Politics – Democracy Warrior

The persecution of Kilmar Ábrego García

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On his return, he was immediately jailed in Tennessee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

A few of Trump’s latest travesties

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

But not all Americans are silent or indifferent.

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

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

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

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

The November report tells a story of two Donald Trumps:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rise and fall of Marjorie Taylor Greene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to The Hill, this happened subsequently:

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guess who’s coming to dinner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump runs wild as Congress sleeps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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.

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

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

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

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

They all should take heed.

Trump’s mental decline continues

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

On Ukraine, Trump is an obstacle

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.

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.

Democrats, stand firm on shutdown!

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.

Video: White House prepped for Netanyahu

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.