Tag: trump

Yes, Trump is crazy

No, you and I need not be psychiatrists to recognize mental illness. We know it when we see it.

If you are out of doors in your town and encounter a man in the street shouting about his enormous imagined competencies and accomplishments while complaining about always being persecuted, do you hail him as a most excellent soul and invite into your life to manage your important affairs? Or do you avoid eye contact with him and keep your distance out of fear that in his psychosis, this afflicted person might attack you violently for no reason other than his sickness?

President Trump is featured on a banner at the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C., on Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. A corresponding banner out of the frame to the right shows President Theodore Roosevelt. A Department of Commerce and Labor was established under Roosevelt in 1903. The Department of Labor was established as a Cabinet-level entity in 1913. In this portrait, Trump obviously channels his demeanor in the mug shot to which he was obliged to submit when he was charged locally in Georgia with election interference. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

The American electorate had such a choice in the past three presidential elections. In the first instance, in 2016, the mental defective was embraced as some sort of messiah and invited indoors. As many clearheaded people predicted, the nation’s experience with him at the helm would prove to be disastrous. Therefore, moved by buyer’s regret, the electorate pushed him out of office in 2020. But it was disturbing to note that even then, a huge share of the electorate had wanted to keep this fool on the job — inevitably along with his chaos.

Nonetheless, he was out. He couldn’t take the loss of face. He made an almighty fuss, claiming that he had been cheated in the election, and he inspired some of his supporters to attempt a coup to keep him in office. That failed, and he was replaced by a well-meaning but cognitively impaired, doddering man just a little older than the lunatic. In 2024, the electorate, apparently also overcome by madness, compared the doddering old man and the flaming lunatic and made the incomprehensible decision to return the lunatic to office.

This time around, he has been off his chain. His delusions of grandeur have been grander and more menacing than ever. And whatever is ailing his brain is clearly becoming worse. If you wish to see evidence, just look at Trump’s performance on two recent occasions: his address to the United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan on Sept. 23 and his speech to senior U.S. military officers in Quantico, Va., on Sept. 30. If you can make it any meaningful distance into those speeches, you will see that both were showcases of nonsensical rambling leavened with lies, exaggerations, fantasies, self-pity and the usual lashings of spiteful rhetoric. They clearly show a thought process marred by illness.

In both instances — occasions on which rational and normal leaders would have presented consequential visions of the world’s future and of how the U.S. military would buttress the nation as it advanced core U.S. values of promoting democracy and maintaining old alliances and building new confederations against tyranny and backwardness — Trump fell woefully short. It is clear that he is not being advised in any positive way. Both speeches were unhinged screeds fit for a campaign appearance in front of a low-information and fanatical audience.

At the U.N., we saw a bitter and ignorant old man complaining and complaining as he always does, and patronizing and insulting the rest of the world on various bases. James M. Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations summed up Trump’s speech at the U.N. this way:

Much of Trump’s speech was familiar to anyone who has watched a MAGA rally. He frequently went off script. He boasted of his domestic policy successes, complained that he had been overlooked for the Nobel Prize, and bragged that the United States is “the hottest country in the world.” Former President Joe Biden served as a punching bag throughout the speech. Trump mentioned his predecessor directly or indirectly nine times, accusing him of leading “the most corrupt, incompetent administration in history.”

Biden was not the only target of Trump’s barbs. The United Nations was as well. Some of his complaints were minor: a broken escalator on his way to the speech and a malfunctioning teleprompter once he reached the dais. Some were historical: he lamented losing a contract decades ago to renovate UN headquarters and claimed he would have done a far better job than the winning contractor and would have given the building marble rather than terrazzo floors. And some were substantive: he argued that the United Nations is failing to live up to its “tremendous potential.” Anyone familiar with the United Nations sympathized when he dismissed its penchant for a “strongly worded letter” and “empty words” in place of effective action. He offered no practical solutions, however, for improving the organization’s operations.

To the extent that Trump’s speech had a theme, it was the evils of immigration and renewable energy.

Observe this demented flight into fantasy early in Trump’s U.N. speech (the bolding for emphasis is mine):

Six years have passed since I last stood in this grand hall and addressed a world that was prosperous and at peace in my first term. Since that day, the guns of war have shattered the peace I forged on two continents.

***

Something new has emerged among Trump’s obsessions: the Nobel Peace Prize. He and his minions actually have been lobbying for it. This behavior is outrageous. Who does this? Donald Trump does, because his diseased mind cannot stand the idea that Barack Obama, one of the people he despises most in all the world, was given the Nobel Peace Prize merely for taking office s U.S. president in 2009. Obama certainly had no accomplishments to justify being awarded the prize, and that award has stuck in Trump’s craw as an unhealthy idée fixe, although he is even less deserving of the accolade. So when he spoke to the admirals and generals in Quantico, the Nobel was on his mind. He claimed then, as previously, to have settled seven wars, with a settlement of the conflict between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip possibly about to be his eighth peacemaking triumph.

Here is Trump in Quantico:

Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not. They’ll give it — they’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing.

And if he does not get the prize:

[I]t’ll be a big insult to our country, I will tell you that. I don’t want it. I want the country to get it. It should get it because there’s never been anything like it. Think of it. So if this [peace in Gaza] happens, I think it will.

I don’t say that lightly because I know more about deals than anybody. That’s what my whole life was based on. And they can change and this can certainly change. But we have just about everybody. We have one signature that we need and that signature will pay in hell if they [Hamas] don’t sign. I hope they sign for their own good and we create something really great.

Also in Quantico, he suggested, casually, that the U.S. military use Democratic-run large U.S. cities as training grounds. This is a U.S. president speaking in the Year of Our Lord 2025! Here is what he said, and it was in the context of his supposedly eradicating crime from Washington, D.C. (again, the emphasis is mine):

And now, Washington D.C. after 12 days of serious, serious intensity, we took out 1,700 career criminals.

If you have five career criminals, they can make your numbers look very bad because they’ll commit many crimes a day. But we took out 1,700, and they took them out. There was no doubt who the boss was. They did an unbelievable job. Then they [National Guard troops] started even cleaning. I said, I don’t want them doing that. Sir, they wanted.

They were cleaning it up. I drove through it two days ago, it was beautiful. People were walking down the street, holding hands. Man and wife coming from Iowa, they’re not worried about being shot. Washington, D.C. is now a safe city. In fact, I went out to dinner with my crew. I haven’t done that. In theory.

I wouldn’t do it. And I felt totally safe. And nobody’s been attacked. Nobody’s been hurt. Washington D.C. went from our most unsafe city to just about our safest city in a period of a month. We had it under control in 12 days, but give us another 15 or 16 days, it was — it’s perfect.

… You know, the Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape, too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.

… And I told [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth], we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city, with an incompetent governor, stupid governor, stupid.

A madman with federal executive power is threatening to unleash the U.S. military on American citizens in cities he identifies with the political opposition. In an era of deeply transgressive firsts in the governance of this country, Trump could well find that he becomes the first U.S. president to be removed from office by the U.S. military. Let him keep overreaching, and we will see what happens. Somewhere, at some point, something will have to give.

A patrolling police officer and the occupants of a veterans protest tent chat amicably outside Union Station in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Oct. 5, 2025. The U.S. Park Service allowed this veterans group to keep its First Amendment activity permit, which it continues to use to encourage members of the military to defy President Trump’s orders deploying them in D.C. and other cities. But the Park Service revoked the permit of FLARE USA, which had operated a larger tent, 24/7, with bold signage calling for Trump’s impeachment. That encampment was dismantled by U.S. Park Police officers and other Park Service personnel before daylight on Friday, Oct. 3. According to Washingtonian magazine, the Interior Department, which oversees the Park Service, issued a notice to FLARE saying that the permit holder, Jake Adams, had “personally assaulted a USPP [U.S. Park Police] officer.” The alleged assault by the FLARE permit holder aside, someone at the veterans tent surmised that his group still had its permit only because the Trump administration feared the optics of tearing down a veterans protest encampment. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley
A veterans encampment outside Union Station at Columbus Circle in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 1, 2025, encourages National Guard troops deployed outside the transit hub to honor their oath to the U.S. Constitution above obedience to President Donald Trump.
FLARE USA’s anti-Trump protest encampment, installed outside Union Station at Columbus Circle in Washington, D.C., is seen on Sept. 1, 2025. FLARE USA had a permit from the U.S. Park Service to carry out First Amendment-protected activity there. The Park Service revoked the group’s permit days ago, citing an alleged assault by the permit holder on a U.S. Park Police officer, and authorities broke down the encampment and trucked it away in the predawn hours of Friday, Oct. 3, 2025. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

***

Whatever the subject before him, Trump declares that he knows more about it than anyone else — medical matters; military affairs; diplomacy; business; the country’s economy; the environment; our tax system. You name it, Trump is the greatest expert in the subject. And anyone who has an opinion contrary to his is so far in error as virtually to be committing treason. In September, for instance, Trump declared that heavily critical media coverage of him is “really illegal.” Yes, illegal. This man is plainly mad.

During the past presidential campaign, Trump disparaged the nation’s capital city as “nightmare of murder and crime” and threatened to take it under federal control to clean up its problems and its image. After taking over policing in D.C. for a month this summer and bringing in law enforcement officers from numerous federal agencies — plus National Guard troops from a number of states in a deployment that continues here — Trump declared variously on Sept. 1, 2 and 3 that D.C. had “no crime” or that “there is none” as a consequence of his security surge. Follow the D.C. police on X and see for yourself the numerous fresh crimes on which MPD is seeking the public’s assistance.

Trump’s 30-day crime-emergency order for D.C. expired on Sept. 10, and the extra law enforcement officers have gone back to their various agencies. At the end of the “emergency,” Trump declared that there was no more crime in D.C. And he has continued to make that plainly ridiculous declaration, despite the Metropolitan Police Department’s multiple daily appeals via X and YouTube for the public to provide information so that the police can address various newly occurring crimes. Even when he addressed senior U.S. military officers in Quantico on Sept. 30, Trump continued to lie shamelessly about crime in D.C., to wit: “Now I can say it because we solved it, but Washington D.C. was the most unsafe, most dangerous city in the United States of America.”

Trump’s initial excited exaggeration of crime in D.C. and his latter declaration of having eliminated this problem from the city were both plainly absurd.

D.C. in general was not “a nightmare of murder and crime” to begin with, and there is not now “no crime” in the city, not even in the poshest and best-secured areas. Yes, there is crime in D.C. In fact, there are parts of the city that I have seen with my own eyes to be frightening places. But Trump’s security surge did not touch those places, because his surge was all about deceitful optics.

National Guard troops cross the quiet intersection of 20th and S streets NW in north Dupont Circle, D.C., at 10:21 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025. The one-month crime emergency that President Trump declared in D.C. ended on Sept. 10, and the extra law enforcement officers that he had deployed in the city have been withdrawn, but his deployment of National Guard personnel in D.C. continues. They can be seen roaming various parts of the city in little groups, armed but lacking police powers and serving no clear purpose. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Trump had an opening to stage this pointless performance because of the timidity and fecklessness of local D.C. politicians on the question of crime. D.C., like many other major U.S. cities with large and largely poor black populations, is chronically afflicted by the kind of largely black-perpetrated street crime and antisocial behavior that seriously diminishes the quality of life for people, including other black residents, across the city. I speak of carjackings, car break-ins, package thefts, shoplifting, group sweeps by thieves through retail stores, gun and knife robberies on the streets, public weed-smoking that poisons the air in many places with a horrid stink, and loud and obnoxious behavior in all kinds of public settings.

The feebleness of the D.C. Council on the question of crime has given the demented president and his pet U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, the opportunity to posture as heroes in attacking D.C.’s Youth Rehabilitation Act, a piece of legislation dating to 1985 that the D.C. Council never should have passed. The YRA provides sentencing alternatives — excepting murder linked to terrorism, and a few other crimes — for juveniles and young adult offenders. Its practical effect has been a slap-on-the-wrist criminal justice culture vis-à-vis young offenders, who are a predatory scourge in D.C. and in some of the D.C.-adjacent cities in Maryland and Virginia.

***

Trump says any foolishness that comes into his head because he remains unchallenged by those around him who are in a position to counsel him, to speak plainly to him about the wildness of his fantasies, to beseech him to seek psychiatric help. In fact, the great hater Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, is one of the biggest abettors of Trump’s deranged policies. The actual chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is the most silent and invisible White House chief of staff that I have observed since the Reagan era, which is when I began seriously paying attention to American politics.

And there is the baleful influence of Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Vought is an architect of Project 2025, that blueprint for the right-wing, white-supremacist mission of permanently taking control of the levers of power in this country to, supposedly, save the nation from the non-white horde — and make America great again, lest we forget, like it was in the days of Jim Crow.

***

Trump’s madness would be irrelevant were he not the president of the United States. But he is our president and not just some crazy fellow wandering the streets and barking at the sun. His delusions about being a master negotiator and of bending the world to his will have led him into an erratic tariff regime that is alienating countries around the world and, more important, is leading them to reform their economic alliances to the detriment of the United States’ economy.

Case in point: China, Brazil and Argentina. Until Trump returned to office this year and imposed a moving target of tariffs on U.S. imports of Chinese-manufactured products, China had been the single largest purchaser of U.S. soybeans, annually taking some 60 percent of U.S. soybean output. China answered Trump’s tariffs with its own tariffs on U.S.-made goods imported into China. But China, which has a command economy, went a step further: This year, news reports — and U.S. farmers — say China has ordered no soybeans from the U.S. None. Zero.

We are entering the fall season, and the U.S. soybean crop is ready to be harvested, and farmers in Illinois, Iowa, Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Missouri and Ohio are in crisis. The Chinese buyers have shifted their money to Brazil and Argentina, which are the U.S.’s top soybean producing competitors.

Huge gains for soybean farmers in Brazil and Argentina, and steep losses for and even the prospect of bankruptcies in the U.S. soybean sector. Our farmers can thank President Trump, that great visionary. Now comes word that Trump is looking into a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of farmers who have been plunged into this crisis of Trump’s careless making. This is exactly what happened in Trump’s first term: His insane policies created a crisis with whose cost the taxpayer was saddled. In 2024, this country’s farmers voted overwhelmingly for Trump, again, and again they have been burned by him.

Yes, Trump is crazy, but guess what? He is not alone.

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: 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

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.

Kirk’s death and the continuing struggle

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a dreadful crime, and the killer is likely to be executed for what he has done. But no one who opposes President Donald Trump for his anti-democratic excesses should ease up for even a moment in the campaign to spotlight and denounce those transgressions.

If you are pointing out dangerous actions and behaviors in reasonable words and are not encouraging the use of violence, you should consider yourself to be in the clear and should press on with speaking truth to this corrupt power.

Keep challenging Trump’s overreach and the GOP-led Congress’s cowardly dereliction of its duty to be a check on the executive branch. Continue telling that same Congress that we are watching for it to rouse itself and hypocritically rediscover its voice when the next Democratic president takes office and tries to effect his or her agenda. Keep telling Congress that the executive excesses on which it is silent today are establishing precedents that tomorrow’s presidents — Republican and Democrat — will be able employ to constrain disapproving voices, throttle the courts and to stifle the inconvenient rights of the sovereign people.

Keep pointing out that under Trump, the executive branch is, more than ever, a center of power pursuing the interests of the occupant of the Oval Office to the detriment of the common good.

Trump’s supporters seem to have calculated that they will be safe because Trump is their man and they are his people, that he will forever focus on the enemy. But who is enemy and who friend in Trump’s eyes, and for how long? Supporters of aspiring authoritarians have erred fatally in this calculation repeatedly throughout history, failing to recognize that the dictator is a pathological personality who views even his supporters and allies as tools and will turn on them the moment this becomes convenient for him.

Suddenly, they, who were the heroic people in the authoritarian’s telling yesterday, become the enemies of the people. This pattern is already plain to see in Trump’s behavior since his first term. Who can count the number of people he has embraced as the finest to serve him in government and elsewhere, only to turn on them and attack them as villainous and incompetent, even treasonous, because they have indulged in independent thinking? Who can forget his attacks on his own supporters for wanting greater transparency in the Jeffrey Epstein sex crimes case, a matter on which Trump has exhibited an interesting level of touchiness?

All those immigrant groups that supported him in the election? They fancied themselves to be among the elect. They were wrong. They found out in his immigration enforcement sweeps.

Let us deplore the killing of Charlie Kirk and commiserate with his wife and children and the wider community that loved him. But let us not be diverted from our principal purpose by noises such as Trump’s linking of Kirk’s assassination to violent rhetoric on the left. Absolutely no one in American public political discourse of the past decade has unleashed more violent and incendiary rhetoric than Donald Trump has from his perch on the extreme right of American politics.

Since he declared for the presidency in June 2015, he has demolished the guardrails of self-restraint and decency and has dragged this country’s political culture toward levels of physical confrontation not seen since the civil rights struggles of the post-World War II era.

A 22-year-old man may have fired the shot that killed Charlie Kirk in Utah, but when 79-year-old Trump looks in the mirror here in Washington, D.C., he will see someone who bears part of the blame for that heinous assassination. His supporters should wake up and see who is leading them, and to where.

To the glory of Trump — enemy of labor

If you go to the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor here in Washington and stand well back across from the building in that mini park on Constitution Avenue to get a panoramic view of the edifice, you will see two enormous banners honoring American workers for the nation’s 250th anniversary next year. Each banner also bears the image of a U.S. president: on the left is Donald Trump; on the right is Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was a labor reformer even before he became governor of New York, and before he would become U.S. president. But before that, as a member of the New York State Assembly, he was at first a reliable anti-union vote. Then he had an epiphany when he began learning about ordinary people’s working conditions. His education included visiting workplaces and seeing firsthand the appalling conditions that prevailed.

Here is a description of Roosevelt’s work in labor reform, taken from a blog at the Theodore Roosevelt Center that credits a report at the Library of Congress as its ultimate source:
“As Governor of New York, Roosevelt further pushed for labor reform, especially through enforcement of existing legislation. He pushed for the passage of employers’ liability and sweatshop laws, essentially a continuation of the crusade he had picked up from his meetings with [the union leader] Samuel Gompers. Although he could not get [those] passed, he was able to sign a number of individual bills regulating tenement house manufacturing. Other bills he signed regulated the labor of women and children, as well as that of teachers and municipal employees. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, he passed and strictly enforced an eight-hour law.”

Under President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, a Department of Commerce and Labor was formed. In 1913, under President William Howard Taft, the separate Department of Labor was formed, and the original “Commerce and Labor” entity continued as the singular Department of Commerce. The Department of Labor, to which Roosevelt could rightly claim parentage, says this about itself:
“The Department of Labor (DOL) administers federal labor laws to guarantee workers’ rights to fair, safe, and healthy working conditions, including minimum hourly wage and overtime pay, protection against employment discrimination, and unemployment insurance.”

President Theodore Roosevelt has a highly positive legacy in relation to labor. But what about Trump? What does the record show so far of his attitude to labor?

President Donald Trump is featured on a banner at the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C., on Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. A corresponding banner out of the frame to the right shows President Theodore Roosevelt. A Department of Commerce and Labor was established under Roosevelt in 1903. The Department of Labor was established as a separate Cabinet-level entity in 1913. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

In a word: enmity.

It is rich that his face is plastered on a banner at the Labor Department building honoring the American worker. Trump has a bad history with labor, starting in his business life, where he was sued by individuals and by small contractors who alleged that he stiffed them by refusing to pay for work they had completed. In his first term as president, he attacked the labor unions representing federal employees and also treated those employees — essentially his own workers — as enemies of the American people. The courts helped to restrain him that time around.

In his second term, he came loaded for bear. He returned to Washington accompanied by Elon Musk as his hatchet man. Musk set about sacking tens of thousands of federal workers. There is a civilized way to reduce headcount, and the abrupt and cruel way it has been done in a matter of months this year by the Trump administration is not it. The result has been lives upended and multiple government agencies thrown into chaos, their work undercut and their remaining employees feeling terrorized.

And Trump’s tariffs are coming for the American private-sector worker. Watch what tariff-induced inflation will do to consumer demand, the profitability of companies, the cost of living, and, ultimately, the level of unemployment.

Trump is no friend of American workers. He is a fool flailing about pretending to be doing work when in fact he is causing destructive chaos. That his face appears on a banner honoring this country’s workers for the nation’s 250th anniversary is an insult to American labor.

Look for Trump’s image to continue to occupy top billing as the celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary advances. For him, the event is not about the country’s endurance as an experiment in democracy. It is simply about the glory of Donald Trump.

Hating Trump in D.C. over the years #1

Photos by Gilbert Dunkley

Part of a protest encampment outside Union Station in Washington, D.C., seen on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.
A protester in front of Union Station in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025, demands the elimination of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The D.C. region’s Metrorail and the intercity rail service Amtrak are among the bus and rail services using Union Station. President Trump has sent National Guard troops to Union Station as part of what he has called a crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital. On Aug. 27, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the federal government was taking control of the management of Union Station from the nonprofit Union Station Redevelopment Corp.
A protest encampment outside Union Station, a major transportation hub in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025.
A denunciation of President Donald Trump’s federal intervention in the local governance of Washington, D.C., hangs from a balcony at an apartment building in downtown Washington, D.C, on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.
The north side of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025. Visible in the picture are the two towering flagpoles that President Donald Trump had erected on the White House grounds on June 18, 2025, one on the North Lawn (foreground), the other on the South Lawn, on the Ellipse side of the mansion.
A sign at a permanent protest post maintained in the pedestrian plaza on the north side of the White House in Washington, D.C., as seen on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.
A view of a permanent protest post outside the White House on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.
In Lafayette Square, just north of the White House, on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.
Outside the White House on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.
Outside the White House on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.
In Lafayette Square, just north of the White House, on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.
Seen outside the White House on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.
An anti-Trump sticker on a street sign in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on Friday, Aug. 22, 2025.
Large street display near Dupont Circle in Northwest Washington in 2025 before Donald Trump and Elon Musk fell out.
An anti-Trump sticker seen in Northwest Washington on March 9, 2018.

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.

The origins of Trump’s coup attempt

A new American Revolution formally introduced itself to the country on the night of Nov. 4, 2008, with the election of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama to the presidency. That night, at Grant Park in Chicago, Obama spoke in lofty terms about hope and opportunity and the possibility of positive change in our country. The enormous and jubilant crowd he addressed was very much a reflection of the country’s racial variety.

Also that night, some 1,500 miles away in Phoenix, Obama’s defeated Republican rival in the election, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, delivered a concession speech that seems impossibly gracious by the standards of President Donald Trump’s America in 2025.

McCain’s address to his supporters included these words:

“Sen. Obama and I have had and argued our differences, and he has prevailed. No doubt many of those differences remain. These are difficult times for our country, and I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face. … I wish Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president. And I call on all Americans, as I have often in this campaign, to not despair of our present difficulties but to believe always in the promise and greatness of America.”

But I noted something about McCain’s crowd that night: It was overwhelmingly white, and it was angry, although parts of his chivalrous rhetoric did draw applause. Mostly, though, that very white crowd listened to him in bitter silence. I took that as a warning.

That night was born the reactionary fightback, the effort to swing the country back toward a state of absolute white control at the federal level. That effort gave us the radical right-wing tea party movement and its campaign to foil and bring down Obama, who nonetheless won a second term in office. His second victory, in 2012, was proof to the right that extreme measures might be needed, even an upending of the country’s democratic order, since American democracy no longer was a guarantor of white electoral dominance.

American democracy was unassailable gospel while it served to elevate the correct sort of people to public office. But when, by demographic change, our electoral processes began opening doors for all sorts of nonwhite, non-right people, American democracy started to lose its status as unimpeachable gospel in the conservative establishment. After all, it was now enabling the wrong people to share power, and God alone knew where that would all end.

The new power gospel is white supremacy, which has a traveling companion in Christian nationalism. This collaboration reminds me of the Saudi system, in which the absolute monarchy of the House of Saud is validated and buttressed by the Islamic establishment, largely embodied in one family, the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

The fightback that began with Obama’s election needed a leader, an unreconstructed and committed racist who would not be ashamed to say awful things (“He tells it like it is” is what Trump supporters have often said they like about him) and to do unpleasant things. Come the hour, come the man. In Donald Trump they found their brute, a combination of cave troll and messiah.

Trump has proved himself more than equal to the task of executing the mandate. He is profoundly dishonest. He is an unapologetic hypocrite. He is a bully. His ego is enormous. He is greedy. He is venal. And he lies. God, how he lies!

A protester in front of Union Station in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025, demands the elimination of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The D.C. region’s Metrorail and the intercity rail service Amtrak are among the bus and rail services using Union Station. President Trump has sent National Guard troops to Union Station as part of what he has called a crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital.

Trump’s takeover of policing in Washington, D.C., is, I believe, a rehearsal for something larger. Yes, he is using it to disguise his stepped-up hunt for undocumented immigrants in the city, but there is a bigger prize. And D.C. is the ideal testing ground. Many people outside this city do not know, I am sure, that Congress, which makes its home here, has ultimate authority over D.C.

Congress can impose any law on D.C. tha pleases a majority on Capitol Hill. It can take over the city government. Although we have what is called home rule, with an elected mayor and city council and all the other trappings of modern American city administration, Congress is our lord and master. It has ultimate authority.

Washington, District of Columbia, is a federal district whose status is specified in the U.S. Constitution, which says in Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have the power To … exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;

The Constitution says “Congress shall have the power To,” but because the Republican-controlled Congress, the legislative branch, is missing in action, Trump, who leads the executive branch, feels free to take control of our city police, put uniformed officers of all kinds of other law enforcement agencies on the streets of the capital and even augment their numbers with National Guard troops sent from states around the country by those states’ complicit Republican governors.

How does Trump justify this? He says his actions are necessary because crime in D.C. is out of control. Here is where being a barefaced liar is useful to an aspiring autocrat. He rejects the city’s official crime figures as bogus (remember his response to losing the 2020 election?), declares that he knows that crime is out of control in D.C., and says he is surging security personnel into the city to bring the problem under control. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (that means Trump, since Hegseth is a mere cipher) has just authorized National Guard troops deployed in the city to be armed while out on the streets of the nation’s capital.

Let us be in no doubt about what is happening. Donald Trump is rehearsing a coup against the United States. He is pushing the limits further and further, and quickly, because I think he needs to have some assurance of an alternative if the midterm elections of November 2026 go badly against him. Democrats would take over in the House and that institution would rise from its slumber and begin to try to contain this runaway president. I think he is testing and testing to see how many of the states can be counted on to provide National Guard troops for an antidemocratic project, should he deem one necessary.

And he is pushing and testing to accustom the American populace to his excesses so that when he needs to pull the trigger on a spectacular assault on our democratic norms, the people will have been primed.

He said publicly in the presidential campaign last year that once the 2024 election was out of the way, people would not have to concern themselves with future elections. He would fix everything, he said. He said that with a smile, but do you think he was joking?

An anti-Trump sticker on a street sign in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on Friday, Aug. 22, 2025.

Is there any good news? Yes. A resistance to Trump’s excesses is emerging. It is visible all over the country in the demonstrations, some unfortunately violent, against the cruel and heavy-handed tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is visible here in D.C. in the barracking that D.C. residents deliver to any senior Trump administration official who shows a face in public. It is visible in the caustic and proliferating stickers, posters and graffiti around town that insult Trump in seriously profane ways. It is visible, and audible, in the pot-banging demonstrations that are emerging around the city every day at 8 p.m.

As is so often the case, however, the country’s citizenry broadly could be too slow off the mark to head off Trump’s coup and will then find itself struggling to undo a virtual fait accompli. How fragile our democratic systems are proving to be under Trump’s assault. It turns out that these systems rely for their effectiveness on the presence of honorable people in positions of trust.

Trump is not honorable, and he is profaning the nation’s ultimate position of trust. What Trump is doing could lead to widespread citizen-on-citizen violence around the country, because his supporters and his opponents are deeply entrenched in their positions.

Where is all this taking us? No one can know, not even those who think their plans are ironclad and foolproof. I think we should hope for the best but be prepared for the very worst.

Europe learns to manage Donald J. Chamberlain

When the pro-Ukraine leaders of Europe heard that President Trump had decided to have last Friday’s Ukraine-specific face-to-face meeting with the invader Vladimir Putin, those European allies must have shot out of their chairs in alarm. Knowing that Putin exercises a kind of cordyceps hold on Trump’s mind, they would rightly have worried about what might result from the American president’s inability to show to Putin the toughness required as the Russian works to dismember Ukraine.

Trump has repeatedly said that Ukraine should not expect to recover territory within its borders that Russia has seized. That means Trump expects President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people simply to turn their backs on the approximately 20 percent of Ukraine that Russia significantly controls: all of the Crimean Peninsula and, generally, the eastern region of Ukraine known as Donbas, and some additional provinces.

A significant displacement of Ukrainians began in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea after a pro-European revolution occurred in Kyiv, and the displacement accelerated with the arrival of Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Some 3 million Ukrainians now live under Russian authority on their own Ukrainian soil. In an ideal world, most Ukrainians would not agree to cede even an inch of their country’s territory to the Russian aggressor, but war might so exhaust and terrify them that they clamor to fold and walk away. Putin is counting on that. And Putin is counting on Trump to bring Zelenskyy to that acceptance.

Thus we have the spectacle of Trump, the president of the United States, running interference for the butcher Putin.

Our European allies have taken note.

When, after the Alaska meeting, it was announced that Zelenskyy and Trump would meet at the White House on Monday (yesterday), the European allies must have been even more alarmed. They and Zelenskyy would have recalled the disgraceful berating of the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office in February by Trump and Vice President JD Vance. That White House meeting was an ambush against Zelenskyy.

This time around, Zelenskyy came with a posse of the willing: NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen; Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni; Finnish President Alexander Stubb; German Chancellor Friedrich Merz; French President Emmanuel Macron; and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. They would not allow Zelenskyy to be ambushed by Trump a second time. And TACO Trump behaved himself.

While speaking on Fox by phone this morning (on the day after the meeting), Trump was asked by an interviewer how he had managed to bring so many European leaders to the Oval Office together so quickly. Well, Trump said, America is respected again. A year ago, he said, such a thing would not have happened.

He was wrong on the first point and right on the second. A year ago, such a gathering would not have occurred because it would not have been necessary. This country’s allies in Europe had respected this country enough that they fully expected that it would do right by Ukraine. On Monday, they came here to Washington, and quickly, to ensure that Trump did not abuse Zelenskyy and bully him into caving to Putin’s demands.

What happened at the White House on Monday was not a display of responsible American leadership, as the White House has been spinning it. What happened there was an intervention. Those leaders who visited knew that Trump just cannot quit Putin and that there was a risk of a second disgraceful Oval Office performance by Trump if Zelenskyy stepped into the snake pit by himself.

It has to be said that even as a doddering president with a foggy mind, Joe Biden had a mostly properly functioning moral compass. His doddering steps were nearly always pointing him in the right direction, and unerringly in the matter of Ukraine.

Not so with Trump. His inflated ego is the magnetic north that guides his moral compass. When he met with Putin on Friday, that was an exercise in self-gratification (he is desperate for a Nobel Peace Prize), and also appeasement.

The European leaders who visited us on Monday grasp the relevant history in a way that is far superior to Trump’s awareness of it. They remember Europe’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler as first he rearmed Germany in violation of post-World War I treaty limits, then remilitarized the Rhineland, then executed the annexation of Austria via the Anschluss, then purloined the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and then invaded Czechoslovakia outright.

Next came Hitler’s triggering of the pivotal Danzig crisis, which ran through the summer of 1939 and was the last great spasm before that maniac launched what would become World War II. He wanted to retake control of Danzig, a largely ethnically German city over which Germany lost control with its defeat in WWI. But Danzig was now, by international treaty, a free city, the property of no particular nation, although it was connected administratively with its direct neighbor Poland. Germany, too, was a direct neighbor.

When Hitler signed a surprise nonaggression pact with Russia in late August 1939, providing himself security on his eastern front, France and Britain really began to panic. Britain was led by Neville Chamberlain, who in 1938 had appeasingly signed on the dotted line when Germany took the Sudentenland and Hitler gave an assurance that he had no further territorial ambitions. “Peace in our time,” Chamberlain said on his return from the now-infamous Munich Conference. How the British and the French cheered! How Hitler chortled!

A year later, the appeaser was recognizing his mistake and also stiffening his spine. But because he had earlier appeased Hitler, the tyrant did not think that his British adversary really would stand up if Germany invaded Poland. And if Britain did not stand up, neither would France, must have been Hitler’s calculation.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany and Russia attacked Poland. The rest is history.

It is a history that Europe remembers well. In Trump, Europe sees a new Chamberlain. The European leaders know that Ukraine is a modern Sudentenland, and they know that if Putin, a modern Hitler, is not stopped in Ukraine, Europe will end up fighting him in a wider war because he will not have been satisfied with forcing down the unpleasant meal that Ukraine has proved itself to be. Putin “hungers for sweeter meats,” to quote from “The Lord of the Rings.”

That is what Monday at the White House was really about. It was not an example of American leadership. It was an example of European leadership by intervention to head off a world-engulfing catastrophe. Thank God above that the Europeans are beginning to figure out how to handle Donald J. Chamberlain.