term-limits pledge, then broke it twice. In 2013 his plumbing business was the subject of an ethics investigation. More recently, he racked up STOCK Act violations, meant to stop members of Congress profiting from insider information.
He called Rand Paul, a senator who will be overseeing his confirmation, a “freaking snake.”
Come to think of it, Paul v. Mullin would also make a great MMA fight.
So this Macho Mixed-up Ass is the man who would oversee the Secret Service, FEMA, Customs and Border Protection, ICE, and the TSA. A man who endorses war — and not war — violence against the press and political opponents, who is ethically challenged and has zero background in security, intelligence, or managing a massive federal bureaucracy.
And all that said, Mullin might yet need to be reminded who his boss actually is.
A few days ago, while discussing Iran on Fox News, Mullin repeatedly referred to Defense Secretary Hegseth as “President Hegseth.” He made the slip twice before awkwardly correcting himself.
The Department of Homeland Security was built in the wreckage of the worst intelligence failure in American history. The job requires toughness but also judgment, patience, legal sophistication, and the ability to manage roughly 260,000 employees across more than two dozen agencies.
So while I joke about a Hegseth-Mullin cage match, Mullin’s nomination is no laughing matter.
Whether he realizes it or not, the United States faces real threats from adversaries around the world, and those adversaries are watching this spectacle of discombobulation, inexperience, and bravado.
When the real test comes, America may discover the difference between a man who talks about the smell of war, and a leader who actually knows how to prevent one.
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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Even in this ruby red state, resistance to Trump's ICE goons shows he is losing his grip
If the Trump administration felt defeated in Minneapolis and thought it could score easy wins in ruby red West Virginia, it couldn’t have been more wrong.
It’s true that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained hundreds of people in the state in January, snatching them from businesses, homes and along the interstates. It’s also true that West Virginia might not have seen the kind of massive protests that occurred in Minnesota.
But what our state lacks in population density or large-scale demonstrations, we make up for in dedicated community groups willing to do hard work, day and night. Whether the work is loud and attention-grabbing, or quiet and impactful, there are countless attorneys, activists and pissed off people working to resist this onslaught, and their numbers are growing.
In private chats, churches and coffee shops, the community of rapid responders has planned and mobilized.
Like so many places across America right now, responders in our state have shown up to film and protest cowardly masked ICE agents disappearing people from our communities.
Many of their stories will never make the news out of respect for the victims and to protect the work being done, but hundreds of people are putting in long days to make sure their fellow mountaineers will always be free.
Responders are driving kids to school, taking people to doctor appointments, and going on grocery runs for people too afraid to leave their homes. They’re helping people recover items stolen by ICE. They’re holding people’s hands as they walk into government buildings, terrified of being kidnapped again, but able to face these systems knowing that people care and are mad as hell about how their neighbors are being treated.
Advocates around the state are hosting fundraisers for legal representation, and buying cribs and formula for new mothers who go to bed afraid every night. We’re conducting training sessions for bystanders and witnesses to ICE activity to ensure people know the Constitution protects everyone in this country, regardless of where they come from.
And then there’s the work we can talk about in detail; the work that’s happening not in whispers but in the permanent record of American law.
Attorneys and the activists who have connected them with clients have been winning in court on behalf of those caught up in what the governor called “Operation Country Roads.”
In January, a partnership between ICE and local law enforcement swept up an estimated 650 people. Now, they’re running headlong into judicial rebukes over and over again.
In the Southern District of West Virginia, federal judges have taken a stand against the illegal actions of the federal government and shot down its legal arguments.
Judge Joseph R. Goodwin, who has sat on the bench for more than three decades, abandoned what he called “antiseptic judicial rhetoric” to describe what’s happening in plain language:
“Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government — masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind — are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process.”
Judge Thomas Johnston, appointed by former President George W. Bush, has been just as forceful. When he ordered the release of Danny Briceno-Solano, a contractor who pays taxes and was grabbed on Interstate 77 for having unclear plates, Johnston warned:
“Today, immigrants are being detained without due process. Tomorrow, under the Government’s interpretation of the law, American citizens could be subject to the same treatment. This Court will not allow such an unraveling of the Constitution.”
Judge Robert Chambers called the detentions a stain on the American dream, saying in a recent ruling that “The endless opportunity of the American dream that promises ‘liberty and justice for all’ is tarnished with each night an individual spends wrongfully detained.”
Judge Irene Berger accused the administration of showing a complete lack of respect for the law and exposed the shocking sloppiness of the government’s cases. Just last week, federal officials tried to justify detention by claiming a petitioner had marijuana convictions from 2009, even though the petitioner was just four years old in 2009.
As reported by MetroNews, “The most likely cause of the error, Berger concluded, was that the document supplied by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement referred to a different person who was convicted but who had the same name. This mistake occurred ‘despite the differences in birthdate, birthplace, parents’ names, and immigration status.’ The judge’s footnote concluded, 'This sloppiness further validates the Court’s concerns about the procedures utilized by the Respondents depriving people present in the United States of their liberty.'”
These are judges in the heart of Trump country, appointed by Clinton, Bush and Obama, reading the same Constitution and arriving at the same conclusion: What is happening here and across the country is illegal.
Attorneys from across the state (including Jonathan Sidney of the Climate Defense Project, attorney Shane Wilson, and attorneys with Mountain State Justice) have been filing habeas petition after habeas petition, and they are winning. Dozens of people have been released, and judges have made clear they’re done asking nicely.
Resistance to tyranny can look like a lot of things. Sometimes it’s loud and fierce. Sometimes it’s so under-the-radar you might not be sure it’s happening.
One thing we can be sure of is that from the streets of Minneapolis to the hollers of West Virginia, resistance to the administration’s lawless cruelty is getting stronger every day.
- Eli Baumwell is the executive director for American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia. He helps manage ACLU-WV's political advocacy efforts and develop its policy platform and priorities. He works closely with other advocacy and community outreach staff members to direct campaigns for federal, state and local policy efforts.
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Trump is about to get a brutal history lesson
On Monday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth held a press briefing to justify the war in Iran. Praising Donald Trump’s lawlessness, he said, “America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history … No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win.”
Aside from such dangerous hubris befitting a 12-year-old boy, the most shocking aspect of Trump bombing Iran without Constitutional or Congressional authority is that the administration’s “planning” does not seem to match or even appreciate the risks involved.
Many security analysts agree with Sen. Mark Kelly (R-AZ) and Trump that Iran should never be allowed to have nuclear weapons, because no state that exports jihadist martyrdom should have nuclear weapons.
But the precarity of attacking a nation allegedly only one week away from nuclear capacity demands precision and sober objectives, not saber-rattling or changing rationales tweeted at two in the morning. The Trump administration’s lax and lawless messaging suggests either chilling indifference, lack of discipline, or rogue intentions, all dangerous characteristics in the context of nuclear weapons.
Trump has not offered clear political or military objectives, nor explained how the use of force, at this time, is in our best national interest. Instead, Trump’s rationale for war keeps shifting, from immediate national security threats, to humanitarian concerns, to regime change, suggesting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu played Trump to do what no other president was reckless enough to do in service to Israel’s interests, not our own.
Even the laudable goal of eliminating Iran’s nuclear capacity becomes suspect in light of Trump’s worldwide victory tour last June, declaring that airstrikes then had “totally eradicated” Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium.
On June 25, 2025, the White House released an official statement titled “Iran's Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News.” Either Trump was lying then or he is lying now. It’s never smart to trust liars on matters of life and death.
Anti-American sentiment
Human rights organizations reported that tens of thousands of Iranian civilians were executed in January for protesting their repressive governance under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He is now dead. Other than an estimated 15 percent of Iranians who support the Islamic Republic theocracy, no one will miss him, least of all families of people he tortured and slaughtered.
But for everyone involved, in the absence of a clear strategy, purpose, method, or plan for what comes next, the only reliable predictor of outcome is the recent past.
This is not the first time the U.S. has gone to war in the Middle East, seeking regime change. We’ve tried it multiple times, and in every case we have learned that the initial success of ousting a leader is not followed by the establishment of a long-term, stable, or Western-friendly alternative.
Instead, just the opposite happens. When we create a power vacuum, someone even more dangerous, more radical, and more antagonistic rises to power. In fact, Khamenei came to power as a direct result of the last time the US sought regime change in Iran.
Regime change efforts
Americans now slave to algorithms may have forgotten that we were responsible for putting the Islamic Revolution in motion. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence organized a coup to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who was democratically elected, because he nationalized the Iranian oil industry. (Sound familiar?)
After the overthrow, the U.S. reinstated Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who implemented such increasingly autocratic rule that the Iranians began to hate both him and the U.S., for putting him in power. Hatred of the Shah led to intense anti-American sentiment. The 1979 Islamic Revolution to get rid of the Shah ended with a new Islamic Republic empowering Ayatollah Khomeini and his extremist, stone-women-to-death-for-showing-their-hair clerics. We are now bombing Iran to topple the regime we caused.
History suggests we are also repeating mistakes from other Middle East interventions:
- Iraq: In 2003, the US invaded Iraq under the color of a claim that it was developing weapons of mass destruction. The invasion removed Saddam Hussein, which lead to a power vacuum, sectarian violence and the rise of extremist groups like ISIS. More than 20 years later, Iraq remains destabilized.
- Afghanistan: Following 9/11, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to remove the Taliban from power. After a 20-year occupation and US-led efforts at nation-building, the Taliban returned to power in 2021, after Joe Biden withdrew U.S. forces.
- Libya: In 2011, a U.S.-led NATO intervention was meant to protect civilians by removing Muammar al-Qaddafi. As in Iran today, there was no post-regime plan, which left a power vacuum and transformed Libya into a failed state of widespread misery, a current training ground for militant extremists.
- Syria: Also in 2011, the U.S. provided aid and military assistance to opposition groups in the Syrian Civil War with the stated objective of pressuring Bashar al-Assad to leave office. He remained in control of much of the country until 2024, even using chemical agents against his own citizens.
The results are clear and consistent: toppling Middle East authoritarians has, in every case, led to the emergence of even more radicalized factions, resulting in more danger and unintended national security consequences for America.
In just over a year, while seeking praise as a “peacemaker,” Trump has authorized military action in seven nations. In Iran, we are once again ignoring history, this time under an administration that can’t seem to comprehend laws, norms, or nuance.
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the Substack, The Haake Take.
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This MAGA meltdown points to mega Trump defeat
Faced with a revolt among his MAGA faithful over his decision to join Israel in starting a war with Iran, our increasingly demented and delusional president declared this week that “MAGA is Trump.”
He was responding to, among others, MAGA stalwarts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who rightfully called him out for abandoning his vow to “abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change” and his endlessly repeated lie of an “America First” agenda.
Indeed, the nation and world watch in stunned disbelief and overwhelming opposition. Two-out-of-three American disapprove of this haphazard war. That’s no surprise given the fiascos over the Weapons of Mass Destruction that didn’t turn up in Iraq, the long, bloody, and losing effort in Afghanistan, and the recent kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and wife in a blatant attempt to take over the world’s largest known oil reserves.
Even worse is what seems to be utter confusion about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.
First Trump claimed an attack by Iran was “imminent” — which has been proved false even by his own intelligence agencies.
Then it was necessary to “take out” Iran’s nuclear capability, which even those with short memories will recall he claimed to have “obliterated” in last year’s Israel-U.S. attack on Iran.
Then it was for regime change to get rid of what he dubbed “the lunatic” 87-year old ruler.
But then it was we had to attack because Israel was going to attack first — and being the stalwart ally in Israel’s Gaza genocide, our Middle East assets would also be attacked.
MAGA politicians can’t even agree if it’s a war. MAGA Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, claims “We’re not at war right now. They have declared war on us.”
Meanwhile, Montana’s own cluster of muddled MAGAs, masquerading as our congressional delegation, have all backed the bombing — a commitment which is rather specious now that half of the delegation, Rep. Zinke and Sen. Daines, have announced they will not seek reelection.
In the meantime, Montana’s super-patriot junior senator Tim Sheehy is so MAGA gung ho he physically attacked Brian McGinnis, a Marine veteran in full dress blues, who was protesting that “no one wants to go to war for Israel” during a Senate hearing. The incident was captured in videos that have now gone viral.
In the meantime, gas prices are skyrocketing and are now higher than when Trump took office, the global economy is threatened by the closure of the Straits of Hormuz through which 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas are transported. The closure is now used as the latest justification for going to war … which, ironically, resulted in the closure.
Toss in the continuing inflation exacerbated by rising energy prices, the incredible blunders of Trump’s illegal tariffs, his radical attacks on long-time allies, the brutality of his war on immigrants, and the picture of MAGA madness comes into full focus.
Chaos is what’s emanating from the White House now and has been doing so since Trump re-claimed the presidency a year ago. But chaos is not what businesses want or need. Commerce thrives on stability where supplies, costs, and distribution are consistent and profit margins are predictable. Same goes for citizens who are trying harder every day to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.
Has MAGA made America great again? Absolutely not. The utter chaos has done just opposite — which is no doubt why the MAGAs are terrified of the outcome of November’s elections.
- George Ochenski is Montana's longest-running columnist and a longtime environmental activist, concerned with keeping Montana's natural beauty clean and safe. He writes from Helena and appears in the Daily Montanan weekly.
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