All posts tagged "republicans"

Only one person is waging a war on Christmas

Previous presidents traditionally spent Thanksgiving serving a meal to our deployed troops who are away from their loved ones during the holidays. This year, Mr. Trump was at his palatial Mar-a-Lardo resort, playing golf, hobnobbing with the elite, and spewing hatred on social media.

His unhinged diatribe read in part:

“A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our Country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the World, for being ‘Politically Correct,’ and just plain STUPID, when it comes to Immigration.”

Mr. Trump concluded his warm and fuzzy Thanksgiving message to the nation by referring to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as “seriously retarded” and belittling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for her gender and religious attire.

For the record, the 45th and 47th president has never issued a holiday message aimed at unity or even remotely befitting of the season. The man is utterly incapable of speaking kind words, performing selfless acts, or composing a tweet that doesn’t read like it was written by a fifth grader.

Meanwhile, MAGA’s latest boogeyman, mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, was at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, serving hungry New Yorkers.

Given the cult’s complete lack of self-awareness, I doubt they will pick up on the irony of the two conflicting scenarios. Considering the recent shooting of two members of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., I suspect that over the next few weeks we will witness an escalation in xenophobic battle cries similar to those heard in the days following September 11th.

For his part, Mr. Trump will likely spend the holiday season claiming he “saved Christmas,” a regurgitation of the same nonsense he peddled during his first term of office.

For years, the President has alleged there is a war on Christmas. He also claims that while no other president has ended a war, he has ended "six or seven" of them.

In fact, he has not, and there is no war on Christmas — not in the United States, at least. But that won’t preclude Mr. Trump from claiming it as another bogus battle victory.

During the holidays at Rockefeller Center in New York City, you’ll find a larger-than-life Christmas tree. On Capitol Hill in Washington, you’ll see a similar tree. There's even an impressive nativity scene right across from the South Lawn of the White House. It’s been displayed during both Democratic and Republican presidencies, including that of Barack Obama. The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Crèche is a nationally known life-sized nativity scene in the heart of the Steel City. There’s a large Christkindlmarket held every year in Chicago and a smaller one in my hometown of Ellinwood, Kansas.

Throughout the season, public celebrations are held in virtually every city, hamlet, and crossroads in the United States. Those gathered for yuletide festivities exclaim, “Merry Christmas,” and sing carols extolling the birth of the Christ Child. Contrary to the narrative of right-wing fear mongers, there has not been a single instance in which those celebrations have been restricted – not even in blue cities that petrify conservatives.

This year, however, ICE — not frozen precipitation, but rather MAGA’s Gestapo — is prompting some communities to rethink public holiday gatherings. Taking this into consideration, one might conclude that it’s Mr. Trump who is declaring a war on Christmas — not the “radical left,” not pagans, and certainly not the Muslim community.

The non-existent war on Christmas is yet another distraction of the President’s own making. His fearful, gullible base gobbles it up like Christmas ham.

Though I suspect he would love for statues of his likeness to be added to the crèche — and many American Christians would happily oblige — Mr. Trump represents the antithesis of Christmas. He stands out in a motley crew of familiar, albeit comical, holiday villains that includes the likes of Burgermeister Meisterburger, Ebenezer Scrooge, and the Grinch.

Unlike the President, the fictional holiday villains ended up changing their ways, having been overcome by the Christmas spirit. Burgermeister Meisterburger was touched by the generosity of a stranger. Paranormal visions pushed Ebenezer Scrooge to reform. The Grinch’s heart “grew three sizes” as the result of the unconditional love of a child.

The only thing that's grown for Donald Trump is his insatiable appetite for division, vengeance, and corruption.

There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that you’ll find any holiday cheer, much less goodwill toward humanity, from the President. Like Krampus, Mr. Trump is perpetually on the naughty list. He’s an angry elf.

J. Basil Dannebohm is a writer, speaker, consultant, and former legislator. His website is www.dannebohm.com. He is a registered Independent.

We are in this nightmare for one reason — and it's our own leaders' fault

The Supreme Court says it will determine whether the Trump regime can “end birthright citizenship.” That’s the name given to the clause in the 14th Amendment that says that if you’re born on US soil, you’re a US citizen entitled to the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship.

Many roads were traveled to get here, the main one being Donald Trump’s decade-long campaign of hatred against immigrants.

But a road that gets less attention is just as important: Trump’s hate-mongering never saw an equal, opposite and liberal reaction.

Instead, over those years, the Democrats accepted as true the lies told by Trump and Republican allies about immigrants and immigration law.

For instance, the southern border is not open. It has never been open in our lifetimes. But Trump says it is. The Republicans say it is. Their rightwing allies say it is. And the Democrats rarely challenge them.

Over time, the result has been a kind of conventional wisdom about the southern border that is so deeply established that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) avoided facing it head-on in a recent interview with CNN. Instead, the New Yorker gave Trump credit for securing the border.

“The border is secure,” he said. “That's a good thing. It happened on his watch.”

Fact is, nothing about the southern border has changed. It wasn’t open last year, under Joe Biden’s watch. It wasn’t secured this year under Trump’s. That there are fewer migrants coming across is the result of other factors, mainly Trump’s criminal treatment of immigrants. (In practice, they now have few legal protections. Everyone knows it.)

By giving Trump credit for something he did not do, Jeffries validates the lie — that under a Democratic president, the southern border was open. In doing so, he undermines his own party’s position, allowing the GOP to define the terms. That makes it untenable to stand up for immigrants and their constitutional rights. Ultimately, Jeffries cedes ground in a much bigger debate over who counts as an American.

Repeat this pattern long enough, in the absence of an equal, opposite and liberal reaction to Trump’s hate-mongering, and you get what we now have: a high court that will decide whether a president can break the law and ignore the unambiguous wording of the 14th Amendment.

For too long, the Democrats have treated the southern border as a distraction. The Republicans have not, because it represents the highest stakes — the power to decide who America is for. Is it for the rich white men who have historically controlled it or for everyone?

I don’t know what the Supreme Court is going to decide, but I do know the mainstream position of the Democratic Party can no longer hold. The Democratic Party needs to be reminded of its values, the liberal principles that have animated reformers since the founding.

For that task, the republic is fortunate to have visionaries like Adam Gurri. He’s the editor of Liberal Currents, a publication dedicated to the revival of American liberalism after a long period of complacency. Adam is currently in the middle of a big fundraising push to expand the magazine’s reach and influence. I think he’s doing so just in time.

In this interview, Adam tells me about an ambitious project coming up, something he calls The Reconstruction Papers, an effort to lay down the intellectual basis for the restructuring of the constitutional order.

Above and beyond that, Adam told me, “we will stand for and promote a set of principles and won't be cowed either by political expediency or institutional force. And we will continue to cultivate a community alongside the publication that people can feel safe inside of.”

JS: American liberalism has needed a refresher for a long time. I think Liberal Currents is that refresher. Its focus, above all, is liberty and justice for all. How did you get started and why?

AG: We started out as a response to Trump the first time around. More to what he represented than the man himself. It seemed to us that liberalism had grown complacent. Its values had become assumptions held by a lot of people, and those assumptions had gone more or less unquestioned for a generation.

We got started because we believed those assumptions were by and large good, actually, but that people had been left unable to articulate why they were good. There was an intellectual vulnerability in this regard, because our enemies had spent decades aware of what our assumptions were and positioning themselves to attack them, whereas we liberals spent that time feeling as though we had already won.

Good times make weak liberals? Hard times make strong liberals?

I don't like to put it that way just because it sounds like we need some kind of existential battle in order to make progress, and I just don't believe that's the case.

What I would say is that things were becoming untenable already. A lot of our best institutions were designed under economic and social conditions that no longer apply. A lot of our oldest institutions were first drafts of democracy that sorely needed updating and we just sort of knuckled down and kept going.

A lot of work needed to be done, I suppose is my point. And a lack of truly understanding the heart of it, the why, the rationale behind these choices made in the past made it harder to to get that work done. The open conflict of the Trump era has certainly brought things into sharper focus for a lot of people. I'd like to think that wasn't the only path we could have taken, and I certainly believe we needn't hope for some future conflict to help us advance yet further some day.

Where do you see the place of Liberal Currents among other liberal publications, the few there are, and where do you want it to be?

If I were to draw a parallel, I would say Liberal Currents seeks to be The Atlantic, if The Atlantic were run by people truly committed to liberalism and to opposing the consolidation of dictatorship here.

We are a place where liberals can have internal debates about how to orient ourselves to events, as well as for ideas and principles. But we are also a place that won't blow with the political winds, but instead continue to fight for liberal principles, on behalf of everyone, even when trans rights or immigration does not poll well, say.

We are also a place that seeks to give positive answers and provide an actual vision of a liberal future. A lot of people have been caught flatfooted by the crisis. Many genuinely just don't know what to do, even if they understand the danger. We want to be a place that provides at least the beginnings of answers, starting points and ways of thinking about the problem.

You're in the middle of a big fundraising push. What do you envision for Liberal Currents?

We're going to grow the voice of genuine liberals who hate fascism in our media system. One concrete thing we're going to do is invest in a project we're calling The Reconstruction Papers, a printed essay collection where we will draw on a wide variety of subject matter experts in political science, higher education, media studies and more.

These experts will write about how to not only repair the damage that has been done in their area of focus, but how to rebuild and reform into something better than we started with. In general our pitch to people is that we will aim to grow ourselves into a version of The Atlantic that will never abandon trans people or immigrants or people of color to fascists.

We will stand for and promote a set of principles and won't be cowed either by political expediency or institutional force. And we will continue to cultivate a community alongside the publication that people can feel safe inside of.

'Trump has fallen': Analyst stunned as MAGA leader becomes 'electoral poison'

An analyst on Friday warned that President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are showing signs of collapse.

David Rothkopf, a foreign policy expert and columnist for The Daily Beast, wrote how the president's declining health, defecting Republicans, concerns over the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies, the tanking economy, aggressive immigration policy, Democratic electoral wins, court battles and plummeting approval rating have all put him in "deep trouble."

Republicans have even begun to turn on him.

"Recent election results suggest that the onetime star to whom so many MAGA upstarts have hitched their wagons to in the past decade is now electoral poison," Rothkopf wrote. "Across the country, elections last month produced resounding defeats for the GOP, while in the few elections in which Republicans squeaked out victories, their margins shrank considerably compared to 2024 support for Trump."

With midterms looming, Republicans could have a tough challenge heading into 2026.

"Donald Trump has fallen and, given projections of a rough year ahead, it seems increasingly likely that he can’t get up," Rothkopf added.

It might not be quite the end of MAGA, but it could signal even more trouble ahead.

"This is not to say Trump and MAGA have no future. Their presence will likely be felt by most of us for years to come, like a shiver down our collective spine. And that’s not just because something like 60 percent of Americans believe in ghosts," Rothkopf wrote.

Republicans walking into 'historic buzzsaw' by defending hated Trump policy: conservative

National Review senior writer Noah Rothman said Republicans appear to be resigned to “a drubbing in next year’s midterm elections” by blindly following President Donald Trump.

Public opinion on Trump’s economy and his tariffs is crashing, “and that’s just the pro-Trump right,” warned Rothman, citing pro-Trump Republican National Committee chairman Joe Gruters.

“There’s no sugarcoating it,” said Gruters. “It’s a pending, looming disaster heading our way.”

But Rothman complained Gruters was acquiescent to that outcome, arguing “no matter what party is in power, they usually get crushed in the midterms.”

“Gruters is wrong about that,” Rothman insisted. “The GOP’s fate is not written in the stars. The party in control of all the levers of power in Washington has agency and purpose — it is the master of its own destiny. Republicans are simply choosing not to do anything to better their political circumstances.”

Rothman called the downward trend in the president’s numbers “consistent and alarming.”

“And Republicans are alarmed. But that’s about it,” Rothman said. “If the sentiment abroad within the GOP ecosystem is any indication, that sense of trepidation is translating not into resolve but resignation.”

While Trump has few tools to shape the economic landscape, Rothman said he could at least indicate that he has “heard the public’s disquiet and is attempting to meet them in the middle by abandoning his mulish affinity for tariffs.”

“Even if he only telegraphed his willingness to pare most of them back, it would send a signal to the public that would at least boost consumer confidence. But Trump is not doing that. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Trump giving up on a policy in which he evinces near-religious faith. So, with Trump presumably immovable, Republicans are sauntering languidly into a historic buzzsaw,” Rothman said.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, he said.

“Republicans are not destined for disaster. But so long as they regard the president’s bizarre predilections as forces of nature that they must make peace with, they will traipse into an electoral disaster that could set the tone for the remainder of the decade — handing the reins over to a Democratic Party that is increasingly favorably inclined toward socialism,” Rothman said.

“What the GOP can do — what it must do — is evince some basic political survival instincts,” he continued. “If self-preservation is too much to ask, the GOP and its voters deserve the disaster that is now visible on the horizon.”

Read Rothman's National Review article at this link (subscription required).

'Not the biggest fan': Trump fan rips him on CNN at 'Redneck Christmas Parade'

A young voter and President Donald Trump fan ripped the president at a Christmas event in Louisiana this week.

CNN interviewed several voters at a "Redneck Christmas Parade" on Thursday — where the outlet went two years ago and met hopeful supporters — but found they weren't as happy this time around with Trump.

One young male voter, whose name was not shared, gave his thoughts:

"I'm not the biggest fan, but at least it's not Biden. That's my opinion," he said. "I was just hoping for a little bit more personally, you know, especially with like all the stuff happening with the Epstein, you know, files and all that. That's got me really nervous as well."

CNN reporter Elle Reeve asked the Trump supporter if he wanted more of the Epstein files to come out.

"Absolutely, yes. I really want it to come out. I mean, if he was there, I feel like we deserve to know that, you know, especially if we don't want him in there. I mean, what Epstein did was horrible. That's really bad," he added.

Trump's horrifying remarks laid bare his darkest instincts

As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence nears, President Donald Trump’s escalating attacks on immigrants of color have made his administration the most globally racist, hostile administration for non-white immigrants in U.S. history, on top of its aggressively implemented racist policies in the U.S. and around the world.

In the past two weeks alone, we’ve witnessed Trump’s racist rants against the Somali community in Minnesota, the freezing of all non-white asylum bids, and denial of citizenship rights for long-time legal immigrants from non-white majority nations. These come on top of the increasingly violent assaults and deportations of mostly brown and Black people, including citizens, solely based on skin color, language, and where they work.

The Nov. 26 shooting, one fatal, of two National Guard members in Washington was the pretext for the latest intensification of Trump’s anti-non-white immigrant crusade.

The shooter was a troubled Afghan former member of the CIA’s notorious “Zero Unit” death squads in Afghanistan who was resettled in the US after the war’s end. But the context is clothed in years of Trump’s demonization of immigrants from what he called “Third World” — and even “sh--hole” — countries, that has been a centerpiece of Trump’s political career. It has accompanied “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories of Democrats allegedly organizing immigrants of color to flood the US to supplant white voters, and an increasing normalization of racist rhetoric by the far-right.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Trump posted his intent to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions … and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk.”

On Dec. 2, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt verified that “refugee admissions into the country right now are essentially at 0, with the exception of Afrikaners fleeing persecution in South Africa.”

Many sources have debunked Trump’s promotion of the myth of a “white genocide” in South Africa, while he has also stated a preference for white Europeans who oppose migration.

That same day, Trump launched his vile denunciation of Somali residents, calling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and “her friends” “garbage,” adding, “when they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from.”

Omar had a strong rebuttal: “When I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremacist rhetoric, it reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany.”

And, she warned, “It’s also really important for us to remember that this kind of hateful rhetoric and this level of dehumanizing can lead to dangerous actions by people who listen to the president.”

Trump’s racist demagogy against immigrants of color is not new, but this tirade went further, noted Joanne Freeman, professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, in a Jon Stewart podcast.

“On the one hand, saying Somalians are a horrible people is a horrible thing to do. To go the next step and say, so we should throw them out, so they shouldn’t be here. That’s the part that suddenly not only moves into hatred and ugliness… and I’ve got my guys in masks… (and am) willing to enforce them in a way that isn’t constitutional.”

What’s also new is the administration denying citizenship to immigrants taking the final step at naturalization events, as occurred on Dec. 4 in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, despite their having spent years “acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes, and a citizenship test.” Instead, “as they lined up, some were told by US Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin” — 19 countries from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

“Officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled,” Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship, told Boston’s WGBH.

It comes as the administration is “detaining applicants at citizenship appointments — an escalation that blurs the line between immigration processing and enforcement, leaving families completely unprepared.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol raids continue to terrorize immigrant communities, enabled by the Supreme Court’s authorization of the selective targeting of people based on racial profiling, as well as the indifference to assaulting legal immigrants and even American citizens.

Among the latest targets for harassment and detentions, following Trump’s threats, were Somalis in Minnesota, even though more than 70 percent of Somalis are American citizens. The New York Times reaffirmed on Dec. 4 that less than 30 percent “of the people arrested in any of these operations had been convicted of a crime,” despite Trump’ claims that his secret police would only target the “worst of the worst.”

For Trump, racism has long been a fundamental belief, illustrated again Dec. 6 by the decision to eliminate free entrance days to national parks on the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King and Juneteenth, while adding Trump’s birthday.

Additionally, Trump and other MAGA politicians have normalized a yearning to maintain the historic “culture” of the US and make the US the protector of “European civilization” — both an openly racist appeal to reverse the increased racial diversity of the nation.

In a Twitter screed attacking NATO members Dec. 6 following a trip to Brussels, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared, “Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not.”

All of which is directly tied to the vision of a Make America Great Again movement that fantasizes a return to eras of Jim Crow segregation, even antebellum, policies in a nation more dominated by white, Christian populations. As Rep. Kat Cammarck (R-FL) framed it Dec. 2 in a not very subtle message: “Today, 1 in 6 people in the US is foreign born. That quite frankly is not sustainable to maintain a culture that we are known for here in the United States.”

Chuck Idelson, retired, is the former Communications Senior Strategist for National Nurses United, the nation's largest union and professional organization of registered nurses with 225,00 members.

'Who would have imagined?' Ex-GOP governor in awe as defiant GOP sends Trump clear message

President Donald Trump got a clear message from defiant members of his own party this week.

After growing pressure from the president, GOP lawmakers twice on Thursday stood up against Trump and his administration, The Washington Post reported.

Trump spent months trying to push members of his own party to redistrict in deep-red state Indiana — and they rejected it in the state Senate Thursday. Then, 20 House Republicans voted that same day to overturn his executive order that ended union rights at federal agencies, according to The Post.

These moves follow several other changes, as Republicans work to distance themselves from some of the president's policies. Just last month, four Republicans decided to join Democrats to demand that the Department of Justice release the full Epstein files.

“There is a group of Republicans who are maybe going, ‘I’ve got to stand on my own,’ and that ranges from the Indiana state legislators to Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Pat McCrory, the former Republican governor of North Carolina, told The Post. “Who would have imagined?”

It's unclear if Trump will regain his hold on the party, but McCrory warned that Trump's signature revenge streak could also be something to be mindful of.

“This is not the first time people have stood up,” McCrory said. “The question will be, is the power still there to kill their political career?”

These betrayals are splitting MAGA from Trump — and making him more dangerous than ever

I want to pour you a shot of good news, with a stiff chaser.

It won’t wipe away all your troubles, but it might make you feel warm and fuzzy for about 30 minutes — maybe longer if you just allow yourself to go with the buzz …

(BARTENDER’S TIP: Allow yourself to go with the buzz. It’s been a hard damn decade.)

All’s not well in MAGA land, my friends.

It seems there are hardcore members of the most destructive cult in American history, who believe their fearful, orange leader is outdoing himself in the Department of Bulls–––, as he undoes our democracy.

It’s actually starting to look like Donald Trump can go too far for at least a few of his ardent supporters, who have been known to see homegrown terrorists stomping on police officers and destroying our Capitol as “tourists,” and view the poisoning of our air and water as “healthy.”

The list of terrible things these morally busted people have endorsed by helping elect this garbage can of a man, is longer than a summer day in Alaska, but might not be limitless.

It could be there are actually lines they prefer not to be crossed — even by their vulgar idol, who has done the heroic work of battering our government, our benefits, and his spineless party into submission.

In the past week, I have heard from two old friends in the business community here in Madison, Wisconsin, and in my hometown haunts of New Jersey.

These gents deal with a lot of MAGA bros in their day-to-day work, which takes them deep inside the American staples of sales and finance. They interact with these people because they have mountains of patience, and those dreaded bills to pay. Like myself, they are both old-to-middle-aged white men, and as such have been afforded a lifetime of privilege to do just about anything they want in America (including attack it) without any serious ramifications.

Here’s one of those messages I received:

“I’ve had a couple of MAGA folks confide in me the last couple of weeks that they are officially off the Trump train. It seems like based on the posturing that’s happening and his recent losses that they will be cannibalizing him soon.”

He cited Epstein, the “Kash/Bongino obvious lying” and the “pro-billionaire shit” as some of the reasons for their sudden discontent with the orange and appalling man, as well as their desire to be more public with their upset.

Another message I received said this, among a lot of other “stuff”:

“He’s losing MAGA. This is not what they voted for, and the Epstein stuff is killing him. I’m telling you, he’s in trouble.”

Reports like this are hardly scientific, but they are meaningful, and the numbers back them up. Trump’s approval ratings are at historic lows for a president (and I use that term loosely) in his first year in office, where honeymoon periods, and “benefit of the doubts” can extend well into a second or third season.

The speed in which Trump has lost support is breathtaking.

Recent election results that have gone heavily Democratic, and some skirmishes in the Republican ranks point to a presidency that is beginning to wear thin on the majority of America, including more than a few of his once loyal foot soldiers.

Look, I’m not even remotely insinuating we are out of danger here. In fact, if there is any validity to the growing anti-Trump movement in the Republican ranks, and I think there is, Trump will only become more unhinged and dangerous, as the golden walls close in around him, and he becomes more isolated.

He will lash out like a snot-nosed baby with a loaded machine gun, and before he is through, the January 6th insurrection will look like a minor skirmish.

The rest of one of the above messages from my buddy, reads like this:

“Hopefully this doesn't lead to some wild outburst when he (Trump) realizes this is happening (his cratering support), but it most certainly will ...”

Yes it will.

One morning this week, he rolled out of his steel-enforced rack, grabbed his nuclear-powered cell phone and went into full, unhinged, bro-mode by launching this beauty on his state-run social media channel:

This is the President of the United States of America at work on a Monday morning.

And let me answer your question, before finishing up:

“No, I don’t know how ANYBODY can support this grotesque, unhinged thug ...”

We’ll never survive three more years of this madness, and I have been of the opinion that Trump and his failing physical and mental health likely won’t either.

Rather than bet on the natural order of things, though, we are better off cautiously hoping that enough people in his revolting base will start to pull the plug on this failed regime, which will help release some of the hot air in a country that is ready to blow sky-high.

It’s worth keeping on eye on Republicans in Congress as we swing into the midterms and they hear from angry constituents who are fed up with Trump and his billionaires’ money-grab, while their costs increase and they discover they are literally paying for this authoritarian takeover.

We must continue to fight like never before, while expecting the absolute worst from a maniac, who has the singular talent of always going lower.

We still have a long road ahead of us, my friends, but for just today, why not pull off to the side of that road, and enjoy the buzz?

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

'Trump tells the truth': House Republicans back racist attacks on Somalia, Omar and more

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump spoke the “unvarnished truth” when he openly complained about immigrants from “sh–hole” countries, one senior U.S. House Republican told Raw Story, amid outcry over the president’s spate of racist remarks.

“Trump tells the truth,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said at the Capitol. “He tells unvarnished truth. I have no problem with what he's saying. He rallies the troops like no other.”

Asked what he thought about Trump being accused of being racist, Norman, 72, was unabashed: “People say what they want. This man has brought this country back in less than 11-and-a-half months.”

In a cabinet meeting last week, Trump, 79, attacked Somalian Americans in virulent terms, including calling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a leading progressive, “garbage.”

This week, in a speech in Pennsylvania, Trump attacked Omar again. He also said he had “announced a permanent pause on third-world migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries.”

Answering a supporter’s shout of “sh–hole”, the president said: “I didn't say sh–hole, you did.”

But referring to a scandal from 2018, in his first term, he admitted it: “Remember I said that to the senators, they came in, the Democrats, they wanted to be bipartisan.

“So they came in and they said, ‘This is totally off the record. Nothing mentioned here. We want to be honest.’ Because our country was going to hell.

“And we had a meeting. And I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from sh–hole countries?’ Right? Why can't we have some people from Norway? Sweet and just a few. Let us have a few from Denmark, ‘Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people. Do you mind?’

“But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they're good at is going after ships.”

Rep. Derrick van Orden (R-WI) knows a thing or two about ships, having been a Navy Seal. Telling Raw Story he had lived in Africa, specifically Djibouti, he backed Trump too.

Asked to respond to Trump’s “sh––hole countries” remarks, Van Orden said: “Listen.

“The President of the United States is in charge of foreign policy. And the President of the United States has affected more positive changes in foreign policy than any president in my lifetime, with maybe the exception of Reagan…

“So I have the utmost confidence in the President of the United States and [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio getting foreign policy in a way when it's a benefit to America.”

It fell to Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), a former House Foreign Affairs Committee chair, to provide a more conventional GOP take on Trump’s “sh–hole countries” remarks.

“It's not a good message,” McCaul said, adding that “there are some who argue, ‘Hey, we did away with all of our soft diplomatic power’” thanks to Trump’s cost-cutting as well as his frequent racist invective.

McCaul said he was “briefed by Rubio's chief of staff yesterday about things we are doing to deal with soft power in a different model paradigm.”

“Is that hard when the president’s calling them ‘sh–hole nations’?” Raw Story pressed.

“He said that in the first term,” McCaul answered.

“But they denied it then and now he said it publicly,” Raw Story pressed again.

Choosing not to engage, McCaul continued to talk about ways to advance U.S. soft power despite crippling cuts to foreign aid via Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

‘Ignorance, racism, xenophobia’

Among Democrats, Rep. Omar lamented rising “ignorance, racism, xenophobia” and said Trump was more open in his second term about his use of racial invective because “he feels more comfortable being a racist.

“His base [is] basically raising money for a woman who gets fired for calling people the N word. What is there more to be surprised” about?

Rep. Ilhan Omar speaking in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

Omar was referring to a high-profile story from Wisconsin, in which a woman employed by Cinnabon was filmed subjecting a Somali couple to brutal racist abuse.

Crystal Wilsey, 43, was fired but has since benefited from crowd-funding efforts.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) is one of the longest-serving Black members of Congress. That means that when it comes to Trump deploying racist language, he’s seen it all before.

“It's par for the course,” Thompson, 77, told Raw Story when asked about Trump’s “sh–hole countries” remark. “He lies on the regular.

“He has some kind of tendency to talk about countries and people of color … and he makes no bones about it. When he apologizes for insensitive statements, he comes right back and repeats.”

Raw Story cited a recent National Parks Service decision to drop free admission on holidays dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Juneteenth, but to provide it on Trump’s birthday.

“Why are you trying to erase things that people of color have contributed to just because you disagree with them?” Thompson asked, rhetorically.

‘It’s very frightening’

Unlike Thompson, first elected in 1993, Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) is new to Congress, sworn in just last month.

“This can't be the new normal,” she said of Trump’s remarks. “That's what we're here for, fighting against it…

“I see it every day now, where people are openly discriminated against, people threatening their neighbors because they don’t like something that they're doing. It's very frightening.”

Proudly announcing herself as a “wife, daughter and sister of librarians,” Grijalva lamented “the dismantling of public education” through Republican attempts to ban books and change school courses to reflect a conservative view of U.S. history, particularly on grounds of race.

“Generations won't hear history,” Grijalva said, “because this administration is deciding that it hurts their feelings to talk about how oppressive they [white people] were and what we did too, right? Native American, indigenous people, I mean. We have to talk about that stuff.

“I'm very afraid, and I'm a mom with three kids. So [does] this country look like the one we grew up in? Right now it doesn't.”

Cute names for Trump's atrocities mark an awful new low

Amnesty International’s new report on the U.S. detention sites Alligator Alcatraz and Krome is a warning flare for every American who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law, and the basic dignity of human beings.

We’ve seen governmental cruelty before in our history, but these facilities mark a new level of calculated dehumanization on U.S. soil, and Amnesty is calling it what it is: torture, enforced disappearance, and a deliberate system designed to break people.

What makes this report so chilling isn’t just the details, although they’re horrifying enough. It’s that the government has begun giving these places cute, theme-park-style nicknames like “Alligator Alcatraz” and “Cornhusker Clink,” as if they’re attractions instead of concentration-camp-style black sites.

Authoritarian regimes always begin by softening the language, making the abuses sound like logistics, law enforcement, or processing rather than cruelty. If you want to condition the public to accept state violence, you start with euphemisms.

Investigators found people packed into filthy tents and trailers where toilets overflowed onto the floors and into sleeping areas. Water was sometimes rationed. Food quality was lousy. Insects swarmed at all hours. Lights were left on day and night. Cameras reportedly pointed at showers and toilets, in clear violation of privacy and human dignity.

This wasn’t an accident. These were choices.

The so-called “box” at the Florida concentration camp may be the most grotesque example. It’s a two-by-two-foot outdoor metal cage where detainees, shackled and already vulnerable, were left in blistering Florida heat, exposed to mosquitos and biting flies, denied water, and forced to endure punishment sessions lasting up to 24 hours.

These are exactly the kinds of stress-position torture techniques our nation once condemned when used by dictatorships abroad. Today they’re being used in our name, by our government, on our soil.

At Krome, Amnesty documented prolonged solitary confinement, routine shackling even during medical transport, denial of legal access, and a pervasive system of intimidation and retaliation. Medical care was often delayed or unavailable. People needing lawyers were blocked from communicating with them.

This is not a “processing system”: it’s a punishment regime. It’s brutality done with your and my tax dollars and in our names.

The report makes clear that these are not isolated violations: they’re the design.

This administration has woven cruelty into policy, permitting state-run detention networks to operate as if constitutional rights simply evaporate when you cross a razor-wire perimeter.

The crisis for American democracy isn’t just that the camps exist; it’s that they’re being normalized, bureaucratized, branded, and replicated. Amnesty warns that DHS is already planning more such sites, using “emergency” authorities and no-bid contracts to create an extrajudicial detention network beyond the reach of meaningful oversight.

This is exactly how authoritarian systems evolve. They never begin with political opponents: instead, they begin with people the majority already sees as powerless. Immigrants. Refugees. The poor. Non-citizens. Those without family or money or social standing.

When the public tolerates a government treating one group of human beings as disposable, that system is inevitably expanded to inflict that same treatment on others — dissidents, politicians, people like you and me — whenever it becomes politically useful.

We’ve seen this in nation after nation that slid from democracy into authoritarianism. The first victims are always those considered “outsiders” or “threats to the order” the regime promised to maintain.

Once the public is desensitized to cages, beatings, disappearances, and secret courts, it becomes frighteningly easy to redirect those same tactics toward dissidents, journalists, labor leaders, activists, and political opponents.

This Amnesty International report isn’t just a humanitarian alarm bell: it’s a constitutional one.

When due process is suspended for one class of people, it’s suspended in principle for all. When the government can hide detainees in swamp camps with no legal representation, it’s already established the machinery necessary to detain anyone it wants to silence. When the public is conditioned to see cages and brutality and think “this is fine,” the moral system of a nation starts to collapse.

We forget that the Constitution doesn’t protect itself; it’s protected by norms, culture, public outrage, legal oversight, and a shared belief that the state doesn’t get to brutalize human beings no matter who they are.

When those norms erode, when brutality becomes invisible-but-known or acceptable, authoritarianism doesn’t arrive with a drumbeat. It arrives quietly. It arrives bureaucratically. It arrives through “temporary measures” and “emergency facilities” and “processing centers” set up for “those people over there.”

Amnesty is demanding the immediate closure of Alligator Alcatraz and any similar state-run black sites. They call for an end to emergency-authorized detention, a prohibition on outdoor punitive confinement, the restoration of access to legal counsel, real medical care, due process, judicial oversight, and a halt to no-bid construction of new concentration camps in America.

These aren’t radical demands. They’re the bare minimum for a nation that claims to believe in the rule of law.

Because if we let our government continue to create a network of secretive, cruel, extrajudicial detention facilities for one set of powerless people today, tomorrow it will inevitably turn those same systems against anyone who challenges their power.

That is how every authoritarian regime in history has done it.

And unless we stop it now, it’s how this one will, too.