Maybe it’s my sportswriting background, but when a big event comes along, it’s hard not to study the field, put whatever is left of my reputation on the line, and predict a winner.

I used to be far better at forecasting political things when my increasingly liberal heart didn’t interfere with what is rattling around inside my head. For example, I just knew that Nixon was going to wallop McGovern, and Reagan was going to destroy Carter. There was never a doubt in my mind that Obama was going to beat Hillary Clinton in 2008, for the right to batter John McCain, and then Mitt Romney in 2012.

I think 2012 was just about the last time I have been right about anything when picking political horse races. That year, I hit the trifecta, when I predicted Barack Obama would win every swing state, and blow Romney out of the water. Unfortunately, so did the New York Times’ Nate Silver and he got all the credit …

Since then, it’s been all downhill for me and my country.

I mean, I still haven’t gotten over the 2016 election, and most likely never will. I was one of those haughty guys who said he could never win. That was also the last time I ever overestimated my country’s good taste, and sense of smell.

But something is in the air this year, and I can feel my mojo coming back, so I’ll take the opportunity to pump out my chest a bit, and remind everybody that last December I was predicting momentous midterm elections for the Democrats, typing this:

“If the midterms were held this Tuesday, Republicans would lose the House by 40 to 60 seats, as well as the Senate. Big races, small races, and medium races would swing toward the Left, because that is exactly what has been quietly happening among the carnage of Trump’s continued attack on America.”

Well, 11 months later, the midterms are finally here, and I am still feeling mighty bullish about Democrats’ chances to whip up a proper Blue Tsunami next Tuesday.

The year feels very much like 2006 to me, when the idiot, George W. Bush, much like Trump now, was slogging through the sixth year of his presidency. We were in the middle of an unpopular war in the Middle East (because we seemingly always are under Republicans), the economy was showing signs of retracting (because it seemingly always is under Republicans), and there was considerable fatigue with the Republican establishment, which had once again brought us nothing but pain.

The Democrats surprisingly gained six seats in the Senate that year, and 31 in the House to take over leadership of both chambers. Bush called his party’s losses that year “a thumping” and his abhorrent presidency for all intents and purposes was over, but not before he brought about the greatest economic collapse since The Depression.

I was working in Germany at the time, and the bars stayed open deep into the night while Germans and Yanks alike celebrated the fact that America was still capable of getting something right on occasion.

Two years later, we really knocked their socks off when we elected Obama.

sigh

Those were the days …

There is not a single thing recommending Republicans this year, unless you like war, high prices, dirty air and water, and white supremacy. I see another first-class thumping on the way.

Trump is one of the most unpopular presidents in history, and Democrats have been doing nothing but winning races the past two years, including landslides in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections.

I believe strongly in this case that past performance is very indicative of future results. I think the electorate has already told us how they intend to vote this year, by how they already have.

So what will happen Tuesday?

This.Democrats need a net gain of three seats for control of the chamber. If they can’t do at least that much, I will be packing my bags, and going off to die in some corner. It will be better than what’s coming.

Thankfully, death and that corner will have to wait, because I see the Dems racking up huge wins all over the map.

Mike Johnson's Republicans currently hold a 219-214 seat edge with two vacancies (one on each side).

A lot has been written about the 2018 Blue Wave in which Dems roared to control of the House by picking up a whopping 41 seats. People forget, though, that they were in a far deeper hole heading into that election, when they had only 195 seats, and needed to pickup at least 23 seats for control of the House.

While a 41-seat pickup isn’t out of the question this year, thanks to aggressive Republican gerrymandering, there are far less competitive seats on the 2026 map. With those caveats in place, I am going to say that when all the counting is done (drumroll please):

Democrats will pick up an even 30 seats in the House, and will hold a commanding, 244-191 advantage.

I actually wanted to stretch my prediction into the 250-185 range, but will hedge my bets just a bit. I suppose I am getting cautious in my old age, and don’t want to throw out my back by reaching too much.

If you are looking for a race to watch that might tell the tale early Tuesday night, so you can hit the rack at a reasonable hour, the one happening in my new backyard is worth keeping both your eyes on.

Democrat Don Davis is facing a challenge from Republican Lori Buckhout in NC-1, here in Eastern North Carolina. If Davis can hold his seat, it will portend a very long night for Republicans nationally. Since the 2024 election, North Carolina Republicans aggressively redrew this district, making it much more GOP friendly, with the aim of ensuring a win for any Republican candidate going forward.

Except Buckhout, has been trying to run away from the historically unpopular Trump, as much as she has been running against Davis. This is a common theme across the country. There has been an ungodly amount of money spent here — roughly $40 million — which is insane for a race Republicans thought they had in the bag just a year ago.

Polls close at 7:30 p.m. EST here in North Carolina.

If Davis holds, Democrats might be on their way to a full-blown rout, and that 250-185 advantage could be in play.

Either way, it will be a huge night for Democrats running for congress.

The math is lot easier here, and even a journalist like myself can track it breaking only a minimal sweat. The Democrats need to pickup four seats on Tuesday for a 51-49 advantage.

And let’s address the shoddily dressed elephant in the room from Pennsylvania before going further …

Thanks to the reprehensible John Fetterman, a Democrat by name only, I strongly believe Democrats need to pick up five Senate seats to have a safe majority. Should the Democrats ‘only’ pick up four, Fetterman would become the most powerful person in the Senate, and emit some odious Joe Manchin vibes. Nobody did more damage to Joe Biden’s presidency than the West Virginia Democrat, Manchin, who seemed to delight in using his swing vote in that 50-50 Senate to stab Biden in the back every chance he got.

To get to the key number of five, Democrats need to defend the four competitive Senate seats that they already hold in Georgia, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Michigan. If they can do that, and I believe they will, then they must also flip at least five seats currently held by Republicans.

Incredibly, I believe there are eight states in serious play to get those seats, along with a few outliers that might be long-shot possibilities if Democrats are having a truly historic night.

Here’s how I rate these races in the order of their probability of flipping blue:

1. NORTH CAROLINA: If Roy Cooper doesn’t win down here, I will eat my hat, and yours for good measure.
2. ALASKA: Mary Peltola is the perfect candidate for the state, and is running against a pair of Dan Sullivans. To quote another more-famous Sullivan for the Boomers out there: “This will be a very big shoe, for a very big foot …” Peltola uses both her feet to kick the two Sullivans out the door.
3. OHIO: Here's where things start getting tricky. I believe like Cooper, Sherrod Brown is the perfect Democratic candidate for Ohio, but I still don’t trust this state. Used to be “as Ohio goes, so goes the nation.” This year, as Ohio goes, so goes the Democrats’ chances of taking the Senate.
4. MAINE: I lived in Maine, and was working at a paper there the first year Susan Collins was elected to the Senate 30 years ago. I trust it even less than Ohio. I have heard rumors of Collins’ political demise for decades, and she’s still standing. Say what you want about her (please), but she is an underrated politician who navigates the squishy middle just about better than anybody I have ever seen. If she loses, it will be closer than a tick on a deer. Some Maine lingo there …
5. TEXAS: I trust Texas even less than I trust Maine and Ohio. Texas is the Democrats’ great white whale. They can get close, and even taste it, but in the end, the whale always eludes them. But you know what? Republicans used to say the same thing about Pennsylvania. Then, in that hellish 2016 election, they finally toppled the place, and it is now one of the premier battleground states. I hate you, Pennsylvania, I really do, but you did prove that anything — good or bad — is possible. So if Pennsylvania can flip, why not Texas? And if Texas finally goes the way of Democrats, good people, everything you thought you knew about the electoral map in the U.S. will go right out the window. Republicans cannot win the presidency if they can’t win Texas. I say James Talarico will beat the reprehensible Ken Paxton, and Republicans’ worst fears are realized.
6. IOWA: Democrat Josh Turek and Republican Ashley Hinson are in the middle of a good old-fashioned donnybrook there. Wasn’t so long ago Iowa was a battleground state, but then the Republicans took over the radio airways and media markets in the state, and claimed it as their own. There is a lesson there for Democrats … If Turek can pull this one off, it will portend a disaster for Republicans Tuesday night.
7. KANSAS: Latest polling in the state I was able to find shows 45% of Kansas voters support Democrat Adam Hamilton and 43% support incumbent Republican Roger Marshall. Democrats haven’t won a Senate race in Kansas in 94 years. Read that again. That this state is even in play is a win in itself for Democrats.
8. SOUTH CAROLINA: Up until this morning, I wasn’t ready to put it on my list, but a brand-new New York Times poll came out and has the Democrat, Dr. Annie Andrews, in a dead heat with Darline Graham, the late Senator’s sister. It’s both insane that this race is close in this Deep Red state, and that Graham would actually be considered to serve in the U.S. Senate by any sane person. I am to the point where I would sell my soul to see Andrews win this seat.

So those are the eight, and now I can hear some of you gnashing your teeth in Nebraska, and Florida. I am not saying these states are completely out of play for the Democrats, especially if this a Blue Tsunami, but I just can’t bring myself to predict victory in these places. I would be delighted if I was wrong.

So where will the Senate land? I say Democrats pickup six of the eight seats that are seriously in play just as they did in 2006, and have a working margin of 53-47 heading into 2027.

Currently, Republicans lead 26 states, and Democrats 24. I predict that for the first time in 16 years, Democrats will govern more states than Republicans when all the votes are counted.

There are five governorships that are rated as true tossups right now.

1. OHIO: Democrat Amy Acton will beat the grotesque Vivek Ramaswamy.
2. NEVADA: Democrat Aaron Ford will knock off Joe Lombardo.
3. WISCONSIN: Democrat David Crowley will put away Trump-lover Tom Tiffany.
4. GEORGIA: Keisha Lance Bottoms will defeat Rick Jackson in the Peach State.
5. ALASKA: Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins will beat three other challengers.

And again, I hear your teeth gnashing …

What about Florida, Texas, and Kansas? I think all three of these races are going to be closer than expected, and if Democrats are having that historic night I talked about earlier, one, two or all of them could go their way.

My guess is many Texan Republicans will split their vote and Greg Abbott will survive, while Paxton falls. I think David Jolly is going to throw a real scare at Byron Donalds in Florida, and Republican Ty Masterson will win in Kansas, but I wouldn’t bet a rusty nickel on it. Kansas is looking very squirrely for Republicans right now.

So that’s how I see the headline races playing out, my friends. No less important are all the state-level races, where I predict you are going to hear about some mind-blowing results for Democrats.

I do believe this will be one of the most consequential — if not the most consequential — elections in American history because of what is on the line: Nothing less than the future of America as a Democracy.

I intentionally didn’t address the significant what-ifs out there, namely: The anti-American Trump’s plans to undermine the results he doesn’t like. There will be plenty of time to get into all this if any of it comes to pass.

We are already in the middle of a full-blown national emergency, and the only thing you can control right now is your vote. So for now, make sure you have voted, and call as many friends and family who you still trust to make sure they are heading to the polls.

This is not a drill.

Everything depends on it.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and awarding-winning journalist, who headed newsrooms, and worked as a reporter in the newspaper business for decades. You can find all his work here.

I have to admit that I am shocked by the attention the abhorrent ad that Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is running to attack, and hurt his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, is receiving.

I’m sorry, but just where in the hell has everybody been the past decade?

Ramaswamy’s ad is revolting to be sure, and deeply degrading to Dr. Acton, women, and survivors of rape and incest, but do I really have to remind everybody that our president is a noxious, violent abuser who REPUBLICANS have chosen to be their standard-bearer the past three presidential elections???

This really is insane.

The leader of this despicable party, the serial-lying, morally busted convicted felon, and American-attacking and woman-abusing Donald Trump, makes Ramaswamy look like a choir boy by comparison.

Frankly, the hand-wringing by too damn few in the Republican Party over this ad during yet another ugly political moment among thousands the past decade has my head spinning, it really does.

If you are a Republican who is trying to tell us that Ramaswamy’s venom went too far, then just where have you been while Trump has effortlessly called political adversaries names like, “scum” “vermin” “dogs” and “filth?”

How far has your head been willingly stuck up your rear end, when mimicking his hero, Adolph Hitler, Trump has portrayed Black people as monkeys and says immigrants from “s--- hole countries” are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

In what sound-proof closet were you locked in when Trump called professional women like Dr. Acton “fat pigs” “dogs” “slobs” “disgusting animals” “piggy” “ugly” “horse face” and “stupid?”

Seriously.

You have got to be kidding me right now …

Trump has lowered the bar of civil discourse deep into the muck and mire the past decade so that his sickening proteges like Ramaswamy can easily clear it. The ad the guy ran was horrible, sure, but it is hardly the worst thing we have seen since the man who said. “(He) can do anything” to women, including “grabbing ‘em by the …”

Once Republicans decided that was OK, ANYTHING was OK.

Trump has enabled Republicans everywhere to be just as gross and repellent as they want to be, and Ramaswamy is the latest sicko to gleefully cash in on his lewd favor.

And no surprise, King Dump is eagerly defending his apprentice.

The press is “trying to convince everyone that this very powerful ad is bad,” Trump bellowed, “Because it’s so good!”

I have typed this 47 times the past decade, but it can’t be typed enough: The Republicans’ capacity to always go lower is breathtaking.

They have repeatedly showed that there is no bottom to their actions and words. In fact, they are still heading there at an accelerating speed.

Worse? Knowing all this, many of our friends and neighbors will still eagerly pull the lever for their favorite Republican candidates the next 11 days. Not because the Republican candidate of their choice has no standards, but because THEY have no standards.

Many of them have voted for the world’s most notorious lowlife three times. Not because he’s any good at his job, of course, but because he can reach deep inside them and bring out their very worst.

Have you seen the people that attend his circus rallies?

Of course you have ...

They dress up in their garish costumes like spoiled, snotty 4-year-olds and just let the hate drain out of them, while the orange, dirty, old man on stage conjures up his very worst to delight them.

Those rallies are all about going lower, grifting, and little else. What outlandish things will he say tonight?! What kind of childish nickname will he come up with for the libtard Democrat?! Will he do his little dance …?

Republican voters aren’t upset by this ad, or any of the hundreds of revolting things Trump has said and done, but they are slightly upset that the crap they consume — but mostly the cost of food, gas and electricity — is just too expensive right now.

And while it’s just a little politically inconvenient that Ramaswamy said out loud what so many of them think so close to an election, they aren’t really bothered by it, either. I bet you can’t point to one Republican you know who has publicly spoken against it.

These people are desensitized. Morally lost. Without standards.

Because while this ad is running, there has been absolutely no convictions of the scum — including, and mostly, Trump — who litter the Epstein Files they told us they were so damned concerned about in the 2024 election.

Children are being violently rounded up and being stuck in cages, separated from their parents. American citizens are being gunned down by masked government agents. Our endangered animals are being exterminated, and our drinking water, air and food are being poisoned for corporate gain.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is their enemy, and Vladimir Putin is their friend.

Our children are being slaughtered in our schools, and they don’t care. Let me repeat that: THEY DO NOT CARE.

But that Ramaswamy ad? Well now, that crossed a line.

Please, spare me with all this.

The Republican Party is a cesspool. It is governed by hate and willing ignorance. It is a marketplace of evil ideas and destruction. It is racist, misogynistic, and anti-American.

That we’ve decided one revolting ad has gone too far, when “too far” left the stable at a gallop 10 years ago, is absurd.

This is who the Republicans are each and every day, and it would be about damn time everybody starting reckoning with this sickening fact.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and awarding-winning journalist, who headed newsrooms, and worked as a reporter in the newspaper business for decades. You can find all his work here.

I just can’t read another story in our worthless mainstream media that Donald Trump’s agenda has been a failure, when the pain and danger we find ourselves in would most certainly indicate otherwise.

Inflicting as much pain and fear as possible has always been the point of this reckless regime, and after ten years of chaos and hurt, how is it that the people who are trusted with reporting the news STILL don’t understand this?

Consider that as I type this:

-There are U.S. troops and masked gunmen roaming our streets.
-Russian President Vladimir Putin is once again dictating foreign policy to our traitorous, wannabe dictator, and destabilizing the world.
-Our elections and our vote are being threatened by a Department of Justice that works for Trump instead of us.
-The wannabe dictator is pocketing hundreds of millions of OUR tax dollars to spend lavishly on himself and his rotten family.
-Our air and water are once again being poisoned to appease and enrich the corporate raiders who stand behind the wannabe dictator and his ruthless regime.
-Workers' rights are under attack on behalf of the billionaires who are squeezing them and their families to death.
-Equal rights are under sustained fire to appease the racists who form the backbone of the repellent party that bows to their bigoted, sick king.
-Our government, and with it the programs that help to feed and protect us, have been smashed into tiny bits so that lavish ballrooms, and golden arches can be erected in celebration of that sick king.
-Everything is more expensive than it was two years ago, and thanks to that, America’s rising oligarchy have never been richer, while the vast majority of America has never been poorer.
-Finally, our midterm elections, the only way out of this terrible mess, are in peril because there is near certainty that the decaying orange deviant will do everything in his unchecked power to jeopardize them.

ALL of this has been by design.

Trump has accomplished nearly every terrible thing he promised on his manure-laden campaign trail in 2024, and the media wants us to believe he somehow hasn’t been a success. What is it exactly that they were listening to when he stalked those stages in America’s heartland and threatened war on millions of Americans’ quality of life?

The speed in which he has carried out his demented promises, and undermined law and order has been breathtaking.

Trump’s only failure has been his inability to finish us off for good, but that, too, is on his agenda, even if you will never see it reported that way.

We are openly wondering if we are staring at the last free and for elections of our lifetimes, and the media wants us to believe Trump and his billionaires don’t have us right where they want us. They want us to believe he hasn’t fulfilled the promises he made when he did everybody the courtesy of having them written down and published in the chilling Project 2025.

Ask any of those billionaires who are choking us to death right now if Trump has been a success, and they will smile wide. Ask the racist in your life if Trump has provided them with the hate that fuels them, and they will wink with sordid satisfaction.

Our White House has become a golden, cheap whorehouse where odious oligarchs like Elon Musk are wined, dined and bathe in Trump’s grease, while true heroes like Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky are berated and humiliated for standing up to Trump’s Mother Russia.

Trump has enabled chaos in every department of our government, and mined Republicans’ dark hearts for unheard of profit. Since 2016, he has activated the dreams of the most evil people on Earth, and delivered the rest of us a never-ending nightmare.

Trump is a heinous, soulless monster, who has tapped into the cold veins of millions of racist, misogynistic,, homophobic Americans, who tell us they want to return to a time and place, when white men had free rein.

History is their enemy, because of its honesty, and what it says about us, good and bad. Nothing scares these people like the truth.

Progress is another vaunted enemy, which is why so many of them fixate on a fat, black book and spin its fiction so that it somehow fits into their warped narrative of 2026 America. These are the Christian nationalists who have congealed to form his ugly base. They are everywhere. Without them there is no him, and we must never forget that.

These are the racist little monsters who will puff out their chests and breathlessly tell you they go to church each Sunday — as if meeting in a cult-like setting among other brainwashed believers is some virtue — and have fallen at Lucifer’s feet. They worship the ground he disgraces, while they clutch at their outsized, shiny golden crosses, and laugh at the downtrodden’s misfortune in America.

Such good and wholesome times …

After wading in and out of churches early in life, I am not a religious man precisely because of the experience. I understand why many feel the need to connect with something bigger and better in life, but when that something is a grotesque and abusive bigot, it is clear far too many are only interested in finding dark harbor to moor the resentment and hate they carry inside their dark hearts, to somehow feel better about themselves.

Misery loves company, and the Church of MAGA traffic in it.

Just look at the pictures and videos of the people who violently attacked us with murder and zeal on January 6, 2021. It is a mob of white privilege, because only they could think — and later be proven right — that they could do such a terrible thing and get away with it.

Had people of color tried this (they never would), they would have been mowed down, and body bags would have been piled high in front of our Capitol to serve as a warning.

Long after their orange idol is gone, these morbid people will still be among us, looking for another white man with plenty of dark closet space where they can hang their judgment and hate.

What are we supposed to do with THEM?

Look, I’m sorry that 17 days out from the midterms I am delivering such sobering lines, but I just can’t hear another word about Trump’s so-called unsuccessful agenda. The good and decent people of this country have had our brains beaten out the past ten years. It’s OK to admit this, even if it is almost impossible to process.

We have gone from frantically fighting and dying for a normalcy that no longer exists, to just trying to keep our 250-year-old Democracy alive for another year.

We know we must win these smaller battles if we are to have any hope of winning the war. We have been under steady attack from a man and party that no longer hides its grotesque ambition, and is doing everything it possibly can to ensure America the beautiful has fallen and can never get back up.

This hasn’t been by some terrible mistake, it has all been intentional as hell, and part of an agenda and plan that is having its dark day.

All I have wanted from the start of this madness was an accurate rendering of what is happening to America, and that it was reported with the urgency it demanded, so that everybody could understand the stakes. But that, too, has been an impossible ask, because if our mainstream media hasn’t already been bought and paid for by those oligarchs, it has proven to be completely incapable of framing perhaps the most significant story in U.S. history.

The future of this country is hanging precariously in the balance, and we might not make it. Go ahead, tell me when there has ever been a bigger story than that.

Trump has never, ever cared a single bit about what he can do for America, only what America can do for him, and by that ugly measure, his second term has been nothing but a catastrophic success.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and awarding-winning journalist, who headed newsrooms, and worked as a reporter in the newspaper business for decades. You can find all his work here.

This week, Donald Trump, America’s greatest threat, harrumphed upon an unsuspecting stage in Grand Island, Nebraska, and once again welcomed an attack on the United States of America.

This time, though, unlike Jan. 6, 2021, and any number of times he has publicly degraded the people of the United States, he was happy to leave the abuse of our nation to others …

During one of his unhinged celebrations of himself shoddily disguised as a campaign rally, the orange, dead-eyed psychopath wandered into the minefield of his blood-thirsty War in Iran, and said this to his morally busted supporters:

“Let them (Iran) take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay and it’s gonna be over with very soon.”

Hard as it is, you’ll want to read that again.

“Let them (Iran) take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay …”

Donald Trump’s grotesque, inept presidency should be on the fast track towards its end this morning.

Any president who can say these words, much less think them, is a monumental threat to our national security and needs to be removed immediately. He clearly has lost whatever was left of his mind, and is not capable of doing this job, or any job that involves the safety of others.

Just a decade ago his removal would have been a no-brainer, and both parties would be calling for the sicko’s head.

Essentially, the man charged with keeping America safe is once again telling its citizens how little he values them, and how much he thinks of an Iranian regime that is making him (and us) look more and more foolish each day. It’s bad enough he is trivializing war, that he is also trivializing the lives of millions of Americans is abhorrent and against the law.

If these words came out of the mouth of ANYBODY it would be sickening. That it came out of the mouth of the president is horrifying. If God forbid Joe Biden, or Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan or ANY president said something as malicious and treasonous as this, their presidency would be over.

Leaders in both parties would rush in front of every microphone they could find, hearings would be assembled, and lawmakers would set about upholding the law and safeguarding the citizens they serve from this proven maniac.

It would be 24/7 breaking news. Chyrons would scream PRESIDENT CALLS FOR IRANIAN ATTACK OF U.S. CITIES …

There would be endless editorials, and calls for the president’s immediate removal.

A meaty national discussion would ensue addressing how America had come to this, and would detail in no uncertain terms that there are lines that can never, ever be crossed in a Democracy.

Except in Trump’s America, it is just another Tuesday …

THIS is where we are right now, and we should not have to stand for it any longer, America.

When a president values himself more than the people he is supposed to serve, he needs to go. When a president wishes harm on those people he is supposed to serve, then sure as I am typing this, he is a traitor to his country and needs to be locked away for the rest of his miserable life.

There is not a single line Trump will not cross, and I curse anybody who does not know this by now, especially our media.

When I first heard Trump’s treasonous words late Monday night, I slept uneasily, rolled out of the rack, poured some black coffee, and went to all my likely news sources this morning to find out how this ghastly speech was being treated.

I could not find a single mention of it on the front page of The New York Times.

I then went to the Associated Press, and could not find any mention of it there.

I went to NPR, that alleged bastion of dangerous liberal ideas, and could not find a thing on their front page, either.

So a quick question:

JUST WHAT IN THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE????

Since 2016, I have been incredibly hard on a national media that with few exceptions has completely lost its way. Today’s inexcusable and dangerous ineptitude is the reason why.

Their normalization of Trump has been astonishing and dangerous. I have written countless columns asking in so many words what led to this?

I have arrived at all the likely places: complicitness, profit, and sheer incompetence. I suppose it no longer matters, because for the most part the mainstream media that Trump relentlessly batters has curled up into a ball of submission.

I just don’t know how else to explain it.

It breaks my heart, but mostly it angers me. I rage at them. America has not been in this much danger since the Civil War. I bet I have typed that 155 times the past decade, because it is undeniably true. Yet our media has treated this full-blown emergency like a series of cloudy days.

As we steam toward the midterms four weeks from today, Trump will become more unhinged and more dangerous, because he knows a majority of Americans are going to vote to hold him to account for the damage he has done to this country.

His free reign of terror will be over.

Until then, there is not a single thing he won’t do to prevent that. On Monday night he put a bullseye on our cities. God only knows what’s coming next, but one thing we do know for sure: It will somehow be even worse.

So just how-in-the-hell doesn’t everybody know this by now?

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and awarding-winning journalist who led newsrooms, and worked as a reporter in the newspaper business for decades. You can find all his work here.

I am done hearing that Liberals need to find more joy in their lives.

I am done being ridiculed that we don’t smile enough, and take everything too damn seriously these days.

You want joy from us? Then start comporting yourself like half-decent people who love our wildlife more than your guns. Stop spreading your heinous lies, and pick up one of those books you want to ban, and discover the truth. Knock it off with the bigotry and misogyny, and concentrate on fixing yourselves, because you are broken, and a lot to deal with.

I was spurred to write about this today, because while being a dutiful, dour Liberal and watching something called “real news” on the PBS News Hour last night while cooking dinner, the show’s co-host, Geoff Bennett was joined by Jessica Tarlov.

I’d heard of Tarlov, but never seen her in action, aside from a few clips here and there on social media.

Tarlov is the liberal voice on the Fox News show, "The Five," where she debates four Republicans on any of the 14,000 issues Democrats and Republicans disagree on these days.

Fox “News” of course is Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing propaganda network, which I believe is singularly responsible for all the hell we are living amongst in the United States right now. Without Fox, there is no Donald Trump. Without Donald Trump, our Democracy is not facing its greatest threat since the Civil War.

Tarlov was pitching a book and I enjoyed the interview, but one section picked at a scab sustained during the terrible blast the night of Nov. 8, 2016, when a lewd, woman-abusing bigot was somehow elected the President of the United States.

Here’s the final exchange:

GEOFF BENNETT:
“You’re fairly tough on Democrats in this book. You say that they too often don’t really inhabit conservative spaces, that they can be scolding, that the party has lost some of the joy and cultural connection that politics requires.
What do you think Democrats misunderstand about the people they need to win back?”
JESSICA TARLOV:
“That those people are also not taking politics as seriously as they are, that they are consuming media that they are oftentimes not interested in engaging in. That was one of the main findings of every autopsy there was from the 2024 election.
And you see Democrats dabbling more showing up. A lot of them are coming on FOX News. And the way that I found that politics and the politics of persuasion works is when you are in a long-term relationship with the people that you’re talking to and with their audiences, and when then they can really feel like you’re trying to be part of their world.
And most of the time, they want you to show up and not actually be talking about politics, which we’re still not great at. Democrats, we like football too, and all of the stuff that we get made fun of. But showing up on things like “College GameDay” and making sure that you’re going to those events, you see the reception that like a Wes Moore or a Josh Shapiro gets when they go out and do those kinds of things.
And I think that is still missing from the recipe. I worry for the midterms, even though the polling looks great at this moment, and I know the country is in tremendous economic crisis, and folks, they know what it costs to fill up their tank, they know what groceries cost, but the results won’t necessarily be an affirmation of the Democratic Party as a great option.
It might just be that the other side looked that much worse at this moment. And I wanted the book to emphasize a path forward for the party, which I have been thinking a lot about in terms of policies that will move us forward, but also what leadership looks like and joy.”

Maybe I’m just a thin-skinned liberal, but I don’t need to be lectured about what joy looks like in this moment of sheer terror in the United States.

And I am not here to joylessly beat up on Tarlov, who I think is a remarkable talent, and is actually doing some good. I would last about eight seconds on a show like that, before shoving an entire camera down one of those loudmouth’s throats.

I will remind her, though, that she is young enough to be my daughter, and while I greatly respect her generation’s perspective on things, my generation had more rights than she does now, and if that in itself isn’t a national emergency, I don’t know what is.

What the radical right-wing is doing to this country is not normal. It is EXTREMELY dangerous and we are within inches of losing everything.

Finding more joy in our lives would be nice, but right now the people who are truly paying attention are busy fighting for our survival, and Tarlov’s right to say what she wants to on the air.

Because as we know, Trump is going hard after our free speech.

Frankly, it’s insulting to the millions out there, who are scared to death and doing the real work to preserve our Democracy and hold onto the few rights we have left, while we go about our daily lives in the shadow of this fascist regime in our White House.

But if you want to believe we are incapable of joy, I can give you two instances that had us liberals singing from our rooftops, and what followed in the wake of all that giddiness.

The first example was on that glorious fall day in 2020, when the Associated Press called the presidential election for Joe Biden. I felt such pure joy that I whooped and hollered, strapped on my mask and took off like a shot straight to the Capital Square in Madison, Wisconsin, to celebrate with other joyful liberals, while keeping appropriate social-distancing protocols in place, of course, so we wouldn’t die from a pandemic that the Lysol-chugging Trump completely mismanaged.

That joy lasted a few days, until it became clear that the lawless Trump was not going quietly and began trying to shakedown elections officials to throw out or “find” votes, and told violent right-wing groups to stand by for further orders.

There would be no classy concessions, or peaceful transfers of power just as long as this lowlife was still around.

So Liberals put aside their happiness for the good of the country, and worked like hell to win Democratic special elections in Georgia, so that Biden would have a Democratic Senate to work with.

On the evening of January 5, 2021, joy flooded back into our lives when Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won their respective races. Freedom rang in Georgia, and we went to bed that night feeling as if maybe, just maybe, we had saved America.

That joy lasted 12 hours, when on the 13th hour, Trump and his anti-American thugs violently attacked our Capitol and tried to overthrow the 2020 election.

I’m not sure I have felt much joy since that terrible, terrible day, when we watched in horror at the worst homegrown attack on American soil since the Civil War.

And when it was done, and Trump had lost, he told the attackers that he “loved them ...”

Nearly six years after that horrible day, when I don’t feel rage, I feel profound sadness and worry as Trump’s attack continues. Joy is fleeting, and reserved for weddings, birthdays and important events in the lives of the people I love.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t seek out happiness and connection. I do it all the time, in fact, by getting out among nature and associating with the best things on earth — our animals and their pristine habitats. Except those things, too, are under direct attack by these Republican terrorists.

Our air and water are being purposely poisoned again, and endangered species are being slaughtered, so billionaires can rape our countryside for profit. Nearly every day there is some horrific story about our wilderness being assaulted by Trump’s blood-thirsty Orcs.

And you want joy from me?

And what about the millions of American children and families who were temporarily lifted out of poverty in 2021 when Biden expanded the Child Tax Credit in his American Rescue Plan? Well, Republicans could not WAIT to end all that. Their billionaire owners weren’t going to put up with our tax money being spent on trivial things like feeding and clothing children, when there were AI data centers to build.

Then there are the barbaric cuts to our government, our healthcare, and schools.

The cuts to USAID are almost too hideous to contemplate.

Republicans are spitting on our North American friends to the north and the south, attacking our voting rights, demolishing our White House, building insane ballrooms, and renaming the Kennedy Center.

Measles is making a comeback.

I’m sorry, but what kind of sicko finds joy amid all of this?

If Democrats aren’t presenting themselves like a sunny bouquet of flowers each day, maybe it’s because they have the guts to care, and the strength to fight for what is most certainly good and right.

I for one will not be apologizing for the lack of joy I bring to the nation’s table right now.

But if it’s joy you want, then look me up when the orange monster, and the people who have enabled his inhumane carnage, have finally gone off to meet their makers.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and awarding-winning journalist who led newsrooms, and worked as a reporter in the newspaper business for decades. You can find all his work here.

I’d like to think the working press has finally learned its lesson when dealing with abusive fascists, malignant narcissists, and convicted felons.

I’d like to think that after being called “the enemies of the people” and a grotesque variety of demeaning names, our mainstream media are done inviting vulgar, women-abusing creeps to their dinners where he can projectile vomit all over them while they pick away at their shrimp cocktail, and exchange gossip.

I’d like to think these things, but you’ll have to excuse me if I still don’t.

Our press has been a complete failure and a joke the past decade, and has actively contributed to our demise with their inability to carry themselves like professional journalists.

All that said … I will acknowledge even a hint of progress where I see it.

When news broke Monday morning that the major television networks joined together and suspended their pooled coverage of the dishonest Trump White House after he refused to allow CNN to serve as a pool representative, I had this three-word reaction:

IT’S ABOUT TIME.

Please excuse the heavy language, but that’s about as tame as I can keep it right now.

And before digging into this a little further, I want to reiterate a strong suggestion that I walloped our press over their heads with on Saturday after CNN, MS NOW and Politico were banned Friday from covering Trump’s repellent White House:

ALL media agencies who cover this lying, abusive sicko should refuse to go near that White House until he apologies and stops acting like Stupid Putin.
Starve this maniac, and start feeding America the facts.

Watching our press navigate the past decade in Washington, has been like watching Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau hunt down criminals in the Pink Panther comedies. The only difference, of course, is that Clouseau managed to always get his man, and the media’s stumbling, bumbling approach to journalism hasn’t been at all funny.

They have relentlessly disgraced themselves with their inability and/or refusal to spot and report real news, like Trump’s ongoing attack on our country, and have embarrassed thousands of us, who spent time in the business holding power to account, and calling liars, LIARS.

Right now, we are inches away from losing everything to a political party which spends every waking hour devising ways to extinguish our vote. This is a party that is poisoning our air and water, killing endangered species, and coddling Russia, while attacking Canada.

Up is down in America, and there are cold-blooded, masked government agents roaming our streets and killing innocent people without consequence.

Forget the fact that prices he promised to lower are rocketing ever higher, because Trump is actually filling his pockets with our money.

We are under attack in America, and most of our media goes about its business like we are dealing with nothing but another rainy day.

Even the Associated Press was kicking the lying, duplicitous Trump with both feet Monday when they posted this blast of truth out on Bluesky.

Perfectly put, and more, please. Reporting the truth shouldn’t be this hard.

And this note: I am a fan of AP, for what it’s worth. They were one of the first who Trump went after for reporting the truth when they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico anything other than the Gulf of Mexico in their reporting.

I still see some instances where they can do better, but it’s only because I am an angry, old newspaperman, who has been beaten on by better journalists than myself over the course of a long career for getting even the littlest things wrong.

It is impossible to process just how shoddy and bad things have become with our media the past decade.

Now it looks like being kicked down the White House stairs by a limping 80-year-old deviant was the last straw for a handful of these major media conglomerates. Now we wait to see if this is the beginning of something bolder, a return to truth, and holding power to account, or if they faint from the thin air of standing up for editorial principle, a free press and their viewers.

How will they comport themselves if and when Trump allows them back in OUR White House?

I guess we can hope for the best, but you’ll have to excuse me if I am highly skeptical they’ve learned a damn thing.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and awarding-winning journalist who ran newsrooms, and worked in the newspaper business for decades. You can find all his work here.

With 55 days until the most important elections in American history, I am going to try to thread a delicate political needle one more time without bloodying my index finger, while pointing out some significant problems with a tone-deaf Democratic Party that refuses to listen to its voters.

I know, I know, but bear with me, please, because I see this as a necessary crusade to save America, and that fading party, while helping it prevail in November and well into the future.

While I think it is crucial — absolutely CRUCIAL — that these flawed Democrats have a big day on November 3, because they are massively better than the alternative, I think is equally important the party understands that simply being the lesser of two evils, stopped having any real, long-lasting appeal approximately a decade ago.

By and large, the current Democratic Party is too old, too tired, too out of touch, too cautious, and way too far underneath the size-20 loafers of the Big Money corporate raiders who threaten to squash them if they dare get out of line.

Look, there is nothing to recommend Republicans, who are populated by tongue-wagging racist, country-club Christian Nationalist grifters and terrorists. They have been purchased by those corporate billionaires, and are still acting out grievances from the Civil War.

The Republican Party violently attacked us on January 6, 2021, and in any country that TRULY values law and order would have been finished forever after that terrible day.

Its grotesque leader, the felon Donald Trump, who spurred that attack, spent Tuesday afternoon disgracing the victims of 9/11 by making it all about himself and lying about where he was and what he did that day.

Even for Trump, this level of hideousness was breathtaking.

The New York Times called Trump’s outlandish claims “a disputed account” because after a decade of this, they still don’t know how to spell L-I-E and for all of Democrats’ issues, are still most responsible for normalizing this foray into authoritarian rule.

Get a load of this headline, and ask yourself how badly the NYT would have roasted anybody who claimed false valor on that terrible day as Trump did Tuesday.

This loathsome Republican Party always goes backwards because they lack the vision and the guts to go forward. There is no excuse for voting for a Republican right now unless you are stupid, a fascist, anti-American, a bigot, a billionaire, or all five of those things.

Unfortunately, as we all well know, MAGA is a cult that votes tenaciously. They number in the tens of millions, and have an incredible threshold of pain. They are getting screwed just as badly as everybody else is by this top-down, crushing Trump economy, but just as long as their master continues to hate who they do, will bleed out on the operating table rather than admit they were wrong about anything.

I have no suggestions for how to get through to these people. I have tried repeatedly with no success. I have lost scores of friends and colleagues to their disease, and have decided to inoculate myself against it, by simply avoiding them.

But back to my larger point …

Most Americans do not like either of our two major political parties. Roughly two-thirds of of Democrats are frustrated with their party right now.

As I’ve typed before I am a lifelong Independent, because as a lifelong journalist I couldn’t risk my credibility by becoming too political, which was pretty easy after I got to know too many politicians.

These days, as an observer and columnist, I am comfortable telling you I will never vote for a Republican again. That didn’t start with Trump. It started after George W. Bush went into Iraq.

That so many Democrats went along with that high crime, is one of the main reasons I proudly call myself an Independent, and why voting for Barack Obama, who voted against that war, was so easy.

But for purposes of this piece, I will concentrate on the party’s serial dysfunction as reasons for my proud independence.

America is an idiotic, consumer-driven society which is far more interested in what it can acquire than what it can return. Roughly a third of eligible voters won’t even bother to go to the polls this November.

Some will tell you the reason for this is because no matter who they vote for, things won’t change either way. Still others will tell that they weren’t even aware there were elections.

To be clear: These excuses — or ANY excuse — are pathetic. If you live in a Democracy, the bare minimum you should do is vote.

Then there are others who will vote, but are skeptical things will ever get better. I believe this is an ever-increasing voting bloc. I believe many younger voters, and more and more older ones fall into this category, as well. This is very dangerous, because when people lose faith, they lose hope. When they lose hope, they become apathetic. When they become apathetic, they are ripe for the taking.

So what to do?

Well, here are eight things from a longer list that Democrats should be talking about right now to pull these disenchanted voters over to their side, and give them hope that change is still possible in America:

1. Democrats have been rightfully criticized for they inability to assemble words that resonate with voters, so I’ll start with a message: Prices are absolutely NUTS right now, America, and Republicans are 100 percent to blame with their insane tariffs, endless wars and capitulation to odious billionaires, who are stepping on all of our necks for their profit. Republicans control the Executive, the Senate, the House and the Court. This country is a complete disaster area, and all of this is their fault. Repeat: ALL OF THIS IS THEIR FAULT. Vote for change. (This might be the easiest message to articulate in history.)
2. Announce immediately that there has been no decision on who will be leading the party going forward. Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Ken Martin are about as popular as moldy bread. Make it clear that you have heard all the upset with this so-called leadership, and that it will be addressed. The party needs fresh faces leading the way pronto. I really can’t emphasize this enough. You don’t get to tell us you’ve heard us, and will be breaking out new ideas and energy, while fielding the same tired-ass leadership to get it done. I promise you that this announcement would give Democrats an immediate bump at the polls, and fire up its base. It is absolutely insane this hasn’t happened yet, and illustrates a haughtiness and disdain for the voters.
3. Make it clear that the billionaires own too much of America, and that Citizens United is in large part responsible for this. Educate the American public on the damage this appalling ruling has done to America. This would not be hard. CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE, the same way Trump is not honest. Make it clear that billionaires like Elon Musk are the most dangerous people on Earth, and that they will be held accountable, and kept the hell away from OUR government. We do this by getting money out of politics. Will it be hard? Yes. Is all this unchecked money wrecking our country? Yes. Can we continue to survive this? No.
4. Announce that it is past time to implement term limits in the Congress and our Courts. If you got into politics to make a difference, congratulations. You are among the best there is in America. If you got into politics to make it a career, go away. How many people in both political parties fall into the latter category? I’ve seen enough 75-year-old, 15-term congresspeople to last 20 lifetimes. I’m sorry, but a person like this has NO IDEA what is in the heads of 80 percent of America, and has been suffocating inside the Beltway.
5. I say cap the age of elected officials at 70. Go ahead, call me an ageist. I really don’t care. I believe the oldest person in Washington should be 74.
6. Cap the Senate to three consecutive six-year terms. You can’t run for a third term past the age of 68.
7. EXTEND Congressional terms to three years. You read that right. Enough of these never-ending election seasons. I have never understood two-year terms, when all these people do is spend their time raising money their first year, so they can run again the following year. Nothing gets done this way. Cap their stints in Congress to six terms.
8. Cap the Supreme Court justices to staggering 12-year terms. These lifetime appointments are way past absurd.

I am not locked into the specifics on these term limits and age restrictions, and there might be good reasons for altering my suggestions. Something simply has to be done, though, and the party that comes up with a workable way forward will gain immediate favor with the American people.

This will be a hard fight, but points to meaningful change that will allow for more Americans to feel like they are part of our political process instead of just pawns in some rigged game aimed at screwing us.

America is at its very best when its people lead, and the leaders follow. That is most certainly not happening in 2026 America.

Me? I am sick and tired of being told to just shut up and fall in line. How about you?

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

The lesson we damn well better learn from this disgraceful moment in American history is that millions and millions of Republicans will go along with ANY heinous thing -- poisoning our air, water and animals, incinerating our voting rights, employing masked men to slaughter and cage people, and the rape of our children -- just as long as it doesn't cost too much to gas up their clattering pickup trucks, and thirsty SUVs.

THAT is the deal-breaker for these people, and more than anything I can think of illustrates the decline in America, or maybe even more sadly, reveals what this country has always been about at its cold, diseased heart.

The past 20 months have been the most debilitating, evil and regressive stretch in American history. Slow, incremental progress through the years on massively important things like protecting the environment, the sciences, and human rights, women’s rights, and voting rights have not only come to a screeching halt, but have been slammed in reverse by the ugliest, most dangerous political party this country has ever seen.

We have a president who by words and actions is closer to Adolph Hitler in character than even Richard Nixon. This is the racist who urged a violent attack on America, and then sat back, watched it unfold, and did nothing for three hours but root for its success.

So heinous was January 6, 2021, attack that even the late Senator Lindsey Graham and seen enough, and said this on the Senate floor that night:

" Trump and I, we've had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he's been a consequential President, but today (is the) first thing you'll see. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough."

Of course, it turns out Graham never meant a single thing he said, and was a profile in cowardice ….

We simply must do everything we can to douse this fascist bonfire fast, or we will all be incinerated by it, because thanks to people like Graham I promise you this: Other heinous people like JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and Vladimir Putin are both giving orders and taking notes, and will only continue to fine tune the poison they are so eagerly pumping into the Republican Party’s veins.

Make no mistake about it: Their aim is to end us, and make sure our Democracy, like the history they are busy erasing, is also wiped away forever in America. They do not believe for a minute that all men and women were created equal, and this is beyond dispute at this point.

Frankly, we are lucky our end hasn’t already arrived. We still have a chance of preserving what thousands have died for on battlefields all over the world for the past 150 years or so.

The truth of the past decade is this: If Trump was just a tad more subtle dealing out his evil on behalf of the billionaires, oligarchs and fascists who own him, our country would have fallen six years ago at the voting booth, and not on any battlefield or attack on our Capitol.

It can be reasonably argued that if Trump hadn’t encouraged people to drink bleach, while completely mangling the response to the once-in-a-century pandemic that killed millions, and instead handled that crisis with even a minimum of competence, he would have won in a landslide in 2020. He then would have immediately proceeded to do all the awful things he is doing now with the crystal-clear intent of never relinquishing a presidency he values only to pad his insatiable ego and bulging bank accounts.

People forget that at the time of the outbreak Trump’s approval rating had risen to 49%, because no matter how incompetently he handled his presidency up until that point many people needed to believe he could succeed in protecting us from the deadly pandemic.

And before you pooh-pooh a 49% approval rating, consider that number is actually sky-high when compared to other presidencies the past half-century during similar times of their presidencies.

Joe Biden was between 36% and 40% during the same juncture of his presidency in 2024.

Instead, the heartless, cruel Trump didn’t have what it takes to govern through a crisis and proved as always he is far better at starting them. Just enough Americans in the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona decided they had at least temporarily seen enough of him, and ushered Biden into office.

It was that close.

America was given a four-year stay of execution, and squandered it when it refused to kill the beast. Instead of making sure he could never run for office again just enough Republicans led by the repulsive Graham gave him life. Instead of bringing what was left of the full weight of the law atop him, Attorney General Merrick Garland dithered until Democrats had to belatedly call him out of hiding with their January 6th Committee.

By that time, it was clear Trump had somehow survived, and would be around to haunt us the next election. The leadership of the Democratic Party had underestimated how sick America still was, while overestimating their popularity when the 2022 midterms weren't near as fatal as had been forecasted.

By 2024, Biden and that 39 percent approval rating were atop a ticket that had run out of juice, and were unable to connect with the slim majority of the sane people left in America.

What followed was a continuation of the beginning of the end …

My old stomping grounds of Madison, Wisconsin, was labeled “77 square miles surrounded by reality” by a frustrated and constipated Republican governor Lee Sherman Dreyfus 40 years ago. Madison is a liberal bastion of real truths and real justice. People are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. But if you venture outside that liberal square even today you will see endless farms with billboard-sized signs with TRUMP on them.

Trump has done nothing for the farmers, of course, but he hates who they do, so they are plenty appeased.

America is on life support right now, and that is the reality.

Trump is still doling out variants of that bleach, but this time it’s not because he thinks it can help anybody, but because he hopes it hurts them.

Here in my new state of North Carolina, our former governor, Roy Cooper, is running to flip a crucial Senate seat in November with the simple slogan: “Make stuff cost less.”

It’s not that Cooper doesn’t know full well how sick the American electorate is and how obscene it is that an entire political party has fallen at the fat, little feet of a traitor, it’s that he knows that to win in a purple state like this one, talking about affordability is the best way to pull over just enough Right-leaning votes to prevail.

More North Carolinians are worried about the price of gas than they are the attacks on life-saving vaccines and the air and water we breathe, which makes the state a microcosm of our sickly country.

So maybe Cooper and the Democrats will have the big election day in November that I believe they will. And maybe, just maybe, our Supreme Court won’t throw out those elections for the benefits of themselves, and their king’s Republicans ...

Maybe the sane, caring people in America will have bought ourselves a little more time to regroup, and have some semblance of power to curtail the nonstop assault on our country.

Maybe we should take some absurd solace in the fact that had the incompetent Trump kept those gas prices low, everything we are still fighting for this November would have already been gone by now.

Maybe people will finally stop pretending that these lifeless Republicans give a single damn about this country, when it is so bloody obvious that the things they really value can easily be found by looking at the prices at the gas pump.

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

On Tuesday afternoon, I clocked into my Facebook page and it proceeded to pester me about things I was going on about 10 years ago to the day — or about the time Donald Trump began taking up space in my life.

I still wasn’t taking him seriously as a man, much less a presidential candidate, because I lived comfortably in a haughty world where America was above electing someone that unqualified and disgusting to our highest office.

He was the punchline of all of my jokes. In this particular post, I was admonishing people who were comparing Republicans’ creation of Trump to Dr. Frankenstein’s creation of his monster, saying, “Hey, at least one of them had a heart …”

By now, Trump was regularly insulting women, NATO, the disabled, war veterans, Blacks, Mexico, the working press, and common decency. He was openly asking Russia for help, bragging of assaulting women because he could, and had filled his campaign staff with social outcasts, political wannabes, and known racists.

The KKK was on the record as absolutely loving the guy.

GOP candidates like Jeb Bush, who was insulted off the 2016 debate stage, had started to go silent, deciding to let the voters handle the dirty work he helped produce, but would no longer touch with his upper-crust, lily-white fingers.

Phonies like the late Sen. Lindsey Graham offered up his last known proof of life when he infamously tweeted this on May 3, 2016:

“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed……and we will deserve it.

By the end of that year, and after Trump had won the election, he called Graham “a little boy” … “nasty” … and “a dumb mouthpiece” … prompting South Carolina’s finest to dutifully become Trump’s little errand boy in their service to hell, instead of America.

Real damn irony then that it’s Graham who beat Trump to their ultimate destination.

I reckon they’ll be reacquainted soon enough …

The summer before the November blast that would shake America to its core, was the last time I felt sure about anything.

I haven’t been the same since.

I take no real pride in admitting that, but when Trump won that election, the country I had served with my life looked very, very different to me. It was darker, and never to be trusted to do the right thing again.

Not a day goes by that I don’t give all of this abundant thought. It stays with me and fills up too many of those empty spaces, where I once could find peace of mind, or consider absolutely nothing important at all like why my N.Y. Giants don’t win more ...

Because here’s the deal: Ten years ago, it was never about the Republican Party for me — at least not at first. If John McCain or Mitt Romney had beaten Barack Obama, I wouldn’t have liked it one bit, but it wouldn’t have rattled me, and knocked me into despair.

I once occasionally voted for Republicans many years ago, depending on the person and the issues. As a journalist, I was never a party guy, but rather than explain all that again, I will say I have not voted for a single Republican since that abominable 2003 Iraq War, because if you are capable of lying so spectacularly about something as heinous as that, what else are you capable of?

Well, in November of 2016 we got our answer.

Before that, and odious things like Citizens United, and the Internet, politics didn't dominate my life, because I naively believed that if one party had gone too far like W. Bush and the GOP in 2008, the voters would correct that.

For the most part, politics operated like a pendulum. Too far one way, then back to the other …

I never thought for a minute that any president in my lifetime before Trump would attack our vote with a vengeance, and then violently attack our country. And I promise you there was no way in even my wildest dreams that we would reelect the traitorous monster who attacked us the first time around.

Trump broke something in many of us, and awakened something evil in others.

I am blessed that my family saw Trump for everything he was the minute he came on the stage and started with all his hurtful, and sickening insults. It shocks me to this day that a lowlife like Trump got within 10,000 miles of the White House and that even 10 percent of the population supported him.

I feel foolish typing that after all we’ve been through, but it’s the truth. He’s a horrible man and the people who elected him are worse.

No them, no him.

I really did think we were better than that ...

And while I didn't lose any family over this mess of a man, I lost tons of friends, a few of whom I considered family. How could I have missed what lurked inside them? How, even after he attacked us, were they STILL supporting him???

Did they really think that little of America?

I used to bang my head against the wall, and ask them what they saw in Trump, until I stopped asking at all. Turns out, he hated the same human beings they did.

The man’s a bigot, and I don’t abide bigots and people who align with them. I certainly don’t call them friends.

I doubt those old friends will ever come back into my life, but even after all that’s happened, the door’s always open. I’d love nothing better than to have a meaty discussion about the last 10 years, why they finally saw the light, and the way ahead through the darkness.

I have stopped holding my breath that those talks will ever happen, and it saddens me to no end. There will be no meeting in the middle because there aren’t two sides to bigotry, misogyny, the destruction of our environment, and pure hate.

And you want to know what the truly mind-blowing part of all of this is?

They are winning.

I mean, they are heartless losers, sure, but authoritarian regimes like the one in the White House are winning the political fight here, and in many places around the world.

They have the Executive, the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court, and are putting a terrible beating on us.

Clean air and water … women’s rights … voters’ rights … affordable healthcare … animals … food, clothing and education to a fast-growing number of our nation’s neediest are all under attack.

It is getting worse every day. Trump is somehow getting worse every day, as he effortlessly proves he has the ability to always go lower, and drags millions of people down with him.

But I’m not dead yet, and have come to understand I was put on this Earth for this fight. I’m a cantankerous, old white guy, and hundreds of millions have had it worse.

Still, sometimes these things need to be written because they are real. Our heartache and sorrow are real. Our helplessness is real. And when MAGA reads this, and many will, their contempt for me (and you) will be real. I have learned these past 10 years that they really get off on the hurt, because no matter how bad things get in their lives, my tears will sustain them.

I believe these things need to be talked about, and a lot more often than they are, because people like us cannot be trivialized, nor forgotten. We have the courage to wear our hearts on our sleeves, and to take a punch and get back up.

That’s what real patriots do. That’s what people who have fought for our civil rights for centuries have done.

It would be easy to just say the hell with it all, but the history our Republican friends and family want to readily erase instructs us to push on and take that beach no matter the cost … or even just that seat on the bus.

We have been beaten up pretty good, but there is not one of us who has contemplated throwing in the towel and surrendering to these heartless maniacs, because it is not how we are built.

A lot is being asked from us, for so little in return. The 2020 election and subsequent attack on our Capitol should have been the beginning of the end of this madness.

Incredibly, it was only the beginning.

And even with all that … deep in our wounded hearts we somehow know that better days are ahead, but only if we keep pushing onward, and lifting people up, instead of holding them down.

We can see the high ground through all the hurt, but sometimes we need to rest, gather our wits, lick our wounds, and talk about the hard journey we’ve put behind us, before we can keep resolutely marching ahead.

It’s been a hard decade, and it’s OK to acknowledge the pain and anguish. We don’t do enough of that.

Sometimes, it just helps to know that you are not alone …

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

Donald John Trump has done more damage to the United States of America than any foreign adversary in history.

As sure as I am typing this, Trump is a traitor to his country, the most dangerous man in the world, and any person in government who is still supporting this wreck of a human being is aiding and abetting the most sustained attack on this nation in our 250-year history.

Since asking for and getting Russia’s help to undermine our elections, Trump’s attack on America and our vote is now into its 11th year. The Civil War, which up until Trump was the longest sustained internal assault on our nation, lasted but four years.

And lest you think it is folly or hyperbolic to compare the two, then ask yourself what happens if Trump prevails in his war on America. Knowing the chilling answer to that question, ask yourself this one: Why isn’t Trump’s 11-year attack on America and its terrible repercussions reported this way, and given the weight they deserve?

Understand: Trump is a warmongering maniac, and convicted felon, who currently has the United States Senate, Congress, Supreme Court, U.S. military, tens of thousands of armed and masked, murdering jackboots, and fully 70 million Americans happily under his little thumb. Anybody who thinks he is going to give up that power because of something as trivial to him as a vote, just hasn’t been paying attention to this long war.

I have seen far too many people I respect, and many more I don’t, who believe Trump’s attempt to commandeer the airways Thursday night to spew his lies and threats as just another desperate act of a desperate man.

What have they been watching the past 11 years that we haven’t?

Because I saw it far, far differently. I saw it as yet another lever he is showing us he will readily pull to knock the floor out from underneath us while leaving our country hanging by the deadweight of its inaction to be rid of him.

I am reminded of something a colleague of mine, Chauncey DeVega at Salon, has repeated to me during our many chats the past few years. It is constantly ringing in my ears: “The monster has been unleashed, and he has no guardrails.”

When are we going to stop underestimating this monster and the most dangerous person on Earth since Hitler?

Trump is no better than the authoritarian maniacs who have come before him — people who he admires, by the way — and there is no doubt in my mind that we haven’t even seen the beginning of the worst of him.

He is a racist, lawless degenerate who believes America exists to serve him, and so far not near enough has been done to prove him wrong. He has taken a wrecking ball to our vote, our environment, our government, women’s rights, human rights, and a list of good and decent things so long it could fill three pages of space here.

Our vote is the only thing that can stop him, and he is making it painfully clear he knows this, and will do everything he can to stop it.

Before Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes … before he challenged the results of that loss in court and lost 43 times … before he tried to shakedown a Georgia election official during a phone call heard by the entire world … before he publicly called out poll workers and threatened their lives … even before his violent attack on our Capitol on January 6, 2021, to overthrow the election … Trump staggered in front of a microphone in the East Room of the White House just hours after polls had closed across America, commandeered those networks, and proceeded to hatch the Big Lie.

While our vote was still being counted, Trump did his best Mussolini impression and pronounced to the American public that: “We did win this election,” and that the counting of our vote was “a major fraud on our nation. He then added this, “So, we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Just two days later, when it was clear all that vote-counting was going to result in his loss, he accosted his nuclear-powered cell phone, blasted into Twitter’s cesspool and sent out this screaming tweet: "STOP THE COUNT!"

He wasn’t done, because he never is, and followed with this Stalin-esque projectile vomit:

"ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!"

Can we stop right here and consider this for a minute, please?

By now his hoards had marched upon election offices in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania. They menaced poll workers — true public servants — under the encouragement of the outgoing President of the United States, a true enemy.

That’s when the attack was officially launched. That’s when nobody — much less our FBI — should have been surprised by what was to come on January 6.

People forget this, because it was ultimately lost among the sea of lawlessness that has followed since. Trump gave the game away for what would follow, because nothing scares this grotesque liar like the truth, and the truth was America had decided that one term was enough.

On Thursday night, five-and-a-half years removed from the most coordinated attack on this nation since the Civil War, Trump addressed the nation in his angry, slobbering way to up the tempo of his attack on America. To their credit ABC and NBC did not air it, though they did stream it live, where most people get their information these days. Will they do the same thing when Trump invariably pulls this again in November if the results aren’t what he likes?

I’d bet against it.

It is telling of course that Trump didn’t want to talk to Americans about how badly he has failed us. His lies and grievances, as always, were more important.

Our economy is failing, prices are spiraling out of control, he has gotten us into a war he has no idea how to get us out of, our White House and surrounding grounds are piles of rubble, and we are laughingstocks of the world.

His popularity is at an all-time low, but even that doesn’t concern this malignant narcissist, because he has surrounded himself with immoral, broken phonies like Stephen Miller, who whisper sweet nothings in his ear.

Power is the only thing that interests him, and he has amassed a helluva lot of it ...

I have not typed all this to bring you down, but to try to FINALLY open other people’s eyes. I know that all of you except for the anti-American trolls reading this piece are fully aware of the stakes of November’s elections.

But it is as clear as day to me that far too many people, like those who trivialized Thursday’s anti-American speech, still don’t.

What’s left of our damn media continues to underplay the biggest story in American history, this 11-Year War, and I am not convinced a disorganized Democratic Party which managed to so thoroughly mangle the 2024 elections, understands this battlefield covered with Republican landmines. One needs only look at their tired, uninspiring leadership to draw that sad conclusion.

That means it is up to us, the voters who terrify the monster, to hold the line, and somehow win November’s battle for the right to stay in this long war.

That’s a lot to hang on people who have been defending this country every damn day for the past 11 years — patriots who have proven they have the courage it takes to stay in there and pay attention to this madness.

You could have quit, but here you are.

Your physical and mental health have suffered. In too many cases your friendships and families have been torn apart. But you stay and fight because you understand the stakes — right from wrong.

Truth from lies.

This week, yet another innocent human being was shot dead in Maine by Trump’s masked ICE thugs ….

Trump is going to do everything he can to make sure November’s vote has no effect on his powers. If he can’t stop the vote entirely, he will make casting that vote as difficult as possible.

This will most certainly happen, and if you can’t tell us what can be done to prevent it, then at least have the decency to admit that we have been right about him and his revolting party all along.

It has been a long 11 years …

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

On November 3, 2020, American voters elected Democrat Joe Biden to be the next President of the United States, temporarily inoculating us from the awful Trump Virus that had ravaged the country the four previous years, culminating with his violent attack on the country just two months later.

Tragically, we learned but four years after that election, that America had still not developed a vaccine against bigotry, racism and misogyny; our corporate media had failed yet again— and in some cases refused — to counter Big Lies with the truth, and proved pathetically incapable of recognizing the greatest threat to this nation since the Civil War; our feckless Department of Justice catastrophically failed to do the one thing it simply has to: protect the American people from further attacks; and Republicans showed just how little they value the democracy hundreds of thousands have died on the battlefield to protect.

Make no mistake about it, as I type this today, Donald Trump, the most notorious traitor the United States has ever seen, has escalated his attack on America, and is doing everything he can to finish us off. By continuing to use his office to attack past elections like the consequential one in Georgia five-plus years ago, he is telling us he does not intend to honor any future elections in this country.

With few exceptions, our corporate media is still treating all this as just another cloudy day, and a willfully ignorant American public has been worn to a nub by the normalization of a soulless authoritarian regime in Washington.

With that as a backdrop, and Trump readying for another primetime attack on Georgia tonight, I want to take you back to that election in that historic state in 2021, and how one of America’s greatest days spiraled into one of its worst in a span of just 12 horrifying hours.

Here is the indisputable telling of that hopeful and terrible time in America. I type it with hope that truth is still an inoculant to the most dishonest White House in our nation’s history.

Following Biden’s 7-million vote victory in the 2020 presidential election, there were still political mountains to move. The sickly Trump had refused to concede, and was on his way to losing 43 legal challenges to our election results.

Still in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic, and the constant wailing coming from the 74-year-old baby in our White House, our tired eyes turned to Georgia where control of the United States Senate was yet to be decided ...

It was late-November, 2020, and Georgia Democratic Senatorial candidate Jon Ossoff had just joined a clutch of us across the country on a conference call as he drove home for a late dinner with his wife following a long day of campaign appearances all across the Peach State.

Ossoff was still alive to become the state’s first Jewish senator, and his buddy, Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock, was still in the running to become the state’s first black senator because decidedly racist election rules that were built by the suffocating hands of white, racist Republicans in Georgia 60 years earlier were finally in the process of collapsing all over their very own candidates.

The Georgia Republican incumbent senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, were in a strong position to be re-elected in the November 3rd popular vote, but because of other GOP candidates in the field were unable to clear the necessary 50-percent threshold that was needed to win outright in the state, thus setting up runoff elections on January 5, 2021, against the rising Warnock and Ossoff.

The 50-percent rule that had been put in place in 1962 by Republicans to prevent what they called “Negro bloc voting” and blacks from ascending to political office by galvanizing their support behind one candidate, was now blocking the lily-white Perdue and Loeffler from keeping their jobs in the Senate pending January’s runoff results.

If both Ossoff and Warnock, who were now tabbed as slight underdogs, somehow won on January 5, the United States Senate would be tied 50-50, and the nation’s first female Vice President and person of color, Kamala Harris, would have the deciding vote in the case of ties.

And if you aren’t tasting the delicious irony of all that, then I have done a rotten job of cooking and presenting the meal ...

Now Ossoff was on the phone with us delivering crisp talking points, setting the scene on the ground in Georgia, and taking questions. I remember being struck by how smart and engaging the guy was, despite his grueling schedule.

A few of the people on the call outside the realm of journalism and on the inside of political circles from afar wanted it known they were ready and willing to do whatever was necessary, including traveling to Georgia during the pandemic, to help him and Warnock prevail.

That’s when he thanked everybody and said he had but one request, which he proceeded to deliver like an order:

“I know y’ll want to come on down here and help us get out the vote,” he said with a buttery southern accent, “But we would appreciate it if y’ll would just stay right where you are, be safe, and let us Georgians handle things on the ground here. This is our fight, and we got this. Thanks.”

This is our fight, and we got this …

Of course, Loeffler and Perdue could give no such orders to their supporters because their boss, Trump, was throwing a series of high-test tantrums and threatening anybody he could find in the state who had given Biden their stamp of approval.

Anybody who heard it will never forget his call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, on January 2, 2021:

“There’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated. So look. All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

Trump had just been caught on tape trying to rig an election. We know now he had been doing similar things in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

While Loeffler and Perdue were trying to make their case for reelection, the wild man was intent on flying in and landing dead in the middle of their rallies like an orange stink bomb and polluting the air whenever he damn well wanted. He made it clear he didn’t much care about them, or who won the Senate. He just needed everybody to understand that he was the victim here, and was looking to get even with America.

Understand this because it is key: NOBODY hurt the Georgia Republican candidates more than he did with his repulsive behavior, and Georgia voters, now galvanized by the horror they were watching, were not going to let him get away with it.

Still, he continued threatening the lives of poll workers in the state and shaking down Republican and Democratic election officials like the two-bit thug he most certainly has always been.

That also meant lining up fake electors to hand to his mealy-mouthed vice president, Mike Pence, on January 6, to make sure our peaceful transfer of power was as crooked and violent as he was.

That also meant flying in his sweaty orcs like Rudolph Giuliani, black hair dye dripping down his gross face, and lopsided lawyer Sidney Powell to poison the air and smash the integrity of Georgia’s airtight voting system by spouting one disgusting lie and empty threat after another.

Trump and his thugs quickly assembled a crime syndicate in the state with scotch tape, rusty nails and endless white privilege, all while a just-elected, Black district attorney in Fulton County named Fani Willis sat back and quietly took notes ...

Ossoff and Warnock stayed focused, on message, and slowly began peeling away voters from their opponents, who were in the tank for Trump, and slowly drowning because of it.

Black voters in the state galvanized and heroically braved long lines and a virus that had killed more than one million Americans to make sure they protected America.

By the time the runoff finally got underway the morning of January 5, there was something special in the air. Early voting had been strong, turnout was brisk, and Georgia was on the cusp of once again making history.

As the numbers came pouring in that evening it became apparent that the engaging Warnock was going to handily beat Loeffler. Ossoff was in a much tighter battle, but as the clock ticked toward midnight, he began closing like a freight train on Perdue. When hours later, he finally caught and passed him, freedom rang.

The people of Georgia had pulled off one of the greatest feats in U.S. political history by helping send the presidency to Biden, the Senate to the Democrats, and Democracy an injection of much-needed life.

Champagne corks popped all across America.

That celebration lasted only 12 hours.

On the afternoon of January 6, 2021, the day after Georgia was heard from again, our United States Capitol began to get ripped to shreds by an army of Trump’s Deplorables. Inside the Capitol, Republicans’ worst, among them, Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, indicated they weren’t much interested in fighting fair or certifying Biden’s win until they, too, were forced to run for their lives from Trump’s mob.

Pence was threatened with hanging.

Our peaceful transfer of power, a hallmark of America, was now being wrecked by the most anti-American president in U.S. history.

After failing to steal the election, the son of a had actually attacked us.

While law enforcement officers were beaten with flag poles and crushed by the stampede, and lowlifes like Hawley and Cruz hid, Trump sat back in the White House, and for hours and hours did nothing but root for the attack’s success.

We know how that day ended, and for more than four years we waited for justice to begin.

It unforgivably never happened.

What did happen that day was Trump stumbled onto the White House lawn and grudgingly called his attack off, but not before telling the enemies of the United States who had attacked us that he loved them.

He told them that he loved them ...

Ultimately he was charged with nearly 100 felony counts in four different cases for his never-ending attacks on decency and our democracy. We sadly know now that a legal system that can produce people like Clarence Thomas, Samual Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh, and gutless prosecutors like Merrick Garland failed us.

Now ask yourself what would have happened if those January 6 attackers had been Black …

So now the man who violently attacked us that day is just itching to finish us off for good, and has reportedly picked Georgia to escalate his war on our vote.

There is no place in America that has giving me more pride than Georgia during the course of my long lifetime. Georgia’s sons and daughters have been beaten but proceeded unbowed to make sure that liberty rings across America.

Georgia, the state that has given us John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. … Jimmy Carter and Stacey Abrams … Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy, Jr. … Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff …

Georgia, which carried on through a killer pandemic and threats from the President of the United States to make sure every, damn vote got counted is once again under attack.

This time Ossoff, Warnock and the brave people of Georgia could use our help, and we should do whatever we can to give it to them.

There’s never been a better time or place for the most dangerous man in the world to finally ride to his epic fall.

Georgia must be on all our minds right now.

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

I was going to avoid any meaty comment on the passing of Lindsey Graham, because for the most part my thunder has been stolen by people who chose their words wisely, while still others dug into their keyboards in the immediate aftermath of his death Sunday and beat me to the punch.

Then I started reading what two of our most venerable news organizations were saying about the South Carolina Senator’s passing, and I simply cannot let it go without comment.

Before holding them to account (again), I want this clear about Graham, who died at the young age of 71:

If he wasn't the worst, most dulpicitous Republican to ever disgrace Washington, he was right near the top, because unlike so many infested with the killer MAGA disease, he knew better. We know this because over and over again during the past decade or so HE TOLD US he knew better.

There was never a better example of this than his evergreen tweet from 2016.

It is my hope that this tweet will define his legacy.

I found it interesting that while searching for this brush with the truth, that he never deleted it. I wonder if that is because every now and then when trapped in a quiet room and forced to deal with only himself, Lindsey would look back longingly at what he used to be instead of the coward he had become.

Graham debased himself in front of a lewd liar and racist, who attacked our country, so that both of these broken men could stay in power. Because staying in power was what it was really about with Graham, even if he'd stumble every now and then and reveal that he really did know better.

When asked to comment following Trump’s violent attack on our country Jan. 6, 2021, a shaken Graham said this:

“All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

Except just four months later he made it clear he wanted back in, when he lowered himself to gutter level to look into Trump’s eyes, and said this:

“Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”

Grow into WHAT, Lindsey?

In between those two competing quotes from the double-dealing Graham, he voted to acquit Trump in an impeachment trial that would have ensured that the man he warned us about in 2016 would never be able to harm us again.

So this morning, after I’d read four or five pieces on Graham’s death from writers I trust in our independent media, I held my breath and clicked into a pair of increasingly condescending publications, who in their attempt to rise above it all, have lost all touch with reality.

I am talking of course about the The Atlantic and The New York Times.

It is truly amazing how little these once-venerable publications value us, and their credibility as news organizations. There is nothing they won’t rationalize, and on Monday they had their top editorial writers spinning a straw man into gold.

I wonder why they think they can insult our intelligence like this?

It occurs to me that much like Graham himself they damn well know better, but refuse to give into their better selves because there’s profit in acting like duplicitous fools.

Here’s what the Times was going with on Monday.

Wow. Makes you wonder what they said about Hitler’s enablers, no?

Not to be outdone by the Times’ overheated syrup, here’s what The Atlantic poured all over their readers’ heads at the very top of their front page today.

Holy hell.

The other two amigos, of course, were the late Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman.

And because it is impossible to mention Graham without mentioning Trump, it is worth remembering that before 2017, you couldn’t mention him without mentioning his friend, McCain. When McCain died in 2018, so, too, did whatever good was left inside Graham. In fact, when McCain died, so, too, did whatever good was left inside the entire Republican Party.

Lieberman is not worth remembering at all. He stood for nothing, and barely even for Al Gore, who disastrously made him his running mate in 2000.

Amid the sanctimonious whitewashing of Graham by The Atlantic and The Times, a PBS alert arrived in my inbox to save the day several hours ago. They decided to run a piece from the Associated Press, which I slapped around lovingly on Saturday, because they generally know better.

The AP piece laid out Graham’s choppy career fairly, and unlike the other two silly publications was able to break down Graham’s two-faced life in politics, and ultimate disservice to a country he so easily sold down the Potomac River.

I took heart reading the piece, because it is still important that publications that garner so many eyes publish the truth and not revisionist smog that chokes it.

We might never be able to recover from the damage people like Lindsey Graham have inflicted on America, but we can — and must — ensure they are remembered accurately.

It’s the least we can do for an America badly wounded by the likes of Trump, and his pathetic enablers like Graham.

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

I learned long ago as a cub reporter at a weekly newspaper in New Jersey that there are realities in this world, and there are political realities. Realities are, well, real. Political realities are shaped by people in little rooms Inside the Beltway who live in a world detached from reality.

“They’re eating the dogs … They’re eating the cats … They’re eating the pets of the people that live there …”

Our working press used to be pretty good at separating reality from political reality, but these days with partisan noise blasting in from every corner on the Internet, and too much incompetence littering our newsrooms, our press in far too many cases no longer knows the difference between the two, or just doesn’t care.

Take just this past insane week in American politics, for instance ...

On Thursday, while paddling around to all my likely news sources, I came across a headline in one of the few journalism outposts I still trust, the Associated Press.

Here it is:

US and Iran Exchange More Attacks Across the Mideast, Threatening Ceasefire Deal

Read that again.

Anybody want to tell them?

Apparently, despite the cold, hard fact that the U.S. and Iran are still bombing the bejesus out of each other, AP has settled for the Trump regime’s political reality that we are in a ceasefire.

This would be laughable, if it wasn’t so pathetic and dangerous.

Just a day earlier, Trump crashed into a NATO summit in Turkey at full speed with one plane and left the place in another. Go ahead and hit the hyperlink for that insane story at your convenience, but it’s what happened on the ground that has me particularly furious.

And I’ll get to that in minute because breaking news entirely relevant to my heated rant this morning has just come across the wires. The New York Times has reported that the Trump regime has come after its reporters who published a story on this “plane” truth.

Here is the chilling quote from their top newsroom lawyer, David McCraw, in response to this authoritarian attack on a free press:

“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects.”

I believe this case will only see a sliver of the light of day, but the implications of this brazen attack on the Fourth Estate should shake us all to the core. This is exactly what we fought against in 1776.

It is the mad king’s latest attack on the truth.

“Democrats stole the 2020 election, and I won it.”

Again, Trump is trying to turn his warped political reality into a reality …

So back to Turkey where he was busy wreaking havoc on our nation’s friends. While there, Trump did that weird thing he does when he puffs out his ample ass, grabs hold of the podium with one hand, while pointing his little finger with the other, and assaults anybody or anything he can get his squinty eyes on. In this case, he proceeded to accost our NATO partners who have been with us for decades, and through too many of our wars and not enough peace.

It was a performance unbefitting a U.S. president. Even a constipated clown would have behaved better.

Here’s what this nuclear-powered insult machine said about Spain alone:

"Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don't participate. They don't pay. I don't want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits… I don't want to do any more trade with them. All right, take it immediately."

And about NATO:

“I’m not happy with NATO because of what they did with Greenland, and I’m not happy with NATO because of the fact that they didn’t want to help us with the number one state sponsor of terror, that’s Iran.”

Listen to me, if any other president comported himself like this on the world stage, the media would have been rightfully hyperventilating, and calling for said president’s head. Except here was a headline from the newspaper Wednesday, which was just assaulted by the Trump regime yesterday:

Democrats can’t go on like this …

Understand, this wasn’t a one-off from one of their editorial writers. This was the venerable New York Times editorial board deciding to scold Democrats for the Graham Platner fiasco. I had planned to touch on this sore subject one more time today, but will shelve it due to this breaking news, except to type this:

Platner had to go, but his message lives. Tens of thousands of Mainers supported him and that message while making him their nominee. They are now coming to grips with the fact that the man they voted for — and in many instances worked for — is no longer on the ballot. They are going to need a minute with this. But here’s what they don’t need: Pearl-clutchers on the Left scolding them for their choice. I supported Platner until I just couldn’t anymore. If you disagree with me on that, I understand completely. If you want to take shots at me and the people who supported him: back up. Because trust me, if you want to play that dirty game, I’ll bury you with shovels full of your own hypocrisy. So how about we bury the hatchet, the shovels, and the haughty, put aside our differences, and work together to beat the fascists who have it in for all of us?
-Thank you in advance

Anyway …

While Trump was burying NATO with his own shovels full of authoritarian screed, the NYT editorial board was burying Democrats.

The newspaper that intentionally shirked their responsibility of covering the most violent attack on our Democracy since the Civil War, was going to pour barrels full of ink attacking the party defending it.

Two days later, the tyrant attacked them.

The revolting White House Correspondents Association dinner is in two weeks, after being rescheduled because of yet another fiasco attached to the fascist Trump. So I’ll make you a bet: Despite being attacked by the dark forces who want to end us, The New York Times will be there hat in hand kissing Trump’s ring, because they see things through the dirty lens of political realities.

But here’s the reality: Either you stand with the people of America who believe in a free press, and free elections or you don’t. Either you stand with democracies around the world, or you don’t. Either you understand that Trump is the most dangerous man in the world, or you don’t.

Any press organization struggling to grasp these realities are complicit in our demise.

They are out of excuses.

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

Well, the dog finally caught the car in Maine.

Since Graham Platner burst on the scene a year ago announcing his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, he has crisscrossed the Pine Tree State telling uncomfortable truths about America’s broken political system, and making enemies on both sides of the spectrum doing it.

Controversy has followed the combat vet for the past year, but so too, have thousands and thousands of supporters in Maine who nominated him to run against the despicable Republican, Susan Collins, in a key Senate race in November.

Since ascending to the Senate in 1996, the oily Collins has been clobbering one establishment Democrat after another in a state that has a proud history of distrusting the establishment. You have to live in Maine to understand Maine, and the problem is that too many people don’t.

From their rooftop perch in the northeast corner of the country Mainers literally look down on the rest of the United States. This doesn’t make them haughty, it makes them properly suspicious.

Either you are from Maine or are from Away.

It looks like the latest allegations that Platner sexually assaulted a woman five years ago, are going to be the end of his run, but I promise you that the voters I have talked to there the past 24 hours, want more information on this before they drop their support — no matter what the people from Away say.

And look, I’m not going to sit here and try yo have my cake while wolfing it down, too. I endorsed Platner last October, but I believe the time has come for him to drop out, because men have to stop thinking they can assault women and suffer no consequences for it.

I hung on with Platner for as long as I could because he and people like him are the answer to greatest political question of our times in America: How in the hell do we get rid of all this money polluting our election system?

We have to do that, of course, because even our radical Right “Supreme” Court majority has proven it is completely bought and paid for by America’s oligarchy.

Which is why it needs to be blown to smithereens — which is another answer to another vitally important question we can talk about another time.

Platner connected with the people of Maine, who were not going to just blindly say yes to Chuck Schumer and the Democratic elites’ from Away foisting the state’s 77-year-old governor, Janet Mills, on them to take on and lose badly to Susan Collins.

Those elites can say they were right about Platner now, but that is a lot of double-talking coming from people who say they want change, but have rolled out of the rack each day for the past three decades or so doing exactly the same thing.

This started with Bill Clinton, and because life is often a circle, Clinton was elected as president in 1992 when I was working at a newspaper in central Maine. Just four years later, Collins was elected to the Senate in the state.

Clinton’s mostly gone, but Collins has stayed … and stayed … and stayed …

God only knows how many people Bill slept with outside his marriage, but at the time that wasn't much of an issue to the giggly party establishment who still rule the party now. Hell, back then they were only too happy to normalize a 49-year-old man copping a blowjob in the Oval Office from a 22-year-old intern.

I don’t think myself a prude, but any guy who did this to one of my daughters would be eating through a straw for the rest of his life.

I admittedly never liked Bill Clinton because I don’t like most politicians, and because it was just so easy to see he was completely full of it. He was a gifted speaker, smart as a whip, had a boatload of charisma, and most importantly: was a contrast to the stodgy Republican dinosaurs like George Bush Sr., and Bob Dole who no longer fit into anything in America. Both men served their country honorably and in war, but even that has an end date in politics.

Or used to …

Long way of saying the Democratic Party long ago turned into something they used to warn everybody else about, and are stale as month-old bread these days.

They say they want change but have absolutely no idea how to get it. So when a guy like Platner comes along … or another guy like Zohran Mamdani comes along … or a woman like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes along … they say, “Yeah, yeah, fine. But NOT them.”

This is exactly what happened in 2016 when Bernie Sanders burst on the scene.

Let me tell you where I was politically in 2016 as Barack Obama was wrapping up his two terms: Feeling proud I had supported him twice, pretty good about the country, but worried the future would go into some recycling machine.

In fact, I remember distinctly saying this when the field was getting settled for the 2016 race: “Anybody but another Clinton or another Bush, please. We don’t have royal families in America.”

Well, a decade later there are No Kings marches, and for once this old guy was ahead of his time.

And look, I like Hillary Clinton OK, and think she would have been a good president. She is even smarter than her husband, but was a terrible candidate, and most of America knew that. Her time was 2008, but went onto run one of the stupidest campaigns in American history, and the young up-and-coming candidate with a real message, and the outside lane all to himself blasted past her and into the White House.

Even Obama, for all his talent, was turning into an establishment Democrat toward the end of his term, and was convinced that it was important to keep the club together. If it wasn't Hillary’s time in 2008, it would have to be in 2016, whether he or anybody else liked it or not.

So he gave her a high-profile job as Secretary of State, and that settled things, even if it was unsettling to millions of people in America, who weren’t so sure. The real irony here of course is that the guy who should have had the inside track, Vice President Joe Biden, was tackled by the party establishment, and told to wait his turn.

Biden publicly said the tragic loss of his son, Beau, in 2015 led to his decision not to run, but it was clear the decision was not his to make. Hillary was the nominee.

I’ll go to my grave believing Biden would have won in 2016, not because he was smarter than Clinton, but because America is plenty misogynistic enough to have ensured that.

Once again Hillary was stuck running in the middle lane, while the Republicans grudgingly gave way to a maniac who was connecting with white Americans, who were bruised from all the good Obama did.

Because the irony runs deep today, it was none other than Bill Clinton who might have given the best explanation for his wife’s defeat when he said in 2012: “Democrats want to fall in love; Republicans just fall in line.”

Democrats desperately need a new club, but mostly a new message and coalition, which brings us full circle back to Platner in Maine.

I guarantee you 90 percent of the Democratic Party establishment, their elitist bosses, and the mob on social media who were calling for his head never heard him speak. The man has a gift, just as Bill Clinton did when he burst on the scene in Arkansas 40-plus years ago. And think of that: A Democratic governor in Arkansas.

Nothing lasts forever in America, and I type that with hope today.

Platner understands Maine, just as Clinton understood Arkansas. These men knew what the electorate wanted and didn't want, and how to address it. Like so many in this country, Mainers are sick and tired of the head-in-the-sand, do-nothing establishment, who are so ineffective at communicating to the American public that they can’t even preach patience anymore.

The problem isn’t that a guy like Platner was running in Maine, the problem is that a guy like Chuck Schumer is running the Democratic Senate.

Platner for all his warts was offering change and solutions, while Schumer is offering nothing but we’ve been getting for the better part of three decades, which has helped lead to the greatest divergence in income in American history.

Too few people have too damn much in America, and I swear to God, if we don’t get a hold of this pronto, we are done.

OVER.

This is the biggest issue facing America, and second isn't close.

These billionaires don’t care whether you can afford to eat or not. They don’t care how much you are paying for health insurance. They don’t care about clean air and drinking water. They don’t care if the current president is the biggest lowlife in American history, and the most dangerous man on Earth …

Like that lowlife, they care only about themselves and accruing as much wealth as possible, and anybody who dares speak out about this will be crushed. And if you have a problem with that you can take it to their bought-off Court.

For all of our problems in this boiling country, most Americans can actually see this. The candidates who also see this, and can speak to them will thrive. The candidates that want to tell us the answers lie somewhere in the mucky middle are sentencing us to more of the same, and again I am telling you we won’t survive that.

Platner was onto something, and whether you want to say the messenger was shot or that he shot himself, nobody in the Democratic Establishment can say they didn’t hear his message.

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

We are but 122 days from the most important elections of our lifetime, and on the day before our nation’s 250th birthday, those elections are under attack by the anti-American Republican Party and their wannabe king who already violently attacked us once.

As a type this on a steaming hot day across much of America, our clean air and water are also under attack by Republicans. A woman’s right to choose what she does with her body is also under attack by Republicans. Our books are also under attack by Republicans. Our vote, the backbone of any Democracy, is also under attack by Republicans. Life-saving vaccines are also under attack by Republicans. Affordable healthcare is also under attack by Republicans. Affordable childcare is also under attack by Republicans. Lower prices overall are also under attack by Republicans, who look the other way while their despicable commander in thief uses his office in our White House to rake in billions of ill-gotten dollars.

I could go on here for 20 minutes citing examples of the peril Republicans have put our nation in, I really could, but the sharper point is this: If you ask the dying breed known as the moderate Republican or Independent voter in America why, despite the absolute hell we are enduring as a people, they still might not vote for a Democrat in November, you will most likely get some variation of this answer:

They are worried about the Democrats’ extreme positions.

Yep, I know …

Go ahead and read again that abbreviated list of Republican positions I laid out above and tell me which one of them isn’t extreme.

I’ll wait.

The word extreme is yet another one of those loaded words that the Right has successfully co-opted to hammer the Left, while the Left obediently just sits there and dutifully takes their beating. Hell, some of them even repeat it!

“Radical” is another one of those words that gets disturbingly little pushback when describing Democrats. “Lawless” is another. “Dangerous” is yet another …

Sometimes when I read stories that parrot the line that Democrats are too extreme — often from left-leaning authors — I want to throw my computer out the window with the hope it will hit them in their fat heads.

Words and messaging matter, and the patriots of this county on the Left need to get far better at using them, because we won’t survive another election cycle if we don’t.

That means they need to get with it PRONTO.

So let’s try this:

If asked to describe the current President of the United States, I’d readily answer this way (please feel free to repeat after me, and share, er, liberally):

“Well … to start, Donald Trump is a lawless, radical America-attacking convicted felon and bigot, who has lied tens of thousands of times (and under oath), has physically and verbally attacked women countless times, runs with a crowd of Epstein corporate elites who rape women and children and snicker about it, exclusively sides with dangerous and extreme fascist regimes around the world, and has made an absurd profit using the most powerful office in the world to launder our money into his overflowing bank accounts.”

You can go ahead and fact check that one, but I’m confident after editing it down some for tightness that I hit it right on the nose.

The man is “lawless, extreme, radical, and dangerous,” or everything that the Republicans have successfully lobbed at the Left for decades.

Every accusation is truly a confession.

It would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad, and infuriating that they are so easily able to get away with it.

I guess all of this is worth mentioning on this terribly sad day, because Trump and his slobbering party are exactly what the flawed framers of this country hoped to prevent 250 years ago, as they worked to emancipate their newly minted imperfect nation from a pathetic king.

Unfortunately, they failed to fully account for another wannabe king ruling us in the future like Trump because they were writing from the perspective of rich, earnest white guys who had mostly honorable intentions, but were landowners — and in some cases people-owners — who never saw a single tax they liked.

Had women and people of color been a part of crafting our governing charters, based on their hard-earned experiences of dealing with white men in power, they most assuredly would have accounted for the strong possibility that an entitled, violent white devil was going to come along and burn everything to the ground for his gain.

This wasn’t a real reach, and the fact it hasn’t happened more frequently actually speaks to some goodness in the land of the mostly free.

The South’s secession in 1860 and 1861 was the first attempt to destroy our union. January 6, 2021, was the second, and if Trump and his subservient Republican Orcs get their way and an approving nod from our bought-off Radical Right Supreme Court, November 3, 2026, will be the third.

The “lawless, extreme, radical, and dangerous” Trump does not intend to answer to a Democratic House and/or Senate, and will do everything he can to protect himself from that. Anybody who doesn’t think he will violently attack us again to prevent that, has somehow missed the fact that he has proven himself to be easily the most dangerous man on Earth.

The New York Times broke out an important story Thursday afternoon headlined:

The Many Ways Trump is Trying to Tip the Scales for the Midterms

And go ahead and read that headline again, because as we have discussed today, words matter. Why did the editors at the Times use the words “tip the scales” when the word “steal” would have worked perfectly and economically?

Try this:

THE MANY WAYS TRUMP IS TRYING TO STEAL THE MIDTERMS

There, better.

Anyway, in their meaty piece, the NYT lists six ways Trump is continuing his attack on America. (The last six words of that sentence are mine, because the pinky-outs on the editing desk of the paper would never use such plain and accurate language to support their reporters’ hard-hitting work, when beating around the bush is such an attractive option.)

The Times’ broke the story into six sections with the following subheads highlighting his plan of attack:

Taking steps to nationalize elections
Trying to tighten voting restrictions
Pushing for mid-decade redistricting
Cutting election security
Undermining faith in the electoral system by questioning previous results
Punishing those who have worked against election denialism

All of these are pretty self-explanatory, and underway in all 50 states. The Times, in so many coded words, is telling us that the ongoing Republican attack on America is gaining steam.

But Democrats are “extreme” …

Anytime you hear, see, or read a word like that associated with a Democrat, you need to stop it dead in its tracks — especially if it is coming from authors and/or pontificators on the Left. They are either up to no good, or too damn stupid to understand how dangerous this is.

Because words matter, and we have exactly four months to get our messaging straight.

So one more time:

Donald Trump is a lawless, radical America-attacking convicted felon and bigot, who has lied tens of thousands of times (and under oath), has regularly and violently physically and verbally attacked women countless times, runs with a crowd of Epstein corporate elites who rape women and children and snicker about it, exclusively sides with dangerous and extreme fascist regimes around the world, and has made an absurd profit using the most powerful office in the world to launder our money into his overflowing bank accounts.

Please spread the word.

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