The crowd's adoring Trump's antics — and that's terrible for him
Donald Trump's convention antics are being lapped up by this crowd — and that's not good news for him.
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This vile lie must be MAGA's last straw
If Donald Trump is still breathing, he’s lying.
When he’s not making accusations disguised as confessions, he’s overcompensating for his lifetime of failures by creating lies on top of lies, with some distraction tactics in the middle for good measure. It’s a MAGA Mille-feuille of immorality, and yet Cult 45/47 eats it up and asks for more from Donny Three-Card Monte.
It’s basically become an annual tradition for Trump to lie about 9/11, with his false claims of bravery and helping at Ground Zero to his obtuse boasts of having the tallest building left in Manhattan after the towers fell. But the lies he’s told this week, as Americans braced themselves for the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, are possibly his most egregious lies of all.
Everyone has a “Where were you?” story about that day, and we tell those stories as part of the collective mourning the country experienced, because we’ll never forget. I grew up in New Jersey and I could see the Twin Towers from my bedroom window. I had been to the top on school field trips, and any time we flew anywhere, a glimpse of the World Trade Center from the plane meant we were almost home. The skyline still looks incomplete to me, and probably always will.
On the day of the attacks, I had been living in the Portland metro area for six months. My mother, brother, and sister-in-law were working in Manhattan. My stepfather was in Brooklyn and had to walk home to the Upper West Side. I watched the coverage from 3,000 miles away. I managed to get ahold of my brother in his Midtown law office before the phone lines went down. He had just left a firm after only a couple of months because, as he told us, it just wasn’t the right fit for him. He was discouraged by a lot of people from making the move, and was told to stick it out, but he trusted his gut and went anyway. The firm he left was in a building near the World Trade Center that collapsed in the aftermath, making it all feel extra personal for me.
Donald Trump's lies about 9/11 are centered on stolen valor and began on the day itself, when we were all experiencing a national tragedy and had no idea if we were going to be attacked again. He couldn’t keep from inserting himself into the narrative from the beginning; his narcissism just couldn’t allow for the idea that he wasn’t part of the conversation about the biggest event in American history. He saw blanket media coverage and used it as an opportunity to talk about himself, and has done so every year since.
We cannot let him rewrite the history we all witnessed, which is still so visceral that many of us still can’t watch footage even a quarter of a century later. While we feel the gravitas of the day, Trump keeps using it to puff himself up.
But he was nowhere near Ground Zero on 9/11, and we know this because he called into a local TV station, WOR (Channel 9), to claim he witnessed the second plane hitting the World Trade Center as he stood with a “group of people” in his office at Trump Tower. It’s an interesting snapshot of how he was manipulating the media, even back when he was just this gross, chauvinistic playboy hitting the Manhattan social scene with his wives, and the women he dated when he was between wives.
However, some simple geography, math, and the Empire State Building blocking his view dispute his claims of witnessing the second plane hit.
My mom actually did witness the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. She worked on the top floor of the Carnegie Hall Tower, which has 60 floors and 360-degree unobstructed views of Manhattan in all four directions. I often visited her at work when I lived in Manhattan in the mid-'90s, and always made the full walk around the floor to take in all of the views. I don’t know how many times I glimpsed the WTC from there, but it was always there. Until it wasn’t.
Anyway, lots of people called out the latest lie, despite Trump saying, “I’ll never forget how two big firefighters pulled me out…”
Which never happened, but also sounds like a fantasy he’s had for years. There was plenty of pushback online, so then he went and did this.
TL;DR: HE IS LYING.
MAGA has yet to call him out for this despicable lie. The media is silent. He went to Dallas for his midterm convention and stood up and lied more, and then he lied on Thursday about the attendance breaking records when the joint was mostly empty.
There isn’t anything Trump won’t lie about, and that’s what makes him so dangerous. From COVID to the Iran War to Gaza to whatever the latest awful thing he’s done, his lies have an unacceptable body count. He lied about why he’s vandalizing Washington. He lied about the 2024 election. And he’ll never stop lying about the Epstein Files.
The question is, when will MAGA stop letting him lie to them? This latest outrage about what must be America's most solemn day must be the final straw.
And the follow-up is, when will the media stop helping him lie to all of us?
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This catastrophic fool is a dream next to Trump
If you were an adult 25 years ago, politically aware, and a Democrat, you remember the horror of watching George W. Bush win the presidency without winning the popular vote. I remember being up into the wee hours of the morning on election night in 2000, astonished and beleaguered that Bush was being anointed the projected winner of the presidential election against Al Gore.
I can picture many of my contemporaries reading this and shaking their heads in firm affirmation. It was like watching a bomb of ineptitude go off over our country.
The country ended up being on pins and needles until the Supreme Court settled the Florida recount in Bush’s favor. I know for a fact that I held so much hope in the Court doing the right thing, and, of course, it didn’t. And I can also say I watched with tears in my eyes as Gore graciously conceded the election.
Bush was sworn in on January 20, 2001 and, for people like me, it was distressing. How did this guy, untested, incurious and unknowledgeable about the world — and thin on experience — end up as President of the United States?
I wasn't alone in feeling that dread. From election night on, a lot of people I knew lived with a fairly high level of anxiety that something bad would happen on his watch, precisely because he seemed so unprepared for the job. And our adversaries were surely aware of his shortcomings.
Then something bad happened. Something horrific. I've lived in New York City for 33 years, and I watched the Twin Towers burn from my rooftop. In the middle of that horror, a second fear set in: How on earth was George W. Bush going to lead this country through the worst terrorist attack in its history?
The worry that had started as skepticism about an election suddenly became something much more visceral and alarming. Is this man capable of leading us through this catastrophic episode?
And then, to my genuine surprise, Bush rose to the occasion. Standing in the wreckage of Ground Zero, he told the country that the people responsible would hear from us. He struck the right tone: calm, resolute, human, in a way that steadied a shaken country and made the promise of justice feel credible.
For someone who had no faith whatsoever in his leadership going in, it was startling to watch him find his footing. In those first weeks, he looked like a commander-in-chief. I remember him throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium for Game three of the 2001 World Series. He threw a strike, not the ceremonial lobs most public figures toss.
As a baseball fan, I noticed. It felt like a small, strange metaphor for a president who was, for that moment, hitting the mark.
Of course, it didn't last. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and the neocons steered the administration toward a stupefying war in Iraq that had nothing to do with 9/11, and Bush foolishly went along with it.
What followed was one failure after another: a war built on pretenses, the infamous and woefully premature "Mission Accomplished" banner unfurled on an aircraft carrier years before anything resembling accomplishment, and Bush arriving on that carrier in a fighter jet. It sounds like something stupid Trump would do, except for the fact that Trump would never be able to fit in the cockpit seat.
That Iraq conflict dragged on with no real resolution, and Bush bears the responsibility for that decision and its cost. His presidency ended with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. By any measure, it was a presidency that crashed with missions unaccomplished.
So it says something that, 25 years after 9/11, I find myself missing George W. Bush, not because his presidency was good, but because Donald Trump doesn't come close to how Bush handled that specific, singular moment. The fear I had with Bush now pales in comparison to the fear I have with the lunatic Donald Trump at the helm.
First, and most insultingly, Trump this week repeated a fabrication he has spent years building — his own account of where he was and what he did on September 11th, which is galling on its own. This is not the date for fanciful fairy tales and, more bluntly, lies. Bush never had any reason to lie about what he did, because what he did mattered.
Back to that fear. On every single front, from Trump's handling of intelligence, his treatment of longtime allies, the chaos inside the Defense Department, and his eagerness to court adversaries like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, to the needless Iran war, and on and on and on, Trump is 100 times more dangerous than Bush ever was.
If this country were attacked the way it was on 9/11, Trump's unhinged temperament and lack of discipline would prevent him from responding in the measured way Bush did. We got a preview during COVID, which he mismanaged and mangled badly.
And his behavior since, including last weekend’s wild and incessant social-media tirades that read as unmoored from reality as humanly possible, is not the picture of someone who could stand at a podium in a moment of national trauma and steady the country.
My God, if you stop to think about what Trump would do if another 9/11 occurred in this country, well, I shudder violently at the thought.
Yes, sure, hindsight makes it easy to see that Bush, for all his failures before and after, was the right man for that one specific moment. Twenty-five years later, it's just as clear that Trump is, without a doubt or question, the wrong man for a moment like it, should one ever come again, God forbid.
I definitely do not harbor nostalgia for a Bush presidency I never supported and that ultimately failed. But I do have the certainty that if a crisis on the scale of 9/11 hit today, there'd be no Ground Zero moment of steadiness amidst all the ruin and rubble and destruction.
There would just be the ruin and rubble of a destructive Trump.
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A brutal string of humiliations cracked this Republican's glass jaw
U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, has taken it on the chin repeatedly over the past week.
He wants another term in the Senate, but first he has to make it through an increasingly fraught election season.
First, his campaign apparently shared an AI-generated graphic of Kansas showing its 105 counties in — curious positions. Also, there weren’t 105 of them. His challenger, Overland Park Democrat Adam Hamilton, quickly made hay of the situation.
“Spend enough time in Florida and you might forget what Kansas looks like,” the Hamilton campaign posted Friday.
Then President Donald Trump threatened Canadian aerospace company Bombardier on Monday.
“NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES! Their products aren’t good enough!” he proclaimed via Truth Social, ignoring the fact that more than 1,000 Americans work at Bombardier facilities in — whoops — Wichita.
Marshall posted on social media that he had the problem well in hand: “I’m going to fight to keep Bombardier’s over 1,200 Kansas jobs. I’ve already taken that concern inside the Oval Office.”
Notably, the incumbent senator didn’t mention the person who put those jobs at risk. That would be Trump.
Finally, the New York Times posted a story Tuesday analyzing “Doc” Marshall’s medical career. Turns out, he “filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, according to a New York Times analysis of Kansas court records.”
According to the Times, 81 patients were arrested for missing their court dates. Marshall charged up to 18% interest rates for medical debt repayment.
Whew!
Each story hit a different nerve. The AI-generated state map suggested a sloppy campaign apparatus, one peppered with junior staffers who don’t comprehend the pride Kansans take in their state. Trump’s Bombardier threats underscored the extent to which Marshall has chained his political fortunes to those of the president. Let’s not forget that Marshall’s first vote in the U.S. Senate was to reject Joe Biden’s presidential win.
Finally, the medical billing story struck at the very core of Marshall’s biography. He has been at pains to present himself as a mild-mannered obstetrician-gynecologist, a small-town doctor representing the rural folk of Kansas. Turns out, he wanted to be paid. The Times story includes wrenching references to women who lost pregnancies and needed additional surgery.
Rural health care costs money. But Kansas also hasn’t expanded Medicaid services, and Marshall has steadfastly opposed the Affordable Care Act. Did he just prefer his patients poor and indebted to him?
Marshall can’t help but look worse for wear. I’m sure those in the Hamilton campaign have celebrated accordingly. (Keep that champagne in the icebox for now, kids. There’s a lot of time left).
This is what happens after decades of dominance by a single political party and erosion of news media influence. Vetting Kansas politicians takes time, energy and attention. Marshall had an enormous glass jaw that didn’t come into focus until he faced a competitive race. We’ve seen shoddy campaign work and Trumpy outbursts before. The lawsuits in question happened years ago.
But we’re only now putting the pieces together.
We’ve seen the same pattern play out in the governor’s race. State Senate President Ty Masterson, the Republican nominee, finally faced wide scrutiny for his “no-show job” at Wichita State University as the primary approached. He officially went on leave last month. I’d written about the dubious arrangement for years, but elections have a way of clarifying the mind.
Even the most polished and charismatic candidates should face scrutiny from reporters and opposing campaign operatives. It doesn’t matter how powerful their party or financial backers might be. Every candidate should answer tough questions and respond to tough stories. They should run, address fair criticism, and let voters choose.
Marshall has lingered far too long in the shadow of Trump. The time has arrived for the good doctor to step into the sunlight, taking responsibility for the past and outlining a positive vision for the future.
If he can’t manage that, I’m sure Hamilton’s campaign would like a word.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. His first book, “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now,” comes out Sept. 29 from the University Press of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.
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Lie-spewing Trump made a shock admission before pocketing cash meant for 9/11 victims
Remember what a big hero Donald Trump was on 9/11/01? How he rushed over to the Ground Zero site to do whatever he could to assist? How he personally sent hundreds of workers to help in the first responders' effort?
Nope. I don’t remember that, and I’ll bet you don’t, either. But somehow our president does. In his retelling on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the day that will live in infamy, no one was more instrumental in the rescue effort than he was, even risking getting some falling ash on his pressed suit while putting himself in harm’s way.
How is it that there’s no actual evidence of his claims? Could it be that he’s just making the whole thing up to create the impression that he personally helped save New York City from even further destruction? Gosh, that would mean he’s just a big fat self-aggrandizing liar.
Yes indeed. That’s pretty much the size of it.
Shocking, huh?
Let’s back up to examine a few facts as closely as they can accurately be reconstructed — within reason.
Where was Trump when the attacks occurred? He appears to have been at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, roughly four miles from the World Trade Center whose twin towers were attacked with planes and destroyed. He was interviewed by telephone that morning on WWOR-TV.
There is no evidence that he rushed downtown during the attacks or participated in rescue operations on 9/11 itself, an act that would have been entirely out of character for a man who has not a thimbleful of courage in his body.
One striking moment from that WWOR interview came after both towers had collapsed. Trump discussed damage to his own property at 40 Wall Street and remarked that it had consequently become the tallest building in downtown Manhattan. In fact, it wasn’t true — 70 Pine Street was taller — but it was entirely on brand for a man who thought in that moment to place himself above the growing catastrophe.
Trump did go downtown afterward. But the video establishing him blocks away from Ground Zero was shot on September 13, two days after the attack. In the video, he’s wearing an immaculate black suit with a crisp white shirt. He tells a German news reporter, “I have about 100 men working down there…and we have another 100 coming in a little while…I went down the following day, and we worked long and hard.”
There is no independent substantiation that Trump spent a single second helping out at Ground Zero himself, nor any verification that he paid hundreds of employees (or even a single employee) to conduct search-and-rescue work. A retired FDNY deputy chief who coordinated personnel at Ground Zero said he had no knowledge of Trump or any organized workforce under his name playing a meaningful role in the cleanup.
Why? Because it’s just another gigantic lie, that’s why. Duh.
And every few years, the bull gets bigger and grander. In 2016, he said he had personally been clearing rubble. That same year, Trump said he lost “hundreds of friends” on September 11. When asked to name these supposed friends, he could only name a Catholic priest who served as chaplain to the city’s fire department.
In 2019, he told actual 9/11 first responders that he had spent “a lot of time” down there with them. "But I’m not considering myself a first responder,” he clarified.
In fact, his only “response” was not lifting a finger to assist his fellow New Yorkers.
Then in 2021, on the 20th anniversary, Trump concocted yet another tall tale. He claimed to have heard creaking in a building near Ground Zero and told the gathering of first responders, “That building is coming down” just before being grabbed and saved by “two big firemen.”
Huh? This was news to everybody. In point of fact, the event did not occur. Fact-checkers found zero evidence of this or anything else Trump has claimed about his 9/11 heroism over the past quarter-century.
Every year, Trump grows more inextricably linked to the event. He was there, he rescued, he risked life and limb. It all, you see, has to be about him. He hasn’t the first clue about how to approach a subject, an event, a piece of history that doesn’t center on his participation and/or exploits.
This is naturally why Trump is using the occasion of the 25th anniversary on Friday to make the rounds and create still more fiction surrounding his purported heroism. He wasn’t going to be allowed to speak at the Ground Zero event that’s being attended by every living former president, so he’s making the interview rounds in advance and planning to bloviate at the Pentagon on the big day instead.
If he were telling the truth — something the man is utterly incapable of — Trump might talk about the brave firefighters who lost their lives. About the families devastated and forever changed by losing a loved one on a day when nearly 3,000 souls were slaughtered. About the construction workers who spent months laboring in toxic dust and coming down with sickness and disease for years afterward.
Instead, in an interview with Trey Gowdy that was posted on Fox News on Labor Day, he spoke about his memories, himself, how the day impacted him.
One way it did was his having applied for money from a fund that the federal government created to help businesses in Lower Manhattan recover from the devastating economic impact of the attacks. Trump personally received $150,000, even though he told the German TV reporter that his 40 Wall Street property wasn’t personally affected.
He also pledged that he would donate $10,000 to the Twin Towers Fund, but the New York City Comptroller’s office subsequently reviewed the donor records and found no record of a Trump contribution.
It remains astounding how a human being could be so loathsome as to financially profit off the misery of so many. But that’s just how this president rolls.
(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)
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This revolution has been ripped apart by a rogues' gallery of abusers
Whenever I spoke with Gloria Steinem on my program over the years, I always got a sense of a person with incredible charisma, intellect, and a real grasp of what power was and how to use it. She was a force of nature.
When the announcement that she’d passed away at 92 hit the news last week, it perfectly juxtaposed against the story the major “conservative” site Townhall had published titled, “No, the World Would Not Be a Better Place If Women Ran It.” Their point was:
“Anyone who went through middle school, junior high or high school knows full well the kind of nasty behavior that females are capable of.”
Nobody planned that coincidence; there’s so much hate against women floating around in Republican circles these days that if it wasn’t that piece it’d be something else, but it highlights a worrying trend in American culture and politics, one with echoes of a troubling past.
Back in 1972 Louise and I got married, and when she went to get her first credit card in her own name I had to co-sign for her. Not because I was more creditworthy; she’d been supporting herself by working since she was 15. It was the bank’s requirement because she was a woman.
That year was a bit of a touchstone for the women’s movement.
It was the year Steinem’s Ms. magazine sold out its entire 300,000-copy run in eight days; the year that her first issue ran a “We Have Had Abortions” statement signed by 53 women including Steinem, Billie Jean King, and Susan Sontag, all confessing to what was then a crime; the year Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states; and the year Title IX became law.
And even though our culture was racing ahead, my bank still demanded a man’s name on the signature line. It wasn’t until Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974 that a woman — of any age or income — no longer needed a husband, father, brother, uncle, or male friend to co-sign for credit, a mortgage, or pretty much anything else. And, more often than not, the credit history belonged to the man and didn’t mention the woman, so a divorce or a death could erase everything she’d built.
While this may sound both dystopian and like ancient history to today’s young people, it’s a world that many within the GOP are actively trying to recreate.
Pastor Joel Webbon, for example, has been preaching for years that women shouldn’t have a voice in American politics because, he says, a woman’s political voice properly comes from her husband, and if she isn’t married, from her father, brother, uncle or whichever man in her life “loves her most.” That’s the same list Louise’s bank used: husband, father, brother, uncle, family friend...
Webbon helped write “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel” alongside Oklahoma state Senator Dusty Deevers and former Trump administration official William Wolfe. His “Right Response Conference” has put Doug Wilson, Stephen Wolfe, Steve Deace, and Auron MacIntyre on stage. He’s endorsed candidates, and he sat for a 10-part interview series with notorious neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
He’s part of the “TheoBros” network, which is connected to Republican officeholders mainly through Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s church membership and Vice President JD Vance socializing with people in it.
Whiskey Pete belongs to Doug Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), and last year our SecDef reposted a CNN segment in which Wilson and other CREC pastors proclaimed their belief that women shouldn’t vote. Instead, they argued, an entire household should have a single vote, and it should be exclusively cast by the man of the house.
In February of this year, Pete invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon’s monthly worship service, itself a violation of the Constitution. He stood beside him on stage, and broadcast the entire event on the Defense Department’s internal TV network.
In the Pentagon, Hegseth has become obsessed with pushing women out of leadership roles and instituted mandatory testosterone screening in the name of “lethality.” And over at the Department of Health and Human Services, the former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer with no medical training whatsoever that Trump put in charge seems equally obsessed with his own masculinity and testosterone levels.
These are the men Republicans think should be role models for the generation of boys and young men coming up today:
— Hegseth paid $50,000 in a confidential settlement to a woman who told Monterey police that he took her phone, blocked the door of a hotel room, and assaulted her as she kept saying, “No.”
—Kennedy kept a 398-page journal in 2001 with a ledger in the back listing 37 women by first name, each rated on a scale of one to ten according to how far things had gone. His wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, found it, and her family has always believed his promiscuity contributed to her death by suicide in 2012.
— Trump has been held liable in civil court for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and for defaming her about it. The Epstein files the Justice Department tried to keep buried include FBI interview summaries in which a woman alleged that Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Trump when she was somewhere between 13 and 15, that he forced oral sex on her, and that he beat her when she bit his penis. He publicly cheated on all three of his wives, and bragged to Billy Bush that he could sexually assault any woman he wanted because, he said, “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
— Then there’s Musk, who’s fathered at least 14 children with multiple women. While Hegseth, Trump, and Kennedy seem to think the sole role of women is to be arm candy and to provide pleasure in bed, Musk apparently thinks they’re most useful as toaster ovens for white babies.
These are the men writing the rules for our daughters and granddaughters.
And that year Louise and I got married seems to have been one of history’s hinge points. Lewis Powell wrote his infamous Memo in 1971 and Nixon put him on the Court to carry it out the following year. My old debating nemesis Phyllis Schlafly started her Eagle Forum to fight ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972.
The Heritage Foundation was founded the next year, in 1973, the same year the Supreme Court decided Roe, and it all laid the foundation for Rush Limbaugh to spend decades trash-talking “Feminazis.” Andrew Tate carries on his crusade, as does Trump’s former body man, John McEntee, who joked that when conservatives said they wanted mail-only voting “they meant male, spelled m-a-l-e.”
Many men and businesses think they benefit when women can’t have an economic life independent of them, can’t start a business, or take a risk, or even negotiate on their own behalf. Women’s liberation gave half the American workforce the power to walk away from a bad marriage or a bad job, and Republicans are resentful of it.
But the cost to both women and society for this resurgence of misogyny is huge. ProPublica found, looking at 7 years of Texas hospital data, that after that state banned abortion, sepsis rates jumped more than 50 percent and that maternal deaths have been climbing in Texas while falling in Blue states.
Texas’ Attorney General is right now pushing criminal charges and a $1.6 million bond against a Houston midwife, while in Missouri Republican legislators are pushing a state registry of expectant mothers they can then monitor to make sure they don’t get an abortion.
Elon Musk’s Grok AI has generated an estimated 23,000 sexualized images of children and a reported 1.8 million sexualized images of women in just 11 days, after which Musk posted that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero,” as his company put the feature behind a paywall, monetizing it.
Meanwhile, accused rapist Andrew Tate — whose $8,000-a-year War Room ran a PhD course on seducing, isolating, and pushing women into sex-cam work — has cultivated the president’s youngest son, with an associate telling the New York Times he’d given Barron dating advice as Tate became a big brother to him.
This is all incredibly damaging to young men, as well. These views of women and male dominance produce men who can’t ask for help, can’t be a real partner, and can’t ever truly get close to anyone, including their own families. And these incels blame their loneliness on the women, sometimes with murderous violence.
One of the great missions of Gloria Steinem’s life, as she told me more than once on my program, was the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in 1928 and re-introduced in 1972, that says, simply:
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
It’s impossible to measure how many discoveries and accomplishments for the human race we’ve already lost to the suppression of women’s agency and rights, but now is a great time to take the next step toward ending this horror.
The Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified by 38 states, the number the Constitution requires, but Republicans are still fighting it by claiming that it wasn’t ratified by all before 1982 and therefore isn’t valid. The Republicans on the Supreme Court refuse to examine the case.
Two weeks ago, the new Archivist of the United States told senators he’ll stick with his predecessor’s refusal to certify it, following a Justice Department opinion rather than the plain text of Article V of the Constitution, which doesn’t mention dates or times for constitutional amendments at all.
Congress can settle this and establish women’s rights by law with a simple resolution with a majority vote.
So, call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your representative and both senators you want them co-sponsoring the resolution affirming ERA ratification. Then check your registration at vote.org, because Republicans are again openly discussing repealing the Nineteenth Amendment that gave women the vote.
I signed for Louise in 1972 because the bank required it; nobody should have to do that ever again. We need to put women’s rights into the Constitution, where no right-wing politician can again challenge them.
If this article helped you see how the pieces fit, please share it and consider supporting the Hartmann Report so we can keep doing this work. None of this fixes itself and if we want a better future for our daughters and granddaughters, we can’t just stand idly by.
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Trump's ridiculous odyssey is likely a harbinger of impending doom
Irish folklore has an old notion — one that can be interpreted as fun or profound — that certain weird or inexplicable circumstances are often "found along the fairy path."
More importantly, the phrase is entirely neutral; Irish lore teaches that one isn't guaranteed to find a good-natured fairy waving "top o' the morning," though possible. It's equally chancy that one meets precisely the opposite. If you buy into ancient Irish experience, it's as likely as not that Trump's ridiculous odyssey to the country next weekend runs him straight into a Banshee herself, foretelling almost certain doom.
Without regard to the mystical, in the here and now, we know that whatever else the trip entails, it encompasses "Peak Trump" in a way few others can match. From there, one may as well leave predictions as to what actually happens at a roulette table. Oh, except Trump profits.
Next weekend, Trump plans to attend the "Irish Open" golf tournament, an important stop in professional golf and one that is tied to him and his personal business. The golf will be played at Trump International Golf Links & Hotel Ireland, located in County Clare.
In other words, just the type of event calling out for the presence of the current American president. Pffft.
No, the self-dealing is self-evident. Free advertising, free fun, and free fortune for Trump. But for everyone else, mandatory extra expenses and hassles — and "everyone else" includes "us." The trip is so off-the-charts ridiculous that it truly does compete for the title of "Peak Trump."
Before we even get into the myriad of ways Trump plans to unleash his all-encompassing gluttony, it's best to truly appreciate the traditional standard for presidents. While it is true that no statute mandates presidents avoid conflicts of interest, tradition dictates an American president adheres to a standard well beyond most. As to the definition of "most"? When judges are granted a seat on the bench, it's conditioned on doing so while avoiding all conflicts of interest, or even the appearance of a conflict, one that devalues the legitimacy of the court process.
Though there is ample "proof" of Trump's conflicts, we can even dig at all the appearances he's about to unleash. And the first problem doesn't even involve a personal business conflict. No, the trip merely conflicts with expectations that attach to his desire to occupy the Oval Office.
First and most obvious. As we've come to expect with Trump, he values his life and safety above virtually everything else ... except when it comes to luxuriating in hedonistic accommodations.
Despite the fact that the U.S. is in a shooting conflict with the nation most closely associated with international terrorism, Trump has chosen to eschew the traditional and buffed-out robin's-egg blue 747, loaded with defensive capabilities protecting against even nuclear war, and instead will travel over in Arab Farce One, the gilded, modern, insufficiently-defended Air Force One, the same plane he snuck away from in Ankara in July due to threats to the plane.
As to the U.S. taxpayer, this means almost nothing about nothing. But as to Americans who expect the traditional Air Force One to land with the full force of American will behind it ("The U.S.A. is HERE, now!"), we instead must endure the humiliation of a plane that screams "I require gold interiors fit for a sheik, or it's simply not good enough! DJT just arrived."
But don't worry. The U.S. taxpayer will be used again to fund this fairy folly.
For a guy who worries about missiles hitting ballrooms in the continental United States, isn't it odd that he's absolutely committed to protruding from foreign pop tents in limitless grass-covered acreage nowhere near U.S. defenses? Or at least not normal U.S. defenses, and that's where you come in.
Someone has to pay the Secret Service members, the ones over there right now, measuring sight lines, plotting exit points. And that is nowhere close to "cheap," even when not measured against a wonderfully luxurious hideaway in the Maryland mountains, specifically designed to protect a president, called Camp David, if he simply must get away for a weekend.
That's not the point, of course. The course is the point.
What better way to attract moneyed, conservative country club goers than to feature every hole as if a beautifully mysterious enigma, one YOU can take a shot at, if you can infuse a sufficient syringe of cash?
It only gets better. These tournaments themselves may or may not make money. But the property on which the course is played will make what an Irish Times writer called "an avalanche of cash," all made more costly due to the presence of a U.S. president — one presumes, given that same article states a fan should be ashamed to attend the event to put money in Trump's pocket.
We also happen to be at war. Some might consider it a bad look to have U.S. troops and sailors putting their health and lives on the line for a poorly justified war while, at the same time, their Commander in Chief takes a trip to his golf course in the most luxurious of luxury boxes. It is bad enough that he plays so much golf (speaking of security issues). Hauling himself in his flying palace to watch golf make him money is particularly disgusting.
Yes. Yes. "Our" president is managing to squeeze in international meetings amidst his nefarious fairy adventure, including with Irish President Catherine Connolly and Taoiseach Micheál Martin, surely to at least "look" like there might be another legitimate reason for an Arabian night flyover.
But nothing that can't be held on a regular Tuesday at the White House, part of an officially sponsored trip overseas at some other point, or just on Zoom from Camp David, certainly not high-powered meetings about Russia's recent aggressiveness toward NATO (an increasingly dangerous and critical danger to world stability), oh — and not just because the Republic of Ireland isn't even a member of NATO.
Granted. Someone should check. Are we still even a member of NATO?
One could go on and on. The GOP at least wants him to appear to care about the nation as we go into the midterms. This doesn't even seem to satisfy that. Our trade war with Canada has to be worked out before even more long-term damage is done; the list is endless. But so are Trump's appetites. And plenty more issues where those all come from.
Look. U.S. Presidents travel around the world. They attend Super Bowls. They golf. We get it. But this trip along the fairy path seems to stand out as uniquely self-interested even for Trump. Not that he himself is interested in such things.
Americans do not "root" for the ultimate demise of the president (or are at least not ordinarily supposed to), but if Trump's trip along this path included hearing the wail of a banshee — well, it would seem amply invited.
Jason Miciak is a Raw Story columnist, an author, political consultant, attorney, and a single parent, girldad. Please follow on Bluesky, and he can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com.
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An unmistakable stink wafts out of Trump's curious golf club generosity
The hot dog has been one of the presidency’s most delectable diplomatic tools, both foreign and domestic, for the better part of a century, and I’ll bet you had no idea.
But of course, that’s all ruined since the trans fat-laden Donald Trump has made the endearing hot dog nothing more than a moldy, measly money-maker.
Over the weekend, it was revealed that Trump has been ordering hot dogs for his Secret Service detail at his Virginia golf club, only to have his own club turn around and bill the agency for them. Because ethics rules bar agents from accepting gifts from the man they protect, Trump’s staff reportedly set up a special account just so the president could hand out “free” hot dogs with one bruised hand while his business invoiced the government with the other.
As usual, Trump has managed to take something quintessentially American, in this case the humble hot dog, a fixture of presidential lore, and turn it into the perfect symbol of his second term, where everything, even the hot dog, is for sale.
It got me thinking that the hamburger is next. Perhaps Trump will set up a hamburger stand on the street side of his new ballroom and charge $50 for a patty with his image burned into it, using the proceeds to purchase gold appliqués and super glue to adorn the ballroom.
The irony of Trump’s hot dog scheme is that the tasty treat has played a very different role throughout presidential history. It has, at various points, been a diplomatic icebreaker, a regulatory crusade, a peace offering, and a punchline. What it had never been, until now, was a revenue stream.
Perhaps most famously, FDR made the hot dog a hero in 1939, serving King George VI and Queen Elizabeth cheap dogs on paper plates when the royal couple visited his Hyde Park estate. Queen Elizabeth was unsure how to eat the unfamiliar food served on silver trays. She asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt how to eat it, and FDR replied, "Very simple. Push it into your mouth and keep pushing it until it is all gone."
It was a shrewd piece of manipulation, designed to humanize the British monarchy for a skeptical, isolationist American public just months before the world went to war. In fact, it worked so well it’s still taught as a case study in soft power, a president using 30 cents of processed meat to help nudge a nation toward its future allies.
Thirty years later, Richard Nixon, a man who was remembered for eating cottage cheese topped with ketchup, made the hot dog a personal cause. When cheap, fatty lobby meat threatened to flood the market, Nixon went to bat for the American frank, personally pushing through the 30 percent fat cap that still governs hot dog production today.
The event, once referred to as the “Fatty Hot Dog Scandal,” unfortunately is lost in history because it was supplanted by something called Watergate.
Thirty years later, kosher hot dogs were used as an icebreaker between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, during tense and high-stakes negotiations in Norway.
The "hot dog diplomacy" was orchestrated by David Hermelin, the U.S. Ambassador to Norway, who set up a picnic table in the residence that featured Hebrew National hot dogs that Barak, Arafat and Bill Clinton negotiated over. The "hot dog diplomacy" dinner succeeded in temporarily easing tensions and restoring personal warmth, but unfortunately, the meaningful breakthroughs did not last.
And in 2012, Barack Obama turned the pig-in-a-blanket into a diplomatic dilemma, taking British Prime Minister David Cameron to a college basketball game in Dayton, Ohio. Obama, who famously declared that no one over age 8 should eat a hot dog with ketchup, graciously let Cameron violate the rule in the spirit of diplomacy.
In every case, the hot dog tasted better because the president was the one giving it away.
Then Trump got his hands on the wiener. He didn’t just fail to continue the tradition. Instead, he inverted it, warping the frank’s worthiness by being, in the most literal sense, a worthless weenie. He turned a beloved American institution into a cash cow, watching his own security detail eat the hot dogs he ordered for them, then sending off a bill for his own generosity.
Leave it to Trump to take something as delightful as a hot dog and turn the glizzy into a gross, greasy representation of his grifting presidency.
What once charmed a king and queen, survived Nixon’s fat-content crusade, and helped broker peace in the Middle East now sits burnt on a moldy bun, a fitting monument to the rotten meat at the center of Trump’s presidency.
Other presidents understood that the hot dog was a tasty and tantalizing part of the job. Trump saw it as a chance to make a buck.
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Trump's troll boomerangs back onto his favorite event
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
An ugly radioactive surprise is buried deep inside Trump's deal for a loyal MAGA state
One of the most critical issues facing Idaho is one that has received little attention but has profound consequences for the future of our state – the agreement that would make Idaho the dumping ground for a third of the radioactive waste generated in our country.
It’s not surprising that Idahoans don’t know much about this issue. Gov. Brad Little, who is pursuing this agreement, and U.S. Sen. Jim Risch have said precious little or nothing about it, apparently wanting to keep it under the radar until they are safely re-elected in November.
New nuclear campus deal would require Idaho to accept, store spent nuclear fuel, radioactive waste
Congressman Mike Simpson applauded the agreement, saying it will bring jobs to his eastern Idaho district.
“Idaho didn’t become the nation’s nuclear leader by being afraid of hard problems. It became the leader by being the state willing to do the difficult, careful work that others wouldn’t. That’s still the right instinct now,” he wrote.
The Trump administration will choose three states to create what it calls a “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus.” The other states in the running for this dubious honor besides Idaho are Utah, Tennessee, Louisiana and Oklahoma.
The chosen states will each have to receive 33 percent of the radioactive waste generated by the other 47 states.
The public did not know that Gov. Little agreed to be one of the states until the Department of Energy announced it in late July. The memorandum of understanding that Little signed in July without informing Idahoans said: “The host agreement shall provide for the acceptance of out-of-state used nuclear fuel, spent fuel, and high-level radioactive waste.”
In its announcement, the Trump administration promised that the campus will boost manufacturing, create jobs, promote American energy independence, and attract other unnamed financial investments. Of course, we don’t know what this means since Little and our congressional delegation have not told us what’s in the fine print.
Idaho’s long history with nuclear waste
To put the importance of this issue in perspective, it is important to understand Idaho’s long and dark history with radioactive waste.
Starting in the 1940s, the federal energy site in eastern Idaho, which is now called the Idaho National Laboratory, became the repository for much of the nation’s nuclear radioactive waste.
The issue came to a head in the late 1970s when the press reported that the federal facility had regularly poured low-level radioactive liquid waste down an injection well above the Snake River Aquifer, which is the size of Lake Erie and provides much of the water for southern Idaho’s farmers and ranchers. There was also concern about other radioactive liquid waste being stored in containers buried above the aquifer.
I covered energy issues for the Idaho Statesman at the time and reported on the controversy over this waste. There was concern among Idaho’s political leaders because the federal site was also known for its porous volcanic soil and seismic activity. Coverage of the issue made front-page news for months.
That same year the General Accounting Office recommended that Idaho become a permanent repository for the nation’s radioactive waste. That proposal came nine years after the federal government promised to remove the existing waste from Idaho.
The GAO report was quickly opposed by then Gov. John Evans and even a Republican legislator from Boise who introduced a bill in the Legislature to ban any shipment of radioactive waste into our state. Legislators from eastern Idaho rallied and killed the bill.
Fast forward to 1988, when then Gov. Cecil Andrus finally had enough and promised Idahoans that he would block the federal government from transporting more radioactive waste from its Rocky Flats, Colorado, nuclear weapons plant. To emphasize his opposition, Andrus stationed a 24-hour state police detail on one of the shipments that made its way into the state as far as Blackfoot.
A picture of a muscular state trooper standing by the railroad car with his cruiser in the background made the front page of the New York Times and the story was covered by every national TV news outlet. The crisis was averted when the governor of Colorado agreed to take the waste back.
“I’m not a nuclear scientist,” Andrus later wrote, “but I understood on one point from the beginning: Radioactive garbage from the nuclear reservation in Idaho could not – must not – be allowed to come anywhere near the Snake River Aquifer.”
After Andrus left office, Republican Gov. Phil Batt took up the issue and negotiated a landmark 1995 agreement with the federal government that would prevent Idaho from becoming a permanent repository for nuclear waste, limit the waste Idaho would take on a temporary basis, and require the federal government to remove all the waste by 2035, a timeline that it is far from meeting at this point.
It is significant that Gov. Batt did not just sign the agreement with the federal government. He took the question to the people of Idaho to vote on whether to support his agreement which they did overwhelmingly.
“I think the best thing I did was telling (Idahoans) what it meant to them,” Batt told me in a 2019 interview before he died.
Andrus and Batt never gave up on the demand to have the waste at INL removed. They spent the rest of their lives holding the federal government accountable for removing the waste and keeping the issue in front of the people of Idaho.
Gov. Batt’s agreement demonstrated that the Idaho National Laboratory could conduct much-needed nuclear power research and development while still working toward the removal of all radioactive waste from the site. Idaho did not have to accept waste in exchange for being the nation’s leading laboratory for nuclear research and development.
There is more to this story than meets the eye
There is another twist to this story which has received no attention here in Idaho.
Last December, Trump Media & Technology (TMTG) announced that it was merging with the California-based TAE Technologies with an all-stock deal worth an estimated $6 billion. The new company said it plans to find a site and begin construction in 2026 on the “world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant to help power data centers critical to the artificial intelligence industry,” according to the Associated Press.
TAE is currently financially backed by Google and other high-tech investors. Once the merger with Trump Media & Technology is finished, the private company would become one of the first nuclear fusion companies on the American stock exchange.
Donald Trump’s revocable trust owns 114.75 million shares or about 41.5 percent of Trump Media & Technology. After the merger is completed, Trump’s trust would own about 21 percent of the new company. The president is the sole beneficiary of the trust, although Donald Jr. is a trustee and has voting and investment authority.
Here’s the bottom line: The more money the new company earns building and selling fusion reactors, the more money Trump’s investment would be worth. One estimate is that if the value of the new company grows from $6 billion to $50 billion, the president’s investment could be worth more than $10 billion.
“He’s (Donald Trump) jumping into this industry just like he jumped into cryptocurrency a couple of years ago,” Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush Administration, told the Associated Press. “Just as the United States government is gonna get all involved in it. And it’s so obvious that there’s a huge conflict of interest.”
That is an understatement.
Last year Trump Media & Technology lost about 70 percent of its value, but after the announcement of the merger with TEA, its stock jumped by 34 percent.
But that’s only part of the story. Trump signed an executive order in May 2025 to have the federal government speed up the development, construction, and deployment of nuclear reactors. He plans to spend taxpayer dollars doing it.
The Army recently announced that it would spend $2.5 billion to buy micro nuclear reactors for five of its bases as part of Trump’s “Janus Program.” The Army says eventually nine of its bases will buy reactors costing taxpayers billions more.
Alan J. Kuperman, associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and a nuclear nonproliferation expert, told the Associated Press that Trump is using the military’s “deep pockets to provide a hidden subsidy” to help nuclear companies that can’t find private-sector customers for their reactors.
Furthermore, the reactors would be licensed by the Army rather than the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licenses all commercial nuclear reactors. Kuperman told the Associated Press that is “a dangerous scam on many levels.”
Then last month Trump signed a multi-billion-dollar agreement with Saudi Arabia to share nuclear technology so that it can develop a domestic nuclear power program. The agreement gives exclusive rights to American nuclear reactor companies to help the kingdom develop its nuclear power infrastructure.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists expressed concern that the deal would allow the Saudis to enrich their own uranium without international oversight and could lead to the proliferation of nuclear armaments in the Middle East.
So, what does this mean for Idaho?
All this means plenty for Idaho.
As more nuclear reactors go into operation, the more radioactive waste will be generated across the country. The more waste generated, the greater the amount of waste that will be shipped to Idaho under Gov. Little’s agreement to take 33 percent of the commercial radioactive waste generated in the country.
That is, of course, unless Gov. Little writes into the agreement that Idaho will only take so much of the country’s waste. But such a change in the memorandum could kill Idaho’s chances of becoming a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus. Besides, Gov. Little isn’t known for bucking Donald Trump.
Historically, one of the biggest impediments to the development of commercial and government nuclear reactors is what to do with the waste that is generated. Efforts to create a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain near Las Vegas was stopped by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, during the Obama administration.
Thus, Donald Trump, the investor in nuclear power, must find permanent repositories if his dream of manufacturing and selling reactors to utilities, AI companies, to the military and to other countries comes a reality.
If he can’t find permanent dumps for the waste, his investment and dream of turning the United States into a commercial nuclear giant would go from a financial dream to a financial nightmare.
Trump has always been a transactional businessman and president. His plan to create so-called “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses” is a way of leveraging states like Idaho into providing the permanent repository that he needs. It’s a quid pro quo that looks like Gov. Little, our congressional delegation, and INL supporters are ready to buy.
In two years, Donald Trump will be out of office and can’t leverage taxpayers’ dollars to expand the use of nuclear power plants. Future presidents and Congresses may not be as open to spending billions supporting “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses.”
But Idaho will forever be stuck taking 33 percent of the nation’s radioactive waste – material no other state wants to accept.
So, what’s next?
If Gov. Little insists on accepting the waste, there are several questions he should have answered. What will be the impact on Idaho’s current power grid, how much water will the campus require and where will it come from, and how can the federal government prove that it is safe to dispose of the so much waste over the Snake River Aquifer when its track record hasn’t been stellar.
Most importantly, Gov. Little should do the same thing Gov. Batt did: Be fully transparent with Idahoans about the deal and ask them if they are willing to make Idaho a radioactive waste dump for a third of the nation’s waste.
When I interviewed Gov. Batt for my book, “Lucky, The Wit and Wisdom of Governor Phil Batt,” he predicted that Brad Little would change his nuclear waste agreement as soon as he died. As predicted, Gov. Little did amend the agreement shortly after Batt’s death in 2023. Now, if Little accepts the Trump administration’s quid pro quo deal, the Batt Agreement will be shredded for all intents and purposes.
I asked Gov. Batt if he thought the people of Idaho would stand for allowing the state to become a repository for radioactive waste. “Well, I don’t know,” Batt told me. “At one time, they were all excited about not doing things like that, but you don’t hear them (the people) talking about waste leaking into the Snake River and all that stuff like you used to.”
I pointed out that’s probably because the Batt Agreement limited shipments of waste into our state, banned permanent storage, and provided a timeline to get all the waste out of our state. Batt simply replied, “Yeah.”
It remains to be seen if our current governor will include Idahoans in this decision – and whether the people of Idaho still care.
Idaho Capital Sun is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Idaho Capital Sun maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Christina Lords for questions: info@idahocapitalsun.com.
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The damning Republican tell hiding in plain sight with this red state witch hunt
On Nov. 3, Kansans will vote on whether to amend our state constitution, again. This time, we’ll be voting on whether to make it harder for many American citizens who live in Kansas to vote in future elections.
The proposal would amend Section 1 of Article 5 of the Kansas Constitution to state that no person can vote unless they are a United States citizen. To most of us, that sounds reasonable — people who are not citizens should not be voting. However, the proposed amendment is a solution in search of a problem that is statistically nonexistent. Noncitizens are not voting in Kansas elections (or any other state elections, for that matter).
The Kansas Constitution already grants every citizen (and only citizens) the right to vote. So why propose this repetitive and unnecessary amendment? It would be used by certain lawmakers as a pretext to pass laws that supposedly bar noncitizens from voting.
The goal is to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. The proposed amendment will make it more difficult, costly and sometimes impossible for many Kansans to vote. Rep. Pat Proctor, R-Leavenworth, proposed the amendment with near-unanimous Republican support. Proctor is currently running for Kansas secretary of state, the office that oversees our elections.
Proctor has a documented legislative history of introducing bills making it harder for citizens to vote — prohibiting voter registration efforts and restricting advance and mail-in voting.
Requiring documentary proof of citizenship means that, to register to vote or to change your voter registration (you moved, got married or divorced), you’ll have to provide either your passport, your birth certificate or your naturalization papers (if you became a citizen but were not born here).
A Real ID in Kansas is not proof of your citizenship, so that won’t work to register.
About 62% of Kansans do not have passports — those documents take time to obtain and cost around $150. As such, Kansans without them will have to provide their birth certificate to register to vote. For some, that’s easy. For others who might not have ready access to their birth certificate or can’t afford to get one (getting a birth certificate copy costs money), a barrier to voting has been created.
It’s a poll tax and would disproportionately impact low-income, young and elderly voters. Another group disproportionately affected by proof-of-citizenship requirements? Women who changed their last name through marriage or divorce.
Proof of citizenship requires that a person’s name on their birth certificate be identical to the name on their ID. This is a huge problem for women voters who have changed their name, because in addition to providing her birth certificate to register, they also will have to provide “proving documents” — papers that prove her name change(s).
Women will have to obtain their marriage licenses or divorce decrees tracking name changes over the years to prove the women presenting their IDs are the same women presenting their birth certificates. Easy peasy for some women. For others, tracking down and paying for official marriage certificates and divorce papers will be a barrier to vote.
Fewer women voting seems to be a feature, not a bug, of Proctor’s plan.
In response to the defeat of the 2022 anti-abortion amendment, Proctor complained that women — specifically 20- to 30-year-old women — “stole” that election by voting. Proctor complained that the very people who would be most affected by an anti-abortion amendment chose to vote for their reproductive freedom. That is not stealing an election. Women tend to vote against Proctor’s far-right ideology, so the more women who can’t locate or afford the proper documentation to register to vote, the better for Proctor and his party.
Voting is a fundamental right, and every barrier to voting, such as requiring proof of citizenship, means fewer people get to exercise that right. Illegal voting is not occurring, and the Kansas Constitution already adequately specifies voter requirements that protect fair elections. The proposed constitutional amendment is a pretext to require proof of citizenship to register to vote and will be used to justify voter suppression.
Amii Castle is a professor at the University of Kansas, where she teaches at the law and business schools. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.
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Elon's in a panic as his ex spills all — and that's just his latest crisis
Elon Musk is the Donald Trump of South Africa.
Born to millionaire parents, Musk inherited his wealth instead of earning it. He has never invented anything or built anything himself. Instead, he just buys companies he thinks will make him look cool — Tesla, Starlink, Twitter, etc. He also keeps showing up in public dressed like the loneliest goth kid at Hot Topic in 1997 and then dancing like he’s on Ketamine, because he’s admitted to always being on Ketamine
My cringe has cringe with extra cringe sprinkled on top.
Everyone needs to stop thinking that nepo baby billionaires/trillionaires are natural-born leaders when they keep proving they absolutely are not. Elon can’t keep rockets or cars or Twitter from exploding, and he’s the son of two white supremacists, so he isn’t called “Apartheid Clyde” for nothing.
Other nicknames for the friendless Musk include “Sissy SpaceX” and “Clarice Starlink” (that one is all mine, and I’m very proud of it, I can’t lie) because, just like Trump, Everything Elon Touches Dies.
That includes the American voting system, because that guy bought Twitter to mess with the 2024 election, and he couldn’t stop telling us so. Trump and Musk became besties right after the fake assassination attempt in Butler, PA, and they immediately began implementing a plan leftover from 2020 to steal the 2024 election.
Elon tweaked the Twitter algorithm to boost paid MAGA influencers, while suppressing liberal voices. Those of us who had (FREE) blue checkmarks before he plundered our online town square were forced to either start paying him for the privilege of being ourselves or be doomed to basic invisibility. Like, that Nazi needs any of our money.
Oh yeah, that part. The Nazi part. Remember the Nazi salute that he and MAGA claimed wasn’t a Nazi salute? He’s still this guy, and he will be this guy forever.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gestures during a rally on the inauguration day of U.S. President Donald Trump's second Presidential term, inside Capital One, in Washington, U.S. January 20, 2025. REUTERS/Mike Segar
Anyway, Elon’s stupid DOGE stole every American citizen’s Social Security number and other personal information, and now he has even more data to manipulate the 2026 midterms.
Election interference is a federal crime. I don’t know why Democrats didn’t try to stop him when he was paying people millions of dollars to vote in Wisconsin and, while he was threatened with consequences, they magically didn’t come through. Because no jury would find his actions constituted election bribery, according to a Wisconsin state prosecutor.
He only offered people $1 million to vote, but I guess he bribed someone else to make sure he didn’t get prosecuted for bribery.
BRB, I need to go scream into a pillow.
Brazil's Supreme Court previously ordered an investigation into Musk regarding obstruction and the “instrumentalization of Twitter” by participating in public arguments with users over free speech and content moderation. French prosecutors recently escalated a criminal probe into Twitter over algorithm manipulation, foreign interference, and issues tied to the AI chatbot Grok.
Elon also just lost a court case in New York State after bringing a lawsuit seeking to void a 2024 state law requiring social media companies generating over $100 million in profits to disclose how they monitor hate speech, extremism, harassment, foreign political interference and disinformation. Musk had gotten rid of Twitter’s content moderation policy after he bought that company in 2022, claiming to be a “free speech absolutist” while literally messing with everyone else’s First Amendment rights by choking liberal accounts and boosting propaganda instead.
Twitter is now said to be 64% fake accounts, with bots having blue checks and getting more visibility than actual humans like your intrepid contributor here. Elon has multiple alt accounts, from “Doge Designer” to “ALX” to his own mom’s, Maye Musk. So this means that Elon technically blocked me when “she” was defending her poor, defenseless little boy from this very scary lady on Twitter who called Elon out for being transphobic against his own daughter, Vivian.
At the same time, Elon is said to be “extremely worried” about a new documentary by Alex Gibney, which shares plenty of damning footage connecting Musk to the 2024 election, including a text exchange with one of his many baby mamas, former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair.
The Hollywood Reporter saw Musk at an early screening and details that moment and others. St. Clair alleges in the forthcoming documentary that Elon had a “degree of certainty” about the election results before they came in that “I had never seen before.”
Screenshots of the texts between them definitely indicate that something hinky was going on behind the scenes. “He had told me [before the election] he was going to unleash the ‘anomaly in the matrix,’ ” St. Clair says in the clip.
“I have ten thousand lasers in space,” Elon’s text reads.
Musk has also amassed a body count to rival Trump’s, thanks to his dismantling of USAID, which he referred to as a “criminal organization” one month after the inauguration, because every accusation is a confession.
And he’s still acting like the juvenile d-bag weirdo he is, which might explain why “Elon Is A Martian” was trending on Twitter Saturday. For a guy who’s so obsessed with going to Mars, he’s certainly not brave enough to be a test pilot.
Or decent enough to use his unearned wealth to help others. With a fraction of his fortune (a mere $6.6 billion), Elon could feed upwards of 42 million people and not feel the pinch. A Business Insider piece broke it down into a staggering standalone statistic: It equals about 43 cents per person per day to supply one basic meal a day to stay alive.
But Elon would rather keep blowing up rockets and cars while dumping millions into buying another election for Trump.
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A breathtaking scandal has engulfed a red state after an explosive secret report leaked
Just when you thought state politics could not possibly get sleazier, Hope Florida comes roaring back from the dead, putrid yet powerful, casting a light on the breathtaking arrogance and corruption of Florida’s government.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, Attorney General James Uthmeier, and U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody thought they’d killed it and driven a stake through its dirty little heart.
A Leon County grand jury looked into the scandal. But, since they could not get the people involved to tell the truth about how and by whom $10 million of taxpayer money disappeared into political causes, they could not bring charges.
DeSantis, Uthmeier, and Moody counted on that report never seeing the light of day.
But, as is the way with explosive secret reports, it was leaked.
To a reporter.
God forbid the public learn what politicians and their enablers do with public money.
The parties did not express concern, much less remorse.
They attacked journalists.
During a press conference, Uthmeier threatened to bring criminal charges when asked about the matter: “Are you trying to solicit a crime here in violation of the law?”
Somewhat unconvincingly, he went on, insisting, “Nobody did anything wrong here; there was not even probable cause to move forward. This is a hoax.”
Which are you going to believe, Florida’s law-challenged AG or your lying eyes?
DeSantis agreed: “The only crime that was apparent was whoever leaked the grand jury report.”
You may recall First Lady Casey DeSantis founded Hope Florida in 2021, claiming it was a community support program to connect people with faith-based or other non-government assistance. She called it “a philosophy.”
Two years later, the Hope Florida Foundation appeared, its stated purpose to support the Department of Children and Families.
The money
It’s a 501(c)(3), the kind of nonprofit that must, by law, follow strict limits on political involvement and lobbying.
It soon became clear there was shady stuff going on. DCF failed to make public Hope Florida Foundation’s fiscal plan, code of ethics, tax documents, and results, as required by law.
Then a Medicaid contractor that had over-billed the state had to cough up a $67 million settlement, supposedly repaying the taxpayers.
Of that money, $10 million was (strangely) “donated” to the Hope Florida Foundation.
That $10 million (very strangely) ended up in a couple of political action committees controlled by Ron DeSantis’s chief of staff, a fellow by the name of James Uthmeier.
The money got fed back into the state Republican Party machine to fuel its fight against a constitutional amendment to legalize recreational marijuana.
Uthmeier’s PAC was called Keep Florida Clean.
(You can’t make this stuff up).
Many in the Florida Legislature were, to put it mildly, unimpressed.
Then-House Speaker Daniel Perez said the Hope Florida business looked “as though it could be illegal.”
Rep. Alex Andrade, chair of the House Healthcare subcommittee, suggested fraud might be involved and the Hope Florida “donation” could be “money laundering.”
Ron DeSantis flapped his wings like an outraged hen and squawked that these “jackasses” were merely trying to “smear” his wife and crush her dreams of political advancement.
At the time, Casey DeSantis seemed to be considering a run to succeed her husband as governor.
Andrade launched an investigation.
Then ended it. Almost no one involved would talk.
‘Mistakes were made’
He did get Joshua Hay, then chairman of the Hope Florida Foundation board, to testify under oath, but didn’t get much out of it — other than that Hay seemed spectacularly ignorant of what goes on in the charity he runs.
“I cannot confirm what the funds were used for,” Hay said. “We have no monitoring procedures.”
He added, “Mistakes were made.”
State Attorney Jack Campbell in Leon County agreed mistakes had, indeed, been made. He convened a grand jury to discover who made them.
What the grand jury unearthed is pretty damning, finding the Hope Florida Foundation “misappropriated” taxpayer money as “part of a sophisticated scheme.”
The report said, “While we can’t prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes.”
It also states: “Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida.”
“This decision was the original misappropriation, and no witness would take responsibility for making the decision or had any memory of who made it.”
Those in charge of running this dubious show insist they acted on legal advice. So, it was all fine.
Besides, they couldn’t remember what happened.
It’s a mystery!
Those who should have known better turned a blind eye. The report said Ashley Moody’s chief deputy failed to conduct “due diligence to ensure the proper appropriation of taxpayer funds.”
Those most deeply implicated now go around pitching loud hissy fits.
Uthmeier yelped the whole thing was nothing more than a “politically motivated witch hunt driven by the Democrats and a far left Democrat state attorney.”
Sounds a little desperate: Those of us in North Florida know Jack Campbell is about as “far left” as a ham sandwich.
Indignance
As for the people at the top of the power pile getting all red-faced and indignant over the grand jury report, well, as we say here in “far left” Tallahassee, a hit dog will holler.
Meanwhile in the blue corner, the Florida Democratic Party can’t believe its luck: The midterms are coming and the Republicans are trying to excuse the inexcusable.
Angie Nixon says Ashley Moody, her opponent in the 2026 Senate race, should resign.
José Javier Rodriguez, who’s running against Uthmeier for attorney general, calls the Hope Florida mess “the most brazen act of political corruption we have seen here in Florida.”
“My opponent is a criminal,” he says.
Gubernatorial candidate David Jolly doesn’t want Casey DeSantis attacked over Hope Florida: “I think she was used.”
Very gentlemanly.
But he’s not going to ignore the issue: “The scheme de-funded healthcare services for poor children to instead advance the political agenda of Gov. Ron DeSantis.”
Jolly and the rest of the Dems are getting some help from Florida Republicans, too.
GOP nominee Byron Donalds, forced to answer questions about the grand jury report at every campaign stop, insists voters aren’t that interested.
Come on, can’t we please talk about something else?
But even some Republicans, especially those Ron DeSantis has antagonized, aren’t inclined to talk about something else.
Sen. Rick Scott, no fan of Florida’s current governor, demands “accountability.” Scott’s company defrauded Medicare of $1.7 billion. Nevertheless, he’s getting pious on Hope Florida’s dodgy finances: “Money designated to help poor kids was diverted to political ads.”
‘Disgrace’
Don Gaetz, a longtime state senator, says Hope Florida “brings disgrace onto the Florida government.”
He’s pushing “a bipartisan coalition that simply makes sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Not a good look for the Rs less than two months before an election.
Of course, Democrats shouldn’t get giddy: Polls in the races for governor, U.S. senator, and state attorney general still favor Republicans, although they’ve been tightening up: Jolly is within a few points of Donalds, even leading in some polls.
But political scandals have a way of hanging around. They show up in campaign commercials, further souring the mood of voters sick of high gas prices, grocery store sticker shock, the Iran war, Uthmeier’s inflated adjunct professor salary (plus his arrogance), and Ron DeSantis’ attacks on education (plus his arrogance), not to mention Florida’s sky-high rents and unaffordable insurance.
Will Hope Florida make a difference? Maybe we’ll find out in November.
Maybe a couple of long-shot Democrats will break through.
What is certain is that the Hope Florida “philosophy” is as dead as a door nail.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
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