Trump is working fast to do his worst

Author’s note: Since the post below was published, a panel of three federal judges in Alabama has ruled that the congressional district map that the state of Alabama proposes to use in the 2026 midterm elections cannot be used because it racially discriminates against black voters. That is essentially the argument I make in the post below: A map that purports to cure a racial gerrymander favoring black Democratic voters in two Alabama districts is itself a racial gerrymander further benefiting an entrenched white Republican majority across the state. Also occurring since this post was published: The South Carolina Senate declined to heed Donald Trump’s call for a congressional redistricting in the state that would have threatened the state’s sole Democratic seat in the U.S. House, that held by the venerable James E. Clyburn, whose endorsement of Joe Biden in 2020 was the most important factor in Biden’s winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency.

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Donald Trump is in a hurry, and that is because knows he is in a race against three clocks: two electoral and the mortal. One electoral clock is counting down to the midterm elections in November, and the other is ticking toward the constitutionally mandated end of his presidency on Jan. 20, 2029. The mortal clock — his individual life clock — is, of course, counting down to the natural end of his existence as a pestilence. He will turn 80 years old on June 14 and looks increasingly decrepit — see, for instance, his “cankles”; the angry blister that lives behind one of his ears; the ugly blotch on the back of his right hand that he covers (badly) with makeup; and his unsteady gait. And his mind is clearly a mess and declining.

But Trump has big objectives to attain in a short time. And, for the moment, Fortuna seems to be smiling kindly in his general direction.

On May 15, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the state of Virginia in the state’s appeal of a Virginia Supreme Court ruling that found Virginia had violated its own constitution by holding a referendum on redrawing its congressional map. That referendum, which Virginia voters passed fairly narrowly, was intended to advantage Democrats as a response to irregular congressional redistricting in a number of Republican-led states at the urging of none other than Trump himself.

The defect in the Virginia redistricting effort lay in the timing of the process. For general edification, here is the key portion of the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision, issued on May 8:
“On March 6, 2026, the General Assembly of Virginia submitted to Virginia voters a proposed constitutional amendment that authorizes partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts in the Commonwealth. We hold that the legislative process employed to advance this proposal violated Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia. This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy.”

On May 10, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the state of Alabama to use a congressional district map that would effectively eliminate one of the state’s two majority-black districts. Rep. Shomari Figures, a Democrat representing Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, can expect to be ousted in the midterms in November under the map that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling allows the state to use.

On the strength of the court’s ruling on the Alabama issue, Tennessee and Florida also are moving swiftly to use congressional maps that are likely to reduce black Democratic representation in Congress from those states.

This flurry of activity follows directly from another Supreme Court ruling in a case titled Louisiana v. Callais. Here is the essence of the high court’s holding in that case — a decision, delivered on April 29, that significantly weakens the landmark federal Voting Rights Act:
“Because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8, and that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.“

Basically, the high court cleared the way for Republican-controlled state governments to attack congressional districts in their jurisdictions that are majority-black (and majority-Democrat, given historical patterns). Left unaddressed is the plain fact that a map redrawn to eliminate a racial gerrymander that benefits black Democratic voters is, in its practical effect, a racial gerrymander that further entrenches the power of white Republican voters.

Recent primary elections in various Trump-backing states have delivered more gifts to Trump. In Indiana, several Republican state senators who had helped to defeat a Trump-inspired congressional redistricting effort were themselves defeated in primaries.

In Kentucky on May 19, U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican and Trump antagonist who broke decisively with our crooked president, was defeated in the GOP primary by the Trump-endorsed candidate Ed Gallrein.

As the New York Times reported that day, Massie “voted against Mr. Trump’s tax-cut bill, denounced the war in Iran and insisted on the release of the Epstein files over the president’s angry objections. Such apostasies, as the president put it in a video released the day before the primary, qualified Mr. Massie for the distinction of ‘the worst congressman in the history of our country.'” Goodbye, Tom. I salute you for finally finding the courage to stand up to Trump despite the cost, unlike the other cowards and enemies of American democracy in your party.

In Louisiana on the same day, Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his re-election primary badly. He voted to convict Trump in 2021 in the Senate trial concerning the president’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In Georgia that day, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was defeated in the Republican primary for governor. The Republican primary will be resolved in a contest between two candidates, neither of them named Raffensperger. Raffensperger is the secretary of state in Georgia whom Trump telephoned in December 2020 asking him to “find” a specific number of votes that would negate Joe Biden’s election victory in the state and enable Trump to be corruptly declared the winner in the presidential contest there. Raffensperger politely declined, thus becoming a mortal enemy to Trump, in Trump’s eyes.

But Republicans should know that every transgression they commit in their quest to knobble our democracy is a precedent set that can be seized upon by others in the future. I fear that by their dishonest redrawing of congressional maps in defiance of the decennial norm, they have consigned that orderly traditional process to the ash heap.

In the field of election-fixing and political retribution, things look to be coming up roses for Trump. His lapdog Justice Department has even brought a new criminal case against former FBI director James Comey, after failing previously.

Where plain old corruption is concerned, our coin-operated president also shines. And once again, his obedient Justice Department has a hand in a disgraceful turn of events. The government that Trump leads has contrived to enter a settlement to end a Trump lawsuit against an agency that Trump oversees by creating a fund of $1.776 billion (in this, the nation’s 250th year, the “1776” is not accidental) to pay compensation to people supposedly improperly targeted for prosecution under the Biden administration. In exchange for the creation of this fund, Trump is dropping the $10 billion lawsuit that he filed against the IRS, of which he is the boss as president. The lawsuit the president filed issued from an IRS contractor’s leaking of Trump’s tax returns during the first term of our Trump nightmare.

Who will benefit from what is undoubtedly a slush fund? Trump’s allies, of course. A memo that the Justice Department sent to Republican senators on Capitol Hill explaining the fund says this: “There is no partisan restriction: Democrats can submit claims, too.” I would say that that declaration of nonpartisanship is a mere nicety. This money is meant to flow into Republican pockets to shore up the president’s standing with his base before the midterm elections. And the most obvious intended beneficiaries are the many hundreds of miscreants who were haled before the federal courts to answer for their criminality at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But Trump might not get away with this trick so easily. Two former officers of the U.S. Capitol Police are suing to ensure that none of the money goes to anyone who was criminally convicted — that would include people who pleaded guilty and avoided trial — for having any role in the Trump mob’s brutal assault on the Capitol. Those former officers are not alone; lawsuits intended to kill this dirty fund are multiplying. In addition to congressional democrats’ denunciations of this corruption, we see growing opposition to it among Republicans in Congress. Among them: Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who has said, rather delicately, that he is “not a big fan” of the fund, according to a BBC report; and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of New Jersey, who worries that money from the fund will go to people who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Is this “1776” fund finally a bridge too far for Republican lawmakers being asked to carry water for Trump? Are more Republicans in Congress finally developing a conscience about the evils of the Trump administration? We can only wish.

Elsewhere, Trump continues to push at least one other truly diabolical scheme. The New York Times reported on Monday, May 18:
“President Trump moved ahead on Monday with plans to allow 10,000 more white South Africans into the United States as refugees, even as the program remains closed off to people from every other country in the world.

In a report submitted to Congress on Monday, Mr. Trump has proposed lifting the record-low refugee admissions level of 7,500 to 17,500, reserving the additional openings for Afrikaners, who are primarily of Dutch descent.

The administration argued that an ’emergency refugee situation’ in South Africa warrants the expansion of Mr. Trump’s carve-out for Afrikaners, which has reoriented the U.S. refugee program into essentially a pipeline for members of a white minority to reach the United States.”

Not since the violent and ugly death throes of Jim Crow in the 1950s and into the ’60s has the United States seen such a distillation of the racist energy that has surged and pulsed beneath the veneer of democratic and constitutional order here. The advent of the Obama presidency released this wild and desperate energy into a crisis of reactionism that has reached its apogee under the Trump administration.

No one should be in any doubt about what Trump is doing with this false-refugee plan. He is importing a white population that is steeped in the racism of apartheid to further strengthen the Ku Klux Klan mindset that is already strong in this country. What better population exists for the purpose than the descendants of the Boers who created apartheid, descendants who feel aggrieved that they are no longer hegemons in South Africa? They have not been materially dispossessed, but they have been relieved of the political power they wielded so cruelly over th country’s black population, and that is enough to make them beloved of Donald Trump. They are his natural constituency.

In all of this, Trump knows that he is doing evil work, and he fears that a segment of the American populace might successfully do to him what his mob tried to do to American democracy on Jan. 6. Thus you now see the White House permanently ringed with crowd-control fencing. Members of the public no longer can enter Lafayette Park on the north side of the White House, let alone reach the regular fence surrounding the People’s House as they were able to do normally for decades. Thus you see the National Guard’s deployment in the nation’s capital being extended from a temporary stay summer through to the scheduled end of Trump’s presidency in January 2029. Trump wants to ensure that at a critical moment, the National Guard forces in and around Washington will be answerable to him only and will be a shield for him. is afraid of the people.

National Guard troops on a street in downtown D.C. on April 23, 2026. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
National Guard troops on Florida Avenue at Connecticut Avenue NW in North Dupont Circle, D.C., on April 9, 2026. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
National Guard troops in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of D.C. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

It seems to me that only the national electorate acting in November can save American democracy now. I believe totally that Trump’s intention is to end it. But he isn’t there yet, and he can be stopped — if only more people will take an interest in our country’s future. Whenever I turn to contemplating the enthusiasm of the forces of darkness and the indifference of “good” people, my mind returns to a grim declaration in the Irish poet William Butler Yeats’ 1919 work “The Second Coming”:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

That poem ends with these dark words:
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?“

We voters who love American democracy, e its manifold imperfections, are the ultimate guarantors of its preservation. But we must pay attention. We cannot slumber when the wicked are so busily at work. Come the midterm elections in November, we must make a decisive thrust to slice the hamstrings of this rough beast and stop it in its tracks.

Virginia says the resistance is real

Virginia voters on Tuesday approved a state constitutional amendment that permits a deliberate partisan gerrymandering of their state’s congressional district maps to ensure that their delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives is overwhelmingly Democratic — until the maps are redrawn after the next U.S. Census. By then, the reasoning goes, Donald Trump will be out of office and some degree of sanity will have returned to our national politics.

This effort in Virginia is a direct response to Trump’s inveigling of Republican-led state legislatures around the country to gerrymander their own congressional maps to give Republicans a lock on their control of the U.S. House.

Here is the question that was before Virginia voters on Tuesday:
Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?

Here’s the present landscape in Virginia: The state has 11 congressional districts, with Democrats holding six and Republicans five. The coming gerrymandering of these congressional districts could give Democrats 10 seats and leave the Republicans with just one. In normal times, I would like to think, Democrats would not contemplate such an odious action.

Seen in a front yard in the Navy Yard neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, April 21, 2026.

But the Trump era is not normal times. The president’s corrupting influence is pervasive, and it needs to be fought in all quarters and at all times by the right-minded citizens of this country. That is what is happening in Virginia.

Kristi Noem, the fired and unlamented former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, caricatured on a lamp post in the Navy Yard neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, April 21, 2026.

Unfortunately, Tuesday’s vote is not the last word on the matter. Virginia Republicans, being fastidious servants of the Dark Lord, are fighting the redistricting in the courts, and the Supreme Court of Virginia could yet nullify the effect of Tuesday’s vote by ruling that the whole constitutional-amendment effort to redraw the congressional district maps violates the Virginia Constitution.

But for the moment, a majority of Virginia voters, barely more than 51 percent, has told the legislature that it can proceed with gerrymandering the congressional districts.

What did Donald Trump think would happen when he launched this corrupt scheme? Did he think Democratic-led states would just sit by and not respond in kind to partisan gerrymandering by Republican-led states? Oh, wait. He doesn’t think properly; so he didn’t think the matter through sufficiently to see that he would be triggering a kind of arms race. Pretty typical of the man. California and a number of other Democratic-led states have done or are doing what Virginia is doing. Because Trump cannot think straight, he started a war that he is not going to win.

Sound familiar? It should.

Seen in the Navy Yard neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, April 21, 2026.

Keep your eyes on the midterms

In many quarters across the United States and around the world, Donald Trump is viewed as a thoroughgoing rebuke to decency. But whereas this unrivaled model of vileness and perfidy was on one occasion rejected for our presidency by a majority of American voters, he was twice elected to that office by American voters.

As Trump emerges now as an enthusiastic war-maker in the second year of his second term, we who decry his pestilence of a presidency continue to be faced with what is perhaps the worst truth about this awful man: He would not be president — and for a second time! — if the voters who sent him to Washington did not see their own values in him.

Some leaders guide their followers toward enlightenment and broad societal advancement; others foster cultism and herd their blinded acolytes into deepest darkness, there to feast on their souls and gain greater strength to do more evil. Donald Trump is a leader of the latter type. 

He is, in fact, a florid symptom of profound defects in our society: barefaced dishonesty, hypocrisy, selfishness, racist fear of the other, reactionary revisionism, denialism, intolerance, white supremacy, religious nationalism, geo-chauvinism.

My aim here is not to focus on the Trump-Netanyahu war against Iran, but I should at least observe that since the dawn of warfare until now, this truth has stood unimpeached: No military plan survives contact with the enemy. In recent times, even Putin has found himself learning this lesson in a way that is deeply costly to Russia in blood and treasure. More than three years on, the “technical-military solution” that Putin concocted to solve his imagined Ukraine problem ain’t looking like much of a solution. So, good luck to Donny and his leash-holder Bibi in the war against Iran.

As Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel prosecute their war in the Persian Gulf, I am compelling myself to not let my focus shift wholly to the resultant growing international instability and the fact that Americans around the world and even here at home are targets anew in what is sure to be a resurgence of violent anti-Crusader fervor, to wit, jihadi terrorism.

I am keeping my focus, instead, primarily on the radical right’s plan to subvert the 2026 midterm elections so that an increasingly reckless and deranged Trump can overturn our constitutional order, create a conservative authoritarian regime in this country and then bequeath its levers of control to a designated successor — definitely not Ron DeSantis, whom Trump despises, but perhaps “Little Marco” Rubio, who appears to possess an appropriate reptilian coldness and is highly favored by the creature in the Oval Office.

Donald Trump’s motorcade near Union Station on Capitol Hill in D.C. on Wednesday, March 25, 2026. He spoke at a fundraising dinner held by the National Republican Congressional Committee at what is the principal transit hub for many miles around. Union Station is used by the rail services Amtrak, the D.C. region’s MetroRail, VRE (Virginia) and MARC (Maryland) as well as the regional MetroBus network and a host of intercity bus lines. For commuters on Wednesday, this event caused daylong chaos.

Trump and the radical right have this year’s midterm elections in their gun sights, but Trump’s attack on American democracy actually began in earnest in 2015, the year he launched his run in the 2016 presidential election.

As CBS reported on May 23, 2018, the CBS journalist Leslie Stahl “told a group of fellow journalists at the Deadline Club Awards Dinner in New York City … that Mr. Trump had admitted his consistent attacks on the media were meant to ‘discredit’ journalists so that negative stories about him would not be believed.” This campaign by Trump, distilled into the handy epithet “fake news,” has in my view been instrumental in poisoning vast numbers of low-information American minds against U.S. mainstream journalism. When reliable and responsible American journalism is undermined, American democracy is undermined with it.

With his attacks on truth-seeking journalism largely effective alongside his use of federal power to intimidate and compromise the venal ownership of multiple legacy media houses, Trump is extending his malign attention to our system of elections — the actual mechanical parts of our democracy.

And he is in a particular fever over the midterms coming in November. He has reportedly told Republican leaders on Capitol Hill that the GOP must hold the U.S. House in November, otherwise the Democrats will impeach him. But it is not just impeachment that he fears; he fears the loss of his rubber-stamp Congress. And he fears the coming of accountability when the 120th Congress is seated in January under what I expect will be Democratic control.

To preserve the GOP’s hold on the House — an outcome that seems more remote with each passing week — Trump and his Republican allies are deploying a variety of measures, in the federal courts, in Congress and in Republican-controlled state legislatures.

The cheater in chief prodded a number of GOP-led state legislatures to redraw their congressional districts — midway between decennial U.S. censuses! — to favor more Republican victories. Some Democratic-led states have answered in kind, so the net result of that underhanded move by Trump remains unclear for now.

Trump also called on Congress to federalize the system of electing representatives to Congress. Presumably, a single federal election office can be much more easily corrupted than can the offices of 50 secretaries of state. That attempt was stillborn. No state, even a deep-red Republican one, wants to give up control of elections in its jurisdiction.

And let us not forget that for a desperate moment there was talk of a Trump executive order on elections. That, too, was a bust.

One consequential court action involving our elections was argued on Monday before the U.S. Supreme Court. In that matter, Watson v. Republican National Committee, a lawsuit is challenging a Covid-era Mississippi law that allows the counting of mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but received after Election Day, within a five-day window. According to SCOTUSblog, “Justices seem ready to overturn state law allowing for late-arriving mail-in ballots.”

Now, you know that the Republican National Committee and the individual plaintiff who brought this suit are not challenging this law just on the principle that it might violate the Constitution and federal statute. It is being challenged because they think it favors Democratic voters. They think that Democratic voters — and here you should read “black voters” — are more likely to be too lazy to go to the polls in person when they have the option of mail-in voting and then too lazy are careless to put their mail-in ballots in the post in time for them to reach their elections offices by the close of business on Election Day.

Republicans have long held that view about black voters vis-à-vis rainy/snowy election days. It might once have been true among black voters in places where and in an age when they saw that they had nothing for which to vote. But I think that in the age of Trump, any black person who is engaged with the electoral process is more likely to vote promptly, even by mail-in ballot, come hell or high water, to try to bring an end to this long national nightmare.

And then there is the SAVE America Act. The American Psycho is pushing this bill for all he is worth, even threatening this week that he will sign no other legislation unless the SAVE America Act is passed by Congress. I have reproduced the language of the bill below, but as you read it, bear in mind that federal law already makes it illegal for noncitizens to vote in U.S. federal elections. And no state among the 50 allows noncitizens to vote in federal elections conducted within their jurisdictions or in any statewide elections.

Bear in mind also that in the U.S., voting by noncitizens is a rare occurrence.

As many Democrats and other critics assert, this bill is a voter-suppression measure, and it is predicated on another belief about black and other nonwhite voters: that they are less likely than white voters to have or to obtain the identification that would be needed to participate in elections governed by the SAVE America Act. (Actually, the country needs a SAVE America Act to rescue it from corrupt and crazy Donald Trump and his enablers.)

While the centerpiece of the SAVE America Act is a requirement to prove citizenship, do not overlook that it “provides for a private right of action for certain violations.” I hear you ask: What is that? That is a page out of Texas anti-abortion legislation empowering individuals to bring legal action against anyone they think has facilitated an abortion — and collect damages if the legal action is successful. Regarding elections, as regarding abortions in Texas, that provision would allow vigilantes to discourage certain eligible people from voting by harassing them into a retreat from exercising their franchise. Republicans might as well just call up the night riders and also reconstitute the White Citizens’ Councils, since that is clearly what they pine for.

Here is the text of the bill, sponsored by Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas:

Introduced in House (01/30/2026)

Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act or the SAVE America Act

This bill requires individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, and requires photo identification to vote, in federal elections.

Specifically, the bill prohibits states from accepting and processing an application to register to vote in a federal election unless the applicant presents documentary proof of U.S. citizenship. The bill specifies what documents are considered acceptable proof of U.S. citizenship, such as identification that complies with the REAL ID Act of 2005 that indicates U.S. citizenship.

Further, the bill (1) prohibits states from registering an individual to vote in a federal election unless, at the time the individual applies to register to vote, the individual provides documentary proof of U.S. citizenship; and (2) requires states to establish an alternative process to demonstrate U.S. citizenship.

Each state must take affirmative steps on an ongoing basis to ensure that only U.S. citizens are registered to vote, which shall include establishing a program to identify individuals who are not U.S. citizens using information supplied by certain sources.

Additionally, states must remove noncitizens from their official lists of eligible voters.

The bill (1) provides for a private right of action for certain violations, and (2) establishes criminal penalties for certain offenses.

Individuals voting in federal elections must present an eligible photo identification document. An individual who votes by absentee ballot must submit a copy of their identification document with both the request for, and the submission of, the absentee ballot.

Trump’s war: Just what is it for?

“Said the President, he’s got his war
Folks don’t know just what it’s for
No one gives us rhyme or reason
You have one doubt, they call it treason
I said we’re chicken feathers, all without one gut
Tryin’ to make it real, but compared to what?”
— from “Compared to What?,” protest song written by Gene McDaniels and sung by numerous artists, including Roberta Flack on her 1969 album “First Take”

On Saturday at the National Mall here in Washington, members of the Iranian diaspora gathered to celebrate the death of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to honor Iranian citizens killed in their government’s crackdown on domestic protests in January, and to express their hopes for the end of the murderous theocracy.

And they also lionized Donald Trump, the American president who launched the present war against Iran in conjunction with Israel. In fact, as the organizers were setting up for the rally, loudspeakers boomed out a freshly cut and catchy song that included Trump’s words announcing that “Ayatollah Khamenei is DEAD!” Pre-revolution Iranian flags fluttered in the breeze sweeping across the expanse of the Mall, and a central area was adorned with portraits of Iranians killed in the recent crackdown.


I share those Iranians hopes that their home country will be freed from the grip of the bloodthirsty machinery that has controlled it since the Islamic revolution of 1979. But the atmosphere on Saturday was fragrant with nostalgia for an Iran that may never be recaptured or perhaps rightly ought not to be recreated. Prominent at the rally was the portrait of Reza Pahlavi, the U.S.-domiciled son of the late Shah of Iran, who fled that country as the revolution gathered steam.

A rally attendee at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, March 7, 2026.
The posters suggest a “democratic” process with a prescribed outcome.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Pre-revolution Iran was a place in which many of today’s exiles no doubt believe they would feel comfortable, but it was hostile to the many who went on to man the ramparts of the theocratic and cruelly puritanical state that the revolution created. Those to whom dynastic Iran was hostile had to deal with, and in many cases died under, the tender mercies of the shah’s secret police, SAVAK, the Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State. One person’s idyll is another’s hell.

Raw video footage.

As I watched those diaspora Iranians gathering on Saturday, I witnessed the unfurling of a banner that read: “Trump was right about everything. Wake up, America.” Many of them clearly have placed their faith in Donald Trump. But, to paraphrase some dire words from JRR Tolkien, they may all of them yet be deceived. This man Trump is faithless and untrustworthy. I believe this war was undertaken to gratify his egoistic vision of himself as a man of consequence and also to satisfy the desire of Benjamin Netanyahu and the other Israeli hawks to cut off the head of the Iranian theocratic snake.

Trump has no clear plan to deal with the global mess that he is creating with this war of choice. Now there is even talk of arming Iran’s Kurds to help to fight the Iranian government. This American formula is a doomed and disastrous prescription. How did it work out, say, in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union invaded that country?

The unfurling of a banner that reads, “Trump was right about everything. Wake up, America,” at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, March 7, 2026.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
Mahsa Amini was among those who have lost their lives to the Iranian security apparatus and were honored on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, March 7, 2026. Amini was 22 years old in September 2022 when she died in state custody after being arrested by morality police for violating the law that requires women to wear the hijab in public.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
Rally attendees with Iran’s pre-revolution flag at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, March 7, 2026. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

As economic, political and social pressures against Trump build here at home and out in the wider world, he will seek an easy exit and will claim that his ends have been achieved. What the hopeful Iranians here and in Iran itself are likely to end up with, in my opinion, is a nuclear deal that looks very much like the Obama-era deal that Trump tore up when he took office the first time.

In that outcome, the Iranian theocracy and militarists will get to preserve their system and their tyranny, which will be more vicious than ever in its domestic vengefulness, and the resident Iranians and the diaspora will have a deeply shattered country, broken dreams and an even deeper well of disappointment. And Iranians too numerous to count will have been killed for nothing in Trump’s ego-driven war.

And, of course, the anger and enmity of those who hate the United States and its ally Israel will have been stoked to unprecedented volcanic intensity.

But Trump and Netanyahu will crow that they have done good work in Iran.

A profane protest near the White House

Considering the war news of this weekend, I ventured down to the White House on Sunday afternoon to see what demonstrations might be occurring there. All I found was a rather small but extremely loud and very, very profane anti-Trump protest. But on the edge of the tableau was an evangelist shouting a message of God’s love and redemption. He rebuked the cursers, and they cursed him vigorously for his trouble. The whole performance was a disgraceful spectacle, but it is part of our democratic reality.

With the White House as a backdrop, Americans clash ideologically.
Videos by Gilbert Dunkley

Images from D.C., with an anti-Trump theme

Among U.S. cities, Washington is unique in being a federal district — the District of Columbia — established by Congress in territory carved out of the states of Maryland and Virginia along the Potomac and Anacostia rivers to host the nation’s capital.

One of the unique features of this city is that U.S. citizens living in this jurisdiction on the U.S. mainland pay federal taxes like other Americans but have no vote in Congress — no senators and, save for a non-voting “delegate,” no representatives in the House. (The only national offices for which we Washingtonians can vote are president and vice president.) That is why we have on our vehicle license plates the slogan “No taxation without representation.” That slogan comes to us directly from the rallying cry of the American colonists of the 18th century who bristled at being taxed and legislated over by Britain without having representatives in Parliament in London. That grievance led, of course, to the Revolutionary War, the tool by which the colonies established themselves as the independent United States of America.

D.C. is overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal, so, in the modern era, Republican presidential administrations, which are always conservative, tend to be viewed by ordinary Washingtonians as something akin to hostile forces of occupation. Compounding this sense of being imposed upon is that Congress has ultimate authority over this federal district. Congress can cancel D.C.’s home rule, casting aside the elected mayor and the elected city council, and directly run the city’s affairs if it has a mind to do so. Under a hostile President Trump, the Republican-controlled Congress has likewise been hostile to the city, repeatedly intervening in its legislative processes, its law enforcement and its budget — all of which are funded by D.C. taxpayers.

Following are photos from around D.C. that mostly reflect Washingtonians deep antipathy toward the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress, or show city residents’ embrace of values that are anathema to the administration. All photos were taken by the author.

Donald Trump aide Stephen Miller is portrayed as an invasive spotted lantern fly. Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff and a senior adviser to the president, is the architect of the administration’s aggressive sweeps to round up and deport undocumented immigrants.
The Financial Times of Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026, on a doorstep in Washington, D.C.
A yard sign in D.C.’s Dupont Circle neighborhood.
St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in the Dupont Circle-Kalorama area of Northwest Washington runs a charity arm called Charlie’s Place that provides services to the homeless and disconnected including hot breakfasts most days of the week.
A message to Republican members of Congress, seen on a street sign in D.C. The unnamed “he” is, of course, Trump.
Under a deployment ordered by Trump, National Guard troops patrol on Florida Avenue in Northwest Washington on the night of Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026.
On Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026, the president will deliver a State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. Some Democrats plan to boycott the event in protest of the president’s policies.
A dig at Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who, before he and Trump fell out in 2025, was the force behind the unofficial and unpopular Department of Government Efficiency, which was responsible for the laying off of thousands of federal workers.
Displays of the D.C. city flag have become a sharp political statement during Trump’s second presidency.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, is portrayed as one of the invasive spotted lantern flies that have plagued the D.C. region in recent times.

The Declaration of Independence: A warning to Trump

For anyone who has forgotten or does not yet know, and especially for Donald Trump and those allied with him in an effort to destroy the United States’ constitutional system and democratic norms, please know that this nation’s sacred Declaration of Independence is all the license that We the People need to unseat anyone who tries to impose tyranny upon us. We are at present enduring a lengthening “train of abuses and usurpations,” but we who love democracy will not take these impositions indefinitely.

These first passages of the Declaration of Independence properly constitute our indefinite license to rise and vanquish tyranny:

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Trump is desperate as midterms near

Donald Trump is increasingly desperate for a way to forestall the reckoning that he knows will begin when the 120th Congress is seated in about 11 months, and it appears that for him the solution is somehow to defuse the Republican-destroying grenade that is the midterm congressional elections coming up in November.

Despite the fervent desire of Trump and the efforts he is making, I expect that in January 2027, Democrats will be decisively in the majority in the House of Representatives. That Democratic majority will energetically undertake the task of holding President Trump and the rest of the executive branch accountable for administration policies and arbitrary presidential actions that have gone unchallenged under the Republican majority led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in the 119th Congress.

I think the president has long recognized that the voters of this country will quickly sicken of him once his chaotic policies start to cause them pain and even embarrassment, so, like most of the dictator-minded around the world, he sees elections simply as an entryway that must be barricaded behind him as soon as he is safely inside the citadel. He tried to wall himself inside in his first term, but he did not act quickly enough and was frustrated by what he called “the deep state” but what I call the blessed institutions of our democracy.

Having persuaded a majority of voters to give him a new term in office, he is wielding some of his old tricks and deploying new ones to try to neuter this year’s midterms, but these elections are going to be a really hard nut to crack. So, what are his old tricks? Basically lying brazenly about a nonexistent problem of substantial electoral fraud in certain states — majority-Democratic states, of course. This approach leads us to his new tricks: a multi-pronged assault on the system of congressional elections.

That assault began with Trump’s persuading the hardly reluctant majority-Republican legislature in Texas to execute an outside-the-schedule redrawing of that state’s congressional maps to make an additional five or so of Texas’ seats in the U.S. House predictably Republican. The president has encouraged legislatures in other red states to do the same, and some have completed that process or are attempting it. Naturally, legislatures in some blue states have responded to this mid-decade redrawing of congressional voting maps by doing or attempting the same maneuver in their jurisdictions. (Here is an easily read breakdown from the National Conference of State Legislatures on how that effort stands across the country.)

The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Feb. 2, 2026, viewed from Pennsylvania Avenue NW and with fresh snow coating the landscape. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

And Trump’s FBI on Jan. 28 searched the elections agency in Fulton County, Ga., and carted away information including ballots and other records pertaining to the 2020 presidential election. You may recall that after he lost Georgia to Joe Biden in that election, Trump tried to persuade Georgia’s secretary of state, a Republican, to “find” a specific number of votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. That official, Brad Raffensperger, quite correctly refused to commit a crime to help the president stay in office.

The raid executed last week by the FBI is part of the president’s persistent lying about the 2020 election. But with the midterms just nine months away, the FBI intervention has the real potential of interfering with the voting process in Fulton County, which is home to Atlanta and has the largest bloc of voters in the state of Georgia.

Further to that FBI raid, why was Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, present on the ground during the operation? She runs the agencies that are concerned with foreign intelligence, and the FBI is definitely not within her remit but falls under Attorney General Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice. And why did Gabbard patch Trump through on speaker phone to say encouraging words to FBI agents involved in the search of the elections office? Her presence and his direct interest are further indication to me that he is committed to monkeying with the midterm elections.

Two posters placed in the wealthy D.C. suburb of Chevy Chase, Md., by the nonpartisan Nuclear Threat Initiative were seen on Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026, to have been adulterated and incorporated into a tableau denouncing President Trump’s authoritarian bent and the aggressive enforcement posture of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and defending immigrants targeted by ICE. The president is largely reviled in D.C.’s liberal suburbs in Maryland and Northern Virginia.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Then there is Trump’s call in recent days for Republicans in Congress to “nationalize” the congressional elections. In our system, elections are administered by the states. The Constitution says in Article I Section 4 that it is to be so:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, …

As you can see, Section 4 also says that “the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” It is this provision that Trump apparently wishes to exploit to bring all elections for national office under the control of the federal government. With elections to Congress managed by a central federal authority, Trump and his crooked minions could simply declare whatever results were favorable to Trump. They could also disqualify inconvenient state or district results as being fraudulent. But, praise God, the framers of our Constitution had the nous to anticipate the emergence of someone like the Dear Leader. Thus, our voting system, jurisdictionally fractured by state, territory and district, is a shield against a single corrupting hand.

Remarkably, in response to Trump’s urging that congressional Republicans nationalize congressional elections in 15 states, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said a firm no.

“I’m supportive of only citizens voting and showing ID at polling places. I think that makes sense. … But I’m not in favor of federalizing elections, no. I think that’s a constitutional issue,” Thune told reporters, according to the publication The Hill.

This was a remarkably assertive piece of resistance to a Trump proposal by a congressional Republican leader, given that such folk have been largely asleep insofar as holding Trump to account during the entire first year of his second term. The fact is that states are highly possessive about the rights that the U.S. Constitution accords them, and the states’ individual right to organize their own elections is deeply cherished. So, I cannot see more than a handful of representatives and senators — if any at all — coming out in favor of Trump’s call for congressional elections to be federally run in a particular set of states. That idea is just a nonstarter. Ain’t gonna happen.

But the administration is employing multiple tools in its search for a way to meddle with the midterms and head off the Democratic Party rampage that is seen as imminent. For instance, as Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in a Jan. 27 essay, “(Attorney General Pam) Bondi’s Justice Department has demanded access to the voter records of 44 states and Washington, DC, and it has sued more than 20 states for not complying. Two courts have already ruled on the side of the states.”

And then there is, potentially, the military option.

We all know that Trump has conjured publicly with the idea of turning the regular U.S. military loose in majority-Democratic parts of the country. He has, in fact, deployed or has tried to deploy National Guard troops in various Democrat-heavy areas, including California and here in Washington, D.C. What began as a Guard deployment last summer to bolster law enforcement during a one-month crime emergency that the president declared in D.C. has become a troop presence on the streets of the nation’s capital that will stretch at least until after the midterm elections in November.

When you consider, in addition, that the White House security perimeter has been enlarged by the use of crowd-control fencing to include Lafayette Park adjacent to the White House grounds, one suspects that Trump and his nearest sycophants are hedging against a popular rising of the people this year in response to some anti-democratic provocation emanating from the White House.

National Guard troops wait to cross a street in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. Since the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard soldiers near the White House on Nov. 26, 2025, with one dying and the other left gravely injured, Guard troops patrolling D.C. in a deployment ordered by President Trump have adopted a far more alert stance when in a static position. As seen in this image reflected in a vehicle wing mirror, they face outward to be able to spot a threat approaching from any direction.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

I do not know how Donald Trump plans to interfere with the midterm elections, but the evidence of my eyes and ears tells me that he is furiously casting about for some way to stop the blue wave that is rolling toward Capitol Hill. That wave will wash away the compliant Congress that he has so far enjoyed in his second term and replace it with a legislature with backbone and a bad attitude toward him. This prospect fills him with dread. Because he is a walking, talking, certifiable lunatic, I do not rule out any rash act of self-preservation on his part.

Thus I say to all my fellow democracy-loving Americans: “Screw your courage to the sticking place.” Get your marching shoes ready! Our country might face a crisis this year from which only we, in the streets in our numbers, can extract it and set it back on the straight and narrow.

Hey, Congress! Are you dead?

Dear Congress,

I am asking you the question that a popular Chinese app asks users as a check for proof of life: “Are you dead?”

The United States is in crisis. Donald Trump is turning the nation’s immigration enforcement and border control agents into his personal murderous Gestapo. Americans are increasingly seeing the federal executive as an enemy of the people. Tensions are growing nationally toward a violent eruption of outrage. In all of this, where are you, the Congress?

I don’t know whether you are aware of certain uncharitable rumors about you that are making the rounds. Many people are saying that for the entire first year of Donald Trump’s second term in the presidency, you were missing in action, that you checked out, that you were just phoning it in. That’s what some people say. Other people have far worse to say. Those people say that you, and by “you” they mean Trump’s fellow Republicans who are in control of both chambers of Congress, are either complicit in an enormous crime or are base cowards who know that the president is doing great wrong but dare not do their constitutional duty and check him.

What say you, Congress? Are people telling lies about you?

I’ll tell you how I see things. First of all, I have to ask: Are you with us? That means: Are you awake? But it also means: Do you stand in solidarity with those of us who are committed to American democracy as it is expressed through our traditional constitutional order and the rule of law? What I see with my own eyes is that you, the Republican Congress, are, with scant exception, failing in your duty to the United States.

That is how I see things. And you may ask me what evidence I see to justify such an accusation. I see a president who is clearly mentally ill in a very dangerous way and is being abetted by most congressional Republicans, by commission or omission, as he destroys the underpinnings of democracy at home and shatters our most precious international security alliances while empowering some of the worst elements on the global stage.

You congressional Republicans have been nearly uniformly silent as Trump unilaterally and unlawfully demolished the East Wing of the White House to build an obscenely gigantic ballroom, a monument to his diseased ego. You have been silent as he defiled the nation’s living tribute to an assassinated president by slapping his own name on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. That monument was created by a previous and perhaps nobler Congress, and Trump has no right in law to profane it with his name. Your silence at his perverted use of the Kennedy Center condemns you. What about the United States Institute of Peace, another of Congress’s noble creations on which Trump has imposed his name even as he is in court against the rightful overseers of the institution who are suing to wrest it back from his grasp.

Anti-Republican messaging in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., seen on Monday, Jan. 26, 2026.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

You have been silent as Trump, the most lawless American president in my lifetime, builds the twin agencies of Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Customs and Border Protection into his own secret police. Are you awake? Are you seeing what is happening in our country? Have you read any world history at all? Will you be silent until Bokassa decides that even you are not pure enough for his regime and his masked men come for you? When they drag you out of your homes and hustle you into their unmarked vehicles, your newly discovered voices and your outrage will count for nothing.

He has threatened Iran with war to protect Iranian protesters against their government’s violence, but here at home, he is threatening to answer Americans protesting his excesses by invoking the Insurrection Act and unleashing the U.S. military against citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. Congress, have you anything to say about this?

What Trump is conjuring up in this country is an old problem from hell, a murderous chaos that has plagued the world throughout the ages despite being entirely foreseeable. Congress, will you not stop him and the terrible trouble that is coming? Short of a general — and wholly unpredictable — rising of the people, only you can restrain him. Will you not see your duty and do your duty? If you leave him to his own impulses, he will push and destroy and destroy and push until everywhere is war. And because he is an old man whose time among us is short anyway, he will not be around to live alongside us in the wreckage his actions will have produced.

If you want more evidence of Trump’s mental disease, just look at his fevered desire to have the Nobel Peace Prize. He and his acolytes ran a nakedly disgraceful campaign for him to get it. He claimed idiotically to have ended multiple wars. When the prize went to Venezuela’s María Corina Machado for her leadership in the opposition to the dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump announced that Machado had told him that she dedicated the prize to him. No shame. Did you notice that, Congress?

Then came another shameful act in the play. Machado, recognizing Trump as the prostitute that he is, offered him her Nobel medal as she visited him here in Washington after he had ousted Maduro. She was obviously hoping to buy Trump’s blessing for her to become Venezuela’s president. Trump merely took the gift and posed proudly with her and it for a photo op. She got a compliment and so far nothing else of substance.

But Congress, the question for you is this: What sane and normal man would accept someone else’s prize as his own? Would a sane and decent man not have thanked Machado for her gesture and politely declined the offer? Not Trump. He could not even summon the momentary decency to ask, like murderous MacBeth, “Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?” The least that you, the Congress, could have done was to pass a resolution of disapproval of the president’s behavior. But no. Apparently what people are saying about you is true.

You are complicit in the squandering of the greatest gift that this country has given to humankind and bequeathed to posterity: the American model of liberal democracy. If there is such a thing as divine retribution, your portion will be bitter, indeed.

And you are silent as the world laughs at the United States as never before because of the unhinged behavior of our president. Just look at his performance last week in Europe and in relation to Greenland. He publicly said that because “Norway” did not give him the Nobel Peace Prize — the prize is not the Norwegian government’s to award — he was even more minded to pursue control of the Danish territory of Greenland. But Congress, Western Europe’s long-suffering leaders finally set you an example of how to deal with Trump: They told him to go off and pleasure himself. They stood up to the bully, and, suddenly, he lost his appetite for Greenland.

In the meantime, though, because of Trump’s madness, much of the world is reordering its affairs to work around the United States, which is now widely seen as the rogue nation that we used to accuse other countries of being. Trump is destroying the U.S. brand globally, and our country’s wellbeing and that of Americans out in the world are being put at material risk. What are you doing about it, Congress?

In our domestic and foreign affairs, things are falling apart in dangerous ways, and all because of one man: Donald Trump.

Congress, get off your ass! Do your duty! Stop Trump!

Sincerely,
A deeply distressed citizen

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.