Ray Hartmann

Trump's minions just revealed what they really think about dead American soldiers

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent his confirmation hearings promising senators he’d stop drinking. Based on his news conference about the Iran war on Wednesday, that might not be such a great idea.

Reporting on dead American soldiers, Hegseth suggested, is becoming the “narrative.” The public, he said, should “cut through the noise” and focus on the mission.

The “noise,” in this case, is six American lives.

On Sunday, an Iranian drone struck a U.S. facility in Kuwait. The victims were Army reservists assigned to a logistics command. Their names, ranks, and ages:

Sgt. Declan Coady, 20
Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, 39
Capt. Cody Khork, 35
Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens, 42
Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien, 45
CW3 Robert Marzan, 54.

Hegseth’s complaint was that their deaths were dominating coverage of the war. During Wednesday’s White House briefing, when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins read Hegseth’s words back to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Leavitt didn’t flinch.

“The press does only want to make the president look bad,” she said. “That’s a fact.”

To this administration, a dead sergeant from West Des Moines is not a tragedy. He’s a political liability. News reporting on his demise is evidence of bias.

Consider the source. According to a sworn affidavit submitted to the Senate under penalty of perjury by a former sister-in-law, Hegseth once had to be carried out of a Minneapolis strip club by his own brother — drunk, in uniform, during a National Guard drill weekend. Wearing a uniform while intoxicated is a violation of military law.

NBC News also reported that 10 current and former Fox News colleagues said they had to “babysit” Hegseth before appearances because he smelled of alcohol. And a whistleblower complaint from his tenure at the veterans nonprofit Concerned Veterans for America described multiple occasions when he had to be removed from events after drinking to incapacitation.

It is some new pinnacle of irony that a man who required his own “babysitters” at Fox News is now lecturing the press on professional conduct and what is worthy of the front page. It would be more defensible had his diatribe been attributable to an altered state.

But this is a very recent discovery. Travel back to January 2024. Three American soldiers were killed in a drone attack in Jordan while Joe Biden was president. Republicans didn’t tell reporters to ignore the story. They blasted it across every microphone they could find.

Donald Trump called the deaths “the consequence of Joe Biden’s weakness.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) demanded “devastating retaliation.” No one complained the coverage was unfair to the commander in chief.

Go back to August 2021. After the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Republicans spent years invoking those 13 deaths. They held hearings. They issued subpoenas. They put Gold Star families on stage at the Republican National Convention. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the loss of life was grounds for impeachment.

The political rule seemed simple: When American troops die, the president must answer for it.

That rule apparently changed on Inauguration Day.

Trump launched a war with Iran that already has American casualties and, by his own admission, will produce more.

“Sadly, there will likely be more, before it ends,” Trump said Sunday. “That’s the way it is.”

For the White House, that may be a strategic reality. For the family of Nicole Amor — a Minnesota mother of two who was days away from returning home — it is not simply “the way it is.” It is the destruction of their world.

The American press has reported every U.S. combat death for decades, under Republicans and Democrats alike. Those stories are not a partisan narrative. They are the public record of war.

The six names this week are Declan, Nicole, Cody, Noah, Jeffrey and Robert. Reporting them is not an attempt to make a president look bad, no matter how much Trump’s shameless sycophants whine.

It’s journalism.

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A tragic cop killing revealed something especially chilling about this MAGA mover

Josh Hawley had me going.

When I first saw his tweet last Wednesday after two sheriff’s deputies were murdered near Springfield, Missouri, I thought we were in for another attack on the horrors of the political Left. Here’s what Hawley said:

“Two heroic deputies in my home state of Missouri were senselessly murdered by a thug with a long history of violence toward law enforcement. We need accountability for these soft-on-crime policies destroying our communities.”

Then, a few questions popped to mind.

What soft-on-crime policies?
Whose policies?
And who’s getting held accountable by whom?

In case you haven’t been following Missouri politics, it’s quite the red, pro-MAGA state. Christian County, where this tragedy occurred, voted 76 percent in 2024 for Donald Trump. Hawley had a stint in 2017-18 as the state’s drive-by attorney general as he climbed the political ladder to his current seat in the U.S. Senate.

That begs the question of who owns the soft-on-crime policies alleged, without provocation, by Hawley.

On Friday, the shattered community of Christian County paid a richly deserved tribute to fallen heroes, Gabriel Ramirez and Michael Hislope, who were murdered protecting the people there. Both were murdered by Richard Dean Bird, a decades-long criminal who was killed in a standoff with law enforcement.

You won’t be hearing much about Bird, which is fine: He doesn’t deserve the attention. But if he hadn’t fit the most common profile of murderers in the U.S. — white, poor, male — you better believe that Hawley and others of his ilk would have made him a household name by now.

Can you imagine, in this environment, had Richard Dean Bird been an undocumented immigrant? Or worse yet, from Somalia or Latin America?

Instead, the main interest in Bird is why he was released from custody just the week before he killed two cops, on $50,000 bond after having been arrested on charges of second-degree burglary, unlawful possession of a firearm, and stealing. This is a man who had a miles-long rap sheet of convictions dating back to 2003 and had served seven years in Kansas state prison for battery against a law enforcement officer and fleeing police after firing a rifle at a deputy in 2014 in the Johnson County suburb of Kansas City.

Bird was granted bond by Judge Eric Chavez, a Republican who was elected to the Stone County bench in 2022. From all appearances, Chavez is a veteran of the local legal community who was likely following the bond laws as shaped by statutes passed by the Republican-led General Assembly and interpreted by the Missouri Supreme Court in 2019.

Chavez hasn’t been excoriated personally as “soft on crime” by Hawley or other Republicans. Nor should he be. But what do you suppose the story would have been if Chavez were a Democrat?

In that event, Hawley would have made certain that liberal Democrats owned the deputies’ deaths. And he would have laid the bond rules that allowed for Bird’s release at their doorsteps as well.

Inconveniently, those revised bond procedures were a matter of interest in the period Hawley was attorney general. Months after he left office, the state Supreme Court finalized Rule 33.01, which established release conditions that apparently made the granting of bond to Bird legally defensible.

That’s above my pay grade, but this isn’t: If those rules are now “soft,” Hawley had the loudest law-enforcement microphone in the state while they were being considered. Good luck finding a record of any tough-on-crime position he staked out at the time.

(Then again, Hawley apparently doesn’t have the sharpest recollection of Missouri these days. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, Fox Digital reported that Hawley described Christian County as “my home county” in a statement. Christian County is a three-hour drive to Lafayette County, where Hawley grew up in Lexington.)

The murders of Ramirez and Hislope should bridge any partisan divide as a tragedy that turns all stomachs. But Hawley chose the moment to make a cheap political point with his irrational “soft on crime” reference.

It’s of no solace that, in so doing, Hawley executed a remarkable self-own by calling out “policies” from his own watch — and administered by his own political party.

If Hawley wants accountability, he should start with a mirror.

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This vile Trump sidekick is a gift for Dems

Kristi Noem is the political gift that keeps on giving for Democrats.

They need her running the Department of Homeland Security a lot worse than Donald Trump does. And she does run it worse than anyone else.

Democrats don’t require new messaging for November. They need cameras. They need live feeds. They need a 24/7 loop of Noem and her comically transparent paramour Corey Lewandowski blowing up whatever fleeting hope Republicans have of holding power in the midterms — short of stealing the election.

The most recent canary to beat it for daylight out of Noem’s coalmine was her chief spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, who took the job Jan. 31, 2025, calling it “the honor of a lifetime.” In announcing her resignation this week, McLaughlin said the departure had been planned last December.

So, to summarize, McLaughlin had meant to say, “this job is the honor of a lifetime or 10 months, whichever comes first.” But one thing we can all agree upon: You only quit a job like this if everything’s going splendidly.

(It should be noted that McLaughlin had a little baggage of her own. She reportedly was the point person for a $220 million DHS ad contract that allegedly funneled money to her husband’s firm, The Strategy Group.)

But what could possibly not be fulfilling about dealing with the media every day to boast about Noem’s latest achievement? The hits just keep on coming.

NBC News broke the bracing story this week that just days after Noem was confirmed last year, a 23-year-old Coast Guardsman fell overboard into the Pacific. Ships and aircraft surged to find him.

When Noem learned that one of the search planes — a C-130 — was also scheduled to transport detained migrants, she ordered it pulled from the search so it wouldn’t miss the deportation run.

Well, of course, she did.

A young American lost at sea. A rescue under way. Immigration logistics taking precedence. The Guardsman was never found.

What spokesman wouldn’t savor explaining that to the world?

This wasn’t an isolated incident. Under Noem’s leadership, more than 750 Coast Guard flights have reportedly been redirected from search and rescue to deportation runs. Guidance at one air station moved transporting detained immigrants to first priority — and demoted search and rescue, the Coast Guard’s core mission since its founding.

On the bright side for McLaughlin and her team, this fine bit of good judgment did momentarily shift attention from Noem’s scintillating performance in Minneapolis. There, she presided over the deployment of ICE agents with the unabashedly cruel intent of terrorizing immigrants, including those here legally from Somalia and other disfavored ports.

In Minneapolis, to the horror of millions of Americans across party lines, Noem sank to new depths even for her.

After ICE agents killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, in cold blood, Noem wasted no time in labeling her participation at a peaceful protest “domestic terrorism,” before an investigation began.

After the same fate befell Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, she atrociously lied that Pretti had "arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and kill law enforcement."

The Minneapolis fallout was so severe that it triggered a public vote of no-confidence from Trump. He effectively fired Noem from her own operation, dispatching Border Czar Tom Homan to take personal charge of the Twin Cities crackdown.

No amount of national political advertising by Democrats could help them like this.

Noem was humiliated when she was sidelined in favor of Homan — a career official she reportedly despises and who favors targeted enforcement over her “insane” broad sweeps. By handing Homan the authority to de-escalate the "Metro Surge" and report directly to the White House, Trump didn't just bypass Noem; he signaled that even he finds her brand of chaos too toxic to manage.

Publicly, that is, not behind closed doors.

Understand that Noem is not freelancing. She’s carrying out the inhumane agenda of Trump and his Minister of Evil, Stephen Miller.

Trump is all about the optics. When the optics turn bad, buses have this annoying habit of running over loyal advisers.

It’s impossible from afar to assess motives in Trump’s snake pit of corruption. But there's at least some plausibility to the oft-rumored notion that one of Trump's rare loyalties rests, for the moment, with Lewandowski, the man who ran his first campaign.

Lewandowski is the “special government employee” who appears to specialize in proximity to Noem. Both she and Lewandowski are married to other people and deny all reports of infidelity. But even in our litigious age, this is one bit of gossip that a wide range of mainstream media feel comfortable reporting without hesitation.

According to recent reporting, Trump frequently entertains listeners with a story about seeing the two take sips from the same can of soda. “You can’t do that, it’s pretty obvious!” he reportedly mocks, channeling his own germaphobia into a critique of their political survival skills. “You can’t do that, everyone’s going to know!”

But the loving couple are still running DHS as their fiefdom. The Wall Street Journal has detailed their constant luxury travel together aboard a government-leased 737 MAX and both residing in proximate DHS-leased housing.

So, no one in the Beltway was shocked that Lewandowski reportedly berated Coast Guard flight staff mid-flight and threatened to fire a pilot over a forgotten heated blanket. It was chivalry.

Understand that if Noem was fired tomorrow — as many Democrats clamor for — not a thing would change at DHS. The cruelty and terror of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign wasn’t authored by Noem. It was executed by her.

Just like she famously executed a puppy she hated and bragged about it in a book.

If you’re a Democrat, don’t you want someone like that to run against?

Leave her be.

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These red state Republicans just stabbed their voters in the back

On Wednesday night, the U.S. House delivered a stinging, bipartisan rebuke to President Donald Trump’s trade agenda, voting 219-211 to rescind the “fentanyl emergency” tariffs on Canadian imports.

Six Republicans — Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY), Don Bacon (R-NE), Kevin Kiley (R-CA), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Dan Newhouse (R-WA), and Jeff Hurd (R-CO) — joined every Democrat but one to pass the resolution. It was a historic moment: the first time Trump’s own House has formally voted to terminate a national emergency used to justify tariffs.

Missouri Republicans decided keeping the president happy is their top priority. Politically, that’s easily rationalized. This was a symbolic vote unlikely to pass the U.S. Senate, and it’s never getting signed by Trump.

Reps. Ann Wagner, Jason Smith, Blaine Luetkemeyer, Mark Alford, Eric Burlison, and Sam Graves all voted to maintain the 35 percent duties — despite a wall of evidence that these tariffs are bleeding their own constituents. Under a normal president, even one of their own party, these Republicans would have instinctively thrown down for the interests of their voters.

But we don’t have a normal president. It’s a solid indication of how partisanship literally trumps pocketbooks in congressional districts where incumbents feel safe.

The economic reality was laid bare just hours before Wednesday's vote. The Tax Foundation confirmed that Trump’s tariffs represent the largest U.S. tax increase as a percent of GDP since 1993.

For the average American household, this hidden tax cost $1,000 in 2025 and is projected to climb to $1,500 in 2026. The same analysis found the tariffs will offset most of the economic gains from Trump’s own tax cuts.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office, in its flagship outlook released on Thursday morning, revised inflation projections higher for the next three years, citing direct upward pressure from these duties.

This isn’t an abstract dispute. Canada is Missouri’s largest trading partner, its auto and aerospace supply chains running directly through the northern border.

By voting to uphold these levies, the Missouri GOP bucked the very business groups they once regarded as sacrosanct — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Soybean Association — all of which have publicly opposed these tariffs.

For Wagner, the choice was binary: stand with the president, or side with the West County exporters, homebuilders, and manufacturers she claims to represent. She chose the president.

A majority of Americans oppose the tariffs. A January New York Times/Siena poll found 54 percent of voters want them gone. A Marist survey released last week put the number at 56 percent.

When Americans are told that Canadian tariffs could raise gas prices 30 to 70 cents per gallon, half of Trump’s own supporters flip to opposition.

Minutes before the vote closed, Trump posted on Truth Social:

Any Republican, in the House or the Senate, that votes against TARIFFS will seriously suffer the consequences come Election time, and that includes Primaries!

Six Republicans heard that threat and voted their conscience anyway.

Missouri’s delegation heard it and fell in line.

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Trump's Kryptonite just got even more dangerous to handle

This is what we in the business of journalism call a news story.

Last week, the Justice Department released a document showing that Mark Epstein submitted a 2023 tip to the FBI stating that he believed President Donald Trump authorized his brother Jeffrey’s murder. The government had classified Epstein’s 2019 death in prison as a suicide.

Here’s what Mark Epstein wrote to the FBI on February 22, 2023.

“Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in his jail cell. I have reason to believe he was killed because he was about to name names. I believe Presient [sic] Trump authorized is [sic] murder.”

Journalists cannot treat Mark Epstein’s allegation as established fact. There is no public evidence supporting it, and the official ruling remains suicide. But it is not our role to declare his claim false either. Our role is to report that he made it — and that it was submitted to the FBI.

All we know for sure is that the American people have a right to know. And that so much information and context has not been widely reported — through convention or cowardice — by the news media they trust.

Mark Epstein is not claiming America faked the moon landing. He is not alone in doubting the federal government’s assertion that his brother — while in federal custody, facing charges that could send him to prison for life — managed to commit suicide.

According to the Bureau of Prisons, Epstein was found hanging in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Aug. 10, 2019. He had been taken off suicide watch despite having been found semiconscious with marks on his neck three weeks earlier. On the night he died, both guards assigned to check on him were asleep. Security cameras malfunctioned. His cellmate had been transferred out, leaving him alone.

In the 40 years preceding Epstein’s death, the Metropolitan Correctional Center — a fortress that has held everyone from John Gotti to El Chapo — had recorded only one successful suicide. The system had worked for four decades. But presumably not in this case.

Dr. Michael Baden, a former New York City Chief Medical Examiner hired by Mark Epstein to observe the autopsy, concluded that injuries to Jeffrey Epstein’s neck — including fractures to the hyoid bone — were “extremely unusual in suicidal hangings” and more consistent with “homicidal strangulation.” The New York City Medical Examiner nevertheless ruled the death a suicide.

Still, the media had no appetite for the story at the time. Today it’s treated as some frivolous footnote to the Epstein story.

Consider what Trump has said publicly. Throughout his political career, Trump has brazenly embraced retribution as principle. He has mused about handling whistleblowers “like we used to in the old days.” He labeled his former attorney Michael Cohen a “rat” for cooperating with authorities. When Trump uses the word “retribution,” he is signaling that the cost of betrayal is total.

The Trump administration arrested Epstein in July 2019. The Trump Justice Department oversaw the facility where he died six weeks later. Epstein was facing life in prison. His only bargaining chip was information.

Trump and Epstein were photographed together multiple times in the 1990s. In a 2002 interview with New York Magazine, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years and described him as someone who liked “beautiful women … many of them on the younger side.”

Epstein's testimony would have carried obvious political risk for anyone he might have implicated — including Trump — regardless of whether any allegations were true.

Still, taking all that into account, it's an enormous leap to ponder whether an American president might even consider involvement such as that alleged by Mark Epstein. But one needn't take that leap to examine the documented historical record.

Unlike any other president in American history, Trump entered office with a business record marked by decades of litigation and documented dealings with contractors and associates later convicted in organized crime cases. Long before Trump entered politics, elements of his real estate and casino operations were examined in court records, regulatory findings and investigative reporting.

In the 1980s, Trump’s construction projects used S&A Concrete, a company federal prosecutors later described in racketeering indictments as being controlled by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano, who were convicted in organized crime cases.

In 1982, Trump purchased Atlantic City property from Salvatore Testa, later identified by law enforcement as a member of the Philadelphia crime family. The transaction was reflected in public property records and later detailed in investigative reporting.

In 1991, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission fined Trump Plaza $200,000 for regulatory violations involving high-rolling gambler Robert LiButti, who in secretly recorded FBI conversations referred to Gambino boss John Gotti as “my boss.” That same year, the commission imposed additional fines related to luxury vehicle transactions tied to LiButti.

In separate litigation, Judge Charles E. Stewart Jr. ruled that Trump had engaged in a conspiracy to violate fiduciary duties in connection with undocumented Polish workers employed during the demolition of the Bonwit Teller building. The demolition contractor, William Kaszycki, was later linked in court records to organized crime figures.

Trump was never charged with organized crime offenses in these matters. None of this history establishes any connection to Jeffrey Epstein’s death. It does, however, form part of the documented public record of Trump’s pre-presidential business career.

Courts operate under strict evidentiary rules designed to limit what juries hear. Journalism operates differently. Our role is not to adjudicate guilt, but to report what has been alleged and what is known.

The media is not a court of law; it’s a court of public opinion. It’s governed by rules of fairness, honesty and thoroughness.

But now, after all the clamoring for the release of the Epstein files, a veritable news blackout has greeted the bombshell allegation that Jeffrey Epstein’s brother told the FBI he believed his brother did not commit suicide and that the president of the United States authorized his murder.

For those of us who believe the public has a right to know what their government does in their name, that silence is the story.

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Trump will never allow a MAGA defeat - and the implications are unthinkable

Last Aug. 18, Donald Trump sat across from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and posed a “question” that seemed, at the time, like nothing more than Trump being Trump.

“So you say during the war, you can’t have elections. So let me just say three and a half years from now. So you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody — no more elections?”

Zelensky laughed nervously. Some in the media laughed too.

I cited that exchange in an Oct. 26 post titled “Why the 2026 Elections May Not Happen.” My argument: Trump simply cannot withstand Democrats regaining control of the House in the midterm elections — neither politically nor psychologically.

It follows that Trump would indeed do everything in his power to cancel or postpone elections for the first time in U.S. history, rather than succumb to defeat. My prediction wasn’t that he’d succeed, but that he’d at least try if backed against the wall.

Twice in the past week, evidence has emerged that Trump’s efforts to thwart democracy this Nov. 3 have evolved to the point of going public.

Last week, FBI agents raided the Fulton County elections office in Georgia, seizing boxes of 2020 voting records. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present.

Gabbard is a dangerous individual, her cult wiring too easily obscured by others in the crackpot collective surrounding Trump. The DNI has no role whatsoever in the administration of elections.

The revival of seditious lies from the 2020 election — now central to Gabbard's Trump-imposed mission — deserves far more than the fleeting one-news-cycle coverage it received.

And here’s the latest: Trump has personally and publicly validated that warning. The New York Times reported:

During an extended monologue about immigration on a podcast released on Monday by Dan Bongino, his former deputy F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump called for Republican officials to “take over” voting procedures in 15 states, though he did not name them. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Nationalize the voting.

Those three words have never been spoken by an American president until now. If that strikes you as nothing more than noise, you’ve lost perspective.

It does not require investigative skill to place this in context. To those who “both sides” gerrymandering — a bipartisan tradition — note that Trump’s motivations have been stated publicly, brazenly and unapologetically.

At least both political parties in the past have pretended to connect gerrymandering to a legal purpose. That Trump feels no such need speaks volumes about his confidence in having subjugated “his” U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Justice Department has sued 24 states demanding their voter rolls — lawsuits that federal judges in Oregon and California rejected as unauthorized overreach. When Minnesota refused to comply, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried outright blackmail: hand over voter data or we won’t withdraw ICE agents from Minneapolis.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon called it “an outrageous attempt to coerce” the state into violating federal privacy law. So far, he has stared down the bully.

The Times described Trump's Monday’s comments as “an aggressive rhetorical step that was likely to raise new worries about his administration’s efforts to involve itself in election matters.” That understatement bound to journalistic convention was most unhelpful in this case.

When I warned about this last October, here’s how I concluded the piece:

“It’s a critical first step to discard any notion that canceled or postponed elections cannot happen here. We’re already traveling down a dark and perilous authoritarian road with Donald Trump; this would barely represent a speed bump. We’d best not take the midterms for granted.”

Consider it warned again.

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This foul Trump lie falls apart at the slightest touch

Here’s a quick civics test for those concerned with the U.S. immigration issue.

Q. Donald Trump has publicly stated at least a thousand times that other countries have emptied their prisons and asylums and sent criminals across our border. Name one.

Feel free to use any search engine or AI resource you’d like. Just name one prison or asylum anywhere that was emptied to send criminals to America.

You can’t do it because it never happened. It’s a pure fiction invented from scratch by Trump and repeated often enough to brainwash millions of people. And it worked.

Just like it worked to repeat that 10.5 million people illegally “invaded” during Joe Biden's presidency. Or that thousands of murderers, rapists, and child molesters have been unleashed on America. Or that MS-13 gangs are inflicting a “migrant crime wave” on U.S. cities.

All that makes for some fiery speeches and intensely inflamed emotions, even among those who pride themselves on moderation. The lies are compelling.

In fact, the entire premise that the U.S. today faces some new existential crisis — unlike anything it’s ever experienced before — could not be more false. It also could not be more believed by millions of Americans.

I stumbled upon the best example of this in researching this piece.

The most authoritative source on immigration data, Pew Research Center, reported in August 2025 that roughly 14 million undocumented people reside in the U.S. illegally today. Using Pew’s data, we can make an apples-to-apples comparison across decades.

In 2007, under President George W. Bush, Pew measured 12.2 million undocumented people — with a total U.S. population of 301 million. Today’s U.S. population is roughly 349 million.

Do the math: About 4.05 percent of people living in the U.S. were undocumented in 2007. Today, that figure is 4.01 percent.

Let that sink in. The proportion of undocumented people in America hasn’t changed in nearly two decades.

Immigration policy has always been contentious, but it wasn’t viewed as an existential crisis back then. It wasn’t a major issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, or the ones after that — not until Trump rode down his infamous escalator and declared that Mexico was sending rapists and other criminals to the U.S.

Trump’s demagoguery worked. The previously unthinkable idea of federal agents using storm-trooper tactics to terrorize millions of citizens and non-citizens alike no longer draws the universal condemnation it should. All because the scope and nature of the immigration “problem” have been so badly distorted.

Here’s what the actual data shows:

Data collected by Texas in 2025 — anything but a liberal source — confirmed what it showed a decade earlier: that undocumented immigrants are arrested at a fraction of the rate of native-born citizens. Nationally, a 2025 Northwestern University study found that immigrants are now 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the U.S. Conflating people here illegally with crime is just a talking point.

As for the border “invasion,” that 10.5 million figure Republicans cite represents Customs and Border Protection encounters — not unique individuals crossing. It’s like saying that if the St. Louis Cardinals have 3 million in attendance, it means 3 million different people went to the games. Many encounters involve the same individuals being turned back repeatedly. The vast majority were turned away, and many who were admitted came legally seeking asylum under U.S. law.

Here’s another fact that rarely gets mentioned: Between 40 and 45 percent of undocumented immigrants didn’t sneak across the border at all. They entered the United States legally on valid visas and simply overstayed.

Without question, the Biden administration botched border security and handed Trump the demagogue’s dream: an “invaders” issue. Democrats made it worse by abandoning the Dreamers — young people brought here illegally who grew up thinking they were Americans and loving what they thought was their country.

Remember them? In September 2017, 88 percent of Americans — including 79 percent of Republicans — supported allowing Dreamers to stay and apply for citizenship. Support remains strong, with recent polls showing 81 percent overall backing a pathway to citizenship.

I wrote a commentary in 2022 for Raw Story criticizing Democrats for “blowing the immigration debate and hurting kids by hiding.” As a candidate for Congress in 2024, my position was straightforward: tighten border security and establish a path to citizenship for the Dreamers.

I lost. But my fate was nothing compared to the tragedy of the Dreamers — first deserted by Democrats, and now left as collateral damage in Trump’s authoritarian playbook.

Let’s stipulate that any number of people coming to the U.S. illegally and living in the shadows is too many. Let’s also stipulate that if someone here illegally commits a crime — large or small — they should face swift and fair justice.

But none of that excuses what’s happening today. And not all the blame belongs to Republicans. Democrats, terrified of looking “soft” on immigration, have internalized the fear. They’ve gone mute while the lies stick — not just with politicians, but with media analysts and average Americans.

Is illegal immigration too high? Of course. And it was an unspeakable tragedy that Laken Riley, Rachel Morin and Jocelyn Nungaray lost their lives at the hands of criminals who were in the country illegally — to justifiable outrage across the country.

But it does nothing to diminish their suffering to consider that some 5,000 women are murdered annually in the United States, and an estimated 500,000 are victims of rape or sexual assault. Almost exclusively at the hands of U.S. citizens.

It is nothing short of despicable to exploit three tragedies as proof of an immigrant crime wave as if those exponentially larger numbers didn’t exist.

The horror of what’s happening across the country at the hands of ICE has finally begun to give some leaders the courage to resist Trump’s authoritarian surge. But to find any consensus or intelligent path forward on immigration policy will require a reset that has nothing to do with politics.

Instead, America has to start dealing with the truth.

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Trump's psychotic meltdown exposed something terrifying — but not about him

Last Sunday night, Donald Trump sent a deranged letter on White House stationery to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. It shocked the world more than any of his antics of the past decade.

In it, Trump unleashed a madman’s rant at Gahr, an innocent bystander, declaring that “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace” as a consequence of having been denied a Nobel Peace Prize. And there was this:

“The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

By Monday morning, as the National Security Council forwarded it to European ambassadors, global stock markets began to crater. The long-term damage to U.S. international relationships — and world peace — remains uncertain, at best.

The core of the communique is a jaw-dropping admission of bad motives and illegal intentions:

Dear Jonas — Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.

With that, Donald Trump unleashed an international crisis as grave as any in our lifetimes. The U.S. has stared down powerful enemies before.

This is the first time it has stared down its friends.

With NATO nations angrily dug in to defend Greenland from illegal American aggression — and sending troops on the ground there — this borders on a declaration of war with our own allies. Too many numbed Americans will feel no choice to shrug this off as Trump being Trump because it’s too painful for them to process.

The long-term consequences of this act of madness must not be trivialized as just more noise. The damage done to America’s image and reputation throughout the globe cannot be walked back at the next White House press briefing.

But this trauma is significant at home for a more alarming reason. It’s an ominous signal that the president’s mental fitness is unraveling.

Donald Trump is mad.

There’s no analogy to Richard Nixon here: Trump’s irrational behavior — citing personal grievance as grounds for war — is seriously closer to the precedent of the Roman Emperor Caligula, who ordered his soldiers to "attack the ocean" by stabbing the waves and collecting seashells as "spoils of war."

America has moved into 25th Amendment territory with this one. If Trump’s unhinged betrayal of America doesn’t fit the phrase “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” it’s hard to imagine what would.

That said, it is impossible to visualize a serious discussion about the 25th Amendment happening anytime soon. Look no further than those North Korean-style Cabinet meetings at which members ritually prostrate themselves before Trump.

These people orbit Trump like planets around the sun — they’re not about to move against him. Any serious pushback from Republicans in Congress is equally implausible.

But this is one crisis that must not be reduced to partisanship. It won’t be helpful if those on the left frame this as a validation of what we’ve been saying about Trump all along. Or if we plot it on a timeline of American imperialism. So what?

The safe space of normalization is the enemy here. The presumed comfort of knowing we’ve come through worse is useless for anyone not old enough to have been around for the Civil War.

And it’s not enough to note that Trump is a psychotic timebomb. It is critical to understand he is an evolving psychotic timebomb.

Mental illness isn’t static. The escalation between first-term Trump and second-term Trump has nothing to do with human guardrails reining him in or not. It’s about his demons tightening their grip.

Against all odds and across all political lines, Americans need to recognize the progression of what is happening to this man and thus, our nation. Trump’s symptoms of mental distress have grown more pronounced by the day.

They are metastasizing.

If Americans can’t see that — and act upon it — maybe we’re the ones unfit to discharge our powers and duties.

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Trump's poll numbers are awful — but they contain a terrible warning for Dems

Donald Trump’s floor is his ceiling. And his ceiling is his floor.

That is the stark takeaway from a new Associated Press-NORC poll showing his approval rating stuck at roughly 40 percent — flatlining across every major issue. Only 37 percent approve of his handling of the economy. Just 38 percent on immigration. On foreign policy, it drops to 33 percent.

Yet despite the constant turbulence, that 40 percent Trump overall approval rate among Americans doesn’t budge more than a point or two, if that. It’s frozen.

Trump knows this. Even amid rapidly deteriorating faculties, the president is well aware that the people he hates — and has said so — dramatically outnumber the ones who love him. Or at least who are willing to follow him to the ends of the democracy.

Just as Trump knew he lost in November 2020 — with his response coming on January — he knows his party will lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterm elections if he can’t corrupt those outcomes. Or, as I suggested, prevent them from happening.

That’s why Trump’s words last Wednesday in a Reuters interview were not idle chatter.

“It's some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don't win the midterms,” Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.”

His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, later claimed he was joking. When a reporter asked whether the president finds the idea of canceling elections funny, Leavitt sneered, “Only someone like you would take that so seriously.”

Can you hear the echo?

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
“Stand back and stand by.”
“I just want to find 11,780 votes.”

Each time, Trump apologists insisted he had been joking. Or that he shouldn’t be taken literally. Each time, neither was the case: Trump had merely floated the same type of trial balloon he’s been inflating throughout his career.

Trump has been repeatedly expressed admiration for dictators who rule without elections. Remember when he publicly fawned over President Xi Jinping in 2018 at Mar-a-Lago after China’s Communist Party effectively made him president for life?

More recently he “joked” to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky using the crude insult that Zelensky was staying at war to avoid having to face elections. That was not idle chatter.

Trump knows that substance and issues — and even results — do not matter to his political survival. His base is locked in. Independents have tuned out. Democrats are in a state of permanent alarm. He governs with minority support and knows the math is frozen.

So what do you do when you can’t persuade voters? You start questioning whether voters should matter. Confronted by Reuters with the fact that 83 percent of Americans oppose his horrific designs on illegally seizing Greenland, Trump went to his safe word like he always does with bad facts.

He called it “fake.”

In the same brief interview Trump twice said “I don’t care” when asked about Senate Republicans pushing back on persecuting Fed Chair Jerome Powell. He doesn’t.

Trump doesn’t need Congressional approval any more than he needs voter approval. He craves one thing, and he craves it dearly.

He needs power.

Building coalitions is hardly Trump’s road to power because of that frozen support. The normal tools of democratic politics — persuasion, compromise, consensus — are useless.

When many of us preoccupy ourselves with the psychological breadcrumbs of Trump’s thirst for power, we often overlook the simple math of authoritarianism. Trump has no other political survival mechanism.

So, while Democrats are workshopping messages about grocery prices for the 2026 midterms, Republicans ruled by Trump will continue to degrade the value and integrity of elections.

Don’t be surprised when the man with the frozen math seriously tries to prevent them from happening at all.

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Head, meet desk: how one Republican posted GOP red-scare idiocy for everyone to see

When Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO) found out that radical communists from California were trying to meddle with the critical gerrymandering efforts of Missouri Republicans, she sprang into action.

Wagner took to X — platform formerly known as Twitter — to let it be known that she wasn’t about to stand for any of that. Here’s what she posted:

Now, that’s the kind of bold response we need more of in the country, by God. The last thing Missouri should stand for is to allow California puppets of George Soros to be pushing us around.

There was one small problem, however, with Wagner’s righteous indignation.

Just a detail.

It turns out that she had her Californians a little mixed up.

You see, the offensive post from the California Democrat was referencing a gathering of concerned citizens at the California City Hall Railroad Park right down there on 500 Oak Street in the fine little town of California, Missouri.

Population 4,458, nestled in beautiful Moniteau County, 24 miles west of Jefferson City.

As the great Gilda Radner’s legendary Saturday Night Live character Emily Litella would have said: “Never mind.”

In Wagner’s defense, both the state of California and the town of California, MO are indeed located to our west. The little town is about 140 miles from St. Louis County, conveniently on the way toward the West Coast.

And it turns out that California Democrat is the name of the hometown newspaper, not a political organization in Gavin Newsom’s west coast den of inequity.

That’s easily confused, isn’t it?

And who can blame Wagner for her outrage anyway? If I might really add fuel to the fire, it turns out that the Missouri citizens who gathered at the town railroad park were organized, at least in part, by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Now, if I didn’t happen to be a past president of the ACLU chapter, let me tell you, I’d really go off on the danger posed by this sort of thing.

But Mr. Soros won’t permit me to do that.

In any event, kudos to HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery, who grabbed a screenshot of Wagner’s tweet.

For some reason, Wagner has since deleted it.

I don’t know why Wagner would memory-hole the thing.

California needs to butt out of our elections. Right, Emily?

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We must wake from this fawning nightmare even if Trump cannot

Perhaps you’ve seen the scene in Pyongyang when North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un convenes his cabinet of sycophants.

The generals and ministers rise as one, their faces frozen in practiced reverence, eyes locked on their Supreme Leader. No one dares look away. No one fidgets.

The ritualized praise flows like liturgy — each man competing to prove his loyalty, his devotion, his willingness to suspend all independent thought in service of the Dear Leader’s infallibility. Blink at the wrong moment, and you risk death.

We seem to be getting there.

Trump convened another one of his grotesque Cabinet-on-camera meetings Tuesday — produced by the master of Detached-From-Reality TV — and this one was quite a bit like the last one on Aug. 26. Except that jarred a fair amount of sensibilities in the chattering class. Now we seem to be used to it.

No need to dwell on the media angle. That ship has sailed.

But in case you missed it, behold the sweet sounds of sycophancy with which members of the Cabinet of the United States government abandoned their souls, in service of the leader of the band.

Lee Zeldin, EPA Administrator:
“If you were to ask me what I’m grateful for, whether it’s a Thanksgiving, it’s a Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, any time of year the fact that this president, after four years serving in office, he could have just left it in the rear-view mirror and went on to really enjoy retirement. But he is willing to take a bullet for all of you tuning in at home because he believes in this flag, our freedom, our liberties and to save the greatest country in the history of the world. So, I’m grateful this holiday season for you, Mr. President, you’re willing to take a bullet for all of us and by all of us it’s the American public.”

Actually, no one asked you, Lee. But plenty of folks would rather take a bullet than listen to more of that.

Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security:
“You’ve saved hundreds of millions of lives with the cocaine you’ve blown up in the Caribbean.”

Now, there was plenty of other sycophancy from Noem, who served the 2.2 billion residents of South Dakota as their governor. But I’m sorry, creature, did you say Trump saved “hundreds of millions of lives” blowing up cocaine in the Caribbean? I thought you did.

Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce:
"A year ago today I was working on transition with President Trump, right, to build the greatest cabinet ever for the greatest president ever. And I, as I sit here today, I can’t be more proud of how you did it, sir. You’ve created the greatest cabinet. It is a joy to be at this table.”

I’m sorry, sir. That's debatable at best.

Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Secretary of Labor:
“You made the American people realize the American dream is real for the American workforce. And it’s been under your leadership, Mr. President, that over 2 million jobs that have been created since you started have been native born workers. And that is the difference between this presidency, this administration as opposed to the Biden administration where mostly foreign born or federal government jobs.”

Chavez-DeRemer is the one dreaming. The claims about Trump rely upon taking raw data out of context without seasonal adjustments. The Biden stuff is a full-out lie: Native-born workers gained about 7.5 million jobs versus 6.5 million for foreign-born — during his four years. That is what once was called a “fact.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi:
”It’s unbelievable, on the ground in DC and Memphis…we have a 100 percent increase in the arrest of violent criminals, thanks to your leadership.”

That would be impressive were it not for the fact that no publicly available dataset even exists for tracking “violent criminal arrests” in D.C. or Memphis that could serve as a baseline for what Bondi is inventing here. Give them credit for chutzpah: This one’s just made up out of thin air.

Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior:
Mr. President, you’ve assembled an incredibly talented group here. If you took a look at this group compared to any Fortune 500 leadership team, any group of startup folks, I mean, this is an amazing group and the breadth of what’s being accomplished and the timing couldn’t be better because, with your leadership and vision, you’ve set us up for this age of abundance as we head into next year, the 250th anniversary of this country….the White House has never looked better, all because of your vision and leadership. So, again, thank you, sir. You’ve given an incredible Christmas gift to Americans by setting us up for an incredible 250th anniversary.

Doug, thanks for not finishing that part about the Fortune 500 companies.

Scott Turner, HUD Secretary:
“When you were giving your report, which was fantastic, and I listened to the report of all my colleagues here and those that will come, it reminds me when I played in the NFL, we had this thing called game film, you know all about film, and we had a saying that said the film don’t lie. The film tells the real story. And I hope that the American people when they watch the film that’s going on now in this time in our history, that they will see that America is greater today than it ever has been. And so, I thank you for that. And thank you for giving us good stories that we can tell for the American people.”

Thanks, Scott, for the newest slogan of the Trump Administration: “Film don’t lie. We do.” And for proving that covering NFL wide receivers — which you did so well — doesn’t mean you won’t fumble enforcement of the nation’s fair housing laws. Which you have.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins:
These jobs are hard, but the joy every day in getting to fight for America and save the country is the privilege of all of our lifetimes, I believe. So, thank you for that. At the US Department of Agriculture, the people’s department — Abraham Lincoln launched this department in 1862. But under your leadership we have finally again put farmers and ranchers and rural America first.

Finally, an Abe Lincoln reference. But apparently, Ms. Rollins statement was cut off. The full sentence should have read, “Under your leadership we have finally again put farmers and ranchers and rural America first in bankruptcy court, in climate-fueled disaster zones, and in the crosshairs of every trade war you lost.” Just editing.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent:
“We’re going to see real wage increases. I think next year is going to be a fantastic year, taxes, deregulation, energy certainty. That’s why everyone, with your leadership, is coming to America.”

Everyone? Really? Not if they read this transcript from the cabinet meeting.

The fawning references to “your leadership” from Bondi, Rollins and Bessent were just three of 19 served up Tuesday to Trump. Noem and SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler led the way with four apiece, followed by three from Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

No mentions of Jeffrey Epstein.

Oh well, who’s counting? Trump, perhaps, but not Tuesday. It seems that the lead story coming out of the cabinet meeting was that Sleepy Don kept dozing off.

But it’s the rest of us who need to wake up to the soul-selling around the president.

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These sick insults make Trump's illness clear

On Thanksgiving Day, Donald Trump dispensed with gratitude.

While most of us were trying to enjoy a holiday dinner, Trump spewed a torrent of hateful slurs and threats across Truth Social — blather that would have triggered 25th Amendment calls for any of his predecessors. It was Trump at his grossest, which is saying something.

He called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded.”

With no provocation, he savaged Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for having been born in Somalia, saying she was “always wrapped in her swaddling hijab” and calling her birthplace a “decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation.”

Then, the president of the United States declared that he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and demanded “REVERSE MIGRATION” to expel millions.

Let me repeat that.

The president of the United States declared he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and demanded “REVERSE MIGRATION” to expel millions.

It was barely a news story. Trump’s mental illness is obvious. Maybe we should be reflecting on how it has numbed us as well.

He ended: “HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for.”

His White House staff zombies called it “one of the most important messages ever released by President Trump.”

But Trump also delivered important messages in person. When CBS News reporter Nancy Cordes asked why he was blaming the Biden administration for the Afghan shooter when Trump’s own Department of Justice Inspector General reported that vetting for such refugees had been thorough, here’s what he said:

“Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? Because they came in on a plane along with thousands of other people that shouldn’t be here, and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person.”

Somehow, Trump’s mushed brain didn’t function quickly enough to treat Cordes to his customary physical insults of women reporters — like calling Catherine Lucey (Bloomberg) “piggy” or calling Katie Rogers of the New York Times “ugly.”

All very recently. And in no single instance did a single member of the White House press corps have the courage — or even basic decency — to utter a single word of pushback or protest in the presence of the president.

Again, Trump’s illness is one part of a horrific story. The rest of us playing along might be just as bad.

Our lexicon is littered with examples of Trump’s mental imbalance. Americans have been conditioned just to roll their eyes at references to the late great Hannibal Lechter or windmill cancer or sharks vs. electrocution or the awkward 39-minute rally sway to music or people flushing toilets 10 or 15 times or that creepy reference to the size of Arnold Palmer’s schlong.

But we Americans have a long tradition of tolerating old men saying stuff like that on street corners. We just move along and tell the kids to pay no attention.

To the contrary, medical experts recognize the kind of behavior Trump has more recently exhibited as a hallmark of certain forms of dementia—particularly Frontotemporal Dementia, which strips away social filters and impulse control.

This is far worse than “cruelty is the point.” Trump is a sick man.

The U.S. truly swims in uncharted waters with this guy. Fortunately, though, a recent body of political philosophy and strategy has emerged to prepare the nation for this sort of nightmare scenario.

It was introduced to us by Republican politicians during the waning days of Joe Biden’s presidency, which had its troubling moments to be sure. But swap Biden for Trump in any of the current president’s displays of mental illness and … well, you can’t.

So let’s focus on solutions.

On the duty to resign:

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY): “If [the president] can’t run for re-election, he is unable and unfit to serve ... He must immediately resign.”
Then Sen. JD. Vance (R-OH): “If you can’t run, you can’t serve. He should resign now.”

On national security:

Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT): “I am formally calling on [the president] to resign ... I no longer have confidence that [he] can effectively execute his duties as commander-in-chief.”
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH): “[The president’s] continued presence in the situation room is a national security threat.”

On mental Ccapacity:

House Speaker Mike Johnson: “I do, I think most of us do” believe the president is experiencing cognitive decline. “That’s reality.”
Nikki Haley: “Don’t be surprised if you have someone that’s 80 in office, their mental stability is gonna continue to decline ... we can’t have someone that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.”

On the constitutional crisis:

Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Eric Schmitt (R-MO): “[The president’s] mental incapacity” raises the question of “who was running the country.”
62 House Republicans in signed letter: “The American people continue to question [the president’s] mental and cognitive abilities and lose faith in [his] ability to lead this country.”

Every single one of these statements targeted Biden in 2023 and 2024. Every concern was framed as a constitutional crisis and a threat to the republic.

Trump is 79 — a year older than Biden was when Republicans started demanding his resignation. He exhibits the same symptoms they claimed made Biden unfit: confusion, memory lapses, physical stumbles, rambling incoherence.

But Biden never showed meanness like Trump’s, nor the total loss of impulse control that inflicts such pain.

That’s what America faces now.

And for once, Republicans have laid out the solution to a problem.

Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox

This White House disgrace makes no effort to conceal Trump's sheer contempt

Donald Trump will debase the White House today like never before.

Far worse than bulldozing its East Wing, Trump will use the People’s House as the grotesque backdrop for reducing to rubble any pretense of American moral leadership in the world. He will prostrate himself — and our nation — at the feet of one of its most malign actors.

All for the money.

The killer’s name is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. The world came to know him as MBS when he first gained widespread notoriety for ordering the brutal murder in 2018 of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen and legal permanent resident in the U.S.

Little more than seven years after Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — his dismembered body never to be found — MBS will be fêted today at the White House.

Trump will be there to greet him as a dignitary — ready with smiles, handshakes, photo ops, and promises of billions in deals (presumably not limited to his family in this case).

Trump has spent seven years evading the truth, but the intelligence record is unambiguous. On Oct. 2, 2018, Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents for his marriage. He never walked out. Turkish authorities and U.S. intelligence confirmed the gruesome details: he was bound, injected with a fatal sedative, then dismembered, his body chemically dissolved.

This was not some “rogue operation.” The CIA examined audio recordings from inside the consulate, intercepted calls, and text messages. MBS sent at least 11 texts to his top adviser, Saud al-Qahtani, who oversaw the 15-man hit squad sent to Istanbul. A member of the hit team called a senior aide to MBS from inside the consulate immediately after the murder to report the job was done.

The CIA’s assessment wasn’t vague. Officials called it “blindingly obvious” that MBS gave the order. A killing this organized, this brazen, couldn’t have happened without his approval.

And what did Trump do with this intelligence? He didn’t just ignore it — he rejected it outright. He issued a disgraceful, exclamation-point-laden statement dismissing his own CIA’s findings, claiming they only had “feelings” with “no smoking gun” — a deliberate, contemptible lie designed to protect a killer.

Trump framed his surrender as “America First” by prioritizing arms sales and oil over the murder of a journalist who lived here. In a moment that never truly engendered the scorn it deserved, he wondered aloud whether people really wanted him to give up “hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

That’s what it always comes down to: Money. Arms. Oil. Trump declared that abandoning Saudi Arabia would be a “terrible mistake,” ensuring “we’re with Saudi Arabia and staying with Saudi Arabia” — to hell with justice, truth, and American values.

The rest of the world hasn’t forgotten. When the Biden administration released the declassified intelligence report in 2021, it confirmed what everyone already knew: MBS viewed Khashoggi as a threat and supported using violent means to silence him.

MBS hasn’t changed. Saudi Arabia is executing prisoners at a record rate and maintaining an unprecedented human rights crackdown. Dozens of activists and writers languish in Saudi prisons for speaking freely.

This is not just a crackdown on adults. Human rights groups have documented that Saudi authorities are reneging on their promise to halt the death penalty for juveniles, executing individuals for crimes allegedly committed when they were children, in addition to the hundreds executed for non-lethal, drug-related offenses.

But today, Trump rolls out the red carpet — literally. There will be a South Lawn arrival ceremony, an Oval Office meeting, a Cabinet Room signing ceremony, and an East Room dinner hosted by Melania Trump. They’ll sign deals on AI, defense, and semiconductors potentially worth $142 billion. There will be smiling photo ops and glowing praise.

What there won’t be is accountability. What there won’t be is justice for Jamal Khashoggi. What there won’t be is any acknowledgment that the man being honored in the White House ordered a journalist lured to his death and dismembered with a bone saw.

Seven years later, Trump is doubling down on that betrayal. It would be interesting to see if any of Khashoggi’s erstwhile colleagues in the press dare mention his name today.

It appears that the media has moved on. Congress has moved on. But Jamal Khashoggi is still dead, his body never found and his murderer is being celebrated as an honored guest.

For Donald Trump, everything has a price.

And as long as he’s our president, so does America’s soul.

Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox

Trump spent years building this Epstein denial — a Karoline Leavitt slip just destroyed it

Donald Trump just showed up — allegedly — somewhere no one would ever want to be found.

”Spending time” at Jeffrey Epstein’s house with one of the convicted child-sex predator’s victims.

The allegation is one of several politically radioactive revelations in emails released by the Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday. They are part of a trove of materials provided to the committee by Epstein’s estate.

Trump will have a hard time lying his way out of this one. Give White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt an “A” for effort, though.

“In a statement on Wednesday, Leavitt said, ‘The Democrats selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump.’” CNN reported.

“‘The ‘unnamed victim’ referenced in these emails is the late Virginia Giuffre, who repeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever and ‘couldn’t have been friendlier’ to her in their limited interactions,’ Leavitt said.”

That might be a bit more plausible were it not for the fact that Leavitt’s statement blows up every syllable of every word of denial that Trump has uttered for years about having little to do with Epstein. Now, she’s not even denying he was at Epstein’s house — just that if he was, it was to spend time with the one (deceased) Epstein victim who says Trump was nice to her.

Funny, they never mentioned that exculpatory detail before in all the coverage of Giuffre’s death and subsequent book release.

Well, if it’s not a news story, why was Leavitt putting out an instant statement about it?

The emails cut through years of calculated denial. The core evidence is a 2011 exchange between Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, long after Trump and Epstein were supposedly estranged.

Epstein wrote to Maxwell: “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump.”

Then came the definitive line: “[A victim] spent hours at my house with him … he has never once been mentioned.”

That single email destroys the entire narrative. This wasn’t Trump hearing rumors about Epstein’s operation. It was Trump spending hours at Epstein’s house with one of the victims — and saying nothing.

The 2011 date is what makes this impossible to escape. Epstein had no reason to lie in private correspondence to his closest co-conspirator. Trump was a reality TV host with no political power. He couldn’t grant pardons or commute sentences. The email wasn’t a threat or blackmail play. It was a statement of calculated, relied-upon truth between two people who understood the power of silence.

That reality explains Trump’s desperate obsession with burying the full Epstein files. He promised transparency during the campaign. Then he actively obstructed Congress. His administration stonewalled investigators. Republicans split over it. Right-wing supporters broke with him. Now we know why: these emails don’t just contradict his story — they place him in the room.

Every denial collapses under that timeline. Trump didn’t “barely know” Epstein. Their falling-out wasn’t a simple Palm Beach real estate squabble. Trump wasn’t some peripheral figure at a few parties.

The record gets worse. In 2019, months before Epstein’s arrest, Epstein emailed author Michael Wolff that Trump “knew about the girls, as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” You don’t ask someone to stop unless you have concrete knowledge of what they’re doing. And you don’t spend hours in a predator’s house with a victim unless you understand exactly where you are and what is being ignored.

It’s hard to fathom why Maxwell would be asked “to stop” unless she was seen as holding the ultimate currency — firsthand knowledge of what Trump knew and when he knew it. Maxwell, of course, is another person Trump publicly claimed he hardly knew but somehow — after an unprecedented softball interview in prison from Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal lawyer (now Deputy Attorney General), by pure coincidence — Maxwell found herself transferred from the worst women’s prison possible to the system’s Ritz-Carlton equivalent.

Sudden white-glove treatment of a felon sentenced to 20 years hard time for sex-child trafficking.

It happens.

This is why Trump has fought relentlessly to keep these files sealed. From all appearances, he simply cannot withstand the truth coming out.

The House is now expected to vote on release of the Epstein files, an event I’ll believe when I see it. It does appear that House Speaker Mike Johnson has finally run out of tricks to delay the swearing in of Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-AZ, a cool 50 days after she won her seat in a special election.

Grijalva has been seen as the pivotal vote, allowing Democrats and four Republican defectors to call for the full release of the files. But even if that happens — and there’s no guarantee it will — count on Trump to pull out every stop to keep those files from seeing the light of day.

This fight is a long way from over.

You see, Trump knows what’s in those files because he was there.

And now, thanks to Epstein’s own words, we’re beginning to find out as well.

Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox

These Jan 6 lawyers should not be allowed near a courtroom — never mind a school district

Here’s a lesson for the public schools to teach parents: “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be lawyers at the Thomas More Society.”

You may have heard that Kirkwood School District, in Missouri, was recently threatened with a lawsuit over a three-minute LGBTQ+ History Month video shown to middle schoolers last month. Some parents complained.

The Chicago-based Thomas More Society swooped in with an eight-page demand letter threatening years of federal litigation and “substantial attorney fees” unless Kirkwood caved to their demands — all in the name of “protecting” the school district’s children from exposure to non-heterosexual subject matter.

This uncivil society has fancied itself for two decades as a guardian of morality. Not merely to advance homophobia, but to defund public libraries, shutter abortion clinics and otherwise seek to redefine America in the most unChristian manner imaginable.

But it was the group’s spectacularly failed attempt to overthrow American democracy as leading election deniers that best defines its notion of right and wrong. And that best illustrates the threat it poses to the rest of us.

Kids need to be protected from adults like this.

In 2020, the Thomas More Society created something called the Amistad Project — after updating its bylaws to include “election integrity” as part of its mission statement.

It launched lawsuits in multiple key swing states Donald Trump lost — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona — all of which were dismissed or tossed out after courts found serious procedural or constitutional flaws.

In December 2020, it sued in federal court seeking to block Congress from counting electoral votes on Jan. 6. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg rejected the motion, writing that the suit “rests on a fundamental and obvious misreading of the Constitution. It would be risible were its target not so grave.”

Risible is judge-speak for “Stupid on stilts.”

The Amistad Project was run at the time by Phill Kline, a former Kansas state attorney general whose resume included having had his law license suspended in 2013 for what the Kansas Supreme Court termed “clear and convincing evidence” that Kline committed 11 separate ethics violations.

The Court’s findings included that he misled a grand jury, provided false testimony, and illegally obtained confidential medical records during his investigations of abortion providers. The Court cited his “dishonest and selfish motives” and noted his “inability or refusal to acknowledge” his misconduct. He would ultimately lose his appeals at the U.S. Supreme Court, at a reported cost of $600,000 to Kansas taxpayers.

Great guy. I have no idea what he’s doing now. But during the scandalous post-2020 election effort to thwart democracy, he personified the Thomas More Society’s idea of an upstanding and morally impeccable attorney.

There are quite a few other examples of attorneys who have been associated with the society and whose service — like Kline — speaks volumes as to the group’s high standards of virtue.

There was Jenna Ellis, whose meteoric rise from a traffic-law attorney in Colorado to the height of Trump World culminated in a criminal guilty plea for aiding Trump’s fake‑elector scheme and a public censure for repeatedly misrepresenting the 2020 election. (To be fair, Ellis deserves our compassion as a survivor of close exposure to Rudy Guiliani’s flatulence and runaway hair dye.)

There were lesser known stalwarts like Erick G. Kaardal — identified as “Special Counsel” for the Amistad Project in the December 2020 election‐lawsuit filings. A federal judge referred him for possible disciplinary action after describing his complaint as “a sweeping Complaint filled with baseless fraud allegations and tenuous legal claims.”

The list goes on. But you don’t need deep research to understand the grotesque nature of the Thomas More Society. The demand letter it sent to the Kirkwood School District on behalf of a handful of aggrieved parents speaks for itself:

“Based on our track record of First Amendment victories and fee recoveries across the country, those amounts are likely to be substantial.”

Nice school district you have here. It would be a shame if something bad happened to it.

At this point, it’s fair to wonder what sort of moral outrage might be so heinous as to offend the sensibilities of the openly heinous themselves? Must be pretty gruesome, right?

Fortunately, there’s no need to speculate. The demand letter specifies some of the atrocities perpetrated at Kirkwood. Here it is (but I must warn you these bulleted items might not be appropriate for children to see):

“Years ago” being “openly LGBTQ+ was difficult and dangerous” and “everything changed” for the good during the “Stonewall Uprising,” thanks in part to “brave activists like Marsha P. Johnson [a self-identified ‘drag queen’] and Sylvia Rivera [a self-identified ‘transvestite’],” which led to “speak[ing] up” for “LGBTQ+ rights” across the world.
The “Christopher Street liberation day march” was the first “Pride parade” that served as a way for self-identified LGBTQ+ individuals to “step out of the shadows” and “show the world who they were,” because “being yourself is something to celebrate, not hide.”
“Pride” is about “being proud of your identity.”
“Pride month” is “celebrated” with “parades, festivals, and flags full of bright colors.” The rainbow flag was created as a “symbol of love, acceptance, diversity, and hope.”
Newer versions of the “Pride flag” include the “progress pride flag” adding “black and brown to highlight the inclusion of people of color,” along with “pink, blue, and white to include the ‘trans’ community.’ This evolution shows that the movement is growing and working hard to include everyone.”
“The Pride community today is a huge and amazing group”; “it’s a supportive family.”
“Pride reminds us to[:] Be proud of who you are[,] Stand up for fairness and equality[,] Support Others” [as also displayed in illustrated text on the video], “no matter who they love or how they identify.”
“It started as a protest, and today it’s also a celebration of courage, history, and community.” “Supporting ‘Pride’ means supporting equality, kindness, and the right to be yourself.”
“HAPPY LGBTQ+ HISTORY MONTH” [shouted by student-narrators in unison, and as further displayed in illustration on video].

Dear reader, I apologize if it has offended your sensibilities to see — in raw and uncensored form — the subversiveness that was inflicted upon innocent children in Kirkwood. Certainly, it’s understandable that it might offend your religious beliefs.

Especially if you’re possessed by whatever demons haunt the nice people at the Thomas More Society.

Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox.