Trump's national security crackdown misses what's right under his nose
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Rats are jumping ship at Trump's miserable White House
While there is no doubt that Trump lives primarily in his own world of unicorns and devotion from nearly all, he apparently keeps at least one foot grounded in reality — a reality even he understands to be on the brink of breaking him.
Given that, Trump is reacting in predictable ways. After all, he has far more on the line than a simple election loss.
The result is a workplace environment that would get one sued in any other situation. And he has different rats, jumping the same ship.
The New York Times' Maggie Haberman has twice emphasized that White House staffers now understand they're walking on eggshells, with fear of flung china. Not just because the boss is mad; it is just as likely the boss is mad at them. According to Haberman, Trump is "not in a great place with his staff."
Most, or at least many, people want to move on.
Such a dynamic presents a major danger to any administration. To Trump, it might literally break the presidency beneath him.
There is the presumption that the people leaving carry a ton of secrets — stuff that hasn't yet leaked due to fear of lie detector tests. The concern about secrets spilling at the same time an inchoate Democratic Congress spelling change should be enough to chase a ton of people away, even if they could put up with the temper tantrums.
To Trump, there's another level of danger. Susie Wiles has run a tight ship with the most committed MAGA talent available. That competence now sees that working in the White House past this point may be weighing down resumes instead of the ultimate rocket it was once considered. Now note that the next level of possible hires understands the same thing. Wiles may be left literally having to hire the third string, and third stringers don't keep secrets as well, make mistakes the public sees immediately, and much, much more.
“Most people have decided that they want to go do something else.” On CNN, Haberman described the White House as “not a happy environment,” connecting some of Trump's frustration to the prolonged Iran war, leaks, and other problems confronting the administration. Haberman did add an important qualification: turnover has actually been lower than during Trump's first term, and the approach of a midterm election is traditionally a time when White House officials begin considering their exits.
So who is leaving? Just an assortment of folks one needs hanging around to get things done and protect that ship. For example, legislative-affairs director James Braid jumped the railing as the orchestra played. That's the main guy coordinating the White House and Congress communication and direction. The departure could prove deadly, since no one — and wow, meaning no one — needs Congress on the same page as much as Trump.
Struggling to believe Braid is that big a loss? Trump called him "critical" just recently. Well, now one will note how the White House responds to the loss of "critical" personnel; it could easily lead to a critical situation.
Joining Braid is Patrick Adams — deputy assistant to the president and White House press adviser, leaving in the last week. Wiles promoted Adams in the last year for his talent in preparing White House officials facing the press and their questions. Kinda weird, but Trump praised Adams on the way out, maybe, just maybe, as a sign to others that they're respected and needed.
The trouble for Trump is that his ratings and respect are in such a nosedive that that very same appreciation and respect may actually weigh down future prospects. Tough to tell: "He still liked you? You didn't protest inside?"
Another bail comes from an unexpected source and makes very little sense unless one is trying to protect a law license. Joseph diGenova, DOJ special prosecutor, resigned Sept. 10. Now, this isn't the highest White House position, but he may have had the most devastating anti-Democratic agenda. DiGenova combed the crumbs, trying to find enough "evidence" to prosecute those who sought to prosecute Trump. And he left with a vague: “It was an honor and privilege to serve the president and the department.”
Dude was five months into his job and perhaps worried about a five-year layoff from a law license. There is another, perhaps underreported, reason he may have left. Trump charged this man with the duty to prosecute his political enemies. It is not hard to envision diGenova thinking in the back of his mind, "If I come up with nothin' but bull spit and prosecute anyway, the next administration puts me first on the prosecution list.
Last, there's Paige Willey, deputy director of the National Economic Council/deputy assistant to the president, leaving at the end of the month. The White House called her a "loss for the entire team," but she's getting out while she still can to be a principal at Invariant. Willey represents the exact type of staffer who may have been looking at White House work, especially economic work, beginning to become an anchor on a resume, even among and amidst MAGA private sector.
So that's that, at least with accumulating rats. If you look at the folks packing their boxes, there's a striking correlation between job description and Trump fury. A guy who couldn't get Congress to play along with everything Trump demanded, someone who prepared others to play the press (must be a real, real issue with Trump booting MS NOW, CNN, and Politico), a guy who was supposed to play Trump enemies, and a woman involved in playing numbers within economic policy.
If you had to make a list of issues currently not playing for Trump, making the White House a particularly ugly environment, it would be awfully tough to find a better evidentiary sample platter. A buffet perhaps, served as the U.S.S. Titrumptic takes on water.
Speaking of which. If Trump ever had reason to toss plates into walls, it'd be today or tomorrow, over understanding what his ratings mean going into the midterms. Given that the man is not known for patience, calm, or discernment, he is surely acting out as he always has.
As has been said here repeatedly, Trump's only true north is that things always get more extreme. Surely his staff knows better than anyone. If the White House is ugly, terrifying, loud, and smelly now, wait until after the midterms. Maybe this time it's a ketchup bottle, banging off two gold eagles on the way to the wall.
It seems staffers sure know it. Given the context, there soon may be more ship than rats.
Jason Miciak is a Raw Story Columnist, a former editor at Occupy Democrats, author, consultant, attorney, and single parent girldad. Please follow on Bluesky, and he can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com
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Swooning Trump's acting like a lovesick schoolgirl
Anyone with a late-teen daughter needs only to say the name "Finn Wolfhard," one of the actors on Stranger Things, to see a human lose all higher function: linear thought, discernment, self-respect. It's all out the window as she contemplates being the center of a boy god's attention.
Though it's likely that everyone has seen a similar reaction from somebody in their life, it isn't that often that one can flip on a screen and see the vapors flowing from Donald Trump, entirely overwhelmed in the presence of someone with even more of an "it-factor" than him (at least in Trump's mind), someone who makes Trump's breath shorten, sounding like a fanboy.
It is also extremely unseemly given who it is that elicits such Trumpian mindless flirtation. Trump gave what the Associated Press calls an unusually elaborate gesture by meeting Xi's plane on the red carpet; something Trump emphasized when he wrote: “I met President Xi at the plane (Airport!) yesterday, and he looks strong, vibrant, and fit - Better than ever. Madam Xi, of course, BEAUTIFUL! President DJT."
There is no higher compliment in Trump World than "looking" better than ever.
Try to imagine Trump saying the same about any world leader from a democratic and respected country: Canada, France, Australia, South Korea, Germany... Can't do it, can you? In order to envision a similar reaction, we would have to imagine a mogul with so much money it glazes Trump's eyes, and yet a mogul who needs absolutely nothing that Trump has to give, and that's tough to envision. The Trump-Musk, Trump-Bezos, Trump-Ellison world: the relationship is too symbiotic, with each side switching between host and parasite; no puppy love there.
Given just how "weird" it is for Trump to treat anyone with respect, it's worth looking into what drives the type of attraction that appears, from the look on Xi's face, to either bore or even annoy the Chinese leader. It must also be pointed out that we see Trump extend the same fanaticism toward Putin, Mohammed Bin-Salman (The Saudi Butcher) and, to a lesser degree, Kim Jong Un.
Since we know that Trump doesn't feel true kinship or true respect, it must be that these people have something he desperately admires and deeply wants for himself. This is where the attraction becomes self-evident.
In the same way that a dad can watch interviews of Finn Wolfhard and say, "Okay, I get it, he's awfully charming," one need only look at the one thing common among each member of Trump's boy band: they all embody unfiltered power, feeding Trump's original sins — lust for hurting those who question or embarrass him, gluttony in that nothing is ever enough, jealousy, greed, and the greatest of all, pride, pride, pride.
Every member of Trump's quartet has ordered opponents killed, often their own citizens who are merely personally critical. Trump's answer? At a minimum, Trump has killed purported drug runners by missile, finishing off some swimming beside a busted boat (by proxy, possibly a war crime near the top). But just as powerful in this country, Trump "killed" access to him by networks he deemed too critical, suffocating one of this country's most cherished values: freedom of the press and freedom of speech. A political murder on Pennsylvania Avenue.
He also destroys the lives of immigrant families with an iron fist, sending moms and dads away, many after living here for decades. He kills funding for institutions that demand a diversified student body or workforce. Not technically "murder," but perhaps actions just as devastating. He uses what he can, including pardoning friends.
But it doesn't end there, of course. Does anyone think there is a committee or a court to review a Putin, MBS, or Jong-Un plan to build a new wing and ballroom? Pffft. And given that Trump sees himself as the fifth Beatle, he orders a ballroom to be put up, a triumphal arch in his honor — all those things the countries he admires have.
* Momentary pause. The United States eschews over-the-top old-world/kingdom buildings. The United States is supposed to be a young country in comparison to the great traditional European and Far Eastern nations. An understated office in an understated home office, no needless gilded gold, with tents for big supper parties, is the best of America. Trump's envy doesn't just show up in power.
But power is where his kowtowing really takes a toll. We know that Russia provided satellite data that helped Iranians target Americans. We get an anti-Ukraine message from the White House and not a peep about blowing Russia's doors off if done again.
Through a highly suspicious "error" in the shipping of F-35 parts from Australia intended for repair in the United States, the package somehow got routed through South Korea and, from there, Hong Kong. Once the parts arrived in Hong Kong, the Chinese government took control of these highly, highly sensitive parts of the plane (canopy and bomb door, critical to stealth), and China has not given them back... for nearly four months. Moreover, that decision to keep the parts could only come from the very top, the guy who looks "better than ever!" on the red carpet.
It is bad enough that corporate/national espionage may have taken place, benefiting China — that has yet to be proven. What is established is that any self-respecting American president would have been apoplectic over the bold move to simply keep the parts, which are the property of the Australian government but critical to Lockheed Martin and the United States military.
Try to imagine Trump's reaction if Canada kept the parts? Germany? Ukraine? Trump would be venomous in such a situation. But President Xi "is [his] friend," who treats Trump so well, and so Trump has to be much more careful to not shake that friendship. Trump's fan status leaves him needing that friendship, that stage; he wants to be the American Xi Jinping, leader for life.
The irony, of course, is that these other leaders once pandered to the American president's favor, thinking that personal relationships would cover over some animosity. It didn't work with any other president, with the possible exception of W. Bush's old "friendship" with the House of Saud and the Kingdom. The United States' president held the most powerful position; even if temporarily, one could count on the next one carrying out long-held U.S. policies.
Not with Trump, and that's where his fanboy status really hurts. Russia can give Iran satellite data of our troops; China can, for all intents and purposes, steal some of the most closely held American secrets. MBS can say that Saudi Arabia may immediately start building nuclear weapons. And North Korea has total freedom to send troops to Russia and can continue refining its nuclear weapons.
More irony, and this is just sad. Trump accused China of helping the Democrats "steal" the election from him. He accused China of ripping us off in trade, and it used to be his boogeyman for anything people believed involved Russia.
The U.S. relationship with China was always, always complicated by mutual needs and mutual animosity. But it is stunning to see Trump placating a man whom he accused of stealing the 2020 election (NO bigger sin in Trump's world) and really stealing our biggest secrets. Yet it's our guy who rolls out the red carpet with sea bass on the menu for a state dinner. He wants Dr. Fauci in prison.
This is what happens when fanboys lose their breath over their heroes, get giddy wanting a picture taken alongside them, attention. The difference with teens is that none would immediately toss their family and values away for lunch with Finn Wolfhard. Trump only values power, and he is a family of one, ever willing to throw his self-respect aside in pursuit of more.
The American family never factored into the equation.
Jason Miciak is a Raw Story columnist, past editor of Occupy Democrats, an author, attorney, consultant, and single parent girldad. Please follow on Bluesky, and he can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com
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Republicans pulled a bait-and-switch with one man's death
A man is dead in western Kansas.
Erlin Y. Lagos-Gonzales, a Honduran citizen living in Garden City, has been charged with voluntary manslaughter in the Aug. 31 death of Adonis Edgardo Aguilar-Juarez at a livestock facility in Kearny County. A federal immigration judge had issued Lagos-Gonzales a final order of removal in July 2025. He remains presumed innocent unless the state proves the charge.
Those facts are serious enough on their own. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach immediately gave them a broader political meaning.
“This killing never should have happened,” he said, before arguing that law-enforcement agencies should collaborate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to locate and remove people with final removal orders.
The policy connection was not inferred by critics. Kobach himself made it. One charged homicide became the evidentiary vehicle for a general claim about immigration enforcement.
That is where the hypocrisy begins. When a native-born American commits a murder, we generally understand the concept of individuality perfectly well. We ask about motive, rage, domestic conflict, ideology, drugs, mental illness, opportunity or the peculiar facts of that person’s life. Citizenship is rarely offered as the explanation. We do not normally treat a citizen’s violence as evidence that citizens, or white Americans, or white men, are collectively dangerous.
But when the accused is an undocumented immigrant, the individual’s immigration status can suddenly become the headline, the explanation and the policy prescription all at once.
The aggregate evidence does not justify that asymmetry. A peer-reviewed study using unusually detailed Texas arrest data found that undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens across violent, property and drug offenses.
A later National Institute of Justice-funded report cautioned policymakers against linking crime increases to unauthorized immigrant populations without robust evidence and found no significant association between estimated unauthorized immigrant population size and arrest rates after accounting for known correlates of crime and robustness checks.
One horrific case does not erase those denominators.
Chapter seven of my book makes the double standard concrete by naming native-born white offenders whose crimes are seared into American memory: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Dennis Rader, Adam Lanza, Dylann Roof, James Holmes, Scott Peterson, Chris Watts, Timothy McVeigh, Patrick Crusius, Robert Bowers and Stephen Paddock. Beyond that numbered list: Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, James Alex Fields Jr. and John T. Earnest.
Their crimes were monstrous. Yet their whiteness and citizenship did not routinely become a generalized policy category called “white male crime.” The individual remained the individual. That privilege of individuality is exactly what disappears when the defendant is an immigrant or another racialized outsider.
Another reality makes the criminal-immigrant stereotype especially simplistic. Undocumented people often have powerful reasons to fear contact with law enforcement.
Research on Latino communities has found that greater fear of deportation is associated with a lower likelihood of reporting crimes and lower confidence in police and courts. Other scholarship about migrants with irregular status likewise documents fear that contact with police can expose them to immigration consequences.
This does not mean undocumented people never commit crimes. It means the common picture of undocumented immigrants casually embracing conduct likely to attract police attention ignores a basic feature of undocumented life: Official attention can carry consequences that most citizens never have to contemplate.
That fear also creates a public safety complication that slogans erase. If immigrants are afraid that reporting a crime, appearing as a witness or cooperating with police may expose them or someone in their family to immigration enforcement, crimes can go unreported and investigations can become harder. The research is not perfectly uniform, and undocumented communities are not monolithic. But the existence of this documented fear is relevant to any serious claim that more entanglement between local policing and immigration enforcement automatically makes communities safer.
This is where the cognitive science matters. Human beings are not spreadsheets. We process vivid stories more easily than denominators. We form in-groups and out-groups. We give familiar people more benefit of the doubt, and we are more likely to treat a frightening act by an outsider as information about the outsider’s group.
System-justification research adds another layer: When people perceive the social order as threatened, they become more inclined to defend familiar hierarchies and explanations. My book calls the related process “meh relegation”: inconvenient information gets pushed into the cognitive background because the emotionally satisfying story feels more real.
That mechanism is politically universal.
Republican voters are not uniquely susceptible to it, and neither are Democratic voters. But political identity matters because messages from trusted in-group leaders can arrive with built-in credibility. Here, a Republican attorney general deliberately connected a homicide committed by a Honduran national to a broader immigration-enforcement argument.
We cannot establish Kobach’s private mental state or whether he consciously intended to exploit racialized fear or cognitive bias from the statement alone. But the rhetorical structure is inescapable: a vivid death, an outsider, a threat narrative and a policy demand — without the comparative crime-rate evidence that would allow citizens to evaluate the generalization.
That deserves scrutiny because Kobach is not merely a campaign surrogate or television commentator.
The Kansas Attorney General Office’s own website describes Kobach as the state’s “chief legal officer and top law enforcement official.” The office includes the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. When the state’s highest law enforcement official makes an empirical public safety claim, the evidentiary standard ought to be higher than the emotional force of a single case. The more powerful the office, the higher the ethical responsibility to distinguish a tragedy from a trend.
None of this minimizes Aguilar-Juarez’s death. If the state proves Lagos-Gonzales committed voluntary manslaughter, he should be held accountable under the law.
If federal authorities failed to execute a valid removal order, that failure can be investigated on its own terms. If Kansas wants to evaluate whether a particular form of ICE cooperation improves public safety, it can examine actual outcomes. Those are legitimate questions. What is not sound reasoning is using an alleged act as though it proves a proposition about millions of people while comparable crimes committed by native-born white Americans remain resolutely individual.
There is also an ethical question here that cannot be answered by crime statistics alone. At what point does using a person’s death as the emotionally potent substitute for aggregate evidence become more than ordinary political rhetoric?
When a public official knows or has ready access to the denominator, the comparison group and the contrary research, but presents the anecdote without them, constituents are entitled to ask whether grief is being used to do persuasive work that the evidence itself cannot do. That question is especially serious when the speaker is the state’s top law-enforcement official.
Look again at what is easiest to lose.
The best comparative evidence does not show undocumented immigrants to be more violent than native-born citizens. Undocumented people often have reasons to avoid law enforcement contact and can be reluctant to report crimes because of deportation fears. The long list of spectacular native-born white violence has never produced an equivalent presumption that one white offender represents white Americans generally. This particular Kansas case, however tragic, cannot supply a denominator it does not contain.
Do you see how powerful these impulses are? Even when you now know the evidence, can you feel how easy it is to just “meh” away the truth because the original story — foreign criminal, dangerous immigrants, more enforcement — is simpler and more emotionally satisfying?
The frightening anecdote still feels more real than the denominator. The outsider still feels more representative of his group than the insider. That is precisely the cognitive vulnerability my book describes. The first defense against it is to recognize the move when it happens.
Rory Bahadur is the author of “A Critical Race Approach to Systemic Inequity” and the James R. Ahrens Professor of Law at Washburn University School of Law but his views are his own and do not represent those of Washburn University. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.
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Trump has dirt on this senator — and he'll rain hell on her if she steps out of line
Years ago, I worked with a person who habitually used the word “concerned.” They had a junior role on our team but, nevertheless, constantly interrupted meetings with her “concerns.” They'd come to me expressing “concern” for how something didn’t meet their satisfaction, always “concerned” about being “concerned.”
It drove me crazy. Eventually, she was moved to another team because I was “concerned” she was affecting my mental health and, more seriously, the momentum of our team.
Maybe that’s why Sen. Susan Collins gets on my nerves. She frequently uses phrases like “concerned,” “deeply concerned,” or “very concerned” to signal her disapproval of controversial actions or statements by presidents and fellow politicians, particularly Donald Trump, without breaking ranks to take strong legislative or punitive action.
It smacks of wimpiness, an inability to have a backbone, and when it comes from Collins, it's a mealy-mouthed way to make her sound like she gives a damn when she really doesn’t. So, thank God, Mainers are getting more “concerned” about Collins being their senator for the next six years.
She shouldn’t even be in this election at all. Thirty years ago, Collins promised she would serve just two terms. Three decades later, she is still here. Still “concerned” about a host of issues, without actually having the fortitude to do anything about her “concerns.”
Unquestionably, she has become an entrenched creature in the slimy swamp that is Washington, practicing the exact kind of backroom, self-serving wheeling and dealing that should raise serious concerns about her honesty, integrity and morality.
First and foremost, and the most recent example, is a damning investigative report by ProPublica that recently exposed what Democratic challenger Troy Jackson rightly called "corruption of the highest order." The investigation unsealed internal records revealing a sprawling, pay-to-play operation involving defense contractor Navatek.
The contractor allegedly funneled an illegal $150,000 donation into a pro-Collins super PAC. In return, Collins used her immense legislative power to deliver millions in taxpayer-funded federal contracts straight back to that very donor.
It is a classic Washington swamp deal, by an embedded creature of the swamp. And who helped bury the initial FBI investigation into this alleged bribery scheme? None other than Donald Trump and his administration.
Now that this has been put into the public record, ask yourself this question: “Why hasn’t Susan Collins been more vocal, more angry, more energized in speaking out against Trump, and against the rot, destruction and diminishing of our democracy?”
Well, I don’t think I have to spell it out for you, but I will. Trump has her in a sort of blackmail situation, that he likely has with other members of Congress. If you speak ill of me, I will rain down campaign finance violations upon you.
She’s denied that there was any wrongdoing, but I don’t believe her for a second. She’s been a fraud and phony and mealy-mouthed defender of Trump from the get-go. In fact, she mirrors him in other ways, which makes you wonder if she’s Trump lite.
In 2012, Collins’ reported net worth was actually in the negative, languishing around negative $255,000. But after years of wielding massive leverage on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, her mandatory federal disclosures reveal her personal wealth has ballooned up to an astronomical $9.6 million.
Her stock and bond portfolio alone has surged too, heavily packed with blue-chip tech giants, corporate securities, and aerospace companies.
It makes you wonder if Navatek is the only other company that benefits from a financial arrangement with Collins. I’m not saying there are others, I’m just pointing out that it would be a bit unusual if this is just a one-off. When it comes to campaign donations, and when your coffers are empty, you’ll fudge around the outskirts of the law to improve your lot.
And why wouldn’t Trump protect her when she’s been a solid vote for him? Collins has been his most dependable legislative rubber stamp. While she desperately tries to market herself to Mainers as an independent, "pro-choice moderate," her actual voting record tells a devastating story. CQ Roll Call verified that Collins voted in lockstep with Donald Trump’s stated positions a staggering 94.6% of the time during 2025.
When Trump needed to demolish the federal government, Collins was right there to greenlight his most radical picks. She voted to confirm Trump's controversial budget director and Project 2025 architect, Russell Vought. You would have to be an obtuse idiot to confirm Vought and not think he wasn’t going to run the federal budget based on his extremist views expressly laid out in Project 2025.
Collins might as well have voted for another wacko to run government intelligence. Oh wait, she did. She voted to approve Tulsi Gabbard to oversee the nation's core intelligence agencies. One of the reasons she supported Gabbard was because “Ms. Gabbard addressed my concerns regarding her views on Edward Snowden.”
Oh, there go those concerns again!
But her ultimate betrayal of Maine women and families remains her monumental vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Now, you would think that she would vote against him because Mainers were concerned about him.
But her concerns lay elsewhere. She voted for him citing “concerns” with the “special interests” that opposed Kavanaugh from the onset and misrepresented him, i.e., Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s.
And in hindsight, Collins still refuses to apologize. Recently, she doubled down on her betrayal, stating on the record to the Portland Press Herald, "I do not regret that vote," and even admitted in an audio recording obtained by The New York Times that she "would vote for him again."
She clearly has no concerns whatsoever about what her vote for Kavanaugh unleashed. She clearly has little concern about watching her wealth balloon while middle-class Mainers struggle with high gas and grocery prices caused by a woefully incapable and corrupt president Collins supports nearly 95% of the time. And she doesn’t seem to be too concerned about ProPublica’s recent expose.
Susan Collins' “concerns” are the biggest package of BS in American politics, and Mainers should have zero concern for her on November 3rd.
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Underwater Trump decides America's freedom is going to drown with him
President Donald Trump knows almost every poll shows him way underwater as the Republicans head into the midterm. He's decided America's freedom is going to drown with him.
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
A hellbent Republican's corruption crusade just blew up into a scandal of his own making
Republican state Sen. Jake Hoffman set out to expose Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ alleged pay-to-play mess and instead stepped into a money-making scheme of his own.
Hoffman is now backpedaling subpoenas he issued last week against Hobbs, Attorney General Kris Mayes and others to appear before his legislative committee. He’s blaming the “crooked media” for pointing out that he’s pocketed more than $1.2 million to help defeat Hobbs.
On Monday, Hoffman practically called off his legislative hearing — or, more accurately, his government-sponsored show — that had been scheduled for Sept. 29.
Instead, he appointed former Arizona Supreme Court Justice Andrew Gould as “special counsel” and transferred the hearing to fellow Sen. David Farnsworth’s Appropriations Committee. No word yet when a new hearing will be scheduled.
“This transfer follows attempts by Governor Hobbs’ allies to discredit the investigation before a single witness testified or one subpoenaed record was produced,” Hoffman said in a press release.
No, he discredited himself by trying to use his government post to target the incumbent governor whom he’s getting paid handsomely to defeat in November.
Hoffman’s advertising company is on Turning Point USA PAC’s payroll to help Republican Andy Biggs defeat Hobbs.
Just a few days before Hoffman announced the subpoenas, his company received nearly $550,000 from Turning Point USA, according to The Arizona Republic.
Did he really think nobody was going to bring that up? Laughable, if not for the seriousness of the matter.
Quotation
Jake Hoffman discredited himself by trying to use his government post to target the incumbent governor whom he’s getting paid handsomely to defeat in November.
At the heart of the issue are legitimate questions over Sunshine Residential Homes, a state contractor, getting a $4 million annual rate hike to provide care for foster children.
That hike played out while company owner Simon Kottoor and others connected to his company gave $580,000 to Hobbs and the state Democratic Party.
Republicans, including Sen. T.J. Shope accused Hobbs of pay-to-play politics and demanded an investigation.
Attorney General Kris Mayes opened an investigation two years ago and recently concluded that there was insufficient evidence of a quid pro quo to charge Hobbs criminally.
Hobbs has maintained she wasn’t involved in awarding Sunshine Residential Homes a bigger contract.
Separately, the state Auditor General’s Office, with help from Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, is investigating, too. And Republicans in the state House of Representatives have also hired a lawyer with Trump ties to investigate, but there is still no word on when they’ll release their findings.
I previously wrote that Hobbs may be cleared criminally, but politically and ethically, the Sunshine deal with the state still stinks.
Indeed, huge political donations that result in lucrative business for the donor stink and corrupt the political process, no matter how you look at it.
What Hoffman did was to further expose the rot underneath Arizona elections and in doing so he has perhaps given Hobbs a pass.
Sunshine Residential’s owner clearly donated a lot of money expecting a much bigger contract in return, and he got it.
But now, who’s the public going to believe?
Hoffman, who turned all this into a nasty circus to defeat political rivals using government’s resources while pocketing lots of money in the process?
I think not.
Are they going to believe Senate President Warren Petersen, who has blasted Mayes’ decision while he’s trying to unseat her and letting Hoffman’s use his legislative powers to mount an attack against her?
I think not.
Ultimately, what these Republicans accomplished was nothing more than to expose their desperation in a tough year for Republicans and expose their own rot.
Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.
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Putin's secret dirt on the GOP could be just weeks from being discovered
Donald Trump has been owned by Vladimir Putin since the late '80s, and that’s why things are so terrible everywhere right now.
It all sounds like something out of the TV show The Americans, but it’s actually true.
And Republicans have known it all along, because there was a time (2015) when they spoke truthfully about Trump. In this clip from September 2015, Matt “CPAC Groper” Schlapp tells MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell that, “Republicans don’t have a clue” about who their 2016 nominee would be — but he seemed pretty certain it wouldn’t be Trump because he lost badly to both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in the polls.
They were also expecting Joe Biden to announce his candidacy, but instead, the then-vice president chose to be with his family while his son, Beau, was battling brain cancer.
If you had told anyone on that panel that Trump would not just be their nominee, but their de facto king for the next decade, they would’ve laughed in your face. Trump was still a joke of a candidate at that time, an entertaining distraction who said terrible things about the media and the country, and yet no one challenged him until it was far too late.
His Daddy Vladdy had trained him fairly well by then.
Trump had first visited Moscow with his wife, Ivana, in July 1987 to look at potential sites for a joint-venture hotel project near the Kremlin. The building deal never happened, which is on brand for Trump’s losing track record. Soviet operatives, including Putin, flattered Trump during his visit and viewed him as a target for “cultivation or influence,” according to a 2017 report from Politico (yes, the same Politico that’s now been banned from the White House Press Pool, which I’m sure is just a weird coincidence).
The savvy Putin immediately recognized all of Trump’s weaknesses during their early encounters, then exploited them all to his advantage. He groomed and breadcrumbed Trump, doling out small pieces of praise for the unloved poor little rich boy who craved attention at all times. The infamous Steele Dossier revealed that the Kremlin had been “cultivating” Trump for “at least five years” before he shocked the world by somehow defeating the far more experienced (and, therefore, a far bigger threat to Russia) Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Remember when Trump asked Russia for help in defeating her in front of the entire world? "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said during a press conference on July 27, 2016.
At the time, the media had no idea what to do. Was he joking? Was he being serious? Beholden to ratings over truth, too many of them let it go. At the same time, Trump used Twitter to flood the masses with Russian Propaganda Rule #1: repeat a lie over and over until it’s accepted as fact. Trump infected his followers first, growing his MAGA cult as he compromised his cronies in the GOP, and he has never stopped using the tactics he was carefully taught.
Trump’s blatant ask occurred right around the time Russian hackers were able to access both the RNC’s and DNC’s email servers, but only released what they had on the Democrats. It’s almost as if Trump knew exactly what they were doing. And that’s how Putin used Trump as a subhuman bridge to compromise his remaining critics in the Republican Party.
Blackmail is a hell of a thing, isn’t it?
I don’t know about you, Dear Reader, but I would never commit treason against my country for any reason. There’s no amount of money you could offer me to turn, no threat you could make against my loved ones or me. I’d just call a press conference and tell the world that some high-ranking official threatened me unless I turned traitor. But then again, I don’t have any crimes in my past captured on grainy video or anything. Nobody could suggest I’d stepped outside the law and that it would be worth my while to stay quiet.
Whatever Putin has on the GOP, it was bad enough for Rand Paul to hand-deliver a love note from Trump to Daddy Vladdy in 2018.
It’s bad enough that multiple members of the current regime have made countless trips to Moscow while deliberately alienating all of our global allies. It’s why Trump repeatedly threatens other nations while toying with pulling the U.S. out of NATO. It’s allowed Trump to openly join forces with another Putin puppet, Benjamin Netanyahu, to flatten Gaza.
Trump has already vandalized Washington to make us look as weak as possible on the global stage as a 250th birthday present for Daddy Vladdy, and RFK Jr. is helping him thin the American herd.
Maybe someday we’ll find out what the Russians dug up on the Republicans that was awful enough for them to commit treason against the United States of America, because that’s what happened. Aside from their names being in the Epstein Files along with Trump’s, what could be so bad that Mike Johnson just shut down the House until after the midterms?
When Democrats get our full Congressional majority back, I expect them to keep investigating the GOP’s deep ties to Putin.
Russia, are you listening?
Do svidaniya, traitors.
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Tantruming Trump's threats just hit his own fans between the eyes — and they're furious
To the extent that the ubiquitous reports pointing to President Donald Trump holding a large poster-type document that reads "Kennedy Center Demolition" proves to be a plan of action in taking the first unequivocal steps to knock the gorgeous complex down, paired with Trump stating that he will withhold disaster relief from North Carolina if it doesn't vote in Michael Whatley for U.S. Senator, Trump is now playing a dangerous personal game at a level unseen since last January 6th, practically begging for the same sense of shock, violation, and need to step in to stop him.
The two new developments are a one-two punch that actually could break MAGA support over the course of two weeks, something otherwise seemingly impossible.
This is not to say that demolishing a popular building rises anywhere near the objective level of danger as did his attempt to demolish democracy on January 6th. That event is more evenly matched by threatening to withhold disaster funds based on a Republican vote. Nor is either act as significant as unilaterally taking the country to war.
But the combination — the visceral, observable insanity and impetuousness — may leave all Americans' jaws dropped over the feral self-centeredness and a loss of cognitive function beyond "me," and invite the already simmering movement against him to boil over.
If he goes forward and demolishes the Center over the pettiness of it not being named after him; if he continues to threaten to withhold disaster relief that North Carolinians by law deserve, all in order to punish them for votes they cannot control, it's far more likely that Trump blows up a typical MAGA's Overton window than succeeds.
Since 2015, readers have rightly pushed back against every single prediction that scandal this or that will surely be the one that turns every American against him, only to see him survive. Only Jan. 6th ever rose to anywhere close to a level — which, at the time it happened, appeared to fully end his reign of terror. Remember those weeks? The world breathing again? "It's over," the collective sigh?
It took years of him and them whitewashing and whining about January 6th to wipe it out from the minds of all too many gullible and greedy American independents.
In terms of just subjective, "in your face" offensiveness, these moves rival January 6th with an almost primordial simplicity. Oh, and he's not three weeks from being out of office this time.
Unless he actually is.
"If I don't get what I want, I'll destroy what you want."
That's too much, even for nearly every MAGA.
Making such a prediction is risky. The more "chill" kidz will note that "his supporters support anything." Well, not true — his polls continue to fall, and those numbers come from shrinking support, but there is a kernel of practical truth to the assertion. But there is evidence Trump is getting closer and closer to a point of no return.
Look at his "temper-tantrump" over Lake Ontario. Not only do most Americans not support "getting into it" with Canada, but an overwhelming number also rejected the seventh-grade-level response. "I'll take something from Canada and name it 'Lake America,' ha!" Only a tiny few Americans approved of the renaming.
If you are going to say "The MAGAs will support anything he wants to do," the number is 14% — matching the amount that supports the renaming.
No, these two actions, especially the demolition of the Kennedy Center, reach January 6th levels of dangerous childishness while flirting with that 14% number again. But pair that with threatening his own voters. Then add what he does next.
We can mock and even hate MAGA voters all day, provide an endless list of things that would end any other president's administration, and yet these two acts stand out as breathtakingly dangerous and bullying behavior, all done over a temper tantrump demanding a wholesale reevaluation of his fitness to lead even by those who would otherwise support him the most.
If Donald Trump tears this building down because "they" won't let him name it after himself, is there anything he's unwilling to blow up? Tear down? Demolish over his hurt feelings and need for revenge? Think countries and continents now, not monuments or lakes. If American voters reject Trump so thoroughly they vote in a Democrat in North Carolina as part of a blue wave that will make life exceedingly difficult for him over the next two years, what punishment awaits every American?
Both acts are fundamentally about revenge. He is embarrassed. Not just because a judge told him he couldn't keep that title up, those letters hanging: “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts," but also because his allies in Congress and the MAGA minions didn't rally to his support on this one. They also realize that North Carolina is further and further out of reach, and Trump's panic only puts more states in play. Many MAGA pols in Washington are already doing all they can to avoid appearing to support Trump.
Also like January 6th.
There is no greater injury to a narcissistic mind than embarrassment or humiliation, and thus no greater time of danger than awaiting the response. Most readers are now too familiar with the old Sun Tzu quote: “An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes," having heard it many times as relating directly to Donald Trump.
Well, here we are. Having taken humiliation to a halting level, denied having his name on the famous Center, a complex gilded with an "elite feel" without any need for gold, Trump will render it to ashes and rule over the rubble. And the guy who used to be able to "shoot someone on Fifth Avenue" now needs an illegal armed hold-up against his own voters.
Some will mock equating his current dual-tantrump with the day he put democracy most in danger. Yet, at least symbolically, he is doing the exact same thing here, demonstrating an inability to adult himself into accepting that things don't always go his way. Only unlike last time, on this one, he seems wholly unaware of the fact that he's the one playing with fuses, and the fuses may find more holes than just those into the aging theater.
The prediction is ridiculous were it not for that 14%...
MAGA is often called a cult. Well, cults are impermeable right up until they're not, and tend to fall with shocking intensity and speed when they do, and never, ever, amenable to being "fixed."
It is also likely that cults are most likely to fail when the members are suffering — as surely will anyone going to the grocery store or finding themselves under an Iranian drone today. Done while the leader is acting aberrantly crazed, not just wailing away against the outside world anymore, but also within, furious over the perceived insufficient worship, taking greatness for granted.
Keep an eye on these two developments and keep an eye on that 14% number. If there is a merger, and Trump's overall support starts creeping down toward the 20s in approval, well... Ultimately, every cult is permeable. It all comes down to members feeling taken for granted.
This is especially true when led by an increasingly petulant and petty president, one they recognize could break anything, including their stuff, if they don't pull him back.
And he's not done. This may be what brings him down.
Jason Miciak is a Raw Story Columnist, former editor at Occupy Democrats, author, attorney, consultant, and single parent girldad. Please follow on Bluesky. He can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com
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Trump openly told the UN he's cornered — and a deranged attack is imminent
Today Donald Trump asked a seemingly rhetorical question to the UN General Assembly: Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic of Iran? Do I drive them into hell?
But if you’ve been watching Trump especially close lately, you should not categorize those as rhetorical.
Trump loves the word “hoax” — he used it multiple times in his long-winded UN speech — especially when something is true. There was the Russian “hoax” about the country’s interference in the 2016 election. It happened. He thinks climate change is a “hoax.” It’s not. The 2020 election results were a “hoax.” He lost fair and square.
And he has a word he reaches for when he's flailing or scaremongering: “obliterate.” He used it about attacks on Iran's nuclear sites last June, even as U.S. intelligence disputed the extent of the damage. In March, he used it to describe strikes on Iran's Kharg Island. And he has used the language of obliteration in response to reports that Iran had plans to assassinate him.
Bravado? Yes, but with Trump, who knows? Because he seems utterly incapable of understanding what is actually a hoax and comprehending the horror of obliteration.
Case in point. When researchers, and even company CEOs, have warned recently that AI technology represents a genuine existential risk to humanity, Trump’s impulsive answer should not have surprised anyone, particularly because AI titans have lathered him with love and loot.
He posted that the warning of omnicide was a “HOAX,” a “SICK conspiracy,” no more real than climate change, and declared that the only guardrail AI needs is “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.” I guess he doesn’t see the irony that he is a hoax when it comes to a high-IQ president.
That's his obtuse response to people telling him the technology could end civilization: a shrug and an all-caps Truth Social post. He didn't say the risk was overstated, or that regulation was premature, or that innovation should take precedence, or anything that would have represented modulation.
It's wildly strange to watch someone treat the possible extinction of the species with less seriousness than when Politico writes a FAKE NEWS story about him.
Trump is almost inhuman in the fact that he doesn’t have the mental capacity to understand that serious problems require sustained attention because he has a severe lack of seriousness that equals his zero lack of attention.
He reaches for “hoax” and “fake” and “annihilation” and “obliterate” as ways to dismiss something he doesn’t want to deal with, would never deny, or doesn’t understand.
Which brings us to something that is not only serious, but requires undivided attention, and can’t be dismissed as a hoax because there is a real threat of annihilation.
Multiple intelligence assessments this month have raised alarms indicating that Vladimir Putin is preparing a major escalation in Ukraine in the coming months, betting that Western attention is scattered across Iran, the Red Sea, and his own domestic distractions. This threat, according to experts, will have global ramifications.
This is the proverbial canary in the coal mine for what Trump might do to Iran that makes his UN speech today less about bravado — and more about actually blowing the country to hell.
If that happens, Trump won't have the luxury of calling it a hoax. Ukraine is a war, not a hypothetical, and Putin escalating on a scale that hasn’t been seen will happen on Trump's watch. It’s not something he can simply wave off with a Truth Social post.
There are so many offshoots to what might happen if Putin, who has lost patience and support for the war, rains terror on Ukraine: Putin is not just another foreign leader to Trump. He is the man Trump has held up as his model of strength for a decade, or, as Trump stupidly puts it, “a very strong leader.”
Trump’s blanket thuggery, from the Kennedy Center to ICE agents to Jan. 6 insurrectionists, even prohibiting the press from the Oval Office, are all ways he measures his own toughness against Putin’s. Even if he doesn’t come out and say it.
I am hardly the first to point that out or to note that Trump yearns to govern like the thuggish Putin. The way Trump slobbered all over Putin in Alaska last year is the visual of his lust for Vladimir.
So what happens when the man you've spent years calling stronger than an American president (yes, Trump famously and stupidly said Putin was stronger than Obama) makes an enormously aggressive and destructive move?
Trump doesn't know how to calibrate a proportionate answer. He has never once, in any domain, responded to a challenge with something measured. He tore down the East Wing of the White House for a $400 million ballroom.
He's threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center over a naming dispute and has turned his planned 250-foot arch into what he's now calling a military installation stocked with drones and ammunition. He outright banned the media from the White House. To Trump, it’s just a matter of how extreme he reacts.
Now how will that extremism play with how he responds to Putin’s own extremism? The realistic range of Trump's response isn't “diplomatic pressure” or “targeted sanctions.” It's somewhere between complete disengagement and derangement.
So what should scare every American, and every human alive, is that he has every incentive, ego-wise, to match or top Putin rather than de-escalate the situation. And because Iran is now Trump’s version of Putin’s Ukraine, Trump may do the unthinkable, like Putin, because it’s the only way for him to disengage himself from an enormously unpopular war that has obliterated his support among voters.
Over the weekend, he told Fox News, again, that “wiping out” Iran is on the table. If Putin can wipe out Ukraine, why, he might think, can’t he wipe out Iran?
History shows that when a narcissistic, lunatical madman is cornered, and with no other way to escape, “obliteration” and “annihilation” and “wipe out” can become the only answers to save himself. And Trump would blow up the world to save himself.
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Trump's plunge into madness enters freefall in preposterous week
It is utterly exhausting and it's tempting to write that no one can be blamed for turning away from it all in a combination of disgust and wonder. And yet, with stakes so high, it's critical to review this administration's insanity and racism.
Because while perhaps one can hit pause and vacation from politics for a few weeks, it's impossible to simply pick up where one left off. If there is one dependable characteristic of this administration, it's that it gets more extreme by the day.
Especially the insanity and racism. To wit:
The Republican Party, synonymous with Trump and MAGA, finally got too racist for even Karl Rove last week, as Rove moved on, saying he would vote for a Democrat for the first time in decades after Bo French — a GOP candidate for the Texas Railroad Commissioner (a far more important position than it sounds, with little to do with railroads) — posted the unquestionably racist post below:
I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined. pic.twitter.com/Ys1bql0y4U
— Bo French (@bofrench) September 13, 2026
Yes, because the last thing one wants, apparently, is a university with a diverse student body of South Asian and Indian-Americans cheering on their football team. Again, that was too much for Rove, who called French a bigot, but not too much for the White House, which decided to get a little "cute" with its racism by supporting French, not the students or Karl Rove.
MAKE COLLEGE FOOTBALL GREAT AGAIN. pic.twitter.com/1XoCfmev0Z
— U.S. Department of Education (@usedgov) September 19, 2026
There is no conceivable way that the White House isn't echoing French in this even though the "Save College Sports Act" is being considered in the Senate. Lest one doubt where Trump comes down on the "bigot" matter, Trump ran to Truth Social to post:
Ah yes, a world divided by winners and losers, as Trump's daddy taught him, and evidently those who just can't tolerate the racism any longer are losers.
And then there is the sheer insanity of it all. Not content to simply rip the Kennedy Center to shreds, Trump wants to build, too — but we're beyond simple ballrooms and arches. This week, we learned that Trump wants his arch to also function as an armory of drones, sniper posts, bullets, weapons, snakes, dragons... Might've gotten carried away on the last two only, as Trump posted:
As they say down South, "Do what now?"
Someone, please explain Trump's new obsession with snipers and drones? Does he not know that he will be 200 ft below the ground if anyone attacks the White House? (True, this is looking more and more like he's worried that the attack will come from the American people; in other words, he wants citizens to pay the cost of his stronghold against Americans.)
And this might not be a bad place to mention that one has a pretty iffy victory arch if it has to be filled with defensive weaponry just in case we weren't that victorious. Granted, that feels right with Trump, who has declared victory over Iran dozens of times.
Oh, and we've come full circle some, because we're back to the battle between sharks and batteries. From just last week in the new Rose patio:
“So if I'm in an electric boat and I see I'm going down and the water's pouring in, so I know I'm gonna be electrocuted, but five yards away there are sharks. Do I take the electrocution, or do I go swimming with the sharks?”
Not only is his hypothetical stunningly stupid, as if it could ever happen, but even the basic conundrum is ridiculous. If you face certain electrocution, jump in with the shark!! Not only may the shark not be hungry, they don't usually eat humans (particularly that human, one thinks), maybe you can poke it in the eye, maybe it only eats a foot and says "Yuckies!" But the shark might get electrocuted too, you stupid...
Speaking of stupid, former President Barack Obama called out Trump's idiocy in relying on the AI industry to regulate itself, characterizing and criticizing Trump's position, then noting the obvious:
Trump's position: “These companies will solve the safety issues because they have every incentive to do so — if it turns out to be dangerous, people will just sue them and they’re worried about financial liability.
Obama: That’s not how we treat airlines. Or drug companies, or food companies.
Sweet Jesus, doesn't it sound wonderful to hear from a normal adult, never mind a former president? Perhaps we can "rent" a normal president; Justin Trudeau seems to have some time on his hands. Katy would understand.
Last, Trump insists, insists, that the United States recognizes the "Trump administration's contribution" to the Kennedy Center, apparently based on the belief that every monument or memorial to which his administration funds money — from us, by the way, not Trump — be recognized by naming it after him and engraving his name on it, or at least having his name beside it.
There is laughably no precedent for this other than Trump Tower, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump International Golf Club, Trump Steak, Trump Modeling (now THAT needs to be investigated).
We did not immediately coronate "The Johnson Moon" after landing in 1969 (thankfully). We did not name World War II the "FDR War" despite his major contribution. And we built the Lincoln Memorial after he literally held the nation together, only to be assassinated just as the war ended — he did not get the memorial for remodeling.
But Trump does really seem to have a Kennedy obsession; we can add OCD to his many other disorders. We come full circle in noting that Trump's "FAA" (hint) wants an eternal torch on top of his arch because... Trump has to one-up Kennedy's grave.
New news! Trump appointee Richard Grenell told the art curator at the Kennedy Center to start returning international gifts to their countries of origin as part of a plan to replace unwanted art with works reflecting “shared American values” (MAGA Art). Yes. This is real.
What constitutes MAGA art is anyone's guess, but there's a presumption that there will be a Cracker Barrel raid for "donations"; Thomas Kinkade paintings will shoot up in value, and there could be a 14-foot gold eagle carrying an AR-15.
This is the American president. This is who is leading us through a war with Iran, the AI crisis, and an economy on the brink. We could have Kamala Harris, or if we just cast the net, someone like another Obama, maybe Buttigieg — just someone who knows how to "president." Just someone normal, because the above were the funnier examples of what he's done! (racism is not funny, agreed, though Karl Rove being driven from the Republican Party is fitting, and maybe chuckle-worthy.)
So are the funny ones worth your valuable time? In a way, yes, because they pop in and out with the very serious ones. They also reveal a terribly mentally unhealthy man.
Plus, it's not like you can take a month off and pick back up where you left him. If there's one true north in this administration, it's that his issues only get more extreme.
Jason Miciak is a Raw Story columnist, former editor at Occupy Democrats, author, attorney, and consultant. Please follow on Bluesky, and he can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com
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Trump's appalling rampage forced even quivering C-SPAN to bite back
The recent White House decision to bar CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the premises has produced the predictable mixture of outrage, legal analysis and hand-wringing. Our ‘Free Speech” president announced the ban on September 18, accusing the outlets of publishing what he called “FAKE NEWS.” By the following morning, reporters from all three organizations were being turned away and having their credentials disabled or confiscated.
But amid the noise, something unusual happened.
C-SPAN showed some backbone.
C-SPAN, which has spent decades playing the media version of Switzerland, issued a statement standing in solidarity with the news organizations that had been excluded. But perhaps even more revealing was the network's appeal for a rational resolution.
A rational resolution!
From a president whose response to unfavorable coverage now includes banning the journalists responsible for reporting it.
And therein lies the problem.
C-SPAN absolutely deserves credit for standing with its colleagues (see how it’s done, Lesley Stahl?) But by appealing for a rational resolution from a president who has repeatedly demonstrated he has no qualms eviscerating every conventional political norm, the network inadvertently illustrates just how clueless it — and much of the mainstream media — still seems to be about the moment we're living through.
Demolish entire sections of the White House?
We can fix this over coffee.
Threaten to raze a memorial to one of history's most cherished presidents if your name doesn't replace his?
Let's talk about it in group.
Ban major news organizations from accessing the People's House?
We respectfully implore you to reconsider.
If this were 1939 Germany, would C-SPAN be asking Hitler to “reconsider” his plans for a master race?
Maybe over a cup of tea, he'd change his mind?
With all the combined intelligence of C-Span executives and its legal team, they’ve apparently still not learned one of history’s greatest lessons: A civilized response to an uncivilized man will get you nowhere. More importantly, at what point does a civilized response to an uncivilized act stop being civility and start becoming complicity through naiveté?
As I wrote previously in my piece about Whoopi Goldberg asking for decorum during Ted Cruz's appearance on The View, the insistence on decorum above all else can become absurd when it is combined with a refusal to acknowledge just how far outside ordinary political norms the situation has moved.
Civility is useful.
Civility is admirable.
But civility is not a strategy for dealing with someone who has decided the rules don't apply to him. Especially if that person swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution.
The failure by a majority of the mainstream media to acknowledge how far from the norms we really are all but guarantees our current national (and global) nightmare will last much, much longer than it needs to. And that’s a tragedy.
To put it simply using a metaphor from the Spielberg classic Back to the Future, we all know what would’ve happened if George McFly — C-Span — tried to defend Lorraine — America — by politely asking Biff — Donald Trump — to reconsider sexually assaulting her. Biff would’ve become president. Get the picture, media?
Again, C-SPAN absolutely deserves credit for standing with its colleagues. But the second part of its response — asking a president with a documented record of conflict with the press to reconsider his latest self-imposed conflict — also demonstrates the larger problem.
The question isn't whether the media should be civil.
The question is what the media does when civility isn't working.
How should the media respond to a president who repeatedly tests the boundaries of established norms, legal precedent and institutional restraints?
One thing seems increasingly clear: pretending every confrontation has a rational, diplomatic solution isn't working.
A ban isn't just another disagreement.
A threat isn't just another headline.
An attack on a journalist isn't just another news cycle.
And when the response to each successive escalation is, “Perhaps we should all sit down and talk about this,” eventually the people doing the talking need to ask whether they're actually accomplishing anything (Chuck Schumer take note).
Be it ballrooms, reflecting pools, press bans or military action, there comes a point when the question is no longer whether the gloves should come off.
It's whether we've waited so long to take the situation seriously that we're no longer allowed into the ring.
And maybe that's the real lesson of C-SPAN's statement.
The network finally stepped into the fight.
Now it needs to realize that asking the bully nicely to stop isn't the same thing as stopping him.
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A tsunami of jailings will drown Trump and his gang — his latest acts signed the warrants
A new Economist/YouGov poll of registered voters that just came out this week found that the top two words that Americans across the board endorse to describe Donald Trump are “corrupt” (53%) and “dangerous” (51%). Not even half of registered Republican voters were willing to call him “honest.”
This is consistent with Gallup’s finding earlier this month that fully 89 percent of Americans now believe that corruption in our government is widespread, the highest number in the two decades the polling company has been asking, and a higher number than in any other advanced, industrialized democracy.
The same day that poll came out, on Wednesday, CBS News published photos that American service members smuggled out of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia showing extensive — massive — damage to barracks, facilities, and even U.S. aircraft, all done by Iranian drones and missiles. The Pentagon’s own Inspector General just reported that there has been $3.7 billion in equipment and building losses and around 60 aircraft destroyed or severely damaged.
This follows Trump, last week, lying through his teeth, saying that the Iranians had inflicted “no damage” on U.S. facilities and troops, 18 of whom are now dead with hundreds more hospitalized.
Trump calls that small potatoes and refused to visit the wounded troops when he was at Walter Reed a few weeks ago. One soldier, his identity concealed, told CBS News, “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
Not only is Trump regularly — arguably, daily — lying to America and the world about what’s happening in the Middle East (and dozens of other things), but that polling shows that most Americans have figured it out. Which raises a vital question for our country at this pivotal moment:
What happens to a country when it loses trust in its government and leaders, and what can be done to restore that trust?
I’ve seen the consequences of this sort of loss of trust up-close and personal in the years I traveled the world on behalf of a German international relief organization, and the lessons I learned are both important and grim.
In the 1990s I made several trips to Bogotá, Colombia on Salem’s behalf, as I wrote about in The Prophet’s Way; I remember the immigration officer at the airport stamping my passport, saying “Mister Tourist, be careful.” At dinner that first night, after being warned not to take taxis or trust the police, a German woman who’d lived there for 15 years flinched every time the doorbell rang.
Her husband’s office manager, an ordinary middle-class guy, had been forced to watch helplessly at gunpoint as 15 armed men broke into his house looking for their 16-year-old daughter; when they discovered she wasn’t there, they took his wife, a friend of my dinner companion.
Every night for a month they called the husband and made his wife cry into the phone as he systematically drained every credit card, bank account, and retirement account he had. She was only released when he’d finally mortgaged his condo and given them the last of his money and credit. She was a shell of a person afterward, barely able to speak, and the family was desperately trying to borrow enough money from friends to leave the country and go back home to Germany.
The nun who ran the church where we were staying (locked into cells with steel doors and cement walls) warned us against going to a restaurant after dark and wrote down the phone number of the only trustworthy cab company in the city. Off-duty cops and soldiers had organized “hunt clubs” to shoot street children for sport.
One morning, as Horst Von Heyer and I drove past a billboard advertising a gated community of upscale homes with smiling guards carrying AK-47s, we passed a teenage boy sprawled on the sidewalk in a spreading pool of blood, a uniformed man standing over him with a gun still in his hand. Nobody in the car said a word; it was just too ordinary.
This is just one small example from my own experience of what happens when people no longer trust their own government. Into that vacuum of trust rush two types of people.
The first are the predators, who correctly figure that it’s now open season. We’re seeing that right now as corporate America fleeces us, banks rip us off, health insurance companies deny us care to fatten profits, and oil companies and their wholly-owned GOP shills lie to our faces about climate change.
The second are the strongman politicians, who promise that only violence and an iron fist can “restore law and order.” I saw that in Kaliningrad, Russia in the 1990s when four Russian cops pulled our car over for speeding and then let us go when we gave them a case of high-end chocolates. It was a town where the mob-run kiosks around Lenin Square were “the safest parts of town” (and vodka was cheaper than bottled water).
Six years later, Russians — by then exhausted by the crime and grifting oligarchs — handed the country over to a KGB colonel who promised to make the trains run on time. There hasn’t been a free election in that country since.
Recently, El Salvador ran that same script. A corrupt, on-the-take government of grifters and hustlers so ripped off the country and gutted the middle class that Salvadorans voted in Nayib Bukele, a guy who describes himself as “Central America’s coolest dictator.” He proceeded to arrest and lock up about two percent of the entire country, cutting crime but also ending democracy altogether.
That’s the warning for us. When trust is gone, wild stuff happens to countries and I’ve seen it in person from Peru to the Philippines to Uganda to South Sudan and Darfur and elsewhere. And now I’m seeing it here as the predators and fascists are running amok in America.
Trust is the single most vital component of all human relationships. With it, you can create miracles; without it, it’s hard to do anything productive.
Just ask any marriage counselor; to recover trust after a betrayal can take years and requires both full disclosure, real contrition (or at least explanation), and a genuine change in behavior.
And that’s exactly what Americans are struggling with right now. In a republic like ours, trustworthiness necessarily begins at the top, and Donald Trump is an utterly un-trustworthy man.
He cheated on every one of his wives. He convinced his followers to give him a combined $3.81 billion for his $TRUMP and $MELANIA digital coins before their value fell 97 percent and he pocketed the difference. He’s made another $1.4 billion from crypto just in the first year of his second presidency.
And then there are the jailings and murders being carried out in Trump’s name and under his direction.
In January, his masked thugs murdered Renee Good (a mother of three) and Alex Pretti (an ICU nurse at the VA), both American citizens, on the streets of Minneapolis. For six months, the administration refused to hand the evidence of the murders over to state prosecutors and physically blocked state investigators.
As of today, nobody has been charged with these crimes. That’s the Bogotá sidewalk, the uniformed men with high-powered rifles who know nobody will ever hold them to account for their killing sprees.
This is a pattern that’s been more than 50 years in the making.
— Nixon committed treason, blowing up the Vietnam peace talks to win the 1968 election, and then repeatedly both broke the law and took bribes while in office. Ford pardoned him, telling us our “long national nightmare” was over, when he was simply setting up its next phase.
— Reagan cut a deal with the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the 1980 election to screw Jimmy Carter and, when a special prosecutor began a serious investigation of that treason, George H.W. Bush’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, advised him to pardon the six Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Eve of 1992, just months before he left office. Bill Clinton chose to ignore it all and “look to the future.”
And when George W. Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, purged around 100,000 Black Floridian citizens from the voter rolls in the months before the 2000 election so his sibling could “win” the state by 537 votes and their father’s appointee to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, cast the deciding vote to stop the recount that would have revealed the crime, Al Gore just let it slide.
Which brings us to the Democrats. It’s long past time when they have to say, in one loud voice, “No more! We are finally going to hold these criminals to account!”
Most recently, Trump committed a whole bunch of crimes both during his first term as president and, particularly, when he lost the 2020 election and demanded that Georgia’s Secretary of State “find” another >11,000 votes and sent a mob to the Capitol to murder the vice president and speaker of the House.
Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, waited 15 long, painful months before appointing Jack Smith and getting serious about holding this serial criminal to account; it was too little, too late.
Every one of those decisions, from Ford through Clinton to Gore and Garland, was made by decent people who told themselves that they were protecting our nation’s institutions by letting a little Republican crime slide by.
Unfortunately, that’s not the way this works.
Instead, what they told the next Republican criminal (or, in Trump’s case, himself) was that they, too, should go ahead and crime because if they get caught, they’ll get off with a slap on the hand or maybe, at worst, lose their office.
Every one of these Republican presidents, in other words, showed the next that the price of crimes against our democracy was negligible.
That’s how we got from Nixon hiding his bribes in the Oval Office to Reagan committing treason with the Iranians to the Bush brothers rigging Florida in 2000 to Trump selling meme coins from the White House and implicitly encouraging his agents to shoot citizens in the street.
Other democracies have gone down this road and figured out how to recover from a political party becoming so corrupt it sanctions theft from, and even the open murder of, its own citizens.
— In Argentina, they put the ruling junta on trial in a civilian courtroom in 1985, just two years after the dictatorship ended and during a time when the generals still almost certainly could have re-taken the government.
— South Korea impeached, removed from office, and sentenced President Yoon Suk Yeol to life in prison just 15 months after he tried to declare a state of emergency and martial law to avoid the consequences of his party’s electoral losses — the same crimes Trump is openly contemplating now.
— Brazil arrested and convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a January 6th style coup and sentenced him to 27 years in prison; they also convicted his generals alongside him.
None of these countries collapsed; to the contrary, the democratic fabric of each was strengthened by holding their former political criminals to account. All are still democracies, and it looks like the same process will soon play out in Hungary.
Even South Africa’s “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” — which people think of as a “gentle alternative” to criminal prosecution — wasn’t designed to be gentle. People who failed to make full, public confessions of their crimes were supposed to be imprisoned; the cautionary tale is that none were, which is a good part of why many South Africans will tell you the wounds are still open. The government broke trust even as it was trying to restore it.
Increasingly, Americans get this. There have to be consequences for:
— betraying America, Ukraine, and democracy on behalf of Putin,
— looting our treasury and handing no-bid contracts to friends and business associates,
— traveling the world on our dime while picking up billions from dictators on the pretense of negotiating peace,
— killing unarmed civilians in the Caribbean and children in Iran,
— poisoning our air in exchange for campaign contributions,
— trying to overthrow our government and fix the 2026 election,
— sending armed masked thugs into our streets to intimidate and kill us while organizing them into the country’s largest domestic spying operation,
— handing trillions in tax breaks, all borrowed from the rest of us, to billionaire donors who are now trying to buy this 2026 election,
— and all the other crimes that you’re welcome to list in the comments to this article.
If Democrats want to earn the votes of that 89 percent of Americans who’ve lost faith in their government, they must — every one of them who wants our vote — publicly promise to prosecute these people.
No more Garland pauses, no more Ford pardons, no more Clinton, Gore, and Obama looking the other way. Not for Trump, Miller, Noem, Hegseth, the ICE agents, the crypto bagmen, the Abu Dhabi royals, or the pardon-buyers who’re cashing in on Trump’s corruption every day.
On Day One, the subpoenas must begin: Legislation mandating an independent counsel with a real budget and open trials in open court the way Argentina, Brazil, and South Korea did it. Impeachment of every corrupt Cabinet billionaire and associated lickspittle, from Trump on down. Revealing the complicity of Congressional Republicans.
Democrats don’t get to run on “restoring trust” and then govern like an abused spouse who keeps offering “just one more chance.” We’ve had four Republican presidents openly break the law or even commit treason just for political power; it must come to an end.
So, be sure you’re ready to vote and make sure your friends are, too.
And please share this piece and support hartmannreport.com, because the only reason I can still say these things out loud is that people like you help keep the lights on.
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