Tag: donald-trump

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.

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.

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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.