AlterNet All-Access

When Republicans started calling our Defense Department the “Department of War” it probably should have been a dead giveaway for what was most assuredly coming next.

When the most bloodthirsty and immoral president in American history, Donald Trump, appointed a high-octane oil slick like Pete Hegseth to lead that shell-shocked department, it should have been dreadfully obvious that human beings, not soaring prices, would be under steady attack as long as this violent regime could hold onto power.

Just 14 months into his vile second term, consumer prices are rising quickly across the board, and we are at war seemingly everywhere because it turns out Trump is the most Republican president in my long lifetime. Trump, unlike his phony predecessors in the GOP like the Bushes, isn’t even pretending he gives a damn about the myriad issues that affect Americans’ daily lives, or even life itself for that matter.

Trump knows what his voters really like, and is delivering it to them wrapped cold in body bags.

When he said with a shrug last week after the first three troops were killed in his sinful Iran War, “There will likely be more [deaths] before it ends. That’s the way it is,” he was telling us just how little he values their lives.

Because that is how it really is with Republicans, and has been my entire life.

In Trump’s world there are the billionaire elites, who prop him up and fill both his bottomless pockets and unquenchable malignant narcissism to overflowing, and there are the expendable “suckers and losers” he abuses like so many of the women who have crossed his crooked path.

Trump and his Republicans don’t value life, they celebrate violence and death, and the more brutal and bloody it is the better. This really needs to be talked about more, because it is true, and that truth — like so many countless people and places around the globe and certainly right here in America — has taken one helluva beating the past decade ...

The “shock and awe” of the senseless War in Iraq was just a warm-up act for what we are getting right now from a monster who ran on “no new wars” but has now attacked eight different countries, on four different continents to give his electorate what they really want, but would prefer we didn’t talk about.

High prices, inflation, and affordability issues were just a polite front for what really gets their cold hearts beating: death, destruction, and plenty of it.

An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Friday revealed that 84 percent of Republicans favor this illegal war in Iran, because if they can’t have the lower prices they lied to us they cared about, they will damn sure get the pain and punishment they have proven they crave so much.

The truth is Republicans absolutely love this illegal war in Iran, because they will have the carnage from the racist, America-attacking thug they voted for not once, not twice, but three times.

Can we all finally admit that the cruelty really is the point with Republicans?

For the Republican voter, the 2024 election was never about lowering prices. Oh, sure, that would have been a nice little perk, but Trump’s appeal to the average Republican voter was always his unlimited capacity to say and do the very worst things on their behalf.

Instead of bringing them lower prices, he has brought them blood by the bucketful, via public beatings, and murders that make the hair on the back of their necks stand at attention.

Google “ICE beatings” and you can spend the rest of your day watching masked government agents slamming heads into concrete walls and sidewalks, throwing women into the street, dragging people out of their houses by their hair, and crying children being ripped from their parents’ arms.

These voters didn’t vote for Trump in spite of all those horrible things, they voted for him because of them.

No matter how high prices get, or how bad it gets for the working folk in America, Republicans can always, always, always count on their grotesque president taking their anger out on everybody else.

They concocted stories of brown and black boogeymen eating our dogs and cats so when the time came they could justify dehumanizing them and shooting and beating them to death.

The revolting Kristi Noem wasn’t fired this week because of any of the many heinous acts under her charge — including mass murder — at the out-of-control Department of Homeland Security (DHS). No, she was finally let go, because she gave herself, and not her orange, thin-skinned boss a starring role in an absurd $200 million-plus taxpayer-funded ad campaign.

The insane commercials feature the pie-eyed, flounder-lipped Noem celebrating herself by riding around Mount Rushmore on the back of a poor horse, whose life was in danger the minute she clapped a saddle on his back.

Noem did everything Trump wanted during her revolting tenure at DHS, except get caught, and I promise you that the average Republican voter still absolutely loves her for it.

Noem’s firing was no doubt instructive to Hegseth, who has been given carte blanche to devalue as many human lives as possible, including and mostly the troops under his charge, just as long as Trump gets all the credit for bringing the Republican voters the carnage they love.

It should be inconceivable that such a low form of life would be allowed within 1,000 miles of our armed forces, much less commanding them. Under Hegseth’s crooked charge, our military is no longer being ordered to honorably take the high ground, and are instead being threatened to go just as low as possible.

His very presence atop our Defense Department puts our troops in more and more danger each day, because mark my words, the time is coming when their adversaries will dish out the same terrible punishment to them that they have been ordered by Hegseth to inflict on others.

Most of us who wore the uniform in war and peace, did so because we believed in high ideals. We took an oath to follow the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and march in the footsteps of the thousands of brave souls who came before us, and stormed that beach, or bravely engaged that vaunted enemy carrier group.

War is hell, yes, but it is supposed to be fought with bravery, honor, and under the written laws that guide our military.

What would any of our prisoners of war through the years say about shooting men, who have long since surrendered and are helplessly clinging to the wreckage of a boat, pleading for their lives?

This is the type of thing coming for our troops if God forbid their vessel is ever blown to bits, or their boots ever hit the ground in Iran or elsewhere, because Hegseth and the draft-dodging Trump, have signaled to our enemies that our troops don’t matter much, and there are no longer any rules for engagement.

It is exactly what you would expect from a Commander-in-Chief, who disgraces the graves of our fallen and has never been brave enough to serve anybody but himself.

We are a nation at war with itself, and everybody around us, because that is exactly how the Republican Party likes it.

Violence, war and hate are their hallmarks, and the only things they have consistently delivered to the American public for the past 75 years.

There is nothing new about any of this, except that they’ve finally found a leader who can provide all that with a smile on his face.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

Americans troops are starting to return home in coffins because of Donald Trump’s insane, illegal war in Iran, but today I wanted to touch on Tuesday’s primaries, that will go a long way in determining the candidates who will oppose this bloodthirsty felon, and his ruthless party of anti-American, anti-humane Orcs in November’s elections.

Once again, Tuesday’s primary results showed us that generalities and traditional assumptions are our enemies, and reality is our friend.

Left-leaning, and anti-Republican voters are also proving a helluva lot smarter than they’ve been given credit for, and are finally starting to realize their power in tuning out the tired, out-of-touch establishment in both of our unpopular political parties.

Take heart. I say again: People, not parties, will lead us out of the wilderness.

One size does not fit all on the Left, and man, it’s about time.

Zohran Mamdani is a generational political talent, who danced on the heads of the New York Democratic Party establishment led by Andrew Cuomo to win going away in the New York City mayoral race in November.

As mind-blowingly good as Mamdani is, he would not have been elected in neighboring New Jersey in that November race for governor, because the electorate and the issues are simply different in these places, which are separated only by a river.

So a very talented and able woman, Mikie Sherrill, a former federal prosecutor and Navy helicopter pilot, demolished her Republican opponent by 14 points in a race that was supposed to be close in New Jersey.

Again, the Democratic Party needs to return to the days when it kept the flap to their big tent wide open, and allowed candidates to run races their way in their backyards without toxic influence from the overblown Democratic National Committee (DNC).

This will also be true in a place like Maine and it’s absolutely critical Senate race in June. I will touch briefly on that one, too, after getting to a few of Tuesday night’s key results.

Starting deep in the heart of Texas, I send congratulations to the upstart James Talarico for his convincing win over Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett in that U.S. Senate primary. Polls were all over the place leading up to this one, but it looks like Talarico over-performed in his 6%-to-8% victory.

On the morbid Republican side, incumbent John Cornyn will be taking on the despicable Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a runoff for the right to face Talarico. I don’t have the time nor the inclination to type much about that disgusting race, but there is some pretty good stuff here, if you are interested in reading about train wrecks.

I believe the moderate Cornyn will prevail, but it would probably be best for Democrats if the abhorrent Paxton came out on top. Word has it Trump will be endorsing Cornyn.

Before going further, I want to direct my wrath at racist Republicans in Texas who seem to spend all their time figuring out ways to disenfranchise Black voters. I loathe them with everything inside my being.

The unmitigated c--- they pulled in Dallas, to screw with voters in that city was creatively monstrous even by their dirt-low standards.

Here is the lede in a Texas Tribune story this week:

DALLAS — Veronica Anderson walked 2 ½ miles Tuesday afternoon to the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center because she wanted to vote.
When she arrived, election workers told her she was at the wrong polling place and would need to cast her ballot at a different precinct — one she said she had never heard of. Unsure where it was or how to get there, she stood outside trying to sort out her options.
“I walked up here because I want to vote so, so bad,” she told a reporter for the Dallas Free Press and Votebeat, adding that it felt like “your self-esteem and everything is torn down.”

It felt like her “self-esteem and everything was torn down …”

This is exactly how Texan Republicans like it, and they can all go straight to hell.

Our anger should be at a simmering boil at what Black Americans continue to deal with at the polls all across America, and at what certainly happened in Texas yet again Tuesday.

NOBODY deserves better than Black voters — the true patriots in America — yet time and time again they get our worst.

I am still dubious a Democrat can win a statewide race in Texas, but am positive they can’t without the Black vote.

Crockett, who is no doubt hurting today, is still the most important person in Democratic Texas politics. If she can align with Talarico and help drive out that vital Black vote, the Republican candidate will have their hands full in the state.

In North Carolina, where I will be a resident starting next month, as my family moves away from Wisconsin after 15 years, Democratic Governor Roy Cooper will take on Trump-endorsed Michael Whatley in that key Senate race.

Now an ironclad prediction: Cooper will win this race and flip that seat blue. “Governor Roy” like Sherrill and Mamdani, is the perfect candidate for the Tar Heel State and has plenty of crossover appeal.

And get this: More than 200,000 voters participated in the Democratic primary than in the Republican primary. This is stunning.

That said: We must vote like hell in November, fellow North Carolinians! (It was fun typing that.)

This was a very bad election for moderate Democrats in purple North Carolina. The four moderates who lost to more progressive candidates have actively worked AGAINST Democratic Governor Josh Stein to defeat his vetoes on terrible Republican legislation.

Here was longtime North Carolina political observer and Catawba College political science professor Michael Bitzer’s take on these Democratic Party defectors:

"The biggest surprise was the absolute blowout in terms of the percentages, and what this really says to me is that not only are the voters party loyalists now, but the parties are expecting their elected representatives to be party loyalists — to be allegiant to the party — and when you buck the party, the party can kick back."

Takeaway: The Left-leaners in North Carolina have had more than enough of Trump-appeasers in the Democratic Party.

On the Republican side the headliner is that Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page holds a razor-thin lead over North Carolina Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger in Senate District 26. Berger might be the most evil person in North Carolina, and has singlehandedly led Republicans in their quest to undermine every good thing Democrats have tried to accomplish in the state. His loss would be seismic, and it looks like that race will go to a runoff.

Very briefly in Arkansas … A Democrat won a special election for the State House in a district north of Little Rock Tuesday night. Alex Holladay, smashed Republican Bryan Renshaw to flip that seat. Democrats have now flipped 27 state elections across America since 2024. Republicans have flipped ZERO.

Finally Maine …

The Pine Tree State’s primary is not until June, but all the races that have come before it across America are instructive. Whoever emerges as the Democratic candidate MUST BEAT SUSAN COLLINS for the party to have any chance of taking back the U.S. Senate.

I have written pretty extensively about this race, and know a little about Maine having worked at a newspaper there for six years. My ex-wife also lives in the state, also works at a paper up there, and provides occasional on-the-ground intel.

Mainers are a hearty, independent lot, who take great pride in not falling in lockstep with the other 49 states in our rattled union. From their rooftop perch in the northeast corner of the country they literally look down on the rest of the United States. This doesn’t make them haughty, it makes them properly suspicious.

You really can’t get they-uh from he-yuh, and they like it just fine that way.

Maine voters have repeatedly told us they prefer the progressive oysterman and veteran, Graham Platner, to line up against Collins in this vital election. He will be running against the state’s Democratic Governor Janet Mills.

Ever since emerging as a heavy favorite in the race, Platner has been lighting up arenas and town halls, but has also been dogged by controversy. Some of his errors have been self-inflicted, while others have been generated by heavy fire from the national Democratic machine, which has reflexively supported Mills.

Despite that, in a recent University of New Hampshire poll Platner led Mills by an astonishing 64 percent to 26 percent margin. His strength is increasing, not decreasing.

Read that again.

To be clear: I like Mills, and thank her for her service.

This is not an attack on her or her record, only what reeks of incredible hubris by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), which is sinking tons of money into the state to get rid of Platner, and set the party up for yet another fall. Democrats have not won a U.S. Senate race in Maine since 1988, when George Mitchell was reelected.

I am long past sick and tired of old career candidates running for office over and over again. Mills, who would be the oldest freshman senator ever at 78, simply will not beat Collins, 73, who will somehow look young by comparison if they were to go head to head in November.

Running Mills would be self-defeating and absolute madness in a race Democrats have to have.

Democrats have had a tremendous run since the disastrous November, 2024 elections, because they have fielded candidates who are listening to their constituents and not pointy-headed DNC wonks who are forever trapped inside the Beltway, and counting money.

That is the reality, and as we steam toward November, it’s vitally important that we continue to remember that reality is our friend.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Jared Kushner grew up sleeping in Benjamin Netanyahu’s bed.

That isn’t a metaphor or hyperbole. Netanyahu, during his visits to New York over the decades, was close enough to the Kushner family that, as the New York Times reported, he slept in Jared’s childhood bedroom. Jared Kushner didn’t grow up watching Netanyahu on the news the way the rest of us did. He grew up knowing the man as something close to a family institution.

And that man, who has said publicly that he has “yearned” to destroy Iran’s military and political leadership “for 40 years,” is the same man whose government may have been coordinating directly with Kushner in the days before the most consequential American military action since the invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War.

We need to ask the question that official Washington is too timid, too compromised, or too captured by the moment’s war fever to ask: “Was Jared Kushner sitting across from Iranian negotiators in good faith? Or was he trying to get the Iranian leadership to meet together so Netanyahu could kill them all in one single decapitating strike?”

Here’s what we know. The third round of nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran wrapped up in Geneva on Feb. 26th and 27th. The Omani foreign minister, who’d been mediating the talks for months, told CBS News on the eve of the bombing that a deal was “within our reach” and that Iran had fully given in to American demands and agreed it would never produce nuclear material for a bomb, or an ICBM capable of striking the United States.

A fourth round had already been scheduled for Vienna the following week to work through the technical details following final discussions in Tehran. The Iranian foreign minister told reporters his team was ready to stay and keep talking for as long as it took.

And then, less than 48 hours after those talks in Switzerland concluded, the bombs began to fall.

On the morning of Feb. 28th, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council was gathered together in their offices for meetings. That body, the one that manages Iran’s nuclear dossier and makes the regime’s most consequential decisions, is exactly where you would expect the Iranian leadership to be sitting after a round of talks with America that their own foreign minister was calling “historic.”

They were almost certainly deliberating whether to accept or reject Kushner's American proposal. And according to the Wall Street Journal, American and Israeli intelligence had verified that senior Iranian leaders would be gathered at three locations that could be struck simultaneously. How they knew that is, as the Journal carefully noted, still unknown.

In other words, Iran’s entire decision-making apparatus was assembled in one place most likely because they were in the middle of an active negotiation with Jared Kushner. The talks had created a predictable, intelligenceable window.

Diplomats who were part of the earlier rounds of talks now tell reporters that the Iranian side has come to believe they’d been misled, and that Tehran now views the Witkoff-Kushner negotiations as, in their words, “a ruse designed to keep Iran from expecting and preparing for the surprise strikes.”

That’s not the assessment of Iranian state media spinning a narrative after a military defeat; it’s the conclusion of people who were in the room, speaking to American journalists, on the record.

Now layer on top of that what we know about who Witkoff was meeting with in the days before they sat down with the Iranians. He flew to Israel and was briefed directly by Netanyahu and senior Israeli defense officials and then, with Kushner, flew to Oman and Geneva and sat across the table from the Iranian negotiators.

The man who briefed Kushner’s partner (Witkoff) before those talks — Netanyahu — is the same man who said on the night the bombs fell that “this coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He wasn’t even remotely subdued or reluctant about the possibility of the Middle East going up in flames, perhaps even igniting World War III. He was, instead, triumphant that he finally got an American president to do something he’d been unsuccessfully pushing for decades.

We also know that the Trump regime’s explanations for why the attacks happened when they did have collapsed into open contradiction. Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially told reporters the US struck because Israel was going to attack anyway and Iran would have retaliated against American forces. Trump then went on television and flipped the scenario upside-down, saying he might’ve “forced Israel’s hand.”

The two most senior officials in the administration told two diametrically opposite stories within 48 hours of each other, and neither story explains why the diplomacy that the Omani mediator called substantively successful — that essentially got America everything we said we wanted — was abandoned without the final round.

None of this proves that Kushner was running a deliberate double-cross operation designed to concentrate Iranian leadership in a killable location. What it does prove, though, is that the question is entirely legitimate and demands an answer under oath.

This is not the first time in American history that such a question has had to be asked, or that it damaged America’s reputation on the world stage. In October of 1972, Henry Kissinger stood before the cameras and told the world that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam. The Paris negotiations, he assured everyone, were on the verge of ending the war.

But it was a lie: two months later, Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II, the most intensive bombing campaign of the entire war, dropping more tonnage on North Vietnam in twelve days than had been dropped in all of 1969 and 1970 combined.

The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973 on terms that serious historians have long argued were not meaningfully different from what had been on the table long before the bombing. Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for those negotiations. His North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, however, refused to accept his share of the prize, saying that peace had not actually been achieved and the Vietnamese had been deceived because the negotiations were a sham. And he was right: the war dragged on for two more years and was ended by Jerry Ford with the fall of Saigon.

The question that has haunted the world since those 1973 negotiations is the same question hanging over Kushner’s Geneva talks today: were the talks ever meant to succeed on their own terms, or were they simply a setup to destroy the Iranian leadership even if they gave us everything we wanted?

There’s also the Ronald Reagan precedent. His campaign was credibly accused of running a back-channel to Iran to delay the release of American hostages held in Tehran so that Jimmy Carter couldn’t get a pre-election boost from securing their freedom. It took decades for anything close to a full picture to emerge, but now we know that the Reagan campaign successfully committed that treason just to get him into the White House in 1980.

We don’t have decades this time. A war is under way and Americans are already dying. The leadership of a modern, developed country of ninety million people has been decapitated. And every foreign ministry on Earth is watching and drawing conclusions about whether they’ll ever again trust American diplomacy.

If the Iranians were right that they were “negotiated” into a kill box, no government facing an existential American ultimatum will ever be able to assume our good faith again.

The damage this administration is doing to American credibility isn’t abstract or temporary: when a country uses the negotiating table as a targeting opportunity, it poisons the well for every administration that comes after it.

North Korea is watching. Iran’s neighbors are watching. China is watching. The next time an American president sends an envoy somewhere with a genuine offer of peace, why would anyone believe it? Le Duc Tho knew the answer to that question when Kissinger betrayed his Vietnamese negotiating partners in 1973. The world is apparently relearning it now.

Congress has the constitutional power and the institutional obligation to call Kushner and Witkoff before investigative committees and ask them directly: What did you know about Israeli targeting plans during the Geneva talks? When did you know it? What were you instructed to accomplish or delay? Did you communicate with Netanyahu’s government during the negotiations themselves?

The man at the center of this diplomacy grew up treating Benjamin Netanyahu like a member of the family. That’s not a reason to assume guilt, but it sure as hell is a reason to demand answers, loudly, now, before the war makes the asking impossible.

History doesn’t repeat, as Mark Twain allegedly said, but it sure does seem to rhyme. And right now, the rhyme between the first year of the George W. Bush presidency and the first year of Donald Trump’s second term is staring us in the face and it’s getting scary.

After “Poppy” George H.W. Bush finished his 1991 “little war” against Iraq, he left American troops stationed at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Those soldiers on what Osama bin Laden considered sacred Muslim soil — the home to Mecca — became his primary grievance against America.

He said so publicly, raving at the New York Times and anyone else who’d listen. American men were drinking alcohol and looking at pornography and thus defiling Saudi holy land, he said, and American women were showing their bare arms and driving cars in a country where such things are absolutely forbidden. When Bin Laden declared war on us, he meant it as part of a religious and moral crusade.

That war came home on September 11, 2001, and it arrived at a miraculously convenient moment for an otherwise hapless George W. Bush. The new president had taken office under a cloud of illegitimacy after five Republicans on the Supreme Court, two of them appointed by his own father, stopped the Florida recount — that would have handed the election to Al Gore — and thus gave Bush the presidency.

Millions of Americans believed the 2000 election had been stolen, between Jeb Bush purging 90,000 Black voters from the Florida rolls just before the election, and the five Republicans on the Court handing Bush the Oval Office. His approval ratings were mediocre at best, he had no mandate, and he struggled to find any sort of an agenda beyond more tax cuts for billionaires that could excite the public.

Then the towers fell, and overnight Bush became the most popular president in the history of modern polling: his approval rating hit 90 percent. The man who’d been floundering became, overnight, a “wartime president,” which was exactly what he’d wanted all along.

Back in 1999, Bush told his ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz that if he ever got the presidency, what he really needed was a war:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander in chief ... My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it.”

Bin Laden’s 9/11 attack on the US gave Bush his “chance to invade,” his war capital. He spent it to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, and to drive an even larger tax cut for billionaires than originally anticipated.

Exposed by the Downing Street Memos, his administration had fabricated intelligence, ginned up fake connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and lied about weapons of mass destruction. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of his lies, but Bush got his “successful presidency.”

Now look at Trump.

His poll numbers right now are worse than Bush’s were in the summer of 2001; worse in many regards than any president in polling history. His approval ratings on literally every topic — from immigration to ICE to taxes to inflation to healthcare, etc., etc. — are underwater and sinking.

Further, there are allegations that the FBI is sitting on evidence related to claims Trump raped at least one and possibly two 13-year-old girls. His family is openly monetizing the presidency, with his nepo sons and son-in-law cutting real estate deals and cryptocurrency schemes with the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE while Trump pushes — against the advice of our intelligence agencies — to send advanced AI chips to those same countries.

The corruption is so brazen it barely qualifies as corruption anymore. Trump and his lickspittles have pulled off what was previously unimaginable: the reinvention of government as a machine to generate profit for the ruling family — much like Saddam Hussein had done in Iraq and Vladimir Putin has done in Russia — all right out in plain sight.

Meanwhile, Trump’s ICE agents are terrorizing communities across the country, beating and intimidating American citizens, deporting legal residents without due process, and violating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments so routinely that constitutional scholars have stopped being shocked and started being terrified. Reports of ICE-related deaths of American citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis are piling up as the Trump regime refuses to cooperate in state-level murder investigations.

On top of all these crises, the electoral landscape for November is looking catastrophic for Republicans. Trump and the GOP are staring down a potential wipeout in the 2026 midterms, which is why red-state legislatures are gerrymandering with abandon, why Trump is floating proposals to nationalize elections, ban mail-in voting, and station ICE agents outside polling places in minority neighborhoods.

These are not the actions of a confident political party that believes it’s doing what’s best for average Americans. They are, instead, the actions of people who know they’re on the verge of losing power and facing accountability, and are therefore willing to destroy our very democracy to hold onto power.

So, Trump desperately needed something to change the subject. And right on cue, he launched an unprovoked military attack on Iran, apparently at the urging of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has his own desperate need to remain in power to keep himself out of prison for his own bribery and corruption scandals.

The bombing of Iran gave Trump a few days of wall-to-wall war coverage, pushing every other scandal (including Epstein) below the fold. It was a classic wag-the-dog maneuver, but so far it’s worked well enough to dominate the news cycle.

But here is where the rhyme with 2001 turns frighteningly dark.

Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI director, has fired or reassigned almost the entire FBI team responsible for tracking Iranian threats inside the United States. The specialists who spent years building intelligence networks to monitor Iranian-linked operatives on American soil have been purged from the agency, fired unceremoniously.

At the same time, Trump has let funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapse, leaving critical counterterrorism functions in limbo as Republicans in Congress refuse — at his insistence — to act. He’s systematically dismantled the very apparatus that exists to prevent a terrorist attack on the continental US or our assets around the world.

Ask yourself why. Why would a president who just bombed Iran simultaneously gut the very intelligence infrastructure built by previous administrations to detect and prevent Iranian retaliation? Why would you poke a hornet’s nest and then fire the guy with the EpiPen?

Unless you wanted to get stung.

The logic is almost too ugly to contemplate, but it tracks perfectly with recent history. Bush needed 9/11 and got it, and it saved his presidency. Trump needs something equally dramatic to reset his collapsing political fortunes.

A spectacular Iranian-sponsored attack on American soil, or even a major domestic attack by a radicalized actor inspired by the chaos Trump himself has created, would instantly transform him into a Bush-like “wartime president.”

It would push the bribery, the rapes, the constitutional violations, the ICE killings, and the election rigging off the front page overnight. It would give him emergency powers he has already shown he’s more than willing to abuse. It would give Republicans a reason to “rally around the flag” and postpone the reckoning that November 2026 currently promises.

This is not some wacky conspiracy theory: it’s simply pattern recognition. When a president provokes a hostile nation, then fires the people whose job it is to protect us from that nation’s retaliation, the conclusion is either staggering incompetence or something far more sinister.

We can’t afford to wait and find out which one it is.

President Donald Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the controversial Iran War to AlterNet, arguing that it was “ground in a truth.”

“President Trump’s courageous decision to launch Operation Epic Fury is grounded in a truth that presidents for nearly 50 years have been talking about, but no president had the courage to confront: Iran poses a direct and imminent threat to the United States of America and our troops in the Middle East,” Leavitt said in a statement to AlterNet. “The rogue Iranian Regime under the evil hand of the Ayatollah has killed and maimed thousands of American citizens and soldiers over the years – and that ends with President Trump.”

Leavitt was responding in part to a recent comment by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a fierce critic of the Iran War who on Thursday argued to Fox News that the lack of congressional approval renders the entire operation illegal.

“The people have been robbed of a public debate,” Paul wrote. “Let me inform the public that this evasion is intentional.”

He added,”The congressional leadership — resigned to their own irrelevance — will gladly hand the president the power to initiate war in exchange for plausible deniability. Congressional leaders want to make the case to voters that they are not to be held accountable at the ballot box because they played no role in the decision to go to war. That is not statesmanship. That is shameful.”

Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill,), who was once so loyal to Trump he vowed to use “muskets” if he lost to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, argued in February that Trump supporters are in a “cult” if they still back him despite his warmongering.

“I thought you wanted him to end wars all over the world,” Walsh declared. “You said you wanted him to end American entanglement in conflicts and wars around the world. America shouldn’t be involved in these wars, you said. That’s why you’re voting for Trump, you said.” For this reason, Walsh said Trump’s belligerence toward Greenland, Venezuela and Iran should discredit him to those supporters — but for the most part, it has not.

“And you don’t like when people call you a cult, Trump voters?” Walsh asked. “What else are people to think when you voted for Trump to get us the hell out of wars around the world, and instead he gets us involved in wars around the world and starts new wars, and you still sing his praises and support him? What are we to think, MAGA, but that you are a cult?”

On Thursday, referring back to his 2016 post about grabbing a “musket,” Walsh said that opposing Trump’s unconstitutional behavior has kept him “at war” so continuously, he is exhausted.

“Every day, I feel like I grab my musket and I walk out to that battlefield out there,” Walsh said. “And from eight in the morning till eight or nine at night, I'm just at war.”

Observing the toll this has taken on his health, Walsh said that “I'm not a kid. It's exhausting. I'm tired every night.”

Like Paul and Walsh, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) used to support Trump but argued on Sunday that his attack on Iran violates his supposed anti-war principles.

"This b—— is celebrating the death of American military members and thanking their families for their blood sacrifice,” Greene wrote in response to a pro-war post by a Trump supporter, influencer Laura Loomer. “But this is who Trump takes late night calls from and laps up her praise and worship. … And now Americans are once again coming home in flag draped coffins from another stupid pointless foreign war for foreign regime change on behalf of Israel.”

Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News host who remains influential in far right circles, outright accused Trump of being controlled by Israel, saying “this happened because Israel wanted it to happen. This is Israel’s war.” The Hodge Twins, a pair of popular MAGA influencers, also argued “we are at war for Israel.” On the other side of the ideological spectrum, University of St. Andrews strategies professor and historian Phillips Payson O’Brien told The Atlantic in March that Trump’s Iran invasion could presage a decline in America’s global military dominance.

“When a complex system starts to decay, the first signs are usually subtle,” O’Brien said. “In the third century, after the Roman empire had reached its geographic maximum, literacy began to decline across Roman society. Education levels fell not only among soldiers, but among officers, aristocrats, and even emperors. The Roman army still looked formidable for years afterward. It had good equipment and could march well. Yet it was no longer as advanced relative to Rome’s enemies as it had once been. It fought as hard as ever, but less effectively.”

The U.S. military remains still far superior to Iran’s, O’Brien added, but the American bombing campaign against Iran is showing signs of strain, such as the deaths of six U.S. soldiers (at the time of O’Brien’s interview) or an Iranian drone that destroyed the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Confronting Leavitt about the soldiers’ deaths on Wednesday, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked her about a remark indicating that the “press should not prominently cover the deaths of U.S. service members?”

“The press does only want to make the president look bad,” Leavitt replied. “That’s an objective fact. Especially you and especially CNN.”

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2024 regarding a historian, the New School’s Federico Finchelstein, comparing Trump’s “rhetorical violence” to Adolf Hitler’s oratory, Leavitt replied that “it's been less 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."

It probably shouldn’t surprise us. After all, intolerance and hate have always been the fuel that drives and sustains right-wing movements around the world and throughout history.

Now the hosts of one of the largest-circulation “conservative” podcasts in the country are calling for a Muslim commentator to be stripped of his citizenship and deported from America.

His sin? He called for the next president to take down the Hitler-style massive banners on the Justice and Labor Department buildings that feature Donald Trump’s face, and the new one on the Education Department with Charlie Kirk’s face. And, of course, he’s a brown-skinned Muslim. As Raw Story is reporting:

“Yeah, he’s just a repulsive creature,” said one of the guys filling in for the late hard-right crusader. “We gave him citizenship for some stupid reason, and he rewards us by dumping on an American icon and an American hero. Yeah, you know what? I’ll give my primary support to whoever says, we’re going to try to find a way to strip this person’s citizenship and send him back to some dump.”“Yeah, we should, actually, we should,” his buddy agreed. “He’s a foreigner that, to Blake’s point, for some reason, in our stupid immigration system, he was allowed in. Then he’s allowed to come in here and smear the memory of Charlie Kirk, the legacy of Charlie Kirk.”
“And listen, those are the freedoms that have been bestowed upon him by a superior country and culture than his own,” he added. “And yeah, whatever, he’s British or whatever his, you know. But he’s a Muslim.”
“And so, yeah, we have a superior culture than Mehdi Hasan’s, and yet he’s come in here, and he’s been bestowed with the same freedoms that American citizens have long enjoyed.”

Mehdi Hasan is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and he’d absolutely destroy these two snowflakes in a debate. Which is why, of course, they’re not debating him but simply trash-talking him.

This neofascist call to use the power of government to punish a person for their speech is about as un-American as it gets. And it’s also right in line with the reactionary conservative impulse that goes back more than two centuries.

In the Adams/Jefferson election contest of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I point out in our book The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction and What This Means Today, partisan newspapers were absolutely relentless in their personal attacks against Thomas Jefferson.

John Adams fared better because, during the previous two years of his presidency, our second president had shut down around 30 anti-Federalist/anti-Adams newspapers and thrown their publishers, editors, and writers in prison for speaking ill of him. One died in jail, another fled the country, and others were financially destroyed. Adams even jailed the town drunk in Newark, New Jersey, for a comment he made to the bartender, making Luther Baldwin one of the most famous alcoholics in American history.

Then-Vice President Jefferson responded to a friend who asked, during Adams’ initial crackdown, how he felt about it all and he responded with a pithy expression of what has been, for most of America’s history, the true American credo:

“I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty.“The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

When I was 16 years old, I published a little anti-war newspaper called The Jurist that a friend of mine and I distributed in our high school. My father — a fervent Republican activist — printed it on his mimeo machine, even though he totally disagreed with pretty much everything I wrote about the Vietnam War. In one issue I went too far, attacking the school’s principal for “suppressing our free speech”; he kicked me out of school.

It turned out well for me as I’d been on an advanced-track since Sputnik went up when I was in second grade, so I transitioned straight to community college that year, and my Republican father defended me all the way. As he would have defended anybody whose opinions differed from his.

Barry Goldwater would have agreed with my father (we went door-to-door for him in 1964 when I was 13), as would have most Republicans of that era. William F. Buckley welcomed lefties on his Firing Line show that Dad and I watched together every weekend.

But don’t try to tell today’s Republicans about pluralistic democracy or the importance of dissent in a free society. There’s nothing conservative about these right-wingers who embrace hate, violence, and the use of government force to shut up those with whom they disagree; that’s pure neofascist reactionaryism.

They and their Epstein-class billionaire backers will apparently be much happier if Trump can succeed in flipping America into a Putin-style autocracy and use the force of government to crush all the remaining anti-Trump voices.

Operation Epstein Fury — with a bonus to help Bibi get re-elected so he doesn’t have to face charges for his criminal behavior — is rolling on as Donald Trump ignores the constitutional requirement that only Congress can declare war.

He’s also violating the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that dictates the president, if he reacts to an actual attack on America like Pearl Harbor, must notify Congress within 48 hours and have authorization within 60 days. In this case there was no actual or even imminent attack against America.

To further confuse things, Trump is throwing the Iranian protesters under the bus by saying that he’s willing to talk with the Iranian regime now that Ayatollah Khamenei is dead, much like he crapped on pro-democracy voters and protestors in Venezuela when he kept that repressive regime intact after illegally removing Nicolás Maduro and promising democracy.

This conflict is also now spreading. Khamenei was to many Shia Muslims around the world something akin to what the Pope is to Catholics (there’s no equivalent among the Sunni Muslims). Imagine the Catholic world’s fury if a country had assassinated Pope Leo XIV: we’re now seeing Shia protests and outrage from Bangladesh to Pakistan to Lebanon.

And here at home, Trump is musing about using Iranian interference in our 2020 election as an excuse to issue an emergency executive order to seize control of the upcoming November midterm election.

Which is particularly ironic, given that the well-documented Iranian intervention that year was designed to help get Trump reelected (after all, he’d just torn up the JCPOA nuclear deal) and avoid a Biden administration from coming into power.

Four Americans are dead and five in critical condition because of Iranian retaliatory strikes, as are civilians in several other US-aligned countries in the region. Along with around 200 young people in Iran after we bombed a girl’s school and a gymnasium.

And it’s early days. As Winston Churchill famously said in 1936 about war:

“Once the signal is given, no one can predict how far events will go.”

America’s Founders and the Framers of our Constitution not only would have agreed with Churchill, but saw a president seizing war powers from Congress as an existential threat to the republic. On April 20, 1795, James Madison, who had just helped shepherd through the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and would become President of the United States in the following decade, wrote:

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”

Reflecting on the ability of a president to use war as an excuse to become a virtual dictator, Madison continued his letter:

“In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive [President] is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both.“No nation,” our fourth President and the Father of the Constitution concluded, “could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Since Madison’s warning, “continual warfare” has been used both in fiction and in the real world. In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, the way a seemingly democratic president kept his nation in a continual state of repression was by having a continuous war.

The lesson wasn’t lost on Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, who both extended the Vietnam war so it coincidentally ran over election cycles, knowing that a wartime president’s party is more likely to be reelected and has more power than a president in peacetime.

And, as George W. Bush told his biographer in 1999:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as commander in chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Every Republican president since Reagan has had his own “little war.” Now it’s Trump’s turn, after all the times over the years he warned that if Barak Obama was ever in trouble he’d start a war with Iran to distract us:

“In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran.” (2011)“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective…” (2011)
“@BarackObama will attack Iran in the not too distant future because it will help him win the election.” (2012)
“Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.” (2012)
“Remember what I said about @BarackObama attacking Iran before the election…” (2012)
“I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!” (2013)

Given that Baron, Don Jr, and Eric Trump all apparently suffer from hereditary bone spurs and no Trump has ever served as a “loser” or “sucker” in our military (and his grandfather came to America as a German draft-dodger), it’s unlikely this war will mean anything other than profit-making opportunities for the Trump children.

But it compounds his constant ignoring of constitutional limits on presidential power ranging from gutting federal agencies without authorization to having ICE routinely ignore court orders, flagrantly violate the Fourth Amendment, and daily lie to the American people.

Nobody invested in peace or democracy is mourning the death of the Iranian dictator or the possible unraveling of its theocracy. But must we do it in a way that breaks both US and international law?

Trump apparently thinks so; not only will it distract from the news reports that he allegedly raped at least one and maybe more 13-year-olds — allegations he denies — and his corruption and bribe-taking but it also carves another “screwed Congress” notch in his belt.

There was no attack on America, as required by the War Powers Resolution. There wasn’t even a serious possibility of an attack on America.

Madison and the Founders of his generation had it right: this is a crime by Trump and Hegseth against our Constitution and our laws and requires a strong congressional response such as impeachment.

Recently, Steve Bannon told an audience:

“And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms … some in this room are going to prison — myself included.”

Now, it looks like Donald Trump and the people around him are seriously considering declaring an emergency to let them seize control of this November’s elections, according to reporting in the Washington Post:

“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”

Trump and the lickspittles and criminals he’s surrounded himself with are in a panic. If Democrats take the House and/or Senate in this November’s elections, they’ll have the power of subpoena so the regime’s crimes and corruption will be laid out for everybody to see. Some could even go to prison, including Trump himself.

He’s been basically screaming, “Do something!!!” at Republicans for the past year. It started publicly with his demanding that Texas and then other red states further gerrymander their elections to reduce the number of Democrats in the House.

In red states they’re purging voters in Blue cities from the rolls like there’s no tomorrow, and the GOP is trying to recruit “election observers” to challenge signatures on mail-in ballots on an industrial level. As reporter Greg Palast pointed out, this is how Trump took the White House in 2024; if it hadn’t been for over 4 million (mostly Black) fully qualified US citizens being purged or having their ballots rejected after technical challenges, Kamala Harris would be our president today.

But given how badly Trump’s doing in the polls today, even all these efforts don’t look like they’ll be enough to keep the House and Senate in Republican hands.

So now Trump toadies like Jerome Corsi (the creator of the Birther movement and the Swift Boat slurs, who’s been a guest on my program multiple times) have an idea: just imitate what Putin, Orbán, Hitler, and other dictators have done to hang onto power when they get unpopular: declare an emergency and use it to rig the election.

Yesterday, the Post detailed how MAGA-aligned activists are now openly discussing manufacturing or exaggerating a national emergency to justify Trump’s agents in the federal government to interfere in this November’s elections.

These aren’t fringe anonymous trolls on some obscure message board; they’re people operating in proximity to the president of the United States. Corsi arguably destroyed John Kerry’s chances in 2004 and lit the Birther fuse that catapulted Trump into political fame.

And they’re floating the idea that if normal democratic processes don’t produce the “right” outcome, they could help create a fake crisis to seize control of the election nationally.

If you’ve studied history — and you know I have — that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up.

Because this isn’t new, creative, or even uniquely American: it’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

In 1933, Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, went up in flames at the hands of a mentally ill Dutch communist who was probably maneuvered into the act by the Nazis. Adolf Hitler declared it “proof” of an existential communist threat. Civil liberties were suspended overnight. Gone in the blink of an eye were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble as Hitler’s goons began to round up his political opponents and throw them into his new concentration camp at Dachau.

Elections were technically still held, but under conditions so distorted they no longer qualified as free or fair in any meaningful sense, and the so-called “temporary” emergency became Hitler’s legal bridge to a permanent dictatorship.

Similarly, in Turkey in 2016, elements of the military tried to pull off a coup against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan while he was out of town. Erdoğan declared a national state of emergency and then kept it in place permanently. Tens of thousands of protesters were arrested. Judges and teachers were purged from their jobs, and media outlets were closed down for being “fake news.”

While emergency rule was in effect, Turkey held an election that transformed its parliamentary democracy into a hyper-presidential system tailored to give virtually all federal power to Erdoğan himself. It was the end of democracy in Turkey.

Vladimir Putin’s rise offers another variation. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings killed hundreds of Russians and the Kremlin blamed Chechen terrorists. The attacks propelled Putin, then a relatively unknown prime minister, into the presidency on a wave of fear and fury.

Putin then declared a state of emergency that expanded his police powers, gave him tighter media control, and let him seize control of the elections process. In the years since then, elections in Russia have become ritual rather than reality. The ballots are printed every few years, and the votes are counted, but the outcome is never in doubt.

Viktor Orbán in Hungary shows yet another model. He declared a “state of crisis” over migration by Syrian refugees in 2015 and kept renewing it long after migration levels collapsed. During the COVID pandemic, he got the parliament to give him the authority to rule by decree on an indefinite basis; it’s still in effect.

As a result, elections still happen (there’s one coming up), but the media landscape was completely taken over by Orbán-friendly billionaires (see: CBS, WaPo, LA Times, Fox “News,” Sinclair, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, and 1,500 rightwing radio stations). Orbán didn’t need to cancel Hungary’s elections; he simply reshaped the legal and political environment in which they happened.

There’s a common thread in all of this. The crisis wannabe dictators inevitably declare — real, exaggerated, or cynically manipulated — become the justification for seizing extraordinary powers. Those powers narrow dissent, intimidate opponents, and functionally rig the elections.

That’s why this shocking new reporting in the Washington Post is so alarming. When political actors like Corsi begin talking openly about declaring an emergency to override or interfere with elections, they’re not blowing smoke: they’re testing a classic dictator’s narrative.

They’re trying to figure out — and will learn from the national reaction to this Post reporting — whether they can persuade the public that normal election processes are too dangerous to trust. After all, in each of the cases I listed above, the machinery of democracy was used to hollow out democracy itself.

And they may not even have to manufacture an emergency: if Trump can sufficiently provoke Iran, they may activate their proxy network around the world and in the United States, and we could be facing a genuine crisis on the order of 9/11. This is one of the few ways to make sense of today’s massive military buildup in the Middle East.

The danger here isn’t just a fabricated catastrophe or a retaliatory strike by Iran, although those are pretty damn severe. It’s the normalization of the idea that if the electorate appears likely to choose “wrongly,” an emergency can justify changing the rules of democracy.

History shows us, over and over again, that when a nation loses its democracy to an aspiring autocrat, the language and strategy used is always the same. “The nation is under threat.” “The moment is an emergency.” “Normal rules must be suspended — just temporarily — to save the country.”

And in every case, “temporary” turned out to be the most dangerous word of all.

We’re now at that moment where influential figures are publicly contemplating that path, and the lesson from history isn’t subtle. The real emergency, in a constitutional republic, begins when leaders like Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan and Trump — and their toadies like Corsi, Bondi, Noem, and Gabbard — decide that elections themselves are the problem.

Multiple observers have noted that this plan is grossly unconstitutional. But so were Trump’s tariffs (which also used IEEPA emergency authority as their rationale), and the Supreme Court let him run with them for almost a year before stopping him.

Similarly, ICE goons kicking in people’s front doors and smashing their car windows to drag them off without a judicial warrant is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, but Trump’s agents continued to do it every day. Something being against the law or the Constitution has never stopped our convicted felon/rapist/insurrectionist president in the past.

On the third day of his illegal war with Iran, the bedraggled Donald Trump harrumphed in front of an overmatched podium in the East Room of a White House that is already under siege from this wrecking ball of a man.

Instead of formally and somberly addressing the terrible, needless deaths of four of our troops in this unnecessary war, and honoring their shattered families, this foul-mouthed, ill-bred coward spent his time castigating the gathered press, bragging about a ballroom that would allegedly grow from his rubble, and battering Democrats just for sport.

By this afternoon the U.S. death toll had marched to six.

Only hours before Trump spoke at the White House, not one … not two … but THREE American fighter jets were somehow shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses during an alleged "friendly fire incident” that leaves far more serious questions than answers, such as this one: How in the hell could this have possibly happened?

It really is incomprehensible, but everything connected with Trump often is.

It was an abhorrent display on the world stage, even by Trump’s dirt-low standards, and so I’ll ask another question: WHEN will Republicans stand on the side of decency and finally stop supporting this wreck of a man and his crusade to treat us all to the nonstop madness that bangs around his broken mind?

I will be brief this evening, but want to type with precision about the greatest danger that is most assuredly coming at us in the days and weeks ahead: more and more dangerous lies and accusations, and incoherent messaging that will contradict themselves by the hour.

The pollutants coming from Trump and his ghastly regime are sure to manufacture a fog of war so thick that anybody with eyes or ears will choke from being in their general vicinity.

Nothing can be believed by a serial liar, who from Day 1 of his disastrous presidency has worked tirelessly to drag our armed forces down to his pathetic level.

He will continue to deploy our troops in abhorrent ways that will benefit only him and not our country.

His Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a stupid, loud man, who confuses screaming at people with leadership and clarity. He has no answers or manners, so he berates those who dare to ask him questions, and challenge his qualifications to lead our armed forces into needless battles.

I promise you that fully three-quarters of the military and civilian personnel inside our cavernous Pentagon, view him as a terrible joke without a clever punchline. He is a man without substance, who wears his ignorance on his sleeve. He is the perfect power tool for his mess of a boss to plug in and use however he sees fit.

Our military public affairs staffs deployed here and abroad, who are taught on the first day of their defense information training to deliver battlefield updates with “maximum disclosure and minimum delay” will be under siege, as they are instructed to forget everything they learned about the truth, by an administration that does nothing but tell lies.

I promise you that in the days and weeks ahead, as this war drags on to and fro throughout the most volatile region in the world, and takes more and more of our troops, the one common theme you will hear over and over again is the lack of any coherent message.

Hegseth will say one thing, his public affairs staff will say another, and the Lord of the Lies will contradict both.

And when the only thing achieved is chaos, death, and yet more instability, at some point they will all declare victory, and move onto stirring up trouble elsewhere always making sure to keep everybody terrified and on edge.

Whatever the terrible end looks like, you can count on it being every bit as chaotic as the beginning.

The truth will be nowhere to be seen ...

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

The list of reasons for the president’s illegal and unjustified war against Iran keeps growing. First, it was because Iran had nuclear weapons. (It didn’t.) Then it was because the Iranian people longed for democracy and human rights. Then it was because Iran is a leader in state-sponsored terrorism. Now it’s because of America’s obligation as “a free people” to liberate the oppressed.

But Donald Trump doesn’t mean a word of what he says about his reasons for attacking Iran without the consent of the Congress, because he is a man who never means a word he says. He will say virtually anything to achieve his objectives, no matter how petty or consequential those objectives may be, and if achieving them requires him to contradict previous statements, so be it.

In 2011, Trump famously accused President Barack Obama, who was struggling in the polls, of planning to “start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective so the only way he figures that he’s going to get reelected, and as sure as you’re sitting there, is to start a war with Iran.” In saying this, he appeared to believe that a president who starts a war to protect power is a cheat and a criminal.

He did not mean a word of it, unless he meant that it’s bad when a Democratic president does it but okie-dokie when he does. Either way, that allegation was levied in bad faith in order to deceive – to make Americans believe, in 2011, that Trump cared about things like principles and morality when principles and morality have always been mere tools for achieving his goals.

That Trump does not believe anything he says is illustrated moreover by the fact that he’s been calling individual reporters to determine which war rationales sound best in persuading a skeptical public. One in four say they support war with Iran, Reuters said today. According to an AP poll released last week, just 27 percent trust him to make good choices when it comes to using military force. Meanwhile, a CNN poll released last week found a stunning 68 percent believe he has the wrong priorities.

In that context, The Economist’s Gregg Carlstrom noticed Trump has been workshopping goals and rationales with reporters. To the Post, he said the goal is "freedom for the people.” He told Axios he can get Iran to make a deal “in two or three days.” He told the Times a deal might take "four to five weeks.” (He even suggested that he has “three very good choices" as to who would control Iran.) However, he told ABC News, actually nevermind.

“He doesn't sound convinced by any of it,” Gregg Carlstrom wrote on Twitter today. “He's throwing spaghetti at the wall. Ultimately I suspect he just wants to say he ‘solved’ a problem that has vexed every American president since Jimmy Carter. But there's no clear idea what that looks like and no plan for how to get there. And there are plenty of possible scenarios in which Trump declares victory and leaves the region with an absolute mess.”

The president does not sound convinced of his own words, because, again, he does not believe in his own words. He didn’t mean it when he said he would lower the cost of living. He didn’t mean it when he said he would bring “the Epstein class” to justice. He didn’t mean it when he said only “bad immigrants” would be deported. And now, after a decade of presenting himself as a peace-seeking isolationist who serves America’s needs first, he’s going to war, because he never meant a word.

Everything he is saying right now has one goal, which is creating conditions in which the unpopular president looks big and tough on TV for the purpose of gaining support in advance of this year’s midterms. You could say Trump is doing exactly what he accused Obama of doing. But you also say he’s doing what Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu is currently doing: waging a forever war in order to stay in power forever. Trump has been bragging for months about ending “eight wars.” (He said as much during the State of the Union address.) He believed being seen as a peace-making president would rally the base. That’s not working, so he now believes victory lies in the path of war-making. That this is a diametric reversal of a decade of isolationist rhetoric is irrelevant to him, because everything he said was intended in bad faith.

In the absence of an actual emergency, most Americans aren’t buying the rationale for war. Today, a new CNN found that nearly 60 percent disapprove. That’s before body bags start coming home. How high will disapproval go after the press corps focuses on the war dead? (Pete Hegseth said today he has not ruled out a ground invasion. Trump said today that the war could last four to five weeks.) And that poll was taken in the context of Trump’s heelturn. Every report I have read about Trump’s war has noted how it stands in stark contrast with his previous disdain for “forever wars” – a disdain now revealed to be totally fake.

The Democrats in the Congress are concentrating their energy on a bipartisan war-powers resolution. The goal is to reclaim constitutional authority from an executive who is abusing his. The president has to ask for permission to go to war, and many of the Democrats seem certain that the answer is going to be no.

That’s good, but the president’s betrayal of his stated principles in pursuit of a war to maintain his power presents a bigger opportunity – to dismantle what remains of the public’s trust and, most specifically, to accelerate the demoralization of his base. Maga voters are almost certainly not going to vote for a Democrat, but the Democrats can give reasons to stay home.

I’ll end by quoting Democrat Eric Swallwell, the California congressman: “This guy has lied to the American people about everything he promised he would do. … He said he would lower prices on day one. Instead, he put in his idiotic tariff policy that has raised Price. He said that he would get rid of war and now we are … a year into the administration. We have two new wars on the map in Venezuela and Iran. He has done the exact opposite this entire presidency of what he told he was going to do.”

This week, two old power-hungry, greedy, lawless men are in the process of killing countless hundreds and thousands of innocent human beings, while destabilizing a world they most likely won’t be living in a decade from now.

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and the United States’ Donald Trump have proven without a shadow of a doubt that they are the two most dangerous men on earth, and everything should be done to stop them, because they are way the hell out of control.

I cannot deal with even one person who sees the sense in yet another global war centered in the Middle East, where we simply have to know by now that oil is thicker than blood.

Already three American troops have been killed and several more wounded in a military campaign that has no defined strategy, or upside, unless you are one of these monstrous men like America’s president who profits from that oil, and the residuals of a spiraling, unchecked $1.5 trillion military industrial complex.

The death toll from a deadly strike on a girls’ elementary school in Iran escalated to 115 people on Sunday, according to Iranian media. U.S. and Israeli military are saying only that they “take these reports seriously and are looking into them.”

All of this madness has been made possible by the most blood-thirsty president in United States history, who in the past year alone, has now bombed seven different countries.

Read that again.

He calls himself the president of peace, because he can say literally any unhinged thing he wants knowing it will get dutifully reported. He lies about everything all the time, and our press long ago became far, far too accepting of that.

If truth is the first casualty of war, then the bodies have been piling up since 2016.

He has put thousands and thousands of masked government agents in America’s streets, who have indiscriminately murdered American citizens, beaten hundreds of others to a pulp, and caged countless thousands of human beings in concentration camps.

There have been no consequences for any of these barbaric actions.

Our situation in America has gone from being chaotic to completely out of hand in just months, and promises to somehow get a helluva lot worse in the weeks ahead.

America has engaged in a relentless bombing campaign in three different continents, but has somehow missed Russia …

Sadly, I won’t be holding my breath for Democrats to do whatever is necessary to push back against this lawless regime’s action in Iran, because there are early signs they are already fractured, when the only response to this absolute madness should be a hard NO.

Far too many in that party voted for the War in Iraq, and I fear too many will vote for this war.

I am done being let down by the double-talkers in the party I have voted with, whose so-called leaders give credence to the accusations that both of our major political parties are basically the same in America.

I don’t believe that, but do believe we have never needed a third party more than we do right now. I’ll leave it at that for now, because my opposition to Trump and his grotesque Republican Party is far, far stronger than my distaste of the Democratic Party, which has no sense of itself, or even how to get out of its own way anymore.

Any Democrat who votes for this war will be on my list, and will never get off it. I promise this as a humanitarian, a Navy veteran, a journalist who has reported on too many wars in one lifetime, and an American, who is way beyond disgusted with my country right now.

I also won’t be coming at this as a religious man, because religion has the blood of millions and millions of dead souls on its crooked hands through the centuries. You name the religion, and I’ll point to the countless lives that have been ended thanks to their money-making, power-grabbing, holier-than-thou propaganda.

This war will solve nothing and will only harden hearts already clogged by the knuckle-dragging notion that might somehow makes right.

The men who are leading this latest atrocity are the same kind of men that either are, or could be, mentioned in the Epstein files. They have lived their privileged lives above it all, you see. They know there isn’t a single they can do that they will be punished for including raping children, or blowing them to bits with a tomahawk missile launched from some ship hundreds of miles away.

They cherish only their own lives, and have absolutely no regard for anybody else’s. They will rape, pillage, and burn people, and then enjoy cocktails on the terrace at 5.

Just last night, Trump was seen yucking it up during a party at his garish Mar-a-Lago country club. I’ll bet good money, he was on the golf course when he learned of the deaths of our service members today.

Broken men like Netanyahu and Trump, don’t give a single damn about anybody but themselves. Their strength comes from making good and sure we fight against each other, and not them, because they know the minute that happens, they are finished.

So today we are in yet another war in the Middle East, and nobody but gutless men like Trump and Netanyahu will come out any better for it.

Good grief, this should not be that hard to understand.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

On Tuesday night in the State of the Union, we watched the most corrupt president (and presidency) in the history of America lie his way through a fascist-friendly speech. He didn’t mention how rich he’s made himself and his kids off the presidency, as he tried to paint in a good light what is, frankly, the most dishonorable, unprincipled, and criminal regime in the history of the free world.

On Tuesday night in the State of the Union, we watched the most corrupt president (and presidency) in the history of America lie his way through a fascist-friendly speech. He didn’t mention how rich he’s made himself and his kids off the presidency, as he tried to paint in a good light what is, frankly, the most dishonorable, unprincipled, and criminal regime in the history of the free world.

Rumors have been flying for years — ever since Rudy Giuliani apparently confessed during Trump’s first term he and Trump were selling pardons for $2 million each and splitting the money — that Trump is at it again, taking what look like bribes for everything from pardons to business deals to regulatory and tariff relief. And the evidence is piling up in ways that are unmistakable.

For example, Judd Legum’s Popular Info news site is reporting that the parent company of crypto.com has made a series of “donations” to Trump’s main SuperPAC, MAGA Inc., amounting to $35 million.

That SuperPAC has already paid tens of millions for Trump’s legal fees, apparently including personal defense lawyers and business deal lawyers, and can hang onto that money to support Trump’s lavish lifestyle once he leaves office.

Shortly after the last donation, as Legum reports:

“25 days later, on February 17, the Trump administration’s Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), intervened on Crypto.com’s behalf in high-stakes lawsuit in federal court.”

But that’s just the tip of this particular iceberg. Crypto.com also runs prediction markets, the slick new way to get around laws regulating gambling, and recently cut a deal with Trump’s media company (which owns and runs his Truth Social site that’s so badly Nazi-infested and whose majority stockholder is Trump himself) to offer prediction market products through Truth Social or the company that owns it.

Then there’s the report from The New York Times that lays out how the United Arab Emirates (UAE) desperately wanted to buy super-high-tech chips from the US to kick-start their move from being a petrostate into becoming the Silicon Valley of the Middle East. The only problem was that they have a military cooperation agreement with China, and the US was concerned that they’d funnel some of the chips to that country.

So, the UAE “invested” $500 million in Trump’s new crypto scheme. As the Times laid out:

“An investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates purchased nearly half of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company last year, making the family business partners with the U.A.E. even as President Trump negotiated foreign policy matters with the Middle Eastern nation …“At the same time that the crypto deal came together, the Emirati government secured an agreement with the Trump administration for the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced chips to power A.I. technology.”

Similarly, after Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner backed the Saudi‑UAE blockade of Qatar and defended the crown prince after the Khashoggi killing, the Saudi’s gave Kushner $2 billion to fund his investment firm. No droids in that car!

Not to mention the millions that the Saudi’s gave Trump’s tacky golf motels to put on their LIV Golf Tournaments. Or the millions he makes by forcing the Secret Service to pay to follow him to his golf courses and Mar-a-Lago, along with a regular army of foreign governments and corporations seeking favors, as CREW just exposed.

Or when Ivanka Trump was the “senior White House advisor” as she and her father were managing a trade and tech confrontation with China and that government “gave” her at least 34 Chinese trademarks worth millions.

Immediately thereafter, Trump suddenly reversed course to “save” Chinese telecom giant ZTE and later moved to ease pressure on Huawei via temporary licenses, despite U.S. national‑security warnings. She and her husband reportedly made as much as $640 million during their time exploiting the White House in Trump’s first term.

Trump’s boys are opening Trump-branded hotel/golf deals all over the world in countries that have had contentious relationships with the United States, mostly because of authoritarianism and corruption, with hundreds of millions to billions of dollars flowing into the Trump family’s money bin.

They include: India, Indonesia, Oman, Vietnam, Romania, Bali (Indonesia), Maldives, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Or all other the corrupt “deals” making Trump’s two oldest sons mindbogglingly rich that Liz Dye documents.

And, of course, it works both ways. When Pam Bondi was Florida Attorney General, her office opened an investigation on behalf of Floridians who’d been ripped off by Trump’s scam Trump University. Trump had his fake charity — which was later closed down for fraud — write her campaign an illegal $25,000 check and suddenly the investigation vanished.

And then there’s Trump’s pardon pipeline.

Consider Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance. Zhao pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering laws, agreed to massive financial penalties, but was thrown into prison nonetheless. Not long after, Trump granted him clemency as Binance worked out a $2 billion stablecoin deal anchored in a Trump entity.

Or take Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road operator serving a life sentence. Ulbricht ran what was allegedly the world’s largest hub for trading in illegal guns, narcotics, and human trafficking. Nonetheless, Trump gave him a pardon, stunning the legal world.

Other recipients have included well-connected political allies and donors, such as former Las Vegas council member Michele Fiore — convicted of wire fraud — whose sentence was vacated despite a jury verdict, and extremist figures like Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys pardoned after participating in the January 6 insurrection.

Even British billionaire Joe Lewis was pardoned for insider-trading convictions, again showing how Trump’s clemency has disproportionately flowed to the wealthy and well-connected.

None of this should surprise Americans; a jury of his peers found Trump’s little personal corporation guilty of felony tax fraud and fined it over a half-billion dollars (which apparently has yet to be paid). And he was personally convicted of 34 felonies involving falsification of business documents in a successful effort to rig the 2016 election by preventing the public from learning of his relationship with Stormy Daniels.

Since his inauguration just 14 months ago, Trump’s personal wealth has increased by an estimated $4 billion. Not bad for a guy who could have been headed to prison if he hadn’t gotten elected president. After all, both Brazil and South Korea just gave their former presidents long prison terms for trying to pull off what Trump tried to do on Jan. 6, 2021.

This is the most corrupt administration in the history of America, with Trump following Vladimir Putin’s formula for becoming wildly rich step-by-step. And somehow Fox “News” and the rightwing echo chamber never seem to report on any of it…

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

The president lied and lied. He lied so much he appears to think he’s going to scam his way to victory in November. Last week's State of the Union was a preview of what's to come.

Above and below each of Donald Trump's lies was a set of deep-seated beliefs. He doesn’t need the Congress. He doesn’t need the people. He doesn’t need the “disloyal.” He doesn’t need the truth. He believes he can create reality. He believes everyone’s going to believe it.

However, you might not know any of that from reading this morning's headlines. The Associated Press called his lies “takeaways.” NPR called them “familiar notes.” Worst of all, an email alert I received from USA Today called the vast scale of deceit “fighting words.”

A deeper read of followup coverage shows the press corps’ meaning. The president said he was going to use the speech to “sell the public on the economy and unveil new measures meant to lower costs,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic said it had “the potential to put his presidency on more stable ground — if he doesn’t get in his own way.”

Turns out, however, the speech was just more of the same scam.

“Trump has spent the last year boasting of his accomplishments while mocking the record of his predecessor, Joe Biden,” the AP reported today. “But much of this bluster has been based on misinformation, which he again fell back on during his State of the Union address.”

For instance:

"When I last spoke in this chamber 12 months ago, I had just inherited a nation in crisis, with a stagnant economy." No. “Incomes are rising fast, the roaring economy is roaring like never before.” Nope. Tariffs are “saving our country, the kind of money we’re taking in.” Nuh-uh.

One falsehood revealed true intent. Tariffs are part of a scheme by moneyed elites to push the burden of taxation downward so that you, me and everyone we know pay more for a civilized country than they do. The ideal is eliminating the income tax, which burdens moneyed elites most, replacing it with a sales tax, like a tariff, which burdens everyone else.

But success would depend on a majority of the people who would be fully burdened by it not to fully understand it. If they did, it would fail. So, I guess, whoops: “I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love,” the president said.

“The people that I love,” of course, are the moneyed elite.

Trump is lying so hard about foreigners paying for his tariff scheme, because he wants to prevent the truth from being broadly understood. It's the biggest tax increase in over 30 years, according to multiple studies. Importers pony up the extra expense, but charge more to recoup it. The Federal Reserve said US consumers paid over 90 percent of the added cost.

What’s more is this historic tax increase was illegal the whole time. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Congress, and only the Congress, has the tax power. It’s being said Trump accepts the court's judgment, but I don’t know how that can be. He responded with a new round of tariffs (under a new authority) that is, according to Judd Legum, just as illegal.

So not only did Trump scam us with an illegal tax, and not only are corporations that passed on the cost to us going to be refunded, an act the Treasury secretary has already called “ultimate corporate welfare,” he’s also finding new ways of scamming us – at least until the Supreme Court catches up with to him a year from now to strike down his new illegal tax.

By then, of course, it will be too late.

A president who intended to turn the economy around with policies that benefit the majority of people would take into account polling saying that a majority of people disprove. A Fox News poll taken before the high court’s ruling found 63 percent believe Trump has gone too far on tariffs. That’s in addition to 65 percent who disapprove of his handling of inflation.

That poll and others like it amount to what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called "an extinction-level event." "He’s like negative 40-plus with independents," Jeffries said before last week's speech. "Latino voters are leaving him. Young voters are leaving him. Working-class white voters are leaving him. Independents have abandoned him a long time ago. Any normal person would realize we better change course because this is not working."

That the president’s current course is not working is beside the point, however, given that economic policies benefiting the majority were never the goal. The real objective has always been enacting economic policies that benefit a tiny minority – “the people that I love” – while scamming everyone else into believing Donald Trump cares enough to solve their problems.

Last week's speech was marketed as a chance for Trump to reset. But there’s nothing to reset. If the Republicans hope to avoid slaughter, they'll have to scam even harder.

“He needs all four years to fix the mess,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson in a Fox interview after the State of the Union. “If we lost the midterms – heaven forbid, if we lost the majority in the House – it would be the end of the Trump presidency in a real effect."

“We gotta keep this going,” he said, meaning the scam.

Last week's speech was a preview of what’s of the come.

The American people were under no imminent threat from Iran. Its government does not have nuclear weapons. It was no more threatening to Israel or any other US ally than it normally is. The decision this morning to attack Tehran, the capital, has nothing to do with “freedom for Iran,” as Donald Trump told the Post. He’s not going to “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy.” Why? Because that’s not the point.

The point is creating a made-for-TV war that makes Trump look like a big, tough war president. He’s doing this for transparently obvious reasons: things are going badly, very badly, for him at home. Freedoms are being violated. The middle class is being immiserated. There’s a general sense that the rich and powerful – the Epstein class – can act with impunity while everyone else pays the price. If Trump doesn’t change the subject, his presidency, and perhaps more than his presidency, will cease to be as it is once the Congress is turned over to the Democrats.

Trump believes Americans will rally around the presidency in a time of war, thus boosting his poll numbers among people who only pay attention to the news if there’s a war going on. This is not an Israel-Iran war. This is not a US-Iran war. Those titles give this moment too much dignity. This is little more than a political stunt, with the real consequences being murdered Iranians.

As such, it has to be as brief as it is spectacular to watch on Fox. There can’t be any US casualties, anyway not so many that it looks bad on video screens. He is making titanic declarations to suggest that he has an indomitable will to achieve objectives at any cost. “All I want is freedom for the people,” Trump told the Post this morning. “I want a safe nation, and that’s what we’re going to have.” But again, that’s just part of the performance.

As soon as something goes sideways, and it will go sideways given enough time, Donald Trump will chicken out. That’s why he will end it quickly – to prevent what is so far a carefully managed political stunt from blowing up in his face. He will accept any convenient reason to declare victory over Iran, even if victory falls short of “a safe nation, and that’s what we’re going to have.”

I will defer to authorities on Middle East politics, but from where I’m standing, Trump today ended the democratic spirit that was rising up from the Iranian people. Iran’s government has been crushing dissent for months. Trump is acting like he’s enabling regime change, as if he were the Great Liberator. In reality, he’s justified more repression by an already repressive government. More than that, he’s undermining dissidents. Who’s going to be seen as American allies after the US bombed a girls school?

Indeed, Iran’s government benefits twice. Not only can it justify more, and more violent, crackdowns on individual liberty in the name of national security, it can also defeat “the Great Satan” with a lucky punch. Again, this is a made-for-TV war. Trump does not have the will to do what it takes to “liberate” Iran. That would require a generation-defining occupation of the kind that George W Bush attempted in Iraq in the 2000s. All Iran has to do is bloody Trump’s nose – bomb a base, sink a ship, humiliate the titan so that his titanic declarations seem farcical. They can declare victory, then go back to repressing their own people.

Because the point of all this is looking good on TV, Trump has overlooked the fact that he’s not in complete control. As someone wiser than me once said, the enemy gets a vote, too. Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly pretending to act like an ally, as if his top priority is Israel’s and America’s safety and security. In reality, what he needs is a continual emergency to stay in power to prevent him from being prosecuted and imprisoned for life. As such, he’s happy to provide cover to Trump’s stunt, as attacking Iran seems more justifiable in America if seen as defending Israel. But Netanyahu’s credibility in America is now deeply strained, to put it mildly, by the fact that he murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians. He’ll be all right if the Democrats in the Congress play along with him and Trump. What happens if they don’t?

Whether the Democrats do play along will be determined by how far they are willing to go in accepting Trump’s lies – if they accept that Iran posed such a threat to America and Israel, by way of possessing nuclear weapons, that Trump and Netanyahu were justified in triggering a conflict that could engulf the world. There is no reason the Democrats should accept those lies, given that Trump already said Iran’s nuclear sites were “obliterated.” If the Democrats decide against playing along, we might expect them to lump the president’s new illegal war with all other high crimes committed against the Constitution and the American people, so that a made-for-TV war intended to boost his standing with voters before the midterms becomes just another liability.

Not only for him but for Netanyahu, too. You could argue that but for the faith of the Democrats, Netanyahu would be in jail. His war crimes have put a wedge between the Democrats and the biggest pro-Israel lobby. That wedge could become permanent, as Democratic elites slowly come around to accepting the idea that Joe Biden’s position on Gaza cost Kamala Harris precious votes.

Moreover, Gallup found for the first time in 25 years that more Americans, not just Democrats, sympathize with the Palestinians more than they sympathize with the Israelis. Whatever the American consensus on Israel used to be, it clearly no longer is. The more Netanyahu exploits Trump’s vanity to stay out of jail, the wider that gap will get, to Netanyahu’s detriment.

Donald Trump didn’t merely criticize his political opponents this week, both at the State of the Union and from his office the following morning. He went on a racist rant that would have embarrassed a talk radio shock jock (if it didn’t get them fired), much less a head of state.

After Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) shouted “shame” and “liar” during his State of the Union and walked out in protest, Trump took to social media to sneer that they had “the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people” and were “LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick” who “look like they should be institutionalized.”

He labeled them “Low IQ” — his favorite slur for women, Black, and Hispanic people — and suggested they be sent back “from where they came.” He lumped in Robert De Niro as “Trump Deranged,” “demented,” and possibly “criminal” for criticizing him.

This is the president of the United States talking.

This may have been normal politics in the old Confederacy — which Trump is trying to revive with his base namings and statues and purging Black history from museums and monuments — but it shouldn’t be normal today.

This is an elderly man — whose father was busted in a Klan rally and who himself was busted in the 1970s for refusing to rent to Black people — now occupying the Oval Office and responding to dissent with language that sounds like it was scraped from the darkest, most disgusting corners of the internet.

When Trump tells elected racial-minority members of Congress to “go back where they came from” — US citizens who’ve sworn an oath to defend the Constitution — and trash-talks well-known and respected public figures like De Niro this way, he’s using the oldest dictator’s trick in the book: he’s trying to dehumanize them.

And when he says they should be sent overseas “as fast as possible,” he’s invoking one of the ugliest refrains in American history, the taunt racists have hurled at people of color for generations to tell them they don’t really belong in our nation.

Ilhan Omar came to this country as a refugee and went through the arduous and lengthy process to become a US citizen. Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit. Yet Trump’s first racist instinct when confronted by two outspoken women of color is to question their right to be here at all.

That’s not an accident; it’s an ancient political strategy rooted in dividing people and turning them against each other. He wants his followers to hate them, and then to act on that hate, making them fearful and putting their lives at risk.

He knows his followers tried to kill Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and actually killed a state legislator in Minnesota and her husband, a federal judge’s son, and others. He knows that by painting Tlaib, Omar, and De Niro as alien, unhinged, and dangerous, he can activate that part of his base that regularly acts on grievance and fear with violence.

This is Blackshirt and Brownshirt politics for the 21st century. It’s pure, unadulterated hate, and should be beneath any elected official. But, of course, this is Donald Trump, for whom there’s no floor beneath which he and his Republican lickspittles can’t sink.

He called his long, boring, rambling, lie-filled State of the Union speech an “important and beautiful event” and accused them of ruining it with their protests. But democracy isn’t a pageant like his old Miss Teen USA contests (that are accused of feeding the Epstein machine). It’s not a royal court where subjects must sit quietly while the monarch speaks (or walks into their dressing rooms while they’re naked).

Members of Congress are not props: they’re co-equal representatives of We the People. If they believe a president or anybody else is lying or has harmed their constituents (and Trump’s ICE goons murdered two of Omar’s constituents in cold blood), they have every right to say so, to do it loudly, and to suffer the consequences like removal or censure if they come.

The Founders and Framers of the Constitution didn’t design a system to protect a president’s feelings. They designed one to protect liberty.

Trump’s attack on De Niro follows the same playbook. De Niro criticized his fascist-like behavior and Trump responded by calling him “sick and demented” with an “extremely Low IQ,” hinting that some of what he said was “seriously CRIMINAL.”

“Criminal.” For speech. In America! That word should chill to the bone anyone who cares about the First Amendment and our most basic freedoms. When Trump toys with the idea that criticism of him could be prosecuted, he’s not joking any more than Putin did in the months before he started arresting protestors. He’s testing the boundaries of what his followers in Congress and what’s left of our system of justice will accept.

And then, almost as an afterthought, Trump boasted that “America is now Bigger, Better, Richer, and Stronger than ever before.”

“Richer” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Yes, the top sliver of this country is now, as a result of 45 years of Republican tax cuts, staggeringly wealthy. Billionaires saw their fortunes explode with the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts. Corporate profits have soared because of Republican deregulation and the destruction of our union movement.

But for working families staring down sky-high rents, unaffordable health care, crushing student loans, stagnant wages, and grocery bills that don’t match their paychecks, Republicans bragging about unprecedented riches among their Epstein-billionaire donor class rings hollow.

We’re living through an affordability crisis caused by Republican policies. More than half of Americans are one emergency away from financial ruin. Young people wonder if they’ll ever own a home. Parents juggle two or three jobs and still fall behind. If this is what Trump’s “richer than ever” looks like, it’s a prosperity reserved for a gilded few while the rest of us tread water.

Any president with a moral compass would acknowledge that reality. He’d understand that leadership requires more than chest thumping and name calling. The office carries a responsibility to elevate the national conversation, not drag it into the gutter. It requires the maturity to accept that in a diverse republic, people will disagree, sometimes loudly, sometimes angrily, and that’s a sign of a healthy democracy.

That diversity is not a flaw in the American experiment: it’s its genius. A democracy that includes Somali refugees turned lawmakers, Palestinian American women from Detroit, Hollywood actors, rural conservatives, urban progressives, people of every color and creed, is a democracy that reflects the real America. And, apparently, the America that Republicans once embraced but today the GOP now hates.

A clash of perspectives and approaches is how we fine-tune our ideas and correct mistakes. It’s how we prevent a concentration of power from calcifying into naked tyranny.

When Trump calls dissenters “lunatics” and tells them to “go back where they came from,” he’s attacking that very foundational American principle. He’s signaling that only certain voices — specifically those of wealthy white Christian men — are legitimate. That they’re only “real” Americans who count.

History teaches us where that road leads, and it doesn’t end in strength. It ends in repression, decay, and the ultimate destruction of the republic itself, which is most likely why Putin probably encourages Trump in this sort of thing during their regular phone conversations.

The bigger picture here is about more than one bizarre, racist, hateful rant among many. It’s about the playbook that authoritarians across the world have used for generations to fracture democracies from within.

When people are anxious about their jobs, their bills, and their futures, an aspiring strongman doesn’t calm those fears with honest solutions; he redirects them. He points at the “other” and says, “There’s your problem!” The immigrant. The Muslim woman in Congress. The Black lawmaker. The outspoken actor.

He tells us to be afraid of each other so we won’t question how Reagan Revolution Republican policies of the past 45 years are crushing working people.

Trump’s words matter because they’re not just insults. They’re signals. When a president calls political opponents “lunatics,” suggests they should be “institutionalized,” or tells American citizens to “go back where they came from,” he’s normalizing hate and exclusion, the “othering” of his opponents.

That poison seeps into public life and erodes the traditional American shared understanding that no matter how fierce our disagreements, we’re all equal citizens under the law. Democracy can’t survive if we start treating dissent as treason and diversity as a threat, which is exactly why Trump is doing this. Like his mentor Vladimir Putin, whose picture he just hung in the White House along with Washington and Jackson, he hates democracy, and has said as much over and over again.

America is strongest when it refuses that dictator’s trap, when it expands the circle of American belonging instead of narrowing it.

The real danger to our country isn’t Omar’s loud protest or De Niro’s sharp criticism. It’s America being stuck with a leader who lives and breathes hate, fear, and division, who wants us to see our neighbors as our enemies, and a party that’s so terrified of him that they back everything he does and says, no matter how grotesque.

That sort of fear-stoking and poisonous hatred doesn’t make America bigger or better. It makes us smaller, angrier, and — as Trump and Putin want — easier to divide and thus control.

What if Donald Trump had gotten out of the box and had at least given the appearance of governing more moderately his second time around the White House block last year?

I’ve been giving this some thought on the rare occasions I can quiet my active mind and find the clear air needed to grapple with truly terrifying what-ifs ...

I was spurred to write this piece by my penpal, and reader, Margo Howard, who I have had the honor of getting to know a bit during this ongoing American tragedy. Margo spent her life in print, and penned the popular Dear Prudence column for Slate for many years. She is the daughter of Ann Landers, the renowned, syndicated advice columnist.

Margo is wise, direct, and one of those special people who can see straight through the fog.

She sent me this rocket in the aftermath of Trump’s never-ending State of the Union.

“Not that he listens to (White House Chief of Staff) Susie Wiles (or anyone) but had he spoken for 25 minutes, only upbeat stuff, and brought out the Olympians, he could have turned everything around.

I winced knowingly. I thought it was a perceptive take (as always) and spurred me to dig deeper into similar dark thoughts I have had on this subject.

So here goes:

In the days after a second, lethal November blast in an eight-year span had rocked our senses and nation, I wondered about two things specifically:

• How would the despicable Trump deal with power the second time around?
• How would Democrats react to this terrible event?

We got the answer to the second question first, and it was appalling and unforgivable.

Somehow, Democrats seemed to be caught flat-footed by Trump’s win, and came off as pathetic weaklings almost resigned to their fate. They were ripe for surrender, and dutifully waved white flags. My God, within weeks the outgoing Democratic president warmed Trump’s fat ass by a crackling fire at the White House while literally welcoming him back.

The uninspiring national Democratic “leadership” that couldn’t even provide a presidential candidate for us to vote for until it was all but too late, dusted themselves off, and seemed only too satisfied to reassume their places at the kiddie table, where the Republicans threw them scraps, and picked away at what was left of their self-respect.

Instead of pushing back with vigor, they acquiesced, and melted into the background. This did not go down well with the folks on the battlefield who had busted their tails working to get Democrats elected only to be abandoned by them the minute all the trouble arrived.

Our Democracy was officially put on the clock, and the opposition party hit the snooze button, before turning off the alarm.

Now let me tell you what my real fear was during that pitch-black time, when it was hard to see a way out: Trump would actually take some prudent advice, and get out of the box slowly. He would at least give the appearance that he was taking a measured approach to governing and would thoughtfully deal with the issues that concerned the majority of all Americans like the economy.

What if in the wake of that gruesome election Trump somehow found it deep inside himself to act like a semi-decent person who really cares about this country?

Before proceeding I want to be very careful here, because I like to think I know you almost as well as I know myself: Please notice the emphasis on the word act. Because I know you know how despicable Trump really is. I know you know the terrible things he has done, and what he will most certainly try to do with the rest of his miserable life: end us.

In short: There is NOTHING he can do to redeem himself in our eyes. We will celebrate when he is gone, because we know the world will be a better, safer place with his absence.

Unfortunately, we are but an ardent, clear-eyed voting bloc. Like it or not, we aren’t the majority of the people in this country, or it turns out, like too damn many cowards in the party we vote for.

As we have tragically learned by now, roughly 40 percent of the American electorate will stand with the orange, racist maniac no matter what. There isn’t a thing he can do, including shooting one of them in the middle of the street, that will change their stubborn, angry minds about following this soulless monster off a cliff while trying to drag the rest of us with them.

Then there are the people in the middle of the political spectrum, who can go either way with Trump. (And yes, I have concluded that these people actually exist.) They are persuadable. How that can actually be given that they are standing in hell up to their knees right now I don’t know, but they are out there just as sure as I am typing this.

Finally, there are tens of millions more who simply don’t give a damn, and rarely bother to vote at all. Who even knows what they will do, or worse what they could possibly be thinking.

Regular readers will know I reserve most of my heat for them.

How dare they …

Well, as we all painfully know by now, Trump did not move slowly and prudently, and wasted no time proving just how despicable he truly is by implementing the Project 2025 playbook he lied he knew nothing about on the campaign trail.

He moved to hurt as just many people as he could just as fast as possible.

He went full authoritarian, set fire to our government, and demolished our White House. He introduced ridiculous, harmful tariffs, and mustered troops in our streets. He blew up global alliances and threatened war with Greenland. He did nothing about our rising prices, and all he could to strip us of our health insurance, making everyday life just as miserable as possible.

He actually seemed to go out of his way to prove just how horrible he is, as if so many of us weren’t already convinced.

That’s when people decided that they, not some political party, were best equipped to handle this.

So we hit the streets and marched by the millions. We protested, and by God we voted. Democrats won every single election of consequence last year, and have hit the ground running again in elections this year.

Trump kicked the hornet’s nest and is as unpopular as he’s ever been in his short-lived political life. His approvals are hanging at about 40 percent nationally. Here in the battleground state of Wisconsin a recent poll has his net approval rating at -10, matching the worst numbers of his disastrous first term.

He is failing miserably, while doing what he has always done better than anybody: going lower.

He is a sicko bent on revenge, and filling his bottomless pockets with our money.

I believe Republicans are going to take a historic shellacking in November. They have nothing to run on, and are too damn scared to run away from the orange, swollen-ankled monster who has them by their skinny necks.

As bad as things are … this is actually the best-case scenario for Democrats, because mark my words: If Trump had proceeded slowly last year, and worked incrementally and quietly toward destroying America, instead of taking a sledgehammer to it, his approvals would at or around 50 percent right now, and Republicans would be in decent shape heading into the midterms.

According to The Cook Political Report, Trump is underwater with women by almost 30 points. This is a group he lost by only 7 points in 2024. White voters without college degrees, his strongest group, have dropped 23 points in their support of a man who is doing nothing for them, but providing a weekly booster shot of racism.

Had he been capable of showing just a shred of humility, it really wouldn’t have been that hard to steal it all forever, because as we simply have to know by now, there are just too many idiots in this country who would have gladly handed him the keys to the kingdom.

Tens of millions more just don’t give a damn either way.

It’s really sad when you can’t trust your country to do the right thing. We have been exposed, and I am just not sure we will ever be safe and sound again.

Trump could have had it all, but he wanted it too damn quick, and for now at least, a majority of America is finally on to him.

Instead of giving the State of the Union speech Margo suggested, he pontificated, spit and raged for close to two hours.

While making things harder on Americans, he’s only made his attempted authoritarian takeover harder on himself.

There will be more spitting and raging as we move toward November’s elections. In the past 24 hours there have been reports he will try to gin up national emergencies to stop or takeover our vote.

As we know, he’s fully capable of anything, and we will have to be ready for that.

I believe we will be, because as bad as things are right now, they could have been worse …

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Tennessee Republican State Rep. Monty Fritts, who’s eyeing running for Governor, has proposed legislation that would put women in that state who’ve had abortions in the electric chair. Republican policy has already killed hundreds of pregnant women: those who live in a red state with an abortion ban (almost all of them) are more than twice as likely to die during pregnancy or immediately after childbirth than women who live in states that allow abortion.

The founding principle of America is freedom, a word that’s been a touchstone for the GOP since the days of Ronald Reagan. Thomas Jefferson identified what his generation meant when using that word when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Today, however, all three of these rights that secure freedom’s predicates — “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — are under assault by Trump and his Republican lickspittles.

So much for “Life”: Masked, armed ICE thugs have murdered two American citizens and multiple immigrants on the streets of our country in the first few weeks of this year, and women are dying in red states for lack of healthcare as Republican lawmakers substitute their obsession with controlling female bodies for the judgement of physicians.

An estimated 50,000 Americans — men, women, children — die every year in this country for lack of health care (and another 500,000 families are wiped out in bankruptcy) because Republicans refuse to even consider a national health care system like every other developed country in the world has.

Or “Liberty”: Trump’s secret police are compiling lists of people who’ve protested against them, are routinely smashing in front doors and car windows and imprisoning people without the warrants the Fourth Amendment requires, and are now even demanding — again, without judicial warrants — that all of the big social media companies turn over details on anybody who’s criticized ICE online. All of the companies, it appears, are complying out of fear that Trump will retaliate against them.

Or “the pursuit of Happiness”: Two entire generations are crippled with student debt since the Reagan Revolution ended free or cheap college in America; only about a tenth of Americans have the protection of a union since the GOP declared war on organized labor in 1981; and while you and I are paying income tax rates approaching 50 percent in some states, billionaires and giant corporations pay virtually nothing.

Our freedom to know what’s happening in the world and within our government is under attack by an administration that echoes Stalin’s “enemy of the people” and Hitler’s “Lugenpresse” (“lying press” or “fake news”) language as it sues and arrests journalists like Don Lemon for doing their jobs. Funding for NPR/PBS was ended, at the same time Trump surrendered the foreign information wars to Russia by killing off the Voice of America.

Our freedom to live without being poisoned is under attack by Trump’s regime gutting clean air and water protections while Bob Kennedy cheerleads Trump’s expanding production of cancer-causing herbicides like glyphosate.

Our freedom to vote is under direct assault by Republicans who want to purge from the voting rolls women who changed their names when they got married, as well as literally hundreds of smaller attacks on our right to vote across the Red states.

Our freedom to live without fear of our homes being destroyed by extreme weather is gone, as Trump and his GOP toadies gut our protections from greenhouse gasses, kill off Biden’s green energy programs, and bring back expensive coal to produce electricity.

Our freedom to be represented by people the majority of Americans want in office is similarly crippled: as reporter Greg Palast points out, if the 4+ million citizens who were either purged from the rolls or whose votes were challenged and thus not counted in the 2024 election had been able to cast their ballots, we’d have Kamala Harris as president and a Democratic-controlled House and perhaps even Senate.

Our freedom to live in a world at peace has been kneecapped by Republican administrations that lied us into war with Iraq and Afghanistan, now threaten war with Iran, and keep increasing military spending while pleading poverty when it comes to the needs of working people and their communities.

Our freedom to live in a nation free of corruption has been destroyed by the most corrupt administration in the history of America. Tom Homan taking a $50,000 bribe. Pam Bondi taking a $25,000 bribe. Kristi Noem and her boyfriend (both married to other people) flying around at taxpayer expense in a lavish “flying bordello” 737 with two plush bedrooms. Trump’s and Witkoff’s kids making billions off corrupt deals while “representing America” overseas.

Our freedom to a stable economy free of manipulation by the morbidly rich is gone, as the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts have run up a $38 trillion national debt. We’re paying more now in interest on the national debt — over a trillion dollars a year — than it would cost to solve much of the problems of homelessness, student debt, and healthcare in this country. All so over $50 trillion could be transferred from the middle class to the Epstein billionaire class over the past 40+ years.

Our children’s freedom to a safe, secure childhood has been shattered by decades of Republican obeisance to their donors in the weapons industry; kids are regularly thrown into a state of terror by active shooter drills in their schools and the knowledge that in America — and only in American — the bullets could start flying anytime, anywhere.

Our right to religious freedom — and freedom from religion as well — is under daily assault by wealthy Christian nationalist fanatics and hypocrites like “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth forcing extremist Christianity on our troops and states forcing the Ten Commandments on their own schoolchildren. (A list of commandments that have all been violated by our current president.)

Even our businesspeople are losing their freedoms: Trump is now threatening publicly traded Netflix with “consequences” unless they remove former Obama administration official Susan Rice from their board. He’s extorting millions in “donations” and “gifts” from corporate CEOs while making billions for himself and his corrupt family. And small businesses across the nation are being crushed by monopolies that 45 years of Reaganism have allowed to flourish.

When American oligarchs and their rightwing media shills rant about “freedom,” they mean freedom from taxes and regulation so they can get richer and poison the world for profit while they systematically crush workers. They’re calling for an end to personal and corporate responsibility, but only for themselves.

Freedom isn’t a slogan (although Republicans have abused it as one for decades): it’s found in the lived experience of average people.

When Americans can no longer feel safe in our bodies and homes, secure in our votes, stable in our economy, and confident in our education and healthcare, then Jefferson’s “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” have become aspirational again rather than actual.

Which appears to be exactly how the neofascists who’ve taken over the GOP want it

Stephen Colbert joked that Donald Trump wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about him on television because “all Trump does is watch TV.” It was a punchline, but it also revealed something darker: when political power becomes obsessed with controlling the screen, the most effective way to silence dissent isn’t through raids or arrests. It’s through ownership.

In today’s America, the battle over free speech isn’t happening in courtrooms, it’s happening in quiet White House dinners with greedy billionaires. And it’s following an old script.

When Viktor Orbán — the Hungarian strongman who Marco Rubio visited this past weekend to tell him how much Trump loves him and supports him — wanted to crush opposition media in his country he didn’t need police, courts, regulatory agencies, or even threats. He didn’t even need the Hungarian mafia to break the knees of Budapest media owners or threaten reporters.

Orbán simply invited a few morbidly rich Hungarian oligarchs over for dinner and told them that if they’d buy out the big media outlets and spin the news in his favor, he’d make sure their government contracts and business opportunities in other non-media areas would more than compensate them for their hassle and expenses.

Orbán let Republicans in on the strategy in May 2022, when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest and told the American Republican crowd:

“Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left.”

It’s a pretty straightforward business proposition that we see Trump embracing right now: “Give me good media coverage and I’ll make you additional billions; use your media to c--- on me and I’ll have the FCC harass you and my billionaire friends buy you out.”

And, sure enough, check how it’s working out for the non-media companies (rockets, AI, data, web services, etc.) owned by media moguls Elon Musk (Twitter/X), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Larry Ellison (Paramount/CBS/TikTok), and Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) that now get hundreds of billions of dollars every year in contracts from the federal government. No doubt it’s just a coincidence that their media outlets have all become cheerleaders for Trump.

Putin did the same thing in Russia, and the media in most other autocratic nations is similarly all or mostly owned by regime-friendly oligarchs on similar terms.

This model, pioneered in Germany in the 1930s, is now used to keep in power strongman regimes in the Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Colombia, Tunisia, Turkey, Peru, and Ghana, among dozens of others. It’s rapidly spreading across the world.

It’s produced headlines like these:

• “How oligarchs seized Central Europe’s media”
• “Serbia: State Influence on Media Ownership: Igor Žeželj and Telekom Srbija”
• “Media in the Balkans: the rise of oligarchs”
• “Media Oligarchs Go Shopping”
• “The Media in Indonesia: Journalism Between the State and Oligarchs”
• “Slovene Media Owned by Oligarchs, Corrupt Politicians”

And now, here in the United States:

• “When Billionaire Government Contractors Are Also Media Moguls”
• “Musk and Bezos Get Their Billion-Dollar Federal Contracts After Sucking Up to Trump”
• “Meta Gains Approval To Supply AI Services to US Government Departments”
• “Paramount Has a Secret Plan to Buy Hollywood Before the Cops Arrive”

To be fair, Republicans didn’t just suddenly adopt this strategy when Orbán suggested it to them. They’ve been doing it since the days of Ronald Reagan; it just went on steroids with Trump.

We used to have laws and rules to prevent this sort of thing. But in 1985, Reagan greased the skids for Rupert Murdoch to become a citizen so he could buy US media outlets. In 1987 Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine, and in 1988 Rush Limbaugh debuted on 56 major radio stations.

In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, overturning laws dating back to the 1920s that prevented any one oligarch or company from owning multiple newspapers or radio or TV stations, leading to an explosive consolidation that today gives us 1,500 oligarch-owned rightwing radio stations and hundreds of rightwing oligarch-owned TV stations across the nation.

Republican screams of a “liberal media” dating back to the 1980s notwithstanding, there isn’t a place in America where you can’t get a large daily dose of pro-fascist, pro-Trump media. Drive from the East Coast to the West Coast, from the Canadian border to the edge of Mexico, and you’ll never be without a rightwing radio companion telling you how wonderful Trump, Vance, Putin, et al are.

As Colbert joked this week:

“Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV.”

And now, Matt Stoller is reporting that the Ellisons — who now own CBS — have a “secret plan” to acquire CNN as well, a goal that Trump has explicitly and publicly gushed about. As the network itself reported, Trump said, “It’s imperative that CNN be sold” and David Ellison recently “offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.”

But the Putin/Orbán/Trump strategy to end all media independence in America may be facing headwinds if Democrats can take control of the House, Senate, or both this fall.

Axios and Raw Story report that:

“DC insiders and partners Matthew Miller and Tucker Eskew have issued warnings that Democrats will aggressively pursue corruption allegations against the president and Trump administration officials.”

Miller and Eskew added:

“The subpoenas are coming. The only question is whether companies will be ready.”

State attorneys general also have real power over media concentration. In 2015 a coalition of state AGs joined federal regulators in challenging Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable, and Comcast abandoned the merger rather than face trial.

In 2018 several state attorneys general urged regulators to block Sinclair Broadcast Group’s acquisition of Tribune Media, after which the FCC moved to reject the deal and it collapsed. And in 2019, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Virginia attorneys general sued to limit Nexstar’s purchase of Tribune stations, forcing major divestitures before the merger could proceed. History shows that when states intervene, consolidation often fails or is dramatically reduced.

Citizen activism has also repeatedly changed the behavior of partisan media without any hint of government involvement or censorship. For example, after the 2012 Limbaugh Sandra Fluke controversy, dozens of national advertisers left his program and many never returned.

And following Trump’s January 6 attack on our Capitol, advertiser boycotts and viewer pressure led companies to suspend advertising on certain Fox News opinion programs, and several cable carriers reconsidered their carriage agreements. Organized brand-safety campaigns have also pushed social media platforms to demonetize rightwing and fascist extremist content.

In each case the speech itself remained “legal,” but because of public outrage the economic incentives changed, showing how average citizens in a market-based democracy can reshape media behavior by influencing the revenue that sustains it.

If ever there was a time ripe for revisiting the laws and rules that gave us the relatively unbiased media landscape — that vigorously supported American democracy — between the 1930s and the 1980s, it’s now. And the same is true of the immediate need for citizen activism, like we saw in awake of Trump’s attempt to use pressure on media owners to silence Jimmy Kimmel.

Hopefully, Democratic politicians and citizen activists are paying attention, because the crisis — and the opportunity — has never been more urgent.

Until yesterday, it wasn’t clear to me why Savannah Guthrie’s mom was still missing nearly a month after her disappearance. Then came images Sunday of the FBI director, Kash Patel, partying with members of the US Olympic hockey team after they won the gold medal.

Then it all started to make sense.

Why wouldn’t Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping remain unsolved given the country’s leading lawman doesn’t take the law seriously? He thinks the FBI gives him access to things other people can’t, as if law and order were an exclusive membership card to an elite club.

Meanwhile, real people suffer.

For all we know, Nancy Guthrie could be dead.

If you haven’t heard, Kash Patel took a taxpayer-funded jet to Italy to watch the men’s hockey final. His office said he was checking on security. His people accused reporters of lying when they reported the news. Their boss, with images of his partying, exposed their lies.

Sunday’s episode was only one instance of a larger pattern of lawlessness that's getting so big that the Times noted that Patel has “shown little willingness to curb or even conceal his jet-setting." He "has offered comparable explanations" (ie, lies) "to provide SWAT team protection for his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, a country singer and rightwing activist, as well as for his heavy use of federal resources for travel that has at times appeared to blur professional lines.”

The Times said that "over the summer, he flew on a government jet from the Washington area to Inverness, Scotland, for a getaway at the exclusive golf resort, the Carnegie Club, with friends ... He has also taken flights, at taxpayer expense, to a private hunting ranch in Texas and to a wrestling match in State College, Pa., to watch a performance by Ms. Wilkins.

The Times and others say Patel’s bad behavior comes in spite of “multiple, fast-developing crises.” These include Americans in Mexico being told to shelter in place after a drug cartel leader was killed by the military. Closer to home, police killed a Florida man who tried to enter Mar-a-Lago with a shotgun and a gas can. Scott MacFarlane added more context:

The FBI is being pushed by Epstein survivors to do more to investigate some of the people … that have come out in the released batch of Epstein files, which show the circle that surrounded Jeffrey Epstein as he prayed on girls and young women. … All these things, not to mention crime nationwide, opioid crisis, gun crimes, child pornography, drug running, gun running, are happening as the FBI director is ... partying with his buddies.

But I think it’s the other way around. It’s not that Patel’s lawlessness is happening in light of these crimes. They are happening in light of his lawlessness. Why care about the law, or criminal consequences, when the country’s leading lawman shows so much contempt for it?

The Times reported that Patel was cheering Team USA when he tweeted that the FBI would dedicate “all necessary resources” to investigating the Mar-a-Lago incident. The implication is that he’s falling down on the job, as “all necessary resources” clearly didn’t include him.

But consider the message he's sending – that law enforcement is just empty talk. That's more consequential than falling down on the job. With his actions, Patel is saying that as long as you’re hooked up to the right people, you can do all the criming you want. Even if you’re not hooked up, just wait. When the cops are away, the criminals can come out to play.

This message was deepened by Patel’s (almost certainly fictional) claim that he was invited by the men’s hockey team to celebrate their victory with them. A different FBI director would have refused such an invitation out of concern that accepting it would not only compromise the bureau’s standing with the American people but also appear to encourage lawlessness. But public trust means little to a man who acts like he will never face public accountability.

Lawlessness isn’t harmless.

An FBI director who properly feared public accountability would never have let an Arizona sheriff investigate Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance without the FBI’s aid. He or she would have given Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos a choice: save yourself the humiliation of failure by accepting that the FBI is “the premier agency to deal with kidnappings,” as one expert described the bureau, or I will open my own investigation and guarantee your humiliation.

Instead, the FBI joined the investigation many days after Guthrie went missing, a debilitating loss of time, critics told the New York Post, that allowed for serious errors – for instance, surrendering the crime scene too soon, “with everyone from reporters to true-crime sleuths able to walk right up to Guthrie’s front door with no security or crime scene tape.”

As things stand, Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance is now approaching a month in duration. Her family seems increasingly desperate. Savannah Guthrie herself is forced to make public pleas to her mom’s kidnappers that yield no results. Nanos and Patel are both humiliated, but only Nanos, who faces future reelection as a sheriff, will be held accountable. Meanwhile, Patel jet-sets on the taxpayer dime, hastening the decline of public faith in law enforcement.

I’m a bit sad that the Winter Olympics are over, but downright joyful I won’t be hearing that stupid, meaningless “U-S-A, U-S-A …” chant every evening while watching the games.

It should have been retired many decades ago shortly after its birth in the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York.

That’s the year a bunch of pimply-faced American kids knocked off the vaunted Big Red Russian hockey machine on their way to winning gold, 4-3, in what is now referred to as the Miracle on Ice.

As that American amateur men’s team, composed of college kids, and recent grads, skated to one victory after another, it became clear something special was happening in that northern New York town tucked hard in the middle of the Adirondacks.

Our country was in desperate need of a spark that made us all feel good about ourselves and brought us together, even if we really didn’t know it at the time.

We were being suffocated by bad news, and a malaise that President Jimmy Carter eloquently addressed in a memorable speech a year earlier. Carter called it a “crisis of confidence” in America that struck “at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.”

Even if the speech received positive reviews from much of the American public, they weren’t ready to fully concede they were at least partly to blame for their own problems.

In addition to rotten economic conditions in 1980, there were gas lines, a hostage crisis in Iran, the stink of Watergate, and the shadow of a long, terrible war in Vietnam that had ended tens of thousands of American lives, while wrecking millions more.

There was trash in our streets, and smog menacingly hung over our cities just daring the sun to try to break through.

I became a Navy vet early that year, and couldn’t even find a job pumping that gas. I finally found work digging graves, and mowing the grass around the freshly planted headstones in a cemetery for $4.75 an hour, which pretty well summed up the state of things in the country I served.

When the 1980 Winter Olympics came along, we were all ready for a diversion, and the inspiring kids on that hockey team grandly served one up.

America finally had something to feel good about, no matter how fleeting. As their victories piled up so too did the chants, “U-S-A, U-S-A ...” which grew from a whisper to a thunderous affirmation.

It was nice to feel good about something again, so we embraced it, and rode it as long as it would go. That team provided a shred of hope that maybe, just maybe, if we all came together we could still accomplish improbably wonderful things in America.

Unfortunately, the “U-S-A” chant lasted far longer than the good times, and has been cheapened through the years, as America has engaged in more wars, wrecked more of its families, and rewarded the rich at expense of the poor and middle class.

By the terrible 2016 presidential election the USA collapsed under the weight of its bloated hubris, and is still trying to get back up.

That once inspiring chant is no longer remotely genuine, and just comes off as phony, nationalistic garbage used to drown out all the bad, instead of amplifying anything good.

We are a ghastly country that is at war with our allies, and our own citizens. We are back to indiscriminately polluting our air and water, and women have fewer rights than they did when America won that hockey game in 1980.

We have a lewd, misogynistic, racist president backed by a party of hyenas who are busy picking the bones of anything good and decent in America.

When American Jack Hughes blasted the puck past the Canadian goalie Sunday giving our boys a 2-1 win, I cheered. I was happy for them, but not for us, because I knew — just KNEW — what was coming next.

Sure enough, while the USA team celebrated in the locker room they were joined by our creepy FBI Director Kash Patel, which should be as bizarre to read as it was to type.

But it got worse, because that is what the USA does these days.

While spraying beer on himself, the rat-eyed Patel embarrassingly acted the part of some punk 18-year-old at an all-night kegger, jumping around like an over-served frat boy on the taxpayers’ dime.

While America burns, one of its chief law enforcement officers was partying with kids half his age.

And because things always get worse, Patel connected the team with Donald Trump’s nuclear-powered cell phone, which he uses to depict Black Americans as apes, and himself as some rotting, orange paragon of virtue.

Trump gushed as only he can about himself and finally the team. He invited them to his State of the Union address Tuesday — which I wouldn’t watch with somebody else’s eyes — before snidely telling them:

“I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team. You do know that. I do believe I’d probably be impeached [if the women’s team wasn’t invited].”

Such a role model. Such class.

Predictably, the misogynistic pig hadn’t bothered calling the U.S. women’s hockey team, after they had also defeated Canada, 2-1, only three days earlier.

For Trump, his assault on the U.S. men’s locker room provided a daily-double: He could play the part of the lurid 79-year-old, male gasbag in front of a bunch of impressionable young men, while also taking a direct shot at the women.

Well, this afternoon, the women politely alerted the White House they would not be accepting any invitations to the State of the Union, because apparently they have a firm grip of what the state of our union really is right now.

And that important statement resonates far more loudly than any meaningless “U-S-A ... U-S-A” chant ever will.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

We’ve only had one genuinely failed presidency in the modern era: Richard Nixon’s. I believe we’re on the verge of the second, and for very similar reasons. If it plays out the way I expect, the consequences could be world-changing, and will certainly alter how our politics work for decades to come.

The tipping point began in a big way when Attorney General Pam Bondi went before Congress to defend Donald Trump. When asked how many of Epstein’s co-conspirators she’d indicted, she refused to answer and instead completely lost it, going off on a bizarre rant that included:

“Donald Trump signed that law to release all of those documents. He is the most transparent president in the nation’s history. None of them asked Merrick Garland over the last four years one word about Jeffrey Epstein.“Donald Trump — The Dow — the Dow right now is over 50,000. The S&P at almost 7,000 and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.”

Nobody was buying it any more than when Trump said on Wednesday of this week, “I’ve been totally exonerated. I did nothing.”

Instead, both became punch lines for comedians and have Republicans hiding to avoid being interviewed.

And on Thursday we saw the bookend of this Watergate-like tipping point, when the former Prince Andrew was arrested by the British police. They didn’t even give the royal family an advance notice, didn’t invite him to come and be questioned, but instead just showed up and took him away, then tore apart his residences looking for evidence.

Consider the analogy.

The Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down began in June 1972, but Nixon didn’t resigned until August 1974. It crossed over his re-election in November 1972, and was barely a factor, just like Epstein was only a footnote to Trump’s election in 2024. For over two years, most Americans thought Watergate was overblown.

Early reporting in the mainstream media largely dismissed the initial furor of Democrats over their headquarters’ offices being broken into as partisan huffing and puffing, because almost nobody thought Nixon himself had anything to do with the crime.

Conservative media at the time ridiculed Democrats’ concerns as political opportunism, calling the event — as Nixon himself said — “A third-rate burglary.” The legal system was largely disinterested, beyond holding the burglars themselves to account for a crime where it wasn’t clear that anything was even taken from the offices.

And the Nixon administration — and his Department of Justice and its leader, Attorney General John Mitchell — ridiculed both politicians and media folks who expressed concern that Watergate represented an actual threat to our constitutional system of government.

What changed when the tapes were finally released (analogous to the release of 3 million documents by the DOJ and Bondi’s evasive testimony) was that Americans finally realized that the president was, in fact, “a crook” and that the institutions of the federal government — particularly the DOJ — had been covering up for him.

We’re damn close to that moment now.

The recent DOJ release included reference to a report that a 13-15-year old girl reported to the FBI that Trump beat her up when she bit his penis as he forced her to perform oral sex.

This week, reporter Roger Sollenberger found that she was interviewed at least four times by the FBI and those more in-depth interviews ­(case number 3501.045) had mysteriously gone entirely missing from the documents released by Patel and Bondi.

The story made a headline on the conservative news site Drudge Report, among others; this mirrors the period immediately before Nixon resigned when rightwing sites and elected Republicans stopped publicly defending him.

Nixon fell when institutional America and the GOP stopped speaking out in his defense. It wasn’t just the break-in or the hush money he paid the burglars that broke the dam; it was when the elite consensus turned on him.

Late in the evening on Aug. 7th, 1974, three Republican leaders — Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott, and John Rhodes — walked over to the White House and told President Nixon that the evidence against him had accumulated beyond spin, loyalty, and even partisan defense. The center of gravity had shifted, and two days later he was gone.

I’m not suggesting Trump is losing his presidency this week or next; after all, Watergate took over two years and Nixon didn’t have Fox “News” or 1,500 rightwing radio stations or Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk churning social media on his behalf. Trump has a much more powerful firewall than Nixon ever dreamed of. It may sustain him for months or even another year.

And, as president, he has a lot of tools at his disposal to keep changing the subject, which is where these revelations about Trump could become “world changing” if he comes sufficiently desperate.

A war with Iran appears to be his latest gambit. During Watergate, Nixon’s aides developed what they called a “modified limited hangout,” a strategy not of disproving the scandal but of suffocating it in the media by overwhelming the public with competing announcements, threats, events, and crises.

Nonetheless, while Americans will tolerate misconduct, abuse of office to escape accountability is an entirely different animal. And allegations of child rape are a much bigger deal than breaking into the DNC; Nixon didn’t even participate, he just gave the orders and supervised the cover-up. Trump, on the other hand, appears to be right in the middle of Epstein’s operation, perhaps even including his teen modeling agency and Miss Teen USA pageant.

It’s a cliché that “the coverup is worse than the crime,” but they keep doing it.

And now it’s metastasizing beyond Epstein.

Bondi and Patel insist the Epstein investigation is closed. Kristi Noem and Kash Patel refuse to give Minnesota police evidence in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. ICE defies over 4,400 court orders and refuses members of Congress or the press entrance to its brutal concentration camps. Trump goes after the FBI agents who uncovered Putin’s efforts to make him president in 2016. He and his family make $4 billion off his presidency in less than a year. Trump sucks up to Putin.

Trump’s level of criminality and corruption exceeds Nixon’s by orders of magnitude.

The coverups were why Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell went to prison, as did his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, his Assistant for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman, his Special Counsel Charles Colson, and his White House Counsel John Dean (who’s since been a frequent guest on my radio/TV program).

That has to be waking Pam Bondi and others around Trump up at night. And it should be giving pause to every elected Republican facing the November midterms.

Every Watergate moment looks impossible right up until the hour it becomes inevitable. And when that hour arrives, it never feels sudden to those who carefully read history; only to the people who insisted, until the very end, that it could never happen here.