Marilou Johanek, Ohio Capital Journal

This repulsive spectacle spoke of one man's irreversible moral rot

JD Vance famously admitted he was willing “to create stories” to attract media attention during the 2024 presidential campaign.

It was his stunning defense of knowingly spreading false, racist rumors of pet-eating Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio.

The lie demonized the large, legally welcomed immigrant population in Springfield to stoke anti-immigrant hostility (against a powerless community) and fuel MAGA zealotry for mass deportations.

Vance’s unconscionable deceit about Springfield Haitians brought terror and bomb threats to the southwestern town but he doubled down on the story he created to win votes and the vice-presidency.

It was, to say the least, a low point of self-serving shamelessness for the power-drunk Millennial.

But Vance went lower last week. His take on a Kent State-sized moment that shook the nation to its core was next-level Orwellian head games.

Repulsive hardly describes Vance’s performative spectacle last week justifying the public execution of an American citizen by state militia.

The horrific killing was all over social media but Vance, to borrow from George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, told us to reject what we saw with our own eyes.

The vice-president insisted what we saw recorded on multiple cell phone cameras on a street in Minneapolis in broad daylight did not happen as we all saw it happen.

Those cameras caught every angle and the last-words of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in her maroon Honda Pilot before she steered the wheels of her car to leave an intense encounter with masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“I’m not mad at you,” a smiling Good said to them while resting her arm on the rolled down window of her vehicle. She had just dropped her six-year-old off at school. Her dog was in the back seat. Seconds later she was dead.

One of the ICE officers, with a pulled-up neck gaiter and cell phone in one hand, whipped out a gun with the other and summarily shot her through the windshield. Then twice more through the driver’s window.

Good’s SUV careened into a parked car.

Onlookers, including a self-identified physician, who rushed to her aid were waved off by ICE officers.

It took emergency responders, apparently blocked federal law enforcement vehicles, an estimated 15 minutes to get to the lifeless woman on foot.

Almost immediately Trump and his minions blamed the victim for being shot in the face. They all but insinuated that she had it coming because she did not obey conflicting ICE commands.

They wove an official account out of whole cloth without investigation or evidence.

They exonerated the shooter they decided acted in self-defense.

They smeared the dead woman as a “domestic terrorist” who “weaponized her vehicle” to kill law enforcement officers.

They claimed she was part of a left-wing radical network bent on violence with no verification.

Trump posted that Good “violently, willfully and viciously ran over an ICE officer” who was lucky to be alive and “recovering in the hospital.”

It. Never. Happened.

The videos clearly showed a woman in a beanie cap try to drive away from a bad scene.

In a blink, we see rapid gunfire. Images of a bloody front seat. A glove compartment overflowing with stuffed animals. She had a six-year-old.

We see the ICE agent lean into the driver’s window to shoot, hear apparent audio of him call Good a profanity and watch him walk to the crash before departing the crime scene altogether.

Yet Vance, wearing his Trumpy uniform of red tie, white shirt, and blue suit, told us not to believe our lying eyes.

Good, he declared without equivocation or proof, “was trying to ram this guy with her car and he defended himself.”

Vance repeated the lie to denigrate the victim who, he was certain, “tried to run someone over” and “incite violence against ICE.” His “torrent of untruths” hit a crescendo.

“This was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order. This was an attack on the American people.” Vance framed the fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen by a trigger-happy ICE agent as “a tragedy of her own making.”

It was “classic terrorism” he said, “what you see is what you get in this case” and I will tell you what you see and believe, he implied.

In Vance’s telling, the ubiquitous videos of a state-sanctioned killing — that crossed the Rubicon — revealed “a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator,” not an unarmed neighborhood mom who did no such thing.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes.

Vance suggested we owe a “debt of gratitude” to the paramilitary thug who shot Good three times in the head for noncompliance.

Besides, he stipulated, (on no legal basis) the ICE agent who killed the mother of three is protected with “absolute immunity on the job.”

He excoriated the media for “prejudging this guy as if he’s a murderer” while prejudging the victim as a “deranged leftist.”

But as a true Orwellian prototype, Vance must control the narrative — regardless of how twisted or hateful.

He dehumanized Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

He disparaged a woman shot dead in Minnesota.

His knowing lies “justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith,” wrote the National Catholic Reporter.

Indeed. But Vance’s calling card is unconscionable.

Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.

Another red-state invertebrate just sold out his people to Trump

What a cop out. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said he didn’t want to sign another voter suppression bill into law before he signed a sweeping anti-voting measure into law last Friday.

Spoken like a true invertebrate.

Despite an outpouring of opposition from voting rights advocates, DeWine codified Ohio Senate Bill 293, a measure rushed through the legislature with only one hearing in the Ohio House that will change nearly every aspect of voting by mail, voter registration, and provisional ballot processing.

Why? Coercion from Trump World and litigation threats from its personal law firm, aka the U.S. Justice Department, unless its voter restriction demands were met.

Never mind that states, not the president or his heavy-handed lobbyists, run elections in America. But the cowardly governor clutched his pearls and caved.

Then he came up with a pretext about a possible ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on mail ballot deadlines that could decide whether states can count postmarked absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day.

DeWine weighed the legally dubious arm-twisting of a historically corrupt regime and what-if judicial scenarios against the rights of tens of thousands of voters being disenfranchised to appease Donald Trump — and chose excuse over principle. Again.

Ohio Senate Bill 293 was fast-tracked (to dodge public scrutiny and input) from introduction to passage and the governor’s desk for one purpose: control.

It was designed and padded with last-minute provisions to confuse and curb voter turnout, especially among Democratic-leaning demographics, in time to affect the 2026 midterms.

The trumped-up voting barriers DeWine “reluctantly” imposed on statewide voters, unsupported by objective data from Ohio’s own “gold standard” election administration, are a significant step backward for that system and voter rights.

Yet, next year, thanks to Trump toadying opportunists in the Statehouse and an excuse-making governor, Ohio will needlessly take away the already whittled down four-day grace period it gave to voters whose absentee ballots were properly completed, postmarked on time, and mailed before the legal deadline.

That post-election window offered 803,253 Ohioans, who voted by mail in the 2024 election, trust that their ballots would be counted if they arrived in the post-election window allotted — as some 9,500 ballots did last year.

But next year, under Ohio Senate Bill 293, those same U.S. citizens who were eligible to vote in Ohio and did so before the last presidential election could have their otherwise valid ballots tossed if they arrive after Election Day.

The law DeWine enacted effectively penalizes voters for postal deliveries that fail to meet sensible expectations.

The flimsy rationale for eliminating what was once uncontroversial — extra time to accommodate absentee voters for mail delays beyond their control — was “Election Day is Election Day for a reason” and “Allowing ballots to be delivered days after the election does nothing but hurt the integrity and credibility of our elections.”

Such well-articulated profundities are standard fare from state Sen. Theresa Gavarone, the go-to fabulist committed to making voting as difficult as possible for Ohioans with baseless nonsense that defies logic and discards facts.

The Bowling Green Republican’s thin reasoning masks a sinister mission to diminish voter power and citizen challenges to non-responsive government.

During the deliberately short-circuited legislative process to hurry Ohio Senate Bill 293 through the Ohio House and enactment in 2025, Gavarone folded in core components of another anti-voter bill of hers that had not passed the Senate.

It was a devious back-door move to jam through key parts of S.B. 153 (Ohio’s copycat version of the federal SAVE Act stalled in Congress) that will make it harder for eligible Ohioans to vote, harder to collect petition signatures, and create huge bureaucratic and financial burdens on county boards of elections.

What sailed out of the legislature in the waning hours of the lame duck session is worse than you think.

The bill that is now law also requires “documentary proof of citizenship” to register to vote or update your voter registrations (with birth certificates or passports that millions of voters don’t have), shuts down online registration and voter registration drives, increases provisional voting exponentially, and creates potential invalidations for minor clerical errors (which risks large-scale disenfranchisement of voters), bans drop boxes, makes citizen initiatives much harder and more expensive to conduct (to undermine direct democracy rights in the state), and expands mass voter purges.

This is not about election security. This is about erecting obstacles to suppress participation. To disenfranchise countless eligible Ohio voters, particularly married women, young people, the poor, people of color, foreign-born Ohioans. Many in these groups already face disproportionate barriers to voting.

The additional roadblocks Gavarone copy-and-pasted into Ohio Senate Bill 293 could prevent some from exercising their fundamental right to cast a ballot entirely.

This is democracy under aggressive assault in the state.

Mike DeWine could have vetoed S.B. 293 but said he didn’t to avoid potential chaos in future elections that might happen with a possible Supreme Court ruling that could affect the state or not.

Instead of making it easier for eligible Ohio voters to freely and fairly participate in our democratic process with expanded access and accommodations, DeWine copped for excuses that allowed more hurdles to be erected for Ohioans who just want to cast a ballot, have it count and not lose their birthright to petition for government change under punitive rules drafted to derail grassroots campaigns.

More legacy rot for the go-along governor.

Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.

Rampant fear in this red state shows the true danger of Trump's vile racist attacks

Will we be next? Ohio’s Somali community, the second largest in the U.S. after Minnesota, is terrified that President Donald Trump’s crackdown on Somali immigrants in Minneapolis will spread to Columbus, where an estimated 60,000 Somali Americans live.

A surge in ICE activity and racial profiling targeting Somalis in the Twin Cities followed Trump’s racist rant last week against the entire Somali community in America that among them includes an overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens.

Sit with that for a minute.

The president of the United States openly trashed Americans of a certain ethnic and racial group in a vile attack that preceded increased federal government harassment of mostly Somali Americans in Minnesota.

Will Ohioans of Somali descent be next?

Trump has insulted people from African (“s---hole”) countries before, but his latest outburst against Somali Americans was, as one account put it, “shocking in its unapologetic bigotry.”

After nodding off during a lengthy Cabinet meeting dripping with Dear Leader adulation, the 79-year-old convicted felon lashed out at immigrants from the war-ravaged Horn of Africa nation.

Trump called American citizens from Somalia “garbage” and vowed to deport them “back to where they came from” because “they contribute nothing” and “I don’t want them in our country.”

His premier toady, Ohio’s shameless JD Vance, banged the table in emphatic concurrence.

It was repulsive, if not unsurprising behavior from a man who notoriously demeaned and endangered legal Haitian immigrants revitalizing local economies in his home state.

As the approving JD looked on, Trump heaped derision (again) on Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar, who immigrated from Somalia as a child, and called for the member of Congress to “be thrown the hell out” of the U.S.

“We’re going the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. Her friends are garbage.”

There is no ambiguity about the message Trump is sending to the world when he disparages nonwhite immigrants in America while inviting affluent white South Afrikaners to emigrate here with U.S. support.

Conversely, the most powerful man on the planet depicts Black Somali Americans as worthless freeloaders who threatened to destroy “our” country and wants them expelled.

Never mind the taxpayers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners, politicians, etc., who are first- and second-generation Somali Americans contributing to their communities.

Ismail Mohamed is one of them.

He is a 33-year-old lawyer and one of two Somali Americans serving in the Ohio House as a state representative from Columbus.

The Democrat, in his second term, has been fielding urgent calls and texts from anxious constituents ever since Trump put Ohioans of Somali origin in the crosshairs of his wrath.

People are gripped with fear, he said.

“Especially those who don’t speak English, who fear going out. If they get picked up and can’t communicate, how are they going to relay that they are U.S. citizens?” asked Mohamed.

“I am advising many to know their rights, make sure you have documents with you, the name of a lawyer.”

The young legislator was shaken by Trump’s hateful rhetoric about his community yet resolved.

“We’re educating the community, but those in legal limbo as asylum seekers are worried. Even though you have legal status, a pending application, you’re at risk. When the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, attacks a community he knows is not in a position to fight back, it’s hard not to be scared.”

Mohamed, who was born in Somalia and lived as a refugee before coming to the U.S., is most concerned about the impact of Trump’s words and what they could trigger in someone who’s already on edge.

“It’s easy for someone who’s a racist or bigot to pick up a gun and shoot at a local mosque or, God forbid, kill someone. We’ve seen that happen before in other states. We’ve seen an increase in hate crimes in Columbus. I’m careful, even as an elected myself.”

The lawmaker recounted recent online attacks against him stemming from a video of him speaking Somali to his constituents.

Posted blasts skewered an elected rep in the U.S. speaking a foreign language.

Mohamed was unsettled when a Republican colleague in the Ohio House, state Rep. Jennifer Gross, actually reposted the video attacking him and added, “This is an Ohio State Representative. Thoughts?”

Mohamed confided he had to have security for a period of time.

Gross’ post has not been deleted.

Still, the refugee-turned-lawyer-turned-state representative reflected that every immigrant community in America has faced some initial pushback and hostility.

“They’re not American enough, or their language is different, their food is weird.”

But experiencing the ugliness firsthand, and from the president no less, is difficult to process said Mohamed.

“It is still hard and painful when a young kid, a college kid, reaches out to you and says why is the president calling me garbage?”

It is a new low to try to explain or justify, he added.

“You feel so angry and hurt. But we are appealing to everyone to say this is wrong, this is un-American to target and dehumanize an entire people simply for political gain. If it is Somali Americans now, it’ll be a different community next week. I hope Ohioans who are not Somali can just take a step back and imagine what is happening to us happening to them or their ancestors who were not welcomed.”

Voters in this red state enshrined abortion rights. Republicans simply ignored them

Try as they did to mislead and deceive Ohio voters about the horror of protecting abortion access and other forms of reproductive care in the state constitution, Ohio Republicans — from the governor on down — failed to fool 57 percent of the electorate in 2023.

Voters from across the political spectrum saw through the preposterous propaganda meant to dissuade Ohioans from enshrining the right of every individual “to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” in the Ohio Constitution.

The decisive passage of Ohio’s Issue 1 amendment to preserve the right to make those decisions, including abortion, was essentially people telling politicians to butt out of personal medical choices they had no business meddling in.

Despite the deliberately loaded ballot wording, inserted by Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose to subvert the referendum, voters channeled their Midwest sensibility of justice.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion, it was up to states to either restore that half-century right or repeal it.

Ohio voters chose a rational middle ground to restore a woman’s reproductive autonomy on private medical options that included, but were not limited to “contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care and abortion.”

It was not unreasonable, a voting majority concluded on Nov. 7, 2023, that the state be barred from directly or indirectly burdening, penalizing, prohibiting, interfering with or discriminating against this constitutional right to reproductive freedom — unless it demonstrates “that it is using the least restrictive means to advance the individual’s health in accordance with widely accepted and evidence-based standards of care.”

Put a pin in that caveat.

Voters agreed that abortion may be banned after fetal viability, but no procedure could be prohibited “if in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient’s treating physician it is necessary to protect the pregnant patient’s life or health.”

Contrary to claims made during the Issue 1 campaign, late-term abortions are extremely rare, representing less than 1 percent of all abortions in the U.S.

Despite the fear-mongering and falsehoods thrown at Ohio voters weighing the abortion rights amendment, despite the ton of money dumped to defeat the measure by the Catholic Church, the citizen’s initiative is now Article I, Section 22 of the Ohio Constitution.

The people spoke. Resoundingly.

Yet, ever since, a clear majority of the statewide constituency secured the constitutionally protected right to make reproductive decisions without government interference, the government has interfered.

Ohio Republicans signaled their intent from the beginning not to respect the will of voters on self-determination, but to override it.

The day after the amendment passed, more than two dozen GOP lawmakers in the legislature signed a statement to “do everything in [their] power” to maintain restrictive abortion laws on the books in Ohio.

A handful of anti-abortion zealots even tried to seize “exclusive authority over implementing” the constitutional amendment from the judiciary “to prevent mischief by pro-abortion courts.”

“This isn’t the end,” huffed then-Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman (and current Ohio House Speaker) who promised “a revolving door of ballot campaigns to repeal or replace” the reproductive rights amendment.

Former Speaker Jason Stephens warned “the legislature has multiple paths that we will explore” to undercut the people’s wishes.

Ohio’s Republican attorney general is still soaking taxpayers with endless litigation to preserve parts of the state’s six-week abortion ban that multiple courts have ruled unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, Ohio Statehouse Republicans can’t stop coming up with new legislation in 2025 to burden or impede individuals from accessing their constitutional right to abortion.

Ohio House Bill 347 would reinstate a 24-hour waiting period for abortions (along with state-mandated information and in-person visits) unrequired in other medical procedures.

Never mind that the existing law, blocked by an Ohio judge as unconstitutional, is still in court.

Two other anti-abortion bills in the Ohio House could potentially limit access to medication abortion (used safely in the U.S. for 20 years) and threaten non-abortion healthcare for low-income Ohioans by banning Medicaid reimbursements to clinics that provide abortions.

But the real topper by Republican lawmakers — less than two years after voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion — is Ohio House Bill 370, sweeping legislation that would impose a near-total ban on the procedure.

The proposal would redefine legal personhood to begin at conception, effectively granting fertilized eggs full legal protection under Ohio law.

After their setback in 2023, the Republican supermajority in the legislature has attempted to regulate, restrict or outlaw abortion as if nothing changed.

Pending bills that would undermine legalized abortion in the state are designed to overturn the popular vote of Ohioans.

GOP lawmakers in other red states are following similar playbooks with voters who approve progressive measures Republicans oppose.

The unaccountable autocrats, who erode the power of direct democracy, do not answer to the gerrymandered constituents they take for granted or feel any obligation to adhere to the letter of any law they dislike.

Ohio’s Republican overlords openly defy the state constitution on redistricting and abortion rights to get their way no matter what a majority of folks in their state wants.

Question is, will voters cede self-governance for team loyalty at the ballot box, or will they demand due respect from the elected representatives who work for them and loyalty to the rule of law over party?

Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.

Of all Trump's toadies this may be the most vicious — and hopeless

Never forget that the Ohioan who is a heartbeat away from the presidency — and chomping at the bit to replace the aging, increasingly incoherent incumbent — said he makes things up to get attention.

JD Vance, the former first-term Ohio senator who wheedled his way into the good graces of a convicted felon (he once called an “idiot”) to become vice-president, flat out declared his willingness “to create stories” last year while defending his false, racist rumors of Haitian immigrants abducting and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

It was a remarkable confession from a craven opportunist who scarcely hid his power lust.

Today Vance salivates over sitting behind the Resolute Desk and proves time and again that he will do and say whatever it takes to get there.

Ohioans saw his politically expedient metamorphosis from anti-Trumper to bearded MAGA poser in his rocky U.S. Senate campaign. They watched Vance prostrate himself before a disgraced ex-president to snag an endorsement and pull off an improbable win.

His brief stint in the U.S. Senate was largely spent auditioning to be Trump’s presidential running mate with performative, made-for-Fox News theatrics and bookings. Vance won the part and the vice-presidency.

That politicians lie is hardly news. But Vance does it pathologically, like his boss. Except the veep isn’t Trump. The Ohio politician doesn’t get a pass on lying or acting like a jerk. That’s reserved for the twice-impeached adjudicated fraudster and sexual abuser who famously bragged he could get away with anything and not lose any voters.

Vance gets no such reprieve.

When he fumbles and fabricates with obvious untruths, the veep gets worldwide ridicule and even worse favorability ratings.

Yet driven by ambition, Vance persists in repeating disproven claims, believing it will benefit his 2028 prospects rather than harm them.

He may be right.

Vance catapulted to the White House as Trump’s understudy despite the dehumanizing story he invented to terrorize lawful immigrant workers in his home state.

He amplified all sorts of lies in the 2024 campaign, including false claims about a stolen election that wasn’t and Trump saving Obamacare which he tried to kill.

Nevertheless, some in the MAGA camp still look askance at Vance’s transformation from Never-Trumper to Biggest-Trump-Fan-Ever.

Authentic doesn’t describe the Silicon Valley venture capitalist-turned-MAGA grievance peddler.

Little wonder Vance was tanking in the Republican primary race for the Ohio U.S. Senate seat until his billionaire pals came to the rescue with Trump’s blessing.

But the 41-year-old from Middletown, Ohio is a climber on his way to the top.

He is a restless vice president who covets his boss’ job.

Problem is Vance has neither Trump’s charisma nor entertainment chops — let alone his cult of personality. To be fair, it’s doubtful any red-tie wearing sycophant does.

Yet from the moment Vance boarded Air Force Two, he began sharpening his skills set as a front man for the Trump regime who could effortlessly dispense spin on the daily with scant connection to reality.

His list of whoppers have effectively erased any pretense that the prospective president-in-waiting is a straight shooter who can be trusted to tell the truth.

But frankly, Vance forfeited the mantle of credibility when he confessed a penchant for inventing fairy tales as a means to an end. He admitted he was willing to manufacture stories that weren’t true to generate headlines that paid off politically.

Everything Vance says must be weighed in the context of that admission. He essentially copped to lying as a partisan ploy for publicity.

Last week the veep super-charged a lie so big and so brazen about the Republican government shutdown it was almost not worth addressing — save for the people who might be misled by the ploy to juice up media attention.

It was a story created out of whole cloth that falsely tied the shutdown to Democrats’ alleged drive to give all immigrants health care. Pure fabrication. But Vance ran with it.

As the U.S. headed for a shutdown a week ago, the shameless Ohioan repeated what he must have known had no basis in fact:

“Democrats are threatening to shut down the entire government because they want to give hundreds of billions of dollars of health care benefits to illegal aliens.”

Vance and other Republicans continued to parrot the made-up claim even after it was factually refuted as fantasy.

Nowhere in the Democrats’ proposal, which Republicans refused to negotiate, is there any demand to fund health care for people in the U.S. unlawfully — who have never been eligible federally funded Medicaid, Medicare, or Affordable Care Act tax credits.

Democrats want Republicans to extend a temporary Biden-era program that lowered health insurance costs for more than 20 million Americans buying coverage through the ACA.

They also want Republicans, who control the White House and Congress, to undo at least some of the dramatic Medicaid cuts the GOP enacted over the summer in Trump’s godawful bill.

But Vance isn’t focused on the dire financial stakes facing low-to middle-income Ohioans or citizens across the country. He has stories to create and appearances to book.

Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.

We are about to ruin what makes America great — and it will hurt these Trump voters first

“We’re in a hell of a mess here,” said Ohio farmer Chris Gibbs as he worked on his combine at the start of harvest season.

“A severe cash flow mess,” he sighed. “A working capital mess.”

Gibbs, who farms more than 500 acres of corn, soybeans, wheat, and alfalfa hay in Shelby County, along with a 90-head cow-calf operation, described the five-alarm fire raging in the farming community from Trump’s blanket tariffs.

Some growers have called the fallout from his chaotic trade war, and the reciprocal tariffs it provoked, a “farmageddon” that could ruin what made rural America great.

It’s that bad.

The Trump tariffs are shrinking incomes and exploding expenses for farmers, who, thanks to a president they still overwhelmingly support, fear losing their farms.

Many don’t know how much longer they can hang on.

Trump’s punitive tariffs on foreign buyers made their crops less competitive in markets around the world (and drove down prices more) while other senseless tariffs on fertilizer, steel, aluminum, and lumber just sent the cost of doing business through the roof.

The double whammy of Trump tariffs is especially painful for family farms that make up about 87 percent of all farms in Ohio.

Individual farmers struggle to break even, buy supplies, sell their crops, and build a sustainable future with long-term customers.

But the current tariff dance with Trump keeps them up nights.

Everything a farmer buys “from phosphate and potash to agricultural chemicals, herbicides, machine parts, is up by 50 percent over the last decade, while our proceeds from the sale of crops is down by 40 percent,” said fifth-generation Ohio farmer Joe Logan.

The former president of the Ohio Farmers union — a group focused on family farmers — maintained “the industrial agricultural community is chugging right along, raking in billions of dollars” while family farmers are not making any money.

Instead, they’re battling irrational tariffs, rising costs, high interest rates, farm bankruptcies and abiding dread.

How will they move crops without buyers or the major trade deals Trump promised to fix what he broke?

Farmers felt the same creeping despair with the tariff debacle of 2018 when Trump first slapped punitive tariffs on crucial exporters of American crops, including China.

The move caused a tidal wave of financial disaster for U.S. farms and irreparably damaged trade relations abroad.

“Farmers, agribusiness and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) had invested millions of dollars and decades of time to cultivate foreign markets like those in China,” explained Logan, “which, up until that point, bought most of our soybeans.”

But the biggest crop farmed in Ohio was fated to lose its biggest customer then and now.

In 2018, Trump destroyed enduring trade deals in overseas markets and “the trust that we had built over the previous 30 years,” Gibbs said.

“That left us with acute losses because of retaliatory tariffs, primarily from China.”

The U.S. soybean crop dropped 20% in value overnight in the summer of 2018, recalled the farmer from west central Ohio.

“I came out swinging pretty hard with that and was very critical of the president and the policy at the time.”

The tariff madness was enough for Gibbs, a lifelong Republican and former chairman of the Shelby County GOP, to leave his party in 2019 and join forces with state Democrats as an advocate for rural Ohio and America.

Then came 2025 and another blast of Trump tariffs to hammer farmers with shattered export markets and rising input costs.

“This is déjà vu all over again,” Gibbs griped. “We’re back in the same situation but only worse. In the major commodities, corn, wheat, soybeans, sorghum, rice, cotton, prices are below the cost of production, so there’s built-in loss. But we also have exorbitant costs that never recovered since Covid.”

Plus, the front-end cost of farming has been jacked up by Trump tariffs on seed, fertilizer, and machinery.

Farmers in already-thin margins are getting crushed.

Tariffs on imported goods have made it more expensive for them to farm while retaliatory tariffs, imposed by other countries, (in response to Trump’s trade war) mean fewer American crops being sold and, when they are, at lower prices.

It’s a no-win gambit for farmers and the ag industry that generates over $9 trillion in economic activity and supports millions of jobs.

Last year, China accounted for 54 percent of U.S. soybean exports. This year it bought zero so far.

Not a single soybean from U.S. farmers.

Chinese buyers turned to Brazil and other suppliers for the crop in 2018. U.S. soybean trade with China never fully recovered.

“We did hear that China made a big purchase recently,” said Logan, “but unfortunately that purchase was from Argentina rather than the U.S., so we’re in a world of hurt.”

He believes more farmers are waking up to the hollowness of Trump’s promises for a “golden age” through tariffs but expect the government to bail them out again like it did in 2018.

Trump floated using tariff revenue as farm subsidies.

Farmers will wait, because what choice do they have? And sweat.

“I used to tell my son, when he was just getting started, until you wake up in the middle of the night, 2:30 in the morning, and you got sweat rolling down your face, you haven’t really experienced what it is to farm,” Gibbs said with a rueful laugh.

“I’m feeling that now, 49 years in. It’s hard.”

Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.

There's still time to oppose these shameless grabs for power

Ohio politicians pressured by an openly corrupt president look to be doubling down on blatantly partisan gerrymandering to help them in the 2026 midterms by manipulating congressional district boundaries in 2025, to silence the voices of opposition.

That’s not normal. Neither is armed troops and tanks in American streets. Neither are unidentifiable, masked federal agents seizing people off the streets because they fit a racial profile.

None of this is normal. Not in a functioning constitutional republic.

But without effective, sustained pushback from fearless pro-democracy leaders and a resolute citizenry determined to keep its inalienable rights, the takeover happening now in Ohio and the country will become the accepted norm by default.

We are not there yet.

There is still time to dissent — loudly — about political dictates from the Ohio Statehouse and the Trump regime.

But the window of opportunity is short.

Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, the mastermind behind Ohio’s unconstitutionally gerrymandered legislative and congressional maps — who called the rule of law on redistricting reform in the state “aspirational” and basically ignored it — is already signaling that new congressional districts will be drawn by GOP fiat without buy-in from the minority party.

Even before the new joint committee on congressional redistricting was announced by Republican legislative leaders, Huffman judged that chances for a bipartisan deal — on GOP plans to grab at least two more congressional districts through gerrymandering — are “not looking good” for passing a map with Democratic support by Sept. 30.

That means the congressional map that gives unfair advantage to one party over the other (which the Ohio Constitution explicitly prohibits) will go the Republican-majority Ohio Redistricting Commission.

If the panel can’t convince the two Democratic commissioners to bless the GOP power grab for more U.S. House seats by the end of October, the process returns to the legislature where Huffman and the Republican supermajority can easily pass their congressional map with a simple majority.

The Speaker — who in 2022 thumbed his nose at the constitutional amendment Ohioans overwhelmingly approved to end congressional gerrymandering — figures he can screw voters again and get away with it by dispensing normalizing assurances to follow the “process voters approved” and “stick to the Constitution and make decisions based on that.”

Huffman presents as conventional and law-abiding as he takes gerrymandering to new extremes in Ohio — like Texas and other red states considering similar steps. But make no mistake: He is razor-focused on undermining the will of Ohio voters so his party can stay in power in Congress regardless of majority opinion.

Gerrymandering disconnects political power from the will of voters by letting the powerful choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. The result is skewed, unrepresentative district maps where electoral outcomes are virtually guaranteed.

That is what Huffman has orchestrated repeatedly with Ohio’s congressional redistricting, but he frames it as good faith map-making in accordance with the law to put a sheen on stealing voter power at the ballot box — as if that were normal.

It is only normal in governments who do not answer to the people they claim to represent.

Same goes for the unprovoked, unwarranted military deployment of troops and armaments in a free society to police its citizens.

It is only normal under regimes flexing muscle at the expense of the constitution and the rule of law.

It is a show of force to intimidate the governed into submission. It is also illegal, ruled a federal judge recently in California about Donald Trump’s use of federal troops for domestic policing in Los Angeles this summer.

Yet the president plans to escalate his use of troops in U.S. cities saying he’ll deploy to Memphis next — one of several blue cities run by Black mayors Trump has targeted to “fix like we did in Washington.”

Nearly 2,300 National Guard troops were deployed to patrol the nation’s capital a month ago after Trump declared a “crime emergency” in D.C. — even though violent crime in the federal district was at its lowest level in 30 years.

Trump falsely claimed the city was the most unsafe in the U.S “and perhaps the world” to justify his militarized policing of Washingtonians.

Six red-state governors, including Ohio’s Gov. Mike DeWine, rushed hundreds of extra Guard troops to D.C. to sightsee with tourists and score points with Trump.

Bored soldiers, used as political props, were relegated to picking up trash, raking leaves, laying mulch, and taking selfies with onlookers startled to see soldiers with rifles and armored vehicles loitering outside Union Station.

DeWine could have declined to be complicit in the dress rehearsal of military used against his fellow citizens; others from his party did. But he chose to put more boots on the ground in an American city to support a bogus “emergency” and call it the “right thing to do.”

The governor said his decision to send troops against the wishes of D.C. officials was consistent with past deployments. How on Earth could it be?

Truth is DeWine just wanted Ohioans to think his armed reinforcements to appease a dangerous megalomaniac was normal.

It was not and can never be as long as democracy has breath in America.

Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist

Tweedledum and Tweedledumber: these two shameless GOP pols betray their state each day

Ohio Republican U.S. Sens. Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted both swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States and “bear true faith and allegiance to the same” before taking their seats. But their promised loyalty to the rule of law was quickly supplanted by unyielding loyalty to a twice-impeached felon with a vindictive streak.

It appears their unwavering commitment to “bear faith and allegiance” is first and foremost to Donald Trump. Obeyance without question.

They support and defend whatever he wants legislatively, regardless of consequences.

Moreno and Husted both approved massive Trump tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, businesses, and large corporations that will balloon our national debt by trillions while leaving behind or raising costs for millions of working families in Ohio and across America.

They voted for the “big beautiful” bill that overwhelmingly favors the richest 10 percent in the country while savagely gutting programs everyday families depend on from health care and food assistance to public safety programs.

The Ohio Republicans will dodge and weave about the severe ramifications of the wildly unpopular bill they enacted but rave over the “no taxes on tips” temporary program that will, in fact, result in little to no benefits for many workers.

Ohio’s GOP senators decided early on to singularly appease Donald Trump (and give lip service to constituents?) in straight party line votes on his flagship legislation (even if it cruelly defunds programs for Ohioans trying to make ends meet) and on whomever he nominates, regardless of quality or controversy.

For a minute last week, it seemed their slavish devotion would keep them in sweltering D.C. during the entire August recess. Trump demanded the Senate confirm his backlog of nominees, who “should NOT BE FORCED TO WAIT,” before adjourning.

Moreno and Husted had their blanket “yes” votes ready to go — but Senate Democrats suddenly grew a spine to thwart Trump’s ultimatum. Who knew? They conditioned approval for “historically bad nominees (who) deserve a historical level of scrutiny” on the release of congressionally appropriated funds (largely for the National Institutes of Health) illegally frozen by the White House.

Trump went into a tailspin on social media, telling Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to “GO TO HELL.”

But the standoff went nowhere, and senators headed home without a deal and just a handful of confirmations.

Still, Moreno and Husted will always have bragging rights for their roles in confirming what is easily one of Trump’s most appalling picks for the federal judiciary. Both Ohio Republicans helped put Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and so-called Justice Department “enforcer” of his retribution campaign, on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals — where Bove could conceivably review one of hundreds of lawsuits against the Trump administration. Where his impartiality would be a punchline in a bad joke.

Bove demonstrated total sycophancy to the president during his corrosive stint at the Justice Department.

Trump pardoned all the Jan. 6 insurrectionists criminally convicted for violently storming the U.S. Capitol. Bove complemented that depravity by personally firing Jan. 6 prosecutors (purely for political reasons) while echoing Trump’s assertion that their arduous case work was “a grave national injustice.”

Bove also called for the FBI agents who investigated the attack to be identified and fired. He ordered career prosecutors in New York to abruptly drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams in an apparent quid pro quo for Adams’s help in Trump’s immigration roundups. Stunned attorneys resigned in protest rather than “abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington.”

Multiple whistleblowers came forward with corroborating accounts of Bove encouraging Department of Justice lawyers to defy court orders and intentionally mislead judges about administration policies. They warned Republican senators that Bove had lied during his confirmation hearing. Over 900 former DOJ prosecutors and dozens of former federal and state judges pleaded with senators to reject such a manifestly unfit nominee for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.

Yet, instead of recoiling at all the red flags raised about Bove’s alleged misconduct, nearly every Senate Republican, including Ohio’s Tweedledee and Tweedledum, rewarded him with an appellate court judgeship.

Clearly, it was more crucial for them to be counted as unswerving Trump loyalists than to preserve the integrity of federal courts.

Federal judges must adhere to a code of ethics that requires them to “maintain and enforce high standards of conduct,” to “respect and comply with the law,” and, most importantly, to “not be swayed by partisan interests.”

A ton of evidence plainly showed Bove did not meet these minimum qualifications but Republican senators, like Moreno and Husted, pretended otherwise.

They surrendered their constitutional mandate to advise and consent and lined up behind a faithful Trump footsoldier.

By rushing to confirm Bove to a powerful circuit court — without bothering to hear from witnesses with substantiated testimony about his purported lawless behavior — every Senate Republican, save two, declared fealty to Trump over duty to protect the rule of law and an independent judiciary.

They betrayed their oath of office and those who naively expected more of their U.S. senators than to blindly execute Trump’s agenda — no questions asked.

Shame on you, Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted. Do better for your state and country.

How Trump is screwing workers in his VP's home state

Ohioans whose livelihoods are inextricably linked to the automotive industry are in for a bumpy ride.

The Big Three automakers, who employ 86,000 workers in vehicle and parts manufacturing in the state, along with Honda’s strong presence, are grappling with escalating costs and tumbling profits as Trump's tariffs take effect.

Cumulative tariff costs for U.S. automakers are pegged at nearly $4-5 billion this year, according to a recent study, roughly $5,000 per vehicle in parts.

Last week, General Motors and Stellantis, formerly Chrysler, announced bad news about their bottom lines.

GM said Trump’s tariffs on its biggest trading partners cost the company more than $1 billion in the second quarter of 2025.

Stellantis expects a $2.7 billion loss in the first half of the year, in part from tariffs. Ford Motor, and other import-heavy brands, face similar strains from tariffs.

Analysts predict Ford’s Q2 earnings will show a double-digit earnings decline when the company releases its numbers Wednesday.

But understand this: the financial tumult of tariffs eating into U.S. carmakers’ profit margins will reverberate in factory hubs throughout Ohio when import costs cannot be sustained without steep markups on cars people won’t buy.

We’ve seen this movie before. If inventory isn’t moving, plants cut shifts. Layoffs mount as unsold vehicles pile up in dealership lots.

When that happens — and it sure appears to be the tariff-induced trajectory we’re on — it won’t just be tens of thousands of Ohio manufacturing jobs that will be affected by declining car sales and plummeting company profits.

Several times that many people in the state are employed by businesses that serve automakers and their families. The impact of the auto industry on Ohio’s economy cannot be overstated.

The toll of Trump’s irrational trade war with Mexico and Canada, Ohio’s largest trading partner, will ultimately be paid by Jeep workers in Toledo, employees at the Ford assembly plant in Avon Lake, the Lima engine plant, the GM stamping and metal plant in Parma and others.

These are Ohioans earning solid wages (average salary is $29.85 an hour or $62,097 a year, according to ZipRecruiter) with better benefits.

Many are Trump supporters but he is directly jeopardizing their success stories by threatening to hike tariffs even higher on Mexico and Canada — 30% and 35%, respectively — on Friday.

Adding insult to injury, Trump further undercut U.S. car companies last week by lowering tariffs for Japanese imports to 15% while GM, Ford and Stellantis still pay 25% tariffs for cars they manufacture in Canada and Mexico.

The American Automotive Policy Council, that represents the Detroit Big Three, said “any deal that charges a lower tariff for Japanese imports with virtually no U.S. content is a bad deal for the U.S. industry and U.S. autoworkers.”

But despite the pressing concerns of American automakers that Trump’s plan could give Japanese automakers unfair advantage, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick brushed off the complaints with his trademark, tone-deaf drivel.

“Oh my God, that’s just so silly,” Lutnick sputtered on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street. American auto companies don’t mind the discrepancy in tariff costs that favor a foreign competitor, he brayed. They’re “cool with” paying higher tariff fees than Japan,

Lutnick assured absolutely no one.

Does the commerce secretary really believe domestic automakers and suppliers are “cool with” the cost of business rising astronomically? Or jacking up consumer prices on vehicles that inevitably reduce sales? Will the Big Three be “cool with” massive job losses at shuttered factories?

It is absurd blather from a billionaire carrying water for another billionaire lost in magical economic thinking.

Trump promised a new “golden age” in U.S. manufacturing courtesy his nonsensical trade war with some of America’s closest allies.

The “very stable genius” insisted his barrage of tariffs, with little discernible rationale, will generate a domestic manufacturing boom like no other — contravening every fundamental taught in ECON 101.

“Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country,” declared the felon (with multiple bankruptcies) based on nothing.

But instead of roaring back, U.S. manufacturers are in a slump.

In just the second quarter of this year they are reeling with oppressive import costs they are forced to offset with prices increases on products buyers can no longer afford.

Tack on more tariff charges (taxes) for other imported material (steel and aluminum) on top of EV (electric vehicles) incentives, such as tax credits, going away and tell me again how the Big Three are “cool with” unsustainable losses caused by a seemingly addled 79-year-old with a nostalgic tick for the 1950s.

Second quarter numbers scream for course correction but Trump is on a tariff power trip that defies reason.

His economic policy (?) — driven by impulse and flattery — could set American competitiveness in manufacturing back decades and increase the prospects of more hollowed out communities like Youngstown, Ohio.

Trump promised an economic renaissance there, too. Remember?

In 2017 he said all the lost auto jobs, that used to fill the GM Lordstown parking lot with 4,500 employees, would come roaring back.

The exact opposite happened. GM cut the second shift at Lordstown in 2018. A year later the plant would close for good.

Trump betrayed those who elected him and never looked back. Is he doing that again by risking auto-dependent livelihoods in the state with reckless trade wars to no end?

Two red states are about to get redder thanks to brazen GOP cheats

Ohio and Texas could do it. Both states could steal enough congressional seats with new gerrymandered maps for voting districts to fortify the Republican majority in the U.S. House next year.

Rigging the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections with gerrymandered congressional districts drawn to guarantee GOP wins is paramount to protecting the Trump regime from political opposition.

By the time voters go the polls in 16 months, the ramifications of shredded safety nets, hiked tariff prices, lowered job growth, eliminated health insurance, gutted federal agencies, and expanded militarized raids in American neighborhoods may be acute.

The electorate may well be fuming and motivated to end, or at least put a check on, Trumpian madness by rejecting the rubber-stamping Republican majorities in Congress. The GOP-led U.S. House, with its exceedingly slim margin of command, is most vulnerable to a Democratic flip in the midterms.

Persuading voters on the merits of a highly unpopular agenda that hammers working families with the largest cuts to Medicaid and food aid in history, and showers the ultra-rich with huge tax breaks that add trillions of dollars to the national debt, is a tall order for Trump’s servile coalition on Capitol Hill.

So rather than take a chance on a losing argument, Trump wants the fix to be in before any vote is cast in the pivotal election. Redrawing congressional districts to give lopsided partisan advantages to one party fits the bill.

The felon-in-chief pressured the Republican governor of Texas to call a special legislative session this week with a rare ask of lawmakers: Consider redrawing congressional districts ahead of the midterm elections.

The Texas Republican Party hailed the unusual request to revise redistricting in the state mid-decade as “an essential step to preserving GOP control in Congress and advancing President Trump’s America First Agenda.”

There you go. A candid endorsement of politically manipulated district boundaries — that dilute votes and disenfranchise whole constituencies — to hold on to power.

If the Texas legislature can turn more blue districts into red ones through unfair, undemocratic gerrymandering, Republicans could pick up four or five seats in Congress and pad the House majority with predetermined election outcomes.

Ohio Republicans also plan to bolster the narrow GOP majority in the U.S. House with two or three seats they intend to skew red when they draw a new congressional map soon.

Republicans lord over every aspect of redistricting in the state. They can easily ram through another unconstitutional redistricting map that flagrantly ignores the rule of law again and disregards the overwhelming mandate of voters for fairer, more competitive, more representational districts in Ohio.

Under one-party rule in Ohio, Republicans don’t have to follow the clear text of the state constitution on drawing legislative and congressional districts that broadly represent statewide voting preferences without unduly favoring one political party over another.

They have repeatedly brushed off Ohio Supreme Court orders to comply with constitutional redistricting amendments approved by over 70% of Ohioans.

They ran out the clock on challenges to their lawless gerrymandering until they could replace an independent state supreme court with a partisan panel.

This year Republican majorities in the legislature, the Ohio Supreme Court, and the Ohio Redistricting Commission will have another crack at out-gerrymandering the congressional voting districts they originally approved because the shelf life of the current maps — Ohioans have been forced to use for two elections — was limited to four years with no Democratic buy-in.

The congressional boundaries drawn in 2025 will dictate the next three elections. Expect even more lopsided districts designed to cement Republican dominance in Ohio.

The party is eying at least two congressional districts, represented by Democrats Marcy Kaptur in Toledo’s 9th and Emilia Sykes in the Akron-based 13th, to turn into solid Republican strongholds.

Cincinnati Democrat Greg Landsman, representing Ohio’s 1st district, could also be targeted with newly configured boundary lines that stretch into deep red territory.

What is no doubt taking form now, while unaware Ohioans vacation, is another unlawful scheme to win elections, not on merit, persuasion, or robust competition, but by cheating.

By circumventing constitutional mandates on redistricting with the blessings of accommodating Republican justices. By hollowing out the one person, one vote principle that asserts each individual’s vote should carry equal weight in the electoral process. (Gerrymandering stacks the deck by roping 2-to-1 ratios of Republican voters into failsafe GOP districts that consign opposition voters to statistical irrelevancy.)

But the fix is in to destroy any semblance of representative government in Ohio and steal a couple of congressional seats to secure a Republican majority in the U.S. House that will green-light whatever Trump wants.

In the coming months, Republican operatives in the state will go through the motions of consensus-making with Democrats in the Statehouse and on the redistricting commission but it’s all for show. GOP kingpins have no incentive to play fair or do right by Ohio voters — who voted twice to reform redistricting and end partisan gerrymandering.

Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman and his coterie of legislative lackeys will do as they please.

Without any check on their power in the state, they will put party over people to secure Republican congressional majorities by rigging the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections with unconstitutionally gerrymandered districts to keep absolute rule — not self-governance.

Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.

'Why does he do it?' JD Vance can't stop damning himself with snark

Why does he do it? Why does Ohio’s former U.S. senator, hopeful heir to the MAGA throne, keep damning himself with snarky provocations and self-evident lies? How difficult is it for JD Vance to be respectful, instead of derogatory, honest instead of glibly deceitful?

Every time the vice-president is before an open mic he seems to revert to cutting diatribes about people MAGA loves to hate or alternative facts that bely reality. That’s not leadership from someone a heartbeat away from the presidency. That’s venom masquerading as virtue and promoting Orwellian “War is Peace” propaganda.

Vance has mastered the dark art of manipulating thought through ignore-the-evidence Trumpian rhetoric. He excels at stoking unfounded fear or fanning unquestioned loyalty whenever the boss requires subterfuge as a means to an end.

Hours after Trump unilaterally (and arguably unconstitutionally) chose to launch an unprovoked attack against Iran early Sunday (without the authorization of Congress) Vance was spouting the doublespeak of Team Trump on Sunday morning talk shows to portray America’s abrupt entry into foreign combat with Israel as a proud accomplishment.

To be clear, the U.S. inserted itself into a hot war by impulsively bombing a sovereign nation on the pretext of an imminent nuclear weapons threat — contradicted by Trump’s own U.S. intelligence community.

Iranian leaders called America’s act of aggression against their country “unprecedently dangerous” and a “betrayal of diplomacy.” But Vance peered into network cameras and pretended the unforced decision by the U.S. to drop more than a dozen 30,000-pound bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities was not what it looked like to the rest of the world.

“We’re not at war with Iran,” said Vance with a straight face. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program” — the same one U.S spy agencies and U.S. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard determined was dormant before Trump sent B-2 stealth bombers into Iranian airspace.

“We do not want war with Iran,” prattled the Ohio poser in the wake of the largest operational strike ever by those bombers to take out Iranian nuclear sites. “We actually want peace.”

Despite preemptive attacks certain to inflame greater conflict in an already volatile region.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

In an awkward tap dance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vance tried to pivot from his longtime opposition to proactive military intervention in the Middle East.

As an Ohio senatorial candidate Vance was adamant about not supporting military action against Iran on its own soil — even as proxy militia groups escalated attacks on U.S. and coalition forces.

But the staunch isolationist did a 180 on Trump’s recklessness in dragging the U.S. into another sketchy war without an end game.

Trump was smarter than his predecessors when it came to targeting Tehran with American military muscle, Vance argued unconvincingly, so the risk of the U.S. succumbing to another endless war was slim.

“I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,” said the ex-Marine who served in the Iraq entanglement. “I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”

Trump directly threatened those objectives by alienating nearly every international partner and ally of the U.S., aligning with autocratic Russia against democratic Ukraine, destroying the federal national security workforce, and eliminating irreplaceable expertise, decimating global foreign assistance investments, nuclear safety protections, cyber security, and more.

But when Trump plunged the U.S. into a Middle East conflict with his bombardment of Iran, he knew exactly who to deploy to disingenuously frame America’s military pounding of that country as preventative medicine to reset fruitful diplomacy and spur peace.

Vance shelved his skepticism about starting foreign wars without clear objectives or exit strategies and gamely pushed a narrative that Iran essentially had it coming but rest assured the U.S. has “no interest in boots on the ground” or Iranian regime change. Maybe.

Yet the veep deals in dishonesty like a chameleon changes color. A day before Trump announced his bombing strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure, Vance was in Los Angeles lying through his teeth about the Democratic mayor of the city and governor of the state encouraging violent immigration protests.

Then he disparaged a former Senate colleague from California who was slammed to the ground and handcuffed at a press conference when he tried to ask the Homeland Security director a question. Vance referred to U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla as “Jose Padilla” (a convicted domestic terrorist) and suggested his ordeal was “political theater.”

Why did Vance spew “lies and utter nonsense in an attempt to provoke division and conflict in our city?” asked LA Mayor Karen Bass. Why did Vance mock the first Latino elected to the U.S. Senate by intentionally misnaming him?

Same reason he put an Ohio city and its Haitian community in danger with savage lies about pet-eating immigrants: To snag attention, stoke ugly, and distort truth beyond recognition.

A slick Vance played his fellow citizens for chumps with Trumped-up bull that American troops belong on American streets and a wanton act of war by the U.S. isn’t. That’s not leadership. That’s a glib gaslighting from a cringe-making toady.

'Really done Ohio proud': JD Vance's first weeks as VP torn apart in home state newspaper

This article first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal.

J.D. Vance has really done Ohio proud these last few weeks, hasn’t he? The lapdog vice-president, with evidently a lot of time on his hands, has managed to be firmly rebuked by Pope Francis, denounced by outraged NATO allies and widely ridiculed for his bizarre ‘masculinity’ rant at a weekend MAGAfest just a month into his tenure. Way to create a buzz/acute embarrassment back home!

What is wrong with J.D.? Have the wheels come all the way off? Why does the 40-year-old awkwardly playing VP keep stepping in it stateside and abroad? Is the “childless cat ladies” charmer acting out unresolved rage from a bad place? Working through some deep-seated anger? Seriously, Vance manifests juvenile cringe, not sober sway, as he settles into his nondescript role as an appendage in the Trump-Musk administration. Even Trump won’t name him as a slam dunk heir apparent. Not good.

For a supposed Ivy League intellectual, Vance sure spouts stupidity on the regular: Honestly, you’ve got to be really off base on Catholic theology for the Vatican to correct your twisted take on love with descending priorities as justification for mass deportations. In Vance’s godawful reading of the Christian order of love concept; (to mesh with his political ideology) family, community, and country come first and everyone outside that concentric circle later or not so much. Which puts migrant families outermost from Vance’s construct on brotherly love for me but not thee from outside our borders.

Francis rejected the VP’s sophomoric theoretical defense of cruel immigration crackdowns as flatly wrong. He urged the misguided millennial to meditate on the parable of the Good Samaritan, “on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” But “American citizens first” nativist Vance has no interest in building a “fraternity open to all,” just an all-white patriarchy focused on baby-making. To that point, he started a holy war (barely a week after inauguration) against charitable organizations across the country that feed, clothe and house refugees and immigrants (i.e., Catholic Charities and Catholic relief groups) by implying they perform their labor of love for federal money — not humanitarian concerns.

“Devout Catholic” convert Vance went all glib and combative on compassion and care for the “least of these” because they included Brown and Black mothers and fathers and children fleeing horrendous homelands for hope. But upholding the dignity of every human being (native-born or not) as a core tenet of Christianity clashes with the core MAGA mission to degrade, shackle and ship terrified families back to the foreign hellscapes they fled. Vance threw nasty and mean into the mix to look tough on dehumanized “illegals” and scorn mercy. He is a dutiful, if not decent, Trump toady.

But the swift rebuttals to Vance’s hollow broadsides from the Church and the pope himself only reinforced the veep’s smallness as a smug sycophant slinging ugly. Whatever reputation Vance may have enjoyed in the past as a thoughtful individual with at least a modicum of integrity is long gone. With a brief stint as a venture capitalist, an even briefer stint as Ohio senator and now VP, Vance is heady with power and hubris over his meteoric rise from bending the knee to a man he once derided as “America’s Hitler.” Then Vance went to the Munich Security Conference recently, not to collaborate with NATO allies on mutual security interests and Ukraine, but to turn on them.

Vance, the shameless election denier in service to an authoritarian regime lawlessly dismantling a democratic republic, had the towering audacity and historical blindness to lecture his European audience on democracy, downplay threats from Russia and China, and publicly court a far-right German party (AfD) that many Germans consider the heirs of Nazi ideas and that sanitizes the Holocaust. His blistering dress-down of European leaders, rightly dismayed over rising extremism and history repeating itself, coupled with his pronounced affection for far-right politicians a week before a crucial German election (U.S. election interference?) was obscene.

The last thing the world needs now is a U.S. vice-president trashing eighty years of foreign policy with America’s closest and most enduring friends. But that’s what a dangerously reckless Vance did on the world stage to compete with Elon Musk and boost his nascent brand as an uber-nihilist bent on destroying plurality for purity and seeding a new world order. It’s wing-nuttery on a disturbingly dark scale. But Vance, for all his performative bravado — whether it’s lashing out at European allies for not welcoming extremism, or engaging in petty posting on X, or weirdly obsessing about “the essence of masculinity” and a “broken culture” that tells you “You’re a bad person because you’re a man” — is a phony.

He morphed from Never-Trumper to groveling suck-up for unimagined power, but he can’t quite pull it off as a poser with a makeover beard spewing stupid and offensive and strange. Vance has been doing us proud by attacking friends, embracing enemies, insulting humanitarians, drawing papal ire, and pontificating laughably on what makes a man a man.

Seriously, what is wrong with J.D.?

'Thanks for nothing': J.D. Vance shamed in hometown newspaper for 'spineless' stance

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

The quote is attributable to a 1965 sermon Martin Luther King Jr. gave the day after “Bloody Sunday,” when civil rights protestors were attacked and beaten by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In a period rife with ugliness and hate, King exhorted his beleaguered congregation to live with moral courage when faced with grave wrongs or die with soul-killing silence long before you take your last breath.

“A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.” King’s prophetic words should reverberate off the walls in this fraught moment for American liberty and justice as the tyrannical hammer of Project 2025 methodically pounds down the rule of law.

But they don’t. Not to a wide swath of apathetic Americans. Not to their spineless and largely muted political leaders. Nothing drove home the point more than the stunningly suppressed reaction to the presidential pardon of Jan. 6 convicted police beaters who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to hang the vice-president, hunt lawmakers and stop the peaceful transfer of power through mob savagery. Crickets and meh is what we got.

Although the brazen felon holding court in the Oval Office campaigned on pardoning the “patriots” who bashed, tased and blinded overwhelmed law enforcement officers defending the Capitol, few expected that clemency to include those videotaped beating the hell out of cops in front of the whole world. Former DC cop Michael Fanone was beaten unconscious, suffered a heart attack, concussion and traumatic brain injury:

“I’ve been betrayed by my country, and I’ve been betrayed by those that supported Donald Trump, whether you voted for him because he promised these pardons or for some other reason, you knew that this was coming.” He and others who testified in Jan. 6 cases fear for their lives again now that the insurrectionists have been released.

Yet sheeplike Republicans gave Trump a pass on freeing even the most violent Jan. 6 offenders and far-right militia leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy — “to overthrow, put down or destroy by force the government of the United States.”

Ohio’s newly minted U.S. Senator and Trump bootlicker Bernie Moreno defended the pardon of armed rioters on the seat of democracy — “because nobody’s been treated worse” — then, with a straight face, proclaimed himself and Trump big backers of the Blue.

“Nobody is a stronger supporter of law enforcement than President Trump, myself, or JD Vance. We honor and respect law enforcement. When I walk in every morning, I look at the guards, I say ‘Thank you. Thank you for being here, thank you for helping out.’ But these people [the pardoned police beaters] have been treated horribly.”

No, Bernie, the tried and convicted thugs had their due process in court. The gruesome videos of Jan. 6 document who was really treated horribly by MAGA combatants summoned, assembled and sent to the Capitol by Trump to “fight like hell” over his baseless lie of a stolen election. The police who were dragged down the steps, beaten with everything from flag poles and pipes to fire extinguishers and baseball bats, are the victims Moreno sold down the river with sympathy for their attackers. Thanks for nothing.

Some GOP leaders, including Vance, who had previously argued that “obviously” violent protestors should be excluded from any presidential reprieve, were notably mum after Trump’s sweeping amnesty of the horde that pulverized officers and desecrated, defecated and plundered its way through the Capitol while lawmakers ran for their lives. Other cowardly Republicans, like Ohio’s Jim Jordan, hid their disagreement to Trump’s decision with a walk-off line that the pardon was his to make.

No point in decrying the glorification of political violence in service to a sore loser. Trump might invite the insurrectionists to the White House. Not a peep from Ohio Republicans about the hundreds of vindicated criminals released into communities, including Ohio hometowns, or the emboldened paramilitary leaders who threaten to “bring the heat” on those who held them accountable. One pardoned Ohioan considered his crimes for Trump “an honor.”

It’s sick. The horrendous siege of America’s citadel of democracy on live television repulsed the nation four years ago. Today the man who incited that siege to steal a second term recasts it as a “peaceful day” with skirmishes that resulted in “minor injuries” (not critical injury and death) and portrays his rioting red shirts as heroes imprisoned as “hostages.” George Orwell must be spinning in his grave.

Opposition to Trump’s fanciful narrative is nonexistent from Republicans and most of the country doesn’t seem to care. Jan. 6 was bad but whatever. Are we all the walking dead in this country? Trump’s blanket pardons of his most vicious foot soldiers on a mission to forcefully overturn a democratic election was, as an enraged Ohio Democrat Marcy Kaptur said, “a sacrilege against our republic and our constitution…an affront on decency and a violent attack on the rule of law.” Be outraged.

Take King’s sermon to heart. Stand up for what is right in “the fierce urgency of now” because staying silent on what matters will kill your soul.

Ohio Republicans start the year by throwing public education under the school bus

It didn’t take long. The new legislative session began in Columbus with Republican chieftains in the state throwing the future of public education in Ohio under the school bus.

First it was the billion-dollar voucher king, Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, to hedge his bets on giving Ohio’s 611 school districts what they need to provide a quality education to the 1.7 million students they serve.

Then it was Huffman’s patsy in the executive branch, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who added his two cents worth of wishy-washy about how a leaner state budget ahead means something’s gotta give — like fully funding the education system used by the vast majority of Ohio families and their children. “Sometimes these are very, very difficult, difficult choices,” said the gutless wonder. What leadership.

Educating future generations of Ohioans with high-quality public schools is your job, governor. It’s the No. 1 responsibility of the state to ensure a thorough and efficient system of funding for public schools. ‘Says so right in the Ohio Constitution. It also says, “no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, control of, any part of the school funds of this state.” But DeWine and his puppet master in the Ohio House ignored that part years ago when the state began diverting hundreds of millions of education funds to private and mostly religious schools.

Clearly, the politicians calling the shots in state government have no regard for the state constitution. Adhering to the rule of law is optional when political power is absolute. Huffman, who thumbed his nose at the Ohio Constitution on fair redistricting (to pull off even more egregious gerrymandering in legislative and congressional districts) is doing the same thing on adequately funding public education.

He’s looking to cut revenue to public schools while spending a ton of tax dollars on private school vouchers — with aspirations to fund more private school facilities to increase demand for those vouchers. Call it the Great GOP Phase-out of Public Education. Last week, Huffman dropped a calculated bombshell to prepare Ohio’s public-school districts for another financial hit from the state. The Lima Republican said the state couldn’t afford to fully fund public schools or finally fix a school funding formula ruled unconstitutional nearly three decades ago. The Ohio Supreme Court’s 1997 ruling said the state’s failure to provide and distribute sufficient resources for public education and its over-reliance on local property taxes to cover that shortcoming violated the law.

Yet Ohio lawmakers never remedied the problem. School districts had to keep going back to voters just to maintain and operate local schools. Homeowners carried the weight of school funding, not the state. They were/are understandably tapped out on school levies, especially as changes in property evaluations jack up tax bills.

But in 2021, after years of collaboration between former Republican Ohio House Speaker Bob Cupp, former Democratic state Rep. John Patterson and scores of public education stakeholders, Ohio came close to meeting its constitutional obligation of ensuring a thorough and efficient system of funding for public schools. “What we really wanted to do was figure out what it really costs to educate a student and then what a district can really do to support its fair share, and then the state would compensate with the rest,” said Patterson.

The Cupp-Patterson spending formula, known as the Fair School Funding Plan, was enacted as part of the 2021-23 state budget. The new system weighed a district’s expenses to come up with the base per-pupil funding amount — instead of a blanket amount of state funding for all schools — and changed the way the local community’s share was measured depending on property tax value and the income of local residents.

That was a big deal and a significant step forward to address the long-running inequities of an unconstitutional school funding system that had failed generations of K-12 students. The quality of their education often depended on where they lived. Wealthy school districts in Ohio had every advantage over high poverty districts that struggled to pay for even basics in the classroom.

The Fair School Funding Plan initiated a level of fairness and reliability in state support that past spending programs lacked. Complete state funding of the FSFP (around $2 billion altogether) was to be phased in over a six-year period through two-year budget cycles. The goal was to continue expanding state funding for districts in successive biennial state budgets until the Fair School Funding Plan was fully funded.

The last installation, or third phase, was to be paid in full in the upcoming 2026-2027 operating budget. But that expectation hit a wall when Huffman nixed increased spending to public schools as “unsustainable.”

His excuses for not making good on fully funding Cupp-Patterson — less state revenue to work with, less federal pandemic relief money, more scrutiny needed for school money already allocate — don’t apply to his expansive voucher outlays to religious schools that reached $966.2 million for the 2023-2024 school year. Enough to fully fund Fair School Funding Plan.

But Huffman is laying the ground to shave more off the FSFP and showing his utter indifference to the acute financial challenges facing countless districts. Tough luck for the nearly 90% of Ohio students who attend public schools with slashed opportunities. It didn’t take long.

Vivek Ramaswamy insulted Trump supporters and Ohioans in his elitist rant

The 39-year-old from Cincinnati, rocking a pretentious pompadour, got carried away with himself last week. Vivek Ramaswamy presumed his sizable net worth, amassed from biotech and financial investments, and his inflated sense of self-importance, gave him latitude to be a jerk online. Gave him permission to flip the MAGA script on all immigrants are bad to some are better than Americans. Bound to happen to a rich guy high on his own supply.

A year ago, the wealthy Wall Street speculator was so impressed with himself that he indulged in the ultimate ego trip. Ramaswamy ran for president not so much to win, but to market his emerging brand as a slick provocateur in the MAGAverse willing to take smarmy to next-level obnoxious. After his failed campaign, Ramaswamy hopped aboard the Trump train and wormed his way into the Dear Leader’s inner circle.

He became a Trump surrogate on steroids to ingratiate himself with the convicted felon and sexual abuser who would be president. Ramaswamy was a hardliner on Trump’s signature campaign issue — scapegoating Black and Brown immigrants. The candidate fumed that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country” and had to go.

Ramaswamy amplified that anti-immigrant message because it supercharged the MAGA base. The dehumanizing rhetoric put a target on undocumented workers but played well at Trump rallies. Crowds roared, “Send them back!” Promises of mass deportations of terrified families provoked thunderous applause. Ramaswamy, son of Indian immigrants, fanned the fear and hate of other immigrants.

He told his xenophobic audiences he was committed to universally deporting undocumented immigrants and using the military to stop migration at the southern border. He cruelly vowed to limit the number of immigrants — fleeing persecution in their home countries and desperately seeking asylum in America — to “I would say zero, darn close to zero.”

Ramaswamy, who was born in the U.S. to two noncitizens (which means he gained citizenship through birthright), also pledged to end birthright citizenship for “kids of illegal immigrants in the country because their parents broke the law.” He was against even a special visa program (H-1B) that temporarily allowed highly skilled foreign workers in the country — until he wasn’t. Hold that thought. The wealthy Millennial, who now lives in an enormous mansion in Columbus, attached himself to the Trump campaign as a zealous crusader for the anti-immigrant cause. He bet his abject sycophancy would pay off and it did. Ramaswamy was appointed to a vague government efficiency initiative with the richest oligarch in the world. Must have been a heady moment for the young poser striding through the U.S. Capitol with his commission co-chair, the billionaire becoming trillionaire Elon Musk.

But Ramaswamy gave away the game. He told the world what he and the hi-tech titan really thought about the rubes who bought the Trumpian propaganda about immigrants as an evil to be eradicated. “America is for Americans and Americans only!” screamed Stephen Miller, anointed architect of Trump’s mass deportation plans. Immigrants stole American jobs. They must be stopped, not managed. No exceptions. Ramaswamy found some.

Immigrants who work as software engineers.

Silicon Valley and high-tech companies, with powerful allies like Ramaswamy and Musk, want more of them — even if they steal American jobs and depress wages in high-tech industries. Besides, and this is where young Ramaswamy let the cat out of the bag, Americans are too dumb and too lazy to compete with foreign tech workers.

Vivek let his disdain for MAGA loyalists fly. In a moment of pique during the holiday lull, Ramaswamy caused Trump World to wince and go to war with itself. He revealed his inner contempt for Americans as slackers with a superficial culture that “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”

In a post on X, Ramaswamy bizarrely placed part of the blame for the mediocre masses (or his fellow citizens) on 90s sitcoms “that venerate Cory from “Boy meets World” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters.”

The best tech workers are Indian and Asian immigrants, ranted the rich man-child, not culturally depraved ‘native’ Americans. Discounting decades of American innovation and ingenuity, along with scores of homegrown engineering graduates with high tech expertise, Ramaswamy suggested skilled visas for select immigrants in high-tech jobs were critical considering the lousy pool of American applicants.

The Ohio finance bro, who made bank off capital gains, not invention, dripped with derision about “a culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian” and produces average talent. Methinks a nerdy Vivek, with a huge chip on his shoulder, felt underappreciated as a schoolboy know-it-all. Ramaswamy was wistful the Trump presidency could start an American culture that prioritizes “hard work over laziness.” Please.

This guy doesn’t get us. At all. And he’s reportedly eyeing a run for Ohio governor in 2026! His home state boasts first-rate universities and colleges that train top notch engineers, software developers, data scientists, systems analysts, computer architects, and plenty of highly educated professionals. Ohio industries, from automotive to aerospace and advanced manufacturing technologies, embody innovation and resilience.

But the smug pompadoured prince posted scorn and showed his cards. A losing hand for Ramaswamy.