Trump’s grip is not as tight as he thinks it is

On the night immediately following ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Jan. 7, my sleep was disturbed by visions of the ensuing protests around the country exploding into an “American Spring.” In Washington, D.C., where I live, I saw a vast rising of demonstrators besiege the White House, then overrun the place. The president and his key advisers fled the compound by helicopter, and a mob ransacked the abandoned executive mansion and the adjacent executive office buildings.

Lesser White House staffers fled into tunnels beneath the White House complex and tried to slip away into the city. Not all escaped, however. Some were cornered and beaten. In the general chaos, deaths occurred on both sides. For many hours, Trump’s whereabouts were unclear, but then it emerged that he had flown to a U.S. Navy ship in the Atlantic and eventually retreated to Florida and the gilded fastness of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach County. He was guarded there by various elements of federal security agencies and by a cordon comprising thousands of the most die-hard MAGA faithful.

In the capital city, the mob was gleeful, but the event was a tragedy. Our country had walked the path of Sri Lanka, Egypt, Tunisia, the Philippines, Bolivia, Honduras and many other countries in the Americas and beyond whose leaders had so outraged their populations that those leaders had to flee the people to save their own skins.

Crowd control barriers line the front of the headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at 500 12th Street SW in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026. Protesters had gathered outside ICE headquarters the previous night to protest Wednesday’s fatal shooting in Minneapolis of a U.S.-citizen civilian, Renee Good, by an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

There was a time when I could not dream to countenance such developments in the United States of America. Our country was different. Manifestly different. But on Jan. 6, 2021, everything changed.

On that day, Congress, acting in a constitutionally mandated exercise, was meeting in a joint session to conduct the pro forma task of certifying the electoral college results that established Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump, the incumbent and soon-to-depart president, had urged his supporters across the country to assemble in Washington on that day. On what was then known as Twitter, Trump declared: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

On the appointed day, Trump hosted a rally on the Ellipse at the south side of the White House. Although at one point he urged the enormous crowd to act peacefully, his words in their totality were highly aggressive and provocative. “And if you don’t fight like a hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore,” he said near the end of a fiery speech, which also featured the recently minted lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. Then he told the crowd that “we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue — I love Pennsylvania Avenue — and we’re going to the Capitol … and we’re going to try and give our Republicans — the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help — we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So, let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

The “pride and boldness” that the Republicans in Congress needed, in Trump’s mind, was the will to interfere unconstitutionally with the certification of Biden’s victory in the presidential election.

The crowd marched down Pennsylvania Avenue as a “they” rather than as a “we,” since Trump was not among his supporters for that procession (apparently having been diverted by the Secret Service), and laid siege to the United States Capitol. Trump’s supporters ultimately forced their way into the place and rampaged through it in a display that disgusted all decent Americans and shocked much of the rest of the world. From that disgraceful episode several deaths resulted, including that of Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter shot by a police officer as she tried to climb through a breach in a locked door well inside the Capitol.

When I heard Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump and Vice President JD Vance justify last week’s fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis as an act of self-defense by ICE agent Ross, my mind inevitably ran back to the shooting of Babbitt inside the U.S. Capitol building, which she had penetrated deeply as part of a violent criminal mob. Since her death, Republicans have lionized her as a martyr, casting her as the faultless victim of a murderous police officer. The second Trump administration even agreed to a nearly $5 million settlement in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by Babbitt’s family.

I suppose the same will happen for Renee Good under the next Democratic president. If it does, it will not necessarily be a good thing, merely evidence of a further hardening of the “us” and “them” division in the country. The right looks after its own when it has state power, and the left looks after its own when state power swings back into its hands. Tribal politics.

And this brings me back to Donald Trump and his behavior as president. The posture of Trump and his administration has been deeply offensive to the values to which this country has long clung — even though too often the country has viewed those values too lofty or inconvenient to be honored. At home and abroad, the attitude of Trump and his administration is broadly adversarial. Trump’s malignant personality has reshaped all of government to project the idea that if anyone objects to what Trump wants, what Trump wants will be obtained anyway — by threat, by corrupt use of state organs such as the Justice Department or by naked force. And because Trump is fundamentally dishonest, discerning his motives in many situations is like unpicking the Gordian Knot.

Thus we have the supposed peacemaker president invading Venezuela and seizing its fraudulent leader Nicolás Maduro in an exercise of thug vs. thug. But what is the real reason? Is it to use Venezuela’s heavy crude oil, which the U.S. does have the capacity to refine, to prevent a fuel-price shock here at home when Trump decides to topple the Iranian theocracy in the interest of Israel and Saudi Arabia. (Remember that the Sunni kingdom has urged the U.S. in the past “to cut off the head of the snake” that is Shiite Iran because of Tehran’s feared nuclear activity.) Trump, for various reasons, is eager to please both Riyadh and Jerusalem. And both would rejoice at a defanging of Tehran. But rare is the plan that survives contact with the stresses of reality.

A demonstrator coming from the vicinity of the White House carries Iran’s pre-revolution national flag in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. Iran has been rocked by widespread protests against economic hardships and the hardline theocratic government. President Trump has threatened to intervene militarily in the country to safeguard protesters against government violence aimed at suppressing the demonstrations.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
A demonstrator coming from the vicinity of the White House carries Iran’s pre-revolution national flag in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. Iran has been rocked by widespread protests against economic hardships and the hardline theocratic government. President Trump has threatened to intervene militarily in the country to safeguard protesters against government violence aimed at suppressing the demonstrations.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
A demonstrator coming from the vicinity of the White House carries Iran’s pre-revolution national flag in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. Iran has been rocked by widespread protests against economic hardships and the hardline theocratic government. President Trump has threatened to intervene militarily in the country to safeguard protesters against government violence aimed at suppressing the demonstrations.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Then there is Ukraine. There, we have our supposed peacemaker president claiming to be working to end the war of aggression that Russia started by invading its neighbor, but Trump, in the same breath, is threatening to acquire Denmark’s Greenland territory using exactly the method by which Russia’s Vladimir Putin seeks to obtain eastern Ukraine: violent and illegal seizure.

I have a theory about this Greenland campaign: For Trump and his white-supremacist cabal, the contiguous parts of the U.S. have become frighteningly polluted with brown and black people. One solution is to obtain a territory in Europe to establish a racial Eden, an elite destination for white people only, and even then only white people of suitable ideological purity. After all, in the eyes of white supemacists, a “woke” white person is as undesirable as a black or brown person. The 50,000 or so Inuit people of Greenland would not constitute a problem. After all, neither did Native Americans, who were eliminated or displaced and corralled as European Americans pursued their “manifest destiny” in westward expansion here.

The effort to take Greenland threatens to sever the U.S. from its NATO security partners and from its commercial and civilizational partners in the European Union. It raises the prospect of NATO’s European members, and perhaps NATO member Canada here in North America, rallying to defend Denmark and Greenland militarily against the aggression of fellow NATO member the United States. That would be the end of NATO as constituted and purposed since its formation after World War II. Trump would shed no tears over a breakup of NATO, and Putin would be delighted by it.

Here I return to a theme that I continue to hammer: white supremacy. I believe that Trump sees a Russia with Putin’s values as a necessary partner to a U.S. with Trump’s values in a global, fascist, white-supremacist axis. That axis encompasses Europe’s entire far-right white-purity enterprise stretching from the United Kingdom in the west to the farthest eastern reaches of Russia. And, of course, it includes the supposedly imperiled and dispossessed Boers of South Africa.

The surge in worldwide migration that has come with economic globalization has triggered pushback in countries around the world, but the rejection of the migrant outsider — often a dark-skinned Muslim — has been especially harsh in Europe. That is the tune that Donald Trump sings, demonizing brown-skinned migrants in the U.S. as polluting American blood and society with the ways and values of their “shithole countries” while he pines for the U.S. to attract more Scandinavians as immigrants.

If Trump is burning through the U.S.’s goodwill abroad with hostility and a bizarre tariff policy targeting even long-standing friends, for most Americans he has absolutely no personal goodwill to spend here at home. Trump and his administration are deeply despised across this country, and the hatred is growing. Even elements of his notoriously faithful base are beginning to question their religion. More and more of his base sees him as governing not for the people’s interest but for his people’s interest. Most Americans simply want him gone — whether by impeachment and eventual imprisonment or by illness or death of natural causes. They are sick of his chaos, his bloated and festering ego, his divisiveness.

Protesters head away from the headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the end of a n hours-long demonstration and during biting cold in Southwest Washington, D.C., on the afternoon of Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
A message for President Trump from the last protester to leave a rally outside the headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at 500 12th Street SW in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
Law enforcement officers adjust crowd-control barriers outside ICE headquarters in Southwest Washington after the departure of protesters on the afternoon of Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. A strong wind, seen here buffeting police caution tape, caused the feel-like temperature to drop so painfully low that it may have contributed to the breakup of the protest.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Increasingly, Americans are appalled at Trump’s misuse of the Department of Justice to persecute his political enemies or any significant figure who stands in his way. This is a man who claimed that the Biden Justice Department had been weaponized against him, but nothing that happened under Biden compares to the excesses of the Trump Justice Department. (In my view, the prosecution of Trump by the Biden Justice Department was entirely right and proper.) Trump has fired U.S. attorneys (whom he himself appointed) because their judgment led them to defy his desires and has improperly substituted handpicked stooges who have gone on to be disqualified or to see their partisan prosecutions rebuffed by grand juries and federal judges. Trump’s Justice Department is has become the very word he used to describe those countries he so profanely dismissed.

After instigating government legal action against Letitia James, Lisa Cook, John Bolton and James Comey, Trump has now sicced his eager-beaver Justice Department head Pam Bondi on the Federal Reserve because he wants to get rid of Fed Chair Jerome Powell. In less than one year in office for a second term, Trump has corrupted the Department of Justice more deeply than I think most Americans could have imagined could happen.

And now we have an aggressive expansion of two federal police forces: Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and Customs and Border Protection. It occurs to me that most of the people becoming law enforcement officers in these two agencies today under Donald Trump may be of a mindset like Trump’s: aggressively racist. After all, they must know what team they are joining. And they will get to go hunting throughout the country while masked. These two police agencies worry me inordinately. They appear to me to have the ubiquity and the mindset to be Trump’s own Geheime Staatspolizei in this do-or-die mid-term election year. My fear is that Trump will try to use them and the National Guard somehow to interfere with the conduct of this year’s elections.

If you think I am having a fever dream, think back to the inconceivable events that came to pass with such ease Jan. 6, 2021. Think of what you know of Donald Trump and his most ardent abettors, the likes of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Think of the entire architecture of right-wing white supremacy in this country. None of it has gone away. It waits in the wings to emerge as it did for Jan. 6.

But Trump is not in a strong position. He stands in dire peril, in fact, because with each hand he is holding an unhappy wolf by one ear. One beast is the hound of global alienation, and the other canid is domestic fury over Trump’s crass self-indulgence and his autocratic style of governance. Americans keep telling him that they want no king, and he keeps pressing ahead with what resembles a personal imperial project. He appears to believe that he is safe behind the Secret Service and all the other federal and local law enforcement agencies in Washington. But history shows us repeatedly that when public discontent with a leader reaches a critical mass and the crowds march, even the modern Praetorian Guard melts away and the tyrant falls.

The inconceivable violation that Trump abetted on Jan. 6, 2021, may yet come back to visit him in the very house where he lives.

A do-or-die year for U.S. democracy

It is often said that this election or that election “is the most important of our lifetimes.” I make no such declaration about the congressional elections this year that mark the midpoint of Donald Trump’s second term in the U.S. presidency. What I will declare is that 2026 is a crucial year of action for the conspiracy whose aim is to destroy American democracy and establish white-supremacist authoritarianism. And 2026 is, therefore, also a crucial year for the movement to preserve American democracy and constitutional order.

It has been usual in this country for the winning presidential candidate to have coattails long and broad enough to carry a substantial portion of his party’s congressional candidates into office at the time of his own election. This pattern held true with Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2024. Also usual in this country is that the midterm elections bring a reversal of fortunes for the president’s party in Congress. That is widely expected to be the case in the midterm elections in November 2026.

Some, though — and I count myself among them — expect not merely a reversal of fortunes for the congressional GOP in November but an absolute demolition in favor of the Democratic Party and the country’s welfare. Beyond expecting this outcome, I earnestly desire it, for the good of the country. The anticipated rout is being correctly read as growing public distaste for Trump’s policies and actions in the presidency.

Denunciations of President Donald Trump and his administration are seen on street furniture with the U.S. Capitol — the home of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate — in the background on Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C., on Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

The sealing of the country’s southern border against an indiscriminate influx of migrants from countries near and far is perhaps the president’s most useful and popular accomplishment, but Americans generally have been appalled by the Trump administration’s tactics in that other part of the immigration crackdown: the detention preparatory to removal of undocumented people from the country.

Trump and his officials have been shockingly dishonest in characterizing undocumented migrants as “the worst of the worst” to justify treating them like diseased animals. They are rounded up, chained, penned and hustled out of the country, even to far-distant jurisdictions to which they have no connection. And many brown-skinned U.S. citizens have been swept up in the government’s racist immigration dragnet and been abused alongside the falsely labeled “worst.”

Aside from stopping the unrestricted migrant inflow, little else about the Trump administration recommends it to the voting public, whereas that public finds that a good many of Trump’s actions and those of his administration are distasteful in the extreme. Trump has two primary missions: gratifying his bloated ego and grifting to fatten his family’s purse on one hand; and building the foundations of white-supremacist authoritarianism on the other hand.

The latter of those two primary missions is the one that presents an existential danger to the country’s existing governance structures. We merely have to look to the former apartheid South Africa, or to any of old Europe’s colonial societies, or to the United States in the slave era and then Jim Crow to see the contours of white-supremacist dictatorship that the far right in this country wishes to impose upon us.

So why is 2026 so important? It is important because of the midterm elections on Nov. 3. If we are so fortunate to have elections uncorrupted by Trump’s goons and abettors, a Democratic majority with a proper democratic spirit will be elected to the House of Representatives, a signal to Trump that when that majority is seated in January 2027, he will face congressional opposition and be held to account by Congress for the first time in his second term. (If we are truly lucky, we will have a Democratic-majority Senate as well.)

Up to now, the Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate have lain prostrate in fear before their corrupt emperor. In their cowardice before Trump, their only use has been to demonstrate to the country what sort of people ought not to be elected if the general desire is to have honest representation and a check upon the executive branch of our government.

The coming November elections constitute the greatest danger yet to the far right’s takeover project in Trump’s second term, so the coming months necessarily will reveal the mad schemes that the most desperate in the far-right faction will float or even try to effectuate to circumvent the will of the electorate. One of the far right’s regrets about Trump’s first term is that it did not act with sufficient speed and boldness (the Jan. 6 attack on Congress notwithstanding) to seize control of power in this country. That faction faces a ticking clock in the months between now and November to make an all-or-nothing lunge to grab the levers of power.

Will Trump and his acolytes try to use the National Guard or formations of the regular military to overturn the Constitution? Will the masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security be turned loose on voting centers in Democratic strongholds to interfere with the elections? Such tactics have been used in other countries; why not here? All that Trump has to do is say that he is deploying the National Guard — again — to address crime, and his foot will be upon the fateful threshold. Only a lack of the will to dare on the part of the fascist-minded in this country has so far spared us that scheme and its trauma on a national scale.

I cannot forecast how the forces of darkness will go about their plans in this year that is yet in its infancy. They have earnest and dreadful desires. But those desires face obstacles, not the least of which are we who love American democracy and the United States Constitution and will accept no other master over us. These coming months may form the year in which good and evil once again clash resoundingly over the direction and nature of this great and greatly beloved country. Stand ready, fellow democrats! Stay woke!

A few verses on Trump the lump

There once was a lout called Trump,
In fact a president but such a lump.
He fancied he came across as strong,
But everything about him was just wrong. 

He was as pretentious as they come,
While in fact he was a total bum,
And all together dumb, so dumb!

He slapped his name on the Kennedy Center,
A temple to the arts he was  unfit to enter.
He did the same to the Institute of Peace,
Aping a statesman but in reality just a piece …

Being greedy for honors himself to aggrandize,
He begged shamelessly for the Nobel Peace Prize. 
It was an altogether sickening performance,
And all because he could not countenance,
That a bigger man named Obama,
Already wore that singular aura. 

Oh, what a vulgar savage!
Our democracy he did ravage. 
Oh, what a perverse clown,
Doing the law and justice down. 

He boasted of putting “America First”
All while grifting to fatten his purse. 
And what was his social priority?
Surprise, surprise: white supremacy. 

Take his immigration policy,
A construct riddled with dishonesty. 
Black and brown migrants he  did expel from this country,
And imported Afrikaners, away from made-up genocide.

But those architects and beneficiaries of apartheid,
Were brought to renew the right’s spirit of hatred.
And, please, make no mistake about his intent,
That plan made old Donny’s heart right content. 

The man was a pestilence and a divider,
And I pray the electorate, the decider,
Never again fall for one so dreadful,
But stand eternally wary and mindful. 

Merry Christmas to all, amen. 

The GOP Congress owns Trump’s insanity

One day last week as I was driving on Constitution Avenue in downtown D.C., the word “Trump” flashed by in my peripheral vision. I whipped my head around for a better look and saw the name on the front of an imposing public building, but because the traffic was moving quickly, I could discern no further detail. But as far as I knew, Trump’s name was not on any public building in the capital. I soon discovered, though, that what I had seen was the façade of the United States Institute of Peace, renamed this month the “Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace.”

On Thursday came the news that the Donald Trump-appointed board of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts had renamed the venerable institution “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” (“The Trump Kennedy Center” in short).

The headquarters building of the United States Institute of Peace, at 2301 Constitution Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., is seen on Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025, showing the president’s recently added name. Meanwhile, Trump is in court against the institute asserting that he has authority over the independent entity created and funded by Congress to study and promote peace globally. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Trump’s foisting of his name upon the Institute of Peace — while he is in court against the institute’s board contending that he has the right to control the congressionally created and funded entity — caused barely a ripple in the public consciousness nationally. But his soiling of the Kennedy Center with his name has been a different matter. On Thursday, the day the outrage was announced, I logged on to the Kennedy Center website and for the first time found myself in a queue waiting to reach the homepage. Such was the public consternation. People were flocking to the website to see whether the reported abomination really was true. And the center claimed the heavy traffic was related to the Kennedy Center Honors. A lie, I am certain.

In the same week, we had another demonstration of Donald Trump’s significant mental illness. At the White House, he altered a gallery of past presidents’ portraits by adding to selected pictures brass plaques with insulting versions of those predecessors’ biographies. He reserved special venom for Joe Biden, Barack Hussein Obama and Bill Clinton. (Yes, he included Obama’s middle name as he always does when he wants to sound his anti-Muslim dog whistle.) And although Hillary Clinton was never president or even vice president, he managed to work her in on her husband’s plaque and on his own plaque, the latter of which is full of self-praise and celebrates his defeat of her in the 2016 presidential election. What president who is sane would do something like this?

During the 2016 presidential campaign, I was a Multiplatform editor at The Washington Post, I tried to nudge a senior national reporter there to address somehow — the Goldwater rule notwithstanding — the glaring issue of Donald Trump’s mental defects. My then-colleague did not budge. And no other legacy media houses would touch what everyone knew was an important issue in the campaign and in the nation: Was Donald Trump suffering from a mental illness, and was he under the care of a psychiatrist?

Here we are in 2025, coming up on one full year of Trump’s second term, and we have no idea what outrageous behavior he will use to fill the three remaining years of his term, if, indeed, the good Lord allows him all of that time.

Trump seems to be on a mission to defile every sacred thing he can identify and to push past every reasonable restraint and boundary and to frolic in the badlands beyond. This mad adventure now includes gathering up honors to which he has no entitlement, including putting his name on public buildings. And he is being abetted by battalions of bootlickers: FIFA with its ridiculous inaugural peace prize awarded to the clown; the imposter Kennedy Center board that sullied the great memorial to Kennedy by adding the clown’s name to the Kennedy Center building.

Worst of all, though, is the abetting of Trump by the Republican Congress. With the exception of House and Senate leaders, all representatives and senators are paid a base salary of $174,000 a year. I submit to you, dear reader, that on the Republican side, that money is being lost to a form of honest services fraud. Congress has a duty to be a check on the executive branch. Congress is not beholden to the executive branch, and Congress is the first line of defense against an out-of-control executive. But Congress is in the hands of the GOP, and those Republicans as a whole are a bunch of spiritless cowards.

To stand up to Trump and hold him accountable could cost many of them their political careers, because the mangy MAGA base would turn on them like rabid dogs. But these politicians have a sworn obligation to the country to defy such political hazards. Instead of standing up, though, an increasing number of them are simply creeping away into retirement. Elise Stefanik, Republican representative of New York’s 21 Congressional District, is the latest to announce her exit. She became one of the busiest stokers in the engine of the Trump train, but what did Donald Trump do? He used her like a mat in a mud room and left her dirty and unsatisfied. The promised job as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations? Withdrawn on a whim because he needed her to remain in the House of Representatives to bolster Speaker Mike Johnson’s deathly thin Republican majority.

Now she is also out of the race for governor of the state of New York. She had no chance of winning against the incumbent governor, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, or possibly even winning a Republican primary to secure her party’s official nomination for the position. And Trump was not exactly moving heaven and earth to lift her campaign. Gratitude and loyalty, Trump-style.

But back to the GOP in Congress. Some are leaving because they know what is coming. The country has grown sick of Donald Trump, and the Republican Party is going to suffer an epic beating in the midterm elections in November 2026. And that will be a precursor to a Democratic landslide in the presidential election in 2028. The Republicans who are slinking out of Congress are no less accountable for Trump than the ones who are keeping their heads down and staying with the hope of surviving the coming ass-kicking in November. All are responsible for their own cowardice and for their complicity with Trump, who is their very own lunatic.

In January 2027, we will swear in a Democratic-majority Congress that will start holding Donald Trump accountable. And it should start by removing his name from the Kennedy Center and any other public institution that that piece of obscenity still soils in that glorious month of American rebirth.

The persecution of Kilmar Ábrego García

When the executive branch of the U.S. government publicly turns its power against an individual, that person will need to marshal enormous personal courage and committed legal representation if he is to slip the many snares and stratagems that can be deployed against him.

A Salvadoran national by the name of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García can attest to this. Ábrego García, who is about 30 years old, entered the United States illegally at about age 16 and lived in this country without authorization until a pivotal arrest by federal agents in Maryland on March 12, 2025. I say “pivotal” because he had previously been stopped or arrested by U.S. law enforcement without the storm that grew out of his March 12 arrest.

Arguably the most significant of these other encounters was his March 2019 stop by a police officer outside a Home Depot store in Hyattsville, Md., as he and three other men waited around hoping to be hired as day laborers. That stop led to Ábrego García’s being handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for federal immigration action. It was during his interactions with the Hyattsville Police Department and gang detectives of the Prince George’s County Police Department (the city of Hyattsville is in Prince George’s County) that an assessment of MS-13 gang affiliation became attached to Ábrego García. He was not charged with any crimes and therefore has not been tried on any criminal matter, but the MS-13 label has stuck.

Ábrego García sought release from immigration detention, but this was denied, although the immigration judge hearing his case noted contradictions and inconsistencies in the government’s allegations against the Salvadoran. Nonetheless, a police informant’s assertion that Ábrego García was associated with MS-13 was enough for him to be denied release from ICE custody. He then applied for asylum, but that was denied on the basis that U.S. law specifies that a person seeking asylum must file a claim within one year of entering the country. Ábrego García was many years late with his asylum petition.

He then applied for protection from removal to El Salvador on the basis that he feared for his safety in his native country. At that time, El Salvador was still a pretty dangerous place, with President Nayib Bukele just ramping up his war against the bloodthirsty gangs that had held a knife to El Salvador’s throat for many years. A judge granted Ábrego García’s request for protection from removal to El Salvador.

That was his status until March 12, when he was arrested by federal agents while on his way home with his young child after finishing his workday. Three days later, he was among a three-plane load of undocumented immigrants flown from the U.S. to El Salvador to be incarcerated without trial or any other due process at Bukele’s maximum-security Terrorism Confinement Center, known by the acronym CECOT.

His deportation, which took place on March 15, violated the order of protection from removal to El Salvador that the judge had issued. The Trump administration said Ábrego García had been deported in error. Ábrego García’s wife, a U.S. citizen, sued to compel the Trump administration to bring her husband back to the U.S. A U.S. district judge ordered that he be returned, but President Trump himself declared that he had no power to bring Ábrego García back. About this time, El Salvador’s Bukele came to Washington for a White House visit with Trump. It was a reward for his accepting planeloads of deportees, including Venezuelans, from the U.S. and locking them up in CECOT in exchange for millions of dollars from the U.S.

During Bukele’s obligatory Oval Office sit-down with Trump in front of news cameras, Trump and Bukele both were asked about the judge’s order that Ábrego García be returned to the U.S. Each dishonestly offered some form of a dodge about being powerless to do anything. In an exchange with Bukele separate from the formal news appearance, Trump tells Bukele that he would like to send “homegrown criminals” — U.S. citizens, if his meaning is not clear to you — to imprisonment in El Salvador, and he encourages Bukele to build more CECOTs.

The Trump administration went to the Supreme Court to fight the lower-court ruling that Ábrego García be brought back, but the justices disappointed Trump by ruling that the government should “facilitate” Ábrego García’s return to the U.S.

In early June, the Trump administration did return Ábrego García to U.S. soil, but it did so on the transparently spurious grounds of federally charging him with human trafficking.

On his return, he was immediately jailed in Tennessee.

In late 2022, Ábrego García had been stopped while driving on Interstate 40 in Tennessee. The Tennessee Highway Patrol report from the stop says that his driver’s license had expired and that he told the attending officer that he was transporting eight passengers from Houston to St. Louis and on to Maryland for construction work. The officer suspected “human trafficking.” A note in Ábrego García’s driver’s license record mentioned the suspected MS-13 connection. ICE was contacted but declined to take Ábrego García into custody, and, ultimately, no charges were filed against him in relation to that traffic stop.

That traffic stop became the basis for the case of human trafficking that the Trump administration said was the reason for his being returned to the U.S. His lawyers fought on, and judges ordered that Ábrego García be released from custody. He was eventually released but immediately taken back into custody by ICE, and he faced the danger of deportation to a third country. In fact, Pam Bondi’s Justice Department gave Ábrego García an ultimatum: Plead guilty to the charge of human trafficking or be deported to a country in Africa.

He refused and continued his legal fight. Hence his release from ICE custody on Thursday on a judge’s order. His fight is not over, of course. He still faces the danger of a cooked-up federal criminal case in the U.S. or vindictive deportation to a distant country with which he has no connection.

One aspect of the Ábrego García case that stands out is the reckless cruelty of the government in relation to this man. Donald Trump’s government means to triumph over him and make an example of him, and if it must break him and devastate his family in the process, so be it. After all, in the telling of the Trump administration, as voiced by Trump himself and by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, undocumented immigrants like Ábrego García are “the worst of the worst.”

Trump means to remove from the country the vast army of undocumented immigrants that forms a second society within our society, and that in itself is a lawful and proper objective. What is indecent and unacceptable is the manner in which Trump is going about this task, and his motives for taking on this work. Trump’s motives, as I say repeatedly, are not honorable. He, the most lawless U.S. president in modern times, is not seeking to uphold law and order and protect American citizens from criminal “aliens.”

Trump is pursuing a white-supremacist agenda against a steadily browning American populace. And he and his white-supremacist allies on the American far right understand that millions of undocumented immigrants producing Fourteenth Amendment-protected U.S.-citizen children is a hastening of the browning of America and the diluting of the political power of the white populace.

That is what the immigration clean-out is all about. For hard evidence, look no further than the glaring and outrageous contradiction in Trump’s policy toward South Africa’s white Afrikaner farming class vs. his attitude to brown and black undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Trump valorizes the Afrikaners, whose politicians were the architects of South Africa’s infamously racist apartheid system. He says falsely that the Afrikaners are being subjected to genocide by black South Africans and consequently need rescuing by the U.S. in the form of relocation to our shores. As for the latter group, the black and brown undocumented immigrants in the U.S., Trump demonizes and insults them and has unleashed his agents to hunt them down in the streets as if they are rabid animals.

Look also at Trump’s inane threat of military action in Nigeria supposedly to protect Christians who are being persecuted by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram. Now, there is a population that actually needs protection against the mass kidnapping of schoolchildren, especially girls, and the slaughtering of civilians. But Trump will never countenance bringing the good Christian folk of Nigeria to the U.S. to protect them from genocidal harm. Why? They are black. They are not right for the U.S. asylum program. In fact, under Trump’s recent revision of the program, virtually the only people who now qualify for refugee status in the U.S. are Afrikaners, who are, of course, white and, Trump assumes, ideologically suited to the far-right U.S. mindset. And I wonder whether Trump raised the question of Nigerian Christians merely as a pretense at evenhandedness in his play at savior in Africa.

***

There was a time when I believed that humanity was an ever-improving enterprise. I was mistaken. I misread the advance of science and the modernizing of our processes and accessories as the forward march of humanity. The truth is that our things are nicer but we are not. We constantly see evidence that human nature remains what it was at the birth of bipedalism. We are unchanged in spirit. We are a mixture of virtue and savagery eternally at war with each other. But I — and many others, I think — have failed to see this because of an erroneous reading of what constitute’s human improvement.

But that misapprehension can be corrected by apprehension, and there is enormous satisfaction in knowing that one does stand on the side of light and the angels. Trump’s side is rampant for a season, and then it will pass away. The light of goodness will shine again until the next season of darkness falls upon us. But the good dare not grow weary and must never cease from struggling against the dark. To surrender to the banishment of light means permanent night and its attendant nightmares. The Trump administration and its evil ways are a clear warning that all who stand for justice and right must never stand down.

A few of Trump’s latest travesties

The Resident Evil at the White House desires most earnestly that we citizens of this country pay no attention to his machinations and excesses. And, sadly, some people are indeed blind or indifferent to what the president is doing as he endangers our democracy at home and soils our national name before the world. Trump has made the United States a laughing stock, but he cares not, because, while the world laughs at us and the leader that has afflicted us, that man has been laughing all the way to the cryptocurrency bank.

But not all Americans are silent or indifferent.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have issued a report that starkly lays out the president and his family’s cryptocurrency grift.

On Nov. 24, 2025, Judiciary Committee Democrats published a staff report titled “Trump, Crypto, and a New Age of Corruption.” To be clear, this document is a partisan piece of work. It was not produced by the full Judiciary Committee, which is controlled by Republicans, who are naturally allied to President Donald Trump. But the fact that Judiciary Committee Republicans are not associated with the report is telling: Judiciary Republicans, like most of the rest of the House Republican conference, and indeed the Senate Republican conference, are silent in the face of Donald Trump’s excesses.

Instead of publicly standing up for their party’s supposed traditional values of accountability and governmental restraint, which necessarily would put them in opposition to Trump, House Republicans in increasing numbers are quietly announcing their departure from Congress. By so doing, they are simply passing the baton of complicity to Republicans with fresher legs who are eager to race to Washington to get their share of the glories of the swamp. Those coming to replace worn-out and embarrassed GOP representatives will not be coming to Washington to hold Trump accountable. They are coming here to empower him further in his authoritarian corruption.

And they certainly will not be subjecting Trump and his family to scrutiny in relation to their gobbling up of cryptocurrency billions.

The November report tells a story of two Donald Trumps:

1. First-term Donald did not see his opportunities in cryptocurrency and therefore disparaged and opposed the phenomenon. This is Trump writing on Twitter on July 11, 2019:
“I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity….”

2. Second-term Trump has executed a remarkable turnaround on cryptocurrency, even declaring himself “crypto president,” and enabling his family business, while he is president, to accumulate billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency assets.

The same Republicans who brayed and carped about President Joe Biden’s supposed financial crookedness are silent in regard to the greedy grifting of their man Piggy. But can one really be surprised at this? Not really. The congressional GOP is a collection of disgusting cowards and hypocrites.

Here is a paragraph from the executive summary of the Judiciary Democrats’ report. Read it and weep for your country:

“In the year since his victory in the 2024 election, Donald Trump’s fortune has expanded monumentally, largely because of his crypto dealings. According to Reuters, the Trump family raked in more than $800 million in income from sales of crypto assets in the first half of 2025 alone.  Although it is difficult to determine the precise value of President Trump’s cryptocurrency holdings, public reports make clear the number is in the billions with some estimates putting the value of the holdings as high as $11.6 billion. He has built this wealth from the Oval Office by steering investment to his family firm, shielding his investors from federal fraud and securities investigations and prosecutions, bilking his political base, and degrading the federal agencies ordinarily responsible for investigating bribery and tracking known bad actors online.”

You can read the report here and download it as a PDF.

***

I believe that every decision and directive that issues from Donald Trump in his capacity as president is colored with deceit and ulterior motives. Why? Because the man is fundamentally twisted and dishonest.

I challenge you to make sense of this next travesty. On Monday, Trump issued a pardon to former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who last year had begun serving a 45-year sentence in U.S. federal prison after being convicted under the Biden administration of complicity in the trafficking of prodigious quantities of cocaine into the United States. Hernández was extradited to the U.S. in April 2022, as reported in this news release from the Justice Department at the time.

Hernández was convicted in U.S. federal court in New York on March 8, 2024, and was sentenced on June 26, 2024, “to 45 Years in Prison for Conspiring to Distribute More Than 400 Tons of Cocaine and Related Firearms Offenses,” according to the headline of a Justice Department news release.

His pardoning by Trump follows the delivery last week of a letter of appeal written directly to Trump by Hernández and passed to the administration by the indefatigable Roger Stone. In his letter to Trump (reading it at the New York Times requires a subscription), Hernández appealed wonderfully to the devious old paranoiac’s sense of victimhood, persecution and personal greatness:

“Your resilience in the face of relentless political persecution has inspired me deeply. Like you, I sought only to serve my people, to uphold our conservative values while leading unprecedented reforms to make my country stronger and safer. And like you, I was recklessly attacked by radical leftist forces who could not tolerate change, who conspired with drug traffickers and resorted to false accusations, lawfare, and selective justice to destroy what we had achieved and clear the path for the Honduran radical left’s return to power.”

The New York Times gives the following account (reading the Times story requires a subscription) of Trump’s justification of the pardon:

“That was a Biden — horrible witch hunt which was, you know, a lot of people in Honduras asked me to do that and I did it,” he said [to reporters on Tuesday]. “I feel very good about it. If you have some drug dealers in your country and you’re the president, you don’t necessarily put the president in jail for 45 years.”

And previously, over the weekend, Trump had this to say to reporters, according to the Times:

“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Mr. Trump said. “And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them.”

This is the same Donald Trump who is accusing Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro of being a drug dealer and has massed U.S. military assets off the Venezuelan coast and declared on Saturday, he issued this on his platform Truth Social: “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY” (a cryptic non-declaration declaration by my reading).

Trump has freed a man who was indicted and ultimately tried and convicted by a jury of American citizens in federal court in the Southern District of New York. But Trump happens to have long despised that particular U.S. attorney’s office, so by overturning a conviction secured in the hated Southern District under the detested Biden administration, Trump is sticking a finger in the eye of that reviled Southern District office and the similarly scorned Biden-Kamala Harris administration.

The Trump who spoke of the injustice that Hernández supposedly suffered in his drug case is the same Trump who is using the U.S. military to execute alleged drug runners off South America in the Pacific and the Atlantic. No arrests, no due process, no presentation of evidence. No justice. Just summary killings including the now infamous “double tap” execution of survivors of an initial strike on an alleged drug boat. That particular outrage is the subject of discussions of possible war-crimes culpability on the part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the unhappy head of U.S. Special Operations Command. And you may be sure that if this particular case becomes truly troublesome for the administration, Adm. Bradley will find himself swiftly flung under the ever-handy accountability bus.

***

On the day before Thanksgiving, two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot in downtown D.C. near the White House. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, who was just 20 years old, subsequently died, and Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains hospitalized in D.C. The suspect in the shooting is an Afghan national, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, who CBS News reports “entered the U.S. in 2021 as part of the Biden-era Operation Allies Welcome after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Lakanwal came to the U.S. under Biden, benefiting from that program designed to save the risk of Taliban reprisal such Afghans as had worked alongside U.S. forces during the two-decade, armed occupation of their country by the U.S. And Lakanwal was granted asylum in the U.S. this year under the Trump administration. He is facing multiple charges, including first-degree murder, and the federal death penalty is on the table.

One of Trump’s responses to the shooting has moved a tragic and sad case at least a little distance into the territory of farce. Immediately after the shooting of the two National Guard members, Trump ordered that 500 additional Guard troops be brought to D.C. to walk the streets of the capital, as the initial 2,000-plus Guard personnel had been doing. Before the shooting, many, but not all, of the Guard members deployed in the city had carried firearms. Now the Pentagon says all will be armed.

Cast your mind back to Trump’s justification for deploying National Guard troops on the streets of D.C. late in the summer. A young member of staff of Elon Musk’s DOGE entity had been assaulted by a mob of teenage predators on a street in D.C. Furious, Trump declared a one-month crime emergency and deployed the National Guard and police from a string of federal agencies (and immigration agents, naturally) to back up the D.C. police to address street crime. When the crime emergency expired, law enforcement officers from various federal agencies returned to their home agencies, but Trump kept the National Guard tramping the streets of D.C. to buttress the city’s police in their fight against street crime.

But now, after the shooting of those two National Guard members, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department is providing one police officer apiece to accompany the little knots of Guard troops that continue to walk the city’s streets. This is a puzzle to me. The Guard came here to support the police, but the police are now guarding the Guard. And what is more, the shooting of those two Guard members had nothing to do with D.C. street crime. Lakanwal, the accused, allegedly carried out his attack after driving to D.C. all the way from Bellingham, Wash., which is on the opposite side of the country.

I say again that the shooting was not the product of D.C. street crime, but Trump is boosting the number of Guard troops in the city, where they were never needed or welcomed in the first place; all will now be armed; and city police officers are being pulled off their regular tasks of serving Washingtonians to walk the streets with Guard members to help them protect themselves from … what exactly?

Help me, please. Make this make sense to me.







The rise and fall of Marjorie Taylor Greene

A rupture has occurred in the space-farce political continuum. MAGA majorette Marjorie Taylor Greene is now a MAGA castoff. She came into Congress like a lion and is leaving like lamb kabob, well-done. After a dramatic breakup with President Donald Trump in the past week-plus, MTG announced that she would resign from Congress in January instead of seeking reelection next year as she had intended.

You know of whom I speak: The turbulent Republican representative of Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. For the edification of the few who may not know her history, here are three useful paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry on her:

Greene has promoted Islamophobic, antisemitic, and white supremacist views including the white genocide conspiracy theory, as well as QAnon, and Pizzagate. She has amplified conspiracy theories that allege government involvement in mass shootings in the United States, implicate the Clinton family in murder, and suggest the attacks of 9/11 were a hoax. Before running for Congress, Greene supported calls to execute prominent Democratic Party politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. As a congresswoman, she equated the Democratic Party with Nazis, and compared COVID-19 safety measures to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, later apologizing for this comparison. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Greene promoted Russian propaganda and praised its president Vladimir Putin. Greene identifies as a Christian nationalist.

A vocal advocate of President Donald Trump during his first presidency, Greene aided and supported Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election and has promoted Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. She called for the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election in Georgia to be decertified, and was part of a group of Republican legislators who unsuccessfully challenged votes for Joe Biden during the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count, even though federal agencies and courts overseeing the election found no evidence of electoral fraud. Days after Biden’s inauguration, Greene filed articles of impeachment alleging abuse of power.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted to remove Greene from all committee roles on February 4, 2021, in response to her endorsements of political violence. Eleven Republicans joined unanimous Democrats in the vote. Greene was appointed to new committee roles in January 2023. In June 2023, Greene was expelled from the conservative House Freedom Caucus after insulting fellow caucus member Congresswoman Lauren Boebert. Greene unsuccessfully attempted to oust Mike Johnson from his role as Speaker of the House of Representatives on May 8, 2024.

In 2021 when Greene was stripped of her House committee assignments over her endorsement of political violence, she delivered a peculiar pseudo-apology on the House floor in which she made this remarkable assertion: “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.”

Who but she herself could have “allowed” her to believe the appalling ideas to which she gave voice or otherwise endorsed? How could she not have known better? She was, after all, a grown woman, and a mother at that. That attempt at evasion of responsibility for personal conduct has been typical of verbal bomb throwers at both ends of our political spectrum. But in the case of Greene, the behavior was so extreme as to suggest some sort of unwellness.

For much of her time in Congress, Greene was a determined climber of the slippery political pole. When Republican Kevin McCarthy of California was House speaker, she attached herself to him like a limpet. And she was an embarrassingly frequent presence at the side of Donald Trump at his various properties during his first term and in the interregnum. She was all in on the MAGA crazy. And in the House, she was an aggressive warrior for the cause of the unhinged far right.

Greene constantly sought attention by acting up in public, even heckling President Joe Biden during his State of the Union speech to Congress in March 2024, shouting a demand that he say the name of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old university student in Georgia who, while out on a run in broad daylight in February 2024, was ambushed and murdered by a Venezuelan man who was illegally in the U.S. (That man has been sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.)

Greene also became a bully to the most liberal female members of the House, and in one notorious confrontation with Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, the Georgian came out epically on the short end.

Greene, who had by then been returned to service on House committees, took a personal dig at Crockett during a hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee in May 2024. “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading,” Greene sniped.

According to The Hill, this happened subsequently:

Later in the hearing, Crockett asked what she described as a hypothetical question about what might violate congressional protocol.

“I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling,” Crockett said, referring to a decision made by Chair James Comer (R-Ky.). 

“If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde bad built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?” Crockett said, in a veiled barb aimed at Greene. 

Crockett’s “clapback” immediately entered the realm of political legend.

***

Once Kevin McCarthy had been driven from the House speakership for the unforgivable crime of making legislative deals with the enemy — that is, President Biden and House Democrats — Greene seemed to be somewhat adrift, like a limpet whose fierce grip on a piling has been broken, with the unhappy gastropod cast into the waves beating against the dock.

By degrees during Donald Trump’s second term as president, Greene has appeared to lose her MAGA fealty. But it was in relation to the Jeffrey Epstein sex-crimes scandal that she most clearly broke with Trump. She was one of just four House Republicans who put their names on a discharge petition to force a floor vote on a demand that the Department of Justice release all of the files in its possession concerning the late Jeffrey Epstein. The idea was to reveal the names of powerful people who had made nice with Epstein the sex trafficker. Trump had long opposed and attacked the “Epstein hoax.” He had been close with Epstein, and speculation that the files might implicate him in dreadful acts has been rife.

As the push for a House vote on the Epstein records came to a head in the past two weeks, Greene criticized Trump for resisting the release of the records and as neglecting his domestic agenda to focus on matters abroad.

Trump reversed himself on the Epstein files, suddenly urging Republicans in Congress to vote to release the records. (Events may yet prove, though, that his about-face is part of another, more elaborate, effort to conceal the records.) But soon after his reversal on the Epstein vote, Trump also announced that he was withdrawing his support from Greene and attacked her in the personal way to which his targets are accustomed. She then announced that she would leave Congress.

When Greene departs from Congress in January, we may not have heard the last of her politically. It is not for nothing that cynics say that formaldehyde is the only cure for the strain of Potomac River fever that infects politicians who come to serve in Washington.

Greene says that Trump’s latest treatment of her is intended to cow the rest of the Republican conference in Congress. Well, yes. But Trump is a bully, so he has always succeeded by abusing and cowing others. The real lesson in this latest rupture between him and one of his former sycophants is a repeat lesson: Trump is faithless and is never to be trusted. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, should have known better, since she and he are two peas in a pod.

Guess who’s coming to dinner

It’s the Butcher of Riyad. Tomorrow — Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025 — Donald Trump will commit one of his most audacious assaults on decency when he breaks bread at the White House with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a man I like to call the Butcher of Riyad.

Trump commits an assault on decency simply by rising from his slumber each morning, but his insult against the moral universe tomorrow evening will be particularly egregious. 

This man Mohammed is one of the world’s most bloodstained tyrants, but you would not know it from looking at the battalions of international celebrities who have murdered their consciences in order to accept millions of dollars of Saudi money. They are golfers, soccer players, Hollywood actors and actresses, comedians, singers. You name a profession, and I or someone else can show you the high-profile Westerners — and they need to be Westerners (most are Americans), and preferably white — who have been bought by Saudi Arabia to give the regime’s image the Persilschein. 

Critics generally speak of “sports-washing” and “art-washing” being practiced by the Saudi government, but regardless of what a particular observer calls the practice, its aim is always the same: to draw the world’s eyes away from Saudi Arabia’s appalling human rights record and to give the kingdom a nice, acceptable global appearance.

The Saudi record of human rights violations is broad and bloody, but that record is particularly ugly in the area of the death penalty. To be clear, the Saudis are not the global leader in absolute number of executions by a national government in any given year; China is the champion there. Expert observers of the judicial system in China estimate that thousands of people are executed in that country annually. China does not, however, reveal the number of people its criminal justice system kills, so the expert observers can provide estimates only. 

But Saudi Arabia, with a population of about 34 million vs. China’s 1.3 billion, is among the world’s busiest execution countries by its rate of official killing. And as a state run by a harsh and absolutist monarchy backed by a pitiless religious establishment, Saudi Arabia’s executions are very much the royal court’s affair to moderate or accelerate. Yes, I know that MBS is not yet king, but he is that in all but name; his father is 89 and ailing and is largely absent from the arena. King Salman is just quietly waiting for death to call his name. Thus MBS is large and in charge. And Trump certainly is sweet on him.

Many Saudis have lost their lives to the executioner’s sword or the firing squad so that MBS and the rest of the Saudi establishment — religious and secular — may live in their vision of tranquility without the nuisance of internal criticism or domestic political challenge. 

This matter is addressed in a Human Rights Watch news release dated Aug. 11 of this year:

Saudi authorities have been carrying out an unprecedented surge in executions in 2025 without apparent due process, Human Rights Watch and the Middle East Democracy Center said today. The June 14 execution of Turki al-Jasser, a journalist known for exposing corruption within the Saudi royal family, raises concerns that the Saudi government is using the death penalty to crush peaceful dissent. 

Saudi authorities had executed at least 241 people in 2025 as of August 5, with 22 executions in the previous week alone, according to the international human rights organization Reprieve. Reprieve reported that the number of executions in 2025 would exceed all prior records if executions continue at the same rate.

“Saudi authorities have weaponized the country’s justice system to carry out a terrifying number of executions in 2025,” said Joey Shea, researcher for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates at Human Rights Watch. “The surge in executions is just the latest evidence of the brutally autocratic rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”

By now you might be asking yourself: Wasn’t there some sort of international outrage in recent years concerning someone named Khashoggi? Yes, but let me give you a little history before we touch on the case that is tickling your brain. For people of my vintage and older, the name Khashoggi might more readily bring to mind someone from an earlier time. That would be Adnan Khashoggi, who died in London in 2017 at age 81. Adnan had been a Saudi insider of such sterling connections that in addition to being an international weapons dealer, he was a broker in many of the Saudi government’s military purchases on the world market. He was rich, he was influential, and he was cemented into the national and regional establishments. And so was his wider family, naturally. 

Here is an example: Adnan Khoshoggi’s sister Samira married an Egyptian businessman known to the world as Mohamed al-Fayed. These two were the parents of a man named Dodi al-Fayed, who was romantically linked to Princess Diana and was fatally injured alongside her in that high-speed car crash in a road tunnel in Paris in August 1997. 

Dodi al-Fayed had a cousin and Adnan Khashoggi a nephew by the name of Jamal Khashoggi.

Jamal Khashoggi was lured into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018, by Saudi security agents on the pretext that consular officials wished to finish up some paperwork he was seeking to be able to marry again. He was not seen to emerge from the consulate, and no trace of his body has ever been found, despite extensive searches in Turkey, including in forests, as part of the investigation that followed his disappearance. Investigations concluded that he had been murdered and his body dismembered inside the consulate. And the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency concluded that Mohammed bin Salman, the very guest for tomorrow’s White House dinner, had personally ordered that Khashoggi be killed.

Why was Jamal Khashoggi killed? He was a critic of the Saudi royal leadership who spoke up for human rights, including women’s rights, and argued for a system in Saudi Arabia that would more closely match Turkey’s, in which the religious establishment is far less dominant and secular society is far more in control and is more permissive. And Khashoggi laid out all of these views as a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. In other words, he was very public with his criticisms. That was enough to get him killed by a Saudi leadership that is malignantly averse to seeing its sharpest domestic critics continuing to draw breath.   

The spectacular murder of Jamal Khashoggi happened about midway through the first Trump administration, but the heinous act barely disturbed the bromance between Trump and MBS. As we all know by now, Trump does not allow any pronouncements or assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies to disturb his plans. Whatever Trumpy wants to do, Trumpy gets to do.

And by now, in Trump’s mind, the ghastly business with Khashoggi at the consulate is old news, and possibly even fake news. The present is what matters. There’s his own ego to be burnished by a royal visitor no doubt bearing valuable gifts and copious praises; there’s a coldblooded authoritarian to be cozied up to; and the dagger that Trump has sunk deep into the heart of American decency is there to be given another savage twist.      

But I have this to say to Trump: Before you and your butcher friend sit down to your fine meal tomorrow evening, you should know that hundreds of uninvited guests will be present. You and your friend the Butcher of Riyad might not see the unwelcome multitude standing shoulder to shoulder, hovering silently over you, your honored guest and all the others present for the feast, but they will be there as a standing accusation. I have to believe that if there will not be some sort of moral justice soon for you, your enablers and your guest the butcher, it will come one day. I leave you with this quote from the venerable Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa:
“[T]he past … doesn’t go and lie down quietly and behave or disappear. It has this uncanny characteristic of returning to haunt us.”

‘Sandwich guy’ and the turning tide

On a street in Washington, D.C., on the night of Sunday, Aug. 10, a man threw a wrapped submarine sandwich directly at a Customs and Border Protection officer, striking said officer on the ballistic vest covering his chest. The sandwich fell to the ground, and the sandwich thrower turned and took off running at what seems in video to be a rather relaxed pace. Federal agents chased him and had him in handcuffs in no time. The assailant, Sean Charles Dunn, 37, was a Justice Department employee at the time of the confrontation and was swiftly fired by an exultant Attorney General Pam Bondi.

This confrontation occurred during President Trump’s “crime emergency” in D.C., a one-month period during which the president deployed to the streets of the city law enforcement officers from a variety of federal agencies — including Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — supposedly to back up the D.C. police.

During the election campaign last year, Trump had declared that D.C. was a “nightmare of murder and crime,” and he vowed to clean it up if reelected. Not much happened regarding that pledge until August, when a group of feral teenagers from D.C. and nearby parts assaulted and tried to carjack 19-year-old Edward Coristine, one of the employees of Elon Musk’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Coristine was beaten bloody during the mob assault, which took place on a public street, and Trump was incensed. That attack was the trigger for his declaration of a crime emergency in D.C. In addition to law enforcement officers drawn from federal agencies, the president deployed armed National Guard troops to walk city streets.

The crime emergency was limited by statute to 30 days, and it ended without an extension. Trump then declared, ridiculously, that there was “no crime” in D.C. “It took 12 days to solve the problem,” he told reporters early last month. Nonetheless, he is keeping the National Guard deployed here until next year. If crime has been banished from the city, why keep the Guard in the streets? Oh, right; that’s not about crime at all. How could I have forgotten? It’s about optics and Trump’s demented posturing as a strongman — and about his determination to intimidate a Democrat-led city. And since D.C. lies just outside his windows at the White House, this city is a convenient place for Trump to exhibit his plans.

Meanwhile, the kind of criminal and antisocial behaviors that are a permanent drag on the quality of life of law-abiding Washingtonians continue at their regular pace: The city stinks from end to end with the stench of weed being smoked in public (the emergency order and police surge did nothing about that); package thieves continue to run rampant (the emergency order and police surge did nothing about that. On the same weekend that Trump spoke of having solved the crime problem in “12 days,” 17-year-old Jermaine Durbin and 26-year-old Jerome Myles were killed in separate shootings in D.C.); street robberies and assaults continue (the emergency order and police surge did nothing about that); homicides continue (the emergency order and police surge did not stop that); the city’s open-air drug markets and the drug trade, which are a factor in homicides, otherwise still flourish (the emergency order and police surge did nothing about that). And so much else that should not be happening does continue to happen.

Local Washington has been intensely hostile to federal Washington in the second incarnation of the Trump administration. The type of messaging shown here has proliferated in the city since President Trump declared a 30-day crime emergency here in late summer. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Local Washington reacted with anger to Trump’s emergency declaration and the deployment of extra law enforcement personnel. Locally, the security action was decried as a hostile occupation — not because Washingtonians love crime but because they do not trust Donald Trump. They regard him, with good reason, as a deceiver with toxic motives driving malignant schemes.

It was in this climate that Dunn threw his sandwich at a CBP officer and became a local hero.

The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, the former Fox television host Jeanine Pirro, seized on Dunn’s sandwich throwing to illuminate the Trump administration’s toughness on crime (this is absurd, considering Jan. 6 and Trump’s own grant of hundreds of pardons to supporters of his who committed crimes on that infamous day). Pirro’s office tried to persuade a grand jury in D.C. to indict Dunn on a charge of felony assault. The grand jury demurred. Undaunted, Pirro’s office brought a charge of misdemeanor assault against Dunn (a misdemeanor charge in D.C. does not require a grand jury indictment). The case went to trial, and a D.C. jury acquitted Dunn on Thursday.

“Sandwich guy” Sean C. Dunn is iconized in a style channeling Banksy and intifada; seen in Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C., on Friday, Nov. 7, 2025.

This acquittal was a clear rebuke by a selection of D.C. residents of the Trump administration’s fascistic approach to governance. And the chastisement in a court of law occurred in the same week in which Democrats made a powerful showing in elections in multiple states and municipalities. In Virginia, former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, whom Trump had denounced as “a disaster,” handily defeated Republican candidate Winsome Earle-Sears, whom Trump had described as “very good” and “excellent.”

In the Virginia lieutenant governor’s race, Democrat Ghazala Hashmi beat Republican John Reid, also handily. But the strongest signal-sending Democratic victory anywhere nationally on the day may have been that of former Virginia state delegate Jay Jones in the contest to be Virginia’s next attorney general. Jones defeated the incumbent, Republican Jason Miyares, by just over six percentage points. What is remarkable about this outcome is that Virginians elected Jones despite his being engulfed in a damaging text-message scandal in the closing weeks of the campaign. Here is a synopsis from Politico:

In August 2022, Jones wrote about shooting then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert in text messages he sent to Republican state Del. Carrie Coyner. The texts, which were first reported by National Review and subsequently viewed by The Washington Post, have not independently been confirmed by POLITICO, but Jones has not questioned their veracity and has publicly apologized for them.

“Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot,” Jones wrote. “Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.”

“Jay,” Coyner responded. “Please stop.”

In a normal time, Jones would have been out of the race very shortly after Coyner made the text messages public with a month left in the campaign. Jones stayed in. He weathered such public outrage as resulted and the Republican Party broadsides that emerged and ultimately won the race. Coyner, meanwhile, lost her reelection bid to a Democrat in the election on Tuesday.

For a majority of Virginia voters on this occasion, Jones’s dreadful sentiments could be overlooked. Perhaps it was a case of “needs must when the devil drives,” and the devil in this scenario would be the moral bankruptcy and fecklessness of the Republican Party in general. The fact is that Republicans are in no position to lecture anyone about moral failings and scandalous behavior. They do avidly support Trump, after all. By so doing, they show us exactly who they are.

The voters’ willingness to overlook Jones’s egregious conduct is an index of the level of their disgust with the Republican camp headed by Donald Trump. This is a stark warning to the U.S. political right of the electoral bloodbath that is coming for it in the midterm elections next November.

Meanwhile on Tuesday, in New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli in the governor’s race. And in New York City, Zohran Mamdani, running on the Democratic Party ticket, won the race for mayor over some guy named Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa.

In a multitude of races in multiple states, Democrats triumphed in a wave that clearly signals wide national discontent with the performance and behavior of Donald Trump and his administration — and the GOP nationally.

One of the other seismic Democratic wins occurred in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, where “voters elected a Democratic district attorney for the first time since the 1800s, part of a Democratic sweep of every county office, including controller and recorder of deeds,” the Washington Post reported on Saturday.

Something is happening in the country. The political tide is turning against the MAGA-captured Republican Party. The poisonous MAGA mindset as seen in ruinous policies emanating from Donald Trump and his government are driving an awakening of courage and reason in the country.

Some would call it a backlash. I call it overdue and say, “How sweet it is!”

The Jeffrey Epstein affair is being kept alive in Washington, D.C., via tools such as graffiti and posters. This item was seen at 20th Street and S Street NW in D.C. on Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025. The telephone number on the poster showing Epstein and Donald Trump belongs to the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, which is based in D.C. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Trump runs wild as Congress sleeps

Congress is a co-equal branch of the U.S. government and is designed in the Constitution to be a check on the power of the executive branch, the president’s part of the government. But you couldn’t tell that from the posture of the legislature as that body is constituted today. Congress under the control of the Republican Party has shamefully abdicated its sacred duty to defend the Constitution, instead cravenly prostrating itself at the feet of a president who is hostile to the Constitution itself and is otherwise unbound by norms, decency and the law.

So the man who would be king of the United States has been allowed to run amok. He is seizing for himself powers that clearly are Congress’s to exercise. He is trampling the law at will and running a campaign of self-aggrandizement and persecution because of an enormous ego that is papered over with an exceptionally thin skin.

This is President Trump. This is how a fascist-minded president behaves. Abetted by people like the fawning Attorney General Pam Bondi and the desperate-to-survive FBI Director Kash Patel, the president uses the federal legal machinery to hound those by whom he feels wronged or significantly opposed (think James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, Lisa Cook). A fascist-minded president puts the military in the streets of disfavored cities with the goal of intimidating the populace and mythologizing himself as a strongman.

National Guard troops in the U Street Corridor of D.C. on Friday, Oct. 31, 2025, as part of President Trump’s deployment of military personnel to Democratic-led cities. Recent reports suggest that the troops will remain in D.C. into 2026. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

A fascist-minded president is telling other people how to think, using taxpayers’ money to blackmail universities into toeing his ideological line. This fascist-minded president says that media coverage that is critical of his policies is “illegal,” the First Amendment of the Constitution be damned. This, by the way, is the same president who suggested during his first term in office that parts of the Constitution should be suspended.

As for our wounded democracy, I think Trump would like to put it out of its misery by creating permanent Republican control of Congress. To that end, at his urging, multiple GOP-controlled state legislatures are undertaking irregular re-drawings of congressional district maps to cement a higher number of Republican representatives in the U.S. House and achieve a permanent GOP majority. Congressional maps are normally adjusted after the once-a-decade U.S. Census reveals how states’ populations have changed.

No Kings day in D.C., Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

The present GOP redistricting is gerrymandering that will give us the fiction of fair elections with the certainty of indefinite Republican control, surely an insult to democracy. What may not be obvious to some people is that this is an essential part of the greater right-wing plan to cement white-supremacist control of the levers of national power. Some Democratic-controlled state legislatures are also redistricting, in an attempt to neutralize the GOP’s national power grab, but this arms race is unsustainable. It just makes our bitterly adversarial political system redder in tooth and claw. And we can thank Donald Trump for that.

This fascist-minded president is following the authoritarian’s playbook in manifold ways. He grifts shamelessly, hawking cryptocurrency and access to the executive’s power. He peddles vulgar trinkets to the gullible. What a disgrace! He embraces blood-soaked dictators like Vladimir Putin (at the expense of valiant Ukraine) and Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud. Indeed, he is about to roll out the red carpet here in Washington for the said Mohammed, one of his most beloved cutthroats.

This fascist-minded president transgressively glorifies himself by interfering with the arts and building monuments to his ego. A decent U.S. president recognizes that the enormous powers of his office have companion duties of discretion and restraint. Not so with Trump. He ousted the board of the storied and sacred John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and had himself elected chairman of the institution by the sycophants he appointed in place of the previous nonpartisan directors. This is like an illiterate buying himself a vast and important library because he has come into money but never bothering to invest in learning to read. Trump is a barbarian, and a barbarian with the trappings of refinement is still a barbarian. His brutishness remains obvious. And his touch is like the kiss of death. The Washington Post reports, “Kennedy Center ticket sales have plummeted since Trump takeover.”

Dictators through the ages have built monuments to their inflated egos. Think of Hitler with his showpiece New Reich Chancellery in Berlin; Saddam Hussein with his vast edifices, statues, public portraits and monuments across Iraq; Syria’s Assads and their monumental self-hagiography; and the current absolute rulers in the Arab Persian Gulf with their enormous public portraits.

Trump, too, now has an enormous public portrait in Washington; his particular image hangs on the façade of the headquarters building of the Labor Department downtown. And Trump is building a ballroom fit for an empire on the east end of the White House. Predictably, in keeping with his personal style, the design shows a structure that profanes the actual White House: This ballroom will be 90,000 square feet against the 55,000 square feet of the core executive mansion. The East Wing (which was extra to the core White House) is no more, having been demolished last month. And if you wonder, can the president just do this? Yes, if he ignores the law, and especially since he has fired the members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a body established in 1910 to review and approve construction of or alterations to public and private structures in defined historical areas of D.C. that include the White House. (If you are a betting person, I dare you to wager that Trump will not name the ballroom after himself.) By this maneuver, Trump gets to blight the people’s house in perpetuity by attaching his name to it — permanently, I am sure he hopes.

No Kings day in D.C., Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

A great triumphal arch is also among Trump’s plans. Supposedly, private donations will pay for all of it, but this is merely part of Trump’s grift: He gets lavish monuments to his ego, and the underwriters will get U.S. government contracts and legislation that is favorable to their narrow interests. Nothing to see here; it’s just Trump being his usual self-dealing self.

Abroad, Trump is desperate to be accorded acclaim and pomp, and he gets these little treats essentially by blackmailing other countries with tariffs and other U.S. power. Basically, he is running an international shakedown.

Trump is an old man, with not many years left in him. (On behalf of all humanity, thanks be to Almighty God for this particular mercy. And for the sake of the country, that gratitude of mine to the Almighty stands even if Trump should outlive me.) In his old age, instead of becoming reflective and restrained in light of his well-shortened mortal horizon, Trump is in full gallop to establish himself as a modern-day Ozymandias. But Percy Shelley’s great poem of the same name is a warning that power is fleeting and that monuments eventually crumble to dust and rust. For my money, Trump’s works are likely to live on mostly in infamy and as a stain upon his children and their children’s children, for generation unto generation. The word “Trump” will be a byword for government by venality, tackiness, greed and cruelty. It will stand wretchedly beside “kakistocracy.”

No Kings day in D.C., Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

For the democratic-minded in this country, all is not lost, though. Trump’s folly and the systemic rot he is causing can be stopped. But that requires the Republicans who control Congress to rise from their slumber, grow a collective spine and reacquaint themselves with the oath that each of them swore when taking office. They swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They did not swear fealty to any president or to any party.

Most of the Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate have violated their oaths by enabling Donald Trump’s obscene excesses, either by active complicity or by passive, cowardly silence. Congress has a duty to act to contain the president. The courts alone cannot do it. And as Congress abandons its moral obligations, it is putting the judiciary, that other branch of government, in the grim position of taking on matters that belong squarely in the political and legislative realm.

No Kings day in D.C., Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Because Congress is shirking its responsibility to be a check on the executive branch, the federal courts will end up losing their credibility. Congress has already squandered its own credibility through fecklessness, and the country is closer to losing its way in consequence. In the trending climate, disunion is the ultimate danger. Such thinking is not farfetched. Remember the Civil War? Remember the Civil War!

The whole state of affairs tends to be deeply dispiriting. The forces of reaction appear ascendant. But the hopeful opposition is determined to be a bulwark against the growing darkness of authoritarianism and white supremacy. For a theory of hope, let us look to the general trend line of progressivism in this country since its founding.

The trend line began with a hopeful upward leap. The colonies freed themselves from England’s stifling control. They had been vexed and exhausted beyond tolerance by “a long train of abuses and usurpations” committed by the Parliament and the king back in England. From across an ocean, the colonists’ commerce was taxed without their interests being expressed by any representatives from among them. They simply did not have such representatives in England. And here in the colonies, the king’s troops were eating them out of house and home and strangling their liberty (abuses that gave rise to the Third Amendment of the Constitution).

The colonists reached a breaking point, severed the grip of the monarchy and established a nation, deeply flawed, yes, but something that came to be known as the venerable American experiment. Our Declaration of Independence, which one finds with every copy of the U.S. Constitution, is a warning that the people of this country collectively have license to throw off tyranny and build democracy anew. It is a clear warning to Donald Trump, to the likes of Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who is carefully angling to be Trump’s successor, and to the rest of the far right in this country that there can come a breaking point.

They all should take heed.