israel – Democracy Warrior

Keep your eyes on the midterms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduced in House (01/30/2026)

Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act or the SAVE America Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A profane protest near the White House

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

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

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

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.

The peace, the grift and the vendetta

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.

Video: Netanyahu at the White House

A visit to the temporary, expanded White House perimeter fence on H Street NW in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Sept. 29, 2025, during the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to President Donald Trump.
— Video and photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Shameful U.S. silence on the genocide in Gaza

A nation that was born as a rebuke to genocide is now guilty of committing genocide to preserve its own existence.

That is a broad-strokes painting of where Israel finds itself today. But between today and the end of World War II — during which Nazi Germany tried to extirpate Europe’s Jews — lies a tormented and bloodstained narrative of colonial highhandedness, ineptitude and bankrupt assumptions; betrayals; usurpations; religious and secular warfare; deep hatreds; land grabs; displacements; massacres; terroristic murder; apartheid; and so much else, all for control of what the American author Aaron David Miller has called “the much too promised land.”

This is how the United Nations defines genocide: acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

And the U.N. lists acts that constitute genocide:

Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

With the exception of the final item in the list, I think all of the conditions for genocide exist in the Gaza Strip. But what is the proximate context and background to what is happening in Gaza?

On Oct. 7, 2023, the terrorist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, led a shock assault out of Gaza into southern Israel, attacking multiple small civilian communities, Israeli military posts and a music festival underway in the desert near the Israel-Gaza frontier. The assault force included fighters representing multiple groups that are pretty much universally committed to the eradication of the state of Israel: Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades; Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades; the Popular Resistance Committees’ al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades; and, of course, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades among a handful of other militant anti-Israel groups.

The assault was a horror. About 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, were slaughtered in civilian settings and at military posts. The terrorists butchered people in unspeakable ways, and about 250 people, also mostly Israelis, were kidnapped and hauled across the frontier into Gaza to be held hostage for bargaining purposes. Israel responded with a furious assault on Gaza to destroy Hamas and its allied forces and to free the hostages.

Today, about 50 of the hostages are thought still to be in Gaza, but it is now feared that most of those are corpses. To minimize its own troop losses, Israel has taken the sledgehammer approach to killing militants. And so Gaza lies in absolute ruin because of the pounding that it has taken from Israeli artillery fire and airstrikes, Israel’s preferred method of attack.

More important, an estimated over 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in the bombardments. How many of those are non-combatants is unclear, because the Hamas authorities in Gaza obviously will not issue numbers distinguishing between fighters and civilians. But there is no doubt that the vast majority of the victims of the war have been Palestinian civilians, people trapped in Gaza with no way to escape the fighting between Israel and the Hamas coalition.

Remind yourself that the Gaza Strip is, indeed, a strip of land, just 25 miles deep and about seven miles at its widest point, bounded to the south by Egypt’s North Sinai Governorate, to the west by the Mediterranean Sea, and to the east and north by Israeli territory. Israel holds the sea and the surrounding land except for that south of Gaza, which is Egypt’s.

Gaza is, in effect, a prison holding about 2 million suffering people. Most of them have been displaced multiple times, chased from their homes by fighting or directly ordered by Israeli forces to leave parts of Gaza to make way for military operations.

As Israel has pressed its campaign, its military has repeatedly targeted journalists working in Gaza, killing scores so far, no doubt to cut off the outward flow of information about the atrocious spectacle unfolding in Gaza. And with the repeated killings of aid workers, medical rescue personnel and civilians just trying to get food at aid distribution points, no one should doubt that the Israeli military is acting with naked malice toward Palestinians in Gaza.

Palestinian civilians have repeatedly been herded in every direction within that tiny territory. Their homes have been leveled. All the normal structures of civic life have been shattered. Their hospitals have been repeatedly attacked and are mostly out of use — and not just because Israel has wanted to destroy them: Hamas does embed itself in civilian facilities, as the Israeli forces say, because Hamas cares nothing about how many Palestinian civilians it causes to be slaughtered as it pursues its own interests. If it cared at all, the conflict would not have come to this.

And what it has come to is famine.

A single dry sentence just issued in a United Nations report should shock us all: “As of 15 August 2025, Famine (IPC Phase 5)—with reasonable evidence—is confirmed in Gaza Governorate.”

Those words are the essence of a “snapshot report” on the hunger situation in the Gaza Strip, whose lifelines have been exclusively in Israeli hands for many months now. The next two sentences of the snapshot are no less grim: “After 22 months of relentless conflict, over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic conditions characterised by starvation, destitution and death. Another 1.07 million people (54 percent) are in Emergency (IPC Phase 4), and 396,000 people (20 percent) are in Crisis (IPC Phase 3).”

The Israeli government declares that there is no starvation in Gaza.

But that is a lie.

Israel has repeatedly cut off or sharply restricted the entry of food and medicines into Gaza in order to force Hamas to give up the remaining hostages, employing the illegal tactic of collective punishment. But we also know that Israel has another design on Gaza. It wants to possess all of that land, but without Palestinians on it. And the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is busily scheming with the barbarian Donald Trump to cleanse the Gaza Strip of its people and turn the place into a gleaming Mediterranean resort for the world’s unscrupulous rich. They are planning ethnic cleansing, lest anyone be confused about what is in the works.

And it is because Donald Trump, the chief executive of the United States, is a part of this dirty plan that the U.S. government is silent on the genocide that is unfolding in Gaza. How did the great United States of America sink to such infamy? When your nation is led by a thug, thuggish things will be done in your nation’s name.

But what about Congress, our independent legislature and a check on the executive branch of government led by Trump as president? Ah, poor Congress. So cowardly, so feckless. It is in the hands of Republicans, and almost to a person, they are moral midgets. They remain silent in the face of multiple outrages being committed by the Trump administration.

Why will members of the Republican majority that controls Congress not rouse themselves to say something about the enormous crime being committed in Gaza? They have an obligation to do so, because we, the United States, are the ultimate guarantors of Israel’s security. As such, the Israeli government’s crimes are our crimes. Israel’s infamy is our infamy.

The genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza is being armed and underwritten by us. This is intolerable.

Clarification: The assertion that fighters from Gaza who attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, committed rapes is a highly disputed issue, and an assertion that rapes were committed that day has been removed from this post. It is to be noted, however, that on Aug. 14, 2025, the U.N. secretary general’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict issued a news release that includes the following passage:
With respect to the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Hamas is listed in the annex of the report on the basis of information verified by the United Nations in 2024, indicating reasonable grounds to believe that some hostages taken to Gaza were subjected to different forms of sexual violence during their time in captivity, and clear and convincing information that sexual violence also occurred during the attacks of 7 October 2023 in at least six locations.

The actual report can be seen here.