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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When Donald Trump and JD Vance roughed up Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House, their back-alley bullying was ... unpresidential, to put it politely. Tony Soprano would have displayed more diplomatic finesse than Trump, and the mobster's henchmen always had more dignity than Vance.

To vilify an American ally so publicly while spewing Russian propaganda points was a stunningly coarse betrayal.

But make no mistake in understanding what lies behind that contemptible episode, which represents the abandonment of American values and commitments under the banner of "America First." At this moment of national peril, let's not forget where the Trump gang found their foreign-policy slogan.

An organization purporting to represent the national interests of this country in the years before the Second World War, "America First" in fact served as a front for a hostile foreign power that sought to impose an authoritarian order on Europe and the world, with tactics designed to divide and deceive the American people.

In many ways, "America First" resembled the MAGA movement that undermines democratic institutions at home and promotes autocratic regimes abroad. And just as "America First" was subsidized and sometimes directed by agents of Hitler's Germany, MAGA now appears to be the Western front for Russia's ongoing subversion of democracies around the world.

Does that mean Trump himself has adopted the authoritarian outlook of the Kremlin's pet political philosophers? He doesn't seem capable of geopolitical thought beyond the most superficial. But it doesn't have to be complicated to work for Trump. Russia constantly offers big inducements to him, such as the secret election assistance its agents flashed at his campaign in 2016 (an invitation eagerly embraced by Donald Trump Jr. and later by campaign manager Paul Manafort).

Whatever his motive, Trump's subservience to Vladimir Putin is now beyond dispute, as he openly lies about the Russian dictator's invasion of Ukraine, while threatening and undermining Zelenskyy. He may well believe that a "peace deal" would bring his long-coveted plans for Trump Tower Moscow to fruition, not to mention all the other corrupt emoluments that Putin's oligarchs could lay before him. (Russians have already "invested" in his Truth Social money pit and must be snapping up pricey Don and Melania cryptocurrency meme coins by the thousand.

And let's not forget the perpetually insecure Trump's insatiable need for flattery. In his sordid way, he has repeatedly nominated himself for the Nobel Peace Prize, proclaiming on many occasions that he "deserves" the Norwegian honor more than others who received it, and obliging his sycophants to utter the same nonsense. Watching the prize slip away as Zelenskyy insisted on security guarantees surely frustrated him -- and led to that juvenile outburst in the Oval Office.

This relentless pursuit of financial and personal gain doesn't serve American interests in any way. Trump's campaign to wreck NATO and alienate our military allies in Europe and Canada only renders us less secure in an extremely dangerous world. Those reliable allies had our back after 9/11, the only instance when NATO's mutual defense pact has ever been activated. Trump and his idiot advisers have yet to explain how they will replace the defense and intelligence assets that help to protect us and our allies together, not only in NATO but across the Pacific as well.

Should Trump withdraw military and intelligence support from Kiev, as he menacingly warned Zelenskyy he would, he will shift the massive power of the United States into a de facto alliance with our longtime adversaries -- not only Russia, whose media and government organs constantly declare their anti-American hostility, but China and North Korea, both of which have joined the Kremlin's assault on Ukraine.

It will be fascinating to hear how Trump's Republican supporters in Congress, who often complain about the growing military and economic power of China, can justify what their president is doing in Europe. Whatever excuses they may present, we already know that they know that he is putting himself first -- and America last.

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As Americans struggle to grasp President Donald Trump's reversal of American foreign policy, which abruptly overturned decades of cooperation with other democracies to contain authoritarian aggression, many observers have faltered.

Describing what Trump has done strains the usual vocabulary of analysts, who are still not fully prepared to confront this administration's insidious purposes.

Yet there is a word familiar from Trump's first term that now defines precisely what he and Russian President Vladimir Putin are up to. That word is "collusion."

For most of the past decade, nothing provoked more anger in Trump and his associate than that word, which evoked a sinister and secretive connection dating back to his first presidential campaign or in some versions much earlier. Rumors circulated widely about his alleged status as a longtime asset of Russian security services, beginning in the Soviet era, or his supposed vulnerability to gamy blackmail by those same agencies, or his desire, eventually well documented, to build a "Trump Tower" in Moscow.

And during that 2016 campaign, copious evidence emerged that not only had the Kremlin wanted Trump to defeat its nemesis Hillary Clinton, but its leadership had enacted a whole series of "active measures" to ensure that result.

Under Putin's direct orders, Russian agencies pursued a broad strategy of online hacking and disinformation. Based in Putin's hometown of Saint Petersburg, the Internet Research Agency launched a barrage of social media designed to promote Trump and denigrate Clinton, influencing millions of Americans during the election cycle with fabricated stories. Hackers working for Russian military intelligence invaded the databases of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign, releasing reams of stolen files and emails through WikiLeaks and other outlets to create embarrassment and distraction.

It could not have been more obvious that the Trump campaign welcomed and encouraged Putin's election interference. Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and numerous other campaign aides met or contacted the Russians on as many as 200 occasions to pursue their shared objective. Even the sycophantic campaign chair Steve Bannon blurted that this pattern of behavior struck him as "treasonous."

Whether all this activity amounted to treason or not, the FBI and congressional investigating committees found enough evidence of espionage and other crimes to justify the appointment in May 2017 of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate "Russiagate."

In addition to firing former FBI Director James Comey, Trump did everything in his power to thwart the Mueller probe, including the abuse of his pardon power to silence Manafort, former adviser Roger Stone and others. As Mueller reported in 2019, Trump's manipulations helped forestall indictments charging conspiracy between the Trump campaign and its friends from Russia, although Mueller indicted three Russian organizations and 26 individual Russians.

The inability to charge Trump or his associates for conspiring with the Russians to influence the election in no way mitigated Mueller's finding that the Trump campaign had welcomed the Kremlin efforts and expected to benefit from them -- a finding corroborated by the Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's five-volume report on the same matter, released in July 2019.

Nevertheless, Trump and his minions in the Republican propaganda machine obscured all the damning details to proclaim full exoneration -- and Trump himself constantly repeated the phrase "no collusion," usually in all capital letters and punctuated as an exclamation, to insist that "Russia, Russia, Russia" was nothing more than "a hoax." Ever since then, he and his apologists have frequently and ludicrously declared that he was in fact history's toughest negotiator with the Kremlin, without a blush.

But now, behind the thin scrim of "peacemaking" in Ukraine, we see the noxious flowering of collusion in its fullest form.

From the Pentagon to the State Department to the White House, the direction of U.S. policy is unmistakable: to deprive the Ukrainians of sovereignty and freedom while bringing them under the Russian heel as quickly as possible. Among those advancing Russia's interests is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who boobishly capitulated in advance of the so-called negotiations. Hegseth was surpassed only by Trump himself, who consulted secretly with his pal Putin, while excluding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy from the process, then insulting and threatening him publicly.

This nefarious initiative has expanded in many directions, from Vice President JD Vance's threats against our European allies and his promotion of neo-Nazism in the German election to Elon Musk's use of his Starlink satellite system as an instrument of blackmail against Ukraine. Where it will go is terrifying to contemplate, but we can at least give it an accurate name.

It is nothing less than collusion between an American president and a hostile foreign dictator -- and it is the most brazen betrayal in our history.

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Elon Musk, required by federal law to file financial disclosures as he rampages across government, doesn't want anybody else looking at this tax returns. Neither does Donald Trump, the first president or presidential candidate in decades who refused to reveal his tax returns.

But they don't feel the same way about your tax returns, or mine, or the private financial and banking information of hundreds of millions of other Americans. The billionaire and his president are now demanding that the Internal Revenue Service provide access to its highly confidential data systems for Musk's unvetted aides in the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, according to reports in the Washington Post and the New York Times. The DOGE bros supposedly require this unprecedented capacity to invade Americans' privacy in order to curb IRS "waste."

Both newspapers also report that the specific DOGE employee assigned to the IRS is an engineer named Gavin Kliger, who recently gained a measure of infamy when a Reuters article revealed his social media posts endorsing racist and antisemite Nick Fuentes and misogynist and accused rapist Andrew Tate. His Substack account is full of rants about "bureaucracy," COVID-19 restrictions and his heroic decision to join DOGE to "fix" the government. (When the media first revealed his identity as a DOGE employee, Kliger immediately attempted to raise his Substack's subscription price to $1000.)

Naturally IRS officials and independent experts have expressed profound alarm at the notion that Kliger, his boss Musk and others of their ilk would have free-ranging access to innocent citizens' IRS accounts and all the data stored in them -- which is supposed to be kept safe from such malign actors. Those same experts fear that the personal data of millions of Americans may have been compromised already by DOGE employees who gained access to Treasury Department systems that disburse federal funds.

Nina Olson, who served as the IRS internal consumer watchdog for 18 years, offered this warning to the Post: “The information that the IRS has is incredibly personal. Someone with access to it could use it and make it public in a way, or do something with it, or share it with someone else who shares it with someone else, and your rights get violated."

The reckless Musk has already demonstrated on X, the social media platform he owns and controls, that he will misuse personal information for his own vindictive purposes. Last fall, he identified an employee of the US International Development Finance Corporation who works on climate issues, naming her and questioning whether she deserved a federal job. “So many fake jobs,” he wrote, insulting her and provoking an avalanche of abuse after 33 million views. In January, as wildfires raged in Los Angeles, Musk blamed minority and female firefighters for the failure to stop them, posting their names and photographs.

There was no law requiring Trump to disclose his taxes, although some returns were revealed against his will (and showed how he escaped paying his share). At the moment, Musk and the Trump White House are relying on an apparent loophole in federal ethics law that may exempt a "special government employee" like him from its disclosure requirements.

If so, that loophole needs to be closed. Public interest groups and state attorneys general should file litigation to force Musk -- who constantly barks about "maximum transparency" in government -- to disgorge his data. Whatever is good for the ordinary taxpayer should be good for the tax-dodging billionaires too.

Few Americans would welcome an elected leader from Germany or France who gave a speech on our soil, urging politicians here to stop shunning the Ku Klux Klan. Yet that isn't so far from the message delivered to European officials by Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14 -- which understandably provoked outrage among our allies, just as Vance and his boss, President Donald Trump, must have intended.

Instead of addressing Europe's security concerns, such as Trump's impending abandonment of Ukraine to Russian aggression, Vance lectured his audience on domestic issues such as "free speech," immigration and the rejection of ultra-right extremism.

Nobody familiar with Vance, a man known for spreading false stories about migrants eating pets in his home state, could have been surprised to learn that he uttered numerous falsehoods in Munich. In warning against infringements on religious speech, for instance, he claimed that Scotland had intimidated its citizens from privately praying in their own homes. Scottish officials instantly rebutted that absurd lie, which referred to a carefully drafted law creating small "buffer zones" for protesters at abortion clinics.

But the thrust of Vance's remarks represented a brazen attempt to interfere in the German national elections that will occur next week, signaling Trump administration support for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party.

"Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters," Vance intoned. "There's no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don't." Although he didn't mention the AfD by name, his inference couldn't have been clearer. Every mainstream political party in Germany has quarantined that party's antisemites and Nazi apologists behind a political firewall for decades, symbolizing their nation's commitment to prevent any resurgence of fascism before it can occur.

And immediately after his appearance, greeted with stony silence from the Munich conference delegates, Vance met with AfD leader Alice Weidel. A banker who has defended her party's worst racists and bigots, while pretending that the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was "a communist," Weidel then praised Vance's speech as "excellent."

The comparison between the KKK and the AfD is all too appropriate, and not only because the German party echoes the racist rhetoric of thugs in white hoods. Back when Nazi spies in this country spent millions to subvert the United States during the years before World War II, their "German American Bund" forged a secret alliance with the Klan. It was a time when many American politicians, especially in the South, openly described the KKK as a legitimate expression of "the voice of the people." No doubt Vance would have been among them.

Today, the AfD members elected to public office in Germany don't hesitate to exploit anti-immigrant hatred and racial bigotry against both Muslims and Jews. No less an authority than the U.S. State Department -- during the first Trump administration -- repeatedly reprimanded the vile racism of AfD figures in its annual reports on human rights in Germany.

"While senior government leaders continued to condemn anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiment," the State Department noted in 2018, "some members of the federal parliament and state assemblies from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party again made anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim statements."

So typical were the poisonous outbursts from AfD officials that they drew the attention of the Anti-Defamation League in the United States, which has described the party as a "radicalized" entity "whose leaders have made antisemitic, anti-Muslim and anti-democratic" statements.

The European leaders offended by Vance reiterated their determination to defend their continent against totalitarians of all varieties -- as did Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose rebuke reminded everyone why most Germans will have nothing to do with the AfD. "Never again fascism, never again racism, never again aggressive war," he said. "That is why an overwhelming majority in our country opposes anyone who glorifies or justifies criminal National Socialism."

Glorifying Nazism doesn't seem to trouble Vance, Trump or their designated hitman Elon Musk, who has publicly endorsed an AfD victory as "the only hope for Germany." But Vance's interference in German politics is more than a token of the Trump administration's fascist inclinations, as if any more were needed.

Like Trump's urge to back Russian aggression against Ukraine in his "peace" initiative, the White House embrace of German fascists again shows the American president promoting the interests of a foreign power hostile to the United States and the West. What Vance said and did enraged our longtime allies in Europe, but his words aligned perfectly with Russian President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin -- whose assistance to German fascism defiles the sacrifice of all the Russians and Americans who died to defeat Hitler.

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For Christians here and across the world, the ongoing confrontation over the fate of USAID dramatically illustrates the moral degeneration of the politicians who most fervently profess their piety. While Donald Trump wraps himself in the mantle of the Almighty, his assault on the world’s largest relief agency is a modern passion play, with scheming malefactors of great wealth sadistically persecuting sincere people of faith who seek to serve the poor.

Not everyone who works for USAID, a government agency that employs hundreds of private contractors, is motivated by charity or religious conviction. While many are nonprofits, others are profitable companies. But the agency’s single largest contractor is Catholic Relief Services, which has provided billions of dollars in assistance to impoverished communities on every continent.

Nearly every denomination is represented among the recipients of USAID funding, including major evangelical and conservative organizations such as Samaritan’s Purse, the global charity operated by Franklin Graham -- who happens to be among Donald Trump’s most sycophantic admirers. Graham's reputation as a "humanitarian" has surely benefited from his organization's association with US relief efforts, not to mention $90 million in taxpayer support. And he knows that Musk and Trump are lying about USAID.As Christianity Today reported on February 4:

Most of USAID’s budget goes to grants for specific development projects, including at Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision, World Relief, Catholic Relief Services, and many other faith-based groups. It supports local Christian health clinics in Malawi and groups providing orphan care.

In Kenya, PCEA Chogoria Hospital, a historic mission hospital now run by Kenyan churches, provides comprehensive health care to HIV patients through support from USAID. On January 24 the hospital received a stop-work order for that care and has had no indication of a return of funding despite [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio’s promises that life-saving HIV care could continue. The hospital has 3,162 HIV patients in that USAID-funded program, and 42 staff members caring for those patients…“It is exceptionally painful to watch all this,” said Kent Hill, a former top official at USAID who also worked at World Vision and in Christian higher education as the president of Eastern Nazarene College. If USAID has specific problems, shutting the whole agency down instead of addressing the problems is a “tremendous overreaction” and “inhumane,” he said.

“Few American investments, if any, bring such a remarkable return,” Hill said. “To talk about shutting USAID down is callous and represents a tremendous a lapse in judgment which ought to call forth bipartisan condemnation.”

What do Rev. Graham and other evangelical leaders on the right think when they hear Elon Musk accuse USAID of corruption, with zero evidence, and denounce it as a “criminal” organization that must “die"?” The foreign-born billionaire boasted about putting the agency “in the wood chipper,” as if the deprivation and suffering that would ensue among the ill and hungry is a funny fratboy joke.

What seems truly amusing, by contrast, is the notion of Donald Trump as a follower of Christ, specially anointed by the Lord. From the beginning of his political career, the former casino owner has cultivated the tawdriest characters in Christianity, from the pants-dropping Jerry Falwell Jr. to TV evangelists Paula White, Kenneth Copeland, and other exponents the “prosperity gospel.” Like Trump, these are individuals whose unbridled avarice leaves little space for good works of any kind. It isn't hard to imagine them mocking the actual Christians who minister to the poor instead of swindling them.

Perhaps to promote sales of Trump-branded Bibles, he played the devout Christian at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 6. “Well, we wanna bring religion back stronger, bigger, better than ever before. It’s very important,” the president declared. “We have to have religion and it suffered greatly over the last few years, but it’s coming back.”

As for Musk, once lionized by libertarians for his atheism, the world’s richest man has taken to proclaiming his belief in “the teachings of Jesus Christ,” notably to “love thy neighbor.” In a late 2022 tweet, he wrote: "Jesus taught love, kindness and forgiveness. I used to think that turning the other cheek was weak and foolish, but I was the fool for not appreciating its profound wisdom." This alleged attraction to Christian principles accompanied Musk’s turn toward the far right, with its hostility toward racial minorities, immigrants, and all of the destitute and oppressed.

In short, Musk now qualifies as that most MAGA brand of Christian -- a hypocrite who exploits religion to amplify his own power and wealth, with a heavenly license to bully the weak. Somehow ruining the lives of people who depend on USAID for their very sustenance seems much more like the devil’s work.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

The last time Americans faced the possible spread of Ebola to U.S. territory, in 2014, Donald Trump irresponsibly stoked public fears and barked at Barack Obama while doing nothing useful to protect us. Now the same deadly virus has showed up in the crowded capital of Uganda -- where a nurse has died -- and is threatening to spread further, which means it could eventually arrive here.

And this time Trump has done something far worse, mindlessly ripping down the shield that has defended us from Ebola and similar menaces. If and when the hemorrhagic virus arrives here to kill Americans, he won't be able to point an accusing finger at Obama or anyone else.

Last August marked the 10th anniversary of the Ebola outbreak in Liberia that the Obama administration stopped through the work of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overseen by White House officials, all working in cooperation with other countries and the World Health Organization.

It was a complex undertaking: Led by Ron Klain, who later became Joe Biden's chief of staff, veteran officials mounted what's known as a "whole of government" effort to confine the outbreak in West Africa and bolster the local response with advanced medicine, protective gear, burial teams and experienced clinicians.

The result they achieved was an enormous success that saved many lives and enhanced American prestige abroad. Hundreds of idiotic carping tweets from Trump, then just a celebrity conspiracy monger, were an ignoble footnote.

Flash forward to our current dark moment, when the Trump administration is abruptly eviscerating all kinds of vital government functions -- including our once-unparalleled capacity to suppress a hazard like Ebola before it seriously imperiled our citizens.

Almost as soon as he returned to the Oval Office, the president misused his power to cripple all the agencies whose personnel and expertise are most needed at this moment to guard against the return of Ebola. On his orders, the United States withdrew from the WHO, while his minions took down USAID websites and shut down most CDC functions.

Mark Leon Goldberg, a journalist who superbly covers international organizations and America's role in the world, explained how the system is supposed to work in his Global Dispatches column on Substack:

"Under normal circumstances, there would be no need to panic. Since the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak, local health officials in Africa and the international community have become skilled at containing outbreaks before they spread out of control. There have been at least eight separate outbreaks in the region, but all have been contained. None spread internationally, least of all to the United States.

"At the center of these efforts to stop the international spread of Ebola are the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the United States Agency for International Development. These agencies work with local authorities and provide platforms for international cooperation that help develop and deploy vaccines, conduct disease surveillance, and work directly with local health officials to provide capacity where it may be lacking."

He quotes Stephanie Psaki, a former National Security Council official, outlining the "playbook" that those agencies followed to stem countless disease outbreaks -- implemented at high speed with international partners, emergency funding and trained health professionals in place.

What's suddenly different, says Goldberg, is that "there's no one left to execute that playbook. Trump fired most of them. ... Simply put, the methods and strategy that have successfully kept Americans safe from eight Ebola outbreaks over the last decade are no longer operational."

The same numbskull who once mouthed off about Ebola has left us more vulnerable to it than we've ever been before. Trump's own former surgeon general, Dr. Jerome Adams, recently warned against the vindictive and stupid assault on the nation's public health infrastructure by his old boss.

"Regardless of how you feel about 'public health,' or 'Fauci,' it's a real bad time to have blocked public communications from CDC, and work with WHO," Adams scolded on social media. "Republicans must understand (that) they're gonna own any and all preventable outbreaks / harm moving forward."

He means the Republicans who are letting Trump run wild. But no worries! When the coffins are lined up, I'm sure they will all send thoughts and prayers.

Within days of Donald Trump entering the Oval Office, he decreed by executive order that the United States will withdraw from the World Health Organization. He ordered the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services to stop communicating with the public and other scientific organizations. And he withdrew the security protecting Dr. Anthony Fauci, the retired federal infectious disease expert.

Why would Trump issue these reckless orders, which appear ill-timed and foolish as the H5N1 virus -- bird flu -- begins to spread across the nation? Having already killed millions of chickens, this disease appears now to have killed at least one American male -- and could soon mutate into a form transmitted from human to human.

To anyone who remembers how Trump mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic during his final year in office, his actions during the first week of his second term are deeply ominous. The U.S. death toll was the highest in the world, with over a million Americans struck down by the virus, despite the fact that we had access to vaccines before many other countries.

Despite Trump's laudable effort to encourage production of vaccines, he also became the principal obstacle to an effective response. Politics dictated Trump's actions from the very beginning, when he downplayed the pandemic threat and pretended that coronavirus would disappear before Easter. He discouraged testing, again because he wanted to minimize the threat. Listening to extremist advisers, he promoted quack cures, scoffed at effective health measures like masking, and undermined trust in public health authorities. His statements and actions resulted in countless unnecessary fatalities -- ironically concentrated among his own Republican supporters.

Now Trump appears to be deflecting blame for his own failures onto international and federal agencies -- and onto Fauci, whose undeserved status as a whipping boy for the far right has brought death threats against him and even his family.

It's not that WHO and the U.S. health agencies didn't make mistakes in coping with COVID-19 -- a new form of illness that kept mutating and defying measures to bring it under control. Even the wise and experienced Fauci didn't get everything right. But the errors and missteps by Trump and his administration were far more consequential -- and worse, were plainly motivated by political self-interest.

While the actual impact of Trump's executive orders has yet to be determined, their effects could severely undermine our defenses against the next pandemic, which seems likely to arrive sooner than expected. As a member of WHO, the United States benefits from the WHO global surveillance network that monitors perilous diseases such as influenza and Ebola -- providing timely data, genetic material and other crucial information to our scientists. Removing U.S. funding and support will seriously undermine that system and endanger the entire world, including us.

Silencing or chilling communications from federal health agencies -- and halting their exchanges with other scientists both here and abroad -- poses a different risk. Prohibited from publishing scientific reports, issuing health advisories or updating their websites, the CDC and NIH won't be able to send out public alerts and recommended procedures, with potentially grave effects on our collective response to a pandemic.

These dictates from the new Trump regime are a spooky echo of the old Trump regime's bad behavior.

Recall that in late February 2020, a top CDC official publicly warned of an imminent pandemic and urged Americans to prepare for the shutdown of schools and workplaces. The president instantly threatened to fire her and forbade the CDC from delivering briefings on measures to combat the virus.

Instead, Trump took over the briefings and constantly misinformed the public. On masking, for instance, he said, "You don't have to do it. I'm choosing not to do it." Trump not only contracted the virus and became gravely ill -- surviving only thanks to special care at Walter Reed Army Hospital -- but made many others in his orbit sick as well. He nearly killed his former friend Chris Christie by exposing him to the virus (although typically Trump claims it was Christie who infected him).

We may soon relive that nightmare. Sadly, this president appears to have learned nothing from experience, except how to deflect responsibility. That won't protect any of us -- not even Trump.

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Legalized bribery is still bribery -- and there is no other way to describe the celebration that marks the second presidential inauguration of Donald Trump.

With the menacing manner of a mob boss, Trump has extorted million-dollar contributions from dozens of corporations that fear federal retribution against their shareholders or management (as in the case of Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, who coughed up his million after Trump literally threatened him with "life in prison" not so long ago).

No doubt many of the corporate and billionaire donors are keen to prove their loyalty to a new administration that promises to uphold their interests. They know better than to worry about Republican proclamations that their party now represents "working class" Americans. Nobody who has glanced at Project 2025 or read Elon Musk's posts could harbor any such illusions -- and surely the inaugural donors from outfits such as General Motors, the pharmaceutical lobby, Pratt Industries, Uber, Amazon and Microsoft do not.

Many of the corporations currently greasing Trump withheld donations from his 2016 festivities, apparently repelled by the racism, misogyny and propensity for violence he had flaunted during the campaign. Some combination of fear and greed has overcome any such scruples this year.

Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, a nonprofit that monitors corporate influence, is tracking the payments of tribute, and even its jaded staffers are shocked by the Trump inaugural's brazen style. Said Craig Holman, a government ethics expert at the Nader group: "The record-breaking cesspool of special interest financing for the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee raises serious concerns about the ability of corporations and wealthy special interests to purchase influence over public policy or lucrative government contracts."

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Estimates of the amount that the presidential inauguration committee will collect from both eager and reluctant donors range up to $200 million, a record sum certain to prompt boasting from Trump and his minions. Impressive though it is, the inaugural hoard only represents a down payment on what portends to be four years of unprecedented and gluttonous corruption.

If you wonder why Trump needs $200 million for this little event, so does everyone who ever ran a prior inauguration. Due to frigid weather in Washington, the 47th president will take the oath of office indoors at a ceremony paid for by the taxpayers. Then the Trump-Vance committee will host only three inaugural balls -- a tiny schedule compared with the number of balls held by his predecessors -- plus a few events at his Trump National Golf Club, miles from the capital.

In other words, they're spending almost none of that big haul.

Yet while the actual expense of parties and fireworks will be nominal, the opportunities for grift are vast. As in so many instances during Trump's first presidency, those golf club events are siphoning big money from the inaugural fund into his business accounts.

The Trumps ran the same kind of scam eight years ago, when the 2016 inaugural committee inked massively overpriced contracts for rooms and services purchased from the Trump hotel in Washington. That pattern continued during his administration, with big profits booked from taxpayers footing hotel and resort bills for Secret Service agents protecting Trump and his family.

Where will all the money go? In 2017, the Trump inaugural raised $107 million, a total far in excess of what the committee spent on its events. The committee -- whose top staff included notorious crooks Rick Gates and Elliot Broidy -- never presented any accounting of its expenditures, let alone an audit. Tens of millions of dollars simply disappeared.

The official story is that funds not spent on this week's inaugural will be transferred to the newly formed Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund Inc. -- with the supposed purpose of establishing a repository and museum memorializing his presidency.

Maybe that will happen someday. But the sordid history of the Trump Foundation, ordered to shut down after the New York state attorney general proved its myriad abuses, showed that the Trumps are familiar with every trick for stealing from a nonprofit. The likelihood is that most or all of the tainted inaugural lucre will wind up in their pockets.

Day One won't see a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia, a drop in grocery prices, or anything else that Trump promised during his campaign. The customary grifting will resume promptly, however. In fact, it has already begun.

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The solidarity of American communities in the face of catastrophe, whether natural or manmade, is an aspect of our national character that most of us cherish. We never tire of stories about our fellow citizens upholding one another at the worst of times. We venerate the firefighters, emergency service workers, law enforcement officers and ordinary neighbors whose endurance and sacrifice hold communities together against cruel circumstance -- without regard to race, creed, color, gender or partisan affiliation.

Or at least we did during much of our history. Yet as huge swaths of Los Angeles are consumed by wildfire, it is striking to see those traditional American values torched by a self-serving coterie of right-wing billionaires, whose loyalty to any principle beyond self-aggrandizement is nil: Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and of course their political avatar Donald Trump, the president-elect.

While the LA blaze rages on, all three of these men have used their gigantic public platforms to stoke a different but exceptionally destructive conflagration. Rather than encourage patriotic bonding and mutual aid, they broadcast messages of division, hatred and suspicion, served up in a poisonous stew of blatant lies, conspiracy theories and wretched nonsense.

Even as the Los Angeles Fire Department's undaunted officers and leaders work around the clock, confronting danger and tragedy in every moment, loudmouths like Musk have the temerity to attack them, prattling on about "DEI," the effort to mitigate decades of discrimination. Neither the Tesla mogul nor Murdoch's blithering minions on the Fox News Channel -- who are shocked that the LA fire chief is a lesbian -- have produced a shred of evidence to show that diversity hinders firefighting. They never will. For the purposes of right-wing Republican propaganda, facts and logic are irrelevant and annoying.

In the same vein are Trump's attacks on California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom he disparages with his usual gutter vernacular as "Newscum." Posting ridiculous falsehoods about the state's water supply, claiming the governor is withholding water from burning communities, can only be regarded as an obnoxious distraction while state officials try to save lives and stop the fire. With reservoir levels at or above capacity in most of the state, there is no shortage of water, but its use has been hampered by the hurricane-force winds and other more technical obstacles.

Instead of seeking ways to support the scorched and weary Angelenos, the Trump gang aims only to fabricate myths that will overshadow the real cause of this disaster. On CNN, GOP spokesman Scott Jennings has repeated a fake story about budget cuts to the LA Fire Department, when in fact the department received a $50 million increase last year. Donald Trump Jr. and various other clowns are whining over a tiny donation of equipment to Ukraine, which has no impact whatsoever.

They will literally say anything to avoid discussing the way climate change -- the underlying cause of the hot, dry superstorm that turned a local fire into a regional inferno. They don't believe in it, so it can't be causing the fires. Except of course it is.

Trump's impending return to power is awful to contemplate in these circumstances -- especially for those in California who remember how he behaved the last time he occupied the Oval Office. He denies climate change and opposes any program to stem its deadly impact. And he has repeatedly manipulated federal aid to punish states he considered politically hostile to him, including during the 2018 wildfires in southern California.

As reported earlier this year by Politico, Trump refused to approve critical assistance for those communities until aides showed him that Orange County had given him more votes in 2016 than the entire state of Iowa. Obviously, that is not what presidential duty requires, as if that would matter to him.

The incoming president appears to have no compassion, no instinct to help those who have suffered horrendous losses. As usual, he is thinking about himself, his partisan objectives and his obsession with vengeance against perceived enemies.

The Trump years, which will soon be extended for another presidential term, have inflicted awful damage on American morale, empathy and unity. Restoring that spirit will take years and probably decades after he finally leaves. It doesn't seem accidental that Murdoch and Musk, Trump's gleeful enablers, are of foreign origin. Like him, they display no regard for American ethics and customs. And like him, they are making America not great but small, stupid and mean.

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Elon Musk's aggressive defense of the H-1B visa program -- which permits his companies Tesla and SpaceX to bring engineers and other workers from overseas -- has aroused fury among his erstwhile admirers on the far right. Despite his ongoing efforts to identify himself with the most extreme nationalists, xenophobes and racists both here and across Europe, they suspect that the world's richest man is driven not by love of his adopted country but by his lust for money.

Fresh evidence that Donald Trump's new best friend is motivated by greed rather than MAGA fervor has emerged via Electrek, a popular website that covers the electric vehicle and green energy industries (and has sometimes been accused of excessive solicitude for Musk and Tesla, or worse).

Electrek reported this week that after a massive wave of layoffs at Tesla last spring, the company replaced many of its higher-paid American employees with foreign workers holding H-1B visas. In the wake of Musk's bruising online feud with other Trump allies -- most prominently Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer -- a number of whistleblowers reportedly showed up to expose the EV giant's alleged mistreatment of Americans working there.

"Over the last few days, several current and former Tesla workers reached out to Electrek to reveal that Tesla ramped up its use of H-1B visas to replace US workers it let go during a wave of layoffs earlier this year," according to a story by its editor-in-chief, Fred Lambert, that led the website on Dec. 30.

Last April, Electrek reported that Tesla dismissed about 15,000 U.S. employees, mostly in Texas and California -- but then the company moved to fill those same jobs with imported labor at lower cost.

"Current and former Tesla employees said that many of the laid-off US workers were replaced by foreign workers using H-1B visas," the website reported on Dec. 30. "These claims are backed by US Department of Labor data, which show that Tesla requested over 2,000 H-1B visas during the time it was laying off US workers. ... Tesla workers said that many employees let go were more senior engineers with higher compensation and they have been replaced with junior engineers from foreign countries at a lower pay."

Lambert offered his own nuanced view of the controversy, which is that H-1B visas may well have a legitimate role in supporting U.S. tech industries but can also be abused -- which may be what Musk has been doing. He points out that the H-1B rules afford corporations like Tesla enormous power over the visa-holding workers, who can only remain here as long as they are employed by the firm that sponsored them. In other words, those workers have far less autonomy and clout than unionized worker in auto -- and we already know how much Musk hates unions.

One need not endorse the bigotry of Bannon and Loomer -- nor their ridiculous views on immigration -- to acknowledge that they are probably right about Musk and other bosses lining up to exploit MAGA "nationalism" for their own power and enrichment.

As for the president-elect, of course he has been on both sides of the H-1B debate, depending on whatever profits him at the moment. Various subsidiaries of the Trump Organization have hired thousands of foreign workers, using both the H-1B and related H-2B visa programs -- yet that didn't stop candidate Trump from denouncing those programs as "very bad" and "unfair" for American workers when he was first running for president in 2016.

Charlatans like Musk and Trump are fortunate that the MAGA herd tends to be ignorant and gullible -- which is why Republicans can pretend to support American workers and complain about the "globalists" and "elitists" who are quietly financing their campaigns.

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