Kash Patel gets a fresh uniform to match new fame
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This slap in Trump's face is a catastrophic warning
“The Strait of Hormuz isn’t social media. If someone blocks you, you can’t just block them back.” That snarky but perceptive taunt, posted by an Iranian diplomat on X shortly after Tehran reversed its decision to open the waterway, should be the epitaph for the Trumpian school of foreign policy.
It was intended as a slap in the face to Trump, who actually does treat the most volatile chokepoint on the planet like a digital word game on his smartphone.
For over four decades, prior administrations’ understanding of global macroeconomics warned that poking the religious extremism that is the Iranian bear would possibly lead to the shuttering of the Strait. They warned that Tehran’s leverage had the power to pull the plug on the global economy and plunge the world into an oil crisis or worldwide recession.
But Donald Trump thinks decades of advice about Iran consist of scrawling on a bar napkin to be disposed of. He relies solely on the “stable genius” that lives in his gut, the only decision-making process he thinks is relevant.
That unstable, moronic rotgut then transmits signals to his swollen fingers that punch out nonsensical blabber posted to Truth Social. He regards that as official policy procedure.
He does it all by impulse. He frantically spits out herky-jerky Truth Social posts at 3 a.m. with a demented mind that pontificates nonsense and typos, treating the Strait of Hormuz as just more content to be uploaded, alternating between calling it the “Strait of Iran” and the “Strait of Trump,” while misspelling “strait” itself.
He continually invites chaos and potential catastrophe by diabolical typing in ALL CAPS.
The offshoot of Trump’s recklessness is a terrifying pivot in the global balance of power. While the world has spent years obsessing over Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear warhead, Tehran has discovered a weapon far more effective and immediately deployable than any bomb — an absolute, unchecked leverage over the world’s oil super-highway.
And Iran now understands that Donald Trump is nothing more than a social media blowhard.
Because of Trump’s irresponsibility, Iran may find that it doesn’t actually need a nuclear weapon to bring the West, and the world, to its knees. Why bother with the international pariah status of uranium when you can simply prompt U-turns from cargo ships in the Strait?
By weaponizing the world’s oil supply in response to Trump’s digital diplomacy, Iran has found a way to bypass traditional diplomacy and upend carefully calibrated treaties, and what might be called the world’s decades-long slavish deference to Iran’s hold on trafficking black gold.
And the Iranians are clearly relishing the irony. Iran has reciprocated with Trump’s Truth Social negotiations by posting Lego-character AI videos of American and Israeli officials. They aren’t afraid of us, particularly if the dialogue initiated by Trump is a series of wacky Truth Social posts, some of which are more like 900-word opinion pieces.
Although his diatribes are not as thoughtful and articulate as this column.
Iran is mocking us. And the tragedy is that Trump, a man so thoroughly incapable of distinguishing between being feared and being laughed at, cannot tell the difference. And the evil empire that is Iran understands this about Trump.
That’s what makes them dangerous, because Trump has no understanding of Iran, its leaders, or its history.
The domestic fallout of this precarious situation is already gutting the proverbial American pocketbook. Seven weeks into this conflict, U.S. gas prices have soared past $4m a gallon, spiking grocery and other costs and causing a slump in discretionary spending.
Economists are now sounding the alarm about the risk of a global recession this year, with inflation proving impossible to dislodge as long as 20 percent of the world’s oil remains hostage to Iranian whims.
Meanwhile, our alliances are being shattered under the weight of Trump’s go-it-alone, social media–driven insults. When Trump demanded NATO allies “take care of” the passage, he was met with a resounding no (if they were responding like Trump on social media, it would have been in all caps) from nations across Europe and elsewhere, who refused to be dragged into his whim of a war.
While a fragile coalition of 22 nations led by the UK has agreed to help clear mines and restore traffic, the damage is done. Trump’s Truth taunts, calling our closest partners “COWARDS” and NATO a “paper tiger,” have only reinforced the idea that the U.S. is no longer a reliable guarantor of global security. Nations abroad are figuring out ways to move forward without the U.S.
Here is what our allies understand, and what Trump never will — the Strait of Hormuz is not a way to capture the latest news cycle. It is not a creativity award for AI-generated images. It is a 21-mile-wide choke point through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil flows every single day.
Nations have spent decades building entire military doctrines, diplomatic frameworks, and economic contingency plans around keeping that waterway open.
The moment you start treating it as a random opinion screed that you hope goes viral, you don’t just lose a negotiation, you lose years of carefully constructed diplomacy that held up global stability.
That is the once-and-future danger of the Trump doctrine. It isn’t just about the mistakes of today, but the unprecedented chaos that looms in the future.
When you treat a delicate strategy like a social media feud, you teach your enemies that the old rules of deterrence, steady diplomacy, and predictable consequences are out the window.
You teach them that the American superpower is the real “paper tiger,” because at its core it is just a very loud, knock-off Twitter-like account with a short attention span.
In other words, Iran is treating Trump like an obsessed teenager who can’t let go of his phone long enough to pay attention to the urgency of what’s going on around him.
Iran knows that in the real world, when the Strait closes, the block button doesn’t just silence an obtuse opponent. It blocks everyone.
The Iranians have learned something profound from this catastrophe that will linger: you don’t need a nuclear warhead to bring a superpower to its knees. You just need a stupid social media addict as the leader of its arch nemesis.
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Trump's insane reversal is set to make your 4/20 celebration a federal crime
If you’re celebrating 4/20 today, consider marking the occasion with a drink — a THC-infused beverage that’ll get you buzzed without all the sloppy, soppy effects of alcohol.
There are a few reasons a "cannabis cocktail” might just be this year’s optimal option. For starters, even if you live somewhere where marijuana is super illegal, you can still find THC drinks — because the majority derive their THC from hemp, which was legalized in all 50 states by the 2018 Farm Bill. They hit faster than edibles, come in seltzer, juice, tea and mocktail form, and are sold everywhere from Target to gas stations to vape shops to, yes, liquor stores and bars.
In terms of bang for your buck, the price of drinkable cannabis is roughly $5 to $10 a can, about the same as craft beer, but without the attached hangover. Or the reputation for being precious.
So bottoms up — because it’s that time of year!
And because, by this time next year, it’ll probably be a federal crime.
The impending recriminalization of hemp-derived THC drinks stands as an almost too perfect example of the insane arbitrariness of America’s byzantine drug laws. Seven years after signing the aforementioned bill that made hemp legal during his first term, this past November, Trump signed another bill — a spending package, not even a drug law — that garnered lots of headlines for ending the longest government shutdown in American history. But buried in the fine print was a provision that will, as of Nov. 12, make any product with more than 0.4 mg of THC illegal under federal law. It effectively outlaws not just THC drinks, 95 percent of which contain at least 5 to 10 mg of THC, but every other “intoxicating hemp” product on the now -legal market. The law sets the threshold so low, in fact, it will even criminalize hemp-derived products with mere trace amounts of THC incapable of getting anyone high, including CBD lotions, lip balms, dog treats and more.
Virtually every CBD and hemp-derived THC product will become a Schedule I controlled substance, same as marijuana. And heroin.
It is dumb that our longstanding drug laws pretend that pot is as addictive as black tar heroin. It’s doubly dumb that this legal reversal will, yet again, treat your favorite THC and elderberry-infused tea the same way.
It’s not public health advocates who led us to this change. The frontlines do not include, for example, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who in 2025 stated that alcohol causes “100,000 cases of cancer in the United States each year and 20,000 cancer deaths” — figures that led him to call for alcohol labels to include warning of increased risk for cancers of the liver, esophagus, mouth, larynx, breast and colon. Nor did it involve researchers from the CDC, who cite excessive drinking as the cause of nearly 180,000 deaths in this country each year.
It was not a rollback that Americans in general — whose alcohol consumption in 2025 hit the lowest rate since Gallup began tracking it in 1939 — were asking for. In national surveys, about 75 percent of Americans say hemp should remain legal, a figure outpaced by the near 90 percent of Americans who say marijuana should at least be legal in medical form. Asking for this least of all were members of Gen Z, who drink less than prior generations and whose supposed teetotaling, polls suggest, has been greatly exaggerated — it’s just that cannabis is what they’re mostly drinking instead.
It was, instead, Big Alcohol groups that lobbied for this, including the American Distilled Spirits Alliance, Beer Institute, Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S. and Wine America. Not unrelatedly, as the conservative Cato Institute notes, recent years have seen “a surge in hemp-related lobbying from Anheuser-Busch, Molson Coors, Bacardi, and other big companies that compete directly with the upstart THC beverage industry.”
Then there’s the corporate cannabis industry, or Big Weed — a term that, full disclosure, I didn’t even know existed until I started writing this but promise to get plenty of future mileage from — which also lobbied for the bill and doesn’t look kindly on the new untethered-by-rules competition. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who notably pushed the hardest for the law that legalized hemp back in 2018, was the key Congressional figure behind the measure. Ironically, he spent years proselytizing about hemp to farmers in his home state of Kentucky, per a 2015 Politico article headlined “Mitch McConnell’s Love Affair with Hemp.” In 2014, he even put out a press release touting his role as “the author” of a provision that launched hemp pilot projects around Kentucky, calling them “a means for job creation and economic development.” There is a straight line connecting that bill, and McConnell’s help advocacy to the bill that legalized hemp four years later. Now that the hemp industry is worth somewhere between $7 and 28 billion dollars and employs roughly 330,000 people, he’s decided to burn it all down.
And look — there are valid reasons why modifications to the legal hemp law would be worth investigating. Legalization was intended to make hemp accessible for industrial use in things like fiber, rope and textiles, and maybe even some CBD wellness stuff. Nobody, least of all McConnell, seems to have anticipated that people would be creative enough to extract and convert compounds from hemp that can get people really high. Certainly, McConnell could not imagine the dizzying array of psychoactive products that would yield, all of which are subject to little oversight and even less quality control. (Hemp and marijuana are from the same plant but the former has less than 0.3 percent THC. I’m not going to get into the delta-9, THCA, HHC-ness of it all here, because a million stoners and others have already done that on YouTube, so go there if you need more deets.) This is the “loophole” so often cited as the justification for the hemp ban. And groups that oppose legal hemp argue that without regulation, what’s to stop kids from getting their hands on the intoxicating hemp products on store shelves?
But abrupt bans on things people have grown accustomed to accessing don’t really work. We should know this as a country, because we’ve done it before. Multiple times, actually. (There’s a whole historical period called the Prohibition Era for a reason.) If the ban is motivated by a fear of the lack of quality control and regulations on hemp-derived THC products, I’m not sure the way to solve that problem is helping create an underground black market. I mean, I get that America has a long and seemingly proud history of blanket criminalizing things it is forced to think too hard about. It’s a tendency that springs directly from its indifference to collateral consequences and incuriosity about things like science. But the old "think of the children"routine comes off as stale in a country that’s considering resurrecting a draft for 18-year-olds. Not to mention wantonly killing children abroad.
I should mention that efforts to stop this thing are kicking into high gear, and they’re being led by alcohol distributors — who also distribute and profit from THC drinks. The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America even launched a whole microsite advocating for regulation over prohibition. And this past Dec., Trump issued an executive order (hear me out) calling for marijuana to be recategorized as a Schedule III drug, and ordering that CBD remain not just legal, but made accessible to Medicare and Medicaid recipients. None of that can actually be legally mandated with an executive order, but what’s a Constitution or a Congress these days, really? This is, after all, a White House that, during its first term, got caught freely and illegally handing out uppers and downers to every staffer who asked. Never forget!
Just last year, the cannabis drink market hit a new high, bringing in roughly $1 billion dollars in sales. With those kinds of returns, they’re betting on staying in business. So throw back one of those beverages today. In just a few months, you might need a dispensary, a dealer or a time machine — but for now, you just need a reason. Might as well make it 4/20.
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This obscenity has women furious — and they're naming and shaming
If you’ve noticed an uptick in female rage online over the last week, we have our reasons.
Women have been reeling over the Eric Swalwell scandal, which saw our former collective Dem Crush fall from grace in the span of a mere 11 days. Republicans really could learn a lot about accountability from Democrats, but why would they bother doing anything that makes sense?
And while we were still trying to sort out the disappointment of learning that a supposedly Good Guy Ally is actually the polar opposite, we found out about the “Online Rape Academy,” exposed by a lengthy global CNN investigation.
All of the details revealed about the “Motherless” website are unspeakably horrifying. While women have always been fully aware of the potential dangers of sexual assault as a result of being drugged in public spaces, we never considered the possibility of it happening thanks to a trusted intimate partner. The website received 62 million unique hits in the month of February, and over 82 million in March. While its founder has been arrested, the site was still very much active at the time of this writing.
The site contains multiple subforums where men share videos of themselves assaulting and raping their female partners, who are fully passed out thanks to drinking spiked tea or being drugged some other way. They also share tips on which drugs are better than others, meaning which ones stay in a woman’s system for the shortest amount of time so that they can’t remember any of the rapey parts and therefore can’t report the men they trust most in the world to the police.
These and other horror movie details have created the kind of reaction from women that you’d expect, while too many men are pulling the “Not All Men” defense. And fellas, you need to drop that one like a counterfeit $100 bill.
Women are rightfully enraged by our collective lived experiences. After all, we’ve been watching men get away with sexual crimes since the dawn of recorded history. It’s only now in the digital age that women are finally able to shed the shame so often associated with sexual assault. We have lived with “harmless” catcalls on the street (my first one was at the age of 14 in Manhattan). We know what it’s like to be sexualized by adult men from very young ages (including by our own fathers), to be shamed over our bodies as a male power move, to be assigned our value from men based on our breast sizes, hip widths, belly fat, leg lengths, and ass shapes.
All too many of us know what it’s like when men cross the line into committing crimes against women, ranging from stalking to rape and murder. We have a man found liable of sexual abuse currently squatting in the White House who’s being enabled by the entire Republican Party, including members of his Cabinet who’ve been named along with him in the Epstein Files.
It also doesn’t help that Substack is platforming accused international sex trafficker Andrew Tate, who was given safe harbor in Florida by Donald Trump, who also welcomed Tate’s brother, Tristan, back to America. Andrew is somehow the #1 Bestseller this week, with over 1.1 million subscribers, which just shouldn’t be allowed on the app where the smart kids post. Or ANYWHERE ELSE, because he’s an accused CRIMINAL.
I’m very proud to say that all three of them blocked me on Twitter, because women need to stand up to men who abuse women, not enable them with our silence.
Understandably, women are gathering online to figure out how to channel this rage in the most effective ways. The main conversations are happening on Threads and Instagram, where women have dubbed the movement “MeTwo.” They can simply ask the Threads algorithm to put fellow raging females in their feeds so we can all take over everything as quickly as possible.
Along with the rightfully furious women are the male allies who are standing with us and calling out their fellow men to join them in smashing the patriarchy in the right way. We need much more of this energy, fellas.
Of course, there are the fragile MAGA snowflakes who are triggered and freaking out over women holding men accountable--and therefore keep proving our points for us. We know it’s “not all men,” but it is ALWAYS men, and it’s happened to literally ALL women.
ALL OF US.
If you’re a man reading that, read it again. And again. And really take it in.
Because when I say all of us, I’m telling you that there’s not a woman who’s ever walked this planet who, at the very bare minimum, hasn’t been the target of an inappropriate comment from a man. It’s really not a question of IF a woman you know--from your mom to your sister to your aunts, cousins, friends, girlfriends, and wives--has a story to tell about a Bad Man. The question is WHEN was the first time she can remember something happening to her?
Any follow-up questions? Before you ask them, remember that no woman “asks for it.” Especially not a woman who’s been drugged by her partner. More men need to be taught never to shame the victims of sexual violence, only the perpetrators. And yet, protecting a man’s professional reputation has all too often been the focus, instead of believing the women.
Women have had it, guys. There’s been a very real and perceptible shift in our attitudes. Women are naming and shaming their attackers, going back to their childhoods. Women are done protecting the men who’ve hurt us, and we’re also done staying silent if you start anything with us in public.
Women are going to get louder and louder. I’d advise all men trying the “not all men” thing to think about what all women live with, and then say nothing instead.
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Salivating right-wingers have set a trap for Dems
I recently came home from the studio and turned on the TV to see an MSNOW host and her guest agree on how important it is that Democrats “unite around the issue of term limits” for members of Congress. Last week, the Democratic governor of a swing state said on my program that he was pushing for term limits.
In just the past 48 hours, I’ve heard three different commentators on MSNOW and CNN speak of them as if term limits are the “solution” to “elderly” legislators or to the naked corruption that’s so rampant in DC.
This is the wrong issue for Democrats to be promoting now: term limits actually do more damage than good, which is why Republicans and the Heritage Foundation have been pushing them for decades.
For example, they’d get rid of good, effective, high-quality legislators like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Pramila Jayapal, among others.
But the problem with term limits goes far deeper than that.
Unfortunately, term limits are popular because they seem like an easy fix to the corruption crisis in American politics (over 70 percent of Americans favor them), but in reality, they simply hand more power over to giant corporations and the morbidly rich. Here’s how:
First, term limits shift the balance of power in a legislature from the legislators themselves to lobbyists, which is why corporate-friendly Republicans so often speak fondly of them.
Historically, when a new lawmaker comes into office, he or she will hook up with an old-timer who can show them the ropes, how to get around the building, where the metaphorical bodies are buried, and teach them how to make legislation.
With term limits, this institutional knowledge is largely stripped out of a legislative body, forcing new legislators to look elsewhere for help.
Because no Republican has ever, anywhere, suggested that lobbyists’ ability to work be term-limited, we have an actual experiment we can look to. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota all have term limits.
Research has shown, repeatedly and unambiguously, that in those states with term limits the lobbyists end up filling the role of permanent infrastructure to mentor and guide new lawmakers, and thus have outsized power and influence, far greater than they had before the term limits were instituted.
Of course, lobbyists — and the billionaires and corporations that pay them — love this. It dramatically increases lobbyists’ power and influence, giving them an early and easy entrée into the personal and political lives of the individual legislators who, in those states with term limits, are forced to lean on them for guidance.
This simple reality is not lost on the GOP, which has been pushing these restrictions on service at the federal and state legislature level for years: term limits are law in 16 states, all as the result of heavy Republican PR efforts and lobbying during the George HW Bush presidency.
Pappy Bush rolled the idea out in 1990 as a central part of his failed run for re-election in 1992. An unpopular president who was being blamed by voters for the destruction of unions and factories rapidly moving offshore, his advisors thought it would be a great way to blame Congress for the problems that neoliberal Reaganomics had inflicted on the nation.
As The New York Times noted on December 12, 1990:
“President Bush has decided to push for a constitutional amendment to limit the number of terms for members of Congress, his chief of staff, John H. Sununu, said today. Doing so as he prepares for his re-election campaign will put Mr. Bush squarely and publicly on the side of an idea that is as widely popular among voters as it is wildly unpopular among members of Congress…
“But even though passage of such an amendment is unlikely, there is little risk for Mr. Bush in associating himself with this movement. Politically, the move fits nicely with the growing effort by the White House to depict Congress as the source of most of the nation’s problems.”
While the US Congress never seriously took up the idea, Bush’s advocacy of it echoed through the states and was heavily promoted by Rush Limbaugh, whose national hate-radio show had rolled out just two years earlier in 1988.
Newt Gingrich made term limits the cornerstone of his 1994 Contract On America, but the issue died at the federal level in 1995 when the Supreme Court, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, ruled term limits imposed on federal officials are unconstitutional.
This doesn’t mean Congress can’t impose term limits on itself; it would just require them to be done as a constitutional amendment or via some other mechanism that gets around the Supreme Court, like court-stripping (which, itself, is dicey). Term limits were imposed on the presidency by Congress in 1951, a GOP backlash against FDR’s having won election to four consecutive terms in office, but that took ratification of the 22nd Amendment.
Following Bush’s promotion of them, Oklahoma picked up term limits for its legislature in 1990, with Maine, California, Colorado, Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, South Dakota, Montana, Arizona, and Missouri debating them during the 1991 and 1992 legislative sessions and all putting them into law in 1992. Louisiana and Nevada put them into law in 1995 and 1996, respectively, Nebraska in 2000, and North Dakota finally got around to them in 2022.
In every single case, term limits have worked to the benefit of billionaires and special interests and against the interests of average citizens. It’s why the Koch brothers and rightwing think-tanks have been pushing them for decades, like you’ll find in the article “Term Limits: The Only Way to Clean Up Congress” on the Heritage Foundation’s website.
In addition to strengthening the hand of lobbyists, term limits also prevent good people who aren’t independently wealthy from entering politics in the first place.
What rational person, particularly if they have kids, would take the risk of a job they know will end in six years when instead they could build a career in a field that guarantees them security and a decent retirement?
Also because of this dynamic, term limits encourage legislators to focus on their post-politics career while serving.
Many busily legislate favors for particular industries in the hope of being rewarded with a job when they leave office. This is just one of several ways term limits increase the level of and incentives for corruption.
Because term limits encourage independently wealthy people to enter politics and push out middle-class would-be career politicians like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they always shift the Overton window of legislatures — regardless of the party in power — to the right.
Probably the strongest argument against term limits, though, is that they’re fundamentally anti-democratic. In fact, we already have term limits: they’re called elections.
The decision about who represents the interests of a particular state or legislative district shouldn’t be held by some abstract law: it should be in the hands of the voters, and term limits deny voters this.
And, because term limits weaken the power of the legislative branch by producing a constant churn, they strengthen the power of the executive branch, a violation of the vital concept of checks-and-balances.
Even where governors or presidents are term-limited by law or constitution, the concentration of power in a single executive is inherently problematic, requiring a robust legislative branch to balance it. Term limits thus neuter a legislature’s ability to mount a muscular challenge to a governor or president grasping for excess power.
States that have instituted term limits generally suffer from “buyer’s remorse.” As the Citizens Research Council of Michigan noted in a 2018 report titled Twenty-five Years Later, Term Limits Have Failed to Deliver On Their Promise:
“Legislative term limits in Michigan have failed to achieve their proponents’ stated goals: Ridding government of career politicians, increasing diversity among elected officials, and making elections more competitive.
“Term limits have made state legislators, especially House members, view their time as a stepping stone to another office. Term limits have failed to strengthen ties between legislators and their districts or sever cozy relationships with lobbyists. They have weakened the legislature in its relationship with the executive branch.”
A scholarly study of term limits in Florida similarly concluded:
“The absence of long-serving legislators under term limits equates to a significant loss of experience and institutional memory. … Those who had built a career in the Legislature were not applauded for the expertise they had developed but were castigated…
“After the first full decade with term limitations in place, the Florida Legislature is a dramatically different institution. Term limits increased legislator turnover and drastically affected legislative tenure, all but destroying institutional memory.”
The Brookings Institution, in a paper titled Five Reasons to Oppose Congressional Term Limits, notes that the primary results of term limits are to:
— “Take away power from voters,”
— “Severely decrease congressional capacity,”
— “Limit incentives for gaining policy expertise,”
— “Automatically kick out effective lawmakers,” and
— “Do little to minimize corruptive behavior or slow the revolving door.”
As a result, Idaho, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming have all repealed their legislative term limits.
For people who’ve never worked in politics or held elective office — which is most of us — term limits sound like a quick and easy answer for the complex problems of corruption and congressional dysfunction. But the only truly reasonable place for term limits to be applied are to the presidency (which we’ve already done) and the unelected members of the Supreme Court (18 years is generally suggested as an appropriate limit to their terms).
So, the next time you hear some politician or TV pundit proclaiming that term limits are the “best solution” to the “problem” of corruption or congressional dysfunction, consider their real agenda.
Unless they’re simply naïve or cynical, it’ll almost always be that they are or once were (before Trump) a Republican and just can’t help themselves.
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This is likely the most corrupt presidential act in history
Of the nearly countless unforgivable and often corrupt acts of the Trump administration, very few register as dangerous and threatening as the total politicization of the Department of Justice. The department that used to be entirely hands-off from the White House — and woe to the president that didn't respect that — is now fully functioning not just as Trump's enforcement hammer, but as the political punisher of "enemies."
For enemies, read critics. It is now a crime to criticize Trump.
That corruption now plays out in the DOJ investigation of Eric Swallwell.
Have no doubt, Swallwell should be prosecuted by state authorities if the allegations support it. (And it sounds like they will.) That is how the system is supposed to function. There is no "need" for the federal government to investigate. It is also downright dangerous in this instance.
Traditionally, DOJ investigated and prosecuted only select crimes. Three sets of examples come quickly to mind. Federal agents and prosecutors worked to combat major organized and sophisticated cross-state crimes. Typically, mob, drug, and corporate. They also prosecuted civil rights crimes, especially in states that were less interested in doing so. Finally, the federal Justice Department was the only organization suited to investigate and prosecute federal politicians, in Congress and the Executive branch.
Thus it was that the Department sat almost entirely independent from the White House. The president could make policy decisions and recommendations: "No jail time for pot offenders." But never, ever, would they be involved in any one investigation — never mind ordering it.
Nixon crossed the line. Trump smashed it, and abused it.
There is little question that the federal investigation of Swalwell is linked solely to his Trump criticism. But Trump's influence on DOJ isn't limited to high-profile political opponents (though it's certainly that). It also reaches down into the press and everyday people.
The policy plays out in two ways. First, there is almost no investigation or prosecution of prominent Trump supporters. Indeed, the department will now even reverse prosecutions entirely — see first the J6er's pardon, and now the lifting of the prosecutions altogether. No one acting in Trump's name is committing a crime worth punishment, in DOJ's view.
And, of course, it plays out in the vicious political investigations. Swalwell is being investigated thoroughly by the people who are supposed to investigate allegations against him; now, the DOJ is also digging in. But it doesn't end there; look at the prosecution first of James Comey (tossed by the judge), and the threatened prosecution of Federal Reserve Chairman Powell. (Trump is again threatening to fire him, also a highly dangerous precedent.)
Not only is the White House surely directly involved in demanding those prosecutions, but it also then involves itself in the specific investigation. Such behavior used to be an automatic big-time scandal with the word "impeachment" attached. Trump does it openly and notoriously.
The subject then turns to the possible single most corrupt presidential act in history, its control of the Epstein investigation.
It is very difficult to imagine anything more corrupt than a president who demands that the DOJ stop investigating the Epstein matter on the basis that it might unfairly color innocent people, but also "anger" his friends. Oh, and those examples involve possible suspects other than Trump, never mind that everyone understands that a real Epstein investigation must at least answer some serious questions about Trump directly.
It is possible that a president of the United States ordered his Attorney General to scrub all files mentioning him in which he possibly sexually assaulted children. That is breathless corruption.
Going forward, the real danger is not just the Trump political prosecutions, but the normalizing of the political prosecution of critics. It is highly unlikely that the current Democratic crop of presidential aspirants (Buttigieg, Newsom, AOC, Beshear, others) would turn to political prosecutions, but it is not impossible. And based on historical norms, it is likely the next GOP president will follow Trump's pattern.
Donald Trump has no tools to deal with criticism other than lashing out to hurt the critic. He most certainly doesn't care or consider the precedent going forward, the harm to our system of government, nor his ethical breach. He cares only about "retribution." His insecurities reach such a level that he won't allow the investigation of his major supporters. Crimes in Trump's name are not crimes in Trump's eyes.
If the states investigating Swalwell successfully prosecute him, he deserves to spend much of his future in prison. He probably deserves to have the feds investigate him. But it is dangerously wrong for them to do so, especially if Trump ordered it or was done by a DOJ that knows it will make Trump happy.
A president who prioritizes and directs the criminal prosecution of his political enemies fits the precise definition of a banana republic dictator. His policy isn't confined to major political names, but reaches down to impact all of us. In that respect, federal involvement in the Swalwell matter is viciously wrong.
The extremely tall James Comey once declined President Obama's invitation to simply play basketball at the White House, fearing the appearance of friendship impacted the appearance of DOJ's independence. Trump went straight to directing the prosecution of his enemies and obstructing any investigation into him.
That is a dangerously corrupt conflict of interest on a generational scale and blows up a critical pillar of American democracy altogether.
Jason Miciak is a Rawstory Columnist at Large, former associate Editor of Occupy Democrats, an author, attorney, and single-parent girldad. He can be reached on Bluesky here, on Twitter, and at jasonmiciak@gmail.com. He also seeks beta readers for his latest novel.
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Trump's old pal now hates him — and can bring him down
Dear Marjorie Taylor Greene,
Thank you for standing up against unnecessary war, advocating for Epstein’s victims, and for defending the spiritual side of Christianity against Trump’s recent blasphemy.
Our mutual friend Congressman Ro Khanna (who you worked with on the Epstein legislation) reached out to you a few months ago about dropping by on my radio/TV program to have a friendly conversation; I haven’t heard back, but figured I’d reach out this way to suggest some things we could discuss.
You’re one of the few high-profile Republicans who’s not only disagreed with Trump on policy but has also clearly seen through his con-man façade of competence and, frankly, sanity. Well done! But let’s go a bit farther and talk policy, including a few areas where we may even agree…
Healthcare
America spends about twice as much as any other developed country in the world on healthcare, yet we have a lower lifespan and poorer outcomes than any other similar nation. We spend about $14,885 per person per year, while the average among other developed countries is about $5,967 (according to the OECD). Even Mexico, President Sheinbaum announced this week, will have comprehensive free national healthcare (including drugs) within 2 years.
Some of your Republican colleagues will say our poor outcomes are because we have “too many Black people” (referencing Prudential’s Frederick Hoffman’s old “genetically inferior Blacks” story that dominated healthcare and insurance policy in the 1910-1965 era covered in detail in my book on the Hidden History of American Healthcare). I’ve had several conservatives reference that old canard when they’ve come on my show. But that’s just a racist myth, and the proof is that these numbers hold for poor whites, too; just look at the numbers in overwhelmingly white West Virginia, for example.
As a conservative, I’d guess you’d be outraged by the billions of our healthcare dollars that are being shoveled into the money bins of the insurance and hospital giants. Your colleague Senator Rick Scott, for example, ran a hospital chain convicted of the largest Medicare fraud in American history at the time and walked away from it with hundreds of millions in his money bin; it financed his run for governor and senator from Florida. “Dollar Bill” McGuire, the first CEO of United Healthcare, left with over $1.5 billion from his gig (although he had to return a few hundred million to avoid going to jail for fraud).
The Medicare Advantage scam is costing Americans billions a year and that profit all goes directly to the stockholders and executives of massive insurance companies. And now Trump is inserting for-profit insurance companies into real Medicare in 6 states as an “experiment” and Dr. Oz is talking about replacing real Medicare with Advantage plans as the default when people turn 65. Millions of dollars are going into the pockets of politicians of both parties (but mostly Republicans) who support this fleecing of the American people.
If America just did what every other developed country in the world has done, we’d preserve a fortune and save an estimated 68,000 lives and a half-trillion-dollars a year. And, as any EU citizen can tell you, the service will be better! That seems like something a conservative could get behind?
Education
America is the only country in the developed world where a person goes deeply into debt to get an education; an advanced degree can create a debt that takes decades to pay off, and is preventing young people from getting married, buying a home, starting a family, and discouraging would-be entrepreneurs like yourself from starting a small business.
When we gave returning GIs from WWII free college, almost 8 million young men and women not only got free tuition from the 1944 GI Bill but also received a stipend to pay for room, board, and books, as about half of Europe’s countries do today. And the result — the return on our government’s investment in those 8 million educations — was substantial.
The best book on that time and subject is Edward Humes’ Over Here: How the GI Bill Transformed the American Dream, summarized by Mary Paulsell for the Columbia Daily Tribune:
“[That] groundbreaking legislation gave our nation 14 Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, 12 senators, 24 Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 17,000 journalists, 22,000 dentists and millions of lawyers, nurses, artists, actors, writers, pilots and entrepreneurs.”
When people have an education, they not only raise the competence and vitality of a nation; they also earn more money, which stimulates the economy. Because they earn more, they pay more in taxes, which helps pay back the government for the cost of that education.
In 1952 dollars, the GI Bill’s educational benefit cost the nation $7 billion. The increased economic output over the next 40 years that could be traced directly to that educational cost was $35.6 billion, and the extra taxes received from those higher-wage-earners was $12.8 billion.
In other words, the US government invested $7 billion and got a $48.4 billion return on that investment, about a $7 return for every $1 invested.
In addition, that educated workforce made it possible for America to lead the world in innovation, R&D, and new business development for three generations. We invented the transistor, the integrated circuit, the internet, new generations of miracle drugs, sent men to the moon and reshaped science.
Wouldn’t any rational conservative agree with former Republican President Eisenhower and his Vice President Richard Nixon that that’s a good deal for America? I realize the big banks who make billions in profits from all that student debt regularly pour millions into the coffers of your Republican colleagues, but shouldn’t America’s interest and and that of hard-working Americans come first?
Taxes
When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, two-thirds of Americans were in the middle class and could get and stay there with a single paycheck. Today it’s only 43 percent of us who qualify for that, and, to add insult to injury, it takes two paychecks to get there. In large part that’s because of Republican “trickle down” economics.
When Reagan came into office, the top tax rate on the morbidly rich was 74% and corporations 50%. That encouraged wealthy people to make tax-deductible donations to charity and stop taking money out of their companies after the first three million or so a year (in today’s dollars) when the top rates began to kick in. Billionaires weren’t even a thing, mostly, at the time; now we have a guy who’s about to become a trillionaire.
CEOs and senior managers often lived in the same neighborhoods as their workers, although their homes were a bit spiffier. Just look at old sitcoms from the ‘50s and ‘60s and you’ll see what I mean. It also encouraged companies to invest their surplus money into R&D, new products and expansion, and better wages and benefits for their workers (all tax-deductions that helped them avoid paying corporate income taxes). Today, instead, since Reagan legalized stock buybacks (it used to be a felony called “stock price manipulation”), CEO’s recycle their companies’ money into buybacks to artificially inflate the value of the stock and thus their bonuses.
When Reagan came into office in 1981, the total national debt was about $800 billion — less than one trillion dollars — and had been going down every year since the end of WWII. If you add up the total value of Reagan tax cuts, the GW Bush tax cuts, and both sets of Trump tax cuts — all heavily weighted toward the obscenely rich — you’ll discover that the number is well north of the current $38 trillion of our national debt.
In other words, under those three Republican presidents America borrowed — in your name, my name, and our kids’ and grandkids’ names — $38 trillion and handed it all to the Musks and Zuckerbergs and Bezos of our country so these “Masters of the Universe” could compete to see who could build the largest mega-yacht, shoot themselves highest into outer space on penis-shaped rockets, or build the most elaborately outfitted doomsday bunker.
If we went back to the tax rates we had when Reagan came into office, working class people would see a major tax break, the morbidly rich would have to again pay their fair share, and corporations would once again be incentivized to innovate their products and pay their employees enough to revive the middle class.
Wouldn’t a reasonable conservative think that’s a good deal for America? Eisenhower and Nixon certainly did; even Republican President Jerry Ford agreed and kept the top tax rate at 90%.
There are multiple other issues we could discuss and probably agree on. They include the benefits of:
— Building out public transportation like China, Japan, South Korea, and most of Europe have done;
— Cleaning up our air and water to save lives and slow down these increasingly deadly weather disasters (you do believe in science, right?);
— Protecting our public lands from greedy fossil fuel billionaires;
— Passing Republican James Langford’s immigration legislation to get undocumented people out of the country without brutality while cleaning up our immigration mess going forward;
— Getting off our addiction to fossil fuels and the Middle East;
— And even the “small government” idea of letting queer people and non-Christians simply live their lives in peace and quiet.
We can discuss these things or any issue you’d like; you can also talk directly to my listeners and viewers all across the country. Every week members of Congress come on my show for a full hour to take calls from listeners; you’re welcome to do the same, too, if you’d like. Bernie Sanders did that every week for 11 years. Ro Khanna is one of my regulars and has been for years; he can tell you all about it.
Hoping to hear from you.
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The DOJ's next target could be mind-blowing
Friends,
You’ve got to hand it to Pope Leo, who used a speech Thursday in Cameroon to express “woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”
I can’t imagine who Leo was talking about, can you?
In case there was any doubt, the pope added: “The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.”
The tyrant in the Oval Office has been trying to portray his war in Iran as a “just war” backed by the will of God and Jesus Christ. Pope Leo disagrees. Jesus, he says, “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-described secretary of war, has promised to give “no quarter” to the “barbaric savages” of the Iranian regime, and called on the American people to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
At a worship service at the Pentagon on March 25, Hegseth asked God for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Hegseth’s words apparently provoked Pope Leo to preach on Palm Sunday that God ignores the prayers of those whose “hands are full of blood” from making war.
This past Sunday, Trump attacked the pope on social media as “terrible on foreign policy,” and suggested that Trump himself was the reason Leo was selected to be pope in the first place.
On Tuesday, JD Vance said the pope should be more “careful when he talks about matters of theology.”
Hello? What in heaven’s name is the vice-president to the least-careful-of-what-he-says president doing telling the pope to be more careful of how he interprets Catholic theology?
I’m not Catholic, but I always thought the pope’s words about matters theological were considered by Catholics to be as close to God’s own words as humans can get.
Yesterday in Cameroon, the pope also said: “The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet often a lifetime is not enough to rebuild. They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation.”
At this rate, Trump is going to demand the Justice Department open a criminal investigation of the pope. Trump will get hold of all the bills for restoring the Sistine Chapel and claim the pope misappropriated funds. He’ll have Jeanine Pirro seek an injunction against the pope to block any further papal statements. He’ll threaten that unless the pope stops criticizing him, he’ll get God to reconvene the College of Cardinals and fire Leo.
So far, though, Pope Leo isn’t backing down.
Praise the Lord.
- 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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Here's how Trump will mouth off at the Pearly Gates
There is just so much back-and-forth going on between Donald Trump and Jesus Christ right now that I had a feeling the two must be secretly meeting and trying to figure each other out. And it turns out I was right.
In this Raw Story exclusive, I was able to eavesdrop on the president of the United States and our Lord and Savior as they talked shop.
Here is what I managed to scribble down:
Donald Trump: “So this is it. This is The Guy. I’ll be honest. I expected more. Bigger presence. People talk about you like you’re the greatest ever. I’ve seen greater.”
Jesus Christ: “What were you hoping to see, my son?”
Trump: “Strength. Authority. A winner. Not…this.”
Christ: “And what is ‘this’?”
Trump: “Soft. Quiet. You let people walk all over you. Meanwhile, I’m not buying the whole ‘walk on water’ thing.”
Christ: “I allow people to interact with me however they choose.”
Trump: “And they chose to kill you. Not much of a winning strategy there, pal.”
Christ: “Is that how you measure a life?”
Trump: “It’s how the world measures everything.”
Christ: “I don’t see things in the same fashion. I look at the value of the person. This is how I view achievement.”
Trump: “Yeah sure. Everyone takes advantage of you, uses you and your influence to prop themselves up – including me. You make it WAY too easy.”
Christ: “And yet people find spiritual comfort in the enlightenment I offer.”
Trump: “You talk a good game. But the truth is you’re a disaster. You had the crowd. You had the attention. You could’ve led – really led. Instead, you wandered around, told stories, upset the wrong people.”
Christ: “And what would you have had me do?”
Trump: “Take charge. Build something that lasts out of gold. Put your name on stuff besides churches. No one takes churches seriously. Not really.”
Christ: “What you build will not last.”
Trump: “See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You disparage what you don’t understand because you’re jealous.”
Christ: “You build monuments to yourself that will crumble shortly after you shuffle off this mortal coil.”
Trump: “Not true. You’re crazy. What I build lasts forever and has my name on it.”
Christ: “I inspire people to build from their sacred dreams. Those structures are indestructible due to their foundation of insight.”
Trump: “I haven’t got the slightest clue what the hell you’re talking about.”
Christ: “And you never will.”
Trump: “Oh really? And why is that?”
Christ: “Because you are concerned only with finding someone or something to defeat. You have no interest in things that stimulate, that motivate, that inspire, that fulfill. You care exclusively about conquering, crushing, annihilating, deflating.”
Trump: “Because that’s what success is all about. I win. You lose. You’re destroyed in the process. And no one wins like me. That’s why the people love me. You’re just a guy who got nailed to a cross. I like my messiahs not crucified.”
Christ: “I died to atone for mankind’s sins. I do not view that as a loss so much as a form of sacrifice, a concept I fear you will never understand.”
Trump: “Oh I understand it, all right. I’ve sacrificed plenty. All of the criticism from losers. All of the lawsuits. All of the disrespect.”
Christ: “You will never comprehend true sacrifice until you embrace humility.”
Trump: “This is all just a load of crap, Jesus. You really think you’re above all of this, don’t you?”
Christ: “No.”
Trump: “Then what is it? Because you stand there like none of it matters – success, power, recognition, all of the things people actually care about.”
Christ: “I care about those who care about themselves.“
Trump: “See, there you go again, spouting gibberish. Exactly what people who never notch a victory say.”
Christ: “This victory of which you speak is not what I am here for.”
Trump: “Oh yeah? What did you come for?”
Christ: “I came to free human beings from the tyranny of self.”
Trump: “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?”
Christ: “I’m offering people the truth about themselves.”
Trump: “No. You’re offering them failure.”
Christ: “If it is failure that I represent, my son, then why is it that you seem so enchanted by my likeness that you use it and refer to it at every opportunity?”
Trump: “It’s a way to control people. They are so gaga over your religion – the religion you named after yourself, I might add – that they still follow everything they think you taught them about life.”
Christ: “I offer souls a pathway to contentment.”
Trump: “I teach them to avoid failure and turn it into strength.”
Christ: “You turn it into anger.”
Trump: “Anger wins.”
Christ: “For a moment.”
Trump: “Long enough.”
Christ: “To what end?”
Trump: “Domination.”
Christ: “It is a way to divide. I prefer strength through unity and loving one another.”
Trump: “Whatever. You know, for someone people call the Son of God, you haven’t done a very good job proving it.”
Christ: “How would you suggest I prove it?”
Trump: “I don’t know. Turn water into wine. Heal the sick. Cast out demons. Create chaos out of thin air. Something.”
Christ: “You would not believe it even if you witnessed it, as your cynicism clouds your every thought.”
Trump: “Excuse me?”
Christ: “You only believe what serves you.”
Trump: “That’s not true.”
Christ: “You have built your life on it. And in the process, you have left the world stained with your own egoistic vision of the darkness that inhabits your soul.”
Trump: “Oh yeah? Well darkness has worked pretty well for me so far. I’m worth $6.3 billion. What’s your net worth, Christ?”
Christ: “I cannot be measured in materialistic wealth.”
Trump: “That’s what all the losers tell me.”
Christ: “My response is that you are loved.”
Trump: “Who cares? All that matters to me is that I won.”
Christ: “Then you will never achieve what you seek. And you will never be truly satisfied.”
Trump: “You and that Pope Leo are like peas in a pod. Negative, negative, negative. Enjoy your stupid little existence. I’m done.”
Christ: “I will pray for you.”
Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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Stephen Miller cost Trump what was supposed to be his big win
Friends,
Trump’s chief bigot, Stephen Miller, said on Fox News that immigrants to the United States bring problems that extend through generations.
“Not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller claimed. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
Bulls---. The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in America.
In a recent paper, researchers found that immigrants today are no slower to move into the middle class than immigrants were a century ago. In fact, no matter when their parents came to the U.S. or what country they came from, children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers.
Stephen Miller’s great-great-grandfather was born in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl in what is now Belarus. He came to America in 1903 with $8 in his pocket and spoke no English. Three generations later, little Stephen was born in 1985 to American parents but somehow developed a visceral hatred for immigrants.
Miller and Trump have been dealing with immigrants the same way Pete Hegseth and Trump have been dealing with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz — inflicting pain on both them and the United States, in the hope their pain will be worse than the pain we endure.
Wednesday’s Tax Day was supposed to be a big PR boon for Trump, in which he touts his “no taxes on tips” and other ersatz tax “cuts” for average working Americans (while hiding that his Big Ugly bill actually gave most of its benefits to the wealthy and big corporations, and paid for them by taking money from Medicaid and food stamps and other programs the working class and poor rely on).
But the war in Iran has made everything — even Stephen Miller’s war on immigrants — feel like the Strait of Hormuz.
Consider that before Miller ordered the Internal Revenue Service to give ICE officials the addresses of people subject to deportation, undocumented immigrants had been paying roughly $60 billion annually in federal taxes, much of it going into Social Security and Medicare — programs from which they don’t benefit.
Now, tax experts fear many immigrants won’t file returns, and those who formerly had their taxes withheld in every paycheck will shift into under-the-table jobs. The Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan research center, projected lost tax revenue of about $300 billion over a decade.
Meanwhile, Miller’s vast, sadistic crackdown on undocumented workers is causing significant pain for the U.S. economy. There aren’t enough workers in construction, hospitality, and agriculture to keep these sectors going. Another Strait of Hormuz situation.
Let’s be clear. Apart from Native Americans, we are all immigrants — all descended from “foreigners.” Some of our ancestors came here eagerly; some came because they were no longer safe in their homelands; some came enslaved.
As Ronald Reagan put it in a 1988 speech,
You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. But … anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. A person becomes an American by adopting America’s principles, especially those principles summarized in the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Reagan understood that America is a set of aspirations and ideals more than it is a nationality.
Miller and Trump, on the other hand, want to fuel bigotry. Their entire project depends on hate. Like dictators before him, Trump’s road to tyranny is paved with stones hurled at “them” — whether “they” are immigrants, Iranians, or anyone else who doesn’t fit the white Christian nationalist mold.
America is better than Trump and his chief bigot.
- 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 next demented rage could be the last
Friends,
It’s a catastrophe on the way to becoming a cataclysm.
Trump is rapidly going stark-raving mad. He’s a clear and present danger to the United States and the world.
Yesterday, he lashed out at The New York Times after its chief White House correspondent questioned his mental health and stability and pointed to his “erratic behavior and extreme comments.”
“HAVE THEY NO SHAME? HAVE THEY NO SENSE OF DECENCY?” Trump posted in CAPITAL LETTERS about the Times, inadvertently echoing the famous words of Joseph Welch when standing up to Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. Trump went on to take issue with the Times’s coverage of his war in Iran rather than his mental state, as if to prove the Times’s point.
He keeps saying he’s “won” the war with Iran, although he’s never said what “winning” means. At one moment, his goal is to free Iran’s people. At another, it’s to end Iran’s capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. At another, to destroy Iran’s missiles. At another, to achieve “regime change.” At another, to open the Strait of Hormuz (which was open before Trump started his war). At another, he says he’ll know the U.S. military operation in Iran is over when he feels it "[in] my bones.”
He can’t even stay on the same subject for more than a few minutes. In the middle of a high-level Cabinet meeting about the war, he spends five minutes talking about his preference for Sharpie pens. He interrupts another Iran war update to praise the White House drapes.
He threatens that if Iran doesn’t reopen the strait, “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Then he says America doesn’t need the strait reopened. Then he says: “Open the F-----n’ Strait, you crazy b-----ds, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
He calls the Pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” because the Pope wants peace. He posts an AI-generated picture of himself as Jesus, then says he was only depicting himself as a physician.
He won’t give up on his illegal and dangerous (for the economy) criminal investigation of Fed Chief Jerome Powell, claiming it’s not just about Powell’s renovations at the Fed but also a “probe on incompetence,” adding he’ll fire Powell if he doesn’t resign after his term as chair ends.
He claims that the United States “needs” Greenland. He confuses Greenland with Iceland. He says whales are being killed by windmills. He claims that he won all 50 states in 2020. That he defeated Barack Obama in 2016. He says the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed. He goes on an eight-minute ramble about poisonous snakes in Peru. He boasts of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Armenia.
After Robert Mueller’s death, he says, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” He blames the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle on “the anger [Rob Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” After Joe Biden is diagnosed with an aggressive form of Stage 4 prostate cancer, Trump says, “I’m surprised that the public wasn’t notified a long time ago because to get to Stage 9, that’s a long time” (there is no Stage 9 cancer).
He’s been losing it for a while now, but in the last few months it’s become far worse.
In 2017, 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals concluded in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump that Trump’s mental condition posed a “clear and present danger” to the nation.
In 2021, members of Trump’s own Cabinet — horrified by the January 6, 2021, violence at the Capitol and Trump’s lack of urgency in stopping it — discussed whether to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office due to mental incompetence.
During his 2024 campaign, he attacked Kamala Harris and then went into the stratosphere of his bonkers mind:
“She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s – and I own a big building there – it’s no – I shouldn’t talk about this, but that’s OK, I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world – sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson, they say, was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”
It’s no longer possible to overlook his conspiracy-obsessed paranoia, his uncontrolled rage, his emotional volatility, his delusional claims, his vengeful rantings, his foul-mouthed posturing, his increasing detachment from reality.
Yet his Cabinet members and aides keep their heads down. Republican members of Congress pretend not to notice. His billionaire supporters dare not speak of his rapid decline. The media tries to “sanewash” his growing incoherence.
But some voices on the right — people who have long been supporters of Trump — have had enough.
Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene says Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s civilization is “not tough rhetoric, it’s insanity.” Far-right podcaster Candace Owens calls him “a genocidal lunatic.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones says Trump “does babble and sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot.” A White House lawyer in Trump’s first term, Ty Cobb, says Trump is “clearly insane.” Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham says “he’s clearly not well.”
The public is catching on. Fully 61 percent of Americans think he’s become more erratic with age, while just 45 percent say he is “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges” (down from 54 percent in 2023).
For the good of the nation and the world, it’s time we face the reality: The most powerful man in the world does not have the mental capacity to do the job. Donald Trump — who has a family history of dementia — is increasingly unhinged.
We are all endangered. What happens if, in a demented rage, he hurls a nuclear bomb? Who is watching the “football” with the nuclear codes? Who’s ready to stop him to save the world?
Don’t wait. Impeach him now.- 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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A grotesque analogy guarantees this loser rots in hell
J.D. Vance should count his blessings that his boss is a bigger jerk than he is, because if something were to happen to Trump, Vance would instantly become the world’s most loathed person.
On Tuesday night, Vance — the man who obnoxiously believes himself qualified to correct the Pope of the Catholic Church — strutted into the Akins Ford Arena in Athens, Georgia for a Turning Point USA rally. And fittingly, no one showed up to hear him mouth off.
The 8,000-seat venue was, according to MS NOW journalist Jake Traylor’s now-viral video, less than 25 percent filled for the Vice President. No one bothered to show up to hear the motor-mouth opine.
It was there that Vance had the vile audacity to lecture Pope Leo XIV — the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics, successor to Peter, the Vicar of Christ — about the importance of being “anchored in truth.” The slithering snake of a man once told CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention… then that’s what I’m going to do.
Yesterday, he snarkily frothed — from his oozing spittlebug mouth — that the Pope should be “very, very careful” when speaking about matters of theology.
If I were J.D. Vance’s priest — and thankfully I am not — I would give him a penance of 1 million “Our Fathers” and 2 million “Hail Mary’s.” And then I would tell him when he was done with his prayers to do his fellow mankind a solid, and jump off a bridge.
Vance, regrettably to all of us who call ourselves Catholic, converted to Catholicism in 2019, and now apparently believes his few years in the pews give him the theological standing to school the Bishop of Rome.
Vance’s irritating ego was bent out of shape after Pope Leo’s condemnation of the escalating war in Iran and his declaration that “God is never on the side of those who wield the sword.”
Vance, who is caught up in the pompous perfidy Pete Hegseth’s “Holy War,” reached for the liberation of Nazi concentration camps as his rebuttal — a grotesque historical analogy.
And true to his slimy and duplicitous character, the one time Vance decided to keep his fat-trap shut was when Trump said he was going to erase a civilization. Because any truthful Catholic is fine with wiping people off the face of the earth.
As I wrote previously, Vance, with the tedious reliability of a presumptuous coxcomb, constantly reminds everyone he is the Vice President. Even in attempting to dress down the Pope, he couldn’t resist brandishing the title like a six-year-old Cub Scout who just received a Bobcat badge, “Even as vice president,” he intoned, suggesting that his office requires him to weigh his words carefully about policy.
He is the nugatory vice president, the office which Franklin D. Roosevelt's first vice president, John Nance Garner IV, famously described as "not worth a bucket of warm spit.” In this case, JD Vance is both the bucket and a salivating Trump sycophant, albeit Catholic.
I am a lifelong Catholic. And as a lifelong Catholic, I know well that we are not supposed to judge our fellow man. Matthew 7:1 says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”
But honestly, I believe Jesus, a man who had his own strongly worded things to say about Pharisees, might extend me a little grace here. Vance humiliates the word truth.
Since converting, Vance has waged an unrelenting war on the very values his adopted Church professes. He spearheaded the spread of the debunked lie that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets, and when city officials told his own office the rumors were baseless, he doubled down.
Maybe someday Vance will visit Haiti, and they will eat him. But Haiti has enough ingestive disease, so a meal of Vance would only make things worse.
Vance routinely calls legal residents under Temporary Protected Status “illegal aliens,” a deliberate linguistic slapdown designed to strip human beings of dignity. He campaigned for the evil and repressive Viktor Orbán in Hungary and watched his second favorite (Trump is #1) diabolical dictator lose — badly.
He led talks in Pakistan for nearly a day and returned home having failed to broker any resolution with Iran, blaming Tehran for his failure. Because JD is a Catholic vice president who is without fault and sin.
He is, by almost any measure, an epic political failure, a laborious loser, who has managed to be an unfaithful failure at being a Catholic.
The Church he claims to belong to is not silent. Even in that sparse Georgia arena, a lone voice cut through the air: “Jesus Christ does not support genocide!” Vance tried to wave it away, insisted he agreed with the sentiment, and then lied to the heckler’s face, claiming the Trump administration had “solved” Gaza.
But do you think any of this bothered the supercilious, sanctimonious, simple-minded sad sack? Hell no, as he might say, using a word that he’s destined to experience someday.
Pope Leo XIV should not waste a moment of his papacy acknowledging this man. The distance between the two of them cannot be measured in miles or rank or years of theological training. It is the distance between heaven and hell, the place the Church reserves for profane blasphemers like Trump — and his warm bucket of spit.
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