Opinion
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Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Trump declares open war on his true enemy
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
MAGA gets exactly what it voted for this Easter
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
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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