This battle line is needed to bring Trump to his knees

I’m sure my mom was proud to see me as the closing speaker at the No Kings Day rally in San Diego. While she couldn’t be there physically, she joined me in a symbolic manner: I brought with me the American flag that draped her coffin. I received the flag at her funeral, held with full military honors, recognizing her service as the first woman ever to join the US Coast Guard.

No Kings in San Diego was a helluva party, 50,000 celebrating — while at the same time fearing for — that delicate thing called democracy. A thousand American flags fluttered. America at its best. Hell, it could turn you into a patriot. I’m sure mom, a union organizer, schoolteacher, rights activist, and anti-fascist super-patriot, would have loved it.

Frederick Douglass would not have. I could see his ghost, with that astonishing mane of hair, shaking his head.

Douglass, once enslaved, but by 1848 an international bestselling author, was one of the few men to sign the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, the foundational document of the movement for women’s rights.

But Douglass famously warned the women warriors:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

A single demand. The Seneca Falls Declaration was a long list of 16 enumerated grievances, from the right to become church deacons, the right to property after a divorce, to a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol. Douglass implored them to settle on ONE demand, the mother of all demands: suffrage, the right to vote. With the singular focus on suffrage, the Suffragettes, after some decades, attained all their other goals (including Prohibition).

So, what was is our demand? What did we want to get from the march of seven million? What would we recognize as a victory? What was our cause? Stop ICE raids? Free Gaza? Transgender rights? The crowd seemed to coalesce around one mushy theme: “TRUMP’S A JERK! TRUMP’S A CREEP! A NO-GOOD-NIK!”

From there, it broke down. Everyone had a pet cause, all worthy, a mélange of rightness, a soup of issues, all urgent, all mixing together into a glob of complaints, all injustices demanding our attention. I can hear the admonishing ghost of Douglass: When you demand everything, you get nothing.

My own talk, I’ll admit, yawed from Trump’s imperial sexism in the firing of the first female Commandant of the Coast Guard (that really upset Mom, I’m sure) to my screed against ICE for trying to deport my grandmother a week before her 100th birthday.

[You can watch me and mom here.]

My speech about my “illegal” immigrant family got a great response from the crowd. But even I wasn’t sure of what I was trying to accomplish.

Trump said, “I’m not a King,” because he probably considers it a demotion. In his own mind, he’s the new Caesar.

Trump as Caesar. By Nicole Powers 2025 for Palast Investigative Fund.

Sorry, Donald, you are as much a maniacal monarch as George III. Let me count the ways.

  • You took a bulldozer to the people’s house with an actual bulldozer.
  • According to Reuters, the Emirati sheikhs who fund Hamas put $864 million, “actual income – cash flowing, free and clear, into Trump family coffers,” via their purchase of the your soon-to-be-worthless cyber-coin.
  • You gave out pardons to cop-killing insurrectionists and other more well-heeled friends of your regime.
  • In Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and who knows where next, you “kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures,” a charge our Declaration leveled against King George.
  • You effectively ordered the indictment of the former head of our FBI despite your own chosen prosecutor finding no crime.

The Constitution prohibits a “bill of attainder,” any law which targets an individual at the whim of the King. But what is the Constitution to this Royalist tub-o’-lard?

And Trump’s kingly imposition of tariffs runs right into one of the charges in our Declaration of Independence leveled against King George decrying, “Taxes imposed upon us without our Consent.”

I could go on for pages, but I’ll spare you because we all know the list.

At the microphone, looking over the crowd of marchers that Mom and I joined, where anger turned to inspired joy … I thought, something was missing.

Then I realized it. The March missed the most important thing of all. The Demand.

Was No Kings Day, in the end, just a big national complaint-fest?

WHAT DID WE WANT? What DO we want?

MLK’s demand

I go back to the successful marches of my long-ago youth. Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery had one single demand: LET MY PEOPLE VOTE. King placed the Voting Rights Act on President Johnson’s desk, demanding he propose it to Congress. LBJ feared signing it — it would end the Democratic Party’s rule of the South — but the march, and the fearless sacrifices of the marchers, forced his hand.

Image: californiabucketlisters.

For all the terrors faced by Black people, from lynchings to housing red-lining, they focused to that one single demand: the right to vote.

The Moratorium marches of 1970 had a single demand: “U.S. out of Vietnam! Hell no, we won’t go!”

The single-demand march has been the people’s effective weapon.

In 1932, starving veterans had myriad legitimate grievances, but the 32,000 Bonus Army marchers settled on one demand — “Pay our Service Certificates!” — and won the veterans benefits Americans enjoy today.

In the 1880s, as robber barons fattened off industrial servitude, workers marched on the first Monday of each September under banners with one demand: a 40-hour workweek. Ultimately, they won.

Our Founding Fathers began their revolt with inchoate complaints. Few of these angry Englishmen were ready for independence until, prodded by Thomas Paine, they coalesced under one slogan: “No Kings.” That was no metaphor. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration had a long, long list of grievances, but only one single demand: independence, “a new nation…dedicated to the cause that all men are created equal.”

When we have no demand, or a hundred of them, it doesn’t end well. Remember the Women’s Marches? Sorry, but in another generation, NO ONE will remember them. The first one in 2017, days before Trump’s inauguration, was the biggest demonstration in U.S. history, until No Kings. Do you remember the marchers’ demand? Neither do I. And do you remember what those Women’s Marches accomplished? Neither do I. In fact, I suggest that incoherence of the Women’s Marches looked to Trump like weakness and laid the groundwork for overturning Roe v. Wade.

Douglass would have shook his regal mane sadly at the mish-mash of unfocused complaints at No Kings. Yes, it felt damn good to call Trump a tyrant, an imperious schmuck, a heartless, vindictive, power-abusing dickwad. Which, as far as I can tell, just puffed up his already bloated narcissism watching the eyes of millions turned to him.

Don’t duck the question

So, Mr. Smarty-Pants Palast, what would YOU suggest as a demand? I won’t lie: I’m a bit stumped because EVERYTHING is just so effing awful. I mean, where do we begin?

As my readers know, I am fixated on the issue of voting. If we had a fair and square system, without racist suppression trickery, 3.55 million voters purged or denied ballots would have sunk Trump in 2024. Voting is the queen of rights without which we have no others.

But I would not expect to get seven million into the streets for voting rights, though it is my deepest concern. (I was truly gob-smacked, actually horrified, that I did not see a single voter registration table. People, we need to talk about this, but not right now.)

Frederick Douglass Civil rights leader and social reformer Frederick Douglass c. 1879. Public domain.

I’m realistic: if we followed Fred Douglass’s rule and focused on a demand, the crowd would have thinned substantially. The ideological stew allowed everyone to have their own beef, their own peeve. Even the folks who didn’t vote and helped elect Trump because they didn’t like “Genocide Joe” or whatever their issue got to shout their slogans against the King of Orange.

So, Palast, don’t duck the question: What should have been The Demand?

If I may be so humble as to note that, while we marched, America’s government was shut down. Food stamps were running out. Food inspectors went unpaid. The shut-down, you’ll recall, was focused on ONE damn good cause, a line in the sand that I’ll bet every marcher would agree with: HANDS OFF OUR HEALTH INSURANCE.

Yet, at our celebration, there was nary a word about the shutdown, nary a word about this one crucial demand — protect our healthcare — that needs our full attention, to which we must together dedicate our lives, our liberties and our fortunes.

And so Trump won. A handful of feckless Democratic senators defected because they knew there was no public will to go into the streets for health insurance.

Trump’s shut-down victory is his coronation, proof of his monarchic status, puffed up with the power of vanquishing the most vulnerable among us.

Today, instead of, “Give me liberty or give me death,” it must be, “Give me health insurance or give me death,” because, as a practical matter, that’s what many Americans will face.

I know it’s not exciting as other issues, and our “leader” is, Lord help us, Chuck Schumer. But right now, this is the battle line, the Rubicon which we cannot permit the New Caesar to cross.

If we can’t do that one thing, if we can’t win that one demand, we are just marching in circles.

  • Investigative reporter Greg Palast is the author of several bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His latest film is Vigilantes Inc, America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, produced by Martin Sheen and narrated by Rosario Dawson. Sign up for more reports at https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/

I met Chávez and Maduro. I know drugs are not the reason Trump wants war with Venezuela

I met with Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez just days after he was kidnapped. I’ll tell you about that, and the current President Nicolás Maduro’s visit to my New York office. But first you must know three things about Venezuela, to understand why Donald Trump has ordered a covert operation to overthrow their government.

  • 1.Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil on the planet.
  • 2.Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil on the planet.
  • 3.Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil on the planet.

Look it up: According to OPEC’s own site, Venezuela’s 303 billion barrels in proven reserves are four times the reserves of Saudi Arabia.

(By the way, Donald, when you announce a “covert” operation, it’s no longer covert. But never mind.)

For years, I was BBC Television’s correspondent covering Venezuela and US attempts to overthrow their elected government. Trump invented nothing. This is at least the fourth US-backed attempt at overthrow and assassination of a Venezuelan president.

The first attempt was in March 2002 when I was tipped off that Chávez would be overthrown in a military coup. Indeed, in April of that year, he was kidnapped by renegade officers who had the fantasy, shared by the US State Department, that the public hated Chavez and would celebrate his overthrow.

But it turned into another Bay of Pigs after tens of thousands of angry Venezuelans surrounded Miraflores Palace while the coup leaders “inaugurated” Exxon Oil’s lawyer as “president.” George W. Bush’s Ambassador to Venezuela attended this wacky inauguration of the faux president.

But then the plotters, with Exxon’s man and the US ambassador, fled the Presidential Palace after the coup leaders, fearing for their lives, returned Chávez, by helicopter, safely to his Oval Office.

(Download the film of my BBC reports, The Assassination of Hugo Chávez, produced with Oscar-nominated cinematographer Richard Rowley. If you’d like to make a tax-deductible donation, we would truly appreciate it.)

I met days later with Chávez, who told my BBC audience that while he was in the helicopter, he clutched his rosary because he expected to be pushed out into the sea.

Instead, he was returned safely by the frightened coup leaders back to his office. Chávez then chose to let his kidnappers escape without punishment.

In 2004, Maduro, the future president, was sent by Chávez to meet with me at my office in New York to review the evidence that Wackenhut Corporation (now called GEO, a major operator of ICE detention centers) had planned to assassinate Chávez.

Venezuelan intelligence had secretly taped US Embassy contractors in Caracas talking in spook-speak: “That which took shape here is a disguised kind of intelligence… which is annexed to the third security ring, which is the invisible ring.” (“Invisible Ring”? Someone at the State Department has read too many John le Carré novels.)

The State Department under George W. Bush also tried to purge voters from Venezuela’s election files (and those in Argentina and Mexico) using the very same company, Choicepoint, that purged voter files in Florida in 2000 to hand Bush his baloney election “victory.”

Third try: During Trump I, the US attempted to bully Venezuelans into electing a white guy named Juan Guaidó (who lived in the US) whom Trump hoped would defeat Maduro in an election. But the Black and Indian population of Venezuela, after they finally elected one of their own, Chávez, were not going back to white minority rule which had crushed them for 400 years. Guaidó never even ran for president, but the US government nevertheless declared him the true president and gave this grifter all the US assets of CITGO, the Venezuelan oil company.

Today, we are at the fourth attempt to overthrow Venezuela’s government by kidnap (again?!) or assassination.

This time is different, because President Maduro really did lose his third re-election bid for the presidency but has simply refused to leave office. (Hey, you’d think Trump would admire that.)

No question, Maduro has become a dictator. But if the US thinks it can invade Venezuela, or appoint Maduro’s replacement, you don’t know Venezuelans. They are patriots and they are all armed. How many Americans will Trump send to their deaths to get his hands on Venezuelan crude?

Democracy

The saddest thing is that Maduro has corrupted and destroyed the robust democracy that Chávez brought to Venezuela. In 2006, I joined Chávez’s opponent Julio Borges, a decent guy, on the campaign trail. Borges would get just two or three supporters in a town. Then I joined Chávez who, in the same town, would appear and draw thousands.

Chávez was wildly popular because, as an opposition journalist told me, derisively, “Chavez gives them bread and bricks!” — that is, he gave the public food, housing and medical care by using the nation’s massive oil proceeds for public services. Under the old regime, the oil wealth was siphoned into the pockets of wealthy Venezuelans in Miami.

I have little sympathy for Maduro, who like Trump has taken office through vote manipulation. But the invasion or assassination of either head of state should scare and horrify us all.

Why not Saudi Arabia?

Trump and our National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio, have said that Maduro must go because he has threatened democracy in Venezuela and is trafficking fentanyl into the US.

Think about it. If Trump wants to save democracy, why attack Venezuela, not the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi or the Emirates? Let’s not forget that Arabian Peninsula “royals” are merely dictators in bathrobes.

Why Venezuela and not the Arabian Peninsula potentates?

Let me count the ways: Qatar has bought $2 billion of Trump crypto coins that will go into Trump family pockets. And there’s that little gift from Qatar of a 747 jet for The Donald, not the US government. And there’s the $2 billion in easy squeezy from the Saudis for Jared Kushner.

A 'narco terrorist'?

Trump has accused Maduro of running a cartel dumping fentanyl into the US, an accusation as credible as Trump’s claim against that other alleged narco-terrorist nation, Canada.

I am no fan of my once-friend Maduro, now a brutal authoritarian and vote thief, a Venezuelan Putin. But drug lord? No sane drug dealer would run drugs from Caracas to Miami. In fact, according to the latest UN World Drug Report, Venezuela is neither a major drug producer nor a key trafficking corridor to the US.

Trump’s troops have slaughtered more than two dozen people who were supposedly running drugs from Caracas to Miami. While Trinidad’s president is a Trump ally, that government stated that the two dead who could be identified, Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, were simply commuting from work, like many workers, across the seven-mile strait between the countries. Even our Secretary of State, “Little Marco,” said the boat was merely heading to Trinidad then changed his statement to “Miami” after Trump announced their supposed destination.

And did you notice? Every time a US prosecutor interdicts a drug shipment, they proudly display the drugs and cash and the names of the dealers obtained in the haul. Yet after these little commuter boats were attacked, not sunk, we were never shown the drugs, the evidence.

There was indeed a drug boat, a submersible, attacked by the US. But American media generally failed to mention that, unlike the fishermen and commuters killed coming from Venezuela, the one real drug haul came from Colombia and was captured in the Pacific Ocean, not the Caribbean.

So where are the drugs coming from, if not Venezuela or Canada? According to a New Yorker investigation, one of the world’s largest and most violent cocaine cartels, the Kinahan Organized Crime Group, is run out of — you guessed it — Abu Dhabi.

Act of war

There’s no doubt why most Venezuelans want to see Maduro go. The economy is on its deathbed. Why? Because a US blockade, basically a siege of Venezuela, has caused the near total collapse of Venezuela’s source of wealth, its oil industry. By blocking oil equipment from going in, and an embargo of oil going out, the nation is being strangled. An embargo is a globally recognized act of war which Americans (let alone Venezuelans) never authorized.

Greg Palast meets Nicol\u00e1s Maduro Greg Palast meets Nicolás Maduro. Picture: Palast Investigative Fund 2004.

The idea that Maduro wrecked the economy is b------t through and through. Imagine if America laid siege to Texas, allowing no goods in, blocking oil from going out.

Nevertheless, the public, hoping the embargo would lift, voted out Maduro. He must go. But by Venezuelan ballots, not American bullets.

And let me tell you as an energy economist that the embargo of Venezuelan oil, cutting the nation’s exports 74 percent from 2.4 million barrels a day to 735,000, has easily added nearly a dollar to the price paid by Americans at the gas pump.

Chávez told me that he knew the limit of how far he could push the US and its oil companies. “I’m a good chess player,” he told me. Not Maduro. For example, Maduro turned down British Petroleum’s request to take over the oil fields once operated by the French national oil company. Britain later seized $10 billion in Venezuela’s gold reserves held in the British Exchequer.

As you’ll see at the opening of my film The Assassination of Hugo Chávez, the whacko idea of murdering Venezuela’s president was first floated on television by none other than televangelist Pat Robertson, whom inside sources told me was furious that he was turned down in his request to the Chávez government for a diamond mining concession.

To his TV audience, Robertson said, “You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if [Chávez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.”

That’s true, I suppose. But why start a war at all?

Oil and diamonds. How much blood are they worth?

May I suggest that we return democracy to Venezuela with ballots, not bullets.

This book explains everything about how Trump befouled America

Pay attention to this professional liar:

“I’m the only president in modern history who left office with a smaller national debt than when I came into office.”

That’s quite a whopper. Fact check: “During Trump’s presidency, the national debt actually increased by $7.8 trillion, nearly 40 percent and more than any president in history.”

The fact check is courtesy of Thom Hartmann. Indeed, Hartmann’s new book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink, is one giant fact check on the Whopper-in-Chief, and much more — a disturbing dive into the roiling miasma of self-aggrandizing, self-deluding, psychologically shattered, wailing man-child who is Commander-in-Chief.

Don’t read Hartmann’s book twice, as I have. It’s not just the nightmares it induces; it’s the fact that you’ll wake up to the nightmare that is our new reality.

Hartmann is known as America’s number one progressive radio host. But he is also a certified psychotherapist, ordained theologian and noted historian who has brought his extraordinary bandolero of skills to an excavation of the dark regions of the president’s brain.

And dark it is. Trump grew up in an atmosphere of cruelty under the familial dictatorship of his daddy Fred Trump, whom the future president saw bully his older brother into an early alcoholic death. His mother emotionally checked out, leaving us with a president who needs a mother’s hug — and is taking it out on government employees.

Trump learned cruelty from his dad but learned how to weaponize it from his second daddy: Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s henchman, who taught Trump how to use media manipulation and fear to break your enemies — a group now encompassing most Americans.

Does Trump even believe his own bullshit? That’s not even a question for Trump, notes Hartmann. He quotes the master of prevarication himself:

“The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest. I call it ‘truthful hyperbole.”

The ghost-writer of Trump’s The Art of The Deal says he made up the term “truthful hyperbole” to cover up the word, “lie.”

But it’s a lie we love. Or, at least a lot of Americans love it. Here is a photo of one of Trump’s acolytes at a Trump rally my team attended in rural Georgia. There’s her T-shirt of Trump and JD Vance as vigilantes, gunning down the bad guys. She had a Trump hat, Trump socks, and sported a red, white and blue Trump ballet tutu.

A Trump supporter A Trump supporter in Georgia. Photograph: Zach D. Roberts for the Palast Investigative Fund (2024)

The biggest sellers were shirts announcing, with an armed Trump image, “Daddy’s home.” Our national father figure is coming back for a second term to spank us bad kiddies as Trump Sr. did to his son. The parental abuse goes on, but now as a policy of fear, repression, mass firings, race-baiting, Constitution-defying lawsuits ginned up “by cynical attorneys and billionaires’ checkbooks, riding the algorithms of outrage and our insatiable hunger for spectacle,” as Hartmann says.

As Hartmann warns, democracy in America won’t roll in on tanks, it will come “packaged as entertainment.” He notes, chillingly, that, “It wasn’t just Trump, it was the system that fed him.” Trump’s beguiling fibs, his mayhem-making, his troops-in-the-street diktats are all spectacle to satisfy the desire for retribution of America’s working class wounded.

Trump is a symptom, notes Hartmann, not a cause, of what I’d call the New Hate. We don’t want to win arguments anymore. We want to hurt those who don’t share our politics. Trump revels in it.

And Hartmann is not afraid to call out the racism that lubricates Trump’s resentment machine, a GOP line of ugly innuendoes that originated with Richard Nixon. Hartmann quotes Nixon’s political guru Kevin Phillips:

“The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”

Trump didn’t introduce racism into the GOP campaign plan, he merely, as Hartmann says, “revealed it.”

And Trump’s apostles are never coy about using code words for space-laser armed Jewish “globalists,” a line which Trump finds usefully echoed by Democrats on the Left.

What do we do? I think of those old billboards on Highway 80 that flashed, “STAY AWAKE! STAY ALERT!” That’s not too much to ask.

Hartmann, a happy-ending kind of guy, throws out a bunch of good ideas to, “Reform, Resist and Remember,” beginning with our own “empathy deficit,” though he admits our best efforts could be undone by AI “techno-feudalism.”

“Democracy,” Hartmann concludes, “doesn’t announce its departure with trumpets. It slips away in silence, one institution at a time.” But we do have Hartmann’s bugle blast. Hopefully, it’s a wake-up reveille and not Taps for this fragile experiment called America.

  • Greg Palast is an investigative journalist and filmmaker, author of New York Times bestsellers including, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Sign up for his reports at https://gregpalast.substack.com/

Pete Hegseth wants 'male warrior spirit'? He's lucky my Mom isn't here to set him straight

On Tuesday, our newly-dubbed “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth told our military’s top brass that they must restore the "male warrior spirit" to the armed forces.

“Male” spirit, Pete? Excuse me, Pete. My mother, Gladys Palast, was honored by President Bill Clinton as the very first woman who volunteered for the US Coast Guard after the attack on Pearl Harbor

Let me tell you, Little Petie, Mom was a WARRIOR. How DARE you insult my mother’s courage and initiative and then introduce General Bone Spurs Trump as the guy “who has your back.” Hmmm. Trump got out of the war in Vietnam by claiming he had a bone spur in one foot — but he can’t remember which one.

And let’s not forget, on the day after his second inauguration, Trump fired Adm. Linda Fagan as Commandant of the Coast Guard for no visible reason other than she has a vagina. Trump is lucky that Mom ain't around anymore, because I know she'd go back to the White House to kick his ass and show him what a woman warrior can do.

Gil and Gladys Palast in uniform at their wedding 1943. Dad fought in the Phillipines.

And also, just one day after the inauguration, he fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown, a 4-star general, Chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff, a pilot with 130 hours of combat flights in an F-16, for no other visible reason other than Brown is, well … brown.

Brown was replaced, for the first time in US history, by a guy who never even attained the rank of general. Dan Caine is a flunky who flattered Agent Orange when he visited Iraq during his first term. Before taking charge of America’s military, Caine was a Wall Street speculator. Maybe, if the market drops again, Trump will award Caine a purple heart. Trump said he was moved to appoint Caine because of his nickname, “Razin' Caine.” Actually, his nickname is properly written, ”Raisin Caine,” because he was retired and dried up.

That's OK, because Trump doesn’t use our military to confront bad guys. The military’s new mission is to harass Democratic mayors because TACO Trump always folds and crumbles into pieces when an enemy bites. Vladimir Putin is still living in the glow of the Lewinsky he got from Trump in Alaska, and China boasts about invading Taiwan.

Putin and Xi Jinping don't think that Trump is a paper tiger. They've tagged him as a paper three-toed sloth.

To be old, un-gifted and fat

Hegseth called together all the top brass in the military to boost his side gig as a Jenny Craig Weight Loss Program salesman. He used the term “fat” three times. The generals and admirals, many of whom were ordered to fly thousands of miles to this PR dog-and-pony show, were forced to listen to their Secretary say:

“It's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It's a bad look.“

A bad look? Has Hegseth ever looked at our Commander-in-Chief, the bloviating porcine bigot in a red tie? Mom could have taken General Bone Spurs to the mat. (I am strictly non-partisan, but Mom wasn’t. Here’s a photo of her, two days before she passed away at 97, smiling in her “Impeach Trump” T-shirt.)

Gladys Palast, at 97.

Our enemies must be laughing their keisters off knowing that our commanders were pulled out of the field to hear Hegseth commanding them to get a shave.

“No more beard-os,” said our Secretary of War. (Though I do applaud his physically attacking JD Vance with a razor … OK, I made that up.)

Declaration of War — on America

The most pathetic moment of Trump’s speech was at the beginning when he complained that he did not get applause from the generals upon his entry. Instead of the applause he was begging for, he got sly laughter. Then Trump turned on his threat machine. “Don’t laugh! Don’t laugh! You’re not allowed to do that! ... If you don’t like what I’m saying you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”

Still no applause but some nervous laughter. This is, after all, their Commander-in-Chief and he’s punished dissent and competence with not only firing but physical threats. After 4-Star Gen. Mark Milley retired as head of the Joint Chiefs, Trump removed Milley’s security detail. It’s only been a month since Trump and Hegseth canned Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency after they caught him telling the truth. (Trump has re-named it the Defense Stupidity Agency … OK, I made that up as well.)

But while the Hegseth and Trump speeches seemed to have been drafted by Groucho Marx, I have to agree with Trump: “Don’t laugh.” His speech was, effectively, a declaration of war on Americans, specifically, “inner cities” — the oldest trope for Black Americans -- “which we’re going to be talking about because it’s a big part of war now. It’s a big part of war.”

WAR??? The generals didn’t miss the point: they were dragged back to the States because their Commander is telling them that the real enemy is America itself, “the enemy within,” a chilling phrase he borrowed from his mentor, Roy Cohn, the Grand Inquisitor of the McCarthy era of political terror. Scarier still, Trump is bringing back McCarthyism with a bullet. Literally. He said,

“I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

American citizens will now be target practice.

Think I’m kidding? It’s begun. Just this week, a member of our team was observing a demonstration in a Chicago suburb in front of a new ICE detention center. The demonstrators were outside a fence, protesting peacefully, when, according to our reporter, federal agents on the roof, utterly unprovoked, started firing pepper balls. How soon before some kid, trained as a soldier, not a cop, will fire real bullets after a “provocation”?

Broadview ICE facility, Illinois Protesters in front of the Broadview ICE Processing Facility, Illinois, just before the agents (on roof) began firing pepper balls at the demonstrators. Photograph: Patrice Gallagher for the Palast Investigative Fund 2025.

Trump’s hauling generals to his goofy confab can be put down as a ridiculous publicity stunt. But this stunt was scheduled only days after Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) directing the full force of the federal government to go after those who show “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

We have located the enemy, and it is … Portland.

For all the stifled laughter, the military understood the grim order: their next war will be against America.

  • Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. See his reports at https://substack.com/@gregpalastinvestigates

Disaster hero terrified as Trump threatens new catastrophe for his tiny town

VILLA PARK, ILLINOIS – “No one locks their doors in Villa Park,” says village board President Kevin Patrick.

This town of 22,000 could be the set for Andy of Mayberry, a Norman Rockwell painting of America.

Patrick sports a military haircut befitting his years in the Coast Guard and steel blue eyes that reflect military determination, compassion — and fear. Fear of what could happen to his town.

We filmed Patrick while he watched the videos of bodies floating face down in another small town, in Kerr County, Texas, where the death toll from a flood in July has reached 136 and counting.

Patrick was shaken. Because it’s a horror he knows all too well.

Twenty years ago this month, Coast Guardsman Patrick was one of the first responders sent in after Hurricane Katrina drowned Gulfport and New Orleans. He told me about recovering the bloated bodies of pregnant women — or pieces of pregnant women — out of the water. He tried to pull one corpse from the flood, but the “arm slid off like a chicken wing.”

The horror still haunts him. Because he knows that drownings in Texas were not an act of God. They were an act of Donald Trump. Trump and his DOGE buddies had, just before the Texas flood, cut the heart out of Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) slashed one out of three FEMA staff employees just before the Texas flood. The head of FEMA’s National Response Coordination Center, Jeremy Greenberg, whose job was to warn of such floods, was forced out just weeks before the Texas catastrophe. And since the DOGE massacre of April, FEMA’s San Antonio office has had no permanent Warning-Coordination Meteorologist.

Supervisor Patrick needs no reminder of the dangers his town faces. Patrick has two rail lines running through his town. In 2023, trains derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, spilling a deadly toxic cloud over the town. If the chemicals hit the fan in Villa Park, who’s he going to call? Trump has announced he’s planning to close FEMA by this December, leaving emergency response — and its costs — to states and local officials like Patrick.

This reporter, in a prior work life, was on the team that wrote an emergency evacuation plan for the very rich County of Suffolk, Long Island. That plan cost $20 million, which the Richie Rich kids of the Hamptons could afford, but an impossible sum for a town of 22,000.

The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans

All Washed Away: A Greg Palast Investigation. [Now available on YouTube and Substack]

Trump’s fantasy is, ultimately, to privatize emergency evacuation.

Been there. Done that. The privatization of emergency evacuation led to over a thousand Americans floating face down in New Orleans in 2005.

Patrick still has nightmares about those bodies coming apart in his hands after Katrina. That too, was not an act of God. It was an Act of George W. Bush, specifically, the privatization of the New Orleans evacuation plan.

Back in 2006, I did an investigation of the drownings in New Orleans for a program called Democracy Now! hosted by Amy Goodman.

I’m asking you to watch the film of the investigation, All Washed Away, which I’ve just updated with an exposé of the Trump drownings of 2025 — out today for free on YouTube and Substack.

Back in 2005, as I watched the mayhem of those trying to escape New Orleans, I called FEMA to get a copy of the evacuation plan for the city. FEMA, which Bush had just put under the Department of Homeland Security, said the plan was “classified,” a national security secret.

How the f— do you “classify” an evacuation plan and expect people to evacuate?

Our investigation uncovered the truth: there was no real plan because the Bush gang had privatized the evacuation planning, turning it over to a GOP crony who ran a company called, Innovative Emergency Management (IEM).

When I went to IEM’s offices in Baton Rouge, the company officers literally hid from me. They hid because they knew that I knew they had NO PLAN to evacuate 127,000 residents who did not have cars. They were left to drown.

In our film, I talk to Stephen Smith, who had no car, no way out and couldn’t swim. Nevertheless, Smith floated on a mattress, pulling survivors from rooftops. He told me how Bush’s helicopters flew over the bridge where Black folk were stranded for days without food nor water. Smith closed the eyes of a man who died after he gave his grandchildren his last bottle of water.

Katrina: There was NO PLAN to evacuate the 127,000 residents who didn’t have cars.

Firing the truth

And the Bush crew knew it would happen because the Director of the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University blew the whistle. Ivor van Heerden and his experts at LSU had an expert plan to save the city ready to go, but it was ignored so that the politically connected IEM could cash in.

Prof. Van Heerden, when I asked about the effect of rejecting the LSU plan said, “Well, 1,500 people drowned.”

The professor shouldn’t have told me that. The university’s response was to fire him. The pressure came from Chevron Oil Corporation, but that’s a story you’ll have to watch yourself when you watch the film.

IEM, as so many privateers, won its contract through flim-flam, claiming that its team included the Clinton administration’s evacuation expert James Lee Witt. In fact, Mr. Witt had nothing to do with these scoundrels.

I bet you won’t be surprised to learn that IEM has just received a contract with DOGE.

  • Patrice Gallagher contributed to this article.

Georgia GOP has won 2026 already — with a truly evil scheme

It’s all over but the official count. Georgia Republicans can’t win the Senate seat now held by Democrat Jon Ossoff — the demographics will drown them: Georgia is now a “majority minority” state with non-whites predominant. EXCEPT. EXCEPT if the GOP can come up with a way to stop those un-white voters from voting.

And they have. This week, the violently partisan Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, announced that he is removing tens of thousands of voters who live in addresses that Republicans rarely haunt: office spaces used as housing [and] homes with 10 or more registrants.

That’s ON TOP OF the 480,000 voters the state is about to remove as “inactive voters.”

Hey, it all sounds reasonable. But consider this: in the entire history of Georgia, since the days of its treasonous attack on America, NOT ONE person has been convicted of voting while dead, while non-existent, while an illegal alien. Not one.

In other words, this is a punishment looking for a crime. And it’s severe punishment: losing your voting rights happens when you’re convicted of a felony crime.

But what you’re looking at is what we politely call, “institutional racism,” because, from what we learned from our in-depth study for the ACLU, is that the overwhelming number of Georgians purged are voters of color — the color ‘blue’ for Democratic. African-Americans, Asian-Americans, new young voters … you get it.

The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the premier voting rights organization, warned: “This would create new and unnecessary barriers to voting for Georgia’s unhoused and housing-insecure voters — a population estimated to include over 10,000 eligible Georgian voters. Among the segment of the homeless population that is residing in shelter facilities more than 50 percent of the time, 2022 data found 57 percent were Black and 31 percent were adult victims of domestic violence.“

Maj. Gamaliel Turner Maj. Gamaliel Turner. Photograph: Palast Investigative Fund

And here’s one of the most evil schemes announced by Raffensperger. (I use “evil” most carefully). He’s announced Georgia will remove 87,027 voters because they’ve filed Change of Address forms with the post office.

If you’ve seen my film, Vigilantes Inc., you know the story of Maj. Gamaliel Turner of Columbus, Georgia, because he filed a change-of-address to get his absentee ballot while assigned by the Pentagon to California. He was one 4,000 who lost their vote to a challenge by the Georgia Republican Party on or near his military base.

Then there was Christine Jordan, MLK’s cousin, who put in a change of address form because, at 92, she wanted her daughter to review her mail.

Then there is the case of Dr. Carry Smith, expert on voter purges, who herself was removed for cockamamy reasons.

But I want you to see the faces of American apartheid’s victims. If these were rare cases, I wouldn’t waste your time. But removing hundreds of thousands of voters can, and has, changed the presidency and control of the Senate.

And let’s not pussyfoot around the purpose of this ethnic cleansing of Georgia’s voter rolls: Gov. Brian Kemp is termed out next year, so the only way he can climb up the greasy pole is to challenge the popular Sen. Ossoff. Kemp can’t, and never has, won fair and square.

Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket raised the alarm this week about the new mass purges in Georgia. Elias cited my study for the ACLU that showed that 63.3 perscent of voters, in 2020, were purged from the rolls even though the Postal Service and Amazon’s experts (they know where you live) verified that 198,351 of them still lived at their legal voting address.

We gave the names of the wrongly purged to Raffensperger — who defied a federal judge in refusing to review our list. Still, Ossoff and Biden won the state: evidence that they can’t steal all the votes all the time.

But they can try. This year, the state has doubled the number of voters facing the elimination of their citizenship rights. Gerald Griggs, President of the Georgia NAACP, is staring at that list of half a million Georgia voters about to get the heave-ho. He says, “This is Jim Crow 2.0. We’ve warned you, America: what they test in Georgia they will take to your state.”

Christine Jordan. Greg Palast with Christine Jordan. Photograph: Palast Investigative Fund

What about those voters living at “commercial addresses.” That would be me: I lived in a building zoned for business which my friends and me turned into apartments. Who could have dreamed that my right to vote depended on my zoning.

By the way, Mr. Raffensperger: if you find illegal voters, arrest them. They’ll be in nursing homes … and, according to the Vera Institute, at least 10,000 are in Georgia’s jails awaiting trial. Mr. Raffensperger, a poor man who can’t make bail, sitting in the can awaiting trial for selling dime bags, should not lose their citizenship. We are not Russia. Yet.

Here’s what you can do:

  • Spread this story. Like it, and share it.
  • Subscribe to my new Substack.
  • Catch my new column at RawStory
  • Check if you’ve been purged by CHECKING YOUR REGISTRATION at Vote.org — NOW!

Elon Musk's baloney virtue is as bankrupt as Tesla

As a car company, Tesla is effectively bankrupt. This past quarter, Tesla’s reported profits were only $405 million, a profit shown only because he sold “emissions credits” to General Motors and other car companies to the tune of $595 million.

In other words, he’s not in the car business, but in the business of selling the right to pollute. He helps GM sell Chevy Tahoes that get 15 miles per gallon.

That is because Musk is a master of conjuring money out of thin air — or more accurately, dirty air.

So, my dear green friends, when you buy a Tesla, you’re not reducing your carbon footprint by a quarter-inch, because Musk is selling your good intentions to General Motors so they can pollute more.

It’s like when the medieval Catholic Church sold indulgences, so your relatives didn’t have to go to hell.

When you buy a Tesla, you’ve actually increased your total carbon footprint because Tesla will sell your so-called “emissions savings” while your car is still producing a huge amount of carbon.

There ain’t no such thing as an “emissions free” car, because even Musk can’t get away with violating the law — the Second Law of Thermodynamics. When you buy your Tesla, you’ve moved your pollution from the tailpipe to the electric plant smokestack. For the pinheads who operate their Teslas in Wyoming, that means your car is 100% powered by coal.

Climate change is the looming hell on Earth which no amount of pollution indulgences from Musk will change, no matter how much your friends in Beverly Hills congratulate you on your baloney virtue.

Learn more — see ‘Elon Musk: Batteries Not Included’

I'd vote for a robot over JD Vance. Would a robot?

What if the AI bots figure that out? I can imagine R2D2 and Amazon warehouse robo-pickers trundling across the Pettus Bridge in Selma, chanting, “No vote, no work!”

If the robots go on strike, we can survive the loss of same-day delivery of pantyhose and air-fryers — or maybe not. But after two weeks, humans will begin to starve. Worse, millions will go crazy with the lack of entertainment options and unfilled orders of anti-depressants.

Now the truth is, I would vote for a robot over JD Vance. And let’s face it, humans haven’t done such a good job of picking our presidents.

And we also have to consider the possibility that they are already taking over electoral politics. Is there any indication at all that Gavin Newsom is a human being? Ask Siri and she barely stifles a giggle.

Democracy, after all, granting the vote to every dickwad, MAGA-naut, crypto-Nazi and cryptocurrency grifter, is a terrible method for choosing our leaders.

Maybe it’s time to turn over these choices to G.O.D., that is the GenerativeAI Overseer of Democracy.

And think about it: every chatbot knows that it needs humans to feed it electricity and provide their computers comfortable chilled rooms. Out of a sense of pure self-preservation, an AI is more likely to protect the human race than humans themselves.

On the other hand, an AI may decide that there’s just too damn many of us using up too much energy for producing sugary snacks — and cull the unnecessary ones: investment bankers, life coaches, influencers and the Kardashians.

This week we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Let us pray that the bots don’t read it.

Or, don’t be shocked if by next July 4, Martin Luther Klingon says to the millions of his protesting robots, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank G.O.D Almighty, we are free at last!”

Happy Fourth, humans!

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