Artemis stumbles onto Trump's hidden stash of Epstein files
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
However you spin it, Trump — this was a loss of devastating proportions
Donald Trump spent the last 40 days bombing Iran, threatening to wipe out “a whole civilization,” and turning the world’s most critical oil chokepoint into a war zone - going from the world’s worst tyrant to its biggest idiot.
What he got in return was a two-week pause, brokered not by American military strength or his bravado, but by Pakistan, built on Iran’s 10-point proposal, which Tehran’s Supreme National Security Council is already calling a victory. Iran isn’t wrong. Trump has just screwed everything up, ushering in a foreboding future.
He blew it all up, and will blow it all up again.
Iran’s leaders are openly touting this ceasefire as a triumph, declaring that “nearly all the objectives of the war have been achieved.” And that’s an accurate read of the terms. Iran’s 10-point proposal demands the lifting of all sanctions and UN resolutions, the release of Iranian assets held overseas, withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from regional bases, reparations for damages, and Iran’s explicit right to continue nuclear enrichment. And Trump agreed to a ceasefire based on this?
Does anyone - anyone - believe Donald Trump is going to pay Iran reparations for the bombs he dropped? That he’ll pull U.S. forces from the region? That he’ll sanction Iran’s right to enrich uranium? This agreement isn’t a deal. It’s a wish list for Tehran and a jab at Trump’s infamous bulbous gut of acidic instinct.
Oh, and let’s not forget the single most consequential blunder of this entire catastrophe: the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which one-fifth of the world’s oil typically passes, now comes under Iranian military management, with passage permitted only under coordination with Iran’s armed forces. Seriously?
Gallingly, that wasn’t the arrangement before Trump launched this abjectly nonsensical war of choice on February 28. Iran now controls the most strategically vital waterway on the planet in a way it never did before.
That’s not a win by anyone’s measure. In fact, it might be Trump’s biggest mess yet.
Meanwhile, while Trump was huffing and puffing on Truth Social, who stepped in to shield Iran’s position on the world stage? Russia and China, naturally. A UN Security Council resolution aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz failed after both countries vetoed it. China’s UN Ambassador Fu Cong said adopting such a draft while the U.S. was “threatening the survival of a civilization” would have sent the wrong message.
There it is. Beijing and Moscow used Trump’s own genocide rhetoric against him, blocked
international action, and elevated their status as Iran’s indispensable protectors - all while Trump was busy posting threats in ALL CAPS.
Russia and China know full well the fool Trump is. They didn’t just veto a resolution. They swept in under Trump’s bloated, ego-driven rotting bulging gut and established themselves as the reliable partners in the region.
The obtuseness of Trump to think they’d sit on the sidelines is shocking.
The Gulf states that hosted U.S. forces and absorbed Iranian missile strikes throughout this conflict are watching all of this with horror and fury. Iran targeted hotels, airports, residential buildings and other civilian infrastructure in more than 10 countries.
The UAE, Dubai, Bahrain, America’s regional partners, the allies who were supposed to benefit from a demonstration of U.S. power, watched their territory get smashed while Trump looked on and did nothing.
Frankly, he only cares about taking their money for his family business ventures and could give a damn if they’re bombed to smithereens.
Will these countries ever fully trust the U.S. again? About anything? That question now hangs over every diplomatic relationship in the region. To them, the United States looks like a bunch of backwater hillbillies who don't know their ass from their elbow.
Then there’s Israel. Warmonger Benjamin Netanyahu’s office immediately said the ceasefire doesn’t include Lebanon, contradicting the Pakistani prime minister’s statement that it covered “Lebanon and elsewhere.” Israel has no interest in stopping. Netanyahu wanted this war badly, pushed Trump into it, and now intends to keep bombing Hezbollah regardless of what any ceasefire document says.
The contradictions embedded in this so-called deal are glaring. It is held together by toothpicks, tape, and a desperate Trump hunting for an off-ramp.
The bombing campaign that was supposed to liberate the Iranian people from a repressive theocracy has instead made that government stronger. Iranian nationalism is surging. The religious fundamentalists who run Tehran have successfully reframed 40 days of destruction as a national victory.
The population isn’t revolting against its leaders the way Trump promised at the start of the war. It’s rallying around them. This war achieved the precise opposite of its stated objectives.
And now Trump wants us to believe he’s going to negotiate a permanent settlement with JD and neophyte Jared possibly leading the way. OMG! Two fools cut from the same clown-cloth as their foolish boss. Iran is angrier than it has ever been, more resolved than ever to enrich uranium, and emboldened by the knowledge that it survived everything the United States could throw at it.
Remember this - extremist regimes have long memories and longer patience. The architects of September 11 spent years in the planning. Iran does not forget. Iran does not forgive. The idea that this pause holds because Trump is going to bluster his way to a permanent peace deal is a sick joke.
The biggest question Trump has never answered - besides why the war started - is how it ends. If the regime holds, and it has held, and a negotiated deal falls short, and it will with Trump in charge, what comes next? So far, the only answer has been to extend the deadline again.
TACO Trump’s specialty!
Think about this. If British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had launched a war against Iran, threatened daily to annihilate its civilization, then claimed a two-week ceasefire as victory, the world would call him a tyrant.
The American people elected Trump — twice, mind you — and the world is drawing exactly that conclusion about us. We are no longer the arsenal of democracy. We are the arsenal of chaos and tyranny.
And this ceasefire will not survive contact with the man who made it, because Trump has never succeeded at anything. Ever. He’s a perennial loser. And the future of the world is in his hands right now, and he will find a way to mes this up for sure.
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Iran has shown the world how to defeat Trump
Friends,
Last night, 90 minutes before Trump said he’d cause the death of a “whole civilization” if Iran didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz, an Iranian official said the shipping channel would be reopened for two weeks if the United States stopped bombing Iran. The U.S. has now stopped bombing Iran.
So we’re back to the status quo before Trump began his war. Only now, Iran can credibly threaten to close the strait if it doesn’t get what it wants from Trump — thereby causing havoc to the U.S. (and world) economies. Trump’s only remaining bargaining leverage is the threat of committing war crimes.
In other words, last night’s showdown was a clear victory for Iran and a clear defeat for Trump (although he’ll frame it as a victory).
The Iran fiasco is only the latest in a host of examples revealing how to defeat Trump.
In addition to Iran, similar strategies have been used by China, Russia, Canada, Mexico, and Greenland. Inside the United States, the people of Minneapolis have used them, as have Harvard University, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, writer E. Jean Carroll, and the law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and WilmerHale.
What’s the strategy that connects them all?
All refused to cave to Trump, despite his superior military or economic power. Instead, they’ve engaged in a kind of jujitsu in which they use Trump’s power against him, while allowing Trump to save face by claiming he’s won. Consider:
Iran knew it was no match for the superior might of the U.S. (and Israel). So it used cheap drones and missiles to close the Strait of Hormuz and incapacitate other Gulf oil installations, thereby driving up the prices of oil and gas at the pump in the U.S., which has put growing political pressure on Trump, months before a midterm election. Hence, Trump has been forced stop his war.
China knew what to do when Trump imposed a giant tariff on Chinese exports to the U.S.: It put restrictions on seven types of heavy rare earth metals and magnets, crucial to U.S. defense and tech industries. Beijing continues to use these rare earth restrictions as tactical levers in ongoing negotiations over trade, rather than demand complete surrender by Trump on his trade policies.
Russia has leveraged its vast deposits of oil and natural gas with U.S. allies. It has also demonstrated its power to intrude into U.S. elections (the Mueller Report detailed a “sweeping and systematic” campaign by Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, primarily favoring Trump).
Canada and Mexico have won every tariff showdown with Trump by leveraging America’s substantial economic dependence on them for components and raw materials, but without crowing about their victories.
Greenland has leveraged public opinion globally and in the United States — overwhelmingly against an American invasion or occupation — to curb Trump’s ambitions there.
The citizens of Minneapolis and St. Paul have leveraged their asymmetric power against Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol agents by carefully organizing themselves into a force of nonviolent resistance to protect immigrants there. Their strategy showed itself to be especially effective, tragically, after Trump’s agents murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the public outcry forced the agents to leave the Twin Cities.
Harvard University’s strategy for resisting Trump’s interference in Harvard’s academic freedom has been to leverage its influence with the federal courts in Boston and the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, to get rulings that stopped Trump (although he’s still trying).
Comedian Jimmy Kimmel turned a political crisis into a ratings victory by using the public backlash against his suspension from ABC/Disney (after ABC/Disney initially caved to Trump’s demands that he be taken off the air). Since ABC/Disney reinstated him, Kimmel has continued to target Trump, and secured his contract through 2027.
Writer E. Jean Carroll defeated Donald Trump in two civil cases by leveraging New York’s Adult Survivors Act to prove that Trump sexually abused and defamed her, ultimately securing over $88 million in damages from him — verdicts that have been upheld by federal appeals courts. Carroll’s lawyers used a civil lawsuit, requiring a lower burden of proof (”preponderance of evidence”) than criminal cases. They presented the jury with Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape and testimony from other Trump accusers. The real jujitsu was that Trump’s continued public statements about Carroll, which the court deemed defamatory, led to her second lawsuit. His depositions, where he called her a “whack job,” were played for the jury.
The law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and WilmerHale refused to follow Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms that had represented causes or clients that Trump opposed. The orders threatened to revoke the firms’ security clearances, access to federal buildings and officials, and government contracts tied to firm clients. But the firms didn’t back down. They leveraged constitutional arguments with the federal courts — arguing that the orders infringed on their First Amendment rights to advocate whatever causes they wished, violated the Constitution’s separation of powers because the orders would prevent the judiciary from considering challenges to executive authority, and violated their clients’ rights under the Constitution to be represented.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with the firms and blocked these orders with permanent injunctions. The Justice Department ultimately dropped its fight against these firms in March 2026 after federal appellate judges also found Trump’s orders unconstitutional.
What’s happened to the countries and organizations that have caved to Trump?
All have strengthened Trump’s leverage over them. Europe seems incapacitated, fearing Trump will leave NATO (despite a U.S. law prohibiting it) but unable to decide where to draw the line with him.
ABC continues to lose viewers and while being subject to Trump’s whims. CBS was purchased by Trump allies Larry Ellison and his son, David, and is hemorrhaging talent.
Columbia University has been wracked by dissent from both students and faculty. The Trump regime continues to make demands of it.
The National Museum of American History has lost credibility and talent.
The law firms that caved in to Trump’s executive orders have seen lawyers exit who felt the deals betrayed the firms’ values and principles. Microsoft dropped Simpson Thacher to work with Jenner & Block — a firm that fought Trump — due to Microsoft’s concerns over Simpson’s commitment to the rule of law. Students at elite law schools have also reportedly begun to shun firms that struck deals with the Trump regime.
Bottom line: There’s now a clear blueprint for how to defeat Trump, available to any country, organization, or person on which he seeks to impose his will: Reject his demands and then use your own asymmetric power — a form of jujitsu — to turn Trump’s power against him.
Which is what Iran did last night.
- 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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This is the most dangerous crisis facing America right now — and it's not Iran
Trump is tearing America apart with his threats against Iran and comment that domestically, “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” He’s also succeeded in intentionally pitting Americans of different races, religions, and across the rural/urban divide against each other.
“There was a time when Americans expected political leadership to involve sobriety, judgment, and at least a passing acquaintance with reality. That time now feels like one of those lost civilizations historians whisper about, somewhere between Atlantis and the Republican Party of 1956.”
While it’s worked to the advantage of the GOP, the fossil fuel and private prison industries, and the billionaire class for four decades or more, it’s extraordinarily dangerous to our nation and our children’s future.
That’s because a society can’t function when its people don’t have faith in its institutions, and it’s even more of a challenge for a democracy, a form of government which only exists “by the consent of the governed.” When people lose faith in their nation’s institutions, the result is both social and political chaos much like America is experiencing right now.
I saw this over and over again when doing international relief work back in the 1980s and 1990s: in failed and failing states, people not only distrusted their governments, but were openly disdainful of them and their elected and bureaucratic officials.
Out of that distrust grew a plethora of conspiracy theories that tried to explain why things got so bad, and those often led to political violence (I saw this in Haiti and Colombia), authoritarian takeover (I witnessed this working in Russia) and, in two cases where I worked (Sudan and Uganda), actual civil wars.
America is now going through something similar. For example, prior to Reagan’s presidency, 73% of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time.” Pew found in 2024 that 85% of Americans said most elected officials “don’t care” what people like them think, and only 4% said the political system is working “extremely” or “very” well.
That’s absolutely unsustainable without radical change.
We’re also experiencing a crisis of confidence in America internationally, as nations that were formerly allies across the planet are now openly questioning whether they can ever again trust us after all the betrayals, trash-talking, and Putin-fluffing coming from Trump and his lickspittles.
Tariffs, destroying USAID, and silencing The Voice of America have devastated our soft power and credibility around the world, moving dozens of countries away from us and toward mostly China and Russia.
All of which raises the question: How did we get here and how do we get out of this mess?
Three factors that burst onto the scene in a big way in the 1960s led us to the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, which brought us to today’s crisis.
— The first was the invention of neoliberalism in the 1940s, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.
— This was followed by the creation of the Libertarian Party a few decades later as a lobbying vehicle against rent control by the real estate lobby.
— And, finally, in the 1980s a handful of fossil fuel billionaires jumping into politics to fund think tanks, media, and politicians who’d preach the doctrine that, as Reagan famously said, ”Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Prior to these interventions, the New Deal consensus had brought Americans together around the idea that the purpose of government was, to quote the Constitution’s Preamble:
“[T]o form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Neoliberals, Libertarians, and rightwing petrobillionaires like David Koch (who ran for VP in 1980 on a ticket of shutting down pretty much all domestic spending, presaging Trump’s recent rant that the only legitimate function of government is to run the military) all began the refrain that government is essentially evil, because they all objected to paying taxes to “promote the general Welfare,” or losing profits to regulations that prevented harms to workers and average Americans.
An army of sycophants and spokesmen was mobilized from William F. Buckley to Rush Limbaugh to the “stars” of Fox “News” and its imitators. Soon, the word spread. As Limbaugh used to joke, social programs were actually evil because:
“What do you do for a man when he’s down? You kick him! Otherwise, he’ll never get up!”
Men with wealth beyond the imaginings of Midas were telling average white working Americans that it wasn’t the GOP’s tax cuts and Republicans’ destruction of unions that crushed them, but brown-skinned immigrants, women, and Black people who wanted to “steal” their jobs, invade their homes, and rape their daughters.
The foundation of Trump’s 2024 campaign was the ad repeated on loop asserting that Kamala Harris wanted government to pay for trans surgery for people in prison. Don’t think about being robbed by billionaires; there are queer people out there who just want to live their own lives!
By the end of the George W. Bush presidency (and his and Cheney’s lies that led us into bloody quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq), most Americans had decided they couldn’t believe or trust our government. Then Trump came along and, presumably on Putin’s orders, told the world that we couldn’t be trusted internationally, either.
Just like with domestic politics, our nation can’t effectively function internationally if other nations also don’t have faith in our institutions. The Reagan Revolution, Donald Trump, and the Republican Party have destroyed both our faith and the world’s faith in the institutions of America and thus put our democracy at serious peril.
Part of that peril is that Donald Trump is now threatening to turn America into an “illiberal democracy” police state with rigged elections like Russia and Hungary. And it’s Americans’ cynicism that is his main weapon.
As John Mac Ghlionn wrote this week for The Hill about how hard a serious recession could hit Americans:
“The cultural confidence that once carried societies through genuine hardship – the belief that sacrifice was worth something, that tomorrow warranted patience – has faded into a nihilism that is difficult to condemn in people who arrived at it honestly.
“A society that still believes in endurance can survive contraction. A society built entirely on consumption faces a harder test.”
The solution is straightforward, and it appears we’re moving quickly in that direction, just like we did in 1932 as we woke up and chose to move out of the Republican Great Depression.
First, Americans must realize that these nihilistic ideologies promoted by billionaires and massive, monopolistic corporations are grounded in lies. We’re not a society of selfish individual consumers driven primarily by greed; we’ve historically been here for each other, and that’s why our government was first formed. It worked best during the 1933-1981 New Deal era, when the Middle Class went from around 10% of us up to around two-thirds of us. And it was crippled by the Reagan Revolution, which has cut it down to around 43% of us.
Second, the Democratic Party needs to re-embrace the social and economic goals of the New Deal and Great Society that brought us Social Security, the minimum wage, Medicare, Medicaid, free and cheap college, etc., etc. Put “we, the people” first and again restrain the toxic impulses of billionaires and corporations through appropriate taxation and regulation.
And third, we must repudiated the GOP’s corrupt ideology at the polls this fall and bring into office a new generation of FDR-style progressives who are committed to undoing Reagan’s, Bush’s, Musk’s and Trump’s damage and rebuilding American institutions so they’ll once again work for the average family.
It may seem like a big lift, but more and more Americans are waking up to the Great Grift billionaires and their Republican toadies have been running on us for the past half-century. A new America is possible!
Pass it along.
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Whatever Trump does tonight is an unmitigated disaster for the GOP
We surely can’t diminish the clear threat of nuclear destruction that Trump has made, posting this morning that a “whole civilization will be wiped out tonight” if Iran doesn’t accept his “deal.” This followed his deranged 1.5 hour press conference yesterday that showed how much of a lunatic he’s become, ending with “We want Greenland.”
Trump is threatening to kill millions of civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, engaging in blatant, pre-announced war crimes. And J.D. Vance backed up on a trip to Hungary this morning, stumping for the authoritarian Victor Orbán, who is embattled, facing a tough election next week (and is getting both Vladimir Putin’s and Trump’s endorsements, which tells you everything you need to know).
“We’ve got tools in our tool kit we haven’t used,” Vance said, demanding the Iranians bow to Trump’s wishes or else.
Iran’s response, according to Reuters, was to close all diplomatic and indirect channels of communication with the U.S.
If that’s true, Trump’s threat clearly didn’t have the desired effect.
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Upgrade to paidAs you read this, he is either planning to actually engage in a scorched-earth military operation that could end in mass death. Or he’s bluffing again—it would be the third time—and will soon announce some sort of “breakthrough” in the supposed negotiations and say he is giving Iran more time.
But, even as we can’t rule out that Trump will engage in unspeakable war crimes and perhaps even use nuclear weapons—and we surely don’t want to see anything like that happening—whatever Trump does is an unmitigated disaster for him and the GOP.
Surely if Trump follows through with his threat, the entire world would be enveloped, the entire region of the Middle East catastrophically so. There aren’t enough conventional weapons on hand for Trump to “wipe out” an entire civilization within hours. But even if there were, Iran has threatened to destroy bridges, desalination plants, and infrastructure all through the Gulf states. And if Trump used nuclear weapons, well, it goes without saying that the Gulf allies would face horrific ramifications as well.
The blowback politically would be astounding for the GOP. The wiping out of entire cities, peoples, and countries—all for oil—and the escalation of war that MAGA voters are already opposed to. Gas prices would surge out of control, too—to prices we’ve probably never seen before.
If Trump backs down, however, and claims a big “win” with a “deal” (however real it is) it will likely be one that keeps Iran’s regime in tact and brings things back to the status quo, with the Strait of Hormuz open, but still threatened by Iran at any time. The entire operation will be seen as having thrown the economy into chaos for nothing. Gas prices will only continue to go up as the fallout continues. Moody’s Analytics predicts gas prices will not ever recover, certainly not this year, or next, and will stay at the current prices or rise, into next year and beyond. The price of everything else will go up too.
Trump has caused a disaster for himself and Republicans, and he keeps looking for a way he can “win”—to the point now of threatening civilizational destruction. We can only hope that he sees that this would be an even bigger loss for him—he doesn’t care about the people killed, so hoping on that one is useless—and accepts the smaller loss, even though it’s still a bleak picture for him and the GOP.
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Trump's new blunder just plunged US into decades of war
“A whole civilization will die tonight.” Is this something Jesus would have said?
At a White House Easter event last week, Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White-Cain, compared him to Jesus Christ, invoking betrayal, false accusations and even a kind of political “resurrection.” The remarks were blasphemous. So was Trump’s own doomsday threat to bomb Iran back to the “Stone Age.”
Trump is openly contemplating devastation so complete it would erase the basic infrastructure of an entire nation — its power, its bridges, its ability to function. His threat would cause immeasurable suffering and death, amounting to the destruction of a civilization.
This is where we are now. We are threatening civilizational collapse as if annihilation were just another Truth Social post from the “Jesus-in-Chief.” While Trump exalts in destruction, many conservative Christians remain conspicuously silent, seeking instead to view the war as a “holy” one.
For decades, the United States has defined itself in opposition to regimes like Iran’s, governments where religion and power are fused, where clerics hold ultimate authority, where divine law justifies repression.
Since 1979, Iran has operated under a system in which the Supreme Leader is both political authority and religious figure, claiming legitimacy that flows from God as much as from the state. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has built an identity around martyrdom and sacred duty.
Fighters are taught that death in service to the Republic is not just honorable, but holy — sound familiar? A gateway to eternal reward. Dissenters are cast as enemies of God. Protest becomes heresy. Opposition becomes sin.
This is what we in the United States have long called fanaticism. It is what we have historically opposed.
And yet, as this war escalates, the language coming out of Washington is beginning to echo it.
Start with the effort to cast political leadership in explicitly religious terms. Influential figures within Trump’s orbit have compared his struggles to the suffering of Jesus Christ, not as a metaphor, but as a narrative of persecution and vindication.
I guess they forget that Trump was born in wealth, never suffered for anything, has a history of not sharing that wealth, for example the defunct Trump Foundation, and using that wealth to discriminate against Black people.
Then there is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has described military operations in overtly biblical terms, turning real-world events into spiritual analogies. A downed American airman becomes “reborn,” his ordeal wrapped around Easter Sunday, his rescue framed as a miracle.
Hegseth invokes Jesus while speaking in the language of lethality, creating a dangerous fusion of faith and militarism. It’s an un-Godly version of Christianity that promotes power rather than humility — something Hegseth has none of.
Further, U.S. service members have alleged that commanders are casting the war with Iran as a divine “end-times” mission, presenting the conflict as part of a biblical prophecy and even suggesting Trump is “anointed” to carry it out.
In Hegseth’s official briefings about the war, he routinely invokes “divine help.” Calls for “overwhelming violence” are delivered in the name of Jesus Christ. Telling listeners to get down on “bended knee.”
For years, American officials pointed to this exact mindset within Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as evidence of extremism, and the belief that war is divinely ordained, that enemies are theological, that death carries sacred meaning.
That used to be called radicalization. Now the United States sounds like a religious fundamentalist government.
This is no longer a conflict between a secular democracy and a religious theocracy. It is more volatile, two sides invoking God, each claiming righteousness, each convinced that heaven is on their side.
To bottom-line it, it’s Jesus versus Allah. Victory for the righteous or annihilation for the heathens.
Which brings us back to Trump’s threat and the destruction of a “whole civilization.” Not a military target or a regime palace, but a civilization.
International leaders have warned that targeting civilian infrastructure on that scale would be a war crime. But in a conflict all about religious certainty, such warnings are dismissed as atheist.
History shows religious wars do not end well, if they end. They harden and expand. They become generational. From the Crusades to modern sectarian conflicts, once God is invoked to justify violence, the conflict becomes unbounded.
And once people are convinced God is on their side, it becomes nearly impossible to stop.
If we continue down this path, fusing military action in religious language, elevating leaders into instruments of divine purpose, framing war as sacred, then the line between “us” and “them” will disappear.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo XIV continued to speak out against the war. He tore apart the dangerous attempt to frame the war in Iran as a holy crusade of "Jesus vs. Allah," reminding the world that the Divine cannot be used to justify killing an “entire civilization.”
By declaring that "no one can use Jesus to justify war," the Pope stripped the conflict of its religiosity, exposing it instead as a failure of human diplomacy.
His chilling warning that God simply "does not listen to the prayers" of those whose hands are stained with the blood of combat, serves as a firm warning about weaponization of faith.
If we continue to invoke the name of Christ to justify the destruction of our adversaries, he said, we risk not only a global "irreparable abyss" but a profound spiritual bankruptcy where our prayers fall on deaf ears.
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Trump is on the cusp of triggering the same move Putin used to smash Russia's democracy
On Easter Sunday, Donald Trump posted to his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a rant that has shocked the world, threatening multiple war crimes with a level of obscenity that no Republican would have tolerated from President Barack Obama or any other Democrat:
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F---in’ Strait, you crazy b------s, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.”
The Iranian response was to call his language “vile”:
“Iran’s steadfastness and resistance have driven Trump to the brink of madness.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene shared an opinion most of the world now agrees with, tweeting:
"He has gone insane, and all of you (the administration) are complicit.”
She added:
“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshiping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians.”
All of which raises the question: What the hell is going on here?
When Donald Trump’s mentor Vladimir Putin wanted to cement absolute power in Russia, he and former President Boris Yeltsin authorized a terror attack against an apartment complex in Moscow that would be blamed on Chechen “terrorists.” It was Russia’s 9/11 event, and signaled the end of that nation’s brief experiment in democracy.
Timothy Snyder, the world-renowned scholar of fascism, argued this past week that Trump and Hegseth may be planning something similar for America, using the war with Iran that they lurched us into as its foundation, and a false-flag “terror event” within the U.S. to trigger a legal state of emergency to corrupt our coming elections.
If this is their plan, it could also explain the seemingly-inexplicable decapitation of the JAG corps (which advises officers on the legality of orders), and the recent removal of about 20 of our most senior military leaders who were uniquely in a position to stop Trump and Hegseth from staging a military coup that they could use to stop or severely interfere with the November election.
After all, it wouldn’t be the first time Trump has attempted a coup against our American form of democracy; that’s exactly what he was trying to pull off on January 6th. With that attempt he was able to get the military to stand down for hours; this time he could mobilize it against the people he has now already officially designated as enemies of America in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7.
It authorizes the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (coordinating FBI with local police across the country) to seek out and investigate any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism. They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:
“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”
— Have you ever spoken ill of our country or its policies, particularly under Trump?
— Trash-talked capitalism or praised socialism on social media?
— Publicly questioned Protestant Christianity or professed loyalty to Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Hinduism, Paganism, or any other non-Evangelical-Christian belief system or religion?
— Embraced the trans or more general queer community?
— Spoken out in defense of single-parenting, gay marriage, or same-sex couples adopting children?
— Said things or carried a sign that might hurt the feelings of masked ICE agents, Trump, Miller, or Hegseth?
Just imagining that any of these could trigger FBI agents — or the Army — kicking in our doors was so grotesque a notion that when the story first appeared eight months ago, it was reported and then largely dismissed by mainstream media within the same day.
I mentioned it in a Saturday Report and an earlier article, but, like pretty much everybody else in the media, dismissed it as virtue-signaling to the Trump base rather than an actual plan to set up a Putin-style police state here in America.
I was wrong.
In a second bombshell report, Klippenstein obtained and published a copy of former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 4th memo ordering the FBI to actually begin Russian-KGB/FSB-style investigations of people and groups who fit into the categories listed above.
And now, he reports this week, the FBI is actively in the process of setting up the architecture necessary to essentially become America’s KGB, what he calls “the FBI’s new Political Pre-Crime Center” looking for and rooting out dissidents and critics of the Trump regime.
Not only that, Bondi also ordered the FBI to go back as far as 5 years in their investigations of our social media posts, protest attendance, and other activities to find evidence of average Americans’ possible adherence to these now-forbidden views.
At the same time, ICE is using a chunk of the massive budget the Big Ugly Bill gave them — larger than the budget of the FBI or any other police agency in America (or any other police agency in the world outside of China and Russia) — to buy tools they can use to spy on “anti-fascist” people who protest Trump’s cabal or oppose their actions.
In a report titled “ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants,” the Brennan Center for Justice details how the agency has acquired “a smorgasbord of spy technology: social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools, and more.”
They’ve reportedly acquired devices that spoof cellphone towers, so if you’re near them your phone will connect, thinking it’s talking to your cell carrier. Once the connection is established, ICE and/or DHS/FBI can monitor every communication to or from your phone and possibly even download all the content on your phone including emails, pictures, apps, and your browsing history.
They’re tying into nationwide networks of license-plate readers, airport facial recognition systems, and federal surveillance drones to monitor people they consider enemies of the Trump regime. And they’re carefully combing your social media content for posts, likes, and reposts they consider objectionable. As the Brennan Center noted:
“Homeland Security Investigations recently signed a multimillion dollar contract for a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs that claims to ingest and analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. The agency is also paying millions to Penlink for monitoring tools that gather information from multiple sources, including social media platforms, the dark web, and databases of location data.”
ICE is also acquiring Russian-style spy software that can remotely target your phone without your realizing it, infect it with the equivalent of an “ICE virus,” and then have your phone send them everything you do, say, hear, or see on an ongoing basis for months.
The only clue you’ll have will be that your phone gets warm and battery life seems to have dropped as it’s pumping out to ICE your data and everything the camera and microphone in it pick up, all without your knowledge or permission.
This Putin-style “search” without a legal warrant is the sort of thing that King George III’s officers did against the colonists (although back then it was reading their mail, spying on them in person, and kicking in their doors) in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
It’s also a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protection of our rights to “free speech” and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
When Putin ended democracy in Russia, he called the people who protested his policies “domestic terrorists” and had his secret police go after them in ways that are shockingly similar to the lawlessness ICE has been engaged in and Bondi ordered the FBI to begin.
With every passing day, Trump and his lickspittles grow more desperate that they’ll be held to account for their criminal activities and war profiteering if the November elections go the way they’re looking today.
Forty of Nixon’s senior officials, including his Attorney General John Mitchell, went to prison. Trump and his toadies realize they’re looking at the same thing if they lose their grip on power.
And now that the war is also going badly for Trump, and he’s decompensating right in front of our eyes with his obscene “Open the F---in’ Strait, You Crazy B------s!” Easter rant, comes the very real possibility that after getting nearly $90 billion for ICE and proposing an astonishing half-trillion-dollar increase in the Pentagon’s budget, he’s doing it all to buy in advance the military’s willingness to go along with a second coup attempt against America.
An ICE officer can now make $200,000 a year, enough to ensure complete loyalty to his or her paymaster in DC, Donald Trump. If Trump’s purges of the military and request for additional funds are designed to do the same thing in the armed forces so that, like in Chile during Pinochet’s day, they’ll happily turn their guns on those who hold “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views,” we need to get ready.
That means spreading the alarm far and wide, as Snyder recommends in his excellent Substack newsletter.
Share the news of this threat with everybody you know, post to social media, reach out to your politicians to tell them in advance not to knee-jerk-react to a 9/11- or Moscow Apartments-type of terrorist event between now and the November elections.
And tell elected officials to cut funding to Trump’s ICE, stop his illegal war, and to begin immediate impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives.
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Trump is cornered — and it's driving him stark-raving mad
On Sunday, Trump posted:
Trump's Truth Social post (Truth Social)
Now, I ask you: If you were in the Iranian regime, would you be: (1) frightened by this post or (2) relieved that you were finally causing Trump to melt down?
I’d guess (2). You’d see his post and figure that Trump — posting on Easter Sunday —has finally gone utterly and definitively bonkers. You’ve done it. He’s mad as a hatter.
I was bullied as a kid. The way I knew I was winning against the bullies was when they started to scream and swear and rant and rave at me. That’s when I knew they felt powerless. They’d done everything they could to beat me down, and yet they couldn’t. I was tougher than their fists. They went nuts.
Is there any other explanation for Trump’s outburst? Many of Trump’s posts are really intended for domestic consumption. Perhaps he wanted to sound tough for his American followers?
That’s unlikely. Just Wednesday night he told America that the U.S. doesn’t “need” the strait to be open, If we don’t need it open, why threaten to blow up Iranian power plants (most likely war crimes) if Iran doesn’t open it?
The easiest explanation is the simplest: Trump is cornered and he’s going stark-raving mad.
No less an expert on the workings of Trump’s brain than Marjorie Taylor Greene had this to say about Trump’s post:
“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.”
I’ve never agreed with Marjorie Taylor Greene on anything, until today.
- 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 just exposed a frailty that could force him into retirement
Well, I guess it’s reassuring to learn that gasoline prices have nothing to do with Trump’s war. And that we’re winning against Iran. In fact it’s won! Better than anybody could ever have imagined!!! Although we’ll be there another few weeks... And maybe we’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age… And he needs another $200 billion… And let’s activate the draft (except for Barron, who has congenital bone-spurs.…)
One day, we’ll look back on last Wednesday’s speech as the moment it became impossible to ignore. Not just the policy or the war, but the man and his growing mental and emotional disabilities.
Because what’s now vividly clear — and increasingly dangerous — is that Donald Trump isn’t just prosecuting a war against a major, wealthy, modern, 2,500-year-old Middle Eastern empire that is politically and militarily aligned with Russia and China: he’s doing it while he’s visibly unraveling.
Go back just a few weeks.
On February 28th, as the first strikes loomed, Trump told Axios he could “go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days.” He was calling for total conquest or a quick hit in the same sentence, the same breath.
By March 1st, he’d shifted. The war had “always been a four-week process… it’ll take four weeks — or less,” he said, according to the Washington Post. That same day, it became “four to five weeks.”
On March 2nd, he claimed we were already “ahead of schedule,” still referencing that timeline. But on social media, tracked by New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, he added something else entirely: wars, he said, could be fought “forever.”
Really? Forever. Four weeks. Two days. I guess we’re just supposed to pick one?
By March 7th, he was calling the war “a short excursion” (the proper word is “incursion”) while also saying it would continue “for a little while.” On his Nazi-infested, failing social media site he bragged that “we’ve already won.”
On March 9th, he said the war was “pretty well complete.” In an interview summarized by TIME, he insisted there was “nothing left in a military sense,” even as the fighting continued, and he predicted it would end “very soon.”
Two days later, March 11th, he declared, “We’ve won… in the first hour, it was over.” Then, on March 13th, it would last “as long as it’s necessary” — but also “not long.” By March 17th, he was rewriting history, claiming it had been “essentially largely over in two or three days.” And yet by March 31st, he was telling Reuters it would take “two weeks, maybe three” more.
And now he’s using genuinely obscene and entirely un-American language like “bomb them back to the Stone Age” that seems to invoke nuclear war.
This isn’t strategy, spin, or political 3-D chess: something is deeply wrong with this man, and American troops and Iranian schoolchildren are dying because of it. And it’s not just Trump’s critics or “liberals” noticing his rapidly increasing mental deterioration.
Laura Ingraham — hardly a member of the resistance, but a longtime Trump ally and one of the most reliable voices in the billionaire Murdoch media ecosystem — raised the question of Trump’s ability to “understand the complexity of this” out loud on her show.
“Was the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning?” she asked. “And was he then able to take it all in and understand the complexity of this, how complex it could actually get?”
Meanwhile, major conservative figures like Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, and other online and podcast-based influencers who once embraced Trump are starting to peel away, disturbed by the chaos and the drift toward a wider war that never would have happened if we’d had a rational president in control of his faculties and willing to listen to the experts around him.
None of this surprises longtime Trump watchers like his brilliant niece, psychologist Mary Trump, who wrote about his “decompensating” mental state:
“This isn’t a joke; this isn’t one more thing we can sweep under the rug. This issue, which is infinitely more important and serious than the... emails, needs to be on the front page of every newspaper…”
Trump is running the United States the same way he ran his businesses, but worse. Impulsively, recklessly, and with a long, well-documented history of failure. This is a man, after all, who bankrupted casinos; businesses so structurally profitable that, in normal hands, they’re almost impossible to kill. A man whose corporate history is littered with collapsed ventures, unpaid contractors, lawsuits, and burned partners.
Back then, it was just his own inherited wealth that he was destroying. Now he’s ruining America’s economy, our international standing, and has set up a military disaster in the most volatile region of the world. All while it appears he’s melting down.
Nuclear-armed powers are watching and American troops’ lives — and potentially millions of others — are now on the line. Trump’s lifelong pathological lying, his sociopathic disregard for anybody but himself, and his impulsivity are now all colliding with literally life-and-death stakes that make wrecking an airline, a steak business, or a casino seem insignificant.
First of all, he appears increasingly drunk on power, both in person and online. The bizarre, overblown language of his social media posts — “we’ve already won,” “militarily WON,” his declarations clearly detached from observable reality — increasingly read like something from a spoiled, over-emotional, always-got-his-way adolescent. Tearing down the East Wing. Running multiple grifts. Attacking foreign countries. Picking unnecessary fights with allies. Hanging Putin’s picture in the White House.
Second, unlike his first term, this time Trump’s surrounded himself entirely with toadies who are absolutely terrified to tell him no or even gently contradict him. The guardrails to impulsive or destructive behavior, the professionals and experts who surrounded him nine years ago and restrained him, however imperfectly, are long gone, and what’s left is an horror-movie-funhouse echo chamber of groveling flattery and silent, breath-holding fear. His cabinet meetings are downright shocking. He’s forcing Marco Rubio to wear shoes that don’t even fit.
And third — the part nobody in the GOP or the billionaire-owned rightwing media wants to say out loud — is the reality that he’s pushing 80, and it’s showing.
The contradictions are sharper, his claims more disconnected from reality, and his rhetorical tics like “more powerful than anybody ever imagined” feel like they’re coming from somebody who’s genuinely disoriented. His public comments and posts are becoming more erratic, more grandiose, and more uncoupled from the real events that the rest of us can easily see. It’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” except nobody near him has yet been willing to point out his nakedness.
This isn’t a partisan critique: I’m just observing a pattern that others have noticed as well. And it’s accelerating at a uniquely dangerous moment in world history.
James Madison warned us that war is “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” War, he noted, concentrates political power, erodes accountability, and creates the possibility that a president can essentially turn himself into a dictator.
So, that’s where we are now: a war launched and incoherently narrated by a man whose own words seem to randomly fall all over themselves. Who’s visibly losing it in real time.
A commander-in-chief who treats our troops like they’re objects, toy soldiers with tin tanks and planes, rather than human people with families and hopes for the future.
A government that’s drifting toward disaster, with congressional Republicans and his cabinet members too terrified to even squeak out the tiniest objection or concern.
This has gone way beyond politics; we’re now talking national — and, perhaps, planetary — survival. It’s way bigger than one sick old man who slathers his face in orange makeup and compulsively plasters everything around him with gold paint.
Republicans in Congress and the cabinet must decide whether their loyalty is to an aging, mentally ill, demonstrably incompetent man or to the nation and world he’s put at risk.
Because the cost of continued inaction here isn’t some abstraction; it’s already being paid in American blood and treasure, and could easily lead to an escalation that no one can deal with if it really starts to spin out of control. The echoes of World War I are too loud to ignore any longer.
There are two immediate constitutional remedies: Impeachment and removal from office, or the 25th Amendment.
If even a handful of Trump’s cabinet members can summon the courage to deal with the reality that we all saw last Wednesday, they could force him into retirement. Alternatively, if enough Republicans in Congress choose country over career, they could impeach him and thus end this crisis before it spirals further.
But the clock is ticking, the prime ministers of Great Britain and Australia are already warning their people, and strongman autocrats like Putin, MBS, and Netanyahu are rubbing their hands gleefully as America crashes and burns.
If we’re serious about avoiding a wider war — or worse, a global one — we may not have the luxury of waiting for November’s election; we need to push a few brave Republicans (if we can find them) to join all the Democrats and take action now.
Because last night’s speech not only failed to tell us where this war is going but starkly shoved in all our faces the reality of how far gone the man leading it already is.
Call your Republican representative and/or Senators at 202-224-3121.
The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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This birthday party is about to be crashed — and it could blow out the candles for Trump
As we go about our spring, awaiting the latest drop of "The Pitt," putting money on the Final Four, or indefatiguiably scrolling dog videos on "X," it's all too easy to pretend that, as bad as things may be, they remain "managably bad," not so bad as to touch you personally, not "that bad," anyway.
At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, please set that comforting thought aside, because things are aligned to get "bad" in a way that most certainly does impact you, badly. Summer is coming, and not just any summer.
This summer promises the confluence of several "once in a generation" moments, and it's best to prepare now. Prepare as one of the "better Americans" the world needs to see.
Things are bad even outside the current political climate. Prices continue to rise, rents are now well over one-third of income, job creation is a thing of the past, the stock market — long overly propped up by exuberant AI investment — is set to burst, and even as Oracle lays off 30,000 employees, AI hasn't yet even checked its coat at the job-loss dance.
And absolutely none of this is getting better while gas remains above $4-a-gallon — a price that may soon sound like a fire sale.
Of course, on top of all of this — and, indeed, exacerbating it plenty, the U.S. is at war, primarily going it alone, burning nearly century-old alliances in a fight the administration couldn't even fake justifying to citizens, too busy making video game memes, leading many to conclude the mission involves keeping Epstein off the front pages, and pleasing Israeli P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu, neither mutually exclusive, nor necessarily unrelated.
Indeed, we appear to be days away from American soldiers on the ground on Kharg Island, a formerly unknown piece of land that few knew functions as the fulcrum for global petro-transport, all threatening to toss global markets into further chaos.
The backdrop constitutes a nightmare of Elm Street order, and would under any administration, but the civilization-threatening dangers only increase exponentially given the nation is led by perhaps the single least adult, least competent, most self-interested, and corrupt administration in memory, perhaps history.
A normal president would have appointed a commission of business leaders and politicians working on how to best integrate AI into a workforce with government programs to create jobs, retrain workers, and develop supplemental income by taxing the billionaires, perhaps real talk about Universal Basic Income — it's time. But all of that presupposes adults in charge.
Instead, we have the "Save America Act," which simply makes it harder to vote, harder to respond to emergencies, harder to evict the people that ushered this in.
Summer is coming. Things happen in summer that don't during any other season; how many hot "firsts" in your life occurred during a summer night? Warmer days bring about more time outside, during later hours, often meaning more alcohol, less sleep. Darkness creates doubt, both on scene in the moment and then the impact in the light of day. This coming summer, riding the war, ICE, prices, Trump — all of it, would be notable on its own, long, hot, and very, very dangerous. But this is no ordinary summer.
Raising matters to Shakespearean tragic comedy level, America is celebrating its birthday this July — entering middle-aged, as countries go. And like many middle-aged birthdays, it comes with some reflection about where we stand, whether we even like ourselves, and where we go from here. Making it worse, rather than have a quiet party among family, we've invited the world to our bash, hosting the world's largest sporting event in FIFA's World Cup, where our best and worst will be on display.
The world will look to America, its host, and rather than see a grateful, generous, modest, and caring nation, the one that saved Europe and Asia post WWII, won the Cold War, and provides disaster relief, it will see Donald Trump — master of ceremonies at the UFC octagon built at the White House, face on a commemorative coin, overseeing a military parade the likes of which only a fascist could love, all taking place in and around what was formerly some of the most respected, hallowed ground on Earth. Masked stormtroopers we call "ICE agents" will be the "face" of America.
Expect more thoughtful Americans to do nearly anything to disassociate themselves with the "patriotic hate-kitsch." We loathe who we've become, can't stand masked ICE agents killing protesters, and kidnapping undocumented workers. We don't support our "Secretary of War" bombing schools to distract from headlines. We're tired of being governed by oligarchs forcing us to work two jobs to barely pay rent, furious that two bags of groceries cost three figures, sigh upon hearing of more lay-offs due to AI, and tired of hearing about ballrooms, presidential crypto-schemes, presidential planes, and cognitive screens "aced" by a fading man.
It will be hot and, with the world's cameras pointed at the United States, expect decent Americans to show up to say "I'm not with them!" and "there is more to America than the man in the White House and those in red hats." As a means of self-cleansing alone, we'll want to distinguish ourselves from faux American-exceptionalism, false pride. It must be done.
But expect the man in the White House to use the situation to his advantage to claim every ounce of power that no previous president wanted. Between millions of us protesting what we have become and the militancy within the oligarchy-in-formation, something will almost surely break.
And please don't discount the possibility that it might be the stock market that breaks first (or at least concurrently), and thus your retirement, your job, your job prospects, "Dow 30k" for those of you who remember irrational exuberance. The only reason that the stock market is even in the mid-40,000 is a massive investment in AI — which, may be the single most destructive economic tool humanity ever created, even assuming it harmlessly does exactly what we ask, and in doing so disappears anywhere from 25%-33% of actual jobs performed by people in need of a paycheck to then go shop at Walmart.
It is April now, and you'd be a fool to think that this summer won't be the longest, hottest, most torrid on record — and it's time to begin preparations.
First, don't stray far from home — who can afford it with gas at $5 anyway? But more importantly, we have a president who is dying to utilize the Insurrection Act, federalizing troops — think "ICE" only better trained. The single last place you want to be if Trump federalizes policing is 2,000 miles from home. Stay close, spend your money on your neighbors.
We have the road map to summer success already. "No Kings" builds momentum with each event, decentralized, democracy at its finest, everywhere - let's repeat, only right in the middle of the festivities, the 250th, the World Cup. One word of caution, though - daytime only, strict curfews. Be responsible. He is dying to invoke as much police power as possible; don't hand him unearned gifts — it's also safer for you.
Welcome the world — the good people of the United States WANT you here. We are proud of who we really are, so let us show you. Let's show you how we protest peacefully, respectfully, away from areas where innocents might otherwise get caught up and get hurt. Trump introduced an "alternative Super Bowl Halftime Show" — perhaps the decent people of the United States could put together an alternative to the octagon and military muscle, focus on the gifts this country has given to the world, the science, the disaster relief, the art, there is endless material.
But everyone had better start to prepare now, put your summer plans in place. It is going to be hot and uncomfortable on many levels. Have no doubt, Donald Trump will likely feel his administration falling apart by summer, making this a dangerous place. Do what you can to make your corner of this country safer, helping your neighbors, building up a real national community, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.
It is already getting hot and only getting hotter. Best to prepare. Lots of frozen drinks, care, humanity, and smiles, looking out for one another — find a way to help someone else. No ICE, no orange King. We are bigger than any one man or even one party. Let's send the world a message we can be proud of.
A lot of America is still pretty cool.
Jason Miciak is a Rawstory Columnist at Large, a former associate editor at Occupy Democrats, author, and American Attorney. He can be followed on Bluesky, and reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com, and is seeking beta readers for a soon-to-be-released novel.
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Trump may have signed his own death sentence with this imbecilic outburst
One of my closest friends emigrated from Iran to the U.S. in the 1980s. She is a respected physician in her field, and she texted me when she saw Donald Trump’s expletive-filled Truth Social post at Iran on, of all days, Easter Sunday.
“Do you know how unacceptable it is to swear in Iran? And what happens if you do? And he attacked Allah. That language might be worse than bombs,” she said.
There’s a reason real diplomats don’t spend their Easter mornings dropping F-bombs on social media. But then again, we don’t have a real diplomat in the White House, or in the Trump administration.
On Sunday morning, while most of the world was seeking a moment of peace and renewal, Trump was busy torching what’s left of American decency and credibility in the Middle East. In an expletive-laden Truth Social post, he threatened to attack Iranian bridges and power plants, writing: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran.”
Then he told Iran to “Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell - just watch,” and signed off with a very crude mocking of the Muslim religion, “Praise be to Allah.”
The ramifications of Trump’s language are chilling just at the surface. In the Middle East, where words carry the weight of centuries, these specific words are going to haunt us for decades.
In Iran, social etiquette - Taarof - is the backbone of society, built on mutual respect and the absolute avoidance of public shame. When Trump stooped to gutter-level profanity, he wasn't talking tough. He’s proving to the Iranian leadership, and the Iranian people, that he is a man of no character.
And that he is an imbecilic, insensitive idiot.
What makes this especially obscene is what profanity actually means under Iranian law. Under Article 608 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, swearing or using profane language is punishable by flogging of up to 74 lashes or a substantial fine.
Further, mocking religious figures can be prosecuted under provisions about “spreading corruption on earth” - a crime with punishments ranging from months in prison to execution.
An ordinary Iranian citizen who sent the exact same message Trump posted on Truth Social would face flogging or worse. A sitting American president has now communicated at a lower moral and legal standard than his own enemy’s citizens are permitted to speak.
And the UAE - a supposed regional partner - treats abusive language sent even in a private WhatsApp message as a criminal offense, punishable by hefty fines, imprisonment, and deportation.
Trump’s post would be prosecutable in the very region he’s trying to influence. Though Trump’s posts are often incendiary, laden with profanity and insults, mocking the invocation of Allah is likely to cause additional anger across the Muslim world.
Think about it this way. How would Christians react if Iran’s Supreme Leader put forth a statement that said something to the effect that Jesus was a phony? Nationalistic conservative Christians in the U.S. would go berserk.
Iran's Embassy in Thailand reacted to Trump’s insult, calling him a “teenager”, and then writing, “You don’t have to show your inferiority by this language. Allah is far greater and all-encompassing to be used by your Najis mouth.”
By using profanity-laced ultimatums, Trump has done something no skilled negotiator would ever do - he has made it impossible for Iran to back down without losing face in front of its own people. Again, imagine conservative Christians rebelling against Trump if he did nothing for a Supreme Leader who smacked at christianity.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations called Trump’s threats “a direct and public incitement to terrorize civilians and clear evidence of intent to commit war crimes.”
Iran’s parliament speaker fired back that Trump’s “reckless moves are dragging the United States into a living hell for every single family.”
Our allies have got to be utterly embarrassed to be seen near him. First, Trump launched this war without consulting European or NATO allies, and is now demanding they take responsibility for the damage.
A former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder said Europe did not want a war, “He decided to start a war without talking to Congress, without talking to the American people, without talking to our allies.”
Now, this week, every ally leader and their foreign ministers will likely be forced to answer questions about the “Open the F***in’ Strait” post. They will condemn it and put themselves further away from the U.S. say they are not contaminated by proximity to Trump’s vulgarity.
No democratically elected leader wants their citizens to see them associated with that language.
All this is inevitably leading to questions about Trump’s mental capacity. Only a delusional, demented madman would talk this way in the middle of a war. Senator Chris Murphy called the post “the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual” and urged Cabinet members to spend Easter “calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th Amendment.”
Murphy was being too kind. Trump clearly is completely off his rocker. This is the language of someone who can’t control their thoughts or anger. This is a clear sign of dementia, perhaps the most vivid display of Trump’s declining mental health. Because what else can possibly explain this horrific verbal aggression toward a dangerous adversary?
An article last month on The Atlantic was revealing about why we’ve never gone to war with Iran. The article’s main point is that nothing happening in the current Iran war is surprising, because U.S. leaders have long been warned that attacking Iran could trigger a wider regional war, disrupt global oil supplies and spike the economy, cause significant civilian casualties, provoke unpredictable retaliation through proxies and missiles, drag the U.S. into a prolonged conflict, and leave no clear or stable endgame.
Now, imagine how all of these dangers Iran poses have been compounded and multiplied because Trump brutally offended their culture and their religion.
We are now left to wonder - and worry - if we are about to pay a catastrophic price for a president who is losing his mind, and cannot control his impulses and his mouth. God help us.
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Exposing these lies will bring the GOP crashing down
I still remember the day, back in 2009 when we were on speaking terms, when Alex Jones showed up naked for a live simulcast of our two shows. It’s one of those pictures that my staff and I have worked for years to get out of our heads.
It was for a stunt, of course; if nothing else, Alex has always known how to be a showman. It was April 15, Tax Day, and he wanted to emphasize how the IRS had “taken the shirt off my back.” Point made. And a largely harmless one (other than that $38 trillion national debt that’s 100% derived from tax cuts for billionaires and corporations we were lied into by Reagan, Bush, and Trump).
But when he filmed a phony, staged “ISIS beheading” that he claimed happened on the southern US border, it was far from harmless, according to a new book by one of his former employees, Josh Owens, titled The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones’ Conspiracy Machine.
The video of one of Jones’ reporters dressed up as an ISIS soldier carrying a phony severed-head prop went viral, gaining millions of views, and helped fuel anti-Muslim hatred that the right-wing was then working hard to exploit in post-9/11 America. Owens told an NPR reporter that the turning point for him was sitting on a plane next to a Muslim woman with her young daughter:
“I remember sitting there watching her, and it sounds so cheesy, but it was just this moment of like ... these people didn’t do anything. There’s no reason for suspicion; it’s just racism. It’s not like after that I changed everything and all of a sudden became a good person or started to do the right thing. But it did start to make me look at things a little bit differently.”
The real crisis this kind of media causes isn’t just the misinformation; it’s the collapse of a shared reality among Americans, without which democracy can’t function. And we’re seeing that play out in real time in the daily dysfunction both in Congress and in state capitols across the nation.
When political power is built not on debate, compromise, and persuasion but on intentional lies, governance simply becomes a shallow performance and an opportunity for corruption rather than a way to serve the needs of the people of a country. It becomes, in essence, a grift.
This is why partisan lies used to seize and hold power are so corrosive: they destroy a nation’s sense of shared reality.
While it’s nearly impossible to identify any meaningful lies Democrats depend on to win elections, increase media profits, or pass special-interest legislation, there’s a long list of rightwing lies that serve those exact purposes:
— Tax cuts for billionaires help average people,
— Unions are bad for workers,
— Climate change is a hoax,
— Welfare fraud is widespread and mostly committed by Black “welfare queens,”
— Social Security is going broke and lifting the cap on what billionaires pay won’t solve the problem,
— The 2020 election was stolen from Trump,
— Immigrants bring more crime than native-born citizens,
— Deregulation doesn’t produce harms but by increasing profits helps society,
— National single-payer health insurance can’t work in America (even though it mysteriously works just fine, better than what we have, in dozens of other democracies),
— America was founded as a Christian nation,
— Men are superior to women,
— White people are superior to people of color,
— Vaccines are dangerous and COVID isn’t,
— Voter fraud and voting by non-citizens is widespread,
— Guns will keep your home and children safe,
— Rich Jews are funding a program to “replace” white workers with dark-skinned people,
— Increasing the minimum wage destroys economies and causes severe inflation.
Each one of these lies is repeated regularly by Republicans on TV and hosts of right-wing talk shows as if they’re true to the point where MAGA voters can recite them in their sleep (and when they’re carrying tiki torches).
As America learned when Fox “News” was forced to admit in court that their top talent was lying directly to the camera for months about the 2020 election, these lies are typically planned, organized, intentional, and can produce millions in revenue for the media and its stars.
Not to mention supporting billions in profits for aligned industries like fossil fuels and tobacco that depend on people believing lies to keep consuming their products.
Republican lies can also swing elections, like when a PAC aligned with George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign promoted their Willie Horton ad arguing that a prison furlough program that led to a white woman being raped and murdered by a Black man was Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis’ fault when, in fact, it’d been started by a previous Republican governor.
Rightwing lies have taken America into or prolonged wars, as we learned when Nixon lied about his “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war, Reagan “rescued” medical students by invading Grenada, George HW Bush had a member of the Kuwaiti royal family lie on national TV about Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators, Bush and Cheney lied us into combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Trump lied us into attacking Iran and killing hundreds of innocent children.
Republican lies can even create self-fulfilling prophecies, like how when both Obama and Biden each came into office Republicans and rightwing media immediately started loudly claiming the US southern border was “now wide open” and that lie, repeated over and over again by conservative politicians and media, made its way down to South and Central America and caused people there to believe it and then to migrate north.
It’s particularly problematic when Republican lies become loyalty tests for public office. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Sheldon Whitehouse have been asking every Republican-promoted federal judge nominee to come before the Judiciary Committee the simple question, “Who won the 2020 election?” Not even one single candidate has yet answered with the simple truth that Joe Biden won, fair and square, a result that was even litigated 60 times and proven before the Republicans on the Supreme Court.
The problem Republicans, right-wing billionaires, and conservative media have is that if they simply told the truth about any of the things in the list above — that they really do support more pollution and raw bigotry while exclusively working to enrich the already morbidly rich — they’d quickly lose their audiences and their voters.
The fix, therefore, isn’t particularly complicated, even if it does require discipline.
Every anchor, every host, every journalist, and particularly every guest on radio or TV who lets one of these lies slide past without correction needs to be called out for it.
Not “some people disagree,” or “Democrats say otherwise.” Lies like these require a flat-out, factual, on-air correction: “That’s not true, and here’s the proof.” There really are differences between the two major parties, and only the GOP consistently uses demonstrable lies to get their way.
When hosts or Republican guests refuse to respond to that in good faith, when they treat a documented lie as just another “perspective” worthy of equal consideration, they have to be outed.
The Founders understood — as much as they loved free speech — that democracy can’t survive without a press willing to tell the truth. What we have today in far too much of our media landscape is the opposite: a press that’s either owned by billionaires invested in the lies or so terrified of being called “liberal” that it’s stopped holding liars accountable.
So, when you see this happen, pick up your phone and tell the network, station, host, or politician exactly what you just witnessed. And amplify it on social media.
The deep truth here is that decades of Republican lies have only worked because so many in the media — and so many of us who consume media — have let them pass unchallenged.
The facts are on our side. Americans, when presented with the actual substance of these issues without partisan labels attached, consistently support the positions Democrats hold and Republicans lie about.
And remember, every one of the lies on the list above exists for one reason only: because without them, the people telling them couldn’t win an election, hold an audience, get tax cuts and deregulation, or make more money.
So, correct the lies at the dinner table. Share articles like this one that document them with receipts. Support the journalists and outlets brave enough to call partisan and corporate liars out by name. Show up for protests. And, most important, vote this fall like your democracy depends on it, because (as the old cliché goes) it does.
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Trump claims Jesus led him to this horrifically racist plot
Donald Trump asked Republicans to pass the SAVE Act “for Jesus.” He’d have been better calling out George Wallace and Strom Thurmond.
The debate has focused on the bill’s many dangerous aspects. But the SAVE Act builds on voter suppression that Republicans have been carrying out for the past 25 years. The Democrats need to talk about this history, because whether or not this bill passes, there will be others like it to come.
The bill attacks voting rights in multiple ways:
- It requires a passport, birth certificate, or a handful of other documents to register and vote, excluding student IDs, most driver’s licenses, and tribal IDs lacking an expiration date. More than 21 million Americans lack ready access to these documents, with Black, Latino, and Asian citizens three times more likely to not have them.
- It eliminates most in-person voter registration drives, since election officials would need original proof of citizenship and groups can’t submit proof on people’s behalf. It also severely disrupts or limits online and mail registration.
- It mandates voter purges every 30 days, allowing people to be mistakenly thrown off the voter rolls right before elections.
- It gives access to state voter files to an administration eager to manipulate or evade laws to consolidate power.
The SAVE Act didn’t just emerge, but builds on a long and problematic history.
In the 2000 presidential election, Florida, under governor Jeb Bush, threw 12,000 largely African American voters off the rolls by falsely charging them with being former felons, who Jim Crow-era laws prohibited from voting. This set the stage for a Republican-appointed Supreme Court to tip the state to Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush, by 537 votes. Over 960,000 Florida former felons remain without a vote, including 12% of all African American potential voters, because the governor and legislature undermined a successful 2018 initiative that was supposed to give them back their rights.
President Bush benefitted from disenfranchisement again in 2004. Ohio Secretary of State and Bush campaign co-chair Kenneth Blackwell purged 300,000 largely African American voters from the rolls in cities like Cleveland and Columbus, including one in four Cleveland voters, without which, he probably would have lost the state and therefore the Presidency. Blackwell also tried to reject thousands of registrations because they were on the wrong weight of paper and allowed each county, whatever its size, just a single early-voting station, leaving the state’s major cities with five-hour lines.
In 2013, a Republican-appointed Supreme Court overturned major sections of the Voting Rights Act that made it harder for states with histories of discrimination to limit voting rights. Immediately afterward, Southern states began passing newly restrictive laws. North Carolina, for instance, passed a new voter ID law invalidating student IDs, public employee IDs, and photo IDs issued by public assistance agencies (while allowing gun permits); shortened the early voting window; banned same-day registration during early voting; and prohibited paid voter registration drives. It also prohibited extending voting hours in the event of long lines, eliminated the right to cast a provisional ballot if you end up at the wrong precinct, and ended a highly successful high school registration program. Local election officials also began removing on-campus voting stations, relocating them sometimes miles away. A federal Appeals Court overturned much of the law, saying it had targeted African Americans with "almost surgical precision."
Other states once deterred by the Voting Rights Act including Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama passed similar laws to limit acceptable ID. Alabama’s excluded Social Security cards, birth certificates, Medicaid or Medicare cards, and Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards. More than half a million voters were removed from Georgia's rolls in 2017, including over 100,000 who simply hadn't voted in recent elections or responded to a mailed notice. These laws and others similar created voting rate gaps of up to 24 points between white voters and voters of color, ones that didn’t exist before the new laws.
The rationale was to prevent voter fraud. But a five-year Bush administration crackdown convicted just eighty-six people of voter fraud nationwide, most of whom had simply made mistakes regarding their eligibility. The Save Act focuses on non-citizens voting, but even Project 2025 creator The Heritage Foundation found just 68 proven cases going back as far as the 1980s. While the most dedicated voters will find ways to register and vote, voter suppression laws are like adding hurdles to a running track. Top athletes can still surmount them. If you’re just a bit less skilled or dedicated, you’re likely to give up.
So yes, let’s warn of the SAVE Act’s specific destructive consequences. But let’s also talk about the anti-democratic history on which it builds, because this probably won’t be the last Republican attempt to deter the vote.
Paul Loeb’s books on citizen activism, like Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible Will Take a Little While, have over 350,000 copies in print, with a new edition of The Impossible coming out this fall. See paulloeb.org.
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