It’s the Butcher of Riyad. Tomorrow — Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025 — Donald Trump will commit one of his most audacious assaults on decency when he breaks bread at the White House with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a man I like to call the Butcher of Riyad.
Trump commits an assault on decency simply by rising from his slumber each morning, but his insult against the moral universe tomorrow evening will be particularly egregious.
This man Mohammed is one of the world’s most bloodstained tyrants, but you would not know it from looking at the battalions of international celebrities who have murdered their consciences in order to accept millions of dollars of Saudi money. They are golfers, soccer players, Hollywood actors and actresses, comedians, singers. You name a profession, and I or someone else can show you the high-profile Westerners — and they need to be Westerners (most are Americans), and preferably white — who have been bought by Saudi Arabia to give the regime’s image the Persilschein.
Critics generally speak of “sports-washing” and “art-washing” being practiced by the Saudi government, but regardless of what a particular observer calls the practice, its aim is always the same: to draw the world’s eyes away from Saudi Arabia’s appalling human rights record and to give the kingdom a nice, acceptable global appearance.
The Saudi record of human rights violations is broad and bloody, but that record is particularly ugly in the area of the death penalty. To be clear, the Saudis are not the global leader in absolute number of executions by a national government in any given year; China is the champion there. Expert observers of the judicial system in China estimate that thousands of people are executed in that country annually. China does not, however, reveal the number of people its criminal justice system kills, so the expert observers can provide estimates only.
But Saudi Arabia, with a population of about 34 million vs. China’s 1.3 billion, is among the world’s busiest execution countries by its rate of official killing. And as a state run by a harsh and absolutist monarchy backed by a pitiless religious establishment, Saudi Arabia’s executions are very much the royal court’s affair to moderate or accelerate. Yes, I know that MBS is not yet king, but he is that in all but name; his father is 89 and ailing and is largely absent from the arena. King Salman is just quietly waiting for death to call his name. Thus MBS is large and in charge. And Trump certainly is sweet on him.
Many Saudis have lost their lives to the executioner’s sword or the firing squad so that MBS and the rest of the Saudi establishment — religious and secular — may live in their vision of tranquility without the nuisance of internal criticism or domestic political challenge.
This matter is addressed in a Human Rights Watch news release dated Aug. 11 of this year:
Saudi authorities have been carrying out an unprecedented surge in executions in 2025 without apparent due process, Human Rights Watch and the Middle East Democracy Center said today. The June 14 execution of Turki al-Jasser, a journalist known for exposing corruption within the Saudi royal family, raises concerns that the Saudi government is using the death penalty to crush peaceful dissent.
Saudi authorities had executed at least 241 people in 2025 as of August 5, with 22 executions in the previous week alone, according to the international human rights organization Reprieve. Reprieve reported that the number of executions in 2025 would exceed all prior records if executions continue at the same rate.
“Saudi authorities have weaponized the country’s justice system to carry out a terrifying number of executions in 2025,” said Joey Shea, researcher for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates at Human Rights Watch. “The surge in executions is just the latest evidence of the brutally autocratic rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”
By now you might be asking yourself: Wasn’t there some sort of international outrage in recent years concerning someone named Khashoggi? Yes, but let me give you a little history before we touch on the case that is tickling your brain. For people of my vintage and older, the name Khashoggi might more readily bring to mind someone from an earlier time. That would be Adnan Khashoggi, who died in London in 2017 at age 81. Adnan had been a Saudi insider of such sterling connections that in addition to being an international weapons dealer, he was a broker in many of the Saudi government’s military purchases on the world market. He was rich, he was influential, and he was cemented into the national and regional establishments. And so was his wider family, naturally.
Here is an example: Adnan Khoshoggi’s sister Samira married an Egyptian businessman known to the world as Mohamed al-Fayed. These two were the parents of a man named Dodi al-Fayed, who was romantically linked to Princess Diana and was fatally injured alongside her in that high-speed car crash in a road tunnel in Paris in August 1997.
Dodi al-Fayed had a cousin and Adnan Khashoggi a nephew by the name of Jamal Khashoggi.
Jamal Khashoggi was lured into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018, by Saudi security agents on the pretext that consular officials wished to finish up some paperwork he was seeking to be able to marry again. He was not seen to emerge from the consulate, and no trace of his body has ever been found, despite extensive searches in Turkey, including in forests, as part of the investigation that followed his disappearance. Investigations concluded that he had been murdered and his body dismembered inside the consulate. And the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency concluded that Mohammed bin Salman, the very guest for tomorrow’s White House dinner, had personally ordered that Khashoggi be killed.
Why was Jamal Khashoggi killed? He was a critic of the Saudi royal leadership who spoke up for human rights, including women’s rights, and argued for a system in Saudi Arabia that would more closely match Turkey’s, in which the religious establishment is far less dominant and secular society is far more in control and is more permissive. And Khashoggi laid out all of these views as a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. In other words, he was very public with his criticisms. That was enough to get him killed by a Saudi leadership that is malignantly averse to seeing its sharpest domestic critics continuing to draw breath.
The spectacular murder of Jamal Khashoggi happened about midway through the first Trump administration, but the heinous act barely disturbed the bromance between Trump and MBS. As we all know by now, Trump does not allow any pronouncements or assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies to disturb his plans. Whatever Trumpy wants to do, Trumpy gets to do.
And by now, in Trump’s mind, the ghastly business with Khashoggi at the consulate is old news, and possibly even fake news. The present is what matters. There’s his own ego to be burnished by a royal visitor no doubt bearing valuable gifts and copious praises; there’s a coldblooded authoritarian to be cozied up to; and the dagger that Trump has sunk deep into the heart of American decency is there to be given another savage twist.
But I have this to say to Trump: Before you and your butcher friend sit down to your fine meal tomorrow evening, you should know that hundreds of uninvited guests will be present. You and your friend the Butcher of Riyad might not see the unwelcome multitude standing shoulder to shoulder, hovering silently over you, your honored guest and all the others present for the feast, but they will be there as a standing accusation. I have to believe that if there will not be some sort of moral justice soon for you, your enablers and your guest the butcher, it will come one day. I leave you with this quote from the venerable Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa: “[T]he past … doesn’t go and lie down quietly and behave or disappear. It has this uncanny characteristic of returning to haunt us.”
Congress is a co-equal branch of the U.S. government and is designed in the Constitution to be a check on the power of the executive branch, the president’s part of the government. But you couldn’t tell that from the posture of the legislature as that body is constituted today. Congress under the control of the Republican Party has shamefully abdicated its sacred duty to defend the Constitution, instead cravenly prostrating itself at the feet of a president who is hostile to the Constitution itself and is otherwise unbound by norms, decency and the law.
So the man who would be king of the United States has been allowed to run amok. He is seizing for himself powers that clearly are Congress’s to exercise. He is trampling the law at will and running a campaign of self-aggrandizement and persecution because of an enormous ego that is papered over with an exceptionally thin skin.
This is President Trump. This is how a fascist-minded president behaves. Abetted by people like the fawning Attorney General Pam Bondi and the desperate-to-survive FBI Director Kash Patel, the president uses the federal legal machinery to hound those by whom he feels wronged or significantly opposed (think James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, Lisa Cook). A fascist-minded president puts the military in the streets of disfavored cities with the goal of intimidating the populace and mythologizing himself as a strongman.
National Guard troops in the U Street Corridor of D.C. on Friday, Oct. 31, 2025, as part of President Trump’s deployment of military personnel to Democratic-led cities. Recent reports suggest that the troops will remain in D.C. into 2026. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
A fascist-minded president is telling other people how to think, using taxpayers’ money to blackmail universities into toeing his ideological line. This fascist-minded president says that media coverage that is critical of his policies is “illegal,” the First Amendment of the Constitution be damned. This, by the way, is the same president who suggested during his first term in office that parts of the Constitution should be suspended.
As for our wounded democracy, I think Trump would like to put it out of its misery by creating permanent Republican control of Congress. To that end, at his urging, multiple GOP-controlled state legislatures are undertaking irregular re-drawings of congressional district maps to cement a higher number of Republican representatives in the U.S. House and achieve a permanent GOP majority. Congressional maps are normally adjusted after the once-a-decade U.S. Census reveals how states’ populations have changed.
No Kings day in D.C., Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
The present GOP redistricting is gerrymandering that will give us the fiction of fair elections with the certainty of indefinite Republican control, surely an insult to democracy. What may not be obvious to some people is that this is an essential part of the greater right-wing plan to cement white-supremacist control of the levers of national power. Some Democratic-controlled state legislatures are also redistricting, in an attempt to neutralize the GOP’s national power grab, but this arms race is unsustainable. It just makes our bitterly adversarial political system redder in tooth and claw. And we can thank Donald Trump for that.
This fascist-minded president is following the authoritarian’s playbook in manifold ways. He grifts shamelessly, hawking cryptocurrency and access to the executive’s power. He peddles vulgar trinkets to the gullible. What a disgrace! He embraces blood-soaked dictators like Vladimir Putin (at the expense of valiant Ukraine) and Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud. Indeed, he is about to roll out the red carpet here in Washington for the said Mohammed, one of his most beloved cutthroats.
This fascist-minded president transgressively glorifies himself by interfering with the arts and building monuments to his ego. A decent U.S. president recognizes that the enormous powers of his office have companion duties of discretion and restraint. Not so with Trump. He ousted the board of the storied and sacred John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and had himself elected chairman of the institution by the sycophants he appointed in place of the previous nonpartisan directors. This is like an illiterate buying himself a vast and important library because he has come into money but never bothering to invest in learning to read. Trump is a barbarian, and a barbarian with the trappings of refinement is still a barbarian. His brutishness remains obvious. And his touch is like the kiss of death. The Washington Post reports, “Kennedy Center ticket sales have plummeted since Trump takeover.”
Dictators through the ages have built monuments to their inflated egos. Think of Hitler with his showpiece New Reich Chancellery in Berlin; Saddam Hussein with his vast edifices, statues, public portraits and monuments across Iraq; Syria’s Assads and their monumental self-hagiography; and the current absolute rulers in the Arab Persian Gulf with their enormous public portraits.
Trump, too, now has an enormous public portrait in Washington; his particular image hangs on the façade of the headquarters building of the Labor Department downtown. And Trump is building a ballroom fit for an empire on the east end of the White House. Predictably, in keeping with his personal style, the design shows a structure that profanes the actual White House: This ballroom will be 90,000 square feet against the 55,000 square feet of the core executive mansion. The East Wing (which was extra to the core White House) is no more, having been demolished last month. And if you wonder, can the president just do this? Yes, if he ignores the law, and especially since he has fired the members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a body established in 1910 to review and approve construction of or alterations to public and private structures in defined historical areas of D.C. that include the White House. (If you are a betting person, I dare you to wager that Trump will not name the ballroom after himself.) By this maneuver, Trump gets to blight the people’s house in perpetuity by attaching his name to it — permanently, I am sure he hopes.
No Kings day in D.C., Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
A great triumphal arch is also among Trump’s plans. Supposedly, private donations will pay for all of it, but this is merely part of Trump’s grift: He gets lavish monuments to his ego, and the underwriters will get U.S. government contracts and legislation that is favorable to their narrow interests. Nothing to see here; it’s just Trump being his usual self-dealing self.
Abroad, Trump is desperate to be accorded acclaim and pomp, and he gets these little treats essentially by blackmailing other countries with tariffs and other U.S. power. Basically, he is running an international shakedown.
Trump is an old man, with not many years left in him. (On behalf of all humanity, thanks be to Almighty God for this particular mercy. And for the sake of the country, that gratitude of mine to the Almighty stands even if Trump should outlive me.) In his old age, instead of becoming reflective and restrained in light of his well-shortened mortal horizon, Trump is in full gallop to establish himself as a modern-day Ozymandias. But Percy Shelley’s great poem of the same name is a warning that power is fleeting and that monuments eventually crumble to dust and rust. For my money, Trump’s works are likely to live on mostly in infamy and as a stain upon his children and their children’s children, for generation unto generation. The word “Trump” will be a byword for government by venality, tackiness, greed and cruelty. It will stand wretchedly beside “kakistocracy.”
No Kings day in D.C., Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
For the democratic-minded in this country, all is not lost, though. Trump’s folly and the systemic rot he is causing can be stopped. But that requires the Republicans who control Congress to rise from their slumber, grow a collective spine and reacquaint themselves with the oath that each of them swore when taking office. They swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They did not swear fealty to any president or to any party.
Most of the Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate have violated their oaths by enabling Donald Trump’s obscene excesses, either by active complicity or by passive, cowardly silence. Congress has a duty to act to contain the president. The courts alone cannot do it. And as Congress abandons its moral obligations, it is putting the judiciary, that other branch of government, in the grim position of taking on matters that belong squarely in the political and legislative realm.
No Kings day in D.C., Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
Because Congress is shirking its responsibility to be a check on the executive branch, the federal courts will end up losing their credibility. Congress has already squandered its own credibility through fecklessness, and the country is closer to losing its way in consequence. In the trending climate, disunion is the ultimate danger. Such thinking is not farfetched. Remember the Civil War? Remember the Civil War!
The whole state of affairs tends to be deeply dispiriting. The forces of reaction appear ascendant. But the hopeful opposition is determined to be a bulwark against the growing darkness of authoritarianism and white supremacy. For a theory of hope, let us look to the general trend line of progressivism in this country since its founding.
The trend line began with a hopeful upward leap. The colonies freed themselves from England’s stifling control. They had been vexed and exhausted beyond tolerance by “a long train of abuses and usurpations” committed by the Parliament and the king back in England. From across an ocean, the colonists’ commerce was taxed without their interests being expressed by any representatives from among them. They simply did not have such representatives in England. And here in the colonies, the king’s troops were eating them out of house and home and strangling their liberty (abuses that gave rise to the Third Amendment of the Constitution).
The colonists reached a breaking point, severed the grip of the monarchy and established a nation, deeply flawed, yes, but something that came to be known as the venerable American experiment. Our Declaration of Independence, which one finds with every copy of the U.S. Constitution, is a warning that the people of this country collectively have license to throw off tyranny and build democracy anew. It is a clear warning to Donald Trump, to the likes of Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who is carefully angling to be Trump’s successor, and to the rest of the far right in this country that there can come a breaking point.
This is from Donald Trump on Truth Social tonight:
The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs. The ad was for $75,000. They only did this to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts. TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A. Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT
President Trump’s constant self-reversals on the war in Ukraine must be a great comfort to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who can see clearly that although Trump occasionally talks tough about punishing Putin for the war that he voluntarily started in Ukraine, the U.S. president’s heart is just not in the business of opposing the Russian.
Trump’s record speaks for itself.
On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as Russian military forces were massed on Ukraine’s border with Russia to the east and on the frontier with Belarus in the north, candidate Trump praised as “genius” Vladimir Putin’s declaration two days earlier that the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine were “independent” of Ukraine. Putin was “savvy” because he was going to go into Ukraine to keep the peace. What?
Pro-Russian separatists had for a decade been fighting the Ukrainian military with the goal of tearing a huge part of eastern Ukraine away from the national territory and aligning it with Russia. And from 2014, the separatists in Ukraine had the assistance of Putin’s “little green men” — Russian troops operating on Ukrainian soil but wearing military uniforms without identifying markings. Putin’s declaration on Luhansk and Donetsk, made on Feb. 21, 2022, was his way of cementing independence declarations made by pro-Russian separatists in the two regions in 2014. The proclamations purported to establish a Donetsk People’s Republic and a Luhansk People’s Republic, both occupying Ukrainian land.
You may recall that before the 2022 invasion, Putin had threatened to resort to a “military-technical solution” in Ukraine if he did not receive from NATO an assurance that Ukraine would never join the alliance and if certain other demands about NATO’s posture were not met. NATO, including the United States, rejected Putin’s demands, and so we have a war.
On Feb. 24, 2022, Putin’s forces rolled west out of Russia and south out of Belarus in an operation that the Kremlin thought would have vanquished Ukraine in a matter of days, but the war has been raging from that day to this. Ukraine, reinforced by arms flowing in from Europe and the U.S., has proved a hard nut for Russia to crack.
The Russia-Ukraine war was just another trigger for candidate Trump to tout his imagined greatness as a deal-maker and settler of conflicts. On dozens of occasions during his third presidential campaign, he declared publicly and loudly that he would end the Ukraine war before even starting his new presidency or would do it on Day One. He won the election last November and took office on Jan. 20 of this year, and we are nearing the end of October with the war no closer to being ended.
In April, Time magazine asked Trump about his unfulfilled promise to have ended the war already, and he replied: “Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point, and you know, it gets, of course, by the fake news [unintelligible]. Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended.”
Asked what was taking so long, Trump responded: “Well, I don’t think it’s long. I mean, look, I got here three months ago. This war has been going on for three years. It’s a war that would have never happened if I was president. It’s Biden’s war. It’s not my war. I have nothing to do with it. I would have never had this war. This war would have never happened. Putin would have never done it. This war would have never happened. Oct. 6 would have never happened. Oct. 7 would have never happened. Would have never happened. Ever.“
Also during the campaign, Trump repeatedly criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for his efforts to obtain U.S. weaponry to fight off the Russian aggression, accused him of bearing blame for the war and said that Ukraine, the victim of Russia’s aggression, probably would have to cede territory to Russia for there to be peace.
On April 14 of this year, Trump again blamed Zelensky for the war. “Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win a war,” Trump said at a news conference at the White House. “You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.”
Trump has gone back and forth, again and again, in assigning blame for the war, even, of course, faulting Joe Biden, on whose watch as U.S. president the 2022 invasion took place. In his criticisms, Trump has been tougher on Biden and Zelensky than he has been on Putin. Remember his and Vice President JD Vance’s berating of the Ukrainian leader as ungrateful in the Oval Office on Feb. 28 of this year. Shortly after that acrimonious meeting, U.S. arms transfers to Ukraine were stopped, then quickly restarted. Trump’s pique actually figures into whether the U.S. president will support a country righteously fighting for its very life.
On Aug. 15, Trump hosted Putin in Alaska for a summit on the war. The U.S. president received the Russian graciously at an American military base, according the war-starter the courtesies appropriate for an honored guest. Putin was even allowed to lay flowers in honor of World War II Soviet pilots buried at Fort Richardson National Cemetery. The whole event was yet another instance of Trump flopping in front of Putin, who is the driving force behind a war of aggression and a man indicted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges.
The Alaska summit ended inconclusively, but Trump then spoke of Ukraine’s needing to give up land for a peace agreement to be realized. And here we saw, again, one of Trump’s great weaknesses: a tendency to be swayed by the disputant with whom he has most recently spoken.
On Aug. 18, just three days after the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, Zelensky was to be at the White House again to meet with Trump. But this time, Western Europe was not going to allow Zelensky to walk into a trap as he had at the White House on Feb. 28. A delegation of NATO, European Union and other leaders from Europe rushed to Washington to support Zelensky. That meeting, too, was inconclusive.
Then came another flip. Trump and Zelensky met at the United Nations in New York in September after Trump’s address to the General Assembly. And after his meeting with Zelensky, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Ukraine could “win all of [its territory] back in its original form.”
Zelensky was back at the White House on Oct. 17, without the European posse, and that meeting did not go well, news reports say. Before the meeting, Trump had spoken of granting a request by Zelensky for Tomahawk cruise missiles to allow Ukraine to strike key targets deep inside Russia and make the war much more costly and difficult for Moscow. All seemed to be moving in Ukraine’s desired direction — until Putin called Trump before Zelensky’s visit to the White House.
Whatever Putin said to Trump moved the U.S. president’s position, and he began hedging on Tomahawk deliveries before meeting with Zelensky. The meeting proved to be inconclusive and apparently was confrontational. Immediately after, Trump was back to the line that Ukraine, the victim in the fight, needs to concede territory to Russia, the aggressor in the fight, for the war to stop. It was yet another frustrating and utterly unproductive reversal by Trump.
Our president’s principal formula for peace appears to involve Kyiv’s giving up Ukrainian land that Russia has occupied by force. That idea is a nonstarter for Zelensky. Ukraine is the victim. Russia is the aggressor. Russia should stop the war and leave Ukrainian territory. The formula is simple, and it is the most sensible for the world beyond Russia, because a Russian victory in Ukraine will embolden Putin and thereby endanger all of Europe. After all, Putin’s great dream is to reconstitute a grand Russian empire. Yet Trump just cannot seem to wrap his head around this idea.
He cannot seem to grasp the concept that it is best to stop Putin in Ukraine so that NATO minus one (the U.S.) does not end up fighting Russia after a Putin victory in Ukraine. I say “minus one” because it is not clear at all that the U.S. under Donald Trump would stand with its allies in a conflict started by an expansionist Russia. Such a scenario would have been unthinkable before Putin appeaser Donald Trump became U.S. president. Now we have Trump apparently being more enthusiastic about putting U.S. troops on the streets of American cities than he is about sending weapons to Ukraine to help it fight for its freedom.
What is this mysterious hold that Vladimir Putin has over Trump? Why won’t our leader deal with Putin as the offender that the Russian is? For the sake of world peace, I hope that sooner rather than later we get an answer to this mystery. Something is rotten in it, and it stinks dangerously.
President Trump is justly celebrating the apparent end of the war in the Gaza Strip in a peace agreement that his administration brokered. Just over a week past the second anniversary of the horrific attack from Gaza into Israel that triggered this war, Hamas and its allied fighting groups in that part of Palestine have largely been defeated — although not yet eliminated — by the Israeli military. After tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza and the razing of much of the territory’s built environment, the Palestinian survivors there can begin piecing together something resembling a recovery.
Next to come: the stabilization and redevelopment of Gaza under a 20-point Trump plan to be overseen by the “Board of Peace” (read “Board of Grift”) which Trump, of course, will lead. The stabilization and redevelopment plan is beautifully explained by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
But a great danger remains. The seeds of further conflict lie in the Trump peace plan and in the ruins of Gaza. The plan calls for an “International Stabilization Force” drawn from Arab and other supportive countries gradually to take over security in Gaza as Israel withdraws its troops in stages. The plan also calls for the disarming of Hamas and the other Palestinian fighting groups in Gaza and for the destruction of their weaponry. But Hamas does not agree to be disarmed and disbanded. And it views the Board of Peace as a neocolonialist structure.
The rumps of Hamas and the other fighting groups remain embedded in Gaza, and all kinds of weaponry, including explosives, remain cached all over the territory. Will the International Stabilization Force, or ISF, become the new enemy and target of Gaza’s militants? That remains to be seen, but it seems to me to be highly likely. If the remnants of these groups do fight on, little progress will be possible in Gaza beyond the trucking in of emergency food and medical aid. Obviously, the absence of fighting is a requirement for large-scale reconstruction to occur.
But if Gaza’s fighting groups do finally agree to stand down and disarm, watch for a Trump-facilitated grift in Gaza on a scale “like nobody’s seen before,” to borrow one of the grifter in chief’s favorite hyperbolic formulations. We already know from Trump’s own mouth that he has his eyes on Gaza as a Mediterranean resort destination. (He seems to have dropped, at least for the present, the mad idea of clearing Gaza of its Palestinian population.) In his dual role as U.S. president and head of the Board of Grift, Trump will be able to steer redevelopment work and other moneymaking opportunities in the new Gaza to his friends and political donors. And you can be sure that the Trump family will be dipping its beak into the river of money that will be flowing into the rebuilding of Gaza’s housing stock, roads, hospitals, clinics, bakeries, shops, water supply systems and sewage plants.
The new resort-flavored Gaza will need a specific type of seafront profile. It will need corniches and marinas and luxury hotels (the Trump family’s special area, lest we forget).
Who will sit on the Board of Peace alongside Trump to make all of this come to pass has not been announced beyond the lamentable Tony Blair. And his participation now seems in doubt after Trump said over the weekend that it was unclear whether Blair would be acceptable to all others involved with the board. Trump’s announcement of Blair’s name at the announcement of the Board of Peace drew an intense backlash. Blair has been severely out of favor for backing the falsely grounded 2003 invasion of Iraq when he was British prime minister.
But who are the others to sit on the Board of Peace? Trump will be looking for certain kinds of people to be with him, because he will need those people to be onboard with the entity’s alter ego, the Board of Grift. This much we can take for granted: He will have no use for people who are likely to raise awkward concerns about fiscal transparency, accountability and fairness, because transparency, accountability and fairness are anathema to any enterprise in which Trump is involved.
Meanwhile, on the home front, the great peacemaker is making war on his chosen targets via the U.S. military and the Department of Justice. National Guard troops are being sent into large, Democrat-run cities, which of course did not support Trump in the election, to intimidate them on the pretext of crime emergencies in those jurisdictions. Although National Guard troops are still to be seen roaming aimlessly in D.C. after Trump inanely declared the city to be totally crime-free, the president has shifted his attention elsewhere, and cowing Chicago seems to be his present obsession. Expect him to resume his domestic aggression as soon as he has finished making peace overseas.
With the fanatical compliance of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump has sicced a handpicked federal prosecutor on former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. And Bondi’s Justice Department is investigating Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors whom Trump is trying to fire. Her alleged crime is mortgage fraud. So is Letitia James’. Comey’s is allegedly lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee during testimony in September 2020 about leaks from the FBI to news media concerning FBI investigations.
But these three people’s real crimes are that they have either resisted Trump or have had some hand in legal cases against him.
Lisa Cook: Trump wants to appoint a lackey to the traditionally independent Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and one of his other lackeys, Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, came up with accusation that Cook had committed mortgage fraud. Trump declared her fired on that basis; she resisted and sued him and the Fed itself, for good measure. For now, the Supreme Court is allowing her to remain a Fed governor. But Pam Bondi’s Justice Department is beavering away at making a criminal case against Cook.
Letitia James: The attorney general of New York state had the temerity to sue Trump’s company for business fraud and win a judgment requiring the disgorgement of hundreds of millions of dollars of ill-gotten money. Trump declared that she should be prosecuted, and so she is being prosecuted.
James Comey: In March 2017, when Comey was director of the FBI and Trump was just settling into his first term as president, the agency began investigating whether members of Trump’s presidential campaign had colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Trump was outraged, of course, and Comey was the target of his ire. Trump fired Comey in May 2017, citing a loss of confidence in the director. Trump has held that grudge like an heirloom, and when he recently declared — for the umpteenth time — that Comey should be prosecuted, the deed was all but done.
The U.S. attorney who is prosecuting Comey and James is Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer to Donald Trump who was hastily appointed on an interim basis to the Justice Department’s Eastern District of Virginia, the famous “rocket docket.” She has had no previous prosecutorial experience. Her background is in insurance law, and she worked for a law firm before joining the Trump White House, from which perch she was sent to take charge of the very serious Eastern District, one of the most prestigious of the Justice Department’s districts and a preferred venue for terrorism and other national security cases.
Halligan was appointed specifically to secure an indictment of Comey because her predecessor, Trump-appointee Erik Siebert, had declined to take that action on the grounds that the case was inadequate and was then forced out by Trump. After securing the Comey indictment, Halligan got one for James, the New York attorney general. If anyone wonders why she was able to indict whereas her predecessor would not act, just remember the famous declaration by former New York Court of Appeals chief judge Solomon Wachtler: any prosecutor can get a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The prosecutor simply feeds the grand jury cherry-picked evidence to get the desired outcome.
So as Trump wraps up his whirlwind peace mission in the Middle East and heads back to the home front, he will be wringing the neck of the white dove and burning the olive branch.
He is coming home to cast off the mantle of peace and snatch up the sword that he dropped when he set off abroad. But we want no dictators or kings here in these United States, so he is returning to meet his match in that segment of the American populace that sees him for what he is and has righteously decided that he will not have his way here.
***
The next No Kings day is this Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Find D.C.-area events here. National website here.
No, you and I need not be psychiatrists to recognize mental illness. We know it when we see it.
If you are out of doors in your town and encounter a man in the street shouting about his enormous imagined competencies and accomplishments while complaining about always being persecuted, do you hail him as a most excellent soul and invite into your life to manage your important affairs? Or do you avoid eye contact with him and keep your distance out of fear that in his psychosis, this afflicted person might attack you violently for no reason other than his sickness?
President Trump is featured on a banner at the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C., on Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. A corresponding banner out of the frame to the right shows President Theodore Roosevelt. A Department of Commerce and Labor was established under Roosevelt in 1903. The Department of Labor was established as a Cabinet-level entity in 1913. In this portrait, Trump obviously channels his demeanor in the mug shot to which he was obliged to submit when he was charged locally in Georgia with election interference. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
The American electorate had such a choice in the past three presidential elections. In the first instance, in 2016, the mental defective was embraced as some sort of messiah and invited indoors. As many clearheaded people predicted, the nation’s experience with him at the helm would prove to be disastrous. Therefore, moved by buyer’s regret, the electorate pushed him out of office in 2020. But it was disturbing to note that even then, a huge share of the electorate had wanted to keep this fool on the job — inevitably along with his chaos.
Nonetheless, he was out. He couldn’t take the loss of face. He made an almighty fuss, claiming that he had been cheated in the election, and he inspired some of his supporters to attempt a coup to keep him in office. That failed, and he was replaced by a well-meaning but cognitively impaired, doddering man just a little older than the lunatic. In 2024, the electorate, apparently also overcome by madness, compared the doddering old man and the flaming lunatic and made the incomprehensible decision to return the lunatic to office.
This time around, he has been off his chain. His delusions of grandeur have been grander and more menacing than ever. And whatever is ailing his brain is clearly becoming worse. If you wish to see evidence, just look at Trump’s performance on two recent occasions: his address to the United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan on Sept. 23 and his speech to senior U.S. military officers in Quantico, Va., on Sept. 30. If you can make it any meaningful distance into those speeches, you will see that both were showcases of nonsensical rambling leavened with lies, exaggerations, fantasies, self-pity and the usual lashings of spiteful rhetoric. They clearly show a thought process marred by illness.
In both instances — occasions on which rational and normal leaders would have presented consequential visions of the world’s future and of how the U.S. military would buttress the nation as it advanced core U.S. values of promoting democracy and maintaining old alliances and building new confederations against tyranny and backwardness — Trump fell woefully short. It is clear that he is not being advised in any positive way. Both speeches were unhinged screeds fit for a campaign appearance in front of a low-information and fanatical audience.
At the U.N., we saw a bitter and ignorant old man complaining and complaining as he always does, and patronizing and insulting the rest of the world on various bases. James M. Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations summed up Trump’s speech at the U.N. this way:
Much of Trump’s speech was familiar to anyone who has watched a MAGA rally. He frequently went off script. He boasted of his domestic policy successes, complained that he had been overlooked for the Nobel Prize, and bragged that the United States is “the hottest country in the world.” Former President Joe Biden served as a punching bag throughout the speech. Trump mentioned his predecessor directly or indirectly nine times, accusing him of leading “the most corrupt, incompetent administration in history.”
Biden was not the only target of Trump’s barbs. The United Nations was as well. Some of his complaints were minor: a broken escalator on his way to the speech and a malfunctioning teleprompter once he reached the dais. Some were historical: he lamented losing a contract decades ago to renovate UN headquarters and claimed he would have done a far better job than the winning contractor and would have given the building marble rather than terrazzo floors. And some were substantive: he argued that the United Nations is failing to live up to its “tremendous potential.” Anyone familiar with the United Nations sympathized when he dismissed its penchant for a “strongly worded letter” and “empty words” in place of effective action. He offered no practical solutions, however, for improving the organization’s operations.
To the extent that Trump’s speech had a theme, it was the evils of immigration and renewable energy.
Observe this demented flight into fantasy early in Trump’s U.N. speech (the bolding for emphasis is mine):
Six years have passed since I last stood in this grand hall and addressed a world that was prosperous and at peace in my first term. Since that day, the guns of war have shattered the peace I forged on two continents.
***
Something new has emerged among Trump’s obsessions: the Nobel Peace Prize. He and his minions actually have been lobbying for it. This behavior is outrageous. Who does this? Donald Trump does, because his diseased mind cannot stand the idea that Barack Obama, one of the people he despises most in all the world, was given the Nobel Peace Prize merely for taking office s U.S. president in 2009. Obama certainly had no accomplishments to justify being awarded the prize, and that award has stuck in Trump’s craw as an unhealthy idée fixe, although he is even less deserving of the accolade. So when he spoke to the admirals and generals in Quantico, the Nobel was on his mind. He claimed then, as previously, to have settled seven wars, with a settlement of the conflict between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip possibly about to be his eighth peacemaking triumph.
Here is Trump in Quantico:
Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not. They’ll give it — they’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing.
And if he does not get the prize:
[I]t’ll be a big insult to our country, I will tell you that. I don’t want it. I want the country to get it. It should get it because there’s never been anything like it. Think of it. So if this [peace in Gaza] happens, I think it will.
I don’t say that lightly because I know more about deals than anybody. That’s what my whole life was based on. And they can change and this can certainly change. But we have just about everybody. We have one signature that we need and that signature will pay in hell if they [Hamas] don’t sign. I hope they sign for their own good and we create something really great.
Also in Quantico, he suggested, casually, that the U.S. military use Democratic-run large U.S. cities as training grounds. This is a U.S. president speaking in the Year of Our Lord 2025! Here is what he said, and it was in the context of his supposedly eradicating crime from Washington, D.C. (again, the emphasis is mine):
And now, Washington D.C. after 12 days of serious, serious intensity, we took out 1,700 career criminals.
If you have five career criminals, they can make your numbers look very bad because they’ll commit many crimes a day. But we took out 1,700, and they took them out. There was no doubt who the boss was. They did an unbelievable job. Then they [National Guard troops] started even cleaning. I said, I don’t want them doing that. Sir, they wanted.
They were cleaning it up. I drove through it two days ago, it was beautiful. People were walking down the street, holding hands. Man and wife coming from Iowa, they’re not worried about being shot. Washington, D.C. is now a safe city. In fact, I went out to dinner with my crew. I haven’t done that. In theory.
I wouldn’t do it. And I felt totally safe. And nobody’s been attacked. Nobody’s been hurt. Washington D.C. went from our most unsafe city to just about our safest city in a period of a month. We had it under control in 12 days, but give us another 15 or 16 days, it was — it’s perfect.
… You know, the Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape, too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.
… And I told [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth], we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city, with an incompetent governor, stupid governor, stupid.
A madman with federal executive power is threatening to unleash the U.S. military on American citizens in cities he identifies with the political opposition. In an era of deeply transgressive firsts in the governance of this country, Trump could well find that he becomes the first U.S. president to be removed from office by the U.S. military. Let him keep overreaching, and we will see what happens. Somewhere, at some point, something will have to give.
A patrolling police officer and the occupants of a veterans protest tent chat amicably outside Union Station in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Oct. 5, 2025. The U.S. Park Service allowed this veterans group to keep its First Amendment activity permit, which it continues to use to encourage members of the military to defy President Trump’s orders deploying them in D.C. and other cities. But the Park Service revoked the permit of FLARE USA, which had operated a larger tent, 24/7, with bold signage calling for Trump’s impeachment. That encampment was dismantled by U.S. Park Police officers and other Park Service personnel before daylight on Friday, Oct. 3. According to Washingtonian magazine, the Interior Department, which oversees the Park Service, issued a notice to FLARE saying that the permit holder, Jake Adams, had “personally assaulted a USPP [U.S. Park Police] officer.” The alleged assault by the FLARE permit holder aside, someone at the veterans tent surmised that his group still had its permit only because the Trump administration feared the optics of tearing down a veterans protest encampment. Photo by Gilbert DunkleyA veterans encampment outside Union Station at Columbus Circle in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 1, 2025, encourages National Guard troops deployed outside the transit hub to honor their oath to the U.S. Constitution above obedience to President Donald Trump.FLARE USA’s anti-Trump protest encampment, installed outside Union Station at Columbus Circle in Washington, D.C., is seen on Sept. 1, 2025. FLARE USA had a permit from the U.S. Park Service to carry out First Amendment-protected activity there. The Park Service revoked the group’s permit days ago, citing an alleged assault by the permit holder on a U.S. Park Police officer, and authorities broke down the encampment and trucked it away in the predawn hours of Friday, Oct. 3, 2025. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
***
Whatever the subject before him, Trump declares that he knows more about it than anyone else — medical matters; military affairs; diplomacy; business; the country’s economy; the environment; our tax system. You name it, Trump is the greatest expert in the subject. And anyone who has an opinion contrary to his is so far in error as virtually to be committing treason. In September, for instance, Trump declared that heavily critical media coverage of him is “really illegal.” Yes, illegal. This man is plainly mad.
During the past presidential campaign, Trump disparaged the nation’s capital city as “nightmare of murder and crime” and threatened to take it under federal control to clean up its problems and its image. After taking over policing in D.C. for a month this summer and bringing in law enforcement officers from numerous federal agencies — plus National Guard troops from a number of states in a deployment that continues here — Trump declared variously on Sept. 1, 2 and 3 that D.C. had “no crime” or that “there is none” as a consequence of his security surge. Follow the D.C. police on X and see for yourself the numerous fresh crimes on which MPD is seeking the public’s assistance.
Trump’s 30-day crime-emergency order for D.C. expired on Sept. 10, and the extra law enforcement officers have gone back to their various agencies. At the end of the “emergency,” Trump declared that there was no more crime in D.C. And he has continued to make that plainly ridiculous declaration, despite the Metropolitan Police Department’s multiple daily appeals via X and YouTube for the public to provide information so that the police can address various newly occurring crimes. Even when he addressed senior U.S. military officers in Quantico on Sept. 30, Trump continued to lie shamelessly about crime in D.C., to wit: “Now I can say it because we solved it, but Washington D.C. was the most unsafe, most dangerous city in the United States of America.”
Trump’s initial excited exaggeration of crime in D.C. and his latter declaration of having eliminated this problem from the city were both plainly absurd.
Alert: MPD units are Investigating a shooting in the 1800 block of Rhode Island Avenue North East. Lookout for grey vehicle. Unknown make and model. DO NOT TAKE ACTION CALL 911
D.C. in general was not “a nightmare of murder and crime” to begin with, and there is not now “no crime” in the city, not even in the poshest and best-secured areas. Yes, there is crime in D.C. In fact, there are parts of the city that I have seen with my own eyes to be frightening places. But Trump’s security surge did not touch those places, because his surge was all about deceitful optics.
National Guard troops cross the quiet intersection of 20th and S streets NW in north Dupont Circle, D.C., at 10:21 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025. The one-month crime emergency that President Trump declared in D.C. ended on Sept. 10, and the extra law enforcement officers that he had deployed in the city have been withdrawn, but his deployment of National Guard personnel in D.C. continues. They can be seen roaming various parts of the city in little groups, armed but lacking police powers and serving no clear purpose. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
Trump had an opening to stage this pointless performance because of the timidity and fecklessness of local D.C. politicians on the question of crime. D.C., like many other major U.S. cities with large and largely poor black populations, is chronically afflicted by the kind of largely black-perpetrated street crime and antisocial behavior that seriously diminishes the quality of life for people, including other black residents, across the city. I speak of carjackings, car break-ins, package thefts, shoplifting, group sweeps by thieves through retail stores, gun and knife robberies on the streets, public weed-smoking that poisons the air in many places with a horrid stink, and loud and obnoxious behavior in all kinds of public settings.
The feebleness of the D.C. Council on the question of crime has given the demented president and his pet U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, the opportunity to posture as heroes in attacking D.C.’s Youth Rehabilitation Act, a piece of legislation dating to 1985 that the D.C. Council never should have passed. The YRA provides sentencing alternatives — excepting murder linked to terrorism, and a few other crimes — for juveniles and young adult offenders. Its practical effect has been a slap-on-the-wrist criminal justice culture vis-à-vis young offenders, who are a predatory scourge in D.C. and in some of the D.C.-adjacent cities in Maryland and Virginia.
***
Trump says any foolishness that comes into his head because he remains unchallenged by those around him who are in a position to counsel him, to speak plainly to him about the wildness of his fantasies, to beseech him to seek psychiatric help. In fact, the great hater Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, is one of the biggest abettors of Trump’s deranged policies. The actual chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is the most silent and invisible White House chief of staff that I have observed since the Reagan era, which is when I began seriously paying attention to American politics.
And there is the baleful influence of Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Vought is an architect of Project 2025, that blueprint for the right-wing, white-supremacist mission of permanently taking control of the levers of power in this country to, supposedly, save the nation from the non-white horde — and make America great again, lest we forget, like it was in the days of Jim Crow.
***
Trump’s madness would be irrelevant were he not the president of the United States. But he is our president and not just some crazy fellow wandering the streets and barking at the sun. His delusions about being a master negotiator and of bending the world to his will have led him into an erratic tariff regime that is alienating countries around the world and, more important, is leading them to reform their economic alliances to the detriment of the United States’ economy.
Case in point: China, Brazil and Argentina. Until Trump returned to office this year and imposed a moving target of tariffs on U.S. imports of Chinese-manufactured products, China had been the single largest purchaser of U.S. soybeans, annually taking some 60 percent of U.S. soybean output. China answered Trump’s tariffs with its own tariffs on U.S.-made goods imported into China. But China, which has a command economy, went a step further: This year, news reports — and U.S. farmers — say China has ordered no soybeans from the U.S. None. Zero.
We are entering the fall season, and the U.S. soybean crop is ready to be harvested, and farmers in Illinois, Iowa, Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Missouri and Ohio are in crisis. The Chinese buyers have shifted their money to Brazil and Argentina, which are the U.S.’s top soybean producing competitors.
Huge gains for soybean farmers in Brazil and Argentina, and steep losses for and even the prospect of bankruptcies in the U.S. soybean sector. Our farmers can thank President Trump, that great visionary. Now comes word that Trump is looking into a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of farmers who have been plunged into this crisis of Trump’s careless making. This is exactly what happened in Trump’s first term: His insane policies created a crisis with whose cost the taxpayer was saddled. In 2024, this country’s farmers voted overwhelmingly for Trump, again, and again they have been burned by him.
Yes, Trump is crazy, but guess what? He is not alone.
As of midnight, we have been in a partial shutdown of the federal government because of an impasse in the U.S Senate over a continuing resolution to fund the government until Nov. 21. The measure cleared the Republican-controlled House on Sept. 19 on a vote of 217 to 212. In the Senate, under that chamber’s special rules, the measure needed 60 votes to pass, but Republicans do not have that number in their own conference and so need Democratic votes to pass the measure. Competing Republican and Democratic versions failed in the final hours before the shutdown deadline of midnight on Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
What’s the holdup? Changes to Medicaid are involved, but the main issue is that Democrats insist that an extension of expiring subsidies for Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) health insurance premiums be included in the continuing resolution. Republicans promised to engage in a discussion of the ACA premium subsidies and other health-care-related matters at a later date. Democrats held out. No continuing resolution was passed by the deadline of midnight Tuesday looking into Wednesday, and now, on Wednesday, we’re in a partial government shutdown that could drag on.
Bravo, Senate Democrats! Do not give an inch in this fight; the outcome here is crucial to the health of about 24 million Americans.
The federal subsidies for premiums on health insurance purchased through the ACA marketplace were to have expired several years ago, but these subsidies were twice extended via major bills passed in Congress during the Biden administration. To be clear, these subsidies are funded by taxpayer money, and some critics of the program loudly disparage the subsidies as socialism. But they are no more socialistic than the federal government subsidies that are included in every Farm Bill to help keep American agriculture in business. Nor are they any more socialistic than the $28 billion fund set up during the first Trump administration to help farmers who lost export sales as a direct consequence of the tariff wars that Trump started.
As far as I am concerned, the federal subsidies for ACA health insurance premiums are a righteous use of public money.
And as for Republicans’ saying they are willing to discuss ACA subsidies at a later date but not now, that is a crock. The emergency is now. Annual open enrollment for health insurance begins on Nov. 1, but in a matter of days from now, health insurers will be sending their customers notifications about the premiums those companies will charge for coverage in 2026. To set their pricing plans for 2026, the companies need certainty now, not in two weeks or later.
The question of ACA premium subsidies must be resolved now, not later. If no extension of subsidies is passed in the short-term spending bill — or continuing resolution (so named because it continues federal funding at existing levels in the absence of a proper appropriations bill) — health insurance premiums for the approximately 24 million Americans now covered via the ACA will rise steeply. The consequence will be that millions of Americans will no longer be able to afford health insurance and will drop out of coverage.
One cannot reasonably forecast how many people now covered by insurance purchased through the ACA would give up the coverage because they decided they just could no longer afford it, but surely the number would be in the multiple millions. The great danger, of course, is that people with chronic ailments such as heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, respiratory diseases and various mental illnesses will suddenly stop taking their maintenance medications. Use your imagination. No good can possibly come of such a situation.
But despite the public harm caused unaffordable health insurance premiums, Republicans would have made progress on one of their cherished objectives: destroying the Affordable Care Act. You may recall the Republican reaction to the legislation when it was signed into law by President Barack Obama in March 2010, with then-Vice President Joe Biden being caught on a hot microphone telling Obama, “This is a big fucking deal!” Republicans were dead set against it, and I always thought that their opposition was in large measure rooted in racism.
The right-wing white Republican establishment despised Obama — not just for himself but also for what his election signaled about the future direction of the country — and that establishment recognized that a program that would help millions and millions of uninsured Americans to afford health coverage would be a legacy achievement for the nation’s first black president. The very thought of it incensed those Republicans no end, and they set out to destroy what was by then well known as “Obamacare.”
Enter this appalling man by the name of Donald Trump. In addition to his regular 2016 campaign boast that he would build a southern border wall for whose construction Mexico would pay, he repeatedly pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better. I do not recall that he ever clearly articulated what was wrong with the ACA, but he would produce something better than it, he declared.
When this malignant racist became president in January 2017, he began his legislative assault on the ACA, the proudest domestic work of his black predecessor, via his pet Republican conferences in the House and Senate. He failed, most spectacularly when Sen. John McCain — a Republican, we should remember — gave that famous thumbs-down on the Senate floor in July 2018, driving the fatal stake into the heart of the GOP’s best attempt at repealing Obamacare.
Republicans have not given up on their hope of seeing the death of Obamacare. What they have given up on is any pretense that they intend to offer an alternative. They never had one in the days of Trump 1.0 when they were pretending that they had such a plan; and there is no longer any talk of producing something better. Under Trump 2.0, the Republican agenda across the federal government is simply to dismantle and destroy, and nothing is being created that is not a tribute to the diseased ego of Mad King Trump.
So we return to the present test facing congressional Democrats. For leverage in the standoff, Trump has threatened to fire vast numbers of federal workers rather than furlough them during the shutdown, as would be normal. Democrats should ignore this threat. The ACA question is a red line from which they must not retreat. If they fold here, they will surrender any credibility and usefulness they could have had in the necessary resistance to the madman.
The leaders of Turkey and Pakistan also were expected to visit
One of the joys of living in my particular spot in Washington, D.C., is that a leisurely walk of under 30 minutes can deliver me to the White House or to any number of other important sites in the city. On the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 25, I strolled over to the White House expecting to see a large demonstration against an expected visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his pal Donald Trump.
I did not find a large demonstration. The visit is to be on Monday, in fact. I did find a great deal of extra fencing. Walk the perimeter with me to partake of some interesting sights and sounds.
I applaud the Walt Disney Company’s decision to reinstate “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” starting on Tuesday, after Disney-0wned ABC suspended it indefinitely last week because of uncharitable remarks that Kimmel made about the Sept. 10 assassination of the conservative lightning rod Charlie Kirk.
Disney had issued the suspension in response to a conservative backlash that included ABC-affiliated Sinclair and Nexstar declaring that they would no longer carry Kimmel’s show on their many stations around the country. Behind much of everything, of course, lies money: These large television and entertainment companies almost always have business underway that needs federal government approval, and they have to be careful to present the correct posture before the highly vindictive Trump administration. It was almost natural, therefore, that Disney and its affiliates would do a bit of virtue signaling by dropping the hammer on Kimmel.
To be clear, the argument over Kimmel’s show is not a First Amendment matter. Disney is a private entity, not a government agency, so it cannot be accused of violating Kimmel’s constitutional right to free speech, because Kimmel has no such claim in respect of a private corporation. Disney is at liberty to terminate any presenter’s contract over speech that Disney does not like. But the public that pays Disney for the entertainment it provides also is entitled to withdraw its money from Disney products and spend it elsewhere, or just sit on it, if it does not like Disney’s decisions.
Disney immediately faced a different backlash for benching Kimmel. This one came broadly from the left in the form of loud and harsh criticism of the Kimmel suspension as corporate cowardice in the face of a Trump administration that is demonstrably committed to quashing criticism of federal government policy as well as of the font of federal policy, the stable genius that is President Donald Trump himself.
And the new backlash also took the important form of canceled subscriptions; Disney was frightened about losing money. After all, money rules. So the corporation again adjusted its calculations and decided that it was better that Kimmel and his program be restored.
Or, if I am to be charitable and optimistic in my outlook, it could be that the powers atop Disney genuinely decided that it was more important that media corporations begin to grow some backbone under the repressive pressure the federal government is exerting.
Whatever its real motivations, Disney did a good thing today in restoring Kimmel’s show. And I will now renew the Disney subscription that I canceled over the Kimmel suspension.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a dreadful crime, and the killer is likely to be executed for what he has done. But no one who opposes President Donald Trump for his anti-democratic excesses should ease up for even a moment in the campaign to spotlight and denounce those transgressions.
If you are pointing out dangerous actions and behaviors in reasonable words and are not encouraging the use of violence, you should consider yourself to be in the clear and should press on with speaking truth to this corrupt power.
Keep challenging Trump’s overreach and the GOP-led Congress’s cowardly dereliction of its duty to be a check on the executive branch. Continue telling that same Congress that we are watching for it to rouse itself and hypocritically rediscover its voice when the next Democratic president takes office and tries to effect his or her agenda. Keep telling Congress that the executive excesses on which it is silent today are establishing precedents that tomorrow’s presidents — Republican and Democrat — will be able employ to constrain disapproving voices, throttle the courts and to stifle the inconvenient rights of the sovereign people.
Keep pointing out that under Trump, the executive branch is, more than ever, a center of power pursuing the interests of the occupant of the Oval Office to the detriment of the common good.
Trump’s supporters seem to have calculated that they will be safe because Trump is their man and they are his people, that he will forever focus on the enemy. But who is enemy and who friend in Trump’s eyes, and for how long? Supporters of aspiring authoritarians have erred fatally in this calculation repeatedly throughout history, failing to recognize that the dictator is a pathological personality who views even his supporters and allies as tools and will turn on them the moment this becomes convenient for him.
Suddenly, they, who were the heroic people in the authoritarian’s telling yesterday, become the enemies of the people. This pattern is already plain to see in Trump’s behavior since his first term. Who can count the number of people he has embraced as the finest to serve him in government and elsewhere, only to turn on them and attack them as villainous and incompetent, even treasonous, because they have indulged in independent thinking? Who can forget his attacks on his own supporters for wanting greater transparency in the Jeffrey Epstein sex crimes case, a matter on which Trump has exhibited an interesting level of touchiness?
All those immigrant groups that supported him in the election? They fancied themselves to be among the elect. They were wrong. They found out in his immigration enforcement sweeps.
Let us deplore the killing of Charlie Kirk and commiserate with his wife and children and the wider community that loved him. But let us not be diverted from our principal purpose by noises such as Trump’s linking of Kirk’s assassination to violent rhetoric on the left. Absolutely no one in American public political discourse of the past decade has unleashed more violent and incendiary rhetoric than Donald Trump has from his perch on the extreme right of American politics.
Since he declared for the presidency in June 2015, he has demolished the guardrails of self-restraint and decency and has dragged this country’s political culture toward levels of physical confrontation not seen since the civil rights struggles of the post-World War II era.
A 22-year-old man may have fired the shot that killed Charlie Kirk in Utah, but when 79-year-old Trump looks in the mirror here in Washington, D.C., he will see someone who bears part of the blame for that heinous assassination. His supporters should wake up and see who is leading them, and to where.
Democracy Warrior 