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Presidency of Donald Trump

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The first presidency of Donald Trump began at noon EST on January 20, 2017, when Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States, succeeding Barack Obama, and ended on January 20, 2021, after Trump lost the 2020 United States presidential election to Joe Biden. Trump succeeded Biden to serve a second and final non-consecutive term beginning on January 20, 2025, after winning the 2024 United States presidential election.

The entire Trump administration has been a “mask off” moment for the Supreme Court’s conservatives. It turns out, they don’t actually care about precedent (no matter how many times they lied and claimed to care during their Senate confirmation hearings). They don’t actually care about the text. They don’t actually care about judicial restraint. They want the political outcomes they want and they have the votes to do it.
They do not care about traditions, norms, or the very foundation of judicial decision making in a common law system. They only care about winning. ~ Elie Mystal

Quotes

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First presidency (2017–2021)

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2017

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  • Add to this mix the ascendancy of President Donald Trump, who won the 2016 election in part by courting a nativist, anti-immigrant constituency, and whose reticent condemnation of white nationalist protesters who held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that erupted in fatal violence in August 2017 drew howls of criticism from all but his most loyal supporters, and the urgency of sorting out these political associations begins to make sense.
    Nobody, least of all the millions of rank-and-file right-leaning Americans who voted for Donald Trump, wants to be lumped in with Nazis. It's a fact, however, that Nazi-friendly organizations, Nazi symbols, and Nazi gestures were in evidence at the disastrous Charlottesville event, whose unfortunate title was not "Unite the Left," but "Unite the Right."
    Although the terms "left" and "right" as used in American politics can be somewhat less than perspicuous, they are helpful in delineating the basic ideological divide between liberalism/progressivism (as embodied mainly by the Democratic Party) on one side ("the left"), and conservatism/traditionalism (as embodied mainly by the Republican Party) on the other ("the right"). Seen as a spectrum or continuum of ideologies, socialism/communism traditionally falls on the far left end of this scale, nationalism/fascism on the far right.

2018

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  • As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?
  • Having failed in efforts to control or curtail the president's tweeting, Priebus searched for a way to have practical impact. Since the tweets were often triggered by the president's obsessive TV watching, he looked for ways to shut off the television. But television was Trump's default activity. Sunday nights were often the worst. Trump would come back to the White House from the weekend at one of his golf resorts just in time to catch political talk on his enemy networks, MSNBC and CNN. The president and the first lady had separate bedrooms in the residence. Trump had a giant TV going much of the time, alone in his bedroom with the clicker, the TiVo and his Twitter account. Priebus called the presidential bedroom "the devil's workshop" and the early mornings and dangerous Sunday nights "the witching hour." There was not much he could do about the mornings, but he had some control over the weekend schedule. He started scheduling Trump's Sunday returns to the White House later in the afternoon. Trump would get to the White House just before 9 p.m. when MSNBC and CNN generally turned to softer programming that did not focus on the immediate political controversies and Trump's inevitable role in them.
  • Trump seemed to love the adulation but said to Graham, "You're a middle-of-the-road guy. I want you to be 100 percent for Trump." This resembled the loyalty pledge that then FBI director James Comey said that Trump had asked of him. According to Comey, Trump had said, "I need loyalty. I expect loyalty," during their now famous one-on-one Green Room dinner in the White House during the first week of the Trump presidency. "Okay, what's the issue?" Graham asked, "and I'll tell you whether I'm 100 percent for you or not." "You're like 82 percent," Trump said. "Well, some days I'm 100 percent. Some days I may be zero." "I want you to be a 100 percent guy." "Why would you want me to tell you you're right when I think you're wrong? What good does that do for you or me?" Graham asked. "Presidents need people that can tell them the truth as they see it. It's up to you to see if I'm full of shit."
  • But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying "Fake News," the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: "You're a fucking liar."

2019

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How Stephen Miller made immigration personal]" (April 22, 2019)

  • For all President Trump's talk these days about Democrats trying to make America socialist, the reality is that he is the king of big government. The federal bureaucracy is just as large, centralized, careless with spending, and intrusive under Donald Trump as it was when Barack Obama was in office. In many cases, it's bigger. This is an uncomfortable truth for Trump supporters. Rather than hew to traditional conservative beliefs about a limited federal role, Trump has allowed government to balloon. He's especially vexed when we inform him the government will never be large enough or powerful enough to execute his spontaneous propositions. The US federal budget deficit was actually declining under the Obama administration, from $1.4 trillion in 2009 when Obama took office to $587 billion in 2016, just before he left. Credit for the remarkable downward trend goes to congressional Republicans, who forced a standoff with the White House in 2011. They demanded a budget deal that would bring the deficit under control. This was the Budget Control Act, a law that slashed federal spending, put strict annual limits on future expenditures, and placed a cap on the government's "credit card." It was considered the conservative "Tea Party" movement's crowning achievement.
    • Anonymous, A Warning (2019), p. 99-100
  • Donald Trump was not interested in penny-pinching. He may try to project the image of a man working to save taxpayer dollars, and it's true that he can be talked out of stupid ideas if they cost too much. But that's not because he's trying to save money so it can go back to the American people. He still wants to spend the money, just on things in which he's personally interested, such as bombs or border security. Trump recoils at people who are "cheap." Today he is sparing no expense on the management of the executive branch, spending so freely it makes the money-burning days of the Trump Organization look like the five-dollar tables at a Vegas casino. As a result, the budget deficit has increased every single year since Donald Trump took office, returning to dangerous levels. The president is on track to spend a trillion dollars above what the government takes in annually. Just look at 2019. The president proposed a record-breaking $4.7 trillion budget. That's how much he suggested the federal government spend in a singe year. Since Trump took office, the US debt- much of which we owe to other countries that we borrow from- has grown by the trillions, to another all-time high of $22 trillion total. To pay off our debts today, according to one estimate, each taxpayer in the United States would need to fork over an average of $400,000. This should set off fiscal tornado sirens across America. We cannot keep borrowing money we can't pay back, otherwise our children will pay a steep and terrible price.
    • Anonymous, A Warning (2019), p. 100
  • Willful ignorance is the fairest way to describe the president's attitude toward our enemies. He sees what he wants to see. If Trump likes a foreign leader, he refuses to accept the danger they might pose or ulterior motives they bring to the table. That's what makes it so easy for him to offhandedly dismiss detailed US threat assessments about nation-states or urgent alerts from our closest allies.
    • Anonymous, A Warning (2019), p. 167-168
  • Our enemies and adversaries recognize the president is a simplistic pushover. They are unmoved by his bellicose Twitter threats because they know he can be played. President Trump is easily swayed by their rhetoric. We can all see it. He is visibly moved by flattery. He folds in negotiations, and he is willing to give up the farm for something that merely looks like a good deal, whether it is or not. They believe he is weak, and they take advantage of him. When they cannot, they simply ignore him.
    • Anonymous, A Warning (2019), p. 173
  • Donald Trump's words do more than drive his team crazy. They are dividing Americans. He may start fights on Twitter and at the microphones, but we are continuing them at home. Studies show that Republicans are becoming more partisan, unwilling to veer from the party line, and Democrats are doing the same. The one thing the two sides can agree on is that the phenomenon is real. A Pew Research Center survey released in 2019 found that a whopping 85 percent of US adults said that "political debate in the country has become more negative and less respectful," and two-thirds said that it is less focused on the issues. Where do they pin the blame? A majority believed President Trump "has changed the tone and nature of political debate for the worse." The verbal acrimony has real-world consequences. Our divisions make us less likely to engage with one another, less likely to trust our government, and less optimistic about our country's future. When asked to look forward to the year 2050, Americans were deeply pessimistic, according to another survey. A majority of respondents predicted that the United States would be in decline, burdened by economic disparity and more politically polarized. Nearly the same percentage of Democrats and Republicans agreed on the last point. In the nation's capital, the president's bull-in-a-china-shop language is inhibiting his own agenda. He can't get consensus on Capital Hill, even on previously uncontroversial issues. Democrats aren't exactly trying to restore bipartisanship, but there might be hope if the figurehead of the Republican Party were not treating them as mortal enemies rather than political opponents. Instead, every big idea becomes radioactive upon release. Every line of the budget is a trench on the political battlefield. We constantly struggle to sell the president's priorities because he is his own worst enemy.
    • Anonymous, A Warning (2019), p. 191-192

2020

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  • Everyone knows Donald Trump is a sore loser, and the final precept of Roy Cohn's authoritarian instructions was, "If you lose, say you won." So if Trump loses in November he will probably claim it was a rigged election, and he will try to get it overturned. But a sufficiently overwhelming outpouring by Democrats, and Democratic-leaning independents, can send him packing and bring the moving vans to the South Portico of the WHite House on January 20, 2021. Trump's wretched mishandling of the COVID-19 and George Floyd tragedies has moved, perhaps only temporarily, some undecided voters into the Democratic camp, and even a handful of Trump's base appear (as of early June) shaken by how badly he has responded to these crises. The matter can be decided without doubt by young voters, who are the least prejudiced age group in the United States and strongly oppose Donald Trump on numerous grounds. Historically, persons eighteen to thirty years old vote less but they make up a majority of the crowds peacefully protesting against prejudice after George Floyd's murder. If the democrats run good registration campaigns among the young, and if Biden supporters can overcome all the vote-suppression barriers the Republicans will throw at them, and if Bernie Sanders' supporters can settle for half of what they want in order to have a certain chance to get the rest later on, rather than no chance at all if Trump wins, Democrats can win the White House and both Houses of Congress in November.
    Let us say that happens. The election is close, but even in the Electoral College the democrats post a winning total. Nonetheless Trump claims there was colossal fraud, and the election should not count. "It was a hoax," he claims for the umpteenth time. "It has to be fair!" he says, and his base takes to the street shouting support for Trump. No one should be surprised if Trump loses and refuses to leave. Michael Cohen, Trump's in-house attorney for many years who knows the man much better than most, said under oath on February 27, 2019, "Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 there will never be a peaceful transition of power." Trump's high-level staffer known as Anonymous for his/her New York Times OpEd and book, A Warning, says Trump "will not exit quietly- or easily," suggesting a "'civil war' in the offing." Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the New York Times in May 2019 that Trump's refusal to accept defeat in 2020 was something that concerned her, adding, "We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that."
  • Even if Donald Trump leaves office peacefully in 2021 his base will remain intact and be available to him to hobble his successor as it did his predecessor. Or, should Trump slip inexorably, that base is available to whoever can capture it for themselves. Someone smarter than Trump and championed by Fox News and the right-wing media echo chamber, could pose a much greater threat down the road. You can bet that various Double Highs have already begun thinking how to get incarnated as the next messiah. You can also bet the "king-makers" are studying the field right now too, including the leaders of the religious right who might sense Trump losing a bit of his hold on their believers.
  • Donald John Trump is way out of his league playing a clever usurper of power. If it appears that we have been hard on him, listen to the people who do. As humans being go, he is a sorry specimen. His driveway has not reached the main road for a long, long time. He is incapable of fixing his own life, which is deeply scarred by escarpments of chutzpah and pitted with bottomless potholes of ignorance and self-deception, so he is incapable of repairing the damage he has done. If he becomes a monarch, we can brag that it did not take us generations of inbreeding to produce an imbecile king. We shall have started with one. Even sadder, Trump might not be made dictator by a distinct minority of the country. Most Americans will not have voted for him; they simply did not vote. In short, we could lose what our forebearers fought for and won and preserved and rightly celebrated because most of us would not even go to the polls in 2020 to keep them.
  • It took me about a month after my arrival at the Trump White House to have any chance to assess systematically how things worked inside. Dysfunctionality arose in many ways, often unfolding through specific policy issues... During the last months of 2018 and early 2019, as Trump's second year in office came to an end- roughly eight to nine months after my arrival- several seemingly disparate issues and individuals converged to push the Administration even deeper into uncharted territory. In early June 2018, for example, Kelly tried a new tactic on Trump's schedule, beginning each day in the Oval, at eleven a.m., with "Chief of Staff" time, hoping to minimize the rambling lectures he delivered during his twice-weekly intelligence briefings. Of course, what most people found striking was that Trump's "official" day didn't start until almost lunchtime. Trump was not loafing during the morning. Instead, he spent considerable time working the phones in the Residence. He talked to all manner of people, sometimes US government officials (I spoke with him by phone before he arrived in the Oval nearly every day due to the press of events he needed to know about or I needed direction on), but he also spoke at length to people outside the government. It was an anomaly among contemporary Presidents by any definition.
    • John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (2020), p. 223
  • As it was, Trump generally had only two intelligence briefings per week, and in most of those, he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand. Trump's schedule was the easiest anomaly to deal with. One of the hardest was his vindictiveness, as demonstrated by the constant eruptions against John McCain, even after McCain died and could do Trump no more harm. Another example of his vindictiveness was Trump's August 15 decision to revoke former CIA Director John Brennan's security clearance. Now, Brennan was no prize, and during his tenure the CIA became more politicized than at any other time in its history. He denied any improper behavior, but Trump was convinced Brennan was deeply implicated in abusing the FISA surveillance process to spy on his 2016 campaign, all of which was exacerbated by his constant presence in the media criticizing Trump after he took office.
    • John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (2020), p. 224
  • Perhaps uniquely in presidential history, Trump engendered controversy over attendance at funerals, starting with Barbara Bush's in April 2018, which Trump did not attend (although four former Presidents and the First Lady did), and then at John McCain's in late August. Kelly opened the weekly White House staff meeting on August 27 by saying, "I'm in a bad place today," because of ongoing disagreements with Trump over whether to fly US government flags at half-mast and who would attend which services. McCain's family didn't want Trump at the services either, so the feeling was mutual. The final decision was that Pence would lead the Administration's representation at both the Capitol Rotunda ceremony and the funeral service at Washington National Cathedral. The service was extremely well-attended, with all the socializing that routinely accompanies even moments of passing. Among others I greeted were Bush 43 and Mrs. Bush, with Bush asking cheerily, "Still got a job, Bolton?" "For now," I answered, and we all laughed. When George H.W. Bush later died during the Buenos Aires G20, Trump declared a national day of mourning, issued a fitting presidential statement, and spoke cordially with both George W. and Jeb Bush during the meeting. He and the First Lady attended the National Cathedral service on December 5 without incident. It wasn't so hard to do after all.
  • John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (2020), p. 226
  • The atmosphere of division my grandfather created in the Trump family is the water in which Donald has always swum, and division continues to benefit him at the expense of everybody else. It's weakening our ability to be kind or believe in forgiveness, concepts that have never had any meaning for him. His administration and his party have become subsumed by his politics of grievance and entitlement. Worse, Donald, who understands nothing about history, constitutional principles, diplomacy (or anything else, really) and was never pressed to demonstrate such knowledge, has evaluated all of this country's alliances, and all of our social programs, solely through the prism of money, just as his father taught him to do. The costs and benefits of governing are considered in purely financial terms, as if the US Treasury were his personal piggy bank. To him, every dollar going out was his loss, while every dollar saved was his gain.
    • Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (2020), p. 15-16
  • Although my my aunts and uncles will think otherwise, I'm not writing this book to cash in or out of a desire for revenge. If either of those had been my intention, I would have written a book about our family years ago, when there was no way to anticipate that Donald would trade on his reputation as a serially bankrupt businessman and irrelevant reality show host to ascend to the White House; when it would have been safer because my uncle wasn't in a position to threaten and endanger whistleblowers and critics. The events of the last three years, however, have forced my hand, and I can no longer remain silent. By the time this book is published, hundreds of thousands of American lives will have been sacrificed on the alter of Donald's hubris and willful ignorance. If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy.
    • Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (2020), p. 16-17
  • It's easy to sound coherent and somewhat knowledgeable when you control the narrative and are never pressed to elaborate on your premise or demonstrate that you actually understand the underlying facts. It is an indictment (among many) of the media that none of that changed during the campaign, when exposing Donald's lies and outrageous claims might actually have saved us from his presidency. On the few occasions he was asked about his positions and policies (which for all intents and purposes don't really exist) he still wasn't expected or required to make sense or demonstrate any depth of understanding. Since the election, he's figured out how to avoid such questions completely; White House press briefings and formal news conferences have been replaced with "chopper talk" during which he can pretend he can't hear any unwelcome questions over the noise of the helicopter blades. In 2020, his pandemic "press briefings" quickly devolved into mini-campaign rallies filled with self-congratulation, demagoguery, and ring kissing. In them he has denied the unconscionable failures that have already killed thousands, lied about the progress that's being made, and scapegoated the very people who are risking their lives to save us despite being denied adequate protection and equipment by his administration. Even as hundreds of thousands of Americans are sick and dying, he spins it as a victory, as proof of his stunning leadership. And in the event that anybody thinks he's capable of being serious or somber, he'll throw in a joke about bedding models or lie about the size of his Facebook following for good measure. Still the news networks refuse to pull away. The few journalists who do challenge him, and even those who simply ask Donald for words of comfort for a terrified nation, are derided and dismissed as "nasty." The through line from Donald's early, destructive behavior that Fred actively encouraged to the media's unwillingness to challenge him and the Republican Party's willingness to turn a blind eye to the daily corruption he has committed since January 20, 2017, have led to the impending collapse of this once great nations' economy, democracy, and health.
    • Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World's Most Dangerous Man (2020), p. 203
  • Seven hours later, Trump gave a long statement at his first Coronavirus Task Force press conference in three months. He spoke alone at the White House. No Pence, Fauci or Birx. He also shifted tone. Everything was not rosy with the outlook for the virus. "It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better," Trump said injecting an unusual dose of realism. "Something I don't like saying about things, but that's the way it is." Previously Trump had been reluctant to wear a mask. "Get a mask," he said. "Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They'll have an effect and we need everything we can get." His comments were a tacit acknowledgement that his previous approach had not worked, and that, in fact, the virus was much worse. The day was a microcosm of Trump's presidency, veering from "We have it under control" to "worse before it gets better," all in the span of a few hours. It was just the most recent example- and the last before this book went to press- that Trump's presidency was riddled with ambivalence, set on an uncertain course, swinging from combativeness to conciliation, and whipsawing from one statement or action to the opposite.
  • After I finished reporting for this book on President Trump, I felt weariness. The country was in real turmoil. The virus was out of control. The economy was in crisis with more than 40 million out of work. A powerful reckoning on racism and inequality was upon us. There seemed to be no end in sight, and certainly no clear path to get there. I thought back to the conversation with Trump on February 7 when he mentioned the "dynamite behind every door," the unexpected explosion that could change everything. He was apparently thinking about some external event that would affect the Trump presidency. But now, I've come to the conclusion that the "dynamite behind the door" was in plain sight. It was Trump himself. The oversized personality. The failure to organize. The lack of discipline. The lack of trust in others he had picked, in experts. The undermining or the attempted undermining of so many American institutions. The failure to be a calming, healing voice. The unwillingness to acknowledge error. The failure to do his homework. To extend the olive branch. To listen carefully to others. To craft a plan. Mattis, Tillerson and Coats are all conservatives or apolitical people who wanted to help him and the country. Imperfect men who answered the call to public service. They were not the deep state. Yet each departed with cruel words from their leader. They concluded that Trump was an unstable threat to their country. Think about that for a moment: The top national security leaders thought the president of the United States was a danger to the country.
  • On January 28, 2020, when Trump's national security adviser and his deputy warned Trump that the virus would be- not might be, but would be- the biggest national security threat to his presidency, the leadership clock had to be reset. It was a detailed forecast, supported by evidence and experience that unfortunately turned out to be correct. Presidents are the executive branch. There was a duty to warn. To listen, to plan, and to take care. For a long time Trump hedged, as did others, and said the virus is worrisome but not yet, not now. There were good reasons to ride both horses, but there should have been more consistent and courageous outspokenness. Leading is almost always risky. The virus, the "plague," as Trump calls it, puts the United States and the world in economic turmoil that may not be just a recession, but a depression. It is a genuine financial crisis, putting tens of millions out of work. Trump's solution is to try to recreate what he believes is the economic miracle he created in the pre-virus time. Democrats, Republicans and Trump did agree to spending at least $2.2 trillion on recovery, which will create its own future problems with growing deficits. The human cost has been almost unimaginable, with more than 130,000 Americans killed by the virus by July and no real end in sight.
  • The dead-seated hatreds of American politics flourished in the Trump years. He stoked them, and did not make concerted efforts to bring the country together. Nor did the Democrats. Trump felt deeply wronged by the Democrats who felt deeply wronged by Trump. The walls between them only grew higher and thicker. My 17 interviews with Trump presented a challenge. He denounced Fear, my first book on him, as untrue, a "scam" and a "joke," calling me a "Dem operative." Several of those closest to him told him that the book was true, and Lindsey Graham told him that I would not put words in his mouth and would report as accurately as possible. Trump decided, for reasons that are not clear to me, that he would cooperate. To his mind, he would become a reliable source. He is reliable at times, completely unreliable at others, and often mixed... But the interviews show he vacillated, prevaricated and at times dodged his role as leader of the country despite his "I alone can fix it" rhetoric. As America and the world know, Trump is an overpowering presence. He loves spectacle. In a time of crisis, the operational is much more important than the political or the personal. For tens of millions the optimistic American story has turned into a nightmare.
  • For nearly 50 years, I have written about nine presidents from Nixon to Trump- 20 percent of the 45 U.S. presidents. A president must be willing to share the worst with the people, the bad news with the good. All presidents have a large obligation to inform, warn, protect, to define goals and the true national interest. Trump has, instead, enshrined personal impulse as a governing principle of his presidency. When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.


February 2020
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  • Even before Donald Trump’s election, only one-sixth of eligible families with kids received assistance for childcare and a paltry one-fifth got housing subsidies. Yet his administration arrived prepared to put programs that helped some of them pay for housing and childcare on the chopping block. No point in such families looking to him for a hand in the future. He won’t be building any Trump Towers for them. Whatever “Make America Great Again” may mean, it certainly doesn’t involve helping America’s poor kids. As long as Donald Trump oversees their race into life, they’ll find themselves ever farther from the starting line.
March 2020
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  • Most leaders lack the discipline to do routine risk-based horizon scanning, and fewer still develop the requisite contingency plans. Even rarer is the leader who has the foresight to correctly identify the top threat far enough in advance to develop and implement those plans. Suffice it to say, the Trump administration has cumulatively failed, both in taking seriously the specific, repeated intelligence community warnings about a coronavirus outbreak and in vigorously pursuing the nationwide response initiatives commensurate with the predicted threat. The federal government alone has the resources and authorities to lead the relevant public and private stakeholders to confront the foreseeable harms posed by the virus. Unfortunately, Trump officials made a series of judgments (minimizing the hazards of Covid-19) and decisions (refusing to act with the urgency required) that have needlessly made Americans far less safe. In short, the Trump administration forced a catastrophic strategic surprise onto the American people. But unlike past strategic surprises – Pearl Harbor, the Iranian revolution of 1979, or especially 9/11 – the current one was brought about by unprecedented indifference, even willful negligence. Whereas, for example, the 9/11 Commission Report assigned blame for the al-Qaida attacks on the administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan through George W Bush, the unfolding coronavirus crisis is overwhelmingly the sole responsibility of the current White House. [...] The White House detachment and nonchalance during the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak will be among the most costly decisions of any modern presidency. These officials were presented with a clear progression of warnings and crucial decision points far enough in advance that the country could have been far better prepared. But the way that they squandered the gifts of foresight and time should never be forgotten, nor should the reason they were squandered: Trump was initially wrong, so his inner circle promoted that wrongness rhetorically and with inadequate policies for far too long, and even today. Americans will now pay the price for decades.
April 2020
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October 2020
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  • As many have noted, Donald Trump has a startling inability to accept reality when he wants to believe something else, for reasons I tried to explain in Authoritarian Nightmare. He will seek out bizarre sources and toady yes-men to help him lie to himself. He wanted the virus to just go away, so he believed it would be killed by April warmth, or be cured by hydroxychloroquine, or destroyed by bleach, or be prevented by a vaccine that would be ready by October. And no sooner had he finally admitted how serious the situation was, he began pressuring states to “reopen” and return to normalcy, which some did to their sorrow. And he insisted on holding normal political re-election rallies and discouraging the wearing of masks and forcing schools to open in the fall and pushing poorly tested vaccines on the public to rejuvenate the economy and buoy his chances for re-election.
    Blaming China. President Trump needed a scapegoat as well as sacrificial lambs. He teed up China, saying he had secret evidence it had created the virus and then negligently allowed it to spread around the world. He had been deceived by China’s President Xi early on, he explained, who had assured him over the phone that the disease was under control. Trump called him on February 6, offering to send CDC scientists to China to help eradicate the disease. He thought Xi would agree to this previously rejected offer because he and the Chinese leader had a personal relationship. But Xi was uninterested. He did give the impression that everything was under control in China, according to Matt Pottinger, Deputy Director of the National Security Council who listened in on the call (Rage, pp. 241-243). But China had taken dramatic steps to control the disease. By February 6, Wuhan and the province it sat in had been isolated from the rest of China and locked down with stringent quarantine regulations for two weeks. Some 40,000 healthcare workers had been sent to the area, hospitals were being rapidly built, and the infection curve was flattening out.
    The Chinese government certainly did nothing to stop the spread of the disease abroad for a long time. But virologists around the world are virtually unanimous that COVID-19 evolved in nature, and was not manufactured in a laboratory. The United States became the world leader in coronavirus deaths not because Xi lied to Trump about how well China was containing the threat, but because Trump ignored for weeks and weeks the strongest warnings from his own experts to defend the country, and then most purposefully lied to the American people himself about what they should do. The blood is on his hands more than on anyone else’s, and deep down inside, beneath layers of excuses, denials, blame-shifting, and rationalizations, he probably knows it.
  • I think the American public has a right to rely upon what the president says about what his intent is. It seems to me that when a president makes an unambiguous statement of what his intent is, I can’t rely upon White House counsel saying, 'Well, that was not his intent.' Maybe White House counsel talked to the president. Maybe they didn’t, but I can’t tell.
November 2020
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  • People were upset about Trump's win in 2016 because he ran a campaign promising to implement policies that targeted racial and ethnic minorities with state violence (and he did not simply because he was mean or rude. In no sense is Biden's campaign comparable. Sorry! Biden won't be banning Christians, arbitrarily revoking the status of white immigrants here because of natural disasters, trying to sell off white populated parts of the country or encouraging police brutality against white people. Your disappointment is not oppression.
December 2020
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(in chronological order)

  • I am proud to be the U.S. Congressman for Texas' 5th Congressional District. I am also proud to stand with @realDonaldTrump by OBJECTING on January 6th. I call on every fellow member of Congress to do the same.
U.S. Supreme Court rejects Trump-backed lawsuit to overturn Biden's election win
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  • If the Supreme Court shows great Wisdom and Courage, the American People will win perhaps the most important case in history, and our Electoral Process will be respected again!
  • America deserves an honest election, this is what they got: suitcases of ballots added in secret in Georgia, dead people voting in Wisconsin, money for vote scheme in Nevada, poll watchers denied access in Pennsylvania, second ballot dropbox found unlocked in Michigan, and clerk faces ??? in Michigan. The evidence is overwhelming. Call your legislators, demand they fight for honest elections
  • The case wasn’t rejected on the merits, the case was rejected on standing. So the answer to that is to bring the case now to the district court by the president, by some of the electors, alleging some of the same facts where there would be standing,” he said in a Friday interview on Newsmax.
  • There’s nothing that prevents us from filing these cases immediately in the district court in which the president of course would have standing, some of the electors would have standing in that their constitutional rights have been violated. 
  • We’re not finished. Believe me.
  • The fact that the Supreme Court wouldn’t find standing in an original jurisdiction matter between multiple states, and including the President of the States, is absurd. It is enumerated in the Constitution... .They just “chickened out” and didn’t want to rule on the merits of the case. So bad for our Country!

Post-presidency (2021–2025)

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  • BREAKING: The U.S. Capitol is on lockdown after pro-Trump protestors breached the building as Congress began to certify Electoral College votes for Biden.
  • Supreme Court eras are often identified with their chief justices, as is true of the current period that began with Roberts nearly two decades ago. But the Court can be measured also by presidential influence. Certain presidents, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed eight justices in his twelve years in office, had a disproportionate effect on the Court. Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon also stood out for their imprint. The Trump effect, especially in terms of the individuals chosen and the resulting shift in the balance of power, has been incomparable. He is gone from office and they are here for life.
    • Joan Biskupic, Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right and its Historic Consequences (2023), New York: William Morrow, first edition hardcover, p. 10-11
  • One day when I was about 6, I was walking with my dad in New York City. We noticed that someone had stuck little folded squares of paper under the windshield wipers of the cars parked on the street beside us. My father picked one up and read it. I saw his face grow dark with anger. “What is it, Papa?” “It’s a message from people who think that all Jews should be killed.”
    This would have been in the late 1950s, a time when the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews in Europe was still fresh in the American consciousness. Not, you might have thought, a good season for sowing murderous antisemitism in lower Manhattan. Already aware that, being the daughter of a Jewish father and gentile mother, I was myself a demi-semite, I was worried. I knew that these people wanted to kill my father, but with a typical child-centered focus, I really wanted to know whether the gentile half of my heredity would protect me in the event of a new Holocaust. “Would they kill me, too?” I asked. Yes, he told me, they would if they could. But he then reassured me that such people would never actually have the power to do what they wanted to. It couldn’t happen here.
    I must admit that I’m grateful my father died before Donald Trump became president, before tiki-torch-bearing Nazi wannabes seeking to “Unite the Right” marched through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” before one of them drove his car into a crowd of counterdemonstrators, killing Heather Heyer, and before President Trump responded to the whole event by declaring that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
    Maybe the grubby little group behind the tracts my father and I saw that day in New York would have let me live. Maybe not. In those days home-grown fascists were rare and so didn’t have that kind of power.
  • Why should it matter whether Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and the Republican Party he’s largely taken over represent a kind of fascism? The answer: because the logic of fascism leads so inexorably to the politics of extermination. Describing his MAGA movement as fascism makes it easier to recognize the existential threat it truly represents—not only to a democratic society but to specific groups of human beings within it.
    I know it may sound alarmist, but I think it’s true: proto-fascist forces in this country have shown that they are increasingly willing to exterminate queer people, if that’s what it takes to gain and hold on to power. If I’m right, that means all Americans, queer or not, now face an existential threat.<br<For those who don’t happen to fall into one of MAGA’s target groups, let me close by paraphrasing Donald Trump: In the end, they’re coming after you. We’re just standing in the way.
  • Trump's advisers believed his ego and pride prevented him from making sound, well-informed judgments. His management style resembled a carnival ride, jerking this way and that, forcing senior management officials to thwart his inane and sometimes illegal ideas. Some of them concluded that the president was a long-term and immediate danger to the country that he had sworn an oath to protect, yet they took comfort that he had not had to steer the country through a crisis. Trump's actions and words nevertheless had painful consequences. His assault on the rule of law degraded our democratic institutions and left Americans reasonably fearful they could no longer take for granted basic civil rights and untainted justice. His contempt for foreign alliances weakened America's leadership in the world and empowered dictators and despots. His barbarous immigration policies ripped migrant children out of the arms of their families. His bigoted rhetoric emboldened white supremacists to step out of the shadows. But at least Trump had not been tested by a foreign military strike, an economic collapse, or a public health crisis. At least not until 2020.
    • Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year (2021), p. 1-2
  • The year 2020 will be remembered in the American epoch as one of anguish and abject failure. The coronavirus pandemic killed more than half a million people in the United States and infected tens of millions more, the deadliest health crisis in a century. Through the administration's Operation Warp Speed helped produce vaccines in record time, its overall coronavirus response was mismanaged by the president and marred by ineptitude and backbiting. The virus was only one of the crises Trump confronted in 2020. The pandemic paralyzed the economy, plunging the nation into a recession during which low-wage workers, many of them minorities, suffered the most. The May 25 killing of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee of a white police officer ignited protests for racial justice and an end to police discrimination and brutality. Yet Trump sought to exploit the simmering divisions for personal political gain, quickly declared himself "your president of law and order" and relentlessly pressured Pentagon leaders to deploy active-duty troops against Black Lives Matter protestors. The worsening climate crisis, meanwhile, was almost entirely ignored Trump, who earlier in his term had rolled back environmental regulations and withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement. The president was instead preoccupied with stoking doubts about the legitimacy of the election. After he lost to Joe Biden, Trump fanned the flames of conspiracies and howled about fraud that did not exist. His false claims of a "rigged election" inspired thousands of people to storm the Capitol in a violent and ultimately failed insurrection on January 6, 2021.
    • Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year (2021), p. 2
  • Trump's standard tool kit for getting out of trouble- bullying, bluster, and manipulation- was useless in managing the pandemic. He tried to cloak reality with happy talk. He promised cures that would never be realized. He floated dangerous and unproven treatments, such as injecting bleach into patients' bodies. He muzzled experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who challenged his shaky claims and became more popular than the president. He refused to lead by example and wear a mask. He picked feuds with health officials and state governors scrambling to respond to emergency outbreaks, striking out at those who didn't praise his haphazard response. Not only did he fail to keep Americans safe; he couldn't keep himself safe. Trump was hospitalized with COVID-19 in October 2020, zapping his false air of invincibility.
    • Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year (2021), p. 5
  • The coronavirus changed the world, altering how people worked, how families lived, and what constituted a community. These profound changes were accelerated by the recession and heightened by the tensions in the aftermath of Floyd's killing. Trump, however, principally governed for a minority of the country- his hard-core political supporters- and chose neither to try to unite the nation nor to reimagine a postpandemic America. He egged on the anger and disaffection among many white people who felt economically threatened and culturally marginalized. He pitted groups of Americans against one another. He uttered racist phrases and used his immense social media platforms to spread messages of hate. "His view of America is provincial, it's parochial, it's sullied, it's any other adjective that calls up a sense of narrowness and ugliness," said Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. "In so many ways, Donald Trump represents the death rattle of an old America, and it's loud and it's violent." A senior government official who worked closely with the president drew a parallel between Trump's handling of the Black Lives Matter protests and Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Nazi Germany.
    • Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year (2021), p. 5
  • The New York Times published an article Monday that's bone-chilling for anyone who cherishes our freedom, democracy and constitutional governance. The story recounted, with full cooperation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, his plans to eliminate executive branch constraints on his power if he is elected president in 2024.
    The obstacles to be eliminated include an independent Justice Department, independent leadership in administrative agencies and an independent civil service. Richard Neustadt, one of the country’s best known students of the American presidency, has said that in a constitutional democracy the chief executive “does not obtain results by giving orders – or not. ... He does not get action without argument. Presidential power is the power to persuade.”Trump’s plan would substitute loyalty to him for loyalty to the Constitution. This vision is simultaneously frightening and unsurprising. In 2019, he said, “I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.” And in December, Trump called for the “termination of ... the Constitution.”
    In effect, he attempted to do exactly that in the run-up to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by pressuring state officials to reverse President Joe Biden’s electoral victory, attempting to weaponize the Justice Department and bullying Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election.
  • The Times story outlined his 2025 road map to implement this command-and-control model of executive authority and centralization of power if he’s returned to the Oval Office. In effect, the article described how his team would replace our constitutional republic with an authoritarian state. Such a state seeks to eliminate the independence of civil servants. Saying good things about bureaucracy may be unpopular, but federal employees' competence, expert judgment and commitment to governance by law is essential to democratic government.
    One definition of an authoritarian state is that it is characterized by the consolidation of power in a single leader, "a controlling regime that justifies itself as a 'necessary evil.'" That kind of control necessarily features "strict government-imposed constraints on social freedoms such as suppression of political opponents and anti-regime activity."
    Those characteristics describe the contours of the 2025 blueprint that the Trump campaign wanted the public to see via the Times' report. As the story notes, they are setting the stage, if Trump is elected, “to claim a mandate” for the goal of centralizing power in him.
    The Times quoted John McEntee, Trump’s 2020 White House director of personnel, defending the rejection of checks and balances on a president: “Our current executive branch was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. ... What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”
  • In fact, the executive branch, like the two other branches, was devised by the framers of our Constitution, to limit power by dividing it. Even Alexander Hamilton, who defended energy in the executive branch, suggested that the path to tyranny was marked when government officials are “obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man.”
    James Madison joined Hamilton in warning in The Federalist 48 that “power is of an encroaching nature.” For that reason, The Federalist 51 states, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
    It described the paradox facing the framers as this: One must “enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”
    Trump’s 2025 blueprint would end governmental control on a president so he can dominate and control the governed.
  • Along with divided power, the central constraint that our founding documents create is the overarching legal institution known as the rule of law. That is why Trump’s plan for a radical reorganization of the executive branch starts with ending “the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.”
    Controlling the prosecutorial power allows a president to use it to favor friends, destroy enemies and intimidate ordinary citizens tempted to speak out.
    That would sound the death knell of American freedom. As John Locke, the 17th century political philosopher who inspired the authors of the Declaration of Independence, wrote, “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” Or as Blake Smith put it in an article in Foreign Policy last year, “The bureaucratic ethos is essential to the functioning of the state and the preservation of private life as a separate, unpolitical domain of tolerated freedom.”
    At the close of America’s first decade as a constitutional republic, George Washington voluntarily chose not to seek a third term as president to avoid setting the country on the road to the tyranny of lifetime rule by a president. He understood from the revolution against a king that retaining the personal power of one person is the central goal of authoritarianism.
    If voters elect Trump president in 2024, he will implement the plan his campaign has purposefully leaked. The outcome is easy to foretell. A bureaucracy purged of those loyal to the Constitution rather than to Trump will send free and fair elections to history’s landfill, along with the Bill of Rights and the freedoms they were designed to protect.

Second presidency (2025–present)

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California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes. ~ Gavin Newsom
It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. ~ Donald Trump
The administration is efficient and punctual, and its leader can do no wrong. The American republic is aiming for a head-on collision with democracy, and not incidentally is becoming an enigma, if not a laughingstock, to the rest of the free world. It has to stop. ~ Religion News Service
As United States President Donald Trump relentlessly threatens to annex Canada, reiterating the threat again this week in a speech to American military officials, some Canadians are worried that a U.S. invasion could one day become a reality. How would that scenario play out? Looking at the sheer size of the American military, many people might believe that Trump would enjoy an easy victory.
That analysis is wrong. ~ Aisha Ahmad

January 2025

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  • The privilege of United States citizenship is a priceless and profound gift. The Fourteenth Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” That provision rightly repudiated the Supreme Court of the United States’s shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race.
    But the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Consistent with this understanding, the Congress has further specified through legislation that “a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a national and citizen of the United States at birth, 8 U.S.C. 1401, generally mirroring the Fourteenth Amendment’s text.
  • It is the policy of the United States that no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship, to persons: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
  • Without DEI, we are told, hiring and promotions will be merit-based. Make no mistake though, merit has traditionally been liberally peppered with cronyism and good-ol’-boy-ism. Now add to that fealty to the Trump Administration rather than the Constitution.
    The reality is that Fagan’s firing has nothing to do with bolstering national security. Just the opposite. It is part of a regressive social agenda to put women back in their place, misogyny being the glue that holds together the many racist, anti-immigration, LGBTQ+ and other hate groups that have been unleashed in America.
  • It is worth noting as well that it was President Donald Trump who signed the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Act in 2017, mandating the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) that recognizes the links between gender and security and therefore seeks to bolster women’s participation in security affairs. UNSCR 1325 is built upon four pillars: participation, prevention, protection, and relief and recovery efforts. WPS emphasizes the need for inclusive diversity (women having not just a seat, but a voice at decision-making tables) and consideration of how policies and programs affect men, women, boys and girls differently.
  • Her firing was an insult to Fagan’s career and legacy and will have significant negative national security implications.
    The Trump Administration has vowed to end “radical and wasteful” government DEI programs. “A woke military is a weak military” DEI critics like to say. Actually, however, a well-executed DEI program can address challenges being faced by the military. Those challenges are sometimes referred to as the “5 Rs”: recruitment, retention, readiness, resources and risk to force/risk to mission.
  • Firing Fagan was likely just the first salvo in ridding the Pentagon, and the government generally, of individuals who support diversity. What’s the next chapter? The path forward is no longer visible, just like the Coast Guard web page that used to feature Fagan’s photo and biography.
  • Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.
    This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts. Invalidating the true and biological category of “woman” improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept.
    Accordingly, my Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.
  • “Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true. Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex. Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.
  • Agencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages. Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity. Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.
  • By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
    Section 1. Policy and Purpose. Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.
    Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding. Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization.
    Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called “transition” of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.
  • The phrase “chemical and surgical mutilation” means the use of puberty blockers, including GnRH agonists and other interventions, to delay the onset or progression of normally timed puberty in an individual who does not identify as his or her sex; the use of sex hormones, such as androgen blockers, estrogen, progesterone, or testosterone, to align an individual’s physical appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex; and surgical procedures that attempt to transform an individual’s physical appearance to align with an identity that differs from his or her sex or that attempt to alter or remove an individual’s sexual organs to minimize or destroy their natural biological functions. This phrase sometimes is referred to as “gender affirming care.”
  • Sec. 3. Ending Reliance on Junk Science. (a) The blatant harm done to children by chemical and surgical mutilation cloaks itself in medical necessity, spurred by guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which lacks scientific integrity. In light of the scientific concerns with the WPATH guidance:
    (i) agencies shall rescind or amend all policies that rely on WPATH guidance, including WPATH’s “Standards of Care Version 8”; and
    (ii) within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) shall publish a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion.
    (b) The Secretary of HHS, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, shall use all available methods to increase the quality of data to guide practices for improving the health of minors with gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion, or who otherwise seek chemical or surgical mutilation.
  • Sec. 4. Defunding Chemical and Surgical Mutilation. The head of each executive department or agency (agency) that provides research or education grants to medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals, shall, consistent with applicable law and in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, immediately take appropriate steps to ensure that institutions receiving Federal research or education grants end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.
  • Sec. 6. TRICARE. The Department of Defense provides health insurance, through TRICARE, to nearly 2 million individuals under the age of 18. As appropriate and consistent with applicable law, the Secretary of Defense shall commence a rulemaking or sub-regulatory action to exclude chemical and surgical mutilation of children from TRICARE coverage and amend the TRICARE provider handbook to exclude chemical and surgical mutilation of children.
  • Imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children not only violates longstanding anti-discrimination civil rights law in many cases, but usurps basic parental authority. For example, steering students toward surgical and chemical mutilation without parental consent or involvement or allowing males access to private spaces designated for females may contravene Federal laws that protect parental rights, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA), and sex-based equality and opportunity, including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX). Similarly, demanding acquiescence to “White Privilege” or “unconscious bias,” actually promotes racial discrimination and undermines national unity.
  • Within 90 days of the date of this order, to advise the President in formulating future policy, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the Attorney General, shall provide an Ending Indoctrination Strategy to the President, through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, containing recommendations and a plan for:
    (i) eliminating Federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology
    (ii) protecting parental rights, pursuant to FERPA, 20 U.S.C. 1232g, and the PPRA, 20 U.S.C. 1232h, with respect to any K-12 policies or conduct implicated by the purpose and policy of this order.
    (b) The Ending Indoctrination Strategy submitted under subsection (a) of this section shall contain a summary and analysis of the following:
    (i) All Federal funding sources and streams, including grants or contracts, that directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology:
    (A) in K-12 curriculum, instruction, programs, or activities; or
    (B) in K-12 teacher education, certification, licensing, employment, or training;
    (ii) Each agency’s process to prevent or rescind Federal funds, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, from being used by an ESA, SEA, LEA, elementary school, or secondary school to directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology in:
    (A) K-12 curriculum, instruction, programs, or activities; or
    (B) K-12 teacher certification, licensing, employment, or training;
    (iii) Each agency’s process to prevent or rescind Federal funds, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, from being used by an ESA, SEA, LEA, elementary school, or secondary school to directly or indirectly support or subsidize the social transition of a minor student, including through school staff or teachers or through deliberately concealing the minor’s social transition from the minor’s parents.

February 2025

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  • By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports, it is hereby ordered: Section 1. Policy and Purpose. In recent years, many educational institutions and athletic associations have allowed men to compete in women’s sports. This is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.
    Therefore, it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy. It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.
  • The Secretary of State, including through the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ Sports Diplomacy Division and the Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations, shall:
    (i) rescind support for and participation in people-to-people sports exchanges or other sports programs within which the relevant female sports category is based on identity and not sex

April 2025

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  • Since Trump’s inauguration, something in the American psyche has ruptured. The comforting fictions we were raised on—the permanence of democracy, the inevitability of progress, the moral arc bending obediently toward justice—have begun to decay in the open air. And as the facade crumbles, many find themselves in the throes of a bitter realization: that democracy, like any living thing, must be tended, and we—distracted, sedated, entertained into stupor—have neglected the garden.
    But for some of us, this is not an awakening. It’s confirmation. The slow creep of authoritarian rot has long been visible to those unwilling to mistake noise for substance. We’ve seen it metastasize in school board meetings, in voter suppression bills dressed up as “security,” in pundits who speak in slogans and legislate in spite. This isn’t a glitch in the system—it is the system, finally baring its teeth.
    American fascism doesn’t arrive with marching boots and armbands. It comes wearing a flag pin and smiling through lies. It speaks the language of liberty while gutting its meaning, builds walls while preaching unity, demands law and order while desecrating both. Its genius lies in its banality—it doesn’t shock, it numbs. It doesn’t seize power all at once; it convinces you to hand it over piece by piece, until all that’s left is the echo of your own consent.
  • And yet, even now, something resists. The illusion is fracturing. The machine groans. Some of those once entranced by the spectacle are blinking their way back to awareness. The slogans ring hollow. The outrage feels manufactured. The enemy-of-the-week carousel begins to look more like a grift than a gospel.
    To those beginning to see it—whether with regret, disbelief, or shame—there is no need to grovel. There is no moral utility in self-flagellation. Simply step in. Join the ranks of those who refuse to be further weaponized against their own future. Redemption, in this case, is not spiritual—it’s civic.
    But understand this: the middle ground is gone. It’s not that nuance is dead; it’s that the stakes have outgrown equivocation. This is not about partisan preference. It is about whether the society we pass on values truth or convenience, solidarity or submission.
    Despair, seductive though it is, must be treated like any other form of propaganda: with suspicion. It flatters the ego while paralyzing the will. It tells you that caring is futile, that resistance is symbolic, that apathy is sophistication. But despair is not wisdom—it is surrender dressed in intellect’s clothing.
  • So yes—feel the rage. Let it bloom. But refine it. Make it do work. The answer to this moment is not retreat, and it is certainly not moderation disguised as maturity. The answer is engagement—real, sustained, imperfect engagement. The kind that builds something worth defending.
    Because no one is coming to save us. There is no parent, no party, no perfectly articulated policy that will reverse this decline on its own. There’s only us—flawed, fatigued, infuriated, but still tethered to a vision of something better. Still capable of defiance. Still able to remember who we are.
    And here is what must be remembered: this unraveling is not ordained. It is not gravity. It is not some immutable law of nature dragging us toward darkness. It is permissioned—enabled by what we tolerate, fueled by what we ignore, and shaped entirely by what we allow. History is not written in stone. It is etched moment by moment by human hands—hands that can just as easily build as they can destroy.
    We forget sometimes that there is no “they” without us. The enforcers of tyranny have neighbors. Families. Old friends. Someone taught them to ride a bike, to read, to pray. Someone loved them. And someone, still, might reach them.
  • This is how we change the course—not with brute force, but with brave conversation. Not by outgunning, but by outlasting. By planting the seeds of doubt where loyalty once lived. By offering an outstretched hand in place of a clenched fist. By refusing to see each other as lost causes.
    Violence is not the only language of resistance. Our refusal—clear, calm, unyielding, nonviolent —is itself a form of rebellion. Every time we persuade instead of punish, every time we refuse to dehumanize even those who’ve lost their way, we reclaim a piece of the world we want to live in.
    Because at the end of it all, we are bound to each other—whether we like it or not. There is no exit from the shared human condition. Someone always knows someone. Someone always has a choice. And sometimes, all it takes is one defector in the right place, one refusal at the right moment, one person willing to say “no”—and mean it—for the whole damn machine to grind to a halt.
    So remember: this isn’t hopeless, unless we make it so. This isn’t fate, unless we accept it as such. This is ours. This is still ours.
    And when they ask what we did while the fire was rising, we will say: we remembered our humanity.
    We remembered each other.
    And we stood—together.

June 2025

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  • WASHINGTON − Progressive firebrand Sen. Bernie Sanders said he believes President Donald Trump is “moving this country rapidly into authoritarianism" after Trump deployed 2,000 National Guard troops to help quell immigration protests in Los Angeles. “This guy wants all of the power. He does not believe in the Constitution. He does not believe in the rule of law. My understanding is that the governor of California, the mayor of the city of Los Angeles did not request the National Guard, but he thinks he has a right to do anything he wants,” Sanders, a Vermont independent, told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
  • The protests come as the Trump administration has taken stronger actions to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. Demonstrators allege the administration's immigration enforcement has violated civil and human rights. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement on June 7 that Trump signed a memo deploying the guardsmen “to address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester.” Both California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, however, have criticized the move, saying it would only escalate tensions in the area. “I would say that to a large degree, the future of this country rests with a small number of Republicans in the House and Senate who know better, who do know what the Constitution is about, and it’s high time they stood up for our Constitution and the rule of law,” Sanders said.
  • President Donald Trump’s deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles is stretching the legal limits of how the military can be used to enforce domestic laws on American streets, constitutional law experts say. Trump, for now, has given the troops a limited mission: protecting federal immigration agents and buildings amid a wave of street protests against the administration’s mass deportation policies. To justify the deployment, Trump cited a provision of federal law that allows the president to use the National Guard to quell domestic unrest.
    But Trump’s stated rationale, legal scholars say, appears to be a flimsy and even contrived basis for such a rare and dramatic step. The real purpose, they worry, may be to amass more power over blue states that have resisted Trump’s deportation agenda. And the effect, whether intentional or not, may be to inflame the tension in L.A., potentially leading to a vicious cycle in which Trump calls up even more troops or broadens their mission. “It does appear to be largely pretextual, or at least motivated more by politics than on-the-ground need,” said Chris Mirasolo, a national security law professor at the University of Houston.
  • At issue is the president’s authority to deploy the military for domestic purposes. A federal law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, generally bars the president from using federal troops — the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force or Space Force — to enforce domestic laws. But there are exceptional circumstances when the president can use troops domestically. The most prominent exception is the Insurrection Act, which authorizes the president to deploy the military to suppress insurrections, “domestic violence” or conspiracies that undermine constitutional rights or federal laws. At the end of Trump’s first term, some of his most ardent supporters urged and expected him to invoke the Insurrection Act to push aside state election authorities and essentially void the 2020 presidential election results, although he never did so. During his 2024 campaign, he said he would invoke the act to subdue unrest if reelected.
    But so far, Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act. Instead, in a Saturday order, he cited a different statutory provision: a terse section of the U.S. code that allows the president to use the National Guard — but not any other military forces — to suppress the “danger of a rebellion” or to “execute” federal laws when “regular forces” are unable to do so. Notably, his order did not outright declare the unrest in L.A. to be a “rebellion,” but suggested it was moving in that direction.
    “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States,” the order said.
  • California authorities and Trump critics say that local law enforcement was effectively managing the L.A. protests. And despite the National Guard’s purportedly defensive role of protecting federal property and personnel, some experts see the deployment as throwing a lit match into a tinderbox. If the troops are drawn into violent confrontations, Trump might use the clashes as justification for invoking the Insurrection Act, which would pave the way for active-duty military forces to take more aggressive actions to subdue protesters and engage in law enforcement. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Saturday said Marines could be mobilized to L.A. if unrest continues, writing in a post on X that the troops “are on high alert.”
    “The laws in this area are somewhat unsettled and untested,” said Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor who served as a counselor to the undersecretary of defense for policy under President Barack Obama. “Federalizing Guard troops in this situation — and raising the specter of also sending in active duty military personnel — is a political stunt, and a dangerous one.”
    Experts are also eyeing whether the Guard members accompany immigration authorities when they venture away from federal buildings — a move that could signal a willingness to use troops to actively aid immigration enforcement, rather than simply protect agents from protesters.
  • Trump is not the first president to deploy the military over a governor’s objection. But it’s the first time since 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson ordered troops to protect civil rights protesters in Alabama. President Dwight Eisenhower similarly overrode objections from Arkansas’ governor, deploying troops to help enforce the desegregation of public schools. When presidents view state and local authorities as being ineffective or recalcitrant, those steps may be justified, some experts say. “Usually the President calls out the troops with the cooperation of the governor, which happened in LA itself during the Rodney King riots,” said John Yoo, a legal counselor to President George W. Bush. “But there have been times when governors have been tragically slow, as during Hurricane Katrina, or actually resistant to federal policy, as with desegregation, or, arguably, in this case. “Trump, when speaking about the decision with reporters Sunday, said he warned Newsom a few days earlier of the possibility. “I did call him the other night,” Trump said. “I said you’ve got to take care of this, otherwise I’m sending in the troops.”
    Newsom has railed against Trump’s unilateral action, saying it will inflame rather than ease tensions on the streets and that state and local law enforcement were appropriately responding to the unrest outside federal buildings. Newsom got backup from Democratic governors across the country, who signed a letter calling Trump’s National Guard deployment an “alarming abuse of power.”
    “The military appears to be clashing with protesters in the streets of our country. That’s not supposed to happen,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a national security law expert at New York University’s Brennan Center. “It’s such a dangerous situation. It’s dangerous for liberty. It’s dangerous for democracy.”
  • A purported member of the U.S. Army openly joined the protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Dallas and has called on others in the military to "resist evil." Newsweek has contacted the Pentagon for comment via email.It comes as protests that erupted in Los Angeles over immigration enforcement raids that prompted President Donald Trump to mobilize National Guard troops and Marines have begun to spread to other cities nationwide, including Dallas, Chicago and New York. Many have been peaceful, but some have resulted in clashes with law enforcement as officers made arrests and used chemical irritants to disperse crowds. The Trump administration has said it would continue its program of raids and deportations despite the protests.
  • "We are not pawns for [President] Donald Trump," said the uniformed woman in an unverified video posted to social media by the leftist activist channel BreakThrough News. Newsweek could not independently verify the veracity of the video and has contacted BreakThrough News for clarification. The woman was not fully identified, but a patch that read "Colado" was on her chest where troops wear their last names. She said she had joined the protests after Trump deployed Marines to Los Angeles. "Why now? It's because the military was called upon against the protesters. We, in our oath to serve, we serve the people of the United States, the Constitution," she said. "These constitutional rights are being stripped and just denied. And the military will not be pawns to that." In the interview, the woman also called on "the conscience of military members who served previously and now."
    She said: "We have a conscience, a mind and we have a duty and moral obligation to say no and resist evil." Trump has activated more than 4,000 National Guard members and 700 Marines in Los Angeles over the objections of city and state leaders. However, the Marines have not yet been spotted in the city and the Guard troops have had limited engagement with protesters, according to The Associated Press.
  • There was black smoke in my rearview mirror on the drive back, and I thought, Well, that ain’t good. It wasn’t until I got home and turned on the local news that I found out it was Waymo driverless cars being burned. Five of them. When I turned on the national news after dark, that was pretty much all I saw: the black smoke and flaming carcasses of five empty cars owned by Google or something. Not the concerned citizens that showed up for their neighbors just to be greeted by flash grenades and rubber bullets. If you got all of your information from cable news, burning cars would be all you’d think happened.
    Donald Trump called in the Marines the next morning, and they drove in from Twentynine Palms. Right now the local news is doing a segment on Father’s Day gift ideas. The president thinks the situation is dangerous enough to require the military, but KTLA does not think it is important enough to preempt a piece on backgammon sets and coffee mugs repurposed from MLB game bats. They’re here now, I guess, 700 strong, and nobody seems to know what they’re going to do, or even where they’re going to stay or what they’re going to eat, because now we know that nobody budgeted for the lodging or meals of the 2,000 National Guard members who’ve been sent here, who woke up this morning on the cold stone floor of some federal building.
  • The ICE activity we are protesting is allegedly being directed by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Miller called a meeting of ICE officials last month and directed them to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.” Not to target “the worst of the worst,” as the president had indicated. Not even to target criminals or gang members at all. But to roll up to a Home Depot where day laborers gather. To post up outside of a grammar school graduation in a neighborhood with a high percentage of undocumented residents. Just go and grab them and pull them away from their homes and their babies and their lives. Just lock them up. Now that’s what they’re doing. That’s what we’re protesting. And if it turns out their papers actually are in order, which it has more than a few times, then tough shit.
  • Los Angeles is crazy vast. Santa Monica High School is 12 miles from where I sit writing. If I left right now, I’d be there in an hour. But do you know what’s one half of one mile, one ten-minute walk away, from Santa Monica High School? The beach. A really nice, clean, and well-maintained beach, as a matter of fact. Miller could have been taking a surf lesson, eating some Dippin’ Dots, or watching a majestic sunset over the Pacific Ocean. Instead, he’s sneering to a crowd about his right as a white person to leave his mess behind for a brown person to clean up.
    This behavior is rancid. This rancid behavior is motivated by a rancid worldview that is the kind of rancid you really don’t grow out of. This is rancid, and now it’s backed up by the United States government, and now the United States government has lined the United States military up against its own citizens. These raids are the acting out of that entitled and bigoted and absolutely rancid worldview. That’s what we’re protesting. And on the whole we’re doing it more peacefully than most groups of people who take to the streets after their city’s team wins or loses the Stanley Cup.
    We do not need your help.
  • With President Donald Trump's deployment of 700 Marines to Los Angeles, Sen. Bernie Sanders took to the internet to offer his own thoughts. In a video posted to his X account, Sanders said the message he wishes to impart is not about the protests or the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the California city but something that affects all Americans everywhere. "What's going on is all about Trump's never-ending desire for more and more power," Sanders said. The Vermont senator said that the 45th and 47th president is overriding the California governor's authority in order to consolidate more power with the U.S. military. Sanders also said that Trump is trying to wrest control from the judicial and legislative branch of government as well as stamp out universities' independence and private law offices. "Now is the time for us to come together and stand against authoritarianism and for democracy," Sanders said.
  • President Donald Trump on Thursday declared he doesn’t “feel like a king” after he was asked to address the protests planned across the country in the coming weekend to counter the expensive Washington, D.C., military parade scheduled for Saturday — his birthday and the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary. “I don’t feel like a king,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I have to go through hell to get stuff approved.” Trump cited the example of having to involve GOP leaders House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (S.D.) before signing a resolution passed by Congress to block California’s ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars from 2035. “No, no. We’re not a king. We’re not a king at all,” Trump added.
  • The organizers of the “No Kings” protests said Saturday will mark “a nationwide day of defiance,” noting that they plan to deliver a strong message against authoritarianism. “We’re not gathering to feed his ego. We’re building a movement that leaves him behind. The flag doesn’t belong to President Trump. It belongs to us,” the event’s website states. “We’re showing up everywhere he isn’t — to say no thrones, no crowns, no kings.” “No Kings” protests are scheduled in 50 states and 1,500 cities across the country, but not in Washington. Organizers said they will host a flagship march and rally in Philadelphia. The protests come as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has caused uproar in Los Angeles and other cities, where demonstrators came out to protest the raids carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. In response, Trump authorized the deployment in California of the National Guard, against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) wishes, and also of the U.S. Marines — a move Newsom warned would pour fuel on the fire.
  • Trump’s Saturday parade, which is expected to feature armored vehicles, thousands of soldiers and military aircraft, is estimated to cost taxpayers about $45 million — a price tag Republicans have had a hard time defending. Earlier this week, Trump had a warning for demonstrators planning to take to the streets in Washington this weekend. “If there’s any protest that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force, by the way,” he said. “And for those people that want to protest, they’re gonna be met with very big force.”
  • A part of a US national suicide prevention hotline that caters for LGBTQ young people says it will soon close, after the Trump administration cut its funding. The administration has accused the service of "radical gender ideology". It says it will still fund the wider 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline - of which the LGBTQ youth option is one part - and that all callers will receive "compassion and help". The Trevor Project, an organisation that helped to run the LGBTQ option, said the decision would have a harmful impact on vulnerable young people. "Suicide prevention is about people, not politics," said Jaymes Black, the organisation's CEO. He said his service had been told to close within 30 days.
    "The administration's decision to remove a bipartisan, evidence-based service that has effectively supported a high-risk group of young people through their darkest moments is incomprehensible," Mr Black added.
    The decision comes during international Pride Month, which celebrates LGBTQ culture and history.
  • The news also arrived ahead of a US Supreme Court decision on Tuesday that upheld the state of Tennessee's ban on transition-related healthcare for minors who identify as transgender. The general 988 Lifeline offers free mental health support via call, text, or chat. It is funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), a subsidiary of the US Health and Human Services Agency (HHS). Currently, LGBTQ young people can select option 3 from a call menu in order to connect with counsellors. After the changes, the remaining 988 Lifeline services would "focus on serving all help seekers", including those who previously chose to access LGBTQ youth services, SAMHSA said. But the hotline would "no longer silo LGB+ youth services", SAMHSA wrote in a statement, omitting the "T" and "Q" that refers to transgender and queer people in the LGBTQ acronym.
  • Officials at HHS proposed cutting the 988 Lifeline's LGBTQ youth services last week. In a statement to NBC News at the time, an HHS spokesperson described the option as a "chat service where children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by 'counselors' without consent or knowledge of their parents". Legislation passed in 2020 by the US Congress required the 988 Lifeline to provide services and staff specifically for LGBTQ people as well as other at-risk groups like rural and Native Americans.
    The legislation noted that LGBTQ youth were "more than 4 times more likely to contemplate suicide than their peers, with 1 in 5 LGBTQ youth and more than 1 in 3 transgender youth reporting attempting suicide".
    The law received bipartisan support - including from Donald Trump, who was then serving his first presidential term, and signed the bill into law.
    According to the 988 Lifeline website, LGBTQ communities are "disproportionately at risk for suicide and other mental health struggles due to historic and ongoing structural violence."
    The Trevor Project began providing its services through the 988 Lifeline in 2022. In 2024, it served more than 231,000 crisis contacts, the organisation said in a statement. It says it will continue to provide its own independent services.
  • The decision to eliminate the 988 Lifeline's designated LGBTQ youth option comes amid Trump's push to curtail services, support, and access for transgender people across the federal government. He has pushed to end diversity, equity, and inclusion policies (DEI) within the federal government, arguing that such programmes are themselves discriminatory. The president has also ordered the removal of transgender servicemembers from the US military and issued an executive order that the US would only recognise two sexes – male and female. The US Department of State also announced it would no longer allow applicants to choose "X" as their gender on US passports. Instead, transgender individuals must choose "male" or "female" corresponding to their sex assigned at birth.
  • Last week, during a visit to the “South Loop” ICE facility (the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program office located at 2245 S. Michigan Avenue in Chicago) we were denied the ability to perform congressional oversight – as is our duty as members of the United States House of Representatives. During the visit to this facility, the ICE officer who refused to identify himself called the Chicago Police Department to evict us for “trespassing.” We are writing today to express deep concern regarding the lack of oversight of these facilities and their operations, and to request immediate and full access to ICE facilities for the purpose of investigating this activity further. This specific facility has been the site of very disturbing incidents that have shaken our community. On June 4, 2025, ICE officials detained at least 10 individuals after they were texted to demand they show up for a routine appointment1. It is unclear exactly how many people were taken, where they were taken to, and if they were given access to counsel – all of which we were hoping to learn through performing our oversight duties. We were denied those answers. We are writing to you today to demand access to this facility.
    • Raja Krishnamoorthi, U.S. Representative for the Illinois 8th Congressional District & Jonathan Jackson, U.S. Representative for the Illinois 1st Congressional District, to Kristi Noem, 23 June 2025
  • Our request comes as the President has declared his intent to carry out the “single largest mass deportation program in history,” specifically naming the city of Chicago as a target, in addition to other Democratic-run cities. The President’s politically motivated actions are deeply troubling, particularly for communities like ours in Illinois that have already seen intensified enforcement activity in recent weeks. The administration must ensure that all individuals, regardless of immigration status, are treated with dignity and afforded due process – as that is the law. Yet the reality on the ground tells a different story. The President has repeatedly targeted Chicago, and we are now witnessing the consequences unfold in disturbing ways.
    In Chicago, these facilities are the site of reports that allege rushed deportations, inadequate medical care, restricted legal access, and poor conditions. These are not isolated incidents—they point to broader systemic failures in enforcement and facility oversight.
    • Raja Krishnamoorthi, U.S. Representative for the Illinois 8th Congressional District & Jonathan Jackson, U.S. Representative for the Illinois 1st Congressional District, to Kristi Noem, 23 June 2025
  • Some of the individuals lured to ICE facilities in Chicago were reportedly detained for several days under inhumane conditions. One of those detained, Ms. Gladis Yolanda Chavez Pineda—a longtime Chicago resident and respected community leader—described a harrowing experience. Her husband stated in an interview, “She has not had access to a shower. She has not had access to feminine hygiene products. She has not been able to change her clothes...They have no information of what’s happening. They don’t even have a clock.” After being moved to a jail in Kentucky, Pineda reported that “People are sleeping on concrete floors. Last Sunday, one mattress was given to a group of 20 mothers to share. In one of the facilities, only one bathroom is given to 20 or more individuals, with no partitions and privacy.” These reports reflect systemic issues in ICE’s enforcement strategies and facility management, not just in Illinois but across the country.
    • Raja Krishnamoorthi, U.S. Representative for the Illinois 8th Congressional District & Jonathan Jackson, U.S. Representative for the Illinois 1st Congressional District, to Kristi Noem, 23 June 2025
  • The Pentagon has officially stripped the late gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk's name from a U.S. naval vessel, amid broader efforts by the Trump administration to erase what it describes as "woke" ideology from the public. The former USNS Harvey Milk is now called the USNS Oscar V. Peterson, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced in a video posted online Friday. "We are taking the politics out of ship naming," Hegseth said. "We're not renaming the ship to anything political. This is not about political activists, unlike the previous administration."
    The ship is part of the John Lewis-class oilers, named after the famed civil rights activist and longtime congressman.
    In 2016, then-Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said ships in this class would be named after leaders in civil rights activism. That included paying homage to Milk, who was a Navy veteran and became the first openly gay person to serve in California politics when he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Milk was assassinated by a former board colleague in 1978, leaving behind a legacy of advocacy for gay rights. The ship's new namesake, Oscar V. Peterson, was a U.S. Navy chief petty officer who was killed in World War II and posthumously granted a Medal of Honor by Congress for bravery during the war.
  • Under Hegseth's guidance, the Navy is reviewing the names of several other ships named after women, Black and Hispanic people. Other Navy vessels under review include those named after Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Harriet Tubman, Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Lucy Stone and Medgar Evers.

July 2025

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August 2025

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  • Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul—all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair.
    Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn’t but has always been—arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel.
    It is America’s shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn’t just lose its soul—it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.
  • I have the right to do anything I wanna do. I’m the President of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger — and it is in danger in these cities — I can do it, no problem going in and solving, you know, his difficulties. But it would be nice if they’d call in and say, “Would you do it?” And we do it in conjunction. Now, we work very well with the police because we naturally get along with the police. So, the police and us work really well together, whether the mayor is opposed or whether– I mean, you have a really rotten mayor there, too. He’s got a six percent approval rating in Chicago.
    And I see Black women wearing a red MAGA hat last night on television. “Please let the president come in. My son was attacked. My this–”. You have a force of Black women, Black Women. They’re like, “Only Trump.” They want Trump to come in.
  • Since returning to office in January 2025, President Donald Trump has taken numerous actions that have alarmed international human rights observers: deporting immigrants without due process, holding detainees in inhumane, overcrowded conditions, and deploying both the National Guard and federal military troops to Los Angeles to quell largely peaceful protests. In recent weeks, National Guard troops have deployed to Washington, ostensibly to move unhoused citizens off the streets and to fight crime. Now, with Trump announcing that he will send the National Guard from conservative states to other left-leaning cities like Chicago and New York, fears are rising of an uptick in political violence and human rights violations.
  • Even the troops themselves are questioning what they would do if asked to turn on their fellow Americans. According to new survey data from the Human Security Lab at UMass Amherst, which I direct, the vast majority of them recognize the duty to disobey an unlawful order and are able to imagine such scenarios. Whether they would actually disobey an order when push comes to shove, however, is a murkier question.
    U.S. troops today face an ethical conundrum: they are trained to obey their commander-in-chief, but their oath is to the U.S. Constitution. And when asked if he must "uphold the Constitution," Trump has replied, "I don't know." Moreover, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, service members have a duty to obey lawful orders, but under the U.S. Courts Martial Manual, they also have a duty to disobey unlawful orders-defined as those that clearly violate the U.S. Constitution, U.S. federal law, or international law like the Geneva Conventions. In these instances, following orders is not a defense: service members can be held individually liable for such crimes and prosecuted under the doctrine of individual responsibility.
  • Many of Trump's orders are already being questioned as unconstitutional, and numerous international bodies have indicated that many of his actions violate seven decades of established international human rights standards; some may constitute crimes against humanity. Even the deployment of active-duty troops itself risks violating the Posse Comitatus Act prohibiting the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement. Thus, U.S. troops are in a bind-and it's already affecting troop morale. Some troops are actively calling for Congress to protect service members who refuse to follow unlawful orders.
  • How far is the military likely to go in resisting orders given by Trump? The answer depends a great deal on the individual service member and the context. Troops are taught to disobey orders to commit war crimes in the course of their duties, for example, but as legal historian Tom Dannenbaum points out, they have not typically had the right to question the terms of their deployments, even when those terms themselves-such as Russia's aggressive war against Ukraine-clearly violate international law. Thus, under existing customary law, it would be more likely for troops to conscientiously resist orders to commit atrocities than orders to deploy per se, even in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
    Second, troops are not required to disobey every questionable order, allowing a muddled grey area that makes it unreasonable to think there would be 100 percent compliance with this doctrine. In legal terms, according to military historian Mark Osiel, the barometer for "manifestly unlawful" orders is whether the order is "illegal on its face" -that is, whether an ordinary person would know that what they are doing is wrong. This is reflected in the procedural rules for court martial. But social scientists predict men and women in uniform vary in how they understand the threshold for "manifest unlawfulness" because they can easily talk themselves into excusing actions based on contextual factors.
  • In this context, it is notable that so many US troops are willing to state they would openly disobey orders such as detaining people inhumanely, starving civilians or shooting civilians. And research shows if even a minority is willing to stand up, it can matter. Criminologist Eva Whitehead researched conscientious disobedience during the Vietnam War and at the East German border during the Cold War: her work found that when some troops disobeyed, it was easier for others to follow suit.
    Opposition to following unlawful orders is prevalent among U.S. troops. The question is whether it will make a difference when it counts. Uniformed personnel understand the concept of an order that is manifestly unlawful, and their own responsibility to disobey such an order. This won't entirely prevent harm, as some of those soldiers may still buckle under the weight of military hierarchy in a high-stress situation. But the willingness of so many service members to recognize unlawful orders, and their duty to disobey, highlights the moral agency of individuals and the enduring power of international legal standards, even in difficult and unprecedented times.
  • The United States exists in a new-old universe. After nearly 250 years of democracy, it seems infected with totalitarianism, racial superiority, anti-communism and all the petrified theories advanced by another populist politician, Adolph Hitler. Donald Trump did say he would be a dictator on day one. History will be the judge, but things look rather bleak right now for the democracy side of the equation.
  • Take art and culture. During the 12 years of Hitler’s corruption of the concepts of law and order, he also attacked what we now call “creatives” and cultural institutions. The backlash against artistic Modernism had begun earlier in Germany’s Weimar era, but the Führer fully enforced his own ideas of what comprised art. He banned “degenerate art”: Bauhaus, Cubism, Dada, Expressionism, Fauvism, Impressionism and Surrealism. And the regime supported only official painters, sculptors, architects, writers and even actors.
    Things are trending in the same direction in the 21st-century United States. Trump, having gotten himself elected chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, has vowed to end “woke political programming” at Washington’s premier arts venue. As an example of what this means, the Kennedy Center hosted a screening this week of “The Revival Generation,” a documentary about a “nationwide campus revival movement” drawing Gen Z Americans. Billed as a “call to faith and a message of hope” that “(c)aptures a spiritual awakening among today’s youth,” the program included a one-hour worship service with “a local worship collective.”
  • Next Trump ordered a review of exhibits at the Smithsonian Museums that has sent curators scrambling to “fix” exhibits Mr. Trump finds too woke. The list of things needing repair at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of the American Latino focuses on mentions of race, slavery, immigration and sexuality. The artwork that offends the curator-in-chief is not Cubism or Dadaism or Impressionism. Unlike Hitler, Trump has not put Picasso, Duchamp and Monet on the banned lists. Rather, it is Rigoberto Gonzalez’s extraordinary “Refugees Crossing the Border Wall into South Texas.” The list goes on. Some of it is, well, edgy. But it is not of the order of “Immersion (Piss Christ),” Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in a container of his own urine. Despite an outcry from politicians who tried to defund its sponsors, the piece won an award in a competition partly sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. Ronald Reagan was president then.
  • If only Trump would confine his new strictures to art and culture, his populism would be an affront only to the pursuit of beauty. But they cross several lines, assaulting truth as well. As several mainline faith leaders and the U.S. Catholic bishops have pointed out, the derisive oppression of poor immigrants by members of the current administration is sickening. That some administration officials continue to publicly espouse Christian ethics is mind-boggling. Government spokespeople bend the truth and present an alternate reality. Then, there are the humorless bureaucrats who can change numbers to suit the master’s will. The administration is efficient and punctual, and its leader can do no wrong. The American republic is aiming for a head-on collision with democracy, and not incidentally is becoming an enigma, if not a laughingstock, to the rest of the free world. It has to stop.
  • Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed Sunday that the Trump administration plans to expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in major cities, including Chicago. Asked about plans to expand ICE operations in Chicago specifically, Noem told CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” “We’ve already had ongoing operations with ICE in Chicago and throughout Illinois and other states, making sure that we’re upholding our laws, but we do intend to add more resources to those operations.” Asked about what an expansion of ICE operations would look like in Chicago and whether it would involve a mobilization of National Guard troops to assist with immigration raids and arrests, Noem demurred, saying, “That always is a prerogative of President [Donald] Trump and his decision. I won’t speak to the specifics of the operations that are planned in other cities.”
    Her remarks come one day after Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order directing his city’s legal department to explore ways to counter a potential surge in federal law enforcement and National Guard troops to Illinois.
    During a press conference Saturday, Johnson warned that Chicago officials had “received credible reports that we have days, not weeks, before our cities see some type of militarized activity by the federal government.”
  • Earlier this month, the Trump administration directed federal law enforcement officers, including those employed by ICE, to assist police in Washington, D.C., with crime-fighting operations. That surge of resources included thousands of National Guard troops who were deployed to the nation’s capital with the stated goal of lowering crime rates. Following the movement of troops and law enforcement officers to Washington, Trump threatened to send federal officers and troops to other major American cities, including Baltimore. Later in the Sunday interview, Noem was asked whether Boston would be one of the cities where the federal government would surge immigration enforcement agents.
    “There’s a lot of cities that are dealing with crime and violence right now, and so we haven’t taken anything off the table,” she said, adding later: “I’d encourage every single big city — San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, whatever they are — if they want to help make their city safer, more prosperous, allow people the opportunity to walk in freedom like the people of Washington, D.C., are now ... they should call us.”
  • Other Democratic officials, including a group of over a dozen governors, have condemned plans to deploy troops to their states. In a statement last week, they said, “Whether it’s Illinois, Maryland and New York or another state tomorrow, the President’s threats and efforts to deploy a state’s National Guard without the request and consent of that state’s governor is an alarming abuse of power, ineffective, and undermines the mission of our service members.”
  • And in an interview that aired Sunday on “Face the Nation,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, said, “We don’t want troops on the streets of American cities. That’s un-American. Frankly, the president of the United States ought to know better.”
    Pritzker also accused the Trump administration of targeting states run by Democrats rather than those run by Republicans, telling CBS, “Notice he never talks about where the most violent crime is occurring, which is in red states. ... Their violent crime rates are much worse in other places, and we’re very proud of the work that we’ve done.”
    Asked whether there are plans in place to deploy troops and federal law enforcement officials to states and cities run by Republicans, Noem said, “Absolutely.”
    “Every single city is evaluated for what we need to do there to make it safer. So we’ve got operations that, again, I won’t talk about details on, but we absolutely are not looking through the viewpoint at anything we’re doing with a political lens,” she added.
  • In their initial doubts, what some Guardsmen were really asking was existential: Are we becoming something different? After all, the National Guard appears to have a new kind of mission, one that began in Los Angeles when Trump federalized the Guard over immigration concerns; moved to D.C. under the auspices of addressing “rampant violence and disorder”; and, according to Trump, could soon expand to Chicago and Baltimore.
    This ambiguity not only invites confusion and raises fears of troops conducting more police-like functions, but it also thrusts the National Guard into the middle of political disputes. The more often it is deployed in politically divisive missions—instead of the more routine apolitical assignments to disaster zones—the more perilous the Guard’s standing becomes among the American public.
  • By the time we headed home, after several hours spent wandering the city’s various quadrants, it was clear that almost no one felt particularly good about the arrangement: not the National Guardsmen, many of whom clearly didn’t want to be there, leaving their families and jobs in order to spread mulch and pick up trash; and not the residents, many of whom were furious with the occupation of their city or, worse, terrified of what the military’s presence portended for them and their loved ones. Even those residents who welcomed the troops did so from a place of discontent, so fed up with crime and quality-of-life issues that they felt relieved that someone was finally doing something, anything to help.
  • According to research by the libertarian Cato Institute published earlier this month, one in five people arrested by ICE have been Latinos with no criminal past or removal orders against them from the government, which they called a "telltale sign of illegal profiling." Karkatsanis warns that through his latest order, Trump has created a "vigilante portal" where anyone can "sign up to be a Brownshirt to brutalize poor people, immigrants, people of color, and anyone else who might dare to, say, go to a protest." He says that it "should be a nonstop emergency news alert," but that "instead, mainstream news and Democrats are barely mentioning it."

September 2025

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  • I'm a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028, so I've already endorsed President Trump. A man like this comes along once every century, if we're lucky. We've got him now.
  • The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, explicitly states: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice." This amendment was adopted following Franklin D. Roosevelt's unprecedented four terms in office, establishing a formal limit on presidential tenure that had previously been only a tradition dating all the way back to America's first president, George Washington.
    In March, Trump told NBC News that "a lot of people would like me to do that," regarding a third term, adding, "There are methods which you could do it, as you know." He reiterated these sentiments in subsequent interviews, though he has also occasionally denied interest in pursuing such a path.
    Some Trump allies, like podcast host Steve Bannon, adviser during Trump's first term, have suggested unconventional workarounds. One theory involves Trump running as vice president on a ticket where the presidential nominee would then step aside after winning, allowing Trump to assume the presidency. Legal experts, however, broadly agree this would violate both the letter and spirit of the Constitution.
  • Donald Trump was recently asked about negotiating with the Democrats to avoid a government shutdown. “Don’t even bother dealing with them,” the president said. “If you gave them every dream, they would not vote for it.” Well, I don’t know about Democrats, Mr. President, but as an Independent I am prepared to vote with you if you simply do what the American people want. At a time when 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck I don’t think it’s a “dream” to ask that you:
    Not slash Medicaid and throw 15 million people off their health insurance, resulting in over 50,000 deaths a year.
    Not raise health care premiums by 75%, on average, for over 20 million Americans due to cuts to the Affordable Care Act.
    Not, at a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, give the richest people in America a trillion dollars in tax breaks.
    Not cut nutrition programs for hungry kids.
    Not make it harder for young people to get a higher education.
    Mr. President, your party controls the House, the Senate and the White House. Do not shut down the government.
    If you come to an agreement on these issues, you’ve got my vote.
  • It was an extraordinary week. The slumbering giant of America is awakening. Americans forced Disney to put Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. Over 6 million people watched Kimmel’s Tuesday monologue assailing Trump’s attempt to censor him. Another 26 million watched it on social media, including YouTube. (Kimmel’s usual television audience is about 1.42 million.) Trump’s dictatorial narcissism revealed itself nearly as dramatically in the criminal indictment of former FBI director James Comey, coming immediately after Trump fired the U.S. attorney who refused to indict him.
    As did Trump’s demand that prosecutors go after philanthropist George Soros, Senator Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and other perceived enemies.
    As did Trump’s order yesterday, directing the “Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth” to use “full force, if necessary” to “protect War ravaged Portland” Oregon and any “ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” He is escalating his use of the U.S. military against Americans.
    There was also his bonkers speech to the United Nations telling delegates that their nations are “going to hell.” His attribution of autism to Tylenol, even though doctors say it is safe for pregnant women in moderation. His unilateral imposition of tariffs as high as 100 percent on imports of pharmaceuticals and kitchen cabinets.
    Friends, his neofascism and his dementia are both in plain sight.
  • His polls continue to drop. Voters are turning against him and his Republican party. On Tuesday, Democrat Adelita Grijalva won Arizona’s 7th Congressional District in a special election — leaving House Republicans with a majority of just five. Grijalva’s victory comes on the heels of another Democratic win: James Walkinshaw’s in Virginia. Two more special elections are coming, in Texas and Tennessee. Speaker Mike Johnson is struggling to hold House Republicans together, facing rebellion on issues such as the release of files relating to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
    Democrats are refusing to go along with Republicans to fund the government beyond Tuesday unless Republicans agree to extending Affordable Care Act subsidies — now set to expire at the end of the year and cause 24 million people to lose coverage or pay skyrocketing premiums.
  • Friends, I can’t tell you exactly when the tipping point will occur — when elected Republicans will rebel against him, or when his dementia becomes so apparent he’s forced to resign, or when so much of the nation rises up against his dictatorship that he’s impeached and convicted of high crimes — but we’re getting closer. As I said a few days ago, I’ve been in and around politics for 60 years and have developed a sixth sense about the slumbering giant of America. That giant is now stirring. He about to stand. He’s angry. Soon he will roar.
    Your activism is working. Be strong. Be safe. Hug your loved ones. We’ll get through this.
  • Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech to top generals was supposed to serve as a rallying cry for military exceptionalism — but it didn’t land that way with many of the people it was targeting. Numerous defense officials — who watched senior brass scramble to Washington and then sit through a partisan speech from President Donald Trump and a return to old-school military standards by Hegseth — were left wondering why the event had occurred at all. “More like a press conference than briefing the generals,” said one defense official, who, like others, was granted anonymity due to fears of retribution. “Could have been an email.”
  • Defense officials, in the Pentagon and at bases around the world, spent much of Tuesday trying to make sense of the last-minute gathering at the Quantico base in Virginia. Hegseth called out “fat generals,” and, separately, pushed fitness standards that could limit women in combat roles, while Trump offered his justification for sending the military into American cities. The 90-minute event — which featured military officials who swore an oath to the Constitution attending something more akin to a campaign rally — had the feeling of a Hollywood production. Trump even instructed officials to “just have a good time.”
    The meeting took place hours before a likely government shutdown, and struck some officials as a distraction that threatens to shift the military’s focus away from foreign threats toward an unprecedented domestic role. “Not quite a loyalty test, but … on the spectrum of loyalty to ideology,” said a second defense official. “Total waste of money.”
  • The Pentagon has insisted the U.S. military is retooling to prepare for a potential war with China. But sending American troops to patrol their own cities will “distract warfighters from actually training to fight and win” against Beijing, said a fourth defense official.
    Several Trump allies, including Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), said a face-to-face meeting like Hegseth’s helped reinforce the administration's visions. “There needs to be more warfighter training,” he said in an interview. “We don't do enough of it. We don't do enough flying training. I like this approach … I thought it was a strong speech.” Democrats, on the other hand, attacked the event as purely vanity-driven. Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) called the resources used for the meeting “totally unjustified” and an exercise in chest thumping. “This comes at the expense of real national security,” she said in an interview. “But obviously they don’t give a rip.”
  • Lt. Col. Amy McGrath called out U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for trying to overshadow women’s contribution to the U.S. military in his effort to meet “the highest male standard’ among U.S. soldiers. “Each service will ensure that every requirement for every combat [Military Occupational Specialty], for every designated combat arms position, returns to the highest male standard,” Hegseth told leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Quantico, Virginia on Tuesday. “Only because this job is life or death, standards must be met and not just met at every level. We should seek to exceed the standard to push the envelope to compete.”
  • “Hegseth still has a lot to learn, unfortunately,” said McGrath, speaking with the “Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.” “When I flew my combat missions, there was not a set male standard and a female standard for flying an aircraft onto the back of an aircraft carrier. You can either do it or you can't. Combat jobs have had one standard for a long time. And part of when we opened combat jobs to women, those of us that were in those jobs wanted one standard to be set. And it was — so I think it's kind of ridiculous.”
    “But, honestly, that, in comparison to the rest of what we heard in the last hour, is really minor,” McGrath added. “That speech was bonkers by the president, and everybody sitting in that room knows that we don't have a coherent foreign policy or defense policy. And that, I think, is a bigger issue indeed.”
  • McGrath was particularly wrathful at President Donald Trump suggesting the city of Chicago serve as a kind of “training ground” for urban warfare.
    “There was a lot of rambling. There was a ton of lies. There was a lot of politicization … and craziness that you heard from this speech, but the scariest part was when the president talked about using our cities as a training ground for the United States military,” said McGrath. “Now, the military has done training in cities before, but that's not what I think he's talking about here. He's talking about using the military in ways that we should not see in America. And I'm very worried about this.”
    “I think the whole part of bringing these generals and admirals back here was to discuss this type of thing, and it should it should scare us all,” McGrath said. “This is something that we just don't do in America. We have police to fight crime, and we should be putting money into those police forces, not sending American troops that are trained for war to American cities.”

October 2025

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  • In an interview at Catholic University last week, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said what he’s clearly been thinking for the past 30 years: Supreme Court precedents don’t matter, and he’s making things up as he goes along to fulfill his own political agenda. He didn’t say it in that way, of course. People would have noticed that. Instead, he couched his self-serving philosophy in legal jargon that will fly under the radar of most people, including journalists. Here’s what he said: “At some point we need to think about what we’re doing with stare decisis.… [I]t’s not some sort of talismanic deal where you can just say ‘stare decisis’ and not think, turn off the brain, right?”
    To translate: “Stare decisis” is a foundational legal principle in this country and all countries that follow a “common law” system. What it means, in simple terms, is that prior judicial rulings govern future judicial rulings. If a court rules, for instance, that “gay people have the same basic rights as everyone else in this country, including the right to marry other people,” then that ruling is supposed to govern all future cases concerning the rights of gay people.
    Thomas, apparently, doesn’t agree. Instead of respecting stare decisis and precedent, he is saying that older cases shouldn’t have the power to control newer ones. For Thomas, just because courts ruled that LGBTQ people should have rights in the past, including the right to marry, doesn’t mean he feels compelled to rule that they should keep them.
  • We’ve seen this in Thomas’s opinions in recent years. In 2022, he declared, in a separate but supporting opinion in the Dobbs case, that Roe v. Wade was not respectful of our legal traditions, but Loving v. Virginia is. Why? Well because Roe gave women rights, while Loving gave Thomas the right to marry his white wife, and if you have a better legal difference between those cases other than Thomas’s own personal preferences, I’d love to hear you explain it. Thomas has also decided (in this case, writing for the majority) that simple gun registration laws are not respectful of our traditions in this country, but he signed on to an opinion giving the president the powers of the very king we revolted against. You simply cannot chart a course through what passes for logic in Thomas’s head without understanding his preferred policy outcomes.
    If Thomas were the only justice who thought like this, it would be a containable problem. But the entire Republican cabal on the Supreme Court rules exactly in the way Thomas is talking about, with no respect for precedent or stare decisis. This coming term, the Republicans on the court are likely to overturn a voting rights precedent they set for themselves only a couple of years ago. The Republicans literally cannot be trusted to respect their own rulings.
  • The entire Trump administration has been a “mask off” moment for the Supreme Court’s conservatives. It turns out, they don’t actually care about precedent (no matter how many times they lied and claimed to care during their Senate confirmation hearings). They don’t actually care about the text. They don’t actually care about judicial restraint. They want the political outcomes they want and they have the votes to do it.
    Thomas’s speech is a declaration that there is no judicial precedent that is safe from the current Republicans on the court. Stare decisis will not stand in their way of getting what they want. You could read the entire speech as a shot across the bow of Obergefell v. Hodges, and it is, but it’s also a rare moment where Thomas told the truth about what he and his friends are actually doing. They do not care about traditions, norms, or the very foundation of judicial decision making in a common law system. They only care about winning.
  • That’s all going to be very bad for those of us who do not happen to be white cis-hetero men in the near term, but there is a silver lining. Thomas’s speech at Catholic University literally lays down the playbook for how to defeat him and all the evil and cruelty he has wrought during his time on the bench. According to Thomas, future Supreme Court justices do not have to wrestle with the precedents laid down by Thomas and his Roberts-court brethren. They do not have to distinguish future cases from the ones that are being decided today. They do not have to wait for Congress to pass new laws, or for the Constitution to be amended. They don’t have to stay on the train Clarence Thomas is driving.
    And I am here for that. By Thomas’s own admission, the power of the Roberts court dies the moment there are more liberals on the bench than Republicans. That could happen as soon as the next presidential election, if Democrats get their act together to take control of the Supreme Court. If stare decisis is dead, then it’s dead forever. What can’t happen is for future Democratic justices to try to resurrect it, to preserve the power of the people who killed it. Clarence Thomas will soon be the longest-serving justice in American history. It’s good to know that he thinks his opinions will not matter after he’s dead. On that, he and I agree.
  • Six months ago, I wrote a piece urging soldiers to leave the United States military. At the time, the possibility that the president might use the military as a tool to unjustly abuse US citizens was still somewhat theoretical. At the risk of being repetitive, events in the world make me feel compelled to write, once again: Leave the military now. The time when you can say that you did not understand what might happen is coming to an end.
    Yesterday, the Secretary of Defense and the Commander in Chief gave speeches to all of our nation’s generals, who they had ordered to assemble in Washington. It is bad enough, I imagine, for all of these accomplished career officers to be subjected to the performative tirade of Pete Hegseth, a childish television host, installed as their superior, ranting about the need to be more macho, fairly dripping with overcompensation for his various inadequacies. Yet if Hegseth’s speech was unnecessary, bigoted, and cartoonish, the performance of the Commander in Chief was much more substantively dangerous.
  • First, because it must have been clear to all of those assembled generals that Donald Trump, who possesses complete and total control of the military and its awesome powers, is, at best, mentally unwell. His speech, characteristically, was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness rant consisting mostly of narcissism and fiction and personal grievances. The mind of the man who has the ability to tell all of these officers what to do is broken and impervious to facts and reason. This is the man who can tell you when and how and who to kill.
    “They’re brave in our inner cities, which we’re going to be talking about because it’s a big part of war now, it’s a big part of war,” Trump said, speaking about firemen. “But the firemen go up on ladders and you have people shooting at them while they’re up on ladders. I don’t even know if anybody heard that. And actually don’t talk about it much, but I think you have to. Our firemen are incredible. They’re up on one of these ladders that goes way up to the sky rescuing people, and you have animals shooting at them — shooting bullets at firemen that are way up in death territory.” This is your boss.
  • Worse, the president made his intentions for the military clear. “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,” he said. “And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”
    “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard, but military,” he said, repeating bizarre, made-up stories about Chicago, Portland, and Seattle as war zones.
  • I am not going to try to convince generals in the United States armed forces to embrace my own personal moral beliefs. Rather, I would urge them all to consider their own moral beliefs. Honor and courage are often touted as the highest military values. What do those values demand of these generals at this moment in history? To salute their deranged superiors, and then, in private, to mutter under their breath about how incompetent and awful those commanders are? Is it honorable for these hundreds of generals to go forward doing their very best to carry out the will of a president who vows openly to use the military to suppress his domestic political enemies, and who has in fact already done that in major cities? Is it courageous of these officer to—for the sake of their own careers—continue to robotically serve a man who is obviously making decisions based upon things that are not true, and who is obsessed with revenge above all, and who is quite straightforward about his intentions to use the military to forcefully oppress Americans? Is that what honor and courage demand of the highest ranking officers in our military? Nothing at all?
    It is common for people in the military to point out that they took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and to imply that their allegiance to that oath would prevent them from carrying out truly unjust orders. I can’t help but notice that the point at which this moral duty to stop obeying orders kicks in appears to recede forever into the future. We, the citizens, are assured that there exists some ill-defined moment at which the personal moral code of military soldiers and officers will kick in and stop an out-of-control Commander in Chief from using the military for purposes of tyranny.
    Well? The tyrant is here. Talk is cheap. This theoretical guardrail of our democracy would be much more comforting if it were ever possible to see it produce some tangible action.
  • It is not too late to change America’s future. We sit, right now, in a moment of possibility. The president has made his intention to use the military against American citizens abundantly clear, but the worst versions of this oppression are still to come. He has told us what is coming, but all of it has not happened yet. That means that there will never be a better moment for people of honor and courage to leave the military. There will never be a better moment for the generals to demonstrate that their moral values are not just empty words. There will never be a better time to actually weaken the power of an aspiring dictator by refusing to be a part of his army. There will never be a better chance to exempt yourself from the stain of participating in a great, historic injustice against America’s ideals. Everyone can see who is in charge. Everyone can see what the plan is. Nobody can say that they didn’t see what was coming. Nobody can say that they went into this blind. For the members of the military—and, above all, for the officers at its highest level—the time to be courageous, or not, has arrived.
    Like any large organization, the military is full of all types of people who got into it for all types of reasons. Despite my own objections to the things that politicians make the military do, I do believe that the military itself is full of people who sincerely value patriotism, sacrifice, and public service. And there can be no doubt that the military is full of people who have demonstrated great personal bravery, perseverance, and willingness to overcome daunting obstacles in order to do a job that they believe is honorable and necessary. In 2025, all of these admirable qualities demand a very particular action: to leave the military. Before you find yourself doing things that do not comport with the values that you hold. Before you find that you have become the bad guy. If you can run into a gunfight, you can find the bravery to quit. That’s what patriotism means today.
  • President Donald Trump has condemned the shutdown and laid the blame squarely at the feet of the “Radical Left Democrats”— in the meantime, he appears to be making the most of it. Trump teased on Truth Social that he would be meeting with Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought to – as he warned Democrats he would do – reevaluate the necessity of various government agencies. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote.
    As a potential shutdown loomed, the administration cautioned Democrats that if they didn’t sign on to Republicans’ short stopgap funding bill and prevent a shutdown, more federal employees would lose their jobs. The OMB sent a letter to federal agencies last week directing them to take a critical look at where they might be able to shed more employees.
    “With respect to those Federal programs whose funding would lapse and which are otherwise unfunded, such programs are no longer statutorily required to be carried out,” the letter reads. “Agencies are directed to use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities (PPAs) that satisfy all three of the following conditions: (1) discretionary funding lapses on October 1, 2025; (2) another source of funding, such as H.R. 1 (Public Law 119-21) is not currently available; and (3) the PPA is not consistent with the President’s priorities.”
  • The New York Times reported in August that the federal workforce may have about 300,000 less people by year’s end. Most of the terminations or resignations were reportedly prompted by the Department of Government Efficiency, which was created by an executive order at the start of Trump’s second term.
    It’s unclear which “Democrat Agencies” are on the chopping block Tuesday – and whether entire agencies will be eradicated or they’ll merely lose more employees. The administration has previously described the Congressional Budget Office and the Bureau of Labor Statistics as unreliable, “Democrat-controlled,” politically motivated and riddled with “longstanding failures,” to name a few.
  • The “Project 2025,” which Trump referenced in his social media post, is a strategy for the restructuring of the federal government, crafted by conservatives and published by the Heritage Foundation. The goals of the project, as summarized by the BBC, are to “restore the family as the centrepiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation's sovereignty and borders; and secure God-given individual rights to live freely.”
    Vought was a project co-author, and the president has framed the shutdown as an opportunity to further carry out this initiative.
    “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity. They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DJT," his post concluded.
  • As United States President Donald Trump relentlessly threatens to annex Canada, reiterating the threat again this week in a speech to American military officials, some Canadians are worried that a U.S. invasion could one day become a reality. How would that scenario play out? Looking at the sheer size of the American military, many people might believe that Trump would enjoy an easy victory.
    That analysis is wrong. If Trump ever decides to use military force to annex Canada, the result would not be determined by a conventional military confrontation between the Canadian and American armies. Rather, a military invasion of Canada would trigger a decades-long violent resistance, which would ultimately destroy the United States.
    But in this nightmare scenario, could Canadians successfully resist an American invasion? Absolutely. I know this because I have studied insurgencies around the world for more than two decades, and I have spent time with ordinary people who have fought against powerful invading armies.
  • Guerrillas use ambushes, raids and surprise attacks to slowly bleed an invading army, and local communities support these fighters by giving them safe havens and material support. These supporting citizens can also engage in forms of “everyday resistance,” using millions of passive-aggressive episodes of sabotage to frustrate and drain the enemy. Trump is delusional if he believes that 40 million Canadians will passively accept conquest without resistance. There is no political party or leader willing to relinquish Canadian sovereignty over “economic coercion,” and so if the U.S. wanted to annex Canada, it would have to invade.
    That decision would set in motion an unstoppable cycle of violence. Even if we imagine a scenario in which the Canadian government unconditionally surrenders, a fight would ensue on the streets. A teenager might throw a rock at invading soldiers. That kid would get shot, and then there would be more rocks, and more gunfire. An insurgency would be inevitable.
  • This idea may shock Canadians today because they see themselves as friendly and affable people. However, Canada’s current self-image of “niceness” only exists because they’re at peace. War changes people very quickly, and Canadians are no more innately peaceful than any other human beings. When your child is dying in your arms, you become capable of violence. Once you lose what you love, resistance becomes as natural as breathing. Except for a few collaborators and kapos, my research suggests many Canadians would likely engage in various forms of everyday resistance against invading forces that could involve stealing, lying, cutting wires and diverting funds.
    Meanwhile, the insurgents would unleash physical devastation on American targets. Even if one per cent of all resisting Canadians engaged in armed insurrection, that would constitute a 400,000-person insurgency, nearly 10 times the size of the Taliban at the start of the Afghan war. If a fraction of that number engaged in violent attacks, it would set fire to the entire continent.
  • This scenario would guarantee the destruction of both Canada and the United States. No one in their right mind would choose this gruesome future over a peaceful and mutually beneficial alliance with a friendly neighbour. Nevertheless, if Trump is reckless enough to think the violent annexation of Canada is an achievable goal, then let it be known that all these horrifying outcomes were predictable well in advance, and that he was forewarned.
  • Several people recently asked me who I think is next after Comey and what will happen to him during his prosecution. I don’t know. But the fact that we even have to ask the question embodies just how fast American democracy is collapsing. Comey’s indictment — and likely conviction — will surely be followed by others. Many others. Trump will demand it, and many Americans will want it too.
    The Justice Department has already launched investigations against former National Security Adviser John Bolton, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California and Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James. Other names that have been mentioned as potential targets include Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, who brought charges against Trump in a 2023 election interference case, and former FBI Director Christopher Wray. These names show that the unthinkable has become routine. Malignant normality is now the new normal.
  • Since Trump was first elected in 2016, America’s responsible political and media class have constructed a model of American politics and society that increasingly does not exist. The long-cherished ideals of institutions, American exceptionalism and the character of the American people have been thrown out the window. In many ways, those fantasies never matched reality in the first place — and now the gap is undeniable. For many, this truth is too frightening to face.
    As America’s democracy rapidly collapses, there are public voices in the news media and political class who are warning about the evils of a new Red Scare. In reality, what the Trump administration and its forces are unleashing will likely be much worse.
  • In an interview, Adam Hochschild, the prominent historian and award-winning author of books including “American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis,” was clear-eyed about what America is facing: “This is profoundly frightening because it’s right out of the playbook of the way democracies are converted to dictatorships.” He compared our present moment to what was happening a century ago in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. The country, he said in an email interview, was “inflamed by military fervor…and then by paranoia,” which caused “severe damage to democracy.”
    “The government shut down some 75 newspapers and magazines, and imprisoned hundreds of people — most notably Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs — solely for things they wrote or said,” Hochschild said. “Donald Trump would greatly like to do the same, as his attacks on critical media and prosecutions of people like James Comey show. But he is going one step further than this country went during the madness of the Red Scare of 1917-1921 by trying to seize control of electoral machinery. That, to me, is the most frightening thing about an already dangerous presidency.”
    Commentators get hung up, he explained, on comparing Trump to Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who saw “subversives everywhere.” While noting similarities, Hochschild argued the better parallel is Democratic President Woodrow Wilson who, in his second term, “did all kinds of things Trump would like to do, such as throwing his critics in jail under the Espionage Act by the hundreds, and shutting down media that criticized him.”
    But that wasn’t all. Under the 28th president, the Justice Department created the American Protective League, which Hochschild described as “a national vigilante force [that] scoured cities for suspected draft-dodgers.”
    “We pay far too little attention to that ominous period of American life,” he said, “always preferring to look on the bright side rather than the dark side.”
  • Trumpism is the embodiment of Shakespeare’s observation that what’s past is prologue. It’s now our present and future. But this is not a call to despair, or to embrace the comfort of learned helplessness or to take poison of hopium. It is the opposite. Unearned hope leads to despair. The way forward is to first accept the dire reality and then to engage in peaceful collective action that seizes the moral high ground, and never surrenders or compromises.The Black Freedom Struggle and long civil rights movements offer one such example. To paraphrase Hemingway: “A man alone ain’t got no bloody damn chance.”
  • To capture a democratic nation, authoritarians must control three sources of power: the intelligence agencies, the justice system, and the military. President Donald Trump and his circle of would-be autocrats have made rapid progress toward seizing these institutions and detaching them from the Constitution and rule of law. The intelligence community has effectively been muzzled, and the nation’s top lawyers and cops are being purged and replaced with loyalist hacks.
    Only the military remains outside Trump’s grip. Despite the firing of several top officers—and Trump’s threat to fire more—the U.S. armed forces are still led by generals and admirals whose oath is to the Constitution, not the commander in chief. But for how long?
    Trump and his valet at the Defense Department, Secretary of Physical Training Pete Hegseth, are now making a dedicated run at turning the men and women of the armed forces into Trump’s personal and partisan army. In his first term, Trump regularly violated the sacred American tradition of the military’s political neutrality, but people around him—including retired and active-duty generals such as James Mattis, John Kelly, and Mark Milley—restrained some of his worst impulses. Now no one is left to stop him: The president learned from his first-term struggles and this time has surrounded himself with a Cabinet of sycophants and ideologues rather than advisers, especially those at the Pentagon. He has declared war on Chicago; called Portland, Oregon, a “war zone”; and referred to his political opponents as “the enemy from within.” Trump clearly wants to use military power to exert more control over the American people, and soon, top U.S.-military commanders may have to decide whether they will refuse such orders from the commander in chief. The greatest crisis of American civil-military relations in modern history is now under way.
  • I write these words with great trepidation. When I was a professor at the Naval War College, I gave lectures to American military officers about the sturdiness of civil-military relations in the United States, a remarkable historical achievement that has allowed the most powerful military in the world to serve democracy without being a threat to it. I so revered this system that I went to Moscow just before the fall of the U.S.S.R. and told an audience of Soviet military officers that they should look to the American military as a model for how to disentangle themselves from the Communist Party and Kremlin politics. I regularly reminded both my military students and civilian audiences that they had good reason to have faith in American institutions and the constitutional loyalty of U.S. civilian and military leaders.
    This new and dangerous moment has arrived for many reasons, including Trump’s antics in front of young soldiers and sailors, through which he has succeeded in pulling many of them into displays of partisan behavior that are both an insult to American civil-military traditions and a violation of military regulations. Senior military leaders should have stepped in to prevent Trump from turning addresses at Fort Bragg and Naval Station Norfolk into political rallies; the silence of the Army and Navy secretaries, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and some top generals and admirals is appalling. To their credit, those same officers listened impassively as Trump and Hegseth subjected them to political rants during a meeting at Quantico last week. But young enlisted people and their immediate superiors take their cues from the top, and one day of decorum from the high command cannot reverse Trump’s influence on the rank and file.
  • Trump’s rhetoric in his speeches to the military has been awful—he has ridiculed former commanders in chief, castigated sitting elected officials, and told the members of America’s armed forces that other Americans are their enemies. But his actions are worse. In deploying troops to American cities, he has set up a confrontation in which military commanders may soon have to choose between obeying the president and obeying the law. “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Judge Karin Immergut—a conservative Trump appointee—wrote last week when she blocked Trump’s attempt to send troops to Portland. The White House aide Stephen Miller likely foreshadowed Trump’s next moves, including possibly ignoring such rulings, when he lashed out at Immergut’s decision. Miller, a man who hates being called a fascist, made the fascistic accusation that a “large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country” is being “shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general.”
  • Trump, of course, doesn’t care all that much about Venezuelan speedboats or costumed pranksters in Portland. He cares about power, which is why he is determined to flex military muscle on the streets of American cities. As opposition grows and his popularity falls, Trump may be tempted to issue orders to the military that will be aimed at suppressing dissent, or disrupting elections, or detaining political figures; he has already floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act, which could enable such actions. He may even become desperate enough to launch a foreign war—as he seems to be trying to do right now with Venezuela. If more of these orders come, how should the leaders of America’s armed forces respond?
  • Congress, so far, has been useless in restraining Trump: The Democrats are too timid, and the Republicans are too compromised. Only by standing together can the senior military officials warn Trump away from leading America into a full-blown civil-military confrontation.
    Military officers are human beings, not Vulcans or robots. Even the most virtuous young officer may tremble at the idea of refusing a direct order—especially one from the president of the United States. Others may be tempted to abandon their oath, either by ideology or a misplaced sense of obedience, and they should recall Hyten’s warning from 2017: “If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail. You could go to jail for the rest of your life.” Most American military personnel, however, need no reminder of their constitutional duty. But they do need some reassurance that they have support from their chain of command to resist illegal orders. And the rest of us, whether we’re elected officials or ordinary citizens, should do everything we can to let our fellow Americans in uniform know that if they risk their careers and even their freedom to protect the Constitution, we will stand with them.
  • A governmentwide reduction in force during the federal shutdown will touch an already lean U.S. Department of Education, the Trump administration said Friday, with the department’s office of elementary and secondary education potentially facing some of the most significant cuts. An Education Department spokesperson Friday confirmed the agency will be subject to the RIF but did not immediately answer how many positions would be part of the downsizing and in which department divisions. A spokesperson from the Office of Management and Budget—whose director, Russell Vought, announced the layoffs in a Friday post on X—called the government-wide reduction “substantial.”
    The Education Department’s office of communication and outreach will see cuts to its state and local engagement team under the layoff, according to the union that represents department staff. Meanwhile, the office of elementary and secondary education, which oversees key programs such as Title I and enforcement of the Every Student Succeeds Act, will see cuts to all of its teams, the union said.
    Others could still be affected, the union, a chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees, said.
    “Once again, the Trump administration is acting as though they have impunity to cut staff from an already lean, efficient agency,” union president Rachel Gittleman said in a prepared statement. “Dismantling the government through mass firings, especially at the ED, is not the solution to our problems as a country.”
    The layoffs were announced on the 10th day of the federal government shutdown, during which the Education Department had already furloughed roughly 87% of its staff after congressional lawmakers couldn’t come to an agreement to extend funding beyond the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.
  • A furlough is different from a layoff in that it’s temporary. Generally, federal employees have to be given 60 days’ notice before a layoff can take effect. The cuts will slash an Education Department that has grown substantially leaner since the start of the second Trump administration. The agency has shed nearly half its staff since the winter. Its footprint shrank from more than 4,000 staff to about 2,400 after the department announced layoffs in March.
    The earlier layoffs touched just about every office within the department—though they cut more deeply in some places than others, such as the office for civil rights, which lost just under half its 562 positions and seven of its 12 regional offices. The office of elementary and secondary education, which employed 282 staff members in 2023, lost at least 49 positions in the March cuts.
    (Meanwhile, the office’s new leader, Kirsten Baesler, was just confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Tuesday but can’t be sworn in until the shutdown ends.)
  • The earlier layoffs are being challenged in court by states and education leaders who say the department can’t carry out its congressionally mandated functions with fewer staff. Court orders delayed the layoffs, but higher courts have since allowed them to take effect.
    The Education Department is among at least nine federal agencies subject to the shutdown RIF, according to Politico. The American Federation of Government Employees sued OMB last month for telling agencies to prepare RIF plans ahead of the shutdown. Normally, agencies prepare only to furlough staff during a shutdown and bring them back when the government reopens.
    “It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” the union’s president, Everett Kelley, said in a prepared statement on Friday. “It’s time for Congress to do their jobs and negotiate an end to this shutdown immediately.”
  • Trump created his MAGA coalition based on fear of “the other,” which has historically been a potent political move (think Richard Nixon’s perfection of the Southern strategy and Ronald Reagan’s aggressive race-baiting with his fictional Chicago welfare queen, among many other dog whistles).
    After America elected and then re-elected Barack Obama, not only a Black man but a constitutional scholar and an intellectual, to the presidency, the Republicans in Congress completely lost their minds and pledged to make him fail as president. They began to do all they could to shut down government and to excoriate Democrats, using the list of pejorative terms former House Speaker Newt Gingrich cribbed from conservative shock-jock Rush Limbaugh. The hard turn in Congress away from collegiality and compromise had begun.
  • We could argue the many, many inhumane points of Trumpist decrees if we were actually interested in discussing policy or, say, the mainline Christianity I once knew as a Presbyterian. But the Republican Party stopped working on policy — and started perverting Christianity — many election cycles back. Why? Largely because the GOP ran out of ideas that would fly with the American public (“Trickle-down” economics? C’mon, man!), and was assiduously courting the evangelical and Catholic religious right as a voting bloc. Meanwhile, “welcome-the-stranger” and “eye-of-the-needle” messages of Jesus had become entirely inconvenient for elite Republicans. With Trump, the Southern strategy morphed into something quite like a “Bring back the Jim Crow laws that inspired the Nazis” strategy.
    To divert attention from their desire to give further assistance to the wealthy and corporations through tax breaks, they focused their energies on “othering” different groups: People of color, immigrants, Democrats, women and LGBTQ folks.
    Of course, if you are part of the MAGA cult of personality, you don’t want to hear any of this. But we — progressives, liberals, Democrats, moderate Republicans (those horrible “RINOs”), people of faith and of no faith — are, frankly (to use a word Republicans love to utilize), the reasonable ones. There’s no question about it. To mimic Trump, everybody knows it. You do, too.
  • Government works pretty well all over the world, so long as well-meaning people with strong, relevant experience are put in leadership positions. Look at this deplorable Trump “administration,” filled to the brim with suck-ups, grifters, unhinged ideologues and conspiracy-theory kooks — each one, including the one playacting at the Resolute desk, astonishingly unqualified. The word for that kind of group being in charge is kakistocracy, which is an unhappy-sounding term that describes a devastatingly unhappy situation: government by the worst people. It sounds like something you might utter right before vomiting.
    A white supremacist theocracy, installing this Trumpian reign of the corrupt, mean-spirited, and woefully incompetent? We are just as disappointed and angry as you are about predatory capitalism, which leaves many Americans homeless and many more without access to health care. And we are just as angry about the failures of our democracy, which, as Robert Reich recently pointed out, are almost entirely due to lobbying money in politics. Much of our political class takes legal bribes and serves the interests of those with the most money.
  • But we aren’t living in the wrong country. Our America is multicultural and all of us benefit, socially and economically — yes, even you — from that fact. Our America supports freedom of religious belief, including the freedom to hold none at all, because we do not have a national religion. Our America strives to make it easier for all citizens to exercise their right to vote. Our America believes in facts and the process of scientific discovery. Our America does not whitewash its history but learns from it.
    Our America recoils from people who push their religious beliefs on others, or who denigrate women and other citizens who happen to be unlike them. Our America welcomes the strangers who come to this country with a desire to better their lives through hard work and community service. Our America supports public education and wants to make it stronger, not undermine it. Our America believes that a country should be judged by how it treats its least fortunate citizens. Our America is not ruled by a petty, vindictive despot wannabe with an outrageous history of criminal and socially abhorrent behavior who imagines he is king.
    No, despite what the astonishingly corrupt, would-be Roman emperor occupying the White House tells you, we are not the enemy: we are Americans. We have tried to be true to the best, most idealistic of American values. In the meantime — and these truly are mean times, both in material and spiritual terms — we will serve the public good by standing up for the Constitution, the rule of law and the nonpartisan civil service, and we will argue for our own ideas on how we might make a better union.

See also

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