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This simple tactic will take down Trump — and every one of his sycophants

Hey, DNC, I’ve got your unifying message right here.

A new poll shows that the majority of Americans believe Donald Trump is using the Iranian people as human distractions for his crimes against humanity. Deploying 2,500 Marines to Iran is a clear signal that Trump is willing to send our military to die for him just because his name is so embedded in the Epstein Files.

This is the kind of thing Democrats should be talking about every chance they get. Trump’s failures are all they need to campaign on. Every last one of his sycophants in Congress shoulders the blame for everything he does, and that’s what Democrats need to focus on.

MAKE TRUMP’S FAILURES STICK TO MAGA CANDIDATES.

That’s it.

That’s the Democratic Party’s unifying message for the 2026 midterms.

You’re welcome, Ken Martin! It’s okay, you can send me a small stipend for that and the other ideas I have about the aggressive campaign every Democratic candidate needs.

Call it OPERATION TRUMP’S FAULT.

Gas prices? Trump’s fault.

Grocery prices? Trump’s fault.

Epstein Files and the Iran body count thus far? Soooo Trump’s fault.

Trump is the Republican Party, and they are him (maybe not Rep. Thomas Massie at the moment, but the rest for sure).

Democrats have been accused of not bragging about our accomplishments while also not holding their Republican colleagues accountable. It’s time to switch things up ahead of a midterm election that Trump is already telling everyone is rigged. Sound familiar? Do any of us need to relive any of our previous elections over the last decade of Trump Blight?

Democrats need to quit campaigning nicely and use the truth as a weapon against their Republican opponents, who are barely holding on to their simple majority because they’ve been dropping like flies in the House.

CNN reports that a record 35 House Republicans are either retiring or seeking higher office, such as Senator or Governor. It’s the most since at least 1930, according to data cited from the Brookings Institution.

The recent scandal surrounding Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-TX) is just the latest gift handed to the Democrats from the Trumpublicans. Despite his initial refusals to resign, Gonzalez has now acquiesced and isn’t seeking reelection. And the House Ethics Committee’s investigation into Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) falsifying her Congressional expense report could cost them their majority even before the midterms.

Mace’s seat was already going to be vacated before January 2027 because she’s running a failing campaign for Governor of South Carolina. Her erratic online behavior and support of Trump instead of the Epstein Survivors have made her incredibly unpopular both online and off. And now she might be expelled from Congress over the more than $9,000 she allegedly embezzled from the United States government.

That’s another glorious advantage for Democrats if it happens. No bills are going to get passed when there’s every chance of a 217-217 tie. It weakens the Hastert Rule (not bringing bills to the floor without majority party support), and passing any bills out of committee becomes more difficult.

While there have been plenty of Democrats speaking out against the Trump regime and the Epstein Files, they’re still facing the very real problem of getting the truth to rise to the top, where Americans can see it. Trump and his allies are doing all they can to control the flow of information. FCC Chair Brendan Carr is now threatening to pull broadcast licenses if networks don’t air Trump’s Iran propaganda. At the same time, the 2026 midterms will be the first election truly impacted by the advances in AI technology and deepfakes. Whatever Elon did to help Trump in 2024 is going to not just be repeated, but worsened by whatever his Grok can be programmed to say or show.

As someone who makes my meager living by telling the truth, I’ve only grown more worried about how we’re supposed to believe anything we see or hear at this very critical moment. Our democracy is at stake. Nobody should be playing nice when every decision Trump makes comes with a body count.

But I’m not here to complain without providing solutions. The way to get the truth to the American public is to deliver it to them in a way that can’t be ignored. How does Trump’s propaganda get shared? It starts with a briefing from Press Secretary Karoline “KKKaroline Lie-vitt” Leavitt in a Press Room full of chosen right-wing media outlets. Seems a little biased, right?

So where’s our Democratic Press Secretary to give a daily briefing to counter those lies, like a daily response to the State of the Union? I’ve had this idea since about a week after Trump slithered back into the White House, and every time I’ve written or posted about it on social media, the response is overwhelming.

All members of the media would be invited to the Democratic Press briefing, which would be held at the Capitol. There’s no way the press wouldn’t show up, regardless of the outlet. The so-called “liberal” media that’s been jettisoned from the daily White House briefings is starved for access to the truth and would relish the chance to get real answers to their questions. The right-wing media would show up with their biased questions and get owned by someone smart, informed, and experienced at handling people like Peter Doocy.

I’ve often suggested Jessica Tarlov from Fox News for the job, because she shuts down the pile of stalking smarm that is Jesse Watters five days a week without raising her voice. I don’t know that she’d take the pay cut, but that’s the vibe we need from a Democratic Press Secretary. They’d meet the press while Democratic members of Congress go on TV to keep pushing the unifying message:

EVERYTHING IS TRUMP’S FAULT.

MAGA keeps telling on itself with every post — and a reckoning is coming

The United States of America was founded as a free nation by white people seeking escape from religious persecution in England and across Europe. Sure, they stole the land from Native Americans, and our history of racism and xenophobia is hugely embarrassing, but that’s the stuff we’re supposed to learn from, not repeat.

If you remember your Schoolhouse Rock, we are the “Great American melting pot,” enriched by people from all nations bringing their cultures and blending them to create a country that can’t be defined with any singularity.

And while we’re reliving our GenX Saturday mornings, let’s all sing the Preamble to the Constitution together as a little reminder of what we’re supposed to be doing with it, because Republicans have fully forgotten.

The group of compromised Trumptraitors currently cosplaying as the Republican Party is fully engaged in a scapegoating campaign against Muslim Americans, as yet another manufactured distraction from Donald Trump’s Epstein War in Iran that could see retaliation on U.S. soil.

The White House Twitter account is nothing but aggro pro-war Bro Memes, because it’s run by a brain trust of racist MAGA bullies.

We’ve already seen the effects of the hate campaign led by MAGA agitator Nick “Baby Teeth” Shirley, with his fake “investigation” into “Muslim fraud” in Minnesota. Renee Good and Alex Pretti would be alive right now if Nick hadn’t manufactured distractions for Trump under the guise of “journalism.” Too many MAGA shills are still out there walking around, free to lie for Trump, but I cling to the hope that they’ll go to prison for him first, perhaps along with now-grounded “Eagle” Ed Martin, the far-right lawyer who’s in his own kind of Trump trouble now.

The attack on protestors in front of Gracie Mansion, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s residence, is another example of the consequences of MAGA hatred getting out of control, encouraged by the White House and the MAGA Congress.

Trumpublicans are also whining about Democrats refusing to fund the Department of Homeland Security, while complaining that Democrats won’t support the SAVE Act, the GOP’s voter suppression bill. The two are connected: Republicans are so anti-American in their policies and bills that Democrats refuse to back them. The MAGA cult never hears about that part, as Trump has made it as hard as possible for the truth to get out.

Trump’s enablers have chosen loyalty to him over America, apparently thanks to handy Russian blackmail bad enough to keep them on lockdown for a decade. It’s the grift that keeps on giving to Trump, because put together, the Epstein Files and whatever’s in Putin’s safe are bad enough for Republicans to foment violence at home, or to look the other way when U.S. forces bomb a school in Iran. Other people’s children are expendable to these ghouls, as long as the public never finds out just what members of Trump’s regime might have done to kids trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Republicans have literally chosen violence. Their fealty to Trump will eventually be the end of all of them but it’s still fascinating to me, on a “slow down and look at the car crash” level, that there’s nothing they won’t ignore or excuse. Gone are the days when they hid racism and other personal biases. It’s all about who can “own the libs” with memes and tweets, while trying to gain favor with a bunch of uneducated bullies.

It’s hard to pick the worst MAGA offender but a clear frontrunner, this week at least, is Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), who found a niche in the Muslim Hate space by tweeting xenophobic and racist memes from his congressional account. The First Amendment guarantees our right to free speech, but it doesn’t protect hate speech that’s intended to incite violence. Ogles has gone viral in the worst way for tweeting, “Muslims don't belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.”

Yes, that tweet is still live, and it’s gotten over 16.5 MILLION views. I’m grateful for that Community Note, and I added my own take to the discussion, but my account is super suppressed. And as for Andy, he’s been tweeting up a real hatestorm and it makes me sick.

That’s just disgusting

Then there’s this dumb meme he posted, because he’s really leaning into this “MURICA!” thing.

Um … properly filling out forms is how you get your American citizenship, Ogre. How else do you think people get things like driver’s licenses, passports, and mortgages? Lots and lots of paperwork.

Mixed in with the Muslim-hating MAGAbots, there are truth-based progressive responses. (Quick sidebar: I’m thinking about writing a primer to help you all spot the fake accounts so you don’t get sucked into time-wasting as they’re programmed to do.) But Ogles doesn’t care. This is how dumb he is.

It makes my brain cry to know that the dumbest and worst people have been able to worm their way into Congress, there to enable Trump’s crimes.

We can’t ignore such deliberate targeting from the Republican Party. Democrats don’t have the majority back. But we’re getting closer. Thanks for that expense report, Nancy Mace! Oh, so you might be reconsidering some things, Tony Gonzales? Not loving your chances for re-election as a Republican, Kevin Kiley?

See ya, wouldn’t want to be any of ya, once Democrats begin the Nuremberg Trials 2.0. Luckily for us, every tweet is a confession. All social media communications are in the public domain (even though some of us can’t reply because we’re blocked). And amid it all, Trump is trying to TACO his way out of Iran, which is being all, “Hey, you started it!” and rightfully so.

Hate never wins.

  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

The party of 'family values' just covered up unspeakable crimes

If this week has proven anything, it’s that the entire Republican Party (minus Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky) is guilty of treason and manufacturing a war with Iran to deflect from being accessories to the sexual assault of women and children.

Several new bombshell releases from the Epstein Files brought even more allegations about President Donald Trump, including testimony from a woman who said that as a young victim, she fought back by biting him on the penis.

Another Epstein document details “underage sex parties” allegedly hosted at Trump's golf course. Trump vehemently denies wrongdoing, of course, but it’s still weird that a lot of his clown cabinet talk about the “Sinaloa Cartel” when it comes to the immigration discussion, and how ICE is only going after “the most violent criminals” — when NO, they aren’t, said everyone who’s seen the footage of the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good — when they could just read the Epstein Files.

THIS is what Republicans are refusing to address:

And all of this is apparently fine with Trump’s Republican enablers, who are ritualistically shredding our democracy because — checks notes — WE DO NOT KNOW WHY, actually.

The reason you missed this, Dear Reader, is that a manufactured Distracto-War is happening in Iran, and possibly another one is about to pop off in Ecuador. Also, Trump finally fired puppy killer Kristi Noem for lying about her $220 million cosplaying ad campaign and replaced her as Secretary of Homeland Security with someone even less qualified: Markwayne Mullin, the junior senator from Oklahoma.

I wonder if Mullin will be obligated to offer Corey Lewandowski free rides on that tricked-out DHS jet now Kristi’s been grounded as a “Special Envoy,” which also sounds like a gross thing to make her husband super-embarrassed.

If you’re not familiar with Mullin, he’s a former pro Mixed Martial Arts fighter who Democrats nonetheless allege wasn’t so brave on January 6th, and who needs to stand on a box to feel like a Big Boy whenever he finds himself next to an actual grown-up.

None of this has to be happening. But both Senate and House Republicans used their razor-thin majorities to VETO bipartisan war powers resolutions and the public release of sexual misconduct reports involving members of Congress.

So, to reiterate, the Republican Party, which calls itself the party of “Family Values,” which claims to be “Pro-Life” in the pursuit of “protecting children,” and which wants America to be a “Christian Nation,” is helping cover up unspeakable crimes against women and children by bombing children in Iran. Trump doesn’t care about those deaths, the deaths of our servicepeople, or the impending deaths of Americans ON AMERICAN SOIL if Iran retaliates here.

GOP: Works for us, Boss!

I’m old enough to remember when the Republican Party behaved mostly like human beings who understood the assignment. They had informed and intelligent political discourse with their Democratic colleagues, without devolving into grade-school bullying, insults thrown in public.

I contend that without social media, Trump would still be pulling focus on the New York social scene by acting like the chauvinist and womanizer he’s always been, the highlights of his life beginning and ending with giant headlines in the New York Post.

Remember when Republicans spoke truthfully about Trump? I do! It’s on video and everything!

- YouTube www.youtube.com

They KNEW what he was. And, Dear Reader, I posit that every one of them still knows what he is.

Remember when the Russians hacked the DNC and RNC servers but only released what they found about the Democrats and held onto kompromat on the GOP? Guess who got his tiny hands on all that blackmail? Why, Putin’s Puppet, that’s who! One by one, Republicans running for president in 2016 started dropping out of the race, even those still polling pretty well against Trump.

You know the timeline. Trump should’ve been held accountable by the media, but they let him bully them instead. The RNC should’ve yanked him from the campaign when he mocked a disabled reporter. He should’ve been stopped after the Access Hollywood tape, but James Comey agreed with Susan Sarandon that Trump would just be more interesting and released Hillary’s emails. Trump should’ve been stopped a million other times and he still hasn’t been stopped, and look where we are now.

His tariffs have tanked the American economy. The February jobs report showed a dramatic drop in new jobs created and boosted the unemployment rate to nearly 4.5 percent.

It’s fine, we don’t need a functioning society if you can “own the libs,” right?

Every decision Trump makes comes with a body count. All Americans should be asking why the Republicans refuse to stand up to him, because their fealty is glaringly obvious. Is the kompromat on them as bad as what’s been found about Trump in the Epstein Files?

There’s nothing you could do to make me turn against my country, no amount of blackmail or bribery. But then again, I didn’t participate in the world’s biggest and most abhorrent cover-up. I never met Jeffrey Epstein, and I don’t hang out with anyone who knew him.

However, I AM a taxpaying American citizen, as well as a member of the indie media, so please join me in demanding all Republicans be forced to say under Congressional oath whether they’re loyal to Trump or to America, because it’s painfully and abundantly clear that it’s impossible to be both.

Trump has never been a “take one for the team” guy. He’s a “make the team take one for ME” guy.

It’s time for that to STOP.

  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

This Trump ghoul is shocked to learn taxpayers turned her jet into a love nest

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi “KKKristi” Noem is so bad at her job that congressional Republicans this week joined Democrats in demanding her resignation, under threat of impeachment, during fiery hearings in which Noem perjured herself multiple times. And not for the first time, for those of you at home, trying to keep score.

The former South Dakota Governor and Worst Pet Parent Ever could only glare back at her questioners, while trying to justify the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good at the hands of ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis.

As a woman, writing about Republican women, I do what I can to sidestep the low-hanging fruit. I make it a policy to never body shame or comment on their appearances … unless they do something so glaringly egregious that it would be irresponsible to not call attention to it. We don’t have the space here to get into why women have been socialized to please the male gaze, nor enough bandwidth to get into why so many women have fully altered themselves on the Trump Plastic Surgery Plan. Once you decide to commit treason for Epstein’s Wingman, I guess you’re contractually required to get a Mar-a-Lago Makeover.

Whatever happens to Noem now, she will be stuck with Alina Habba’s Ivanka Face forever.

I mean, come on.

I also don’t know why any men would prefer a fully fake face to a real one, but also I do, because I’m a woman in the modern age. Again, we don’t have the time to get into this now, but we do have time to wonder about KKKristi and her close “advisor,” former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Full disclosure: Corey blocked me on Twitter all the way back in 2016, because I kept doing this annoying thing called “telling the truth about Trump” and he didn’t like it, just like Trump didn’t. Such snowflakes, I swear. I’m my own MAGA-valanche of Twitter blocks, open to suggestions on how to better monetize this power I have over the worst people this country has ever produced.

Anyway, Kristi and Corey’s alleged affair is said to have begun all the way back in 2019 and is probably the worst-kept secret in Washington besides the Epstein Files and their contents.

The widely reported relationship was a big topic of discussion during Kristi’s Senate Judiciary hearing. She stuck to “We’re just good friends” … while being shown photos of a luxury bedroom on one of her government jets. You might have missed it, but our tax dollars were spent to turn a multimillion-dollar private plane (one of two) into a private getaway up in the sky.

Here’s Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) asking a basic question, with a visual aid. Noem seems incapable of understanding that other people know about her not-at-all-secret relationship.

That woman blankly stared at her own sky bedroom and pretended she didn’t know what it was. But we know she knows. There was a recent story about her leaving her woobie behind during a flight change, and Corey firing a Coast Guard pilot instead of telling Kristi she’s an alleged adult and doesn’t need a special blanket.

Yes, I call him that. I’ve been calling him that since the rumors about him and Kristi began. I’ve posted it so many times that whenever I start a word with “won-”, my predictive text does the rest.

In the same hearing, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) fully unloaded on Kristi during questioning, which also touched on the famous puppy killing incident.

While it’s great to see this from a Republican, keep in mind that Tillis is retiring at the end of the year and so has nothing to lose. I’m going to play amateur psychiatrist for a moment and say there’s some misdirected anger here. Tillis rightfully dragged Noem to filth, but I’m guessing a lot of that was for Trump and the embarrassment he’s caused the party and our country on the global stage.

Noem was being grilled by the House Judiciary Committee while I was writing this. She perjured herself multiple times again. It was also fun watching Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) do what he was born to do, which is own Republicans.

However, Noem had much more support from the House GOP than from their Senate counterparts, many tossing obtuse softball questions about Democrats refusing to fund DHS while Coast Guard ships are being targeted overseas.

Of course, everyone in both hearings knew the truth, which is that Noem is spectacularly underqualified for her job, like everyone else in the Trump regime. And that’s part of their plan to destroy our democracy.

When you have the worst person possible sitting behind the Resolute Desk, and he surrounds himself with unqualified yes men and women as close as possible to being as bad as he is, there’s clearly an intention to implode all political norms.

From the destruction of the East Wing (Did anyone preserve any of our historical artifacts? Has anyone ever even thought to ask besides me? It’s fine, I don’t know all that much about politics) to the bombing of Iran because Trump’s name is all over the Epstein Files, to the deliberate ignorance of the Constitution, no one connected to Trump has even once put America first.

  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

These MAGA women call out an alleged GOP sexual predator. It’s not who you hope it is

Amid the Tony Gonzales scandal, three of the Texas Republican’s female colleagues are demanding his resignation. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) all voted to release the Epstein Files too. But in a not-very-odd disconnect, none of them are speaking out against the person who appears in those files nearly as often as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

All three Republican women have picked up the fully false narrative that Donald Trump has been “exonerated” in relation to Epstein — his language, which they repeat. Trump hasn’t been exonerated at all, because he has yet to see the inside of a courtroom in connection with the Epstein Files.


As part of my endless pursuit of the truth, I continue to try to annoy Mace enough that she’ll finally give me a real answer as to why she won’t say that Trump is in the Epstein Files. I emailed her comms director twice this week. Since they don’t like my questions, I got the same answer twice:

It irritates me that these people think I’m as stupid as they are.

This is Russian Propaganda 101: Keep repeating the lie until everyone believes it. But consider the Epstein bombshells that have detonated just this week, prominently including an allegation, apparently deemed credible enough to have been investigated, that Trump committed a crime against a child, as part of the Epstein-Maxwell sex trafficking ring.

So if these Republican women are capable of seeing that Rep. Gonzales is alleged to have done terrible things involving a grown woman who then killed herself — allegations he denies — why can’t the same women hold Trump to the same sort of standards, especially since the terrible things he is alleged to have done involved a child?

Along those lines, why didn’t any Republicans travel with Democrats for the billionaire Les Wexner’s Epstein deposition, but then all managed to clear their schedules to be in the room where Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton gave their sworn testimonies?

I know, we KNOW why. I just want them to admit it.

When it comes to Head Case Mace, I’m guessing she’s holding back because she doesn’t want to lose Trump’s endorsement for her flailing gubernatorial campaign in South Carolina. There’s a reason she hasn’t resigned her House seat. She has to keep playing the favorite now that Marjorie Taylor Greene has been banished from MAGAville forever.

I sent the same emails to the comms directors for Anna Paulina Luna-tic and Grandmother of the Year Lauren Boebert, but neither responded. It’s a frustrating endeavor to try to get anyone to say anything truthful about Trump, because they’re scared of retribution. But again, he blocked me on Twitter more than a decade ago and I’m fine, so I really don’t understand why anyone is afraid of such a thin-skinned, lying Friend of Jeffrey.

What makes it more difficult to comprehend is watching Republican men hold Trump accountable, instead of GOP women. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has been in full lockstep with a Democratic colleague, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), when it comes to Epstein. If Massie can do it, why can’t the rest of the party? I’m not a big fan of Massie in general, particularly regarding January 6th, but he’s on the correct side of history when it comes to the Epstein Files.

I also reached out to Massie’s office. The guy who answers his DC office phone and I shared a little chuckle over the “exonerated” line being parroted by those women and the rest of the MAGA cult. There was no reply from Massie’s comms guy by press time, but that’s okay. I got a corker of a quote from someone else who knows a thing or two about the Epstein Files, because he’s been investigating the financials for years: my home-state senator, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).

As the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Wyden (or, as I like to call him, “Senator Chutzpah,” a reference to his latest book) has been looking into the Russian and American banks that financed the international sex trafficking ring run by Epstein and Maxwell. He always stresses that the key to nailing Trump is to follow the money, which is why I keep this screenshot on my phone. It’s of a Twitter thread Sen. Wyden wrote in July last year as a handy way to clap back at the MAGA trolls who still try to false equivalence their way out of every Trump-Epstein accusation.

Feel free to save it to your device. There’s always room for the truth next to those cute cat pics and whatever you ate last night.

Anyway, the Senate Finance Committee is hitting the same wall as House Oversight: Treasury Secretary Scott “What Epstein Files?” Bessent won’t allow them full access to his department’s own Epstein Files, which too many people don’t know exist. I don’t know why — or indeed why Bessent doesn’t care that Trump thinks Bessent’s marriage to a man isn’t real — because Bessent won’t respond to me, just like he won’t respond to my senator. It’s good company to be in, at least.

I got to spend a few moments on Friday with Senator Chutzpah, after his press conference at Portland Coffee Roasters to highlight the impact of Trump’s tariffs on small businesses. I asked what he would say to the MAGA cult about the lies they’re being fed about Trump being “exonerated.”

“Some of these people have as much interest in justice as Bonnie and Clyde,” he said, tipping me a wink.

Great line — but unfortunately, it might just make Nancy Mace show up to work on Monday cosplaying as a gun moll, instead of Hester Prynne.


  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

This State of the Union showed the best and worst of our times before a word was uttered

We begin at 2pm PST, hours before the State of the Union…

Yet another Epstein Files bombshell dropped on Tuesday, just hours before Donald Trump was set to deliver a State of the Union Address we already knew would be a test of human endurance.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), the Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee, revealed the (not at all) shocking news that the Department of Justice has been (hold on to something sturdy, Dear Reader!) covering up information from the Epstein Files that makes Donald Trump look hella guilty. As tweeted by Oversight Democrats:

“For the last few weeks, Oversight Democrats have been investigating the FBI’s handling of allegations from 2019 of sexual assault on a minor made against President Donald Trump by a survivor.

“Oversight Democrats can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor.

“Covering up direct evidence of a potential assault by the President of the United States is the most serious possible crime in this White House cover-up.”

Congressional Democrats should have demanded that the State of the Union be canceled. Or at least postponed, until well after all of these traitors have been removed from our government. Instead, there was a collective Twitter shrug, like there is with everything about Trump, even though everything about him would have ended anyone else a long, long time ago.

Ahead of the speech, Trump’s biggest supporters were gearing up, which was literally true of Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY, via the MAGA Mean Girl Academy at Trump University), who shared a photo of herself wearing a hoodie sold by MAGA Grifter Nick “Baby Teeth” Shirley.

Creepy.

And then there was Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), the performative attention-seeking MAGA Munchausen’s case. Mace is aware the Epstein Files exist, but she’s doing that willfully obtuse Russian propaganda thing where she keeps tweeting about anyone connected to Epstein who isn’t named Donald Trump. And now she’s also courting favor with Qrazy QAnon Qreater Mike Flynn.

Nancy loves all the worst people who have (not) coincidentally blocked me on Twitter.

Conversely, a lot of Democrats were not just boycotting SOTU, they were offering so many counter-programming options that Trump’s ratings should really prove the worst in televised history. Let’s face it, that’s all he cares about anyway.

My Oregon Democratic delegation made me proud because none of them went. Instead of attending Trump’s Slurring Liefest, Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley hosted a “Fate of the Union” Town Hall.

Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-OR), the Democrat from the third District, sat out the speech, sending Epstein survivor Lisa Phillips in her place.

If only I could somehow have arranged for Lisa to sit next to Mace.

There was yet another delegation from my state in D.C., to protest Trump’s (definitely slurred) speech, and they made MAGA hopping mad.

Seriously, that photo (h)op set off some tiny minds on my Instagram, but that just shows the collective IQ point shared by the MAGA cult just went down yet again.

Democratic women also sent a message to the Epstein survivors in the hours before their abuser’s bestie shuffled into the chambers.

In my final pre-SOTU prediction, I went ahead and posited that aside from going insanely off-script from whatever Sieg Hiel-ery was written by Kapo Nosferatu Stephen Miller, Trump’s State of Delusion Address would include a lot of slurs — of his words as well as any marginalized communities he can scapegoat. While defaming his perceived enemies in a Not-Anyone’s-Idea-Of-A-Greatest-Hits Collection, he would be unsteady on his swollen ankles. Hi narcissism wouldn’t allow him to be seen sipping water, lest anyone focus on his tiny hands, so his voice would grow weaker and raspier. Maybe he’d fall asleep standing up again! One could only hope.

We resume at 7:00 pm PST. (No, it’s not over …)

WOW, that was bad.

Like, epically and historically bad.

Make the entire planet cringe as one entity bad.

And I’m just talking about his entrance.

All he’ll care about are the embarrassing screenshots and historically low ratings thanks to all the alt-SOTUs. Oh man, I can’t wait until he gets his phone back and sees all of the hair tweets. Someone on the staff is definitely getting fired tomorrow!

I’m going to enjoy this petty moment, thanks.

But seriously, how does anyone look at him and see leadership?

I only see a giant bucket of whatever he downloads into his diaper. I watched his lies with the sound off and the captions on, which was entertaining, but ultimately not sustainable because these people are monsters. However, I did manage to capture a couple of perfect moments before the lying proper began.

In one, Justice Brett Kavanaugh looked … not pleased to be there. In another…

*giggles like a 6th grader*

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger will get dragged for giving the Democratic response, but that’s only because MAGA knows she’s right. They hate the truth about Trump — including how those pesky tariffs actually cost them all $1,700 each. But since they can’t possibly admit they were wrong, we’ll continue to get gaslighting of the highest order from Cult 47.

The only fallout from the speech will be more punditry, with a weak attempt from the MAGA cult to reframe a “newly energized” (puhleeze) Trump. Democrats need to keep the focus on Epstein and make sure that this is Trump’s last SOTU.

  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

Every Trump accusation is a confession. This tantrum showed he knows he's cooked

Donald Trump’s tariff tantrum in front of the entire world should set off a massive MAGA migration. It was like watching your extra-drunk racist uncle on Facebook who didn’t get the right flavor of Jell-O for Thanksgiving dessert at the Mar-A-Lago Memory Care Center. This is what the alleged leader of the free world did when the Supreme Court wouldn’t let him keep grifting American taxpayers.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

This is just so cringe. Such immaturity. A Democrat would NEVER.

I’ve spent far too much time thinking about what the world would look like if Trump’s parents had only loved him, or at least taught him how to handle loss (like most of us are taught at a young age, but maybe not Republicans). Hillary Clinton would’ve won and had two amazing terms. She would’ve been followed by another amazing Democrat who also understood how to run the government, not run it into the ground.

Instead, we’ve got a cheating, thin-skinned, convicted felon snowflake bully deliberately tanking the global economy out of spite and jealousy.

The history MAGA would love to erase (yet keeps dooming us to repeat because they refuse to learn from it) shows the kind of “woke math” that will always be true. Trump tanked Barack Obama’s economy. Joe Biden lifted us out of Trump’s pandemic depression to the point where all other global economies were booming with ours. Nobody knew that because the media had PTSD from covering Trump and didn’t know how to properly cover a successful administration.

Trump is now undoing all of that, because he’s a dumb bully who can’t stand looking like the loser he is next to the successful and beloved Democrats he inserted himself between. It’s like if you bought a great loaf of bread and a bunch of fresh veggies to make your favorite sandwich, only to find the meat you got from the deli is completely rancid and inedible. I’m tired of not getting my favorite sandwich, but I can’t afford it now anyway, thanks to Trump tanking our economy.

Trump, the self-proclaimed “successful businessman” who bankrupted multiple casinos, just doesn’t understand how tariffs work. He can’t ever be seen to self-correct, so he can’t tell his cult the truth about what tariffs are, which is a tax on them, the consumers. It’s something any of the “Do Your Own Research” Cult could learn for themselves if they ever did their own research.

“I can ruin everything for everyone,” is the same maturity level as a kid throwing a fit at another kid’s birthday party because he didn’t get a present too. It’s mortifying to see this latest display from Sundowning Paw Paw on the global stage. He’s clearly unhealthy, physically and mentally. He’s yelling at SCOTUS like Grandpa Simpson yelling at clouds because he’s freaking out over the Epstein Files. He’s going to bomb Iran and charge everyone 10 percent more to live while awarding his made-up “Board of Peace” $10 BILLION of OUR grifted tax dollars so he can have his stupid Epstein Ballroom. And by the way, did anyone log those historical artifacts from the East Wing before he bulldozed it, or is our history just … gone? Are the Epstein Files buried under there, or what?

No wonder Canada is all “I don’t know her” when it comes to being our ally. You can’t blame them for not wanting to hang out when Trump bullied a woman into giving him her Nobel Peace Prize, then dropped her country like a hot empanada.

This is a great time to remind everyone that former Vice President Kamala Harris, who also served as a Senator, was an economics major endorsed by 23 REAL Nobel Prize-winning economists. Why no, the media never covered it, plus it would’ve “looked bad” if anyone challenged the results of an election that Trump and Elon Musk couldn’t stop bragging about stealing.


BRB, I have to scream into a pillow because screaming into the abyss isn’t quite enough.

Even though I try to avoid false equivalence when making a point, there’s just no way a Democratic president would ever behave like a spoiled child. Biden had a rough debate, but at least he didn’t stand there and whine about destroying the world because SCOTUS wouldn’t let him rip off Americans. The man is living with Stage 4 Prostate Cancer, which he doesn’t deserve for more reasons than I can say. We can only imagine what that must be like for his family after enduring so much tragedy, but have you seen him holding pity parties in the form of press conferences?

Nope, Biden is hanging out on beaches with his family, riding his bike (which Trump can’t do because no one ever loved him enough to teach him how), and eating all the damn ice cream he wants, because he’s earned it.

When Trump shared that racist video of the Obamas, did our Coolest Ever President and First Lady retaliate in any similar way? Of course not. They do what they can to never use Trump’s name, but in this case, they each made statements that showed their iconic class and dignity, while putting Trump in his place in the Smart Kids Way.

Trump has often said how much he “hates losers” but his every accusation is a confession, so what Trump is saying is he hates himself. His toxic narcissistic ego can’t allow him to be wrong about anything, so he overcompensates on his feet. And that’s never gone well for him, because have you seen those swollen ankles?

Dumb bullies always sound the weakest when they’ve been backed into a corner of indisputable losing. But this dumb bully needs to be stopped before he can do any more damage to our country and our planet.

  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

Trump's dumb move just handed Dems a massive gift — again

Donald Trump is the worst thing to ever happen to global politics, but he didn’t get there by himself. Putin’s occasionally useful puppet also happens to be surrounded by the most inept collection of political non-savants ever assembled.

Case in point: When the COVID-19 pandemic began in February 2020, Trump secretly told writer Bob “My Publishing Date is More Important Than American Lives” Woodward how serious the virus was, but seemed to forget that minor detail every time he spoke to the public. Weird!

If Trump had been any kind of competent person, or at least had surrounded himself with competent people instead of attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci on the daily, he would have recognized the coronavirus as the political gift it was in an election year. Trump needed only to embrace measures to stop the spread and he would have —to quote Bill Murray — saved the lives of millions of registered voters.

Instead, he killed off his own voting base in the Red States. And since the surviving MAGA cultists weren’t inclined to vote by mail after he convinced them it wasn’t safe, Trump lost bigly to Joe Biden.

I don’t have enough internet space to list all the mistakes Trump has made that could have been avoided, so let’s just fast forward to Monday night, when Bari Weiss’s spineless Trumpsimps at CBS wouldn’t allow Stephen Colbert’s interview with Texas Democrat James Talarico to air.

We all — including the crack legal staff at CBS, all of whom apparently just graduated from Trump University’s Bondi School of Law — know Trump is very worried about Texas going purple.

Instead of obeying in advance, the smart thing for CBS would have been to invoke the Fairness Doctrine and get a Republican booked too. Of course, Colbert would probably have requested Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the only sensible Republican in the House, but would have had to settle for someone super-Trumpy yet vaguely Talarico-esque, say Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), who’s joined performative, attention-seeking Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) in pretending Trump’s name isn’t in the Epstein Files more than a million times.

The best part of this is how beautifully Colbert handled the latest bit of Orwellian FCC-ery from Trumpocrite Brendan Carr, who basically helped Streisand Effect the entire Talarico interview.

Yes, this Brendan Carr. I wonder what’s changed since he tweeted this in 2019?

Anyway, Colbert got to tell his audience the network wouldn’t let him air the Talarico interview, and to drag Trump and his protectors on the same episode they were censoring. Yay, First Amendment still in effect!


- YouTube www.youtube.com

Even better, the interview with Talarico has racked up far more views on Colbert’s YouTube Channel (over 6 million at the time of this writing, so probably at least 2 million more by the time you read this) than it would’ve if guarding Trump’s snowflake feelings wasn’t CBS’s top priority.

- YouTube youtu.be

But wait, it gets even better!

Thanks to Trump being a giant baby, Talarico’s campaign raised a whopping $2.5 million after the news broke. I’m encouraged to see that Americans are reacting appropriately to censorship and the deliberate deterioration of our First Amendment rights.

Yes, Bari Weiss of CBS follows me on Twitter. No, I don’t follow her back, and she’s never responded to me. Weird, huh? Especially since Trump blocked me forever ago, in August 2015.

If Weiss had any real sense of how to run a news network, she would offer me a gig, representing the liberal take. But again, anyone connected to Trump is terrible at whatever they do. There’s a part of me that wishes they were trying to take him down from the inside, but none are smart enough to maintain a front like that for too long.

As someone who comes from terrestrial radio, my biggest fear about the second Trump Regime arose from its intention to control the flow of information on our airwaves, as laid out in Project 2025. Now we have Carr’s Federal Communications Commission nestled in Trump’s alimentary canal, more than willing to suppress truths Trump doesn’t like.

But don’t forget Kari Lake, who’s filtering all of the truth out of the Voice of America even more than she filters her face. I’m blocked on Twitter by both her personal account and her “Kari Lake War Room.” You know, because she’s so brave and cares so much about the truth — which I suggest is that whatever she sends out from the Voice of America is translated from the Russian first.

We have the First Amendment for so many reasons. If you don’t want to watch something or listen to it, you don’t have to. Unless you’re this giant snowflake baby, then you block some five-foot-nothing lady on Twitter because you can’t handle the truth she tells about you being a convicted felon accused of doing unspeakable things to women and children.

The irony of this kind of censorship happening in 2026 is that there’s more content available now than at any other time in our history. If you don’t want to see Stephen Colbert and James Talarico chatting about politics and their shared faith, just change the channel. It’s that part that really chaps MAGA’s collective IQ point. Those Trumpocrites think they’re the only ones who get to be churchy. But that’s a whole other kind of opinion column.

  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

One simple move will give Dems a potent way to draw Trump's poison

We’re finally seeing cracks in the GOP’s armor, thanks to Pam Bondi’s disastrous hearings and the increasingly horrific details emerging from the Epstein Files. Democrats were surveilled while they searched the un-redacted files, and that’s just one fact that should matter to everyone.

When it comes to the news, the truth has always mattered to me more than anything. As the MAGA cult snowflakes love to say, facts don’t care about your feelings — it’s just that MAGAts say it like a bunch of second-graders who learned how to bully from their sixth-grade brothers. The truth is that the truth is always true, no matter who wants to believe it, and will remain true whether anyone likes it or not, and most of the time, the truth is something we don’t like. But we’re taught to live with the truth and handle our business.

But how to get the truth to the American people, at a time when Donald Trump has single-tiny-handedly ruined the trust in the news media? The slow boil that began when he descended that gold escalator in June 2015 and declared his candidacy with a speech full of racist and xenophobic tropes ultimately led to the scalding hot pants-on-fire Project 2025.

The mainstream media initially dismissed Trump as a joke, until competitors started dropping out in alarming succession, soon after the Russian hacking of both the Democratic and Republican national committees. I don’t know why no one else ever saw the ripple effect of Vladimir Putin holding onto whatever he had on the Republicans while releasing everything on the Democrats, but Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio know.

Does the American public?

Trump’s control over the media is now so blatantly obvious it’s impossible to trust White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt or anyone else in the administration. Trump has banished almost all outlets that challenge him. Jeff Bezos gave him the Washington Post. Bari Weiss gave him CBS. It’s going to take years to repair the damage.

We all know what would happen if a Democrat tried to banish or control the media, especially if they’d turned the Oval Office into a tacky gold Hobby Lobby Make-A-Trophy display while demolishing the East Wing altogether. Oh, and had done so while being at the center of the biggest political cover-up in American history.

Democrats have always been capable of holding our own accountable — just ask John Edwards, Gary Hart, and Bob Menendez, to name a few who did things Republicans have done and were brought crashing down. And don’t get me started on Al Franken, who should be in the Senate right now, based on what now passes for basic congressional comportment.

Trump has forced himself on the media, to the point where people are simply turned off by the news altogether. “I don’t even watch the news anymore,” is something I hear a lot. I can’t blame anyone who says so, but that means they probably aren’t getting any real daily information about what Democrats are doing for the American people, including doing what they can to hold Trump and his cronies accountable.

Congressional Democrats have so much on their plates, trying to save our democracy, that they shouldn’t have to do Leavitt’s job for her too. That’s why, for well over a year, I’ve been advocating for the DNC to appoint an official Democratic Press Secretary. Not someone already in office. Not someone with ambitions to run. A proper press sec, who could hold daily briefings at the Capitol once the KKKarolyin’ ends at the White House. All media would be welcome, from the mainstream to anyone banned by Trump, to Fox, Newsmax, OAN and their rightwing like.

My choice when I began Twitter-pitching my idea was Jessica Tarlov from Fox News, someone familiar to the MAGA audience, a consistently strong and truthful presence while enduring the smarmy proximity of Jesse Watters. She could absolutely handle the gig, but she’d probably have to take a pretty sizable pay cut.

Around the same time I was pushing for a Democratic press secretary, my friend Cheri Jacobus was doing the same. She was lobbying for Pete Buttigieg, but I believe he has ambitions for 2028. We need someone else. I think Cheri fits the bill.

Cheri has experience on both sides of the aisle, and we’ve had several conversations on her podcast about how simple it would be to create the Democratic position. Like, set up in less than a week for not a lot of money simple.

The media would have no choice but to cover a daily Democratic Press Briefing, aired live so no one could claim it was AI. The DNC does offer videos on YouTube, but I bet you didn’t know that until you read this sentence, and that’s not enough right now.

We need someone in front of the cameras every day, reading that day’s list of Democratic accomplishments while fact-checking whatever Karoline just lied about. Like a daily response to the State of the Union address.

Everyone I’ve spoken to about it agrees that it makes sense. But despite my personal invitation to the 2024 Convention from then DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, and despite mutual Twitter follows with current Vice Chair Malcolm Kenyatta, my pleas have gone unacknowledged.

We have to keep demanding the truth from people we’ve entrusted with our livelihoods. Democrats have always delivered, and now it’s time to make sure the truth starts mattering more than being a dumb bully on a CNN panel or being afraid of a mean tweet. The American people deserve so much better.

  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

Trump just gave MAGA a million reasons to walk away

With apologies to Lady Gaga (who managed to be overshadowed by Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl), Donald Trump’s million reasons are a lot different than hers.

Seems pretty sus to me, but then again, I’m not in the world’s dumbest death cult.

And yet MAGA is still finding ways to avoid that truth. It’s honestly impressive that they’re still able to hold their phones in their hands, considering they’ve twisted themselves into the tightest conspiracy pretzel yet.

Trump’s pet AG, Pam Bondi, lied under oath yet again on Wednesday during a House hearing. I don’t know who arrests her for committing that federal offense, but since Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) said she lied under oath, she should be impeached immediately.MAGA knows the truth. They just don’t want to have to admit to anyone, but especially to themselves, they were wrong about Trump. I don’t know when being wrong on the internet became a fate worse than admitting your Dear Leader might have done very bad things, but again … I’m not in a cult.

Instead, I’m a magnet for one. Lucky me!

The MAGA morons got triggered by a tweet of mine about the Million Mentions, and now it’s getting a lot of troll traffic. They MAD! They want to scapegoat and harass me into spoon-feeding them details to dispute. They want to send me on a wild Google chase. Tara don’t play like that, my friends.

Yeah, if your name isn’t “Jeffrey Epstein,” but you’re mentioned in the Epstein Files MORE THAN A MILLION TIMES, it’s probably not for a good reason.

Steve is an actual person, not a bot. He’s a perfect example of how MAGA operates on Twitter. He went from that dumb take to the typical goalpost move of “Why didn’t Joe Biden release the files,” while calling me “Karen,” because they think dumb bullying will hurt my feelings.

MAGAt, please.

After a decade and a half of their juvenile trolling and distraction tactics, there’s nothing a MAGA cultist can say to derail me. They can try it, but they fail every time because I have this pesky thing on my side called the TRUTH. The “Eff Your Feelings” Red Hat Death Squad is a case study in projection language mired in spineless snowflake self-victimization. They’re mad that Bill Clinton is mentioned about 1,000 times, but there hasn’t been anything about Bill with young girls.

(Quick Clinton sidebar: Whatever arrangement Bill and Hillary had/have in their marriage isn’t our business; what they each did when voters tasked them to serve our country is all that matters. Regardless of what Bill did while in office, he never stopped doing his job or threatened our national security. And while I know this isn’t the strongest argument, Bill Clinton likes women who look like WOMEN, not girls. Check his blemished track record for yourself: the man has a type. None of them resembled little girls or his daughter, did they? Even Monica Lewinsky, who was 22 and therefore capable of giving consent, took a lot of hits from the press (and Saturday Night Live) for being a healthy, curvy woman. So enough with the “But Bill Clinton” or “Why didn’t Joe Biden?” when Trump is mentioned OVER ONE MILLION TIMES, FFS.)

That Steve guy trolled me under my reply to Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), a self-described rape survivor who’s the worst woman in Congress now Marjorie Taylor Greene has self-deported back to Georgia. Nancy simply doesn’t use Trump’s name in literally any of her tweets about the Epstein survivors she claims to stand with. It’s like Trump simply isn’t a person who’s been alive for nearly 80 years. (Oh, if only.)

If you read any of Nancy’s tweets about the Epstein Files (which I don’t recommend, but you do you), you get a narrative that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell did all the bad things, and Trump is just an innocent victim who had no idea what they were up to when he accidentally crossed their paths.

What bad luck, huh? Between the “witch hunts” and the “fake news” lying about him, he just happened to accidentally be friends with a couple of international sex trafficking rapists, one of whom claimed to have introduced him to his third wife. (Who has threatened to sue over the claim.) Those million mentions? Just anecdotal, hearsay, or whatever the Putin Propaganda of the Day might be.

I’ve tried all of the ways to get an answer out of Nancy, but no one in any of her offices will give me one. They don’t respond to emails. They say they can’t answer my questions when I call, because the comms director just can’t be located. She’s never going to reply to my tweets. I guess someone will have to make Mace stand on the House floor to declare her loyalty to a rapist pedophile cult over America, and then be forced to resign so she can go right to jail. Protecting a pedophile rapist cult while pretending to care about its victims is re-traumatizing for Epstein survivors and the worst possible way to throw away your life, but the MAGA cult is clinging to every last shred of hope that the Epstein Files are somehow Biden’s fault.

Trump has lied to his minions about everything, but especially Epstein. The timeline of lies began with a campaign promise to release them. We still haven’t gotten all the files, fully unredacted. Perhaps a million more mentions are on the way, but they still won’t be enough to convince the diehards who need to keep living this lie.

This is the MAGA cult today, and it will remain who they are until they decide that being decent human beings is more important than “owning the libs.”

  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

Bully Trump cut me out — because he couldn't scare me

There’s been a lot of support this week for CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who got berated by the Giant Orange Snowflake Epstein Bestie for simply Doing A Journalism While Female in the Oval Office.

But it’s also a classic example of who Trump has always been, and therefore should be used as an example of how to fight back against him.

🚨TRUMP MELTS DOWN AT KAITLAN COLLINSTrump lost it when CNN reporterKaitlan Collins asked him an Epstein related question.Share this widely. linnocent people don't act like this:KEEP THE HEAT UP. HE'S PANICKING.

[image or embed]
— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@calltoactivism.bsky.social) February 3, 2026 at 5:39 PM

The vainglorious, short-fingered vulgarian bloviated loudly, steamrolled Collins’ questions, and even busted out some tired “You should smile more” misogyny that no woman in history has ever enjoyed hearing, especially from someone who’s never given any of us anything to smile about.

Bullies are the weakest people. There’s nothing strong about needing to put another person down, to feel bigger and stronger. They learn soon that no one will respect them, so the next best thing is to instill fear.

At the same time, all bullying is rooted in jealousy. In Trump’s case, it also comes with a whopping dose of self-victimization and the need to assert power over anyone who might expose him as the spineless coward he is.

As kids, we’re taught to stand up to bullies, even if they’re bigger. “Don’t let them push you around like that!” my father barked at me when I was bullied in sixth grade. Imagine if Trump had been a truck driver in New Jersey in the 1970s and '80s — that’s my dad. He bullied me for getting bullied, so I learned how to stand up and push back. That included pushing back at him. Instead of letting my abuser continue to abuse me, I cut him out of my life.

That’s not as easy to do with Trump, but it’s a problem that never should have existed. When he descended that gold escalator to launch his first bid for president in 2015, I knew exactly what he was: a smarmy, slimy, chauvinistic playboy who thought he was better looking and more powerful than he actually was.

Groomed first by Roy Cohn, then by Vladimir Putin, Donny Daddy Issues got all the attention and ego-boosting he thirsted for. The false bravado grew as he created his own legend. He famously pushed back against any woman who interviewed him — like Barbara Walters and Lesley Stahl.

When he hit the campaign trail, his attacks on the media surged. Even the most professional of journalists were taken aback by his attacks — but few were able to prevail over the tactics he learned from Daddy Vladdy: deny, deflect, and distract.

Trump was astute enough to understand how to play to his few strengths. E. Jean Carroll can attest to how he used his physicality to intimidate women, and we’ve all seen him steamroll anyone who asks questions he doesn’t like.

Guess who else asked him questions he didn’t like?

Me, that’s who.

I’m 5ft tall and weigh maybe a buck-five, so I love knowing that huge homunculus of an adjudicated rapist is scared of me.

Such a fearless leader, huh? Yell louder, Tiny. I can’t hear you because you’ve never unblocked me.

MAGA loves the “loudest person is always right” approach, because then they don’t have to hear anything that makes them feel bad. They’ve all taken on Trump’s persona in their pursuit of “owning the Libs,” a goal apparently more important than making sure they can feed their families or afford health care. And that whole Epstein files thing? Just a “Democrat hoax” pushed by the “fake news media.”

I’ve already written about Trump’s favorite way to scapegoat the media and any others who dare challenge him. But that certainly wasn’t the first time I tried to get their attention.

Trump’s abusiveness left the mainstream media (MSM for short) incapable of covering Joe Biden accurately. While he and VP Kamala Harris were undoing the damage of the first illegitimate Trump regime, the MSM was all, “Will Trump run again?”

When Biden pulled us out of Trump’s pandemic depression and lifted all other global economies with us, the MSM breathlessly covered Trump’s FOUR DIFFERENT ARRESTS, simply watching as MAGA turned his mugshot into a badge of honor instead of yet another Hall of Shame moment.

“The MSM has PTSD from TFG,” I wrote in October 2023. Remember when Biden called Trump “The Former Guy”? Dark Brandon should’ve been the media’s darling, not the convicted felon rapist who fomented an insurrection and stole classified documents from the White House. It’s still true. Ironically, I submitted that as an op-ed to the Washington Post, which has now fully capitulated to Putin’s puppet. Its new masthead should read “Trumpism Over Journalism,” as it helps our democracy die, drowned in Dark Money.

But if I can stand up to the bully, so can Kaitlan Collins and anyone else he targets. Trump will continue to abuse anyone who asks him about Epstein, but that can’t mean no one asks him about Epstein.

My advice comes from my GenX experiences and every '80s movie where the bullies finally lose, after a montage where the nerds build a clubhouse or something, all set to “New Song” by Howard Jones.

Just ask Trump why he’s never released the full and unredacted Epstein files, to exonerate himself. When Trump goes after that person — and he will — the next person should ask the same question. And the next. Use your voices together. Be louder than him. Say it’s your job to get the truth to the people. He won’t know what to do with a united front like that, and you’ll be exposing his weakness live on camera.

Give it a try. It’s only our democracy at stake. Use the truth as a shield instead of letting him hurt us with his lies.

  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

Trump henchmen's horrifying attack on this little girl made one thing abundantly clear

The residents of Portland, Oregon have been engaged in a daily battle for peace on our streets ever since convicted felon Donald Trump decided to scapegoat sanctuary cities as a distraction from the Epstein Files.

I’ve lived in the Portland Metro area since 2001 and I’ve participated in plenty of marches and protests, from the early days of marriage equality to the most recent city-wide protests after the ICE murders in Minneapolis. We pride ourselves on protesting peacefully, here in the Rose City. There wasn’t a single arrest or any violence at the historic Women’s March in 2017. The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were contained to a couple of city blocks, but like all other BLM marches they were blown out of proportion, sealing Portland’s reputation with the MAGA cult as a bombed-out crater full of Antifa.

To this day, MAGA trolls love to respond to my tweets by bagging on Portland. I don’t respond to the fake accounts, but the truth about Trump being all over the Epstein Files is true no matter where I live, smoothbrains.

Thankfully, I have never been teargassed, hurt, or arrested in Portland, but I know plenty who have. I’ve also seen plenty of kids at the protests at our Waterfront, and the worst thing that’s ever happened is that a speaker said the F word where kids could hear it.

I’ve avoided going down to the ICE facility at night, because that’s when the MAGA KKKids come out, looking to start sh–. The one time I went down there was during the day, and it was pretty quiet. Again, I have to stress that it occupies only one city block, on the South Waterfront, in a residential area with apartment buildings and a school. The images America has seen of that one block are in no way indicative of what Portland is like on the daily, everywhere else in town.

The South Waterfront is home to Oregon Health & Science University Hospital and Doernbecher’s Children’s Hospital, and the number of ER visits has increased significantly thanks to teargas and other chemicals sprayed by federal agents.

MAGA agitators have harassed residents and business owners, in their attempts to manufacture videos for their cult to drool over. Trump’s anger over losing in multiple attempts to invade and occupy Portland has filtered through his fascist followers. Now their snowflake feelings have a body count but instead of backing down, MAGA is doubling down. Those Epstein Files released last Friday — still only a fraction of what soon-to-be-impeached Pam Bondi was legally required to share — set them off like nothing else. There’s now far too much evidence of what Trump and his pedo-protecting pals allegedly did to children, and yet the MAGA cult continues to claim they care about protecting kids.

Tell that to Liam Ramos and his Spiderman backpack, you miserable MAGA miscreants. Now he and his father are home after their traumatic detainments, the MAGA minions are calling in threats to Liam’s school.

How loving and Jesus-like of you, Fake Christians.

If you need any more proof that MAGA couldn’t care less about kids, they’ve decided it’s fine that ICE agents in Portland teargassed children on Saturday, Jan. 31st, during what was promoted as a “family-friendly” protest.

There’s no hiding what’s been happening from kids, and they’ve been traumatized enough by what they’ve seen. Encouraging them to walk with trusted adults to express themselves in a healthy and constructive way is so much better than being taught to hate and fear anyone who seems different. These kids have seen neighbors disappeared. These kids know other kids are being taken from their homes. These kids have seen more tragedy than any kids should see, in this or any other country. These kids, who have grown up with active shooter drills, have now seen real shooters on American streets, and those shooters are agents of their own government.

So instead of teaching their kids to hide and let the bad guys win, Portland families and others exercised their First Amendment rights to assemble and express themselves.

MAGA hates this. And so, as a crowd including the now-famous Portland Frog Brigade blew bubbles and sang protest songs, the big brave ICE agents ran up to the roof, where they sprayed the peaceful crowd with teargas.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

This image should haunt every American.

A friend of mine who’s a nurse was there, and checked on that little girl. Those butterflies were a real Antifa threat, let me tell you.

Most human beings would see that and feel bad, because what child deserves to be teargassed? Ah, but the MAGA cultists who claim to hate abortions, and scream about the SAVE Act, are hella callous when it comes to the children of liberals.

These are just a few of the responses I got to the photo of a teargassed girl in a butterfly sweatshirt.

Now, none of those accounts are real, but the sentiment definitely is. The MAGA cult doesn’t care about kids being brutalized by Donald Trump and the others named in the Epstein Files.

Trump’s minions have been creating new lows for humanity every day since he descended that gold escalator and began his Decade of Blight. Their continued support even after the newest Epstein bombshells is just more proof that they’re unreachable. That’s why we must continue to tell the truth about what they’re doing.

Our kids are watching.

  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

Everything Trump has done since returning to power was to distract from this bombshell

Future historians just might pinpoint the week of Jan. 26, 2026, as when the Trump regime’s collapse finally began.

The timeline is painfully obvious: They couldn’t spin Alex Pretti’s murder in Minneapolis, so they raided Fulton County’s elections hub and arrested four Black Americans over a Minnesota protest as distractions, because they knew a major #EpsteinFiles dump was coming by Friday, Jan. 30 — a full six weeks after the deadline set by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Let’s break that down, shall we?

Trump’s protectors spent a lot of time trying to spin the ICE murders in Minneapolis in their usual blame-the-victim ways, but the available footage of Alex Pretti’s execution by seven masked agents has been seen from every possible angle and studied as intensely as the Zapruder film. The narrative that began with Pretti supposedly attacking the cosplaying Proud Boys eventually led to Trump threatening MAGA’s beloved Second Amendment.

But don’t forget why ICE was occupying the streets of another Blue city, fomenting violence: MAGA shill Nick “Baby Teeth” Shirley was dispatched to Minneapolis to film Somalian day care centers as the newest scapegoat distraction from the Epstein files.

MAGA has long targeted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), as demonstrated by their endless online bullying, pushing Putin-y propaganda about her family. Omar has been ferociously resistant to such tactics, even when one of them showed up at her Town Hall and sprayed her with something.

Instead of seeing a woman defending herself like a powerhouse Shero, MAGA went the Angry Black Woman route, shaming Omar for defending herself. So much easier than admitting her attacker was one of their own.

You know what would’ve happened if the situation were reversed, and someone did that to a white woman like Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC). You can imagine their false outrage, because if there’s anything MAGA loves more than ignoring truth, it’s their own hate.

There’s no winning narrative with the MAGA cult mentality. You can’t expect reasonable behavior from people who refuse to listen to reason.

In the scapegoating hierarchy, Trump usually starts with Black women or women of color, then Black men or men of color, then liberal white women, and finally, any liberal white man who speaks out.

Trump has also scapegoated entire cities, states, and countries as distractions — says the Portland resident, who also lived in Georgia for eight years and knows a thing or two about how MAGA operates so Dear Leader is never forced to take responsibility.

Ask Blue states about their FEMA funds and SNAP benefits. Also, notice how nobody has really spoken about Greenland in the past five days? In contrast, Venezuela is making a wee comeback, thanks to Nicolás Maduro potentially saying he helped Joe Biden steal the 2020 election in exchange for a pardon. Which we all know is a lie, but that didn’t stop Sundowning Paw Paw from rageposting all night on Truth Social. He’s now demanding the arrest of Barack Obama, because he wouldn’t let him win in 2020. He also didn’t win in a landslide in 2016, but then again, his brain is rancid rice pudding riddled with rancid raisins.

While we were all still parsing what exactly is going to happen in the wake of the FBI raid on Fulton County and how it might impact the midterms, Don Lemon was arrested while covering the Grammys on Thursday night in Los Angeles for … checks notes … Doing A Journalism At A Church Protest While Black.

Three others were also arrested after being indicted by a Minnesota Grand Jury: independent journalist Georgia Fort, Black Lives Matter Minnesota leader Trahern Crews, and Jamael Lundy, an intergovernmental affairs manager married to St. Paul City Council Member Anika Bowie.

And what do they have in common, aside from having their First Amendment rights violated by the Trump regime?

Weird, huh?

A Minnesota grand jury has indicted all four on charges related to the interruption of a religious service at a church where a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official serves as a pastor.

The First Amendment applies to all of us equally. This is an egregious move by the Trump regime, to silence anyone telling the truth.

This is a nice moment to share that Trump blocked me on Twitter in August 2015 and has never unblocked me, so he’s technically been violating my First Amendment rights for over a decade. If only I could somehow monetize this already.



What a cowardly fragile thin-skinned bully.

But Friday, Jan. 30, that’s the real date to remember. Because the previous week was all meant as a pre-distraction from the bombshell release of millions of pages of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Now they’re here, and they’re the most damning yet for Trump and his protectors.

The remaining MAGA cult is going to have a hard time disputing the new release, but you know they’re still going to try. I’d say horrific details like these should be enough to finally uncult themselves, but they also can’t ever be wrong about anything. The ostrich method of ignoring all the truths they don’t like about Trump is about to finally suffocate them.

Screenshots are forever, MAGA.

The fallout will continue, hopefully starting with Lemon et al suing the federal government, followed by something that resembles consequences for Trump and his fellow conspirators.

It’s up to us to keep pressure on our elected officials to see this through. We’ve all seen more than enough death and violence on our streets. We’ve seen children traumatized by ICE, fellow citizens murdered by government agents, and a blatant attack on too many of our Constitutional rights.

The entire Trump regime must be removed, before it can do any more damage to our fragile democracy.

  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

These Trump shills will be the first to turn on him — and he knows it

When people ask why I’m still on Twitter (which I never call X, because that’s just stupid), I explain that it’s the only social media app I use where all of the Republicans in Congress post regularly. As a member of the indie media, it’s imperative that I know what kind of messaging is coming from MAGA via Moscow, especially when the Trump regime has a chokehold on most of the mainstream media.

2025 saw the rise of the “MAGA journalist,” which is an oxymoron for the ages. A whole group of them was invited to the White House and given their orders to spread lies and propaganda about blue cities as part of the Project 2025 effort to control the media narrative, and nobody paid much attention.

But I did.

Check that date. It’s one week after the government shutdown began, weird!

Some of those “journalists” are fresh out of high school. None of them holds a journalism degree. Apparently, anyone with a camera and a per diem from the Trump regime can call themselves a “journalist” now.

And some of them had already been sent to Portland, where I live, to start manufacturing violent and otherwise misleading videos at our ICE facility.

On Saturday, Oct. 4, Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-OR) was turned away from the Portland ICE facility after she requested a tour. Dexter was told she couldn’t gain access “because of the shutdown.”

Later that same day, paid MAGA agitator Katie Daviscourt was given a personal guided tour and even gained access to the roof to do an interview that was aired on Fox News, after she claimed she was “assaulted by Antifa.”

Several of the other MAGA “influencers” I named were also dispatched to Portland, but none more famously than Benny Johnson. He accompanied Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on her ill-fated visit, only to be run out of town by a guy in a chicken suit.

I spent a lot of time defending Portland by screaming into the abyss online, but it was especially fruitless on Twitter, thanks to Elon “Clarice Starlink” Musk suppressing my account.

And when I say a lot of time, I mean I stood on the roof of my building and filmed the Portland skyline for nearly two hours to prove the city wasn’t a bombed-out crater on fire.

Nothing makes me angrier than when people lie. I would rather hear the ugliest truth than the most beautiful lie. The truth is rarely something everyone likes, but it’s something we’re all supposed to be able to deal with. If you can’t cope with the reality that Trump is a criminal, by every possible definition, you have no place calling yourself a “journalist.”

And you definitely shouldn’t be making hundreds of thousands of dollars to spread lies and propaganda intended to make Americans not just feel less safe, but now is literally endangering our lives.

That seems egregiously unfair and illegal to me, but I’m not a lawyer, I’m just someone who constantly tells the truth. And no, George Soros isn’t paying me or anyone else to do that, thanks.

I’ve been voicing my concerns over Trump controlling the media narrative since well before November 2024, and it’s obviously gotten worse in this last year that we’ve somehow survived.

While the MAGA “influencer” accounts have exponentially more followers than I do, almost all of them are fake. They’re designed to create false engagement, so the MAGA propaganda merchants are always at the top of my “For You” feed, even though I don’t follow any of them.

Most Americans aren’t on Twitter (bless their lucky little hearts), so they’re not familiar with Nick Sortor, Cam Higby, Benny Johnson, and Tim Pool. But they were recently introduced to Nick “Baby Teeth” Shirley, the self-avowed 23-year-old virgin who can’t pronounce “benevolent,” thanks to his video allegedly exposing fraud at daycares in Minneapolis. Specifically targeting the Somali community, along with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Shirley’s video worked exactly as Trump hoped. He needed a new distraction from the Epstein Files Transparency Act, so Shirley was sent to Minneapolis to make one happen.

All of a sudden, the focus shifted from Epstein to yet another blue city where Trump could send in federal agents to foment violence on the streets. But unlike his attempts in Chicago and Portland, Trump’s arbitrary invasion of Minneapolis has come with a body count.

The MAGA smearing of the murdered Renee Good was bad enough, but the response to Alex Pretti’s execution by seven ICE agents has shown the world just how low MAGA is willing to go to protect their Dear Leader. A handful of Congressional Republicans have begun to push back but there are far too many still standing with the Epstein Bestie who hung a framed photo of himself with Vladimir Putin in the White House — above a photo of himself with one of his grandchildren, who I bet he couldn’t name if you asked him while standing right in front of the kid.

I dunno, seems treason-y to me.

There’s nothing you can say to the MAGA Agitator accounts to derail them from their false narratives, not even when Fox News reports the truth. There’s a direct line from the White House to these shills, which should then create another direct line straight to prison.

Trust me, Trump will throw these small, basement-dwelling fish under the bus first. They’re the most expendable of his loyalists, because none of them are in Congress or in his administration. But that means they’ll also be the easiest to turn against Trump, in exchange for immunity or a reduced sentence, because they know where the money is coming from — and they won’t acclimate well to Gen Pop.

And we’ll still never stop talking about the Epstein Files, no matter what manufactured distraction they come up with next.

  • Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com

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