Failed casino magnate takes biggest gamble yet
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Eight lies Trump told to take America to war
It should come as no surprise that Donald Trump has piled lie upon lie to justify his attack on Iran in violation of international law, constantly shifting his rationale as one lie collides with another.
The following litany of lies reveals how Trump is responsible for fueling a burgeoning war in the Middle East.
Lie #1
Trump has said consistently that he opposes and would never involve the US in regime change and nation building, calling it a “proven, absolute failure.”
Reality: Under Trump in 2025-26, the US has sought regime change in both Venezuela and Iran by attacking both nations and deposing their leaders.
Former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was captured and brought to the US to face criminal charges, Trump stating that the US would “run” the country until a stable government could be formed. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the US’s attack on Iran, with Trump urging the Iranian people to rise up and oust the theocratic regime.
Lie #2
After the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2025, Trump said that the US had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities and completely destroyed Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
Reality: The bombing of the nuclear facilities did not destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. A US Defense Agency (DIA) report concluded that the strikes set back the program by three to six months. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director Rafael Grossi said that Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile was largely unaccounted for.
Had the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities destroyed its nuclear enrichment program like Trump said, why in 2026 was the US attempting to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran? Wasn’t that what the 2025 bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities already accomplished?
Lie #3
Trump claimed that Iran was actively building nuclear weapons as a pretext for engaging in bad-faith negotiations, ultimately leading to the US’s attack on Iran.
Reality: Iran was never building nuclear weapons. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress in March 2025 that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi stated the agency had “not found any proof” of an effort by Iran to build a nuclear weapon. The false justification for attacking Iran mirrored the justification for the US’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 based on the falsehood that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Lie #4
Trump said the massive US military build-up in the Middle East was intended to pressure Iran to negotiate a nuclear agreement, with diplomacy preferred over force.
Reality: Trump’s purpose in authorizing the massive US military build-up in the Middle East was obvious: to employ it. Attacking Iran was not a spur-of-the-moment decision but rather a long thought-out plan featuring a large, coordinated military attack on Iran conceived long before it was executed. The US was not going to amass that kind of military power halfway across the globe without intending to use it.
Lie #5
Trump claimed that he preferred resolving the issue of Iran’s nuclear program through negotiations and diplomacy.
Reality: Trump never intended to negotiate in good faith but rather to use the “failed” negotiations as rationale for the attack on Iran. First, Trump gave negotiations a scant two months to reach settlement while in 2015, the US and an international coalition took 20 months to complete a successful nuclear agreement with Iran.
Second, Trump knew the US’s “red line” negotiating position — that Iran could enrich no uranium after having enriched it for decades for domestic nuclear power — would never be accepted. Third, the US attacked Iran half way through Trump’s stated two-month negotiating window, a diplomatic solution never meant to be given a chance.
Lie #6
Trump claimed the US attacked Iran because it was a threat to America and the American people.
Reality: Iran poses absolutely no threat to America. First, it has no nuclear weapons’ capability and lacks the long-range missiles to reach the US mainland. Second, if it ever developed such missiles, attacking the country with the most powerful military in the world would ensure Iran’s annihilation.
Lie #7
Trump claimed US citizens are safer today due to the attack on Iran.
Reality: Since Iran posed no threat to the US, the attack on Iran didn’t make US citizens any safer. Instead, it could make them less safe through Iranian retaliatory bombing of US military bases and through potential terrorist activity in the US within Iranian-supportive sleeper cells.
Lie #8
Trump claimed the timing of the attack on Iran was necessary to eliminate “imminent threats” from a nation on the verge of developing nuclear weapons.
Reality: The timing had nothing to do with eliminating “imminent threats” which didn’t exist and everything to do with the looming 2026 mid-term elections. Trump’s purpose was two-fold: to try and score a huge foreign policy victory that he could ride all the way to the Nov. 4 election and to deflect focus on the economic woes he has created for the American people through his failed policies.
Trump’s lies that Iran was enriching uranium to build nuclear weapons and that it posed a serious threat to America provided the false justification for the US’s attack on Iran. That perfidious duplicity launched a series of horrific events with no end in sight.
Thanks to Trump’s lies, the US attacked Iran, resulting in the heartbreaking killing of more than 100 Iranian children whose elementary school was bombed. American soldiers have been killed by Iranian retaliatory strikes on US bases, and putting American “boots on the ground” in Iran is being contemplated. The outbreak of a region-wide war has already begun as civilian deaths have been reported in countries across the Middle East.
Thanks to Trump, a diplomatic settlement between the US and Iran that could have avoided all of the bloodshed and destruction was never given a chance. This is Trump’s war, and he bears responsibility for all of the human suffering that it is bringing.
- Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor.
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This horrifying right-wing demand sent a chilling message to us all
It probably shouldn’t surprise us. After all, intolerance and hate have always been the fuel that drives and sustains right-wing movements around the world and throughout history.
Now the hosts of one of the largest-circulation “conservative” podcasts in the country are calling for a Muslim commentator to be stripped of his citizenship and deported from America.
His sin? He called for the next president to take down the Hitler-style massive banners on the Justice and Labor Department buildings that feature Donald Trump’s face, and the new one on the Education Department with Charlie Kirk’s face. And, of course, he’s a brown-skinned Muslim. As Raw Story is reporting:
“Yeah, he’s just a repulsive creature,” said one of the guys filling in for the late hard-right crusader. “We gave him citizenship for some stupid reason, and he rewards us by dumping on an American icon and an American hero. Yeah, you know what? I’ll give my primary support to whoever says, we’re going to try to find a way to strip this person’s citizenship and send him back to some dump.”
“Yeah, we should, actually, we should,” his buddy agreed. “He’s a foreigner that, to Blake’s point, for some reason, in our stupid immigration system, he was allowed in. Then he’s allowed to come in here and smear the memory of Charlie Kirk, the legacy of Charlie Kirk.”
“And listen, those are the freedoms that have been bestowed upon him by a superior country and culture than his own,” he added. “And yeah, whatever, he’s British or whatever his, you know. But he’s a Muslim.”
“And so, yeah, we have a superior culture than Mehdi Hasan’s, and yet he’s come in here, and he’s been bestowed with the same freedoms that American citizens have long enjoyed.”
Mehdi Hasan is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and he’d absolutely destroy these two snowflakes in a debate. Which is why, of course, they’re not debating him but simply trash-talking him.
This neofascist call to use the power of government to punish a person for their speech is about as un-American as it gets. And it’s also right in line with the reactionary conservative impulse that goes back more than two centuries.
In the Adams/Jefferson election contest of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I point out in our book The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction and What This Means Today, partisan newspapers were absolutely relentless in their personal attacks against Thomas Jefferson.
John Adams fared better because, during the previous two years of his presidency, our second president had shut down around 30 anti-Federalist/anti-Adams newspapers and thrown their publishers, editors, and writers in prison for speaking ill of him. One died in jail, another fled the country, and others were financially destroyed. Adams even jailed the town drunk in Newark, New Jersey, for a comment he made to the bartender, making Luther Baldwin one of the most famous alcoholics in American history.
Then-Vice President Jefferson responded to a friend who asked, during Adams’ initial crackdown, how he felt about it all and he responded with a pithy expression of what has been, for most of America’s history, the true American credo:
“I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty.
“The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
When I was 16 years old, I published a little anti-war newspaper called The Jurist that a friend of mine and I distributed in our high school. My father — a fervent Republican activist — printed it on his mimeo machine, even though he totally disagreed with pretty much everything I wrote about the Vietnam War. In one issue I went too far, attacking the school’s principal for “suppressing our free speech”; he kicked me out of school.
It turned out well for me as I’d been on an advanced-track since Sputnik went up when I was in second grade, so I transitioned straight to community college that year, and my Republican father defended me all the way. As he would have defended anybody whose opinions differed from his.
Barry Goldwater would have agreed with my father (we went door-to-door for him in 1964 when I was 13), as would have most Republicans of that era. William F. Buckley welcomed lefties on his Firing Line show that Dad and I watched together every weekend.
But don’t try to tell today’s Republicans about pluralistic democracy or the importance of dissent in a free society. There’s nothing conservative about these right-wingers who embrace hate, violence, and the use of government force to shut up those with whom they disagree; that’s pure neofascist reactionaryism.
They and their Epstein-class billionaire backers will apparently be much happier if Trump can succeed in flipping America into a Putin-style autocracy and use the force of government to crush all the remaining anti-Trump voices.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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529 million reasons Trump and his bloodthirsty Camelot of buffoons dragged us into war
Do you ever get the feeling we’re being played like an out-of-tune violin, every minute of each day?
Take this war in Iran and its first week of airstrikes. Our clueless president and his even more bloodthirsty and incompetent Secretary of “War” are offended that people keep asking what the conflict is about and why we launched it when they don’t seem to have the first clue themselves.
First, it was about stopping Iran from developing nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S.
Then it surrounded a need for “regime change,” that ridiculously benign euphemism used instead of “violent government overthrow,” which sounds so much messier.
Then it was just basically, “They’re an evil, repressive country that’s the greatest state sponsor of terrorism.”
Finally, it became, “We’re looking to bring liberation to Iranian citizens.”
As if.
The ever-changing series of justifications leaves me wondering what’s next. Maybe, “Israel was upset that Iran is positioned just in front of it alphabetically and sought help in bombing Iran until it agreed to change its name back to Persia.”
It’s clear these morons had no plan, other than, “Blow up a lot of stuff because explosions are cool!” It’s as if Beavis and Butthead are running U.S. intelligence. There is no plan for the Iranian people. Basically, the marching orders are to bombard and eventually depart, leaving mass destruction and abandonment behind.
Atta’ way to build global goodwill, America!
Of course, attempting to distract from the Epstein files has to be near the top of any list of actual unstated rationalizations for this disaster, which is why I’ve dubbed the campaign, supposedly Operation Epic Fury, “Operation Epstein Suppression.”
What’s really going on remains anyone’s guess. Whatever pops into Trump’s head becomes the defining rationale until the following minute/hour/day, when it becomes something else.
This is what happens when you elect a sociopathic toddler with ADHD.
Iran has supposedly been two weeks away from having enough enriched uranium to construct a nuke for the better part of four decades. It’s always what we hear.
But back to Trump, our delusional and witless leader, now permitted to make unilateral decisions like which country to invade without much blowback from the increasingly compliant media, much less any explanation to the American people.
So we’re clear: the Iran bombing occurred under the cover of darkness, on a weekend early morning, in flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution.
But wait! As I write, yet another justification slips through: the claim that Iran planned to preemptively strike American forces and therefore forced our hand.
Gimme another 15 minutes — that will likely be refuted.
Let’s put it on the record that if Trump really wanted to destroy Iran, he’d declare himself its president and take over for a couple of months. Much more effective than bombs.
We must also remember that Trump was, per his 2024 campaign, the “Start No Wars President.” Then when that evaporated, he was the “No Extended Wars President.” Then early this week came the inevitable New York Times headline: “Trump Foresees Extended War on Iran as U.S. Adds to Forces.”
So much for that.
Uncertainty. Lies. Chaos. Corruption. The hallmarks of this administration in peacetime, now one in a war that will likely drag on long enough to both divert attention from Epstein (at least for a while) and toss the midterms into turmoil. Like everyone has predicted all along.
(And wait, oh yes, it’s now been another 10 minutes, and it seems there was no confirmation of the Pentagon having feared a preemptive strike. Never mind.)
And yet, there is more. It also emerged on Tuesday that one noncommissioned officer maintained he was directed to tell his troops Trump was “anointed by Jesus” and that war with Iran should be as “bloody” as possible to bring about Biblical end times — that the war was “all part of God’s divine plan” to bring about Armageddon.
This is what you get when your Pentagon chief is a rabid evangelical Christian/religious zealot/raging alcoholic. As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about without casting this as some holy war to justify merciless carnage.
On Sunday, the Save America Movement pointed out the following: “There has never been a military action in which the men leading it (overseen by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) have had less moral stature and integrity than this lot.
“Together, they are the unfittest of the unfit. A Camelot of buffoons, warmongers, and liars. They are a team of losers and felons, pedophile protecters, fascists, weirdos, religious nutters, and weapons-grade hypocrites who are playing a deadly game with young Americans’ lives.”
Add to this the fear that Iran is now highly motivated to lash out on our turf, leaving us concerned about terror attacks on land, sea, or air. On that score, the worst news is that a massive swath of our domestic security personnel is now more concerned with busting day laborers in Home Depot parking lots than defending the homeland.
Priorities, people.
I’d like to close with yet another possible incentive for when and why this war with Iran was launched: money.
It surfaced on Monday that the gambling website Polymarket found $529 million traded on bets predicting the day when the U.S. and Israel would attack Iran. It turned out Feb. 28 was correct. Six newly created accounts made more than $1 million on that prediction. Note: Donald Trump Jr. sits on the Polymarket advisory board.
Additionally, it’s instructive to note that the countries clamoring for government overthrow in Iran are the same ones that have enriched members of the extended Trump family, via direct gifts and shady deals.
When the man running the country openly operates a criminal enterprise out of the White House, it’s hardly out of the realm of possibility that he might launch a war to enrich himself and those around him. In fact, it would be completely on brand.
- Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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Right-wing activists desperately trying to tranquilize their own terrifying Frankenstein
Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN) invited Nick Shirley — the right-wing YouTube star who claims to have found widespread fraud in Minnesota’s safety net programs — to the State of the Union last week.
Unfortunately, finding fraud in our safety net programs is like finding a drunk in Dinkytown on a Friday night, but let’s set that aside for today.
One of Shirley’s fellow YouTubers, Tyler Oliveira, released a video last week in which he claimed, “I exposed New Jersey’s Jewish invasion.”
Here was Shirley’s response, the same week he was Stauber’s guest inside the citadel of American democracy: “EXPOSE IT ALL.”
Shirley’s cheer for an antisemite is a symptom of the ongoing crackup of the American right over its longstanding conspiracist problem.
Christopher Rufo’s shoddily reported piece about fraud in Minnesota safety net programs in the right-wing City Journal kicked off much of the mess we’ve been living through the past few months.
Even he must be worried about the right’s crashout, however, because he’s talking about it publicly.
“The Right’s collective brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy and algorithm-chasing.”
He’s since added details: “I’ve had multiple people approach me at events with conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk. The most deranged Epstein conspiracy theories are now mainstream. And multiple people in my personal network have had siblings or children go down the antisemitism rabbit holes.”
Which is funny coming from someone who pushed a preposterous story about Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats, with the intention of whipping up a pogrom on people whose crime was coming here to work and seek a better life for their families.
(Lest we forget: Vice PresidentJD Vance rationalized the cat hoax: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.)
Rufo is now desperately trying to shoot a tranquilizer dart into the Frankenstein the right created and nurtured.
The problem with a political philosophy based on racial hierarchies — aside from being morally repugnant — is that they’ll come for you eventually. Or, in this case, for your Jewish allies.
John Ganz, a historian who has tracked the right’s Nazi problem for years, explained the obvious flaw with the right’s “Somalis bad/Jews good” formulation last year:
“That ability to keep the coalition by saying: Be as racist as you want, be as hateful as you want — but against designated enemies who are OK. People ask a rational question: Why are those people off the table?
“And then the answer comes back: Well, because Christianity, or because Israel represents Western civilization — or some kind of rationalization like that. And the antisemites say: That makes no sense to us.”
Sure enough, right on cue, Nick Fuentes, America’s most famous neo-Nazi sympathizer, defended Shirley like he was one of his own:
“The conservative movement is falling out of love with Nick Shirley because he expressed support for Tyler Oliviera, who exposed fraud in the Jewish community. They actually believe that the rules just shouldn’t apply to Jewish people. The double standard couldn’t be clearer.”
The ugly discourse is not new. A trope of American history is some people saying other people aren’t real Americans, and that foreign adversaries are dumping their unassimilable people onto our shores — people who are dirty, corrupt, uneducable, violent and loyal to their countries of origin. Or maybe they are drunks or sexual deviants or believe in strange deities.
The ignorant lies change, but the sentiment stays the same.
For instance, on Bloody Monday in 1855, a mob of the American Party — now known by its more colloquial handle the “Know Nothings” — rampaged through Irish and German neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky, killing at least 22.
Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, Haitians, Indians, Afghans, Latinos and many more.
Charlatans have used “scientific” racism and phony anthropology to claim at one time or another that all of these people can’t be real Americans, and we should expel them or stop their immigration here. It’s a tradition as old as Ben Franklin fearing the “Germanization” of Pennsylvania.
The oppression of Black and Indigenous Americans — outrageous in its own right — is a slightly different issue, but needless to say, the “heritage American” crowd has a long history of dehumanizing them and blocking them from full participation in our democracy, too.
In Stauber’s own district a century ago, “Birth of a Nation” — the propaganda disguised as a film — helped unleash a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and robust chapters were organized in Grand Rapids, Hibbing and Virginia, as Iron Range historian Aaron Brown recounted a few years ago in the Reformer.
Their primary targets were Catholics and immigrants.
- J. Patrick Coolican is Editor-in-Chief of Minnesota Reformer. Previously, he was a Capitol reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for five years, after a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan and time at the Las Vegas Sun, Seattle Times and a few other stops along the way. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and two young children. Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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This catastrophic mistake may prove Trump's final undoing
Trump said Monday that the United States would continue attacking Iran for “whatever it takes.”
But what’s the “it” in that sentence?
He also said: “We’re destroying Iran’s missile capability” and “annihilating their navy” and ensuring that “this sick and sinister regime” in Iran “can never obtain a nuclear weapon.”
But how will we know when we’ve achieved any of this?
American intelligence officials say Iran has not tried to rebuild its main nuclear sites since the U.S. attack in June. Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium are still buried deep under rubble. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency says his agency has found no evidence that Iran resumed enriching uranium since June.
Yet even more U.S. forces are headed to the Middle East, and Trump says bigger waves of airstrikes are coming. He hasn’t ruled out sending in ground troops.
Neither Trump nor anyone else in his regime has provided any clarity about how we’ll know whether we’ve “won” this war.
He has no endgame. He’s given out different timelines and goals, depending on when and to whom he’s speaking. Asked by NBC News what his objectives are, he said, “Number one is decapitating them, getting rid of their whole group of killers and thugs.” He told the Washington Post, “All I want is freedom” for the Iranian people.
Trump told ABC News’ Rachel Scott on Sunday that he had a “beautiful plan” for Iran’s future. He told other outlets there were “good” candidates to take over, but later told ABC’s Jon Karl that the people he had in mind were all dead.
I can’t help thinking about the Vietnam War, which preoccupied much of my youth (and, since he’s almost exactly my age, presumably Trump’s as well). There was no clear endgame there, either.
The biggest difference between Trump’s Iran war and Lyndon Johnson’s in Vietnam was that during Vietnam, America had a draft — which meant the administration had to repeatedly justify the war to the American people. As that misbegotten war escalated and its justification became ever more elusive, it grew to become a central focus of American politics, eventually causing LBJ to drop out of the 1968 presidential race.
But Trump feels no pressure to justify or explain anything. He has no f---ing clue what he’s doing in Iran. He’s winging it. He believes he can somehow pull it off because he thinks he’s invincible.
It’s Trump’s M.O. He loves to create chaos because chaos allows him to improvise — to impose his own narrative on a flood of events, dodge responsibility for failures, take credit for successes, and create illusions of glory and victory.
But the chaos he’s ignited in the Middle East is so large that the narrative may already be out of his control. The conflagration is escalating and spreading too fast. Just three days in, he’s making conflicting and inconsistent decisions and providing conflicting accounts.
He assumed a war would be helpful to him. It would justify emergency measures at home. It would deflect attention from his multiple failures. It would make him seem larger.
But it is already making him smaller, more hostage to what’s occurring than leader, more Benjamin Netanyahu’s patsy than senior partner, another American president sucked into the giant maw of the Middle East.
Americans have short memories, but they do recall that Trump was reelected to accomplish three things.
- First, to get prices down. He hasn’t done this. Inflation is growing at an annualized rate of nearly 3 percent. Oil prices are about to go through the roof because of the war he’s ignited in the Middle East.
- Second, he promised to get control of the nation’s southern border. He’s done this by unleashing immigration agents inside America on people here legally, and doing so with such barbarity — including at least two murders — that most Americans think he’s gone too far.
- His third promise was to avoid foreign entanglements. He said during the 2024 campaign that he’d “break the cycle of regime change” and avoid “reckless” policies. He noted that toppling regimes without plans creates “power vacuums that are filled simply by terrorists.” He wanted to shift America away from being “the policeman of the world.” He repeatedly promised to “expel the warmongers” from government. On election night in November 2024, he declared, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
Trump has broken this pledge with astounding negligence. He has launched a war in the Middle East without a plan, without a strategy, and without any clear idea about where it leads or how it ends.
Even absent a draft, Americans will not tolerate this for long. If Trump’s War costs many American lives, they will not forgive him.
For all these reasons, Trump’s War may be his undoing. I pray it’s not also the undoing of America.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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A tragic cop killing revealed something especially chilling about this MAGA mover
Josh Hawley had me going.
When I first saw his tweet last Wednesday after two sheriff’s deputies were murdered near Springfield, Missouri, I thought we were in for another attack on the horrors of the political Left. Here’s what Hawley said:
“Two heroic deputies in my home state of Missouri were senselessly murdered by a thug with a long history of violence toward law enforcement. We need accountability for these soft-on-crime policies destroying our communities.”
Then, a few questions popped to mind.
- What soft-on-crime policies?
- Whose policies?
- And who’s getting held accountable by whom?
In case you haven’t been following Missouri politics, it’s quite the red, pro-MAGA state. Christian County, where this tragedy occurred, voted 76 percent in 2024 for Donald Trump. Hawley had a stint in 2017-18 as the state’s drive-by attorney general as he climbed the political ladder to his current seat in the U.S. Senate.
That begs the question of who owns the soft-on-crime policies alleged, without provocation, by Hawley.
On Friday, the shattered community of Christian County paid a richly deserved tribute to fallen heroes, Gabriel Ramirez and Michael Hislope, who were murdered protecting the people there. Both were murdered by Richard Dean Bird, a decades-long criminal who was killed in a standoff with law enforcement.
You won’t be hearing much about Bird, which is fine: He doesn’t deserve the attention. But if he hadn’t fit the most common profile of murderers in the U.S. — white, poor, male — you better believe that Hawley and others of his ilk would have made him a household name by now.
Can you imagine, in this environment, had Richard Dean Bird been an undocumented immigrant? Or worse yet, from Somalia or Latin America?
Instead, the main interest in Bird is why he was released from custody just the week before he killed two cops, on $50,000 bond after having been arrested on charges of second-degree burglary, unlawful possession of a firearm, and stealing. This is a man who had a miles-long rap sheet of convictions dating back to 2003 and had served seven years in Kansas state prison for battery against a law enforcement officer and fleeing police after firing a rifle at a deputy in 2014 in the Johnson County suburb of Kansas City.
Bird was granted bond by Judge Eric Chavez, a Republican who was elected to the Stone County bench in 2022. From all appearances, Chavez is a veteran of the local legal community who was likely following the bond laws as shaped by statutes passed by the Republican-led General Assembly and interpreted by the Missouri Supreme Court in 2019.
Chavez hasn’t been excoriated personally as “soft on crime” by Hawley or other Republicans. Nor should he be. But what do you suppose the story would have been if Chavez were a Democrat?
In that event, Hawley would have made certain that liberal Democrats owned the deputies’ deaths. And he would have laid the bond rules that allowed for Bird’s release at their doorsteps as well.
Inconveniently, those revised bond procedures were a matter of interest in the period Hawley was attorney general. Months after he left office, the state Supreme Court finalized Rule 33.01, which established release conditions that apparently made the granting of bond to Bird legally defensible.
That’s above my pay grade, but this isn’t: If those rules are now “soft,” Hawley had the loudest law-enforcement microphone in the state while they were being considered. Good luck finding a record of any tough-on-crime position he staked out at the time.
(Then again, Hawley apparently doesn’t have the sharpest recollection of Missouri these days. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, Fox Digital reported that Hawley described Christian County as “my home county” in a statement. Christian County is a three-hour drive to Lafayette County, where Hawley grew up in Lexington.)
The murders of Ramirez and Hislope should bridge any partisan divide as a tragedy that turns all stomachs. But Hawley chose the moment to make a cheap political point with his irrational “soft on crime” reference.
It’s of no solace that, in so doing, Hawley executed a remarkable self-own by calling out “policies” from his own watch — and administered by his own political party.
If Hawley wants accountability, he should start with a mirror.
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Trump just committed a naked crime — and the horrific reason is all too clear
Operation Epstein Fury — with a bonus to help Bibi get re-elected so he doesn’t have to face charges for his criminal behavior — is rolling on as Donald Trump ignores the constitutional requirement that only Congress can declare war.
He’s also violating the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that dictates the president, if he reacts to an actual attack on America like Pearl Harbor, must notify Congress within 48 hours and have authorization within 60 days. In this case there was no actual or even imminent attack against America.
To further confuse things, Trump is throwing the Iranian protesters under the bus by saying that he’s willing to talk with the Iranian regime now that Ayatollah Khamenei is dead, much like he crapped on pro-democracy voters and protestors in Venezuela when he kept that repressive regime intact after illegally removing Nicolás Maduro and promising democracy.
This conflict is also now spreading. Khamenei was to many Shia Muslims around the world something akin to what the Pope is to Catholics (there’s no equivalent among the Sunni Muslims). Imagine the Catholic world’s fury if a country had assassinated Pope Leo XIV: we’re now seeing Shia protests and outrage from Bangladesh to Pakistan to Lebanon.
And here at home, Trump is musing about using Iranian interference in our 2020 election as an excuse to issue an emergency executive order to seize control of the upcoming November midterm election.
Which is particularly ironic, given that the well-documented Iranian intervention that year was designed to help get Trump reelected (after all, he’d just torn up the JCPOA nuclear deal) and avoid a Biden administration from coming into power.
Four Americans are dead and five in critical condition because of Iranian retaliatory strikes, as are civilians in several other US-aligned countries in the region. Along with around 200 young people in Iran after we bombed a girl’s school and a gymnasium.
And it’s early days. As Winston Churchill famously said in 1936 about war:
“Once the signal is given, no one can predict how far events will go.”
America’s Founders and the Framers of our Constitution not only would have agreed with Churchill, but saw a president seizing war powers from Congress as an existential threat to the republic. On April 20, 1795, James Madison, who had just helped shepherd through the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and would become President of the United States in the following decade, wrote:
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”
Reflecting on the ability of a president to use war as an excuse to become a virtual dictator, Madison continued his letter:
“In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive [President] is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both.
“No nation,” our fourth President and the Father of the Constitution concluded, “could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Since Madison’s warning, “continual warfare” has been used both in fiction and in the real world. In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, the way a seemingly democratic president kept his nation in a continual state of repression was by having a continuous war.
The lesson wasn’t lost on Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, who both extended the Vietnam war so it coincidentally ran over election cycles, knowing that a wartime president’s party is more likely to be reelected and has more power than a president in peacetime.
And, as George W. Bush told his biographer in 1999:
“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as commander in chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”
Every Republican president since Reagan has had his own “little war.” Now it’s Trump’s turn, after all the times over the years he warned that if Barak Obama was ever in trouble he’d start a war with Iran to distract us:
“In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran.” (2011)
“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective…” (2011)
“@BarackObama will attack Iran in the not too distant future because it will help him win the election.” (2012)
“Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.” (2012)
“Remember what I said about @BarackObama attacking Iran before the election…” (2012)
“I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!” (2013)
Given that Baron, Don Jr, and Eric Trump all apparently suffer from hereditary bone spurs and no Trump has ever served as a “loser” or “sucker” in our military (and his grandfather came to America as a German draft-dodger), it’s unlikely this war will mean anything other than profit-making opportunities for the Trump children.
But it compounds his constant ignoring of constitutional limits on presidential power ranging from gutting federal agencies without authorization to having ICE routinely ignore court orders, flagrantly violate the Fourth Amendment, and daily lie to the American people.
Nobody invested in peace or democracy is mourning the death of the Iranian dictator or the possible unraveling of its theocracy. But must we do it in a way that breaks both US and international law?
Trump apparently thinks so; not only will it distract from the news reports that he allegedly raped at least one and maybe more 13-year-olds — allegations he denies — and his naked corruption and bribe-taking but it also carves another “screwed Congress” notch in his belt.
There was no attack on America, as required by the War Powers Resolution. There wasn’t even a serious possibility of an attack on America.
Madison and the Founders of his generation had it right: this is a naked crime by Trump and Hegseth against our Constitution and our laws and requires a strong congressional response such as impeachment.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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Trump just sent his MAGA promises to hell with a rash betrayal
Donald Trump is epically and furiously destroying … all of his 2024 campaign promises, causing MAGA to fume and the rest of the world to sweat.
The official name for his war with Iran, Operation Epic Fury, most aptly describes what is unquestionably Trump’s biggest, more ferocious, blood-boiling hypocrisy of all.
There is one through-line, from gas pumps to grocery aisles to the Epstein files to Epic Fury. The louder and more frequently Trump makes the promise, the more spectacular the inevitable betrayal.
This weekend, he jumped a shark.
Americans feel the disconnect in their proverbial pocketbooks. Trump promised lower prices and relief from inflation. Instead, inflation remains above the Federal Reserve’s target. Tariffs, Trump’s favored word until “war” came along, add pressure to consumer costs.
Grocery bills haven’t retreated. Essentials are still pricey. And now, with a widening war in the Middle East, energy markets are rattled. Iranian retaliation targeting infrastructure, including Saudi Arabia's biggest oil refinery, threatens to send gas prices climbing.
“Drill, baby, drill” doesn’t mean much when global supply lines are on fire and geopolitical instability is priced in at the pump.
The same with health care. Trump promised better and cheaper. Expired Affordable Care Act subsidies and rising Medicare and Medicaid costs belie it. There is no relief in sight. No legislation, no executive orders, nothing to address a quickening national crisis.
Then there are the Epstein files. Trump pledged full disclosure. Appropriately, that was a sick joke. What has occurred has been steeped in non-disclosure. Trump’s Attorney General and the abhorrent FBI director openly shield their boss.
And all of this — the high prices, the health care strain, the botched Epstein releases — are now outshone by his biggest hypocrisy, his biggest lie of all. Trumpism was never about “America First” or “start no wars.” It was about Trump as dictator and imperialist.
He pressed “go” on Operation Epic Fury and unleashed death, destruction and chaos throughout the Middle East. This war, its reasons still unclear, will not end in a week, or two, or five. That’s not what happens when there are no clearly defined objectives.
It’s not what happens when you have a liar and a hypocrite leading the charge. Trump has suggested the operation will last a couple of weeks. History will remember that whopper.
The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is dead. So are many other Iranian leaders. That’s a good thing but the Trump administration insists it isn’t “regime change.” Strange, because it sure looks like a governmental decapitation.
Adding to the symbolism of lies and double-crossing — and the alarm — is Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense who after Trump represents the ultimate “F.U.” to MAGA.
Trump promised no wars. Instead, he and Hegseth started a “War Department,” with Hegseth as “Secretary of War” and soldiers recast as “warriors,” committed to a “warrior ethos.”
The candidate who campaigned as the antidote to endless Middle East conflict now presides, with the woefully inexperienced Hegseth, over a conflict that risks expanding beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations.
Two lying, untrustworthy warmongers, who think peace is for sissies.
We are told this won’t be Iraq. It will be. We are told it will be limited. It won’t be. Contained. Not anymore. Strategic. Never was.
Americans have heard this before. Under George W. Bush, in 2003, Iraq was supposed to be quick and surgical. Not a quagmire. Not prolonged. Not generational. Oh, and Trump says Iranians should take to the streets and take back their government. In Iraq, Dick Cheney said U.S. forces would be welcomed as liberators. No similarity there.
Hegseth’s “this isn’t Iraq” is an icing of lies on top of a cake of prevarication.
If the promise of “no wars” morphed into Operation Epic Fury, why should the promise of “not a long war” mean only a couple of weeks? When trust is repeatedly broken, it doesn’t magically regenerate into truth, especially when dishonestly flows from Trump and Hegseth.
Hegseth is the embodiment of this transformation. On Monday, standing at the podium of what used to be the decorous Defense Department, he declared: “If you kill or threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down … and we will kill you.”
“Kill.” It was repugnant.
It was a word delivered not with staid solemnity but with insidious irreverence. Clearly, Hegseth thinks “kill” makes him sound like a UFC champion. It may play well with the bullies and bros.
But Hegseth’s hyper-hypocrisy continues. The same leadership that demands ironclad discipline from its “warriors” has skirted established security protocols, relying on insecure communications channels while lecturing the country about national security threats.
The pattern of pietism is entrenched and unmistakable. Lower prices became lingering inflation. Healthcare reform meant higher premiums. Transparency transformed into protection of the Epstein Class.
And “no wars” mutated into a renamed “War Department” and chaotic Middle East conflict.
Politicians break promises. All. The. Time. But Trump’s lies are worse, with profound implications for Americans and for the world.
You cannot campaign as the peace candidate — and yearn for a Nobel — then govern as a war president. You cannot decry “forever wars” while launching one.
MAGA voters must reconcile themselves to airstrikes, oil volatility, rising gas prices, and the possibility of a drawn-out conflict. They were told “America first.” Instead, they see America entangled abroad while costs rise at home.
Under Trump, America is never first. Trump is first, always. When peace made Trump look weak and like a loser — no Nobel — he became conqueror-in-chief. That’s a lie too.
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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Here are Trump's endgame options in his attack on Iran
Now that President Donald Trump has launched an illegal, unprovoked war of choice on Iran, the next question inevitably becomes: how does this end? Or, what are some off-ramps Trump can take to end it before the situation turns out of control?
There are three broad scenarios; the first and most likely is that Trump continues this until he gets some sort of regime implosion and then declares victory, while also washing his hands of whatever follows.
This has been very clear in internal conversations: no one wants to take responsibility for the aftermath. This is essentially the difference between regime change and regime collapse.
That’s why they didn’t want to do an Iraq War-style regime change where you are actively trying to install a new government. If you do that, its track record becomes your track record.
Indeed, if the US manages to kill a lot of the different leaders of the current system, there could be some sort of an implosion. Trump could declare victory even though you would likely have in that case severe instability, or potentially civil war.
Another scenario is that the Iranians continue to strike back and outlast Trump. The Iranian onslaught would start to become too costly for the United States with casualty rates increasing (possibly even on the American side), inflation worsens, and global markets become destabilized.
And then the pressure on Trump internationally, from the American public, and from his own base would start to become so strong that he would have to look for an exit.
At that point, he may actually take the deal that was on the table: a deal that is better than what Barack Obama managed to secure, and that Trump nevertheless rejected. He may take that and suddenly declare it a victory, saying: “Thanks to my bombing campaign, we achieved this.”
There is also a third scenario, that is the least likely, in which after a couple of rounds of attacks, both sides may feel they can go back to the negotiating table.
They might even go back to the same agreement that was on the table during the most recent talks. And both sides could frame that as a win. Trump can claim he bombed Iran and was very successful. The Iranians can claim they struck back and were very successful. And then they come to some sort of agreement.
However that would be difficult because there’s now absolutely no trust between the US and Iran.
But even if they did come to some form of agreement, it would be extremely difficult to implement, it would likely not endure, and it wouldn’t be anything more than essentially a ceasefire with a pretense of having a deal beyond that.
Meanwhile, Israel’s interest is in pushing the narrative that the negotiations were a ruse from the outset, and that this attack was already planned — because that narrative destroys America’s credibility as a diplomatic force, as a negotiator.
And the more you push the narrative that diplomacy was a lie from the outset, the more easily you can avoid any future negotiations.
I’m not convinced it really was a ruse from the beginning. There were elements in the US government who were sincere about the diplomatic path, but ultimately Trump fell for the type of pressure that he has proven himself to be far too susceptible to.
None of that makes what happened forgivable. It doesn’t make it legal. It doesn’t make it strategic. But we do have to recognize this: nothing would serve Israeli interests more than to completely destroy America’s credibility as a negotiating partner.
- Trita Parsi is Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute and an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign politics, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. He is author of "Losing an Enemy — Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy"; "A Single Roll of the Dice — Obama's Diplomacy with Iran"; and "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States." This article was adapted from Trita Parsi’s remarks during an appearance on Breaking Points
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Famed whistleblower delivers grim posthumous warning we cannot ignore
When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a “national security” insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.
Now, Ellsberg’s voice is back via a compelling new book. Truth and Consequence, being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.
“My father is dead now,” Michael Ellsberg writes in the book’s introduction, but “I for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.” Michael worked with his father’s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.
The book’s subtitle — offering reflections on “catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope” — could hardly be more timely.
Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.
At the center of Truth and Consequence are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.
“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.
“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”
“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.
He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who’d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the U.S. war machine. He’d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.
“After I released the papers,” he vividly remembered, “some people were afraid to write to me … to shake hands with me … to receive a phone call from me.” Three years later, his takeaway was: “Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.”
Ellsberg came to see grim downsides of society’s upper crust. He had graduated from Harvard and went on to get his PhD there. But in 1976 he wrote: “The function of an education at an elite university is to learn inattention and passivity, to learn to disconnect your daily work from the moral values of your family upbringing — sharing, love, trust, mutual dependence — and be part of maintaining a system of inequality, privilege, unnecessary suffering, war, and risk of extinction.”
The next year he wrote: “I have fallen out of love with the State and its Establishment, and I have regained a hopeful affection in the democratic ideal, process, and people who are untouched by power — those outside the base of the existing pyramid of obstruction, power, and privilege.”
And: “Most human-caused destruction, suffering, death, and enslavement (i.e., ‘evil’) is performed by men, at the direction of men. These are typically ‘normal,’ competent, personally agreeable and compassionate men who perform their acts in obedience to lawful orders – or, less often, in obedience to unlawful orders.”
Daniel Ellsberg in 2002. Picture: Christopher Michel/Wiki Commons.
1982: “Massacre is made doable by a chain of command that continually invokes habit, obedience, and career, as well as by leaders’ geographical and bureaucratic distance from the killing.”
Ellsberg had extensive firsthand experience in helping to fine-tune preparations for inflicting radioactive Armageddon, especially during the Kennedy presidency. Later, it was a role that haunted him.
“In this era of the potentially imminent extinction of most of life on Earth, there is now a moral dimension to every aspect of how one spends one’s life,” he wrote in 1977. “The foundation of all morality is that we must now live with awareness of the mortality of our species and the vulnerability of the Earth and all life.”
1985: “The future is not some place we are going to. The future is what we are creating every day. If we continue to prepare and plan for thermonuclear war, that is what we are going to get.”
By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. “Use of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence,” he wrote that year, “is a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated.”
And he added: “I have never before shrunk from violence — from imagining it, planning it, preparing for it. I have wanted, and I have gained, the respect of violent men. Now I want the respect of gentle women, gentle men, and children.”
1984: “Nonviolent resistance has a special power to raise the question ‘What can I do to change this situation?’ I have felt that power in my own life.”
1985: “One way of calling attention to a danger or an illegal practice is to take an action of obstruction, or symbolic obstruction, that will lead to your being in court. Once there, in the context of your defense you can raise issues of illegality, criminality, constitutionality, and danger.”
1986: “Nonviolent civil disobedience does not eliminate moral dilemmas, costs, consequences, and lesser evils. However, it does inspire a search for new ways of behaving, seeing, feeling, and being.”
1990: “Ask yourself, ‘Where is the environment where I can be showing moral courage now? My work? My family? My community?’ Find the strength and the moral courage to do what is right, without knowing what the effects may be.”
Ellsberg’s activism took him to jail many more times after he summed up his protest activities this way in 2006: “I have been arrested in non-violent civil disobedience actions close to 70 times, probably 50 focused on nuclear weapons: e.g. at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production facility, the Nevada Test Site, Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Facility, and the vicinity of ground zero at both the Nevada Test Site and the Vandenberg Missile Test Site. Other arrests have been for protests against U.S. interventions.”
Thirty-five years ago, at the time of the Gulf War, Daniel Ellsberg wrote in his journal: “There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.”
- Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine includes an afterword about the Gaza war. His new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy, is free in e-book formats.
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America First... to be sent to war
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
This terrifying Trump plot to steal elections is already underway
Recently, Steve Bannon told an audience:
“And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms … some in this room are going to prison — myself included.”
Now, it looks like Donald Trump and the people around him are seriously considering declaring an emergency to let them seize control of this November’s elections, according to reporting in the Washington Post:
“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”
Trump and the lickspittles and criminals he’s surrounded himself with are in a panic. If Democrats take the House and/or Senate in this November’s elections, they’ll have the power of subpoena so the regime’s crimes and corruption will be laid out for everybody to see. Some could even go to prison, including Trump himself.
He’s been basically screaming, “Do something!!!” at Republicans for the past year. It started publicly with his demanding that Texas and then other red states further gerrymander their elections to reduce the number of Democrats in the House.
In red states they’re purging voters in Blue cities from the rolls like there’s no tomorrow, and the GOP is trying to recruit “election observers” to challenge signatures on mail-in ballots on an industrial level. As reporter Greg Palast pointed out, this is how Trump took the White House in 2024; if it hadn’t been for over 4 million (mostly Black) fully qualified US citizens being purged or having their ballots rejected after technical challenges, Kamala Harris would be our president today.
But given how badly Trump’s doing in the polls today, even all these efforts don’t look like they’ll be enough to keep the House and Senate in Republican hands.
So now Trump toadies like Jerome Corsi (the creator of the Birther movement and the Swift Boat slurs, who’s been a guest on my program multiple times) have an idea: just imitate what Putin, Orbán, Hitler, and other dictators have done to hang onto power when they get unpopular: declare an emergency and use it to rig the election.
Yesterday, the Post detailed how MAGA-aligned activists are now openly discussing manufacturing or exaggerating a national emergency to justify Trump’s agents in the federal government to interfere in this November’s elections.
These aren’t fringe anonymous trolls on some obscure message board; they’re people operating in proximity to the president of the United States. Corsi arguably destroyed John Kerry’s chances in 2004 and lit the Birther fuse that catapulted Trump into political fame.
And they’re floating the idea that if normal democratic processes don’t produce the “right” outcome, they could help create a fake crisis to seize control of the election nationally.
If you’ve studied history — and you know I have — that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up.
Because this isn’t new, creative, or even uniquely American: it’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook.
In 1933, Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, went up in flames at the hands of a mentally ill Dutch communist who was probably maneuvered into the act by the Nazis. Adolf Hitler declared it “proof” of an existential communist threat. Civil liberties were suspended overnight. Gone in the blink of an eye were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble as Hitler’s goons began to round up his political opponents and throw them into his new concentration camp at Dachau.
Elections were technically still held, but under conditions so distorted they no longer qualified as free or fair in any meaningful sense, and the so-called “temporary” emergency became Hitler’s legal bridge to a permanent dictatorship.
Similarly, in Turkey in 2016, elements of the military tried to pull off a coup against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan while he was out of town. Erdoğan declared a national state of emergency and then kept it in place permanently. Tens of thousands of protesters were arrested. Judges and teachers were purged from their jobs, and media outlets were closed down for being “fake news.”
While emergency rule was in effect, Turkey held an election that transformed its parliamentary democracy into a hyper-presidential system tailored to give virtually all federal power to Erdoğan himself. It was the end of democracy in Turkey.
Vladimir Putin’s rise offers another variation. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings killed hundreds of Russians and the Kremlin blamed Chechen terrorists. The attacks propelled Putin, then a relatively unknown prime minister, into the presidency on a wave of fear and fury.
Putin then declared a state of emergency that expanded his police powers, gave him tighter media control, and let him seize control of the elections process. In the years since then, elections in Russia have become ritual rather than reality. The ballots are printed every few years, and the votes are counted, but the outcome is never in doubt.
Viktor Orbán in Hungary shows yet another model. He declared a “state of crisis” over migration by Syrian refugees in 2015 and kept renewing it long after migration levels collapsed. During the COVID pandemic, he got the parliament to give him the authority to rule by decree on an indefinite basis; it’s still in effect.
As a result, elections still happen (there’s one coming up), but the media landscape was completely taken over by Orbán-friendly billionaires (see: CBS, WaPo, LA Times, Fox “News,” Sinclair, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, and 1,500 rightwing radio stations). Orbán didn’t need to cancel Hungary’s elections; he simply reshaped the legal and political environment in which they happened.
There’s a common thread in all of this. The crisis wannabe dictators inevitably declare — real, exaggerated, or cynically manipulated — become the justification for seizing extraordinary powers. Those powers narrow dissent, intimidate opponents, and functionally rig the elections.
That’s why this shocking new reporting in the Washington Post is so alarming. When political actors like Corsi begin talking openly about declaring an emergency to override or interfere with elections, they’re not blowing smoke: they’re testing a classic dictator’s narrative.
They’re trying to figure out — and will learn from the national reaction to this Post reporting — whether they can persuade the public that normal election processes are too dangerous to trust. After all, in each of the cases I listed above, the machinery of democracy was used to hollow out democracy itself.
And they may not even have to manufacture an emergency: if Trump can sufficiently provoke Iran, they may activate their proxy network around the world and in the United States, and we could be facing a genuine crisis on the order of 9/11. This is one of the few ways to make sense of today’s massive military buildup in the Middle East.
The danger here isn’t just a fabricated catastrophe or a retaliatory strike by Iran, although those are pretty damn severe. It’s the normalization of the idea that if the electorate appears likely to choose “wrongly,” an emergency can justify changing the rules of democracy.
History shows us, over and over again, that when a nation loses its democracy to an aspiring autocrat, the language and strategy used is always the same. “The nation is under threat.” “The moment is an emergency.” “Normal rules must be suspended — just temporarily — to save the country.”
And in every case, “temporary” turned out to be the most dangerous word of all.
We’re now at that moment where influential figures are publicly contemplating that path, and the lesson from history isn’t subtle. The real emergency, in a constitutional republic, begins when leaders like Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan and Trump — and their toadies like Corsi, Bondi, Noem, and Gabbard — decide that elections themselves are the problem.
Multiple observers have noted that this plan is grossly unconstitutional. But so were Trump’s tariffs (which also used IEEPA emergency authority as their rationale), and the Supreme Court let him run with them for almost a year before stopping him.
Similarly, ICE goons kicking in people’s front doors and smashing their car windows to drag them off without a judicial warrant is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, but Trump’s agents continued to do it every day. Something being against the law or the Constitution has never stopped our convicted felon/rapist/insurrectionist president in the past.
This plot will only be stopped if it’s widely reported and an outraged public rises up in opposition. Call (202-224-3121) your elected representatives — Democratic and Republican — and let them know you’re onto this plot and won’t tolerate it. And that if they have any fidelity left to the Constitution and American values, they won’t either.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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