Pete Hegseth may have terrible judgment, but his comic timing is vaudevillian.

The former TV host who bills himself as America's "secretary of war" chose the perfect moment -- as his enraged presidential boss resumes the fruitless bombing of Iran -- to announce an ambitious new Pentagon program of testosterone injections for our troops. Announcing that all male service members will be tested annually for possible deficiency, he said that remedial steroid shots will be optional.

"While we invest heavily in our weapons systems platforms and gear, our most decisive tactical advantage will always be the individual warfighter," noted the defense secretary in a video captioned "High T Department of War."

"We have a sacred duty to maintain that advantage, which is why we must constantly look for new ways to optimize your performance, your resilience and your long-term health," he continued. "And to meet that commitment today, I'm authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members, ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best."

As the nation confronts the dismal prospect of President Donald Trump's continued warmaking, his dim but hotheaded "warrior in chief" is again busily imposing a solution where there is no problem. Hegseth cited no evidence that our soldiers, sailors and airmen suffer from "low-T," as the TV ads put it -- a suggestion that many of them would probably find insulting. But there is, unfortunately, a hefty catalog of posts, photos, policies and remarks that indicates Hegseth's own insecurity about his male status -- a neurosis he appears to share with other members of the Trump administration, not least the president himself.

If a satirist wrote a script featuring a defense chief who urges a program of testosterone therapy amid a failing war, nobody would believe it. Much too "Dr. Strangelove"! Only in the reality of the Trump regime are such outlandish plot points even imaginable.
America's nasty predicament in the Persian Gulf assuredly did not arise from insufficient aggressiveness on the part of the Trump war cabinet, let alone our officers and troops. Our country is again on the cusp of a "forever war," as the veteran New York Times correspondent Steven Erlanger warned recently, most likely due to an excess of macho hostility and a dearth of impulse control in the Trump White House. Those characteristics are typical, as any doctor will confirm, of an excess of testosterone, all too often the result of self-administered injections by men hoping to feel more manly.

Which calls to mind a strange remark not so long ago by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another public figure whose shirtless displays and constant reckless behavior provoke suspicion of what feminists sometimes call testosterone poisoning. On a podcast last spring, the health secretary reported that "Dr. Oz looked at (Trump's) medical records and said he's got the highest testosterone levels that he's ever seen for an individual over 70 years old.

"I know the president will be happy that I repeat that," he added obsequiously.

Without testing administered by qualified physicians, of course, there is no way to be sure that Trump -- or Kennedy or Hegseth or any other MAGA cartoon characters -- are examples of testosterone overdose. But the president does show clinical symptoms: apparent insomnia, with those endless predawn posting sprees; an enlarged prostate and spreading bald spot, indicated by his use of finasteride, a drug prescribed for those conditions; and most of all his irrepressible impulsivity, aggression and fluctuating moods -- which lurk behind his wild swings in war policy and jut-jawed, blundering diplomacy.

Reaching an honorable end to this ruinous war will require less blustering and clearer thinking. With all due respect to Pentagon Pete, his testosterone obsession won't help.

In his clueless and clumsy style, JD Vance has unmasked the cynical corruption at the core of Donald Trump's White House. Speaking at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum on June 25, the vice president said, "As I joked ... backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy."

Was Vance joking? With him as with so many others around Trump, as well as the president himself, the line between egregious ignorance and brazen deception is often hard to discern. Born 10 years after the massive scandal of Watergate ended Nixon's presidency in disgrace, Vance may well be unaware of the historical facts. That may be why he could also say something as stupid and false as claiming that Nixon was forced out by "the deep state."

Actually, Nixon was thrown out of office by the Senate's most conservative Republicans, who warned of his inevitable conviction of high crimes in a pending impeachment trial. Back in those days, "conservative" was not yet synonymous with "crooked."

What Vance unintentionally got right is the seamless congruence between the corrupt presidency he serves and the criminal regime he sought to whitewash. His comments implied that Congress and the media have degenerated precipitously since then — also true. But his grinning indifference to Nixon's felonious, authoritarian presidency should serve as ample warning to the nation about his own character and ambitions.

For the sake of political hygiene, let's assume for a few moments that this repellent politician simply doesn't know what he's talking about (not the first time, in his case). Such historical illiteracy would be unusual for a Yale Law graduate, as historian Timothy Naftali observed, but Vance often sounds strangely mindless.

The scope of Watergate's corruption
Beyond the "third-rate burglary" of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington's eponymous hotel, which exposed the Nixon administration's epic personal and partisan corruption, Watergate ranged across a panoply of criminal schemes — from corporate payoffs, in cash, to the Republican Party and the Committee to Re-elect the President (or CREEP, as it came to be known) to money laundering, witness tampering, bribery, domestic spying and orders to inflict violence on peaceful antiwar protesters.

Through Congressional hearings and investigative journalism, the public came to understand the secret life of the Nixon administration — a pageant of sleaze that had commenced no later than 1969, when the president's top aides set up a secret multimillion-dollar slush fund run out of a back room in a townhouse basement near Washington's Dupont Circle that funneled cash payments to Republican congressional midterm candidates. By the time Nixon was running again in 1972, the townhouse operation had metastasized into several major bribery schemes connected to CREEP.

The ITT Corporation, to take just one of the more notorious cases, coughed up a big donation for the 1972 Republican National Convention to "settle" a Justice Department antitrust probe. (Nixon can be heard on a 1971 White House tape discussing the proper timing of the ITT bribe: "Now this is very, very hush-hush, and it has to be engineered very delicately, and it'll take six months to do properly.") Dairy producer lobbyists agreed to donate millions after Nixon sent his Treasury Secretary John Connally to "shake them down," as the president himself put it. CREEP was also illegally hauling in many millions of dollars from corporations, many of which felt pressured into making contributions.

Why Republicans defended Nixon
Neither Nixon's gangsterish fundraising nor his repeated violations of federal law and the Constitution troubled the Republican right. To them, his resignation represented not a victory for the rule of law but the triumph of everything they hated. He had asserted the will to power and the ideology of authoritarianism against the liberal enemy, whose names he had actually compiled on lists. Many on the Republican right came to view him much more favorably after Watergate than before.

The Trump-Nixon connection
That mangy cohort included young Donald Trump, who openly declared his admiration for Nixon and said the disgraced autocrat "should have burned" the Watergate tapes. They conducted a long, mutually flattering correspondence. With his innate political sense, Nixon predicted that Trump would succeed if he ever ran for office.

Nixon's ruthless amorality was admired, too, by a young Republican named Roger Stone, who got involved in CREEP's "ratf------" dirty tricks and later had Tricky Dick's smirking likeness tattooed between his shoulders. That all came before Stone emerged as the driving force behind Trump's political ambitions. Roy Cohn, the soulless right-wing lawyer who became Trump's role model, was a Nixon crony of much longer standing.

If so many of Nixon's offenses sound familiar, it is because Trump has surrounded himself with such people from the beginning. It is no surprise that they would falsify history to prettify the late miscreant, who narrowly escaped the full consequences of his lawlessness. They will have to do the same thing for Trump someday.

Of all the scandals that have beset the nation during the years of the Trump regime, few have so neatly represented the would-be dictator as his despoliation of the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The overgrowth of green slime caused by Donald Trump's idiotic attempt to refurbish the pool evokes the disgust most Americans now feel at the mention of his name.

This episode includes all the varieties of Trumpian scandal we now anticipate in regular rotation. Scheduled for completion by the Fourth of July's 250th anniversary, it is a shambles and yet another Trump-sponsored national disaster.

From its inception, this was a typical instance of corruption, which saw the White House deliver a no-bid contract to a firm called Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which just happened to have done similar work on swimming pools at the Trump Organization's Virginia golf club.

With no controls and little oversight, the cost of the contract keeps rising: having promised to spend no more than $1.8 million, Trump has paid over $14 million, and no doubt the price will continue to escalate.

Separately, but similarly, the White House gave a $1.7 million no-bid contract to another firm, Greenwater Services, to clean up the algae infestation in the Reflecting Pool. Like the initial contractor, this outfit also did work at a Trump golf club, in Bedminster, New Jersey. Naturally, its principal owner is a shady businessman, sporting a greasy pencil mustache, who happens to be a wealthy Trump donor, a Palm Beach neighbor of the president, and a conspirator in various bribery and illicit donation schemes.

Aside from the slime and sleaze, the Reflecting Pool fiasco captures the environmental ignorance and narcissistic vandalism that Trump embodies. While the administration might reasonably have tried to remedy the pool's longstanding drainage problems, Trump hired his cronies to coat the bottom with a substance in "American flag blue" that quickly began to peel off, causing more trouble.

Having failed to consult scientists -- whose wisdom he always disdains -- the president made the pool's problems worse by increasing the impact of climate change. Turning the pool dark heated it up and made it even more hospitable to algae growth.As the Cultural Landscape Foundation noted in a lawsuit filed to stop the painting of the pool, it is an "aesthetic injury" -- like so many Trump projects -- that will "fundamentally alter the existing harmony, solemnity and dignity of the current memorial landscape.

Although Trump and his minions have lied repeatedly about the Reflecting Pool, claiming it is crystal clear when everyone can gaze upon the murky results, he now needs someone to blame. Having botched this entire process with embarrassing stupidity and venality, he insists that the renovation scheme failed because of "vandalism." Indeed, he has claimed that numerous vandals have been apprehended.

But the one man arrested so far -- a former Olympic athlete named David Hearn, who merely reached into the pool to touch a detached piece of the coating -- is manifestly innocent. Like others targeted by this impulsive and malignant president, he seems certain to be exonerated.

Not so the White House vandal and his henchmen, however. We will spend many millions and many months cleaning up the destruction he leaves behind.

The very first words announcing President Donald Trump's latest "deal" to conclude the war on Iran -- which will reportedly be signed on Friday -- were entirely false.

"The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete," the president proclaimed on his Truth Social site on Sunday evening. "Congratulations to all!"

But the agreement, whose details remain entirely opaque and disputed by all parties, is far from complete -- if "complete" is meant to indicate that Trump has achieved any of the stated objectives for which he expended hundreds of billions of dollars, at least 15 American lives, untold thousands of Iranian civilian deaths, and severe damage to the world economy and this nation's international standing.

Instead, what Iranian officials have called a "memorandum of understanding" merely extends for two months the current ceasefire (which hasn't actually curtailed kinetic hostilities in the region) while the United States and Iran resume negotiations over curtailing Tehran's nuclear programs, the alleged objective of this war.

No honest analyst believes that Trump or his inept negotiators will achieve more restrictions on Iranian nuclear development than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action -- the multilateral agreement that he discarded in 2018 merely because it was signed by his predecessor, former President Barack Obama. Amid the torrent of leaks and comments about this renewed ceasefire, what can be detected is a strong suggestion that this is in fact a far worse deal than Obama got, from the American standpoint -- and a far more lucrative outcome for the Iranians.

Unless the Iranian news agencies are lying just as brazenly as Trump always does, the Tehran dictatorship will collect tens of billions of dollars in previously frozen funds during the 60-day negotiation period. The Trump administration's response has come in the form of nondenial denials, and it now appears that those previously unavailable billions will be exchanged mainly for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. That reopening is the only aspect of the mooted "deal" that both sides agree will happen, merely resolving a crisis that Trump and his Israeli partner Benjamin Netanyahu provoked when they initiated this conflict. In short, a return to the status quo ante, aside from all that squandered blood and treasure and honor.

Of course the gradual resumption of ship traffic in the Persian Gulf won't actually permanently resolve anything, because the Iranians will still be able to close the strait whenever they choose -- a commercial and diplomatic superpower that they can now exercise at will, entirely due to the blundering of Trump, his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, his national security adviser Marco Rubio and the other nimrods in his cabinet.

Beyond that, we have no idea how or whether Trump's low-wattage diplomatic team will negotiate a credible agreement that restricts Iran's nuclear development with any force, as the JCPOA actually did. The likelihood of that occurring within the next two months seems vanishingly small, since the JCPOA talks required many months and intellectual skills that the Trump gang simply doesn't possess.

Even now, however, we can measure what Trump is doing against what Obama did: If the Iranians get $10 billion, or perhaps even $24 billion, to reopen the strait, without any substantial restrictions on their nuclear program, that will represent more than 10 times the amount of money Tehran received after signing the JCPOA. In other words, Trump has sold out cheap to end this pointless war -- and the rest of us will pay the price.

Rarely does President Donald Trump evoke bipartisan applause while delivering a State of the Union address, but he inspired just such a moment last February — when he called out former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over her husband's history of stock trading.

"As we ensure that all Americans can profit from a rising stock market, let's also make sure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information," said Trump as members of both parties stood to applaud.

While Republicans and Democrats in both houses have long invested in markets, with some banking huge profits from such dubious trades, it is Pelosi who has endured the most flak. Republican members named a bill to restrict congressional stock trades after her: the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments, or PELOSI, Act. During that speech, a smirking Trump urged the former speaker to stand up and demanded that Congress "pass the Stop Insider Trading Act without delay."

Yet neither that bill nor any other reform legislation would have stopped the eye-popping orgy of recent stock trades by none other than Trump himself, with thousands of individual market transactions on his account revealed this week in disclosure documents. A new filing with the Office of Government Ethics, released on May 14, showed more than 3,500 specific trades in Trump's name during the first quarter of 2026, with a value between $220 million and $750 million. This represents by far the largest series of securities transactions by a sitting president in American history.

As one observer noted on X, it adds up to 60 trades per day, while he issues executive orders, talks with foreign leaders, shifts tariffs, and gives policy directives that directly affect the value of his holdings.

Former White House ethics counsel Richard Painter told Forbes magazine that he had researched the financial history of every preceding chief executive. "I don't think we've had any president trade in the stock market," he said. Previous presidents had blind trusts with index funds, if they owned any stocks at all.

What outraged ethics experts was not just the volume of Trump's market activity but the obvious overlaps between his actions and policies and the equities that he bought and sold. Although it is impossible to determine exactly how much he may have profited from what looks suspiciously like insider trading — exactly the crime he accused the Pelosis of perpetrating — there can be little doubt that he has made millions.

The Dell Deal
Not long before he delivered that State of the Union slap at Pelosi, Trump bought somewhere between $1 million and $5 million in Dell Computers stock. Then on May 8, less than three months later, he gave a public speech at the White House where he urged "everyone" to "go out and buy Dell," driving the company's stock to an all-time high. Since he bought Dell stock in February, it has gone up a whopping 96%.

Nvidia and Defense Deals
Around the same time, Trump bought a big chunk of Nvidia stock, just before that firm announced a big chip agreement with Meta, and then he purchased still more Nvidia a week before the Commerce Department permitted the sale of the company's chips to Saudi Arabia. Ironically, Nvidia was among the stocks whose purchase by Paul Pelosi provoked Republican outrage; he later sold it before its value rose astronomically.

Trump praising such companies as Palantir and Intel on his social media platform has similarly inflated their stocks after he bought chunks for his account.

The Palantir Pattern
Trump increased his Palantir holdings just as the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security were awarding billion-dollar contracts to the company, whose principal shareholder is the fascist-curious, Trump-backing billionaire Peter Thiel. So now the president too can profit from the company's Orwellian surveillance technologies.

Robinhood and Federal Programs
During the same period, Trump invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Robinhood, the financial technology firm. News reports indicate that those purchases occurred as the Treasury Department named Robinhood as the brokerage and trustee for the federally funded "Trump Accounts" to be set up for American kids. Those children don't stand to earn much, but never mind — Trump will do very well.

The list of sleazy transactions goes on and on, with many more examples no doubt to be unearthed in months to come. The response from the White House and the Trump family echoes their usual "move along, nothing to see here" refrain. Don Jr. recently complained that charges of rampant corruption against his father were "getting old." And it is true that the crooked misconduct dates back to the first Trump administration; it is simply more widespread, more encompassing and more brazen now.

Contradictory Explanations
At least it would be better if the family and the administration flacks could get their stories straight. Eric Trump says his family's stock holdings are exclusively in broad market indexes like the Schwab 1000, a claim belied by Donald Trump's own filings, which show thousands of individual trades. Meanwhile, a White House spokesman told Fortune that all of Trump's assets are in a trust "managed by his children" with no conflicts of interest, another obvious contradiction.

A Pattern of Deception
The Trumps — and the Kushners, and many others associated with the first family — have gaslighted the American public with such bogus "explanations" of their grift-gorging for many years. Everyone in the Trump circle, including Cabinet officers such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has long known that the president is a crook. Out of cowardice and personal ambition, and sometimes greed, they have turned away from challenging his self-enrichment. The public, too, has largely ignored Trump's corruption, believing that "both parties do it," and there is plainly some basis for that cynicism.

But the scale of Trump's exploitation of public resources, his incessant stealing with both hands, is exponentially worse than any theft previously perpetrated by Democrats or Republicans. At a time when voters expected this president to look out for their pocketbooks, he does nothing but stuff his own, plundering them and profiting hugely. Polls suggest that they have at last begun to notice — and don't like what they see.

What a happy coincidence for House Republicans that the Supreme Court's conservative bloc found an excuse to help preserve their party's congressional majority, just in time for the 2026 midterm elections. Without the timely intervention of the right-wing justices, a Democratic wave loomed over the White House and Capitol Hill — which threatened not only the plans of the Trump administration but the corrupt conduct of the high court itself.

Masterminded by Chief Justice John Roberts and written by his ideological sidekick Justice Samuel Alito, last week's decision in Louisiana v. Callais not only eviscerated the last remaining protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act but immediately propelled a fresh wave of partisan redistricting across the South. This was the entirely predictable result of a series of Supreme Court decisions that have undermined racial equality while encouraging white-majority legislatures to redraw congressional maps as a means to ensure perpetual power for the GOP.

And all this was done with self-righteous zeal in the name of "racial neutrality," good government and Constitutional jurisprudence.

The court's critics have noted how little remains of those traditional values after two decades of the Roberts court. Since the majority overturned Roe v. Wade, women saw yet another step in the diminution of their control over their own bodies and health, an attack on their autonomy that is already costing innocent lives in the most backward states. Now in Callais, Black and Latino Americans see the razing of minority political power in the most segregated regions and the return of Jim Crow, delivered by a party that countenances unabashed racism in its ranks.

Alito's justification for abandoning decades of precedent — and the clear textual purpose of the Voting Rights Act — made little logical sense. Rather than determining whether a state's congressional district map imposed the effect of a racial hierarchy on state voters, he ruled, the court would demand proof of racist intent on the part of legislators who drew that map. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her dissent, the impossibility of knowing or proving what was in the minds of those legislators is obvious. It is also a completely invented standard.

Alito claimed wrongly that recent presidential elections show that the nation has progressed beyond the remedies imposed by the Voting Rights Act, because Black voter turnout was higher than white turnout in two of the most recent presidential elections. Of course, turnout for congressional elections is different in midterms — and the years that Alito cherrypicked to make his argument happened to be those when Barack Obama, America's first Black major-party presidential nominee, was on the ballot.

But with their ire provoked by what Alito described as an "unconstitutional racial gerrymander" in Louisiana, the justices feel justified in even the most dishonest discourse. That is why both Roberts and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh could support this devastating decision, despite having voted precisely the opposite way only three years ago. In the case of Allen v. Alabama, court found that state legislators had discriminated against the state's Black voters by dividing them up among seven districts to prevent the election of more than one Black member of Congress. Kavanaugh and Roberts, along with the court's liberal minority, rejected the state's argument — identical to Alito's argument now — that the plaintiffs had to prove racist intent to trigger the Voting Rights Act's protections.

The result was a new congressional map in Alabama, drawn by a special master, that offered Black voters the opportunity to elect two members — who both happen to be Democrats.

What has changed since Kavanaugh and Roberts endorsed that wholly just outcome? Only two things: The 2024 election of Donald Trump and Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, which Republicans on the court plainly aim to preserve against increasingly long odds in this year's midterm election — and the likelihood that if Democrats regain the majority in either or both chambers, then this historically corrupt Supreme Court majority will find itself confronting investigative scrutiny and legislative challenge. Should Democrats control the Senate, they will also face a strong possibility that Trump, the authoritarian they have so brazenly empowered, will be unable to nominate any more constitutional vandals of their ilk.

These right-wing justices, despite their whine about "racial gerrymandering," showed that they have no problem with partisan gerrymandering that has an undeniable racial impact on minority voters. It is fair to assume that among the reasons, beyond their own ideological loyalties, is the urge to protect their own misconduct from the embarrassing oversight that will surely ensue when power changes hands again.

More than friendly to fascists both abroad and at home, the Trump administration is now seeking to destroy the Southern Poverty Law Center -- historically one of the nation's most powerful and effective opponents of the Ku Klux Klan, American neo-Nazis and other white supremacist movements.

This was the latest in a long series of signals from the White House to the president's swastika-flying fans. It means that such groups need no longer fear a resolute federal response to their criminality.

On April 22, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced -- at a blatantly political press event -- that the Justice Department has indicted the SPLC for "wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering." The indictment, described by Patel as "massive" and "sweeping," relies on the notion that the SPLC 's use of paid informants in violent white supremacist outfits such as the Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance and Atomwaffen somehow defrauded its donors.

Blanche and Patel went on to assert that those payments -- which over the years amounted to millions - had financed the continued existence of those groups, a claim echoed in right-wing media outlets. In the New York Post, for instance, a columnist wrote that by paying its confidential informants, the SPLC "kept relic organizations like the Ku Klux Klan on life support."

The alleged motive was to justify the SPLC's own continued existence and fundraising by maintaining a threat from fascist violence, which Republicans in Washington have persistently minimized or dismissed. Indeed, the Trump administration has hired and promoted any number of far-right extremists, especially since its return to power.

The absurdity of the indictment ought to be obvious to anyone -- including former federal prosecutor Blanche -- who knows how the FBI prosecutes organized crime, terrorism, narcotics smuggling or violent extremism, in nearly every case depending on paid informants. Over the past few decades, in fact, the FBI and the Justice Department have relied on information from SPLC and its informants to jail violent Klansmen and Nazis.

The indictment also charges that the SPLC "concealed" its identity behind false fronts when sending money to informants, following similar practices by the FBI and the Justice Department to avoid exposing their paid agents.

To suggest that the SPLC "supported" the activities of those criminal groups, as the DOJ indictment alleges, is precisely the same as saying that federal prosecutors and FBI agents were responsible for financing the Mafia, narcotics cartels and terrorism networks.

Under questioning from reporters, Blanche essentially admitted that the indictment's fundamental claim is baseless. Asked whether the indictment specifically alleged that the SPLC payments benefited the Klan, Atomwaffen or other extremist groups, Blanche admitted that it offered no such evidence. "To the extent that there's any link between that individual receiving the money and benefits to that organization," he said, "that's not in the indictment."

Not surprisingly, perhaps, former federal prosecutors who have gone after the Klan and other violent extremists were appalled by the government's attack on SPLC.

Doug Jones, who served as U.S. attorney in Alabama, described the indictment as "outrageous" and "pure political retribution" by President Donald Trump. Having taken down white supremacist gangs himself, Jones recalled how the SPLC "helped dismantle the Ku Klux Klan's operations in Alabama and beyond" in 1981, when its attorneys and investigators secured justice in a Mobile, Alabama, lynching incident.

There are dozens of similar cases in the SPLC files, including major victories against the United Klans of America, the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Imperial Klans of America, and the paramilitary White Patriot Party and the Aryan Nations.
It isn't only liberal lawyers who can see through the flimsy accusations in the DOJ indictment. In The Free Press, Bari Weiss' Trump-friendly online publication, conservative Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld warns that "the Justice Department will have a hard time proving that the (SPLC's) use of informants amounts to fraud."

Many other right-wing commentators and organizations have welcomed the indictment as just desserts for an organization whose views they despise, particularly because the SPLC has defended Muslims, gays and trans people as well as Blacks and Jews. So much for freedom of speech, a value more likely to be upheld on the right when convenient and comforting to their own.

The most telling commentary on this disgraceful frameup comes not from liberals or conservatives but from the fascist underworld. Gleeful as they are, the fascists admit that the indictment is nonsensical and indeed view its legal falsification as evidence that Trump is truly on their side.

Curtis Yarvin, the authoritarian gadfly whose writings have influenced various Big Tech figures and others in the Trump circle, celebrated the indictment on X: "What's cool is that I don't really see a strong legal case that the SPLC shouldn't be able to run these kinds of wacky black ops. That means DOJ is prosecuting the SPLC just because it (kind of) can. If so this would be an unusual sign of 'finally getting it.'"

On the "revolutionary fascist" American Futurist Telegram channel -- whose authors include former members of the Atomwaffen neo-Nazi group, linked to at least five political murders -- the indictment won praise for the same sickening reason. They know that the SPLC, far from secretly propping up violent white nationalists, is their worst enemy.

"The SPLC was not funding racist groups to enable their racism -- they, in fact, were not funding racist groups at all," the American Futurist-linked TAF Private channel posted, according to Raw Story. "What they were doing was funding bad actors within groups, with the intention of destroying those groups from the inside."
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the old saying goes -- and for the Trump White House, the enemy of fascism is its enemy too.

The humiliating demise of Viktor Orban's authoritarian regime is bracing news for endangered democracies, including our own, but America isn't Hungary. Of the parallels that can be drawn between their despot and ours, the most salient may have been commented on the least -- the overwhelming and unprecedented Mafia-style corruption that enriched the ruling family and entrenched their power.

It was the corruption that motivated Peter Magyar, a lifelong loyal appartchik until two years ago, to break with Orban's Fidesz party and inaugurate the campaign to overthrow the regime. It was the corruption that forced the European Union to act against Budapest by withholding billions in funding and isolating its government. And it was the corruption -- so pervasive in Hungary's media, judiciary and business institutions -- that finally drove otherwise conservative Hungarian voters to reject the crooked outfit that had ruled them for 16 years.

Liberals in Hungary celebrated Magyar's election victory, not necessarily because they agree with the new prime minister on every issue -- they don't -- but because he vowed to clean up Orban's legacy of outrageous theft, to enforce accountability and to strengthen the nation's frayed ties with Europe. Relying on his long experience inside the Fidesz machine, Magyar was able to expose its sleazy deals, including a pardon scandal that embroiled his then-wife, who had served as Orban's justice minister.

Like so much of the criminality perpetrated by Orban and his cronies, that pardon affair echoed a train of remarkably similar offenses in the Trump White House. And as Magyar emphasized throughout his innovative grassroots campaign, the cost of Orban's venality fell on ordinary Hungarians, whose national wealth was siphoned off to enrich the dictatorship's cronies.

According to Akos Hadhazy, a leading voice against corruption as an independent member of Hungary's parliament, the Mafia-style graft perpetrated by the Orban regime has looted more than 2.8 billion euros (over $3.2 billion) annually from public funds. Much of that stolen money came from the EU itself, which played a role in the regime's demise by withholding further funds from suspect projects. Among the reasons to renew ties with Brussels, as Magyar often explained, was to facilitate prosecution of the "Orban Mafia" that stole those EU funds.

The details of the Fidesz government's boodling might almost seem quaint in comparison with the high-tech crypto scams hatched in the Trump White House. Viktor Orban's son-in-law, an entrepreneur named Istvan Tiborcz, became wealthy by forming Elios, a company that won multimillion-euro contracts to upgrade street lighting in cities and towns all over the country. Those contracts were financed by the EU, but as auditors later discovered, the project details were designed to favor Tiborcz's firm and eliminate any competition. In fact, the same officials who oversaw the lighting specifications also wrote the Elios bids.

EU investigators recommended that Hungary void those contracts, claw back the money, and commence legal action against the officials and business executives responsible for the scandal. The crooks in Budapest have been "investigating" that case for the past 11 years.

Meanwhile even more public millions flowed into the accounts of Orban's father, Gyozy, whose real estate development company swelled with government and EU contracts -- and is suspected of serving as a front for Orban himself. This arrangement smacks of the millions in U.S. government funding and related payments that have flowed over the years to the Trump Organization.

Various other Orban cronies -- notably including the chief of his cabinet, Antal Rogan, and his closest friend since childhood, Lorinc Meszaros -- have walked away with enormous fortunes. So brazen was Rogan that the U.S. Treasury sanctioned him in January 2025, during the final weeks of the Biden administration.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control found that Rogan had "orchestrated Hungary's system for distributing public contracts and resources to cronies loyal to himself and the Fidesz political party, (including) schemes designed to control several strategic sectors of the Hungarian economy and to divert proceeds from those sectors to himself and to reward loyalists from his political party."

The Trump administration lifted the U.S. sanctions on Rogan within three months of taking office, as part of its broader abandonment of anticorruption agencies and measures throughout government.

As for Meszaros, he is the richest man in Hungary, sitting atop a fortune estimated at over $3 billion. Having started out as a gas-pipe fitter in 2006, with assets worth less than $42,000, his wealth grew exponentially through state energy and construction deals. When asked how this could have happened, Meszaros modestly attributed his wealth to "God, luck and Viktor Orban."

Americans have long seemed indifferent to the orgy of corruption that has characterized President Donald Trump's career and especially his return to power. Citizens whose news consumption is limited to Fox News, Newsmax and the MAGA media have heard little or nothing about the ways that Trump, his wife and offspring, and their circle of supporters have gorged themselves in one shady deal after another, often at risk to our national security.

Yet somehow, despite a state-controlled Hungarian media universe, Magyar's movement brought the truth about Orban's corruption to the people, who responded with appropriate fury. In this country, Democrats of every persuasion must convey to every American voter that same message about the decadent MAGA movement and its greedy overlord.

Few circumstances are more dangerous to American and world security than an American president -- specifically, Donald J. Trump -- who lies brazenly to the public in time of war. At a moment when his assault on Iran has jeopardized the global economy in a way not seen for four decades, Trump appears to be prevaricating about his government's "very good talks" with the regime in Tehran.

It is reassuring that Trump postponed his mad threat of military strikes on Iran's energy infrastructure. It is not reassuring that Iranian officials immediately denied that they are engaged in any contacts, let alone negotiations, with the Trump White House. And while it isn't impossible that he has authorized some kind of contacts with the Iranians, who are also prone to mendacity, there is little reason to believe him until a diplomatic process emerges.

Given the history of falsehoods leading up to the first strike on Iran and the fog of contradictory justifications for this war of choice, White House deception would hardly be surprising. After so gravely disrupting the world's energy supply lines, at a cost of more than a dozen American troops, thousands of innocent Iranian lives, and countless billions of dollars -- with no sign of achieving the vague and ever-changing objectives of this mission -- Trump suddenly seems desperate for an exit.

Whatever bluster he and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, may emit, they have so far failed to eliminate Iran as a military threat to the Middle East, let alone accomplished the "regime change" that has long been sought by Israel, its only ally in this venture.

They have failed as well to secure the highly enriched uranium at bombed Iranian sites, and they have likewise failed to protect the critical shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz.

All this bloody chaos came to pass because, from the beginning, Trump remained focused on trashing Barack Obama, whose multilateral effort to curtail Iran's nuclear ambitions had at least forestalled them for a decade. By appointing the greedy but feckless and utterly inexperienced team of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to seek a new settlement with Iran, he ensured failure.

Many observers suspect that was his aim -- or at least Kushner's aim -- all along, because that was what the far-right Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu wanted.

None of that has transpired as the war criminal Netanyahu and his Washington cronies would have predicted -- indeed, as they did predict at the outset of this conflict. Despite the massive military and leadership losses sustained by the Iranians, they appear to have prepared far more carefully for this fight than their counterparts in the Trump White House and therefore are prepared to continue an asymmetric battle that the U.S. president wants to abandon.

After the killing of his father, comrades and immediate family, Iran's supreme leader probably won't make it easy for Trump to declare victory and move on. What is the basis for ceasefire talks with an adversary who began bombing while engaged in the last round of negotiations, even as observers indicated that agreement was near? Without that bare minimum of honor and trust, it is hard to imagine how that would work.

Had Trump not trashed America's diplomatic relations with its traditional allies, we might have called upon more trusted European or Asian friends to broker an exit deal. They have no reason to trust us anymore or to put their own credibility on the line -- except that they too will suffer as long as this fiasco continues and worsens. We will be lucky if their enlightened self-interest can help lift us out of Trump's latest catastrophe.

Pete Hegseth won't have to wait much longer before notching his first officially recognized war atrocity as secretary of defense.
Investigators for the Pentagon's Central Command, in charge of all Mideast operations, have determined that U.S. forces were likely culpable in the lethal air strike on a girls' school in Minab, Iran, that killed 175 Iranian civilians, mostly children under 12, two weeks ago.

While that reported finding is "preliminary," the Tomahawk missile that hit the school is only being deployed in this conflict by the United States -- and the same weapons were fired the same day at an Iranian base close by.

The immediate cause of the tragic incident appears to be faulty targeting based on outdated intelligence data, which may not be directly laid to Hegseth, President Donald Trump and the other reckless planners of the attack on Iran. But the cavalier attitude toward war crimes Hegseth so often expressed before his confirmation -- as well as his glaring lack of fitness, character and competence -- made such an awful disgrace inevitable.

That such an atrocity occurred within the first days of the war only underlines the stark warnings against Hegseth's appointment by Sen. Angus King, the Maine independent, and Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a veteran of the 82nd Airborne.

What makes the school bombing even worse are attempts by both Hegseth and Trump to evade responsibility, which reflects their well-documented contempt for the laws of war and American traditions of honor and humanity.

Trump has repeatedly and falsely suggested that Iran uses Tomahawk missiles and is probably guilty of firing on its own schoolchildren, while Hegseth has said more than once that unlike the United States, Iran purposely kills civilians, with an obvious implication. The salient issue here is not whether the U.S. purposely blew up the school, of course, but whether directives from the Pentagon and White House increased the chance of such horrors.

What cannot be denied is Hegseth's mindless approach to the laws of armed conflict, which he has expressed on countless occasions, in his 2024 book on war, and in the opening days of the Iran war.

"Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly," the man who calls himself the "secretary of war" boasted at a Pentagon briefing on March 4 -- four days after the school bombing. "Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it."

Ignorant as they are arrogant, neither Hegseth nor Trump understands the purpose of the laws of war, nor do they seem aware that the origins of the Geneva Conventions they scorn are wholly American. The first American general to insist that our military treat its enemies with decency was George Washington. And the first president to establish rules governing combat was Abraham Lincoln, with whom Trump has dared to compare himself.

Amid the bloodiest battles ever seen on our soil, Lincoln ordered his generals and a German immigrant lawyer named Francis Lieber to formulate a code of conduct for Union troops. Together they wrote a detailed manual, with more than 150 specific regulations, that became known as the "Lieber Code" and formed the basis for the Geneva Conventions more than 80 years later.

Instead of upholding those principles, Trump selected Hegseth because he is eager to trash them. And Hegseth has fulfilled that expectation by firing career legal officers who had faithfully upheld those laws, while appointing and promoting figures who share his lawless, careless and despicable attitude.

Under this regime, the Minab school bombing as well as the indiscriminate killings of alleged narcotics smugglers at sea were among the most predictable offenses ever committed. It is just as predictable that as this war drags on, we will see more and worse.

The belated dismissal of Kristi Noem -- President Donald Trump's woefully unqualified and performatively ridiculous custodian of homeland security --- highlights the perils now faced by all Americans in an increasingly perilous world. Now that the United States is at war with a regime notorious for terror tactics, it is no longer possible to ignore the frightening incompetence of a government that we expect to keep us from harm.

Noem cut an especially clownish figure at the Department of Homeland Security -- with her constant costume changes, soap opera escapades, corrupt expenditures and abuse of Coast Guard aviation and residential facilities -- but her MAGA style of governance is all too visible across our national security agencies.

While it was apparent from the day of her appointment that Noem had no relevant experience or knowledge, she and her "special employee" Corey Lewandowski brought extreme levels of chaos and disrepute to the agencies they oversaw. Like other Trump officials, she imposed senseless waves of cuts, mass firings of veteran officials, useless expenditures and measures such as polygraph tests that destroyed staff morale.

And in her zeal to enforce the administration's absurd deportation schedule, Noem fomented a confrontation with Congress and indeed the entire country that has resulted in the DHS shutdown. With most of its employees forced to work unpaid, all its security functions are now subject to staffing shortages, rising absences and declining resolve.

It's not a good time for that to be going on: The Iranian regime, along with allies in Hezbollah and kindred terror groups, is assuredly seeking means of revenge for the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the wider war. Given Iran's known capabilities in cyber warfare, the reduced defensive capacity of the DHS-based Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency is troubling.

Yet the president has replaced Noem with another politician whose Fox News appearances he enjoys, rather than a serious figure with military, intelligence or even government experience. Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin may be popular among his peers, but his resume for this position is thinner than paper.

As Kevin Carroll, a former senior DHS official, told CNN on Thursday, "I'm not sure that Sen. Mullin is really qualified. I mean, most of the other secretaries of Homeland Security have had substantial experience in federal law enforcement or the military, or have held senior executive positions. ... He was a successful small businessman. But we're in a severe threat environment right now (with the invasion of Iran). It's probably the highest threat environment since 9/11. ... I really don't think it's time for him to be in his first national security position or his first executive position."

That disturbing vacuum of professional leadership and skill is reflected throughout Trump's government, with potentially ruinous consequences. It is especially glaring at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where the comedy team of Director Kash Patel and former Deputy Director Dan Bongino achieved so much destruction in the span of a few months. Their dismantling of FBI divisions tasked with protecting the country showed a reckless enthusiasm that must have excited our foreign enemies.

Patel has done grave harm to the bureau's national security branch, which encompasses its divisions of counterterrorism, intelligence and counterintelligence, and its special directorate for weapons of mass destruction -- all vital to protecting us at this moment of heightened threats. The FBI cyber division, like CISA at DHS, has likewise suffered from the firings and fear that have destroyed confidence among agents in Washington and in FBI offices around the country and abroad.

The impact of Patel's recurrent displays of idiocy, arrogance and abuse are felt far beyond our borders -- although the damage has become obvious in major highly publicized domestic cases like the Brown University murders and the suspected abduction of Nancy Guthrie.

Early in his tenure, at the request of the head of the United Kingdom's MI5 intelligence agency, Patel agreed to maintain a London FBI station where both countries monitor adversary activities. He violated the pledge almost immediately, earning distrust among the "Five Eyes" intelligence consortium, which includes Australia, Canada and New Zealand as well as the U.S. and UK and is critical to our counterterrorism effort.

The barely disguised contempt for Patel (and Bongino, whose position was crucial to everyday operations) among foreign security officials is a serious hindrance to the bureau's international operations division, which depends on our foreign allies to provide actionable information about threats originating overseas.

So toxic is Patel's presence in the FBI that the bureau may be better off with him spending most of his time far from headquarters, whether at his home in Las Vegas, with his country-singer girlfriend on a government jet, or at the Olympics, car races or other sporting events where he weirdly shows up.

The pattern of dubious political appointees extends into the top levels of every sector, from Tulsi Gabbard -- whom even Trump no longer pretends to respect -- at the Directorate of National Intelligence to Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, where security breaches and outright lies have become routine.

Will we pay a hideous price for all these loitering MAGA bozos? So far, in Trump's second term, America has escaped the deadly disasters that can arise from stupid, amateurish government -- whether in an intelligence snafu like 9/11 or a botched pandemic response like COVID-19.

By now we should know that our luck won't hold forever.

There may be nobody -- perhaps not even Donald Trump himself -- who embodies the degeneracy of what used to be called conservatism like Stephen K. Bannon. That the "War Room" host still exerts influence over the American and international right as a media personality, political strategist and power broker indicates just how empty of moral character that movement truly is.

Like dear leader Trump, Bannon owes his prominence and prosperity to a pervasive atmosphere of impunity. Every day, in an era of burgeoning scandal on every front, both of them test its limits -- and have yet to find any at all.

What the Epstein files have lately revealed about Bannon, however, as disclosed in hundreds of emails between him and the predatory financier, is so depraved as to be almost unbelievable. In the face of these damning documents, the former Trump campaign manager has offered mutterings and excuses that scarcely even amount to a denial.

Not only did Bannon begin to execute a costly "op" with Jeffrey Epstein to rehabilitate the latter's image -- which ended only with his arrest by federal authorities in 2019 -- but they conspired politically together on various subsidiary plans both in the U.S. and Europe. Desperate for Bannon's help, Epstein financed his travel and connected him with potentates and politicians around the world. He paid Bannon hundreds of thousands of dollars to tape a dozen or more hours of "documentary" interviews that were evidently meant as media training, in anticipation of Epstein's prosecution.

All absolutely damning when assessed in the context of Epstein's vile assaults on girls and women, as well as his apparent financial crimes. Yet what seems most appalling so far, and most illustrative of the enveloping corruption, was their joint plotting against Pope Francis, whose liberal gestures toward gays and lesbians, migrants, Muslims and the global poor had enraged the self-styled "traditionalists" of the Catholic Church.

Together Bannon and Epstein aimed to produce a documentary film exposing the culture of hypocrisy and concealment surrounding homosexuality in the church, based on a 2019 French book "In the Closet of the Vatican." Bannon met with the book's author several times in Paris, where he also met Epstein, who had an apartment there.

With Epstein as the executive producer, Bannon predicted that the movie would wreak cataclysmic damage on the papacy and his other political adversaries, from Beijing and Brussels to Chappaqua. "Will take down Francis. The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU -- come on brother," he wrote, encouraging Epstein (who would soon be dead).

Stop and ponder for a moment what Bannon was attempting to engineer. He wanted to produce a movie, with the help of a monstrous pedophile who had victimized hundreds of children, which would destroy the reputation of the Holy Father and perhaps many others equally without blame. And aside from the political benefit to his hard-right allies, Bannon no doubt hoped to bank a substantial profit.

It isn't easy to imagine a more sinister project. By comparison, Bannon's swindling of the suckers who financed his "We Build the Wall" nonprofit and his phony indictment of the humanitarian Clinton Foundation look quaint.

Now a few of Bannon's longtime enemies in the MAGA movement -- including Elon Musk and Roger Stone, rather dismal characters in their own right -- have leaped to attack him over these reports. Presumably Musk would like to distract attention from his own cameo role in the files, including his solicitation of an invite to "the wildest party" on Epstein's Caribbean island. And the scorpion-like Stone is merely stepping on a perceived rival, as he always does.

Yet there are many self-proclaimed Catholics and Christians in Trump's orbit, MAGA influencers and conservative pundits who should have something to say about these appalling revelations. Why have we not heard from JD Vance, vice president of the United States, a fairly recent Catholic convert and a MAGA nationalist like Bannon, who spends so much of his time blathering on social media? Why haven't we heard from Peter Thiel, the ultra-right gay billionaire and Epstein buddy who lectures about the "Antichrist" among "woke Democrats"?

Indeed, very few of our moral arbiters on the right have felt moved to speak up about Bannon -- just as they remained silent when his coconspirators in the "wall" scam served prison terms, while he skated with a presidential pardon.

The most apt summation of this MAGA mountebank appears in a video recently released among the Epstein files, which was shot for that aborted documentary.

Bannon asks Epstein, "Do you think you're the devil himself?"

"No," Epstein retorts. "But I do have a good mirror."

Under Republican control, the aims of the House Oversight Committee are to promote partisan narratives rather than to reveal facts and advance public understanding of national issues. Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), its chairman, has displayed that routinely self-serving approach in the committee's "investigation" of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal -- and especially in his zeal to subpoena Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Comer was never among the tiny handful of Republicans who demanded that the Trump administration release the government's files on the deceased sex predator. Instead, the leaden Comer dutifully followed President Donald Trump's lead in defecting public anger over the case. Focusing on the Clintons, who know little (Bill) or nothing (Hillary) about this matter, is exactly how Trump has handled his own troubling connections with Epstein for the past several years.

With tens of thousands of mentions of Trump in the released Epstein materials, that distraction is more urgent than ever. And the Clintons somehow remain enticing targets for politicians like Comer and even some of the Democrats on his committee.

But after resisting the subpoenas for months -- until it became clear that a vote to hold them in contempt would pass the House -- the Clintons have flipped Comer's script. Rather than give depositions behind closed doors, as the Republicans evidently prefer, the former president and secretary of state have demanded that the committee question them in a public hearing.

On Feb. 5, Hillary Clinton posted this challenge on X:

"For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath. They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction."
In a followup post, she urged Comer to "stop the games."

"If you want this fight, @RepJamesComer, let's have it -- in public. You love to talk about transparency. There's nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there."

Comer is not about to accept that challenge, which he ignored.

First, he knows how that worked out when Hillary Clinton showed up to testify about the Benghazi terror attack for 11 hours, at the behest of his predecessor, former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) -- in short, not well for Gowdy and the Republicans, who made themselves look stupid as Clinton briskly schooled them. It's not at all clear that Comer, a plodding character often mocked in whispers by his fellow Republicans, would fare better against both Clintons.

Second, Comer is obviously planning to pursue the devious strategy that proved more successful for Gowdy during the Benghazi farce -- to record the depositions and then selectively leak snippets that create a misleading impression of the testimony. That is how Gowdy abused Sidney Blumenthal, the journalist and former Clinton White House aide called to testify privately for nine hours during that inquest in 2015.

I wrote extensively about that clown show -- and the complicity that Gowdy enjoyed from the New York Times' Washington bureau, which eagerly lapped up the leaks -- in a series of posts. Gowdy and his stooges fabricated a tale about Blumenthal's supposed "business interests" in Libya and how they had influenced Clinton's policy. Having invented that diverting story, the Republicans could not afford to let the public see and hear Blumenthal demolishing it.

Despite protests from Democrats, notably the late and highly esteemed Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), a much sturdier figure than the current ranking Democrat, Blumenthal's testimony was kept under wraps -- where it remains to this day. Neither Gowdy nor his fellow Republicans wanted the public to see how they had misused their power to spread falsehoods, pursue partisan grudges unrelated to Benghazi, and generally make fools of themselves.

Will House Democrats, the Epstein victims and the media allow Comer to get away with the same game? For all their rhetoric about "transparency," not to mention similar high-minded blather from the Republicans, why would they permit this scam?

Comer's scheme to conceal and then distort the Clintons' testimony is the latest episode in the ongoing Trump coverup. It would be a shame indeed to allow such a deception to proceed.

When top public officials and law enforcement authorities lie routinely to cover up police misconduct, the lawless killing of innocent civilians becomes inevitable. That is why Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good -- and others who have perished in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security -- are dead today.

The sense of impunity that has defined Donald Trump's life and regime is poisonous to the rule of law and encourages murder, just as he predicted when he famously proclaimed that he "could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?"

When he first uttered those words a decade ago, Trump was merely a candidate for president, and what he said about himself was taken as a "joke." What that supposed jest reflected was the sense -- inculcated in him by his corrupt and mendacious attorney Roy Cohn -- that he could get away with anything. Extended to its maximal reach in his presidency, it has repeatedly proved lethal.

How far Trump would take his self-awarded license to kill began to emerge back then, too, when he repeatedly urged supporters to "knock the hell out of" hecklers at his rallies and promised to pay the legal expenses of anyone arrested for such an assault. His constant invocations of violence, up to and including killing, have long since become an expansive genre of Trump coverage. As Americans have seen in his unrestrained awarding of pardons to his most dangerously rabid and criminal supporters, the president believes that he and anyone who backs him ought to be immune from prosecution -- or even criticism.

In the wake of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement killings in Minneapolis, Trump's appointees displayed their own sense that they would never be held accountable for anything that they say or do. Although these were scarcely the first instances when the president and his minions have prevaricated, misled and brazenly lied, it was perhaps the most serious episode of untruthfulness in his second term.

Responding to the deaths of both Good and Pretti, the loudest voices in the White House and the DHS spread lies about the incidents and vicious slurs about the victims. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, widely viewed as the enforcer of Trump's anti-immigrant blitz, joined with the dumb and unqualified DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in defaming the dead as "domestic terrorists." Gregory Bovino, the DHS official running ICE operations, told the press that Pretti, a licensed gun owner who had never drawn his weapon, had showed up to "massacre law enforcement."

In their zeal to shape the public narrative even as they shut down and frustrated any actual investigation, the Trump regime invented versions of the deadly incidents that were clearly contradicted by video evidence. So unsustainable were their impulsive lies that Trump himself as well as Bovino and Noem were finally forced to backtrack, insisting that they now intend to unearth the truth.

Having rushed to false and fraudulent judgments, the administration can make no plausible claim to pursuing any impartial finding of fact in these alleged crimes. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel -- both devoid of professional qualifications for their jobs and politically tainted from the beginning -- have already offered pronouncements on these cases that befoul any probe they might oversee. They have allowed tampering at the crime scenes and behaved in ways that no honest law enforcement agency would permit in these circumstances.

Before the advent of Trump, America had started to develop a culture that prioritized lawfulness in law enforcement, that upheld accountability for police officers and others empowered to use lethal force. But we now live under a government that scorns the ethical and legal norms that most Americans cherish, even when they are imperfectly upheld.

That scorn, embodied in the president himself, is a danger to all of us. Inculcated in the poorly trained, bullying ICE agents on the streets of American cities, the Trumpian sense of impunity is a public menace that will not abate until he is gone from office.

The best defenses are massive public protests demanding that the killers and their enablers be held accountable. If ICE is not abolished, then its budget must be cut and its recruitment and training practices drastically reformed. Miller should be fired, as should Bovino and most of the hierarchy of DHS, ICE and the Border Patrol -- along with many of the agents they recruited. Noem and her friend Corey Lewandowski ought to be dismissed as well -- and if they are not, then Congress should move to impeach her.

Their lies kill -- and will kill again.

When observers ask whether Donald Trump is mad, assert that he must have had a stroke, or insist that he suffers from dementia, they are merely struggling to make sense of his senseless acts. To watch the president of the United States doing things every day that appear to be incomprehensible or even insane is so troubling that everyone -- except his MAGA cult members -- searches frantically for answers.

The experts who conclude from Trump's remarks and appearance that he is a stroke victim make at least one convincing argument. As the first year of his second term ends, he does seem fully unmoored from the few mental and moral constraints that once held him back. He doesn't seem to care that his approval ratings -- and the prospects for Republicans in the coming midterm elections -- are swirling round the pollster toilet.

Certainly the president's reckless conduct on every front indicates a disturbing lack of concern for consequences. What did he think would happen when he embarked on a campaign of aggression against Greenland, territory of Denmark, a faithful ally? He knows, of course, that he is endangering the NATO alliance that has bolstered the West against its adversaries for the past seven decades, and yet he doesn't seem to care. In fact, the idea of wrecking NATO fills him with a manic energy that could only be matched by the excitement of his old pal Vladimir Putin.

Surely he must realize that his bizarre intervention in Venezuela, where none of his rationalizations can withstand the slightest scrutiny, would infuriate our neighbors and astonish the rest of the world, while angering his own MAGA isolationists.

The Venezuelan dictatorship has nothing to do with our narcotics scourge, the oil there never really belonged to the United States, and the government there is just as corrupt as when Nicolas Maduro ruled. Aside from the boost to Trump's ego, the Maduro misadventure has only created headaches for the Justice Department and damaged American relationships with all our allies in this hemisphere -- which Trump had already done much to ruin with his political offensives against Canada and Mexico.

We know there is one head of state who is enjoying the Venezuelan mess. That would be Putin, again, who encouraged Trump's idiotic "Donroe Doctrine" as an endorsement of his own domination of Eastern Europe (and perhaps all of Europe).

And does anyone imagine that Trump by now doesn't understand why his crusade against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell undermines our economy, as well as the dollar's precious standing as a reserve currency and the confidence of international lenders who underwrite our debt?

Even a few of the financial leaders who brown-nosed him with such revolting self-abasement now protest his banana-republic threats to prosecute Powell. But he hasn't veered from this destructive course and evidently will only be satisfied when he finishes destroying the dollar's value.

This catalog of his most recent ruinous actions continues, on varying levels, the long list of things he has done to undermine American strength and security from the moment he returned to office.

He took a sledgehammer to the rule of law -- which truly makes our country great -- when he pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants, including the would-be cop-killers and neo-Nazis among them. He persistently sabotages our valiant allies in Ukraine, encouraging worse acts of aggression by their Russian invader. And he has put incompetent clowns in charge of all our intelligence agencies -- including the FBI, whose counterintelligence division defends us against foreign adversaries.

Perhaps none of those decisions makes sense unless he has lost his mind. But there is an even darker possibility.

Trump rarely hesitates to accuse his critics of "treason," including even once-ardent MAGA sycophants like former Rep. Marjorie "Traitor" Green. The draft dodger approvingly cited calls for the execution of top military officers, who have served honorably for decades, simply for dissenting. "Traitor" is one of his favorite insults.

Yet nearly every one of his social media posts, every policy maneuver and every appointment emanating from the Oval Office he occupies have damaged the prospects and prestige of the United States while advancing the objectives of our foes.

When the president of the United States consistently behaves in ways that promote the interests of a hostile foreign power, how should we describe him?

When the legal deadline arrived for the Justice Department to release all its files on the late sexual predator and shady financier Jeffrey Epstein, the country awaited new and significant information about his crimes. Instead, we saw a blizzard of blacked-out documents -- and a strenuous campaign to smear former President Bill Clinton.

The "evidence" Attorney General Pam Bondi chose to distribute only served to underline the basic and exculpatory facts regarding Clinton. Releasing a set of old photographs of Clinton in various scenes with Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, altered and stripped of any pertinent information about dates and locations, Bondi exposed her own rather obvious scheme to protect President Donald Trump.

The attorney general and Trump's other flunkies may well be aware that several of those photographs were published years ago, in full context. But they're playing three-card monte games with the public. Like every other actual fact about Clinton's connections with Epstein, they confirm the former president's previous statements -- and explode Trump's slanders and libels on those topics.

In 2002 and 2003, years before Clinton knew or could have known about the shadowy financier's abuse of underage girls, he flew more than two dozen trips on aircraft owned by Epstein. (Many similar donations of jet time have been made by wealthy individuals, including Google mogul Sergey Brin and others.) The sole purpose of those trips was to advance the Clinton Foundation's efforts to curtail the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Some of the trips included Epstein, his enabling paramour Maxwell and an entourage of Clinton Foundation staff, Secret Service agents and other foundation donors. The destinations included multiple stops in Africa, as well as Russia, China, Norway, the United Kingdom and Singapore.

It is worth mentioning here that independent experts credit the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative with saving well upward of 11 million lives since its founding. Much of that was achieved in cooperation with the President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, founded by then-President George W. Bush with Clinton's help, which Trump and Elon Musk have sought to destroy. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS estimates that a permanent discontinuation of PEPFAR-supported programs could result in an additional 6.6 million new HIV infections and 4.2 million AIDS-related deaths globally between 2025 and 2029.

Now the selective drip of Epstein files material is not just than an act of bad faith but an avoidance of releasing the full files as required under the law. Let's consider a few of the photos they released. By redacting the faces of people next to Clinton, they sought to tie him to Epstein's victims, including underage girls.

One such picture shows Clinton with a blonde woman perched on the armrest of an airplane seat, her face blacked out. From previous coverage in tabloids, we know that she is Chauntae Davies, who served as a flight attendant on Epstein's plane during one of Clinton's Africa trips. While she later lodged accusations of abuse against her former employer, Davies has only described Clinton as a "perfect gentleman."

Other misleading images showed Clinton with the late performer Michael Jackson and singer Diana Ross, with small children whose faces are blacked out. A White House press aide implied that the redactions meant those kids were victims of sex crimes, when in fact they were offspring of Jackson and Ross. Those photographs are available from Getty Images -- with accurate captions -- as the DOJ could easily have learned.

Providing accurate information to the public was not Bondi's purpose here. An abject and lawless official, she was serving up and endorsing her master's mendacious narrative about Clinton, regurgitated by Trump in person and on social media countless times over the past decade.

Trump has claimed, for example, that Clinton repeatedly visited Epstein's private Caribbean island, where many young women were reportedly violated. Trump's false accusations are belied not only by flight manifests and Secret Service records but by Epstein's emails, Maxwell's statement to the deputy attorney general, and Trump's own chief of staff Susie Wiles in her recent Vanity Fair interviews.

Having directed the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to investigate Clinton's ties with Epstein yet again, Trump should brace himself to hear that he has been lying for years. But he already knows that.

On social media, Clinton spokesman Angel Urena succinctly expressed what is really at stake for Trump in this distraction ploy. The former president, he said, wants Trump to order Bondi to release any remaining files, photos or grand jury minutes pertaining to Clinton, because he has nothing to hide.

"Refusal to do so," he continued, "will confirm the widespread suspicion the Department of Justice's actions to date are not about transparency but insinuation -- using selective releases to imply wrongdoing about individuals who have already been repeatedly cleared by the very same Department of Justice, over many years, under Presidents and Attorneys General of both parties."

There can only be one purpose behind that misdirection -- to protect Trump, the man known as "Epstein's best friend," from the reckoning he has sought to forestall for years.

By publicly commanding the Justice Department to investigate the "involvement and relationship" of deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein with former President Bill Clinton and various other Democrats, President Donald Trump advertised his own consciousness of guilt. Instantly, with the zeal of a born lackey, Attorney General Pam Bondi passed Trump's diktat down to Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, a reputedly honest lawyer who defiled the proud traditions of that office by echoing her unlawful orders without a peep of protest.

It was just another entry in the shameful docket that should someday result in disbarments and perhaps worse for all involved (except Trump, who has been awarded blanket immunity by another gang of crooked Republican lawyers on the Supreme Court).

To be clear, there is no evidence at all implicating Clinton (or any of the Democrats named by Trump) in wrongdoing of any kind. There is no justification for Bondi's farcical vow to investigate them "with integrity," a concept and characteristic entirely unknown to her.

Indeed, the only "news" about Clinton emerged in two Epstein emails confirming again that the former president -- who once borrowed an Epstein jet for a humanitarian trip to Africa -- had "never ever ever" visited the predator's private Caribbean island, as Trump and his flunkies have repeatedly alleged. It's just another big lie formulated to distract from the president's own apparent culpability.

What we have seen in the "Trump" pages from the thousands of Epstein documents released so far is damning if not legally incriminating to him, however. "Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop," wrote Epstein in a tantalizing 2019 email. In another the predator depicted Trump as "that dog that didn't bark" and noted that his "friend" had "spent hours" at Epstein's house with one of the predator's female victims, probably Virginia Giuffre, who killed herself last spring. In other messages, Epstein boasted that he could "bring down" Trump.

What we have not seen yet is whatever has frightened the president into the madly panicked acts of falsification and abuse that he and his minions commit almost every day.

Beyond his manipulation of the Justice Department to frame his political enemies, Trump has misused his power to intimidate the handful of House Republicans who stepped forward to demand release of the Epstein files. And as in the Russia investigation, he is dangling a pardon to keep Ghislaine Maxwell quiet and supportive as the Bureau of Prisons lavishes her with special privileges in a minimum-security institution not meant for sex offenders like her.

Only Trump knows (assuming he remembers) exactly what he fears in those massive files documenting his long "involvement" with Epstein. But the disclosures to date should remind us of how deeply his partisan supporters -- and top legal figures in the Republican Party -- are implicated in Epstein's long escape from justice.

Among the released emails are many messages between Epstein and his late friend Kenneth Starr whose saccharine tone induces a spasm of cringe. "Luv ya!" and "Hugs!" wrote the former Whitewater special counsel to his pal Jeffrey -- in stark contrast to his dogged pursuit of the Clintons, which degenerated into a sex probe when he realized that they were innocent of any financial corruption.

As Epstein's counsel, Starr played a pivotal role in the sweetheart plea deal, engineered by his longtime associate Alex Acosta, that enabled him to evade accountability for so long. Booted out of Baylor University for covering up a rape scandal, Starr went on to advise Trump during his first impeachment. (He also had a soft spot for other pedophiles if they shared his religion or political outlook.) Acosta was later elevated into Trump's cabinet as labor secretary, until his gross behavior in the Justice Department as Epstein's supine enabler forced him to resign.

The names of many other Trump Republicans litter the files, notably including Steve Bannon, who advised Epstein on how to "rehabilitate" his ruined reputation.

Although it will never be investigated by Republicans like Rep. James Comer, who has subpoenaed both(!) Clintons to testify about Epstein, therein lies a matter ripe for forensic attention. How did the most notorious pedophile in recent history get away with his crimes for so long?

Trump knew and did nothing -- and so did his Republican mouthpieces and cronies.

When Donald Trump delivered a full pardon to cryptocurrency billionaire Changpeng Zhao last week, the president didn't mention the enormous financial favor that Zhao bestowed on the Trump family last July -- an investment of $2 billion in World Liberty Financial, the first family's big crypto venture.

Instead, when a reporter asked about the pardon of "CZ," as the crypto mogul is known, Trump portrayed him as a wholly innocent victim of the Biden Justice Department, those "corrupt" and "far-left" prosecutors who had targeted the president himself.

"I don't believe I ever met him," Trump said of his crypto benefactor. "But I've been told, a lot of support, he had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime, it wasn't a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration and so I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of good people."

One of those good people was of course CZ himself, who commenced his pardon campaign shortly after funneling that multibillion-dollar investment, financed by Trump's other friends in the United Arab Emirates, into World Liberty. But the Binance boss was hardly the fall guy in a government witch hunt, to use a Trumpian trope. In fact, he committed serious crimes -- which we know because rather than mount a vigorous defense in court, with all the enormous resources at his disposal, both Zhao and his company negotiated plea deals that resulted in guilty pleas.

The Justice Department generously permitted CZ to plead to a single count of facilitating money laundering, an offense that Binance actually had committed countless times and that formed the basis of its business model. The Binance trading operation, launched in 2017, had grown within four years to become the largest crypto platform in the world by willfully ignoring and evading U.S. anti-money laundering laws.

Zhao's business model vindicated the warnings of blockchain critics from the very beginning: that crypto's only obvious uses are to evade taxation and regulation -- and to facilitate crime both here and abroad. Law enforcement officials estimated that "hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds from ransomware variants, darknet transactions, and various internet-related scams" were routed through Binance to escape detection by U.S. and international authorities.

"For years, Binance allowed users to open accounts and trade without submitting any identifying information beyond an email address," as the Justice Department explained when it announced Zhao's plea deal. What this meant in practice was explained in a gloating text message from one Binance executive to another: "we need a banner 'is washing drug money too hard these days - come to binance we got cake for you.'"

Indeed, the charging documents in the Binance case recite a litany of international malefactors who routinely exploited its services to carry out their atrocities, from child trafficking and sexual abuse of minors to narcotics smuggling and murderous terrorism. Crypto provided an easy and convenient channel for weapons dealers, espionage agents and terror organizations to evade sanctions on the outlaw regimes in countries like Iran and North Korea that support them.

The most notorious cases involved Hamas, whose leaders employed crypto accounts on Binance to covertly raise millions of dollars between 2019 and 2023 to fund its armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Not incidentally, the prosecution and seizure of scores of terrorist crypto accounts -- used by al-Qaeda and ISIS as well as Hamas -- occurred under the first Trump administration, overseen by former FBI Director Christopher Wray and former Attorney General William Barr.

Now the Trump White House encourages and excuses major criminal activity, not only by clearing Zhao but by pardoning Ross Ulbricht, whose "Silk Road" dark web entity sold millions of dollars of illicit drugs -- along with regulatory leniency toward Justin Sun, another major crypto manipulator who channeled many millions into Trump family enterprises.

Trump is a crony of crypto whose only purpose is to amass billions of dollars for himself, his family and his friends. He has no interest in preventing the abuses -- financing terror, abusing children, marketing narcotics -- that were so crucial to the founding of a crypto economy. Remember that when you hear him and his minions smearing his critics as "domestic terrorists," or when his "war department" blows a fishing boat out of the Caribbean ocean for unproved drug crimes.

Sadly, those Venezuelan fishermen didn't figure out a way to pay off the Trumps before they went to sea. They might still be in business, like Zhao.

For principled critics of James Comey, the fraudulent and politicized indictment of him issued by a federal grand jury in Virginia is wrapped in layers of bitter irony. It would be entirely fair to suggest that the former FBI director brought this illegitimate prosecution upon himself.

His new jeopardy is only one facet of the unfolding national disaster instigated by his own actions in October 2016. In those days before a presidential election, he made a fateful decision to disclose a renewed FBI probe of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and "her emails" (which ultimately proved to contain no classified information, as the Trump administration officially acknowledged many months later).

It was a choice that violated legal ethics and Justice Department rules, and has permanently damaged the institutions of law he claimed to be protecting.

Yet however dismal Comey's own conduct may have been, and however culpable he remains in the rise of Donald Trump, the Justice Department's fraudulent attempt to jail him on direct orders from the president is an historic assault on the liberty of all Americans and must be resisted as such. Although he isn't the first victim of Trump's drive for authoritarian power and won't be the last, the Comey case represents a stark departure from American standards of justice and an unmistakable step toward tyranny.

Trump warned the country many times that he would abuse presidential power for "retribution" against his adversaries and critics, and -- unlike his admired predecessor Richard Nixon -- he made no effort to conceal what he is doing to get Comey and others. When Erik Siebert, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia refused to prosecute Comey, the president forced him to resign.

Trump instantly replaced Siebert with Lindsey Halligan, a pliant White House attorney with no relevant qualifications for the job. She does display the abject subservience and ideological extremism required by her boss. Within days of her appointment, and just before the statute of limitations expired, Halligan delivered the two-page indictment of Comey.

In that tissue-thin bill of particulars, the Trump Justice Department charges Comey with lying to a Senate committee about a press leak from the FBI's top echelons. Although the indictment cites no evidence whatsoever, its lynchpin appears to be an alleged contradiction between Comey's sworn testimony that he never "authorized" such a leak, and the testimony of his former deputy Andrew McCabe that he did. But as several experts have noted, there may be no conflict between their narratives of that incident.

Among the underlying ironies is that McCabe's 2016 leak to The Wall Street Journal involved an investigation of the Clinton Foundation, which came to nothing as such probes inevitably do. His aim was to dispel rumors, spread by conservative FBI agents seeking to sabotage the Clinton campaign, that the FBI had buried the foundation probe for political reasons.

Subsequent investigations forced McCabe to admit responsibility for that leak, which violated FBI and Justice Department rules, especially in the months before an election. Those extensive probes -- by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and later by Trump's own Russia special counsel John Durham -- both found no basis to charge Comey or McCabe with any crime, while casting doubt on McCabe's credibility. Horowitz and Durham had plenty of criticisms of the former FBI executives, but then again so do I.

Under those circumstances -- with all the glaring proof of Trump's unlawful meddling -- the chances that Comey will be convicted, or even go to trial, seem small unless the courts abandon legality and abdicate to fascist rule. Even if the indictment is vacated, this rogue president will have inflicted severe costs not only on his "enemy" but on the country whose Constitution he falsely swore to uphold.

During a summer when the popularity of Donald Trump fell to abysmal lows -- and strong disapproval of his presidency achieved record highs -- those dire warnings were mostly brushed aside. What received far more intense and sustained attention were the awful numbers registered by the Democratic Party, with analysts bemoaning its "historically" weak condition.

The occasion for all the funereal commentary was the release in late July of a Wall Street Journal poll that any honest Democrat had to find alarming. According to that survey, 63% of voters said they hold an unfavorable opinion of the party, while only 33% said their view of the party is favorable, the lowest rating ever for Democrats in a Journal survey. The party's net unfavorable was 19 points worse than the Republican Party, an unprecedented gap.

Such troubling findings can't be dismissed or waved away, even though the Journal poll was much worse than recent polls by other media outlets, which showed a mere 10-point ratings advantage for Republicans. Before we start putting up black crepe around the Democratic headquarters and drafting documents of surrender, however, there are some numbers that deserve our attention as well. For although the Democrats currently languish under a burden of public disfavor, those sour feelings may have almost no impact on their ability to defeat Republicans and achieve power again.

How can that possibly be? The real question in upcoming elections is not whether voters like the Democratic brand (or the GOP brand) but rather which party's candidate they will choose when marking their ballots. So far this year, despite the bad branding suffered by Democrats, the party is overperforming in dozens of special elections across the country and appears almost certain to win the two major statewide elections this November in New Jersey and Virginia. Polls in Virginia have showed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger beating her Republican opponent by double digits, and her New Jersey counterpart Mikie Sherrill is ahead of the Republican by nearly as much in some polls.

Special elections are not necessarily predictive of a general election outcome, as we learned last year. Yet the results in many races this year have been startling, dating back to Wisconsin's state supreme court contest last April, when Elon Musk and right-wing organizations spent nearly $40 million to defeat liberal Democrat Susan Crawford. The Tesla zillionaire made news not only with his brazen attempt to buy the election but by declaring its outcome decisive "for the future of Western civilization."
All that money and publicity drove unusually high turnout for an off-year judicial election -- which Crawford won by 10 points, a landslide humiliation for Musk and a repudiation for the Republican far right (including Trump).

The trend kicked off by Crawford's victory continued across the country over the ensuing months, including races and places considerably less hospitable to Democrats than the purplish Badger State. In Iowa, for instance, the Democrats have picked up not one but two state senate seats in specials this year -- the first in January, when Democrat Mike Zimmer won in a district that Trump had carried by 20 points only two months earlier, and the second in June, when Democrat Catelin Drey won by 11 points in a district that Trump took by an equal margin last fall -- a turnaround of 22 points in less than a year.

Such encouraging results for Democrats have been commonplace across the country in 2025. According to The Downballot, a website that compiles and analyzes election results across all nonpresidential races, Democratic candidates in 34 special elections this year have run about 16 points on average better than 2024 presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the same districts.
Does that mean Democrats will win next year's midterms? It is far too early to make any such happy prediction.

But even the grim Journal poll demands a deeper look before anyone descends into gloom. As pollster G. Elliot Morris, formerly of FiveThirtyEight, explains on his Substack, it is very possible for voters to say they disapprove of the Democratic Party -- and then cast their votes for Democratic candidates. That same poll found Democrats ahead in the generic ballot for 2026, measuring which party voters plan to support in the midterm, by three percentage points.

"That's a six-point swing from their last poll in 2024," notes Morris, "and would be large enough for the Democrats to win somewhere around 230-235 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives." Depending on specific circumstances in the states, it might even mean a change in control of the U.S. Senate.

The negative atmosphere surrounding the Democratic Party and its public image arises from dissatisfaction and even anger among the voters in its own base, furious over the feckless leadership that led to the 2024 debacle and the hesitant response to Trump's first months in office. Their reaction is understandable and predictable after a national defeat -- but their more recent victories are a signal of hope on the horizon.

NOW READ: Don’t despair: Trump keeps losing bigly

Reacting with borderline hysteria to demands that the government open its files on Jeffrey Epstein — the deceased pedophile and financier who once described himself as Donald Trump's "best friend" — the president has aroused suspicion even among MAGA cultists. Few Americans believe the excuses Trump and his appointees in the Justice Department and FBI offer for pretending they have no relevant files about Epstein's depredations or that there is "nothing to see here." The Wall Street Journal's revelation of a racy scrawled message from Trump to Epstein on his 50th birthday underlined the appearance of a coverup.

In his latest gambit Trump is imitating a president he truly admires — the legendary crook Richard M. Nixon — by adopting what became known during the Watergate scandal as the "modified limited hangout." That's the best shorthand description of Trump's order to Attorney General Pamela Bondi to release grand jury testimony from the Epstein sex crimes prosecution (which ended in 2019 with his reported suicide in a federal detention facility).

It is a phrase originally uttered by John Ehrlichman, the late Nixon White House aide whose career ended with a federal conviction for obstruction of justice and conspiracy. On the afternoon of March 22, 1973, in an Oval Office meeting that included Nixon, Ehrlichman, White House counsel John Dean, Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and Attorney General John Mitchell, the president and his advisers plotted how to extend their coverup of the Watergate burglary and an assortment of related felonies.

They decided to concoct a misleading official report on the White House role in the burglary, with "facts" designed to exculpate the president and his gang. Worried that even a phony report would provide too much information, Nixon asked whether "we want to ... go this route now? And let it hang out, so to speak?"

"It's a limited hangout," replied Haldeman.

Dean agreed, and then Ehrlichman chimed in: "It's a modified limited hangout."

Fast-forward to Trump on the evening of July 17, 2025.

"Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval," he wrote in a post on Truth Social. "This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!"

Trump has never explained — and will never explain — how the Epstein case, which he and his MAGA cohort have exploited for years, became a Democratic "scam." Many of the conspiracy theories involving Epstein, "perpetuated" by his favorite crackpots, supposedly implicate Democrats in the most terrible crimes imaginable. Yet it is Democrats, along with a few Republicans willing to stand up to Trump, who now clamor for transparency on Epstein.

They won't get much if anything from a grand jury transcript. Trump, as a convicted felon, and Bondi, as a career prosecutor, both know how very limited that document will prove to be, if a court ever approves its disclosure. The testimony and investigative evidence presented in Epstein's prosecution will implicate him — not the various friends, associates and public figures whose names and faces may appear in the gigabytes of text, video and financial data seized by the FBI.

No doubt Trump feels assured that his own name and image won't appear in the grand jury documents — because he was never questioned or investigated in the case that focused solely on Epstein. He feels safe in urging their release, hoping and praying that will quell the conspiracy-crazed mob that he created.

It won't.

NOW READ: Supreme Court lets Trump shred democracy in shocking agency takedown

Years after his apparent suicide in a Manhattan federal lockup, the notorious sex offender and financial manipulator Jeffrey Epstein has returned from the dead to haunt Donald Trump and instigate a massive rupture in Trump's government and MAGA movement.

Having long encouraged the proliferation of conspiracy theories on the right -- from the racist birther myth about Barack Obama to the QAnon mania over alleged pedophilia among Democratic politicians and Hollywood figures -- Trump now stands accused of concealing proof of his own perfidy in the "Epstein files." Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed to have those files on her desk, promised to release them, and yet now tells the MAGA faithful that they will not be released.

The reaction has been volcanic.

The most sedulous and servile Trump supporters in the right-wing media complex, from Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer to Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, are castigating not just Bondi but the Trump administration. The far-right provocateur Mike Cernovich posted a direct blast at the president on X: "No one is believing the Epstein coverup, @realDonaldTrump. This will be part of your legacy. There's still time to change it!" On Bannon's livestream show, he taunted Posobiec as a "sap" for ever believing that Trump would release the Epstein files.

Amusing as it is to observe the MAGA weirdos chewing on each other, and to mock them as paranoia overwhelms their usual sycophancy, their suspicions are not ill founded. It was very strange indeed when Bondi -- as well as Trump's FBI director, Kash Patel, and deputy director, Dan Bongino, both professional conspiracy-mongers -- so abruptly decided to bury the Epstein evidence after all their vows of "transparency."

Most Americans interested in Epstein and Trump have seen the old video of them together at a party, whispering and leering at young women. Most have seen quotes from Trump in magazine profiles praising his pal Epstein, who "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." But if you listen to Michael Wolff, the bestselling Trump biographer and National Magazine Award-winning writer, there is far more to their relationship than a few words and images.

Wolff knows Trump well and knew Epstein very well -- and what he has to say about them points in a very troubling direction. Last month he discussed both subjects and their connections on "The Court of History," a MeidasTouch podcast hosted by journalist Sidney Blumenthal and historian Sean Wilentz.

While Trump has repeatedly tried to minimize his ties to Epstein, whom he now calls a "creep," Wolff said "Epstein and Trump had been the best of friends for almost 15 years. ... They were instrumental in each other's rise." The pair "hunted women together," according to Wolff, but fell out, as very rich men do, over real estate. Trump went behind Epstein's back to outbid him on a Palm Beach property that both coveted. Epstein believed that Trump was actually laundering money for a Russian oligarch and threatened to expose him. And then, according to Wolff's recollection of what Epstein told him, Trump "dropped a dime" on his friend's trafficking of young girls to the Palm Beach Police Department. (Which, as Wolff notes, indicates that Trump had long known of the crimes perpetrated at Epstein's house.)

By the time of Trump's ascent to the presidency, Epstein was ready to "drop a dime" of his own. Wolff told Blumenthal and Wilentz how, after Trump's election in 2016, "I was sitting talking to Epstein and he said, 'Wait a minute, I've gotta show you something.'" According to Wolff, Epstein "went into his safe, and he came out with photographs. They were Polaroids, I think, and he kind of spread them out like playing cards. ... It was Trump with girls of an uncertain age, at Epstein's Palm Beach house, where all of the things that (Epstein) would ultimately be accused of took place." He places the date of those pictures around 1999 or 2000.

"And I remember very vividly three of them," Wolff continued. "There are two in which the girls, topless girls, are sitting on Trump's lap. And then a third in which he has a stain on the front of his pants, and the girls are kind of pointing at it, sort of bent over, laughing ... three or four girls." Wolff also said he assumes those photographs were in Epstein's safe when the FBI raided his house and seized every item of potential evidence.

The crimes and coverup demand a Congressional investigation -- and perhaps this time, Democrats and a few courageous Republicans will dare to demand the truth from Trump.

Now read: Trump's goal isn’t to restore American greatness — it's much more sinister

Whatever United States military forces may have achieved in last week's brief attack on Iranian nuclear sites -- a question that will not be answered definitively anytime soon -- we have learned again the most fundamental fact about the current occupant of the White House.

Under Donald Trump, the principal purpose of our military and diplomatic policies is not to enhance American national security or pursue any strategic objective. The most important goal of every U.S. action is childishly simple: to make Trump look heroic and feel powerful, no matter how pointless or destructive it otherwise proves to be.

And Americans, normally susceptible to spurious presidential appeals to nationalism and fear, seem to have noticed that Trump's little war had no plausible aim -- and only put the nation in jeopardy of another ruinous "forever war."

Trump's motives in dealing with Iran and its nuclear ambitions, driven by his unquenchable envy (and enmity) toward his predecessor Barack Obama, have been questionable from the very moment he first stepped into the White House. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, delivered by the Obama diplomatic team and our European allies in 2015, severely restricted Iran's nuclear program.

It is now clear that Trump's withdrawal, effectively killing that agreement, led directly to the recent advances in the Iranian nuclear program, which in turn provoked Israel to mount its recent military campaign. Had the JCPOA held, as it would have with American support, there would have been no "emergency" need to blow up the Iranian nuclear sites now.

Trump himself created the crisis that he now seeks credit for ending, with his repeated claims that the munitions fired on Iran by American submarines and stealth bombers had "obliterated" the mullahs' nuclear industrial complex.

But did he end the crisis? Were those nuclear facilities and uranium stockpiles "totally destroyed"? Or did the Iranians somehow preserve their nuclear options in case of a military attack?

It would be surprising if they had failed to do so, since Trump -- always childishly demanding global attention -- foolishly boasted well in advance of his intentions to hit Iran. Having at first claimed that the U.S. would not get embroiled in Israel's military campaign, and indeed that he had tried to discourage it, the president grew jealous of the Israel Defense Forces' apparent success and determined to glom some glory for himself.

American intelligence agencies later told journalists that the biggest operational security problem in our Iran operations was Trump's egomaniacal posturing. The Iranians assuredly took notice and moved as much of their equipment and enriched uranium stockpiles as possible to secret locations.

Merely asking how it all transpired -- and how it might have affected the successful "obliteration" of the Iranian nuclear program -- was enough to enrage not only Trump but his national security team. The journalists who reported an initial bomb damage assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which found that the air raids had only set the Iranian drive back by "a few months," provoked a hysterical response from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. He accused news outlets that revealed the DIA report of lacking patriotism and respect for the armed services, personally berated journalists, including a former Fox News colleague, and immediately ordered a leak investigation.

What Hegseth didn't do -- and what Trump didn't do -- was deny that the DIA had issued that damning report. Instead, they instantly and rather suspiciously produced a contradictory CIA estimate that reinforced Trump's original claims. Meanwhile, European intelligence agencies and other sources have indicated that, at the very least, Iran has kept a substantial stockpile of enriched uranium, enough to produce several weapons in the future.

When that will be, we cannot know for certain. What we do know is that the military attack on Iran, occurring even as the U.S. was supposedly negotiating with its leadership, has spurred that country and others to build the world's most dangerous weapons as quickly as possible.

Perhaps that is why nearly every poll now shows that Americans strongly disapprove of Trump's Iran misadventure. Foreign leaders have no reason to believe anything Trump says, and neither do we.

Conducting his first press conference as secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. moved swiftly to demonstrate yet again why he is so unfit for that critical cabinet post.

In one of many egocentric abuses of his newfound power, Kennedy has directed his department's resources away from vital research on cancer and Alzheimer's, among other major diseases, initiating instead a massive effort to discover an environmental cause of autism -- which reflects his own obsession more than sound science.

But leaving aside the gross mismanagement of HHS, the National institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the many other agencies whose capacity for good he is rapidly destroying, Kennedy went out of his way on Wednesday to stigmatize the autistic children he is supposed to be helping.

As for Kennedy himself, there will be much more to say about his grimly incompetent and ruinous stewardship of the public health institutions that his family -- and especially his late uncle Sen. Edward Kennedy -- helped build into exemplars of American greatness.

For the moment, let's note that contrary to his suggestion, millions of autistic human beings around the world and in America go to work every day. They contribute to society by creating value in myriad ways, the least of which is their payment of taxes. They go on dates, fall in love, nurture families, and some of them not only can hit a baseball but are top athletes, including an Olympic snowboarder and a Division 1 basketball player. (I happen to know an autistic young woman who was the star of her Little League softball team.)

While acknowledging that some autistic kids are burdened with the disabilities recited by Kennedy, let's also note that the great majority of our autistic fellow Americans, unlike him, have never lapsed into heroin addiction for a decade or more; never peddled narcotics to fellow students; never serially betrayed their spouses with humiliating adulteries; never abused animals in public displays of weirdness; never injected themselves with overdoses of steroids; never profited from lethal disinformation about a pandemic; and never, ever blamed their own bad conduct on a hungry brain worm.

He has prospered and risen the same way he avoided prison and got the medical care he needed, strictly by accident of birth.

The more we learn about Kennedy, who has veered further and further from his once-illustrious career as an environmental advocate, the less there is to admire. Were his story not so sad, Bobby Junior would be a classic caricature -- the buffoonish nob whose inherited wealth and status have catapulted him into a position for which he lacks essential knowledge, experience and character.

Now we see again how Bobby's corrupt bargain with Trump cheated the nation, by elevating him to this position of trust at the expense of vulnerable children and their families.

"These are kids who will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date," Kennedy intoned, gravely and inanely. "Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted."

This broad-brush smearing of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder was both damaging and grossly inaccurate. There is a reason why scientists and doctors use the word "spectrum" to describe what is a very broad category that ranges from those who require intensive care and assistance to those who are fully autonomous and indeed display extremely high levels of intellectual capacity and talent in many fields.

Perhaps Kennedy should have a word with his fellow Trump henchman Elon Musk. Americans have at least vaguely understood the wide variations in autism ever since the tech zillionaire revealed his own childhood diagnosis on various platforms, including a monologue on "Saturday Night Live" and a TED talk. For all his egregious faults and fascistic inclinations, Musk does appear able to toilet himself and to get a few dates. He may or may not be able to write a poem but produces an alarming number of deceptive "Xeets" on his social media site X.

NOW READ: Behind the fatal Trump flaw MAGA can't even defend

Does anyone believe that Donald Trump brilliantly planned the abrupt reversal of his “recriprocal” tariff barrage? Leaving aside the most zombified MAGA cultists, and those who are paid or otherwise induced to pretend to believe whatever the president says, the answer is no.

But that may not be the right question to ask in the wake of his vaunted policy’s overnight collapse.

The most obvious tell was dropped by Trump himself, who often says the quiet part very loud while his minions and publicists play deaf. When a reporter asked yesterday afternoon whether the scary drop in the market for US Treasury bonds had affected his tariff policies, he replied: “I was watching the bond market. It's very tricky. If you look at it now, it's beautiful. The bond market right now is beautiful. But I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy.” People, he admitted, “were getting yippy," meaning terrified.

Indeed Trump was watching the bond market as prices spiked sharply upward, a signal that traders were losing faith in what has traditionally been viewed as the world’s safest investment. The danger that would represent for the US dollar, the nation’s economic stability, and even the world economy were far too profound to ignore – even for Trump.

Telltale signs of what actually happened in the White House are not difficult to see. Several days ago, as the chaotic tariff schemes driven by Trump and his wayward adviser Peter Navarro dominated the news, a story spread on cable news that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent -- whose advice they had reportedly ignored and whose personal credibility had cratered -- was “looking for an exit.” Whether that was accurate or not, the possible resignation of the treasury secretary threatened a ruinous blow to the administration.

On Wednesday, Bessent had been scheduled to speak behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, addressing the House Republican Study Committee – an appearance he canceled. He sent his deputy instead, according to Politico, because he was “called into a meeting with Trump.”

And soon enough, instead of quitting, Bessent went before the cameras, accompanied by the ever- belligerent White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, to announce the tariff turnabout. He dutifully recited the rehearsed claim that this shift had been “the president’s strategy all along,” presumably even while stooges like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick were sent forth to proclaim that trade is “a national security issue” and no way would he drop the new import duties.

Among those who expressly reject the latest MAGA fairy tale is Fox Business correspondent Charles Gasparino, who told viewers yesterday that market conditions had dictated Trump’s actions, not “the art of the deal.” His analysis was direct and unsparing:

“I mean, let's be clear what happened, who capitulated here, and why? And, you know, I don't want to say this, because I am a patriot, I'm an American, but it is the White House who capitulated, based on everything I hear, and all of my sources. And the reason why is because of the bond market and what happened last night.

“You know, Bessent knows this better than anybody, when you have yields on the 10-year rising to five percent, stuff starts shutting down, when you have the lending market screwed up. By the way, who's dumping the bonds? Somebody asked him if it was China, right? It wasn't, it was Japan. While he was negotiating with Japan, Japan, according to my sources, were running major money management firms that are involved in the bond market, without giving up names. Japan was dumping bonds because they believed this was not a great place to do business. That forced their hands.”

When one of the MAGA bootlickers on Fox, longtime correspondent David Asman, claimed that Trump had calculated the pullback “right up to the edge,” Gasparino corrected him with blunt certainty.

“David, he had no choice, he had no choice. Unfortunately, no choice…the gun was at his head. What happened last night was very bad.”

The real question is whether Trump or anyone acting on his behalf – or others inside the White House privy to his decisions, such as Lutnick or Bessent – made a killing in the stock market by shorting stocks -- or going long when the market was way down. Despite the sharp rise in stock values late on April 9, the recovery on Wall Street hasn't come close to erasing the losses of recent weeks, except for those who might have known what Trump was about to do and acted illicitly to exploit that information.

But we can hardly expect the compliant Attorney General Pam Bondi to open an insider trading investigation of this crooked White House. She’s too busy abusing her powers to harass Trump’s critics.

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Everyone should have known what was about to happen when Donald Trump announced huge global tariffs under the slogan "Make America Wealthy Again." Like "Make America Healthy Again," which accompanied the return of deadly measles, the cheery tagline for Trump's trade war foretold ruin -- which has arrived at warp speed.

Within hours, the global markets wiped out trillions of dollars in wealth from the balance sheets of retirement accounts and pension plans as well as banks and corporations. What looms ahead is not the "boom" that Trump has predicted but rather a shrinking economy with both stagnating employment and rising prices. Which is precisely the opposite of what he promised voters last year.

To anyone who has observed Trump closely over the course of his career, this catastrophe was predictable as soon as he gained the unchecked sway he now wields in Washington. He is not a "stable genius" with superior genetic endowment, but a spoiled scion of middling intelligence at best. He is not a brilliant negotiator who can conclude the Ukraine war in a single day or bring the Chinese government to heel, but a failed businessman who wrecked his father's real estate company with bad deals and excessive debt.

Having escaped any accountability for the national destruction incurred during his first presidential term -- from the mismanaged pandemic that cost a million lives to the violent coup attempt of Jan. 6, 2021 -- he has returned to the White House with even greater arrogance, courtesy of the Supreme Court. Secure in power, he is delivering an extremely painful lesson in the consequences of ignorance and incompetence run amok.

Those dismal qualities were instantly on display in every aspect of the tariff rollout, as neither the president nor his phalanx of flunkies could offer any plausible rationale of his actions beyond sloganeering.

Why is the United States seeking to punish its traditional allies in Europe? Why are we penalizing our best trading partners in Canada and Mexico? Why are we imposing trade barriers on tiny countries like Lesotho and remote islands uninhabited by human beings? (We may yet see how brilliantly Trump negotiates with penguins.) And how did Trump formulate the cardboard list of nations and tariffs he brandished as a prop at his "Liberation Day" announcement?

The White House could offer no coherent response to these puzzling questions, which drew contradictory answers from everyone around Trump, as well as the president himself, or no answers at all. That list was reportedly composed on ChatGPT, like a cheating high schooler's homework.

The true purpose of tariffs, according to one of the president's blustering sons, is to assert a muscular dealmaking stance against every nation that supposedly bullied us in the past.

"I wouldn't want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with @realDonaldTrump," wrote Eric Trump on X. "The first to negotiate will win -- the last will absolutely lose. I have seen this movie my entire life..."

What Eric actually has seen over his entire life is Daddy negotiating ignominious bankruptcy deals with bankers, but never mind. At roughly the same moment that he and others uttered those tough reassurances, the White House press secretary declared that "this is not a negotiation" because the tariffs "are part of a national emergency response" to nations that have harmed American workers for decades. Trump himself shows no sign of preparing to negotiate anything.

The "national emergency" lie is what undergirds Trump's legal authority, for he would otherwise need Congress to approve the tariff program. But before rubberstamping this madness, congressional leaders might insist that he explain its ultimate purpose, which only raises another set of baffling contradictions.

You see, sometimes Trump suggests that his aim is to collect trillions of dollars in revenue from imports, supposedly enough money to replace the income tax. Simple math proves that to be impossible -- and unlike the income tax, whose impact is progressive, tariffs impose a far greater burden on middle-class and poor families.

At other times, he claims his objective is to rapidly expand domestic production by replacing goods from abroad. That too is futile, because many important crops can't be grown in sufficient quantity in the United States because our industries rely on global supply chains, and because factories take years to build. If we somehow could substitute U.S. products for all our imports, the tariffs wouldn't raise any revenue at all.

Meanwhile, Trump is torching another of his favorite slogans. As investor Steve Rattner explained on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," the current projections show that our markets are plunging faster and our gross domestic product will shrink more than in other countries.

So much for "America First."

Even in a political environment marked by daily scandal and outrage, the revelation of a reckless and stupid security breach by Trump’s top cabinet members exploded this week. The potentially catastrophic leak of a top-secret military operation showed why President Trump’s cabinet choices were so dangerous – as many seasoned experts warned when he named them. Only by sheer luck was a disaster avoided.

It was a simple but stunning story: The Atlantic magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, as reported by him and his staff, had been included by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz in a supposedly secret mid-March group text chat -- along with Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and more than a dozen other high-ranking officials. A Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the chat, convened on the encrypted app Signal, was authentic.

The chat messages conveyed highly sensitive military and diplomatic information, including “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing” that occurred two hours after he received a message on March 15.

Hegseth’s feeble attempt to deny that any “war plans” had been disclosed can only be added to the long roster of lies from him and other administration officials. A former Fox News personality and the target of numerous warnings against his arrogance, drunkenness, and inexperience before his confirmation, the defense secretary ironically assured the group chat that “We are currently clean on OPSEC" -- the military acronym for operational security.

“Under the previous administration, we looked like fools,” Hegseth recently boasted. “Not anymore.” Hegseth, Waltz, and the rest of the participants in those fateful discussions should soon become subjects of a national security investigation, during which they will presumably be wired up to polygraph machines, just as Hegseth has sternly prescribed for all suspected Pentagon leakers.

As soon as she read the news, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took to social media. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” quipped the irrepressible Democrat, daring her critics to bring up the old matter of “her emails” and the alleged scandal that probably cost her the presidency in 2016.

Despite Republican bleats of indignation, and angry posts urging her to “sit down” or worse, it is instructive to contrast what Hegseth and company did with Clinton’s own exhaustively investigated actions.

As reported in this space three years ago – and confirmed in a subsequent investigation by Washington Post reporter and fact-checker Glenn Kessler – Clinton actually disclosed no classified information in those fabled emails or her home server. Her innocence was confirmed not only by the Justice Department and the FBI (under Republican James Comey, who sank her campaign with his own unethical conduct), but in two subsequent State Department probes during the first Trump administration.

Among the Clinton emails that Comey used to tar her before the election, none disclosed national security information or were classified before she sent them. A typical example was a message from an aide, reminding her to send a condolence note to the president of Malawi.

Such innocuous and outdated information contrasts sharply with the real-time disclosure of a bombing mission which, if exposed, could jeopardize its success and the lives of the pilots and other military and intelligence personnel.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, described the Signal chat as “one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen.”

Joining many other Democrats and some dismayed Republicans, as well as a platoon of retired military and defense experts, Reed said, “Military operations need to be handled with utmost discretion, using approved, secure lines of communication, because American lives are on the line. The carelessness shown by President Trump’s Cabinet is stunning and dangerous.”

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY), an Army veteran and member of the House Armed Services Committee, offered an even more pithy reaction. “If House Republicans won’t hold a hearing on how this happened IMMEDIATELY, I’ll do it my damn self,” he wrote on X. “Only one word for this: FUBAR,” a military acronym that means “f----- up beyond all recognition.”

Which aptly expresses the condition of American national security under Donald Trump and his incompetent and highly suspect minions.

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A deplorable level of waste, abuse and fraud persists in the federal government, as well as in local and state governments run by both parties and in major corporations too. At the moment, however, America's most prolific source of fraud and waste appears to be the ironically named Department of Government Efficiency.

It wasn't supposed to be this way, of course. When Donald Trump returned to the presidency, he vowed -- as he had done many times before -- to crack down on all the loafers, crooks and spendthrifts on the government payroll. With a flourish he appointed the obscenely rich Elon Musk, who needs no further introduction, to lead DOGE and its cost-cutting crusade.

Having promised initially to cut $2 trillion -- or nearly a third of what the United States government spends annually -- Musk quickly backed away from that inflated target. The host of engineers, lawyers and right-wing political hacks that he imposed on federal agencies under the aegis of DOGE soon alarmed everyone by demanding access to confidential data and classified information, at great jeopardy to national and personal security.

Leaving aside the dangers posed by DOGE's bumbling invasion, the sum total of its cost-cutting campaign falls far short of the extravagant claims promoted by Musk and Trump. Nearly every day, the billionaire and his aides have cited millions and billions "saved" by eliminating federal programs, agencies, services and research, often with seemingly ludicrous examples of wasteful spending. Trump echoed many of them in his State of the Union speech, including an alleged study of "transgender mice." That was one of many mistakes served up by Trump and Musk -- in this instance, the research they were mocking involved "transgenic" mice, used to assess cancer and chronic illness treatments.

Much of what DOGE has served up so far is misinformation and disinformation of equally dismal quality. Its name should be changed to the Department of Gross Errors. Debunking the howlers tossed out by Musk's crew is now a regular beat for many news outlets, as "billions" of dollars in supposed savings routinely shrink by factors of a thousand or more -- to an infinitesimal fraction of what the grandiose Musk has asserted.

ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative reporting outlet, found that the cuts imposed on the IRS by DOGE are likely to cost the United States billions of dollars over the coming years. As every tax expert knows, the salaries of the auditors and experts dismissed by the DOGE geniuses are earned back many times over as they claw back taxes owed by wealthy miscreants. Firing these experienced auditors means squandering an investment that would have paid huge dividends for decades. Musk may not like what IRS auditors do -- which billionaire does? -- but that saves money for people like him, not the honest taxpayers.

And according to a front-page analysis published by the Wall Street Journal -- an impeccably right-wing newspaper owned by Fox News boss Rupert Murdoch -- DOGE's "wall of receipts" doesn't quite add up. Musk has boasted about his outfit cutting $55 billion in waste so far, but the canceled contracts posted on its website only came to $7 billion. And the Journal's reporting shows that at least half of those cancellations saved no money at all -- which means the real cuts represent less than 10% of the advertised amount.

Shall we call that "fraud," or is it "abuse"? Considering the time and money spent on DOGE, including its pointless distraction of federal employees who do real work with demands that they draw up lists of their achievements, it is certainly an enormous waste.

Meanwhile, Musk's minions keep busy spreading faked figures about one federal agency after another, as does their billionaire boss.

Evidently, they all harbor deep hostility toward the nation's most popular government program, Social Security -- which is why they have accused the Social Security Administration of paying out billions of dollars to people who have been dead for hundreds of years. Trump made a fool of himself with his dramatic repetition of that obviously false indictment before Congress, only to have Musk "apologize" and promise to do better.

But he assuredly will not do better, because his true purpose is not to "reform" the government or conserve its assets. Musk and Trump are waging ideological warfare against the idea and practice of democratic government that is of, by and for the people. They are creating an autocratic administration that extends control by would-be tyrants -- and, to judge from the Kremlin's admiring reviews, by tyrants who are already in power.

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