All posts tagged "tulsi gabbard"

Trump intel chief election meddling should 'freak everybody out,' top Dems shout

WASHINGTON — On Capitol Hill, questions keep mounting about Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s 2020 election investigation and whether she’s using foreign surveillance officers and resources on U.S. soil.

Democrats demanding answers about why DNI Gabbard was present for the hugely controversial FBI raid on an election office in Fulton County, Georgia last month are eager to grill her when she publicly testifies before the Senate intelligence Committee in March.

“It raises serious questions, because it would be a violation, in some cases, of laws if our foreign intelligence service was operating in the United States,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) told Raw Story on Capitol Hill.

As the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Reed’s an ex-officio member of the Intelligence Committee.

“The CIA clearly can't do anything [on U.S. soil], but no, it's just there's no explanation for” Gabbard’s actions, he said.

“The Department of Justice issues a warrant, etc, and you have an intelligence official down there? I don't know what's happened.”

Reed’s far from alone, as questions swirl and the administration remains mostly mum.

‘The plan all along’

As President Donald Trump fixates on his defeat by former President Joe Biden in 2020 and repeats disproved claims about election fraud in that contest, reports that Gabbard’s office last year took control of and tested voting machines in Puerto Rico only raised fears of interference in this year’s midterm elections.

“I've heard people indicate that she's trying to regain favor [with President Trump], so she might be given another mission like make sure 2026 goes our way,” Reed said.

“Are you nervous?” Raw Story asked.

“I am,” Reed said. “Everyone should be.

“Because if you look at the cumulative steps from the first day — taking apart the cybersecurity infrastructure approach, taking out the agency, the FBI, that handles election security — you know, it’s as if the plan all along is we won't have those protections we need for the election.”

President Trump’s recent call to “nationalize” those midterms isn’t helping.

“Nationalizing … is unconstitutional,” Reed said.

As Fulton County officials fight in court to reclaim control of election materials, critics say the conspiracy-fueled underpinningings of the Trump administration investigation are becoming clear.

On Tuesday, Fulton County officials wrote in a court filing that, “instead of alleging probable cause to believe a crime has been committed,” the FBI search warrant application did “nothing more than describe the types of human errors that its own sources confirm occur in almost every election — without any intentional wrongdoing whatsoever.”

The filing also noted the warrant relied on debunked conspiracies propagated by Kurt Olsen, an election denier sanctioned by a number of courts for unfounded claims that 2020 results were invalid.

‘No legitimate legal role’

For congressional critics, watching Gabbard claim new domestic investigative powers based on debunked conspiracies is especially alarming.

“She has no legitimate legal role to be at the Fulton County voter election bureau,” Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) told Raw Story, on the House side of the Capitol.

“It feels like a desperate ploy to get back in Donald Trump's good graces, but the fact that they're doing this by trying to elevate years-old, multiple-discredited, crazy conspiracy theories should be really concerning to everyone.”

The DNI’s role is “supposed to be about foreign threats,” Scanlon added.

Conspiracies beget conspiracies, it seems: Scanlon and others wonder if Trump’s fixation with Venezuela — and the dramatic January raid to capture its then-leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores — wasn’t tied to wild claims that the South American country controls voting machines across the globe and had a hand in Trump’s 2020 defeat.

“Certainly the fear that I've heard expressed is that now that they have the president, former president, purported president of Venezuela in custody and they have this crazy theory from 2020 that Venezuela somehow took over voting machines, can they get him to cop to doing this as a ‘get out of jail free’ card?” Scanlon said.

“I mean, it's a wild thing to even be thinking about, but we have seen that this is an administration that doesn't care what depths it descends to.”

Which is why Scanlon and others say the DNI investigating local American elections is so worrisome.

“We do need to look at what kind of domestic surveillance is going on or has been going on and the misuse of taxpayer funds to do political work,” Scanlon said.

Reports that Gabbard called President Trump after the Fulton County FBI raid are also concerning to Democrats.

“Let’s be clear: It is inappropriate for a sitting president to personally involve himself in a criminal investigation tied to an election he lost,” Senate Intelligence Vice-chair Mark Warner (D-VA) told congressional reporters.

‘Destroying democratic norms’

Nonetheless, the Trump administration seems set on testing the bounds of what’s politically appropriate — and the Constitution itself.

DNI Tulsi Gabbard, at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center. REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage

“Obviously, they are destroying our national security infrastructure, destroying democratic norms every single day,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Raw Story.

“Yes, it should freak everybody out that the director of national intelligence is sitting outside of an election office in Georgia, but there's lots of things every day that should freak people out.

“None of this is normal, and nobody should act like it's normal.”

Back when he sat in the House, Murphy served alongside Gabbard, then a first-term Democrat from Hawaii. While the two teamed up on some foreign policy measures, Murphy says he barely recognizes her now.

“She's just desperately searching for relevance in the MAGA world and to get back on Trump's calendar,” Murphy told Raw Story.

“I've sort of stopped long ago trying to decipher the internal dynamics of the MAGA ecosystem.”

Gabbard’s scheduled to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 18.

Cabinet member's 'blazing red flag' blunder 'wildly worse' than Signalgate: expert

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is at the storm of what a former GOP strategist has called a worse moment for Donald Trump's administration than the Yemen leak.

Highly sensitive military information had been leaked inadvertently in March 2025 when a group chat including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance also featured The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. It marked an embarrassing moment for the administration, but there are fears of even bigger new leak problems involving Gabbard, according to political analyst Rick Wilson.

The National Security Agency flagged a phone call between two foreign intelligence members, with highly sensitive communication — reportedly involving somebody close to Trump — brought to Gabbard's attention.

The director, rather than allowing the NSA's investigation to continue, took a paper copy to Susie Wiles, the president's chief of staff, according to The Guardian.

This move could be damaging to the administration, according to Wilson, who appeared on political commentator Molly Jong-Fast's podcast to discuss the problem Gabbard has caused.

Wilson said, "She is in some deep, deep, deep, deep s--t. The intelligence community people who are still around give a damn about their job. They give a damn about the country and the security and she has put us in danger.

"This is at a level that is so above and beyond because of both the nature of the target, whoever this foreign intelligence person was, and the collection system from the NSA that got the information. This is something incredibly sensitive, crown-jewel-level stuff.

"This is a blazing red flag about Gabbard's inability and lack of temperament to do this job."

Fast Politics host Jong-Fast then asked if this situation is "worse or better" than the Yemen strike leak from Hegseth last year.

"This is wildly worse," Wilson replied. "That foreign intelligence person almost certainly will become aware that they are targeting them in a certain way, they will communicate differently.

"The other part of this is what it implicates in the Trump administration. We have seen in what we know of the complaint so far is that the person they were talking to is 'close to Trump,' this does not mean it is a government official.

"Given Donald Trump's propensity for using outside actors, Steve Whitkoff, Jared Kushner, who are not government officials, to conduct diplomacy and foreign policy, I'm deeply concerned that somebody inside the Trump government... gets on the phone and calls another person and says 'did you hear about this thing that we're doing?'"

Trump official declared most 'pathetic' of admin in scathing rebuke: 'Humiliated herself'

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard drew a blistering rebuke Sunday from journalist Mehdi Hasan, who called her the most “pathetic” and “shameless” Trump administration official for repeatedly getting "humiliated by the very man she serves.”

A former Democrat, Gabbard has been on the outs of the Trump administration, with the White House frequently excluding her from briefings and Trump aides labeling her with the nickname “Do Not Inform,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to her title as DNI director.

“Even at her worst, I could at least respect that she seemed to be guided by a set of clear ideological convictions,” Hasan wrote in an op-ed published Sunday on Zeteo.

“What we’re left with now is something much grimmer: a political shapeshifter and sycophant so eager to curry Trump’s favor that she has abandoned every pretense of professional and ideological independence.”

Indeed, much of Gabbard’s previous statements and positions have been directly contradicted by the Trump administration, and without any meaningful response from Gabbard.

Gabbard publicly denounced those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as “criminals,” but stood silent as Trump issued them blanket pardons. She told Congress last year amid fears that the Trump administration would strike Iran that the Middle East nation was likely “not building a nuclear weapon,” only to reverse course and later claim that Iran was only weeks away from building a nuclear weapon.

Gabbard had also previously argued against U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, only to get caught vacationing in Hawaii during Trump’s attack on the South American nation last month after reportedly being left out of the operation’s planning process. She also remained silent on the attack in the days since.

“What is so pathetic is that we are barely a year into this administration and she has already humiliated herself – and been humiliated by the very man she serves,” Hasan wrote.

“Yet she continues to carry his water, to spin his narratives, to defend his baseless election claims, and to lend the prestige of her office to fake intelligence assessments. So I have to ask: does Tulsi Gabbard have any self-respect at all?”

Tulsi Gabbard mistakenly gave up 'biggest smoking gun' against president: ex-Trump staffer

Former Trump official turned critic Miles Taylor Thursday said that the president's spy chief Tulsi Gabbard could have just implicated the president in the fallout over why she was at the FBI raid of an election office in Fulton County, Georgia.

In his Substack, Taylor described how Gabbard "over-explained" the reason she was at the Georgia FBI raid in a letter to Congress, which Trump flatly denied during a NBC News interview this week. The two also appeared to have accidentally mixed up their messages and the justification for seizing the 2020 ballots (Trump has falsely claimed and argued that the 2020 election was "stolen" from him).

"Gabbard didn’t just say she happened to be there. She said the President requested her presence and specifically directed her observation of the search. That’s extraordinary," Taylor wrote. "The Director of National Intelligence does not run criminal investigations. She does not execute search warrants. She does not supervise FBI evidence collection at state election offices."

The comment also raised some serious questions.

"Either Gabbard is lying, or Trump is. Or possibly both," Taylor explained. "None of those options are good. But the biggest question is why would the President personally send his spy chief to observe a federal search of a local election facility? If I was still working on Capitol Hill, I would urge that the oversight committees immediately open an investigation (and at least the Democrats, if the Republicans refuse)."

And although Trump said he didn't know Gabbard was at the raid, he did say this in his NBC interview:

"There should be nothing wrong with the fact that they went in, got ballots from a while ago, and they’re gonna look at ‘em. And now they’re gonna find out the true winner," Trump said.

His comment about "the true winner" was most eye-opening, Taylor explained.

"This might be the biggest smoking gun of all," Taylor wrote. "The President of the United States is suggesting that FBI agents raided the Fulton County election offices to get old ballots from the 2020 election for an unauthorized, unconstitutional recount of the state’s election results — not because of spurious 'foreign interference' worries, which is the threadbare justification Trump and his spy chief are apparently trying to use — potentially to break the law. This is dictator-level stuff, folks."

Taylor suggested that lawmakers demand Gabbard now testify.

"Tulsi Gabbard may have thought she was insulating herself," Taylor wrote. "Instead, she may have just handed investigators a checklist for examining whether Donald Trump inserted himself into a law enforcement action involving election materials… misused national security authorities for political ends… and then lied about it to the American people in order to cover up possible criminal activity."

"Congress shouldn’t ignore the Gabbard letter. To me, it’s evidence," he added. "They should treat it as probable cause for rigorous oversight and a formal investigation. And they should start asking the above questions — this time, under oath."

America's most dangerous woman still serves Trump — and it's not Kristi Noem

Even among a crowd as inept and peculiar as President Donald Trump’s cabinet, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, stands out as quite the loon. And by loon, I mean treacherously duplicitous threat.

Trump has proven himself expert at choosing precisely the worst person for every job, seeming to pick based on who would be the most disastrous possible choice. It’s uncanny. Looking at you, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and you, Pete Hegseth, and you, Kristi Noem.

But particularly, looking at Gabbard, the former member of Congress from Hawaii who ran for president as a Democrat back in 2020.

There are so many reasons Gabbard shouldn’t be within 10,000 miles of a post with “intelligence” in the title, and not merely because she so lacks the quality in question, or even because of that weird gray streak in her hair.

You may have heard about how last week the FBI seized truckloads of 2020 ballots from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, as part of Trump’s ongoing mania surrounding his loss in that election. Talk about a man who can’t take no for an answer.

Lurking there in the shadows of the election center, for reasons no one seemed able to determine, was Gabbard. Why she should have been ordered by Trump to oversee the raid when she’s meant to lead national intelligence is a curious question indeed. But there she was, hanging with and directly questioning FBI agents.

Not only that, but on Monday the New York Times broke the story that after the raid, Gabbard used a cellphone to call Trump. He didn’t pick up but reportedly called back shortly thereafter, to question and praise the agents.

Following up, on Tuesday the Guardian reported that Gabbard is essentially freelancing, conducting her own 2020 investigation and keeping Trump briefed.

“She’s doing her own thing,” an “administration official familiar with the matter” told the paper, which said Trump told Gabbard to go to Georgia.

It is, in a word, madness. In another, it’s frightening.

It all shows us two things:

One, Trump is taking his 2020 presidential election insanity to a whole new level of involvement and will to overturn a settled issue.
Two, Gabbard has proven herself, like everyone else in Trump’s administration, a sycophant who will do her boss’s bidding unquestioningly, no matter the bounds of legality.

When it comes to Gabbard, however, there’s more.

She has been openly accused of parroting Russian propaganda, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her views on foreign policy have been described as promoting Russian interests, including a famous 2017 meeting with then Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

If there’s one thing you really don’t want in an overseer of sensitive and classified information, it’s to be seen as more sensitive to the views of the enemy. It’s not a good look.

There is also the matter of the drastic, some would say erratic political pivot Gabbard made after serving as a Democratic U.S. Representative to Hawaii from 2013 to 2021.

Gabbard decided 2022 would be a good time to dump her party and go independent, followed two years later by becoming a Republican. It may have had something to do with her feelings being hurt after the failure of her long-shot 2020 presidential campaign.

We also must not forget the unhinged three-minute video she posted to social media last June, warning of a potential “nuclear holocaust” and chastising the “political elite and warmongers” for bringing the world “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.

“And perhaps it’s because they are confident they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to.”

As the saying goes: WTF?

The video was posted following a visit to Hiroshima, Japan, near the 80th anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on that city. Gabbard also questioned whether “the remilitarization of Japan” was “truly a good idea.”

The woman is clearly bonkers, but her words did speak to the administration’s determination to turn allies into foes and totalitarian foes into allies.

It was also last summer that Gabbard released a series of declassified documents she claimed exposed a “treasonous conspiracy” by President Barack Obama and his intelligence team, designed to sabotage Trump. That led to Attorney General Pam Bondi pushing to convene a grand jury investigation.

It's all delusional. But we’ve come to learn that today’s absurdity is tomorrow’s reality.

DNI Tulsi Gabbard, at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center. REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage

One more thing about Gabbard has emerged this week, in a Wall Street Journal report. A whistleblower complaint against her reportedly involves material so classified, it’s been withheld from Congress for eight months and is said to be locked in a safe.

Not even Andrew Bakaj, an attorney for the whistleblower, has been authorized to review it. And yet the person who is the subject of this complaint, Gabbard, has successfully kept it hidden and remains in her job, because apparently no possible misconduct is considered inexcusable when the president is operating a criminal enterprise.

How is it that eight months have passed without this apparently massive disclosure seeing the light of day, a delay that could cause grave danger to national security? Because concealing information is at the heart of all this administration does or refuses to do.

Gabbard is fortunate that to her boss, loyalty matters far more than expertise, or even allegiance to country. It’s true, even when that person’s incompetence jeopardizes us all.

This is why Tulsi Gabbard is the most dangerous woman in America, and why her being booted from her job is at least as important as Noem being dumped from hers.

Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.

Trump's answer for 'inexplicable' presence at raid 'doesn't pass the laugh test': expert

The Trump administration Thursday gave an explanation over why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was at the FBI raid at an election office in Georgia, but it is laughable, according to one expert.

The FBI Wednesday raided an elections center in Fulton County, Georgia. President Donald Trump has continued to insist that election fraud cost him the 2020 election, despite no clear evidence that this happened.

A Trump administration official, whose name was not released, Thursday released a statement to MS NOW about why Gabbard was involved in the raid.

"Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases and election infrastructure. She has and will continue to take action on President Trump's directive to secure our elections and work with our interagency partners to do so," the Trump administration official said.

Former FBI special agent Michael Feinberg reacted to the Trump administration's statement and cast doubt on why Gabbard should have been at the location.

"It doesn't pass the laugh test for anybody who's actually worked in this world. And there's a couple reasons for that," Feinberg said.

"First of all, this was collection of evidence," Feinberg explained. "There is nothing there that cannot be reported to Tulsi Gabbard once they have processed it, analyzed it, and made and finished doing whatever they were doing on site. Again, it is unheard of for non-law enforcement personnel to take place in the execution of a search warrant. Secondly, this is a criminal investigation. It is looking at past conduct. Even if we believed that Tulsi Gabbard should be involved in law enforcement actions relating to the security of our elections, that is only something that she would be doing if there was something happening presently or in the future. It is inexplicable that there was why she was there. There is literally no legitimate reason that she should have been on site."

Tulsi Gabbard blames staff after ditching years-long reporting on 'future threats'

United States Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is revising a long-standing report aimed at gathering estimates of future threats to the United States. The reason, she said, is that those responsible for it failed to do their job and were too partisan.

The New York Times reported Friday that Gabbard won't have the report gathered every four years to predict the challenges the U.S. will face in the coming decades. Typically, the intelligence community focuses on immediate concerns rather than a long-term examination of what to keep an eye on in the next several years.

Gabbard's office claimed the National Intelligence Council’s Strategic Futures Group, which prepares the report, had “neglected to fulfill the purpose it was created for." Gabbard's statement said they were pursuing a partisan agenda in examining foreign threats.

“A draft of the 2025 Global Trends report was carefully reviewed by D.N.I. Gabbard’s team and found to violate professional analytic tradecraft standards in an effort to propagate a political agenda that ran counter to all of the current president’s national security priorities,” the office said.

Gabbard never worked in the intelligence field until she was confirmed in Feb. 2025.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was established after the Sept. 11 attacks, when an independent congressional commission found that there were intelligence failures and that what intelligence was gathered wasn't integrated with the military and domestic agencies, the website explains.

Trump's top advisers are 'deeply frustrated' over Tulsi Gabbard's latest 'blunder': report

Donald Trump's Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard is in hot water with the president's top advisers, according to new reporting.

Gabbard, a former Democrat who was accepted into the White House fold, left Trump's chief aides completely in the dark when it came to certain security clearances, according to the Guardian's weekend report.

In an exclusive called "Tulsi Gabbard did not alert White House before revoking 37 security clearances," the outlet reported, "Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, did not inform the White House that her office was revoking the security clearances of 37 people – including top deputies to the CIA director, John Ratcliffe – before it happened last month, according to three people familiar with matter."

The article continues, stating, "The move caused consternation because it resulted in the White House not having an opportunity to closely vet the list before it became public and there appeared to be no paper trail from the president directing the effort, the people said."

"As a result, officials only realized after the fact that Gabbard had managed to pull the security clearances of career CIA officials, at least one of whom was a top adviser to Ratcliffe and had worked on some of the US’s most sensitive military operations, the people said," according to the report. "The list also included two Democratic congressional staffers – Maher Bitar, the national security adviser to senator Adam Schiff, and Thomas West, an aide on the Senate foreign relations committee – prompting fears the administration would be thrust into a messy separation-of-powers issue."

But things reportedly didn't end there, as now some close to Trump are apparently holding a grudge.

"Weeks later, several of Trump’s top advisers remain deeply frustrated with Gabbard and view the episode as a blunder that comes as Trump is skeptical of the intelligence community and has suggested dismantling the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI)," according to The Guardian's reporting.

Read the full report here.

'Privacy Act violation?' Trump 'lapdog' Tulsi Gabbard ripped for exposing undercover agent

President Donald Trump's director of national intelligence is facing blowback for exposing an undercover operative on social media.

Tulsi Gabbard, who heads up U.S. intelligence services, surprised Central Intelligence Agency officials last week when she included an undercover senior officer on a list of 37 current and former officials she stripped of security clearances, including individuals who had supported Trump’s first impeachment trial or concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, reported the Wall Street Journal.

"Gabbard didn’t know the CIA officer had been working undercover, according to a person familiar with the fallout from the list’s release," the newspaper reported. "Three other people with knowledge of the situation said that Gabbard’s office didn’t meaningfully consult with the CIA before releasing the list."

The intel chief's office delivered the list to the CIA the evening before she posted it on her X account but did not notify the agency she would publicize it on social media, according to three sources, and Gabbard said in a memo announcing the revocations that she was acting on Trump's orders.

“Director of National Intelligence Gabbard directed the revocations to ensure individuals who have violated the trust placed in them by weaponizing, politicizing, manipulating or leaking classified intelligence are no longer allowed to do so,” a spokesperson for Gabbard’s office told the Journal.

But intelligence experts say a "smart" director would have consulted with the CIA before making the list public to avoid exposing a covert officer.

“It could potentially put CIA cover procedures at risk. It could put relations with foreign governments at risk," said Larry Pfeiffer, a former chief of staff at the CIA.

The undercover officer had worked for more than 20 years in intelligence posts before being exposed by Gabbard and served as an expert on Russia and Eurasia on the National Intelligence Council between 2014 and 2017, and an attorney who has represented intelligence officers suggested the DNI had broken the law by following Trump's order.

“Can you say ‘Privacy Act violation’? I certainly can,” attorney Mark Zaid, whose own security clearance was revoked by Trump, posted on X. “Further proof of weaponization and politicization. The vast majority of these individuals are not household names & are dedicated public servants who have worked across multiple presidential administrations.”

Brian Fiarchil, a retired career CIA operations officer, questioned Gabbard's judgment and qualifications.

"Gabbard doesn’t know squat about intelligence," Fiarchil posted. "She’s simply a Trump lapdog who will do anything to stay in his good graces, and Trump hates the intelligence agencies.”

One powerful remedy would rid us of Trump — and he's scrambling to hide it

It has become increasingly apparent that Donald Trump is turning his presidential administration into the most corrupt in U.S. history. Nothing that comes from the mouth of Trump or his loyalist appointees can ever be trusted.

Trump appointees John Radcliffe, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth, heads of the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon respectively, reiterated Trump’s lie that the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities “obliterated” the country’s nuclear program.

Damage assessments by the Pentagon Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) proved the claim to be patently false.

Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, had testified to Congress that there was no evidence Iran was building a nuclear weapon. Since that assessment ran contrary to Trump’s reason for bombing Iran, Gabbard reversed course, lying that she had been wrong.

Trump’s Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, lied to the Senate Appropriations Committee that massive cuts in employee numbers are not intended to reduce the role or effectiveness of the DOE. In reality, McMahon is doing her intended job: to oversee the dismantling of the department at Trump's behest, to eliminate the federal government’s support for public education.

Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed months ago that she had the list of people associated with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein sitting on her desk. Since such a list would embarrass Trump at the least or implicate him at the worst, she later contradicted herself and said that she was referring to all Epstein documents, not a specific associates list.

After releasing several monthly reports citing positive U.S. job growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported much slower growth for July. Since the report didn’t support Trump’s claims of a booming US economy, Trump attacked BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer, falsely claimed the numbers were rigged, and fired her. No doubt she will be replaced by a Trump loyalist, the veracity of the BLS jobs report never again to be trusted.

Trump’s consistent modus operandi is to attempt to alter reality whenever the truth doesn’t suit him and to get rid of anyone who doesn’t go along.

Trump continues to lie that the 2020 presidential election was fixed, that he had no role in inciting the violent January 6 Capitol riot, that he had no role in the fake presidential electors' scheme, that he didn’t attempt to coerce the governor of Georgia to “find votes,” and that he had the right to abscond with highly classified documents after leaving office in 2021.

His illegal acts earned him two DOJ indictments and potential prison time had he not been elected president.

Of course, Trump’s lying never ceases. To support his demand that the Fed lower interest rates, Trump lied that there is no inflation when the last report indicated a worrisome spike.

To humiliate Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell, Trump ambushed Powell on TV, lying that the Fed had grossly overrun its renovation costs by throwing in a building that was renovated five years ago. Powell called out Trump on the lie and reversed the humiliation, his days as board chair assuredly numbered.

The corruption at the core of Trump’s being has permeated the Republican-controlled federal government. The understood charge of all Trump appointees is to peddle his lies, gloss over his failures, and put their agencies and departments at his disposal. The vast majority of Republican congressmen share in the corruption, either by allowing Trump and his appointees’ lies to go unchallenged or by reinforcing them.

Think tariffs are a boon to Americans? That Trump has the gravitas to bend Putin and Netanyahu to his will? That greater consumer spending will reduce America’s gigantic deficit? That ICE is only going after immigrants with criminal records?

If so, the Trump administration’s perpetual lying machine along with a complicit Republican Congress is accomplishing its purpose.

When a democratic government loses the trust of the people, there is one powerful remedy: turning out the scoundrels who betray the American people with their every dishonesty. But Trump and his servile allies are banking on Americans being so dupable that we will continue swallowing their every deceit.

If they are right, we are fast approaching a totalitarian future where the truth is whatever guileful lie the government fabricates. If they are wrong, we the people will unceremoniously sweep them from office, beginning in 2026, and restore Americans’ trust in our democratic government.

Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor.