On Aug. 9, 2016, Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, stood on his steel-enforced soapbox in Wilmington, North Carolina, and said this through a smirk about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton:

"Hillary wants to abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. But the Second Amendment people … maybe there is, I don't know."

This was Trump at his absolute worst, which makes it as bad as it gets, or anyone can be, with his veiled suggestion that his supporters exercise their gun rights to stop Clinton from abolishing the Second Amendment.

Like so many toxic statements Trump made on his campaign trail of fears that year, it should have ended his candidacy on the spot. No presidential candidate in the history of our country had openly hinted at a call to arms against an opponent. And for the record, Clinton never once said she wanted to incinerate the Second Amendment.

Many Republicans called it simply a “joke gone bad” at the time because they had all heard those horrible words and the context in which he delivered them. Trump later denied he was advocating an assassination attempt, and instead was simply trying to coalesce a political movement.

I know how I felt when I heard his disgusting comments, and have no doubt what the odious Trump was implying with his sick “joke.”

Just four years later, Trump left no doubt about his violent intentions when he tried to overturn an election by instigating the worst attack on our Capitol since the War of 1812. Law enforcement officers were beaten with American and rebel flags. His vice president was threatened with hanging, and his thugs whom he later told us that he “loved” roamed the halls hunting down Speaker Nancy Pelosi, among others.

I remind you of these terrible things, because much of our broken-down legacy media refuses to in the wake of the murder of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk.

I remind you of this, because any reporting that doesn’t mention Trump as the root cause of the Republican hate speech and political violence across this country, isn’t worth the screen it is printed on.

I remind you of this because any reporting that doesn’t mention Kirk’s overt racism and misogyny as the catalyst for his popularity on the right is fooling itself, but worse, trying to fool you.

This is incredibly dangerous, because by treating the death of Kirk as some “political assassination” instead of yet another preventable gun death among tens of thousands in this country, our media is providing fuel to a fire that Republicans would like to burn to the point of out of control.

As I wrote on Friday:

I am not celebrating Kirk’s death, but I am lamenting the demise of truth in this country.

So here is the truth:

Trump is a hardcore racist, and Kirk was one too. I could fill 14 columns using only their racist words to buttress this fact.

He was not as New York Times columnist Ezra Klein typed Thursday, presumably with a blindfold on: “Practicing politics the right way.”

Klein’s column defied belief, because up until the moment he wrote those idiotic, dangerous words, I had a fair amount of respect for a guy who generally takes a reasoned approach to these unreasonable times we live in.

Here’s the column. I’ll guess it’s paywalled, but assure you it’s not worth a dime or a single minute of your time. Klein was slammed by NYT readers in the comments section, before they had to close the one-way discourse down. I’ll hope he read them. If he’s not embarrassed, and rethinking his shoddy, tone-deaf take on Kirk’s killing, he’s not human. Worse, he’s never to be trusted again, which would be a damn shame, because he generally is a voice of reason, whether you agree with him not.

I am not here to exclusively batter Klein, but I am saying he is one of the leaders of the chorus in our broken media, whose mishandling of the Republican attack on our Democracy has helped lead us to this terrible place.

The man who violently attacked our country, now has troops in our streets.

The man who tried to overturn our 2020 election, is now relentlessly attacking our election process.

The man who lied on the camping trail that “I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” is now implementing it almost to the letter in an effort to make sure we never recognize our government or our country ever again.

I have not seen ONE story in our legacy media calling him a fascist, even if he is the definition of one.

The same way I did not hear anybody in our legacy media call him a liar when in fact, he told a documented 30,573 lies or mistruths during his first, disastrous term.

The same way, I am not seeing the legacy media calling him a racist even now …

I want to remind you of something else I typed on Thursday, that is keeping me up at night:

DO NOT LET THE CORPORATE MEDIA FRAME THIS MOMENT.

As a lifetime journalist, that isn’t easy to type, but I was taught to report the truth, and that accuracy breeds credibility.

Without truth, accuracy, or credibility you are finished in the news business.

We all must gravitate toward the truth-tellers in our society right now, and become truth-tellers ourselves, if we are going to survive this rightwing onslaught on our Democracy.

A year ago, Vice President Kamala Harris confidently walked up to Donald Trump, looked him in his bloodshot eyes, offered her hand, and then proceeded to spend the next 90 minutes dragging him all over the stage of Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center in their one-and-only 2024 presidential debate.

Harris was prepared, disciplined, and clearly demonstrated her keen understanding of both domestic and foreign policy issues. She wasted no time stating her key plans for her administration, and effortlessly illustrated a command of the Constitution. She made it clear that she, not her opponent, who was a convicted felon, had spent an entire professional career upholding our nation’s laws, not violating them.

She even predicted how the debate would go down telling the world that Trump would haul out “the same old, tired playbook,” and warning he would resort to “a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling.”

While Harris strongly defended a woman’s right to choose, Trump stammered and lied saying, “As far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favor of an abortion ban. But it doesn’t matter because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”

Then he weirdly said, “I have been a leader on fertilization.”

With an incredulous look, Harris stared at him and then the camera, and said without speaking, “I have no idea what the hell he is talking about, either.”

This was repeated several more times, as Trump used the shovel Harris casually tossed him to bury himself.

When she wasn’t relentlessly fact-checking and battering the haggard Trump with the facts, she was nonchalantly casting a line and patiently waiting for the two-ton sucker fish to hit it, before setting the hook, and reeling him in.

By the time she was done, the orange, flapping fish was bleeding out all over the stage, and screaming, “They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!”

Harris also effortlessly dog-walked Trump into the very racist trap that he set weeks earlier when he questioned Harris’s “Blackness.”

“All I can say is, I read where she was not Black, that she put out. And I’ll say that, and then I read that she was Black. And that’s OK. Either one was OK with me. That’s up to her. That’s up to her.”

That’s up to her … How kind.

Harris again looked at the camera, with a “you decide” look.

When the a----kicking was finally over, Harris had masterfully humiliated Trump. She had proven she had the capacity to be one damn fine president, and knew how to stand up to fascist bullies, not roll out the red carpet for them.

So badly was Trump beaten, he actually flat turned down an offer from Republican state media at Fox TV to host a second debate, saying “there will be no rematch.”

It’s fitting then, that on the one-year anniversary of Harris’s knockout of Trump on that Philadelphia stage, we are getting news of Russia President Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Polish airspace today. High-ranking Polish military officials are decrying an “unprecedented violation” as a “huge number” of Russian drones were shot down by Polish and NATO forces over that country.

This is the first time in the history of NATO that alliance fighters have engaged enemy targets in allied airspace.

Read that again.

As I type this, Poland’s government has invoke Article 4 of the NATO treaty, that states alliance members “will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened.”

Without invoking Article 4, there cannot be Article 5, which could entail military action.

From reporting in The New York Times this afternoon:

Since NATO’s founding in 1949, Article 4 has been invoked eight times. Before Wednesday, the last was on Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

What we know for sure right now is that the world is less safe today than it was yesterday, and certainly one year ago. We still don’t have a clue what Trump has to say about any of it, except what he posted on his social media account:

"What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!"

Here we go? Good God.

This is the terrifying stuff of world wars, but of course, Harris was on top of this issue, too, during that debate, because unlike Trump, she read her national security briefings, and could tell our friends from our enemies.

At one point, Harris turned to Trump and said this:

“Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor, and what you think is a friendship with a known dictator (Putin) who would eat you for lunch?”

She wasn’t done:

“If Ukraine loses, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland.”

Holy hell …

And let me remind you that Trump promised to end Russia’s war with Ukraine on Day One of his presidency. Of course, anybody who was paying attention, and/or really loves this country, knew that like so much of the heated bilge that pours out of his lying mouth, it was all complete bulls–––.

Instead, just last month he surrendered to Putin on American soil by giving the murdering dictator the red-carpet treatment Harris had predicted.

But if we are really being accurate here, all of this was forecasted on another debate stage in 2016, when Trump was dragged around by another smart, tough, unflappable woman.

When Hillary Clinton went after Trump’s bromance with Putin, the man who would violently attack America only four years later said this:

“He (Putin) said nice things about me. He has no respect for her (Clinton), he has no respect for our president (Obama). I’ll tell you what, we’re in very serious trouble.”

Clinton responded this way:

“Well that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”

Truer words have never been spoken.

Both of these patriotic women were right about everything, and we should all be reminded of that every single day.

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.

One of the most significant developments in what was another ear-shattering, soul-crushing week in American politics transpired quietly last Monday evening, when Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) announced he was stepping down.

Nadler, 78, has been a liberal force during his three decades in Congress, and by finally throwing in the towel signaled that maybe — just MAYBE — Democrats are starting to listen to their angry constituents, who are not at all pleased by the way the party has comported itself leading up to, and after, the most consequential election in American history this past November.

“Watching the Biden thing really said something about the necessity for generational change in the party, and I think I want to respect that,” Nadler said, before grudgingly adding, that a younger replacement “can maybe do better, can maybe help us more.”

Using the word “maybe” was Nadler’s ego talking, but it was the “Watching the Biden thing …” that really interested me. I’ll have more on that in a minute, but for now, it’s instructive to listen to how news of Nadler’s departure was received in Democratic circles. Put it this way: I have not heard from ONE person of note who thought this was a bad decision.

Basically, this is what I have been hearing:

“Thank you, sir, for your many years of service. I wish more Democrats would do the same.”

To put it kindly, the Democratic Party has become a stale, useless brand. It is a party crying for a new direction, and new leadership. It needs fresh faces, and new ideas. Again: Nobody I have talked to disputes this.

One only needs see what is transpiring in Nadler’s haunts in New York City for a vivid illustration of the party’s self-destructive clash of cultures.

Up-and-comer, Zohran Mamdani, 33, handily won the New York City Democratic Mayoral Primary in July, but instead of celebrating his victory, the Democratic old guard, led by Andrew Cuomo, are fighting hard against him.

This is grotesque, it really is, but is serving to expose all that is wrong with a party that refuses to get out of its own way.

Even Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has not been able to bring himself to endorse his fellow New Yorker, most likely because his campaign has accepted upwards of $1 million from the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (which loathes Mamdani) in just the last year alone, and because Jeffries has proven himself to be too cute by half.

Once an up-and-comer himself, Jeffries has lately fallen flat, and is out of tune with the majority of his party these days, who see him as a lurker, not a leader. Sadly, he seems to be one of the only people who doesn’t see this.

Mamdani’s stunning victory in the July primary was a repudiation of the old guard, their failed ideas, and all that old money. Mamdani has proven he can reach the voters that Democrats must have to win elections, which begs the question:

Why then are so many old guard Democrats throwing rocks at him?

The easy answer is all that damn money, but there is also something else at play here: Sheer stupidity, as well as that ego even Nadler has found so hard to shelve.

Listen to me:

If there was just ONE thing Democrats could do to enhance their chances in every election for the next 20 years it would be this: Throw out that old guard, swap out your so-called leadership, and make good and damn sure every person in America knows you’ve done it.

REPEAT: Throw out the old guard, swap out your so-called leadership, and make good and damn sure every person in America knows you’ve done it.

Nothing would signal you are listening to your terrified and angry electorate more than that. Further, it would serve notice to the growing number of Americans who don’t see a difference between our two major parties that this version of the Democratic Party isn’t serving up just more of the same old bull----.

Politics is a competitive, bottom-line sport. And in every sport except politics, winners are rewarded with a second chance, while losers go home. When a team wins, coaches, players and general managers are rewarded for their efforts. When a team loses, coaches, players, and general managers are sent packing.

At least this is how the perennial winners do it …

Fans of these teams expect nothing less. Why would they pour their hard-earned money into the pockets of losers? Are these fans any different than the constituents of the Democratic Party? Why should the people who do all the heavy lifting, volunteering, door-knocking, and rallying and marching until their feet hurt keep showing up if their party is just going to trot out the same old, tired-a-- losing team?

If you’ve read even a little of my stuff, you know how I feel about the revolting, racist, misogynistic, anti-American Republican Party.

That this group of bought-off goons has been able to garner the support of something called the “working-class American” is not only patently insane, but speaks to the massive failures of the Democratic Party, which has allowed for the greatest heist in American history.

How can the party that stands with unions, workers’ rights, increased minimum wage, wages overall, healthcare, childcare, social security, Medicaid and Medicare be losing the working-class voters?????

And, by the way, have you seen the latest job reports, showing Trump’s predictable and massive failures?

We’ve heard a lot about Democrats’ inability to communicate to the American public, but I’m not sure if that messaging is as much of a problem as the people who are doing it — those losing players I was talking about.

Like it or not, most Americans are sick and tired of the Cuomos and the Clintons, the Chuck Schumers and Hakeem Jeffries, the Amy Klobuchars and the Steny Hoyers, the Mark Warners and the Cory Bookers …

The list is really long, and growing.

None of these people should be in leadership any longer, and none of them will ever become president despite all their unbridled ambition, so they need to finally get that out of their hard heads.

Like it or not, they are the faces of a failed brand. I am not saying they all need to go, but they do need to learn to lead from behind, while pushing new, aspiring leaders forward.

THAT is how you truly serve your country, and thank you in advance.

It was bad enough the party lost the House, the Senate and the presidency in the most consequential elections in American history last November, but they somehow made it even worse by the way they completely and callously mishandled their beating.

It was almost as if they couldn’t wait to surrender.

It was as if they didn’t give a good goddam about the people who spent their time and treasure working their tails off to get them elected, and were now terrified about what was coming down the pike in a second, vengeful Trump dictatorial term.

A term, by the way, that should have never been allowed to happen if we had a damn Justice Department that acted with the urgency Trump’s January 6, 2021, attack on our nation most certainly demanded.

Joe Biden himself was absolutely appalling in Kamala Harris’s defeat, what with his warm welcome to America’s dictator in front of that damn fire in the White House only days after the election. I will never be able to unsee or un-hear that grotesque spectacle.

Then there was the cheery Klobuchar handling the inauguration festivities of the fascist dictator as if hosting some terrible, pinky-out cocktail party, while Schumer took it all in doing his worst impression of Chuck Schumer.

The gall of these people …

Within months, polls started reflecting Americans distaste for this out-of-touch, ineffective group. As I type this, the Democratic Party’s approval ratings are at roughly 20 percent.

Four out of five Americans don’t like what they are being served by Democrats.

It almost makes Trump’s 40 percent approvals look stellar by comparison.

But maybe Democrats are finally opening the door a crack, to let the fresh air in.

In the past few weeks I have seen hints of a different party, with different tactics, even if I am still seeing the same galling stupidity out of too many selfish dimwits like the odious, women-groping Andrew Cuomo.

Maybe Jerry Nadler’s resignation is a sign Democrats really are beginning to listen to their bosses in the field. We need more of this, people.

FAR MORE OF IT.

We need to hear from the new politicians, with new voices and ideas, who are advancing all the good Democrats have done and are doing, while forcefully standing against the most dangerous party in our nation’s history.

And we need to see them competing in our Red States as well as the Blue and Purple ones. Quit conceding turf to these fascists, who offer nothing to their voters but vitriol and death.

WE are the good guys, dammit.

WE need fighters.

These are the people who I will support. I am done getting my a-- kicked by backing the same old losing team with the same old losing players.

NOW READ: Arkansas farmers are facing catastrophe — and Trump is the reason why

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.

Florida announced plans this week to become the first state to end all vaccine mandates, INCLUDING FOR SCHOOLCHILDREN.

Read that again.

I had intended to write about the Epstein files today, and the incredibly brave survivors of alleged child rape, who gathered on Capitol Hill to tell their stories. They were there because it is beginning to look like our president who ran on releasing those files, instead has a starring role in them, and will do everything possible to make sure they never see the light of day.

That would generally would be a banner story. In a sane, just world, it would have the potential to end Donald Trump's presidency, and ultimately land him jail for the rest of his miserable life.

But because you hang around places like this and pay attention, you don’t need me to tell you that we are not living in a sane, just world.

Just how insane and unjust is the world? Consider that the possibility of the president being accused of sexual abusing underage women was by far only the second-biggest story of the day ...

Truth is, this vaccine news might be one of the most significant stories of the century, because of its gruesome ramifications on the future of our rattling civilization.

Bluntly: If Florida goes through with this death plan, it could potentially result in one of the largest losses of human life ever.

Look, vaccines have been a life-changing discovery, and one of mankind’s greatest achievements. The advent of vaccines has saved hundreds of millions of lives the past 100 years or so.

That we are reversing our thinking on the use of vaccines in America is almost too absurd to contemplate. The profound stupidity and danger this presents really can't be overstated.

MILLIONS of lives are at risk if Florida out-Floridas itself and actually puts this deranged plan into action.

We need only look at COVID to see this.

Despite what you’ll hear from many ghoulish, anti-life Republicans, millions of lives were saved thanks to COVID vaccines. Maybe even more startling, an estimated 317,000 lives in the United States alone would have been saved during the COVID outbreak had everybody just done their civic duty and gotten vaccinated.

If Florida goes ahead with this insane plan, just as sure as I am typing this, all kinds of otherwise preventable diseases will begin reappearing all over the place — measles and polio just to name a couple. And while our children will be most vulnerable, because Republicans never saw a kid whose life wasn’t worth jeopardizing, Florida’s huge population of retirees will also be under direct threat.

We will ALL be under threat.

Today’s gruesome news comes in the backdrop of the insane vaccine guidance being shoveled out to the American public by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our secretary of Health and Human Services, who listens to everybody but professionals in the medical and scientists communities, ignores a century’s worth of vaccines’ positive results, and has been a vocal vaccine skeptic.

Last month, after Kennedy proudly announced the rollback of nearly $500 million in vaccine funding, I typed this:

“Instead of answers and more science and discovery to make sure we are ready for the next mass-medical emergency, Trump instead has inflicted us with this gruesome stray from the Kennedy dynasty, who is quickly becoming a one-man pandemic.”

Last week, Susan Monarez, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was forced out by Captain Death less than one month into her job for refusing to go along with this maniac’s plans to end us.

Four other leading officials at the CDC resigned because they too had come under extreme pressure from the sickening Kennedy. One of those officials said Kennedy’s team asked him to “change studies that have been settled in the past” to fit Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views.

Yep, “change studies.” Just make stuff up. I mean, it’s only people’s lives we are talking about …

So who are the players down in the Sunset State, who are putting this latest death plan into action?

Let’s start with Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, who made the announcement standing beside the state’s grotesque and Trump-slobbering Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Ladapo is a COVID vaccine-denier. A quack. A nut. A complete moron.

And dangerous as hell.

He has associated withccalled “America’s Frontline Doctors,” which is led by Texas physician Stella Immanuel, who has put forth the theory out loud and often that sperm from alien or demon sexual visitations are responsible for much of what ails us.

With qualifications like that, there is a good chance Ladapo has the inside track to the 2028 Republican Presidential nomination …

In announcing what will henceforth be known as the “Florida Death Plan” Ladapo said this:

“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body?”

Who are YOU to tell us??? You are allegedly a doctor, sonny. Should we be going to an exterminator to get advice on medical issues?

Er … That actually might be advisable in Florida.

He added that the administration would be “working to end” all vaccine mandates, because “every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”

I’m not making this up.

Not a single word about the lives vaccines have saved, just lies and conspiracy theories, because that is the Republican way in 2025.

And then, of course, there’s DeSantis himself. A dumb man’s idea of a smart person. The ultimate Florida Man. A guy, who says, “Watch this!” while playing with matches and gasoline, as is the case with this maniacal, evil vaccine plan.

While standing next to Ladapo with that beachball-sized smirk on his face, Trump’s willing punching bag announced that his wife, Casey DeSantis, will head the commission on the Florida Death Plan, because if we are going to kill hundreds of a thousands of children best we have a dreadfully unqualified ghoul doing it.

Her beaming husband, Ron, ended the press conference by bragging:

“We’ve already done a lot. I don’t think any state has come even close to what Florida has done.”

He’ll get no argument there.

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.

I’ll start by asking a question:

Why do Republicans want so many of us to die?

If I’m a Democratic politician, or voter, or even a loudmouth columnist, this is the only question I am asking repeatedly until the polls open in every election in America, before our sickly dictator uses our military in an attempt to end voting for good.

We are in a life-or-death situation in America right now, and if you don’t believe me, why not let Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst tell it. In May, Ernst defended Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Death Bill and his elimination of life-saving Medicaid at a town hall meeting by belittling her constituents and telling them: “WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE.”

It is actually the most honest thing Ernst has ever said during her appalling reign of terror, which makes it a real irony that it also ushered in the death of her political career.

Ernst made it clear on Friday she will not seek a third term, because running on the campaign slogan, “We are all going to die,” might even be a bridge too far for some of the Trump cultists in the state, who somehow still believe they are immune to things like measles, and the truth.

I will touch on this in a minute when I’m officially done with Iowa — er, like Ernst apparently is.

The death of Ernst’s political career means another crucial U.S. Senate seat is in play, which suddenly gives life to the possibility that Democrats could pull an inside straight and gain control of the Senate next year.

It’s a long shot, sure, but already, Maine and North Carolina look ripe for the flipping, and if Democrats can get out of their own way, and demand answers to crucial questions like, why Republicans want so many of us dead, they could swipe the Senate from Trump’s rotting hands.

November 2026, is a long way off, but Democrats continued to prove they are capable of moving the political needle in Red States like Iowa Tuesday night when Catelin Drey handily defeated Republican Christopher Prosch in a district Trump won big last year.

Drey’s loud win in that state senate race smashed Republicans’ supermajority, which means their Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, will no longer be able to simply wave her magic wand to crush the hopes and dreams of Iowans. She will now actually have to legislate in something resembling a bipartisan environment.

And Drey’s win wasn’t a one-off, because Democrats in the Hawkeye State also picked off another state Senate seat in a January special election, as well as a House seat in an April special.

That’s a lot of winning in a state that’s all but been lost to Democrats since Barack Obama won it for a second time in 2012, and their Legislative Campaign Committee President Heather Williams was only too happy to spike the football Tuesday night:

“As Trump and Republicans wreck the economy and erode democracy with power-grabbing schemes, Democrats’ special election wins should send a flashing warning to the GOP: voters are rejecting the failing MAGA agenda and leaving Republican candidates in the dust.”

The good times kept rolling in the Upper Midwest when word came out Friday that Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley would not seek reelection next April, citing "conservative failures" for her decision.

Now “conservative failures” takes in a lot of territory, so I’ll surmise in this instance she’s talking about liberals’ convincing victories in four of past five Supreme Court races in the Cheese State, dating to 2018.

This has been an incredible run, especially when you consider that liberals had not controlled that crucial chamber for decades, and now will lead it through at least 2028.

If they can pick off Bradley’s open seat next April, they will own a stunning a 5-2 advantage on that court. Judge Chris Taylor’s the liberal running for that slot, and it can never be too early to support her.

Which takes us to Iowa’s rooftop of Minnesota, where the news went from good on Tuesday night to horrific on Wednesday morning, and gets me back to wondering why despite Ernst’s prediction that “we are all going to die,” Republicans are so damn eager to make that happen.

On Wednesday, another man with another gun slaughtered two children and wounded 17 people, mostly children, in a church attended by Catholic school children in Minneapolis.

The party of death actually outdid themselves with their response to this sickening tragedy by once again asking America to pray for these children, who were shot in a church while doing just that.

Haven’t we finally had enough this Republican carnage?

Are we finally done listening to a party that is now telling us out loud that “we are all going to die” and then doing whatever they can to make that happen?

Are we finally done with people like Captain Death himself, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is currently doing more to intentionally wipe out people than any man since Adolph Hitler?

As I type this, Kennedy is continuing his gruesome crusade to end our vaccine program in America as we know it, which, according to The World Health Organization, has saved more than 150 million lives and reduced infant deaths by 40 percent.

Can you read that again? Are we really trying to make sense of this, as if it’s in the vicinity of anything resembling normal?

While Captain Death, and his brain worms, and his drug addictions, and woman-abusing and dead animal fetishes, was in his laboratory scheming to kill millions this week, he was also eliminating key public servants who have given their professional lives to protect us.

Just this week, Susan Monarez, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was forced out of her job by Captain Death less than one month into her job for refusing to go along with this maniac’s plans to end us.

Monarez, who is still fighting the dismissal, while she fights for our lives, had her lawyers release this statement:

"When she (Monarez) refused to rubber-stamp unscientific reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda. For that, she's been targeted."

Four other leading officials at the CDC resigned this week because they, too, had come under extreme pressure from the sickening, Kennedy. One of those officials said Kennedy’s team asked him to “change studies that have been settled in the past” to fit Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views.

Yep, “change studies.” Just make stuff it. I mean, it’s only people’s lives we are talking about …

And here’s where I remind you that the only reason the grotesque Kennedy is even in this job in the first place is … you guessed it … Republicans.

Republicans confirmed this ghoul, despite the fact he claimed COVID-19 vaccines are “the deadliest ever,” when the facts are they saved tens of millions of lives.

So I’ll ask one more time: Why do Republicans want so many of us to die?

I suggest we all keep asking this crucial question, and demanding answers while we are still around to do it.

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.

School shootings are now as American as baseball and apple pie.

Just the whiff of fall ushers in back-to-school ads, which appear between news stories detailing the brutal slaughter of our children in those schools.

You can set your clock to it. Every year for roughly the past three decades, we’ve known open season on our children was coming, yet we’ve done nothing about it.

Once the school doors open, so does the mass-murder of our children.

Do you know why? Because of Republicans, that’s why.

Say that with me: REPUBLICANS ARE THE CAUSE OF THE SLAUGHTER OF OUR CHILDREN.

They are to blame. No guns, no murders. Less Republicans, less shootings.

This isn’t hard to understand.

Don’t get it twisted.

We always get it twisted. We always make the cause of these shootings way too hard.

It’s not hard.

This a Republican plague on America.

If Republicans didn’t want more and more guns in this country, there’d be less and less children dead in our schools.

I know this, because it wasn’t always this way in America. It really wasn’t.

All these school shooting are a fairly recent thing, which has coincided with the increase in all the guns in this country, and Republicans’ falling at the feet of death-rattling organizations like the National Rifle Association.

There are currently more guns than people in the United States of America, and more children are dying than ever before because of it.

Again, don’t get his twisted. It’s not hard to understand.

Republicans want more guns. Democrats want less guns.

Not only do Republicans want more guns, and Democrats less guns, they want more military-grade weaponry in the hands of our citizenry. These are the kinds of guns that can kill many, many people really, really fast.

Like little children in our classrooms, for instance.

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. There were almost no school shootings, and I was raised in a pretty tough city in New Jersey. Nobody worried about being shot in school.

Make that NOBODY.

Did these things happen on the rare occasion?

Of course, but almost never.

And when they did, people — Republicans and Democrats — were appropriately outraged by it, and vowed to make sure they would do everything possible to make sure it never happened again.

Because what kind of society would we be living in, if we accepted the slaughter of our children in their classrooms, as business as usual in America? What kind of society would we be if the best that one of the two major parties could offer up in response to these killings, was some stupid prayer.

So no, shootings weren’t a major problem when I was growing up, because there weren't all these guns that Republicans have since eagerly introduced.

Again, please don’t get this twisted.

And let me duck in here and ask a quick question: Do you want more guns, or less guns?

I bet you want less guns, because you care about our children. Everything should be done to protect our children.

Democrats believe that. Republicans don’t.

Don’t get it twisted.

Me? I don’t want any guns. NONE. Zero.

I was in the service, and I know what guns do. Guns are designed for one purpose: to kill things.

Let’s say that again, too, America: GUNS ARE DESIGNED FOR ONE PURPOSE: TO KILL THINGS.

That’s all they are good for: KILLING THINGS.

Why do people want to kill things?

That’s a real damn problem right there. It’s sick.

If you want to kill things, you are a complete sicko.

Broken.

Again don’t get it twisted. Don’t make it hard.

I haven’t touched a gun since I was in the military, because guns kill things. People who have guns have them for one reason: to kill things.

But, sure, let’s introduce more and more guns into our society. Let’s make them available everywhere. Let’s make guns easier to get than registering to vote.

All these guns are a Republican problem. They have even gotten to the point of telling us that more guns make us safer.

Seriously.

Republicans want people to have more guns to protect themselves from all the guns out there.

Now THAT’S twisted.

An anecdote. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, All in the Family was the No. 1 TV show in America for many years. The protagonist, Archie Bunker, was basically a well-meaning bigot, who generally collapsed under the weight of his own ignorance by the end of each episode.

Back then we didn’t have many mass-murders in our schools, but we did have the occasional hijacking. So what was Archie’s answer to this problem?

Arm everybody on the plane, so that they could shoot any prospective hijacker that boarded said plane.

Talk about twisted ...

But we knew twisted logic back then. We knew that more guns meant more killings. We knew Archie was a complete idiot. Occasionally lovable, but an idiot.

Now we don’t, because Republicans are telling us they think more guns will mean less school shootings. It’s as if we have thousands of Archie Bunkers running our country.

Oh, and did I mention Archie was a bigot? Because the biggest single year-on-year increase in gun sales until COVID, was the year Barack Obama was elected …

Republicans tell us more guns will make us safer when they know for a fact that America is the only place in the civilized world where mass-murder has been reduced to just another way of life — before death, that is ...

I have lived all over this world, and America is the only place I worry about being shot to death when I go into a mall, a movie theater, a restaurant, a school, a library, a museum, a zoo, or attend a parade or a ballgame.

People in other countries think we are completely out of our minds.

You know why? Because they know that if we didn’t have all of these guns we wouldn’t have all of these shootings.

They aren’t twisted.

Are you still twisted? Is this hard to understand? It shouldn’t be, because again: Guns kill things. The more guns, the more killings.

Say, have you seen that the racist in the White House is currently introducing more guns into our cities to keep them safer?

The children in our cities, small towns and suburbs are under attack from mass-murdering madmen with guns. So what’s he doing? Sending our military and their guns into our cities, while warning about immigrants eating our dogs and cats in those suburbs.

Talk about twisted.

This afternoon, hundreds of lives will never be the same because a man with a gun slaughtered two children and wounded 17 others in a church attended by Catholic school children in Minneapolis.

Who then has the gall, besides every grotesque Republican in America, to think the appropriate response to this tragedy is to pray for these children, when they were shot in a church … praying?

Apparently they don’t see the sheer hypocrisy and evil insult in this.

Twisted.

America has Republicans to thank for our children’s bloody bodies being splattered all over the walls, floors and ceilings of our schools.

THEY ARE TO BLAME.

I am literally praying we don’t get this reasoning twisted yet again ...

NOW READ: Keeps getting worse: Timeline of Trump's futile Epstein diversions details his newest scam

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.

I’d just voted for Hillary Clinton, and after watching her swat away the hulking schlub who stalked her on the debate stage three different times, was confident enough she’d win.

The final dreaded poll in the battleground state of Wisconsin had her outside the margin of error at a comfortable +6, or right about how Barack Obama had fared twice up here.

In only hours, the racist loudmouth was FINALLY going to be sent packing. Oh sure, he would never go away for good, but it was going to be a real win-win for everybody. Trump would raise his profile, cash in, and begin crawling out of his massive debt, and we’d have another president who understood the nuances of governing, and treated little things like liberty and justice for all with the urgency they demanded.

By 10 o’clock that evening, America was fully engulfed in a five-alarm fire. He could actually win …

By midnight, and around the time Wisconsin was officially called for the vulgar pig, our nation had fallen, and the President of the United States had devolved from a prince into a pumpkin.

That’s when I went into a state of shock, turned off the TV, poured another drink, and repeated these six words over and over: “Nothing will ever be the same.”

By 3 a.m., and three drinks later, I was mumbling six more words to myself: “Nobody will be safe ever again.”

I picked up my phone and called my daughter in the UK, who was just waking up to the news. I said two more words: “I’m sorry.”

You will have your own story to tell about the night the blast hit, and how you processed it ...

Nine years later, it has been far worse than I thought it would be. After valiantly fighting back from the shock of that ice-cold night, and restoring some order and safeguards to our democracy, a majority of Americans doubled down this past November, and decided to give their vote to the loathsome man, who by now had added “America-attacker” and “convicted felon” to a résumé that began and ended with “White Nationalist.”

Nothing in my life has gone the way I thought it would on the afternoon of Nov. 8, 2016. That damn election changed everything. If we were capable of doing THAT, we were capable of doing anything.

As a journalist who mostly viewed politics with disdain, I turned on a dime and became very damn political. As a man who did most of his work as an observer from the outside, I jumped inside the fray. I began writing earnestly, ended up with a book, became a general nuisance, knocked on doors, burned old friendships, kindled new ones, and ended up protesting on the Square here in Madison so many times I was given a reserved parking spot for my skinny a--.

I became an accidental activist. My journalism career morphed from news to commentary, because it was time to say what needed saying.

Writing is my salvation, which is the only thing that isn’t new in my life. My marriage with the written word started more than 50 years ago, and has been the most dependable thing in what really has been a hard and mostly wonderful life.

Lately, I’ve hung a shingle on Substack alongside hundreds of other earnest typists, who put heart to paper. Some of my work appears pretty regularly in other places on the Web, but most dependably at Raw Story, which is staffed by a feisty group of underdog journalists who keep their eye on the ball, our nation’s declining condition, and aren’t afraid to punch down hard on fascism.

Far too many in the working press I once revered failed miserably to do the only thing they had to do: their damn jobs, by reporting on and warning people about the most dangerous time in America since the Civil War.

My anger and heartache over their negligence and incompetence will never subside.

They didn't meet the moment. Worse, some cashed in on it.

Around here, paid subscribers come and go, but lucky for me, I’m not doing this to get rich. Truth is, there’s no money in journalism. Never has been. And a tip: Never trust a journalist who says they are in it for the money, because they will sell you down the nearest river, and leave you soaking wet.

When people go, I politely ask for feedback, because one thing’s for sure: I can always do better. Here is what they are overwhelmingly telling me these days:

“I’m tired.”

And you just sighed with sympathetic understanding …

It’s the price we pay for having the decency and love of country to pay attention.

We are being asked to process a helluva lot, good people. Walk away from it all for even a few hours, and you come back to find our museums under attack, troops in OUR streets, and public servants working to protect things like our benefits, our personal information, and our air and water on the firing line.

As I type this, Trump is accommodating the murdering Vladimir Putin by surrendering to him on American soil.

This is what a nation under siege looks like.

There’s not been a lot of blood — not yet — but sure as I’m typing this, that’s coming, too. Trump and his Republican Orcs are bringing plenty of hurt, and they aim to end America as we both know, and knew, it.

They do this by making us all sick and tired ... They do this because they hate America.

To those of you who need a break, go. Get the rest you need. You deserve it. I think I speak for everybody when I say, “Thank you for your support and all your efforts. We’ll be here waiting if you decide to return. We will no doubt be in need of reinforcements, and a sturdy shoulder to lean on.”

To those who stay, thank you.

It’s the only way through this.

We can stand and fight, or retreat. We can dare to care, or just say the hell with it. We can die on this hill, or we can conquer it.

We’re all tired.

Me? I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

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.

Let’s start here today: Our legacy media is dead.

For some, this pronouncement is long overdue, and might be best labeled “old news.” For people like me, who spent their professional life in a newsroom as part of a team that turned around timely content called “real news” to their readers, while also calling power into account, this declaration officially wipes out everything I once believed in and held dear.

Watching our old, tired legacy media like The New York Times and The Washington Post cover this Russia charade, mislabeled a “summit,” and Trump's meeting with European leaders in Washington this week has completely knocked me over the edge. I’ll let you tell me how badly the gushing toothies on TV are botching this up, because I quit watching their 24/7 screeching with any regularity years ago.

We have reached the point where these incompetents can’t even get the nut of the story right. It’s no longer news that the nuclear-powered narcissist, Donald Trump, is posturing to get every spotlight turned in his direction no matter how big or small a story. Yet the media comes running with their hair on fire every time he beckons.

However … It IS news — URGENT NEWS — when European prime ministers and presidents drop everything they are doing and fly into the United States with their hair on fire to oppose the actions of its unstable, authoritarian leader, and back the man who is fighting for his life and his country’s democracy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

It’s news because THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE.

Yet, in their breathless play-by-play coverage you never saw it reported that way. Instead, here is what we got all day Monday and into Tuesday as these incompetent morons, who dare to call themselves “journalists” were led around by their noses, which are always in the general vicinity of Trump’s two-ton a--:

"Trump just said this!"
"Now Trump said that!"
“Trump is doing this!”
“And now Trump is doing that!”
"What will Trump do next????”

There was literally no fact-checking, nor important context. They just repeated his endless bull that was all designed to go absolutely nowhere, because the most important person in these negotiations wasn’t even on location. And why should he have been? Russian President Vladimir Putin had already emasculated the President of the United States after getting red-carpet treatment in Alaska on Friday, and had gone home to Russia to resume bombing the bejesus out of Ukraine.

So Trump did what he does best, and spoke on behalf of Putin, while arguing against everybody else.

It was appalling.

But there was our legacy media, who somehow thought reporting all that bull in real time was some sort of journalistic feat, when in reality they just come off like a bunch of drunken parrots.

Things are no better than they were on Thursday, when it comes to Russia’s inhumane, illegal attack on Ukraine, they are miles worse. Because God only knows what the two most dangerous leaders in the world talked about while the cameras were mercifully shut off during their dangerous, private meetings the past five days.

I can guess it sounded something like this:

PUTIN: “Never forget who put you in office, Donald.”
TRUMP: “No worries there, sir. I got everybody, but mostly the idiots in the media, eating out of my hand.”

Here is the vitally important context I didn’t read ONCE in all the legacy media’s atrocious coverage of this s-–– show the past 24 hours:

“Putin, who Trump actually asked for help in the 2016 campaign …”

Or

“Putin, who Trump has repeatedly fawned over, even calling the murderous dictator among other things ‘a genius' …’”

Or

“Putin, who Trump surrendered to in Helsinki in 2018, when pressed if there was Russia interference into the 2016 election, when his own Republican Party had determined there was …”

Or

“Putin, who after winning the 2007 Time Magazine Man of the Year Award, received a letter from Trump that gushed: “As you probably have heard, I’m a big fan of yours!”

Or

“Putin, who allowed Trump to host his Miss Universe beauty pageant in Moscow in 2013, and received yet another note from Trump which read: “Will you become my new best friend?”

I could go on and on here, but you get the point, even if the dangerous dummies in our legacy media don’t: Any relationship Trump has with his BFF Putin is at best suspect, but most likely is completely compromised.

Shouldn’t readers and viewers be aware of this right off the top and reminded of it repeatedly?

And what of the 50-plus times Trump said on the 2024 campaign trail that he would end Russia's attack on Ukraine during his first 24 hours in office. I read scores of stories in the legacy media Monday, and this was never reported even ONCE. Further, he was not asked about this even ONCE in those weird sit-downs with the press in that grotesque, golden room, where his tie drags on the floor and he does that weird accordion thing with his hands.

They aren't even bothering to try to hold this liar accountable anymore.

And what about that lying? Because it is all this blabbering loudmouth does.

In just the last 10 days he’s told preposterous lies about Russia, the 2020 election, Jeffrey Epstein, jobs, crime, inflation, Project 2025, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and mail-in voting.

Add this to the tens of thousands of times he has lied in his professional life about all things big and small, and you’d think he would have lost ALL benefit of the doubt 10 years ago.

Instead, our legacy media still hangs on his every word.

It is ABSURD.

They don’t even make lying a small feature of the story, when in fact all his lying IS THE DAMN STORY.

There is not one report or story about about Trump that should make it past the third paragraph without this being inserted for context:

“Trump, who has a long history of lying about [insert subject] …”

WHY isn’t this being done?

Here is the thing that should keep us all awake at night: If Trump, a convicted felon, can wipe out the truth — and he is well on his way — he can wipe out everything this country was founded on, and begin working to wipe us out, and everything we once stood for.

This is exactly what Putin, and every other fascist leader on earth wants.

It can never stop being headline news that Trump is the most notorious liar in the history of the United States.

It should have never become headline news that our legacy media decided to quit reporting that.

But here we are, and neither one should ever be trusted again.

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.

I am back to pondering how in the hell we got here, because try as I might, I will never understand how a thoughtful, caring person who truly loves his or her country, could vote for a racist monster and America-attacking convicted felon like Donald Trump, or any politician who supports him.

I can’t get past it, but more than that, I refuse to.

And let’s get this out of the way early: Yes, I understand that the Democratic Party has issues, and a severe image problem right now, but it is preposterous to think that our democracy wouldn’t be on far safer footing if they were in charge.

It’s preposterous to think our environment, women’s rights, human rights, rights to healthcare, JOBS, and clean air and water would be in jeopardy if Democrats were in charge.

It’s preposterous to think that measles would be making a comeback, cancer research would be canceled, and our personal information would be in the hands of some snot-nosed, 28-year-old tech bro if Democrats were in charge.

I was triggered again today by a classic New York Times clickbait piece headlined: “These are the voters who should scare Democrats most”

Subhead: “Working-class Americans who until recently voted Democratic said the party should not count on a backlash to President Trump to win them back. Still, there were pockets of opportunity.”

The Times talked to “30 predominantly working-class voters who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 before defecting or struggling deeply with their choices last year, and many had a stinging message for the Democratic Party.”

These “working class” voters are disillusioned by seemingly everything, which I actually understand during all this chaos, even if I am getting sick and damn tired of this overused term, “working class.” That they think Republicans are doing a single thing for them, except taking more of their money and their rights, is what I don’t understand.

If you want to say, America deserves better from its two major political parties, you have a sympathetic ear. But if you want to say both parties are the same after watching the first seven months of this morally busted GOP regime, then you are intellectually lazy, completely dishonest with yourself, racist, or likely some combination of all three.

Democrats demonstrably stand up for America’s best ideals: Liberty and justice FOR ALL. Republicans demonstrably stand up for the few, and these bloated billionaires, who are currently standing on our throats thanks to the big pay day they just got in that galling big, beautiful bill.

As I was researching this piece with a steady grumble, I came across another NYT story written by Thomas B. Edsall and headlined: How liberalism went to die on the Texas-Arkansas border

Edsall’s deep dive starts this way:

Few communities in America prospered as much as Texarkana during President Joe Biden’s four years in the White House, and few communities were more ungrateful than the voters of that region, which is anchored around twin cities spread across the Texas-Arkansas border.

In 2024, in spite of economic growth under a Democratic president at rates unheard-of in decades, residents of Texarkana turned around and cast a higher percentage of their ballots for Donald Trump than ever before.

Read that one again.

What the hell are we suppose to do with this? What the hell is a politician or a political party supposed to do, if not providing the voters with better opportunities to improve their lives? What the hell is a politician or a political party supposed to do if they are penalized for that?

More from the piece:

During the four years from January 2021 to January 2025 — the years of Biden’s presidency — the unemployment rate in the Texarkana metropolitan area fell to 4.2 percent from 6.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The metro region’s gross domestic product had experienced sluggish growth from 2010 ($5.04 billion) through 2020 ($5.8 billion). After Biden took office, however, the region’s G.D.P. shot up, reaching $7.2 billion in 2023, the most recent figure available at the Federal Reserve.

And what did Biden and Democrats get for all this?

In 2020, Texarkana, which is made up of Miller County, Ark., and Bowie County, Texas, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump — 72.3 percent to 27.7 percent for Biden, a 44.6-point margin. In 2024, despite the growth of green industry and economic improvement during the Biden years, Trump beat Kamala Harris in the Texarkana counties with 75.4 percent of the vote and 24.6 percent for Harris, an immense 50.8-point margin.

They actually LOST votes. It really is mind-blowing …

It’s not the economy, stupid.

We have just passed the eighth anniversary of the repulsive Charlottesville chapter of our country’s bumpy history that is forever chained to its original sin.

Thousands of white men marched on this Virginia city and for white supremacy on August 11-12, 2017, in something called a “Unite the Right” rally replete with their toxic hate and Tiki torches for effect.

On the second day of this ode to hate, James Alex Fields Jr., a self-proclaimed admirer of Adolf Hitler, plowed his car into the crowd which had assembled to peacefully oppose the racist hell that had arrived on their streets.

A young activist and daughter of Charlottesville, Heather Heyer, was killed instantly and scores of others were injured by the speeding vehicle. I have learned many have not fully physically recovered, and still more are suffering from the psychological impact of that day.

Trump, a career racist, who only a year earlier couldn’t garner the endorsement of a single major newspaper during his dirty run for the presidency, but did get a ringing nod from the KKK, could not bring himself to properly condemn the gruesome event. Instead, extolled the virtues of the “very fine people on both sides” of this terrorist attack.

Like his surrender to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki the following year, it will always be impossible to un-hear or un-see these appalling events.

Joe Biden has said it was the revolting incident in Charlottesville that spurred him to run for the presidency three years later, because he, too, knew he could not live with himself or in a country that promoted this kind of detestable hate.

Which brings me full circle in my reckoning with a country predominated by people who are impossible to love or respect. I believe what happened on that tragic day in Charlottesville eight years ago explains better than anything else what the good people who believe in liberty and justice for all in this country are up against.

It certainly explains what is happening in Washington, D.C., right now in yet another quaking moment, because even if you disagree with everything I have typed here today, you damn well better understand this:

Trump didn't invade our capital again because there is some invented crime problem ... Just as he didn't invade it four-plus years ago, because there was some invented election problem ... He did it both times to throw red meat to his racist base who elected him across the country. He did it to appease the people, who live in ungodly places like that Texas-Arkansas border, who hate our cities — but mostly the people of color who live in them.

And I just can’t get past it. But more than that, I refuse to ...

NOW READ: This single sentence will fast-track Trump to a prison cell

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.

As a man who slings opinion, and is an expert on all that is wrong, I am often asked what we can do to stave off all this evil, and make things right?

Occasionally, I’ll have a pretty good answer, but more times than not, I am just a writer with a leaky pen, who can spell out a problem with no real idea how to cross it out.

When seemingly everything’s wrong, the only selfish answer I have to fight off what afflicts us is to write.

This admittedly seems wholly inadequate while we stare down this relentless, wicked attack from the dark forces that have assembled seemingly out of nowhere, and with blinding speed to turn out our light.

If you are reading this piece, the chances are better than reasonable that you care about the condition of your wounded country and the millions of people who are suffering in it.

This is both a curse and a precious gift.

It’s a curse, of course, because wherever you are, our nation’s menacing shadow chases you. Try as you might, you can’t escape it, at least not for long.

Taking it all in as the sky-blue ocean kisses some sun-splashed beach is chased away by the thought of what we are doing to our oceans and that sky, because of the lifeless corporate raiders, who think of nothing but profits and themselves.

Mother Nature’s vivid colors temporarily turn to black before, like the tides, they recede from our mind, and return anew so we can enjoy these magic moments.

You are a humanitarian, and a lover of life — all life. If you are like me, you grieve the loss of a random animal more than you do the random person. That’s not a slam on people necessarily, but let’s face it, too many of them are rotten to the core. They take, and give nothing back. They support evil, instead of suppressing it. They talk without thinking. They follow without looking, and refuse to stop long enough to see the damage they are doing, or much of anything on this Earth that is truly worth the time.

Not only do they lack the sixth sense of our beautiful animal friends, they seem to lack any sense at all …

So for all your caring, you are rewarded with a world of hurt.

You know it would be easier to just say the hell with it, and join the millions on the sidelines who take things as they come, and just as much as they can for themselves.

Well, I thought today that you should know you are not alone, and that you are loved for your soulfulness, fight and compassion.

You are loved because people make the mistake of thinking you are weak for crying, when the truth is you are enormously brave for letting it all in. You are loved because processing all this hell and trying to spin it into hope is a hero’s chore, and we’ve never needed heroes more.

I take heart that you are out there, my friends, and more than you can possibly know. You are the very best among us. You are a friend and advocate to the animals, and the good people who are scared and suffering alone. You are a shoulder to lean on.

Together we form the line, that will never be crossed ...

We must continue to remind people, but mostly each other, that there are millions of us, and we aren’t going away. We are proliferating … strong.

We’ll have our day, I swear to God we will, but for now we have each other, and that, good people, is a blessing.

NOW READ: Trump's already feeling the pain as this jilted ally plots revenge

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.

I have become convinced that while the repulsive, 79-year-old Donald Trump slowly shrivels up and dies right in front of our eyes, he is going to do everything in his power to take as many Americans as possible to his bomb-crater-sized grave with him.

How else to explain the latest news pointing to just how little he and his disintegrating, America-attacking political party value life?

On Tuesday, which was just the latest, longest 24-hour stretch in America history, the quickly deteriorating Trump was seen on the roof of the White House screaming at people about nuclear weapons, and God knows what else, while the madman he appointed to run the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) completely into the ground, was proudly announcing the rollback of nearly $500 million dollars in vaccine funding.

Here’s where we all stop for five seconds to let that sink in …

In fact, read that again: The madman who Trump appointed to HHS was proudly announcing the rollback of nearly $500 million dollars in vaccine funding.

This insane, dangerous announcement comes on the charred heels of our nation’s bloody bout with COVID-19 in which more than one million Americans perished. Countless millions are still suffering the effects of this pandemic and might never recover. Well, the ghoulish Republican Party have all but forgotten them, and in record time …

These people don’t value life, they get off on death.

Instead of answers and more science and discovery to make sure we are ready for the next mass-medical emergency, Trump instead has inflicted us with this gruesome stray from the Kennedy dynasty, who is quickly becoming a one-man pandemic.

His approach to science makes chugging Lysol seem almost reasonable.

“This is a bad day for science,” Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been working to develop an mRNA vaccine against influenza said in The New York Times.

Here’s more on the grotesque funding cuts from that NYT piece Wednesday:

First used during the Covid-19 pandemic by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, mRNA shots instruct the body to produce a fragment of a virus, which then sets off the body’s immune response.

Unlike traditional vaccines, which can take years to develop and test, mRNA shots can be made within months and quickly altered as the virus changes. The technology won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023.

But Kennedy doesn’t trust science, even though science saved his life after a parasitic worm ate into his brain.

This was from the clunky news release out of Kennedy’s sick and fast-eroding HHS Tuesday:

“We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “BARDA is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu. We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.”

What “experts” was this complete moron listening to? Most likely, the voices inside his head have only gotten louder.

The fact is vaccines save lives, and the sooner they can be produced the better.

Like Kennedy, I am no medical expert, but I can accurately tell you that vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives the past century.

They have literally been a life-changing discovery.

Further, it is estimated that 317,000 lives in the United States alone would have been saved during the COVID outbreak had people just gotten vaccinated. Instead, many were discouraged from doing so by public-health hazards like Kennedy. No surprise, most of these people lived in Red States with West Virginia, Wyoming, Kentucky, Tennessee and Oklahoma leading the way.

These are also the Republican-led states most likely to ban books, defend guns, and support their dying, orange leader who lately is standing on roofs, and defending pedophiles.

Really, I could care less if the Republicans in these backward states want to kill themselves, but their toxic ignorance and recklessness are putting the lives of innocent children and other good-hearted people in jeopardy. Instead of acting for the common good, they have jammed their fingers inside their ears, and locked themselves deep inside a cult, which makes them both dangerous as hell and pathetic.

Here’s what Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health had to say after Kennedy’s death wish yesterday:

“By issuing this wildly incorrect statement, the secretary is demonstrating his commitment to his long-held goal of sowing doubts about all vaccines. Had we not used these lifesaving mRNA vaccines to protect against severe illness, we would have had millions of more Covid deaths.”

We would have had millions of more Covid deaths …

It will come as no surprise that the dreadful Kennedy has repeatedly been drawn to the Holocaust and Hitler’s Nazy Germany to make his case against vaccines that save millions of lives.

During the middle of a pandemic that was killing millions around the world he said this at an anti-vaxxer rally, comparing getting vaccines to dying in death camps:

“Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland … you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”

You can read that one again, too, if you like, but it was no one-off, because abominations like Kennedy can never stop themselves.

He has in the past called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention a “Nazi death camp.”

Even when he was against Trump, before he was with him when offered enough rope to try to hang all of us, he again tipped his hat to Hitler:

“And, you know, (Trump’s) not like Hitler. Hitler had like a plan, you know, Hitler was interested in policy.”

Yes, he had a plan, you morbid, dangerous a------ ...

And if you think I have gone too far here, I will continue to warn you that I am only getting warmed up.

Because unless the people who value life, vaccines, clean air and water, gun control, education, science, democracy, books, and healthcare do everything in their power to stop this fascist takeover, sickos like Kennedy and Trump will do everything they can to rub us out before they meet their maker.

Stopping them just as soon as we can has literally become a matter of life or death.

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.

Dear Undeserving Americans,

It was been many years since I have written you a Very Important Letter, but with all the good news out there right now, I thought it was important for you to hear from me again in this terrific forum of collateral damage, and disintegrating ideas.

I want to remind everybody who is new to reading my Very Important Letters that much like Presidents Jefferson, Franklin and Eisenhowzer before me, my words are terrifically eloquent, sometimes gigantic, and are best read slowly so that you can appreciate their meaning as much as I do.

So I will appreciate it in advance if you could stop doing whatever it is you are doing right now, and give me, your greatest president, all the time I deserve to read slowly on this fine morning. You will thank me for this when you’re done, so you are welcome in advance.

Before I get into all the tremendous things I have done for you since beginning my third term in office, I want to address these ergonomic and horrible job numbers that came out for no, good rotten reason Friday from a very nasty woman who used to work for the traitor, sleepy Joe Biden.

In addition to inexcusably looking like a complete dog in her dress, she has no idea what she is talking about. The economy has never been better in the entire history of America, and all the people I know have never had more money in their pockets. This is important because when all the people I know have money, that means the people they know have lots of money, too, and before you know it we all have lots of money to spend on things you are selling.

WE stimulate YOUR economy and you can thank us all — but mostly me — for that. This isn’t easy on us, and mostly me.

Why just the other day, I bought the tall kid who lives in New York with Melanie, a fancy train set. When I was told he had outgrown that kind of stuff, I bought him a strip club on Long Island.

I hear he is doing very well, and hope to see him during my next trip to the city. I will be bringing three suitcases full of two-dollar bills to stimulate the economy of the strip club. See how that works?

You are welcome in advance for me doing all that for you, for him, and for them. Oh, and let me tell ya, that kid has gotten tall. Not as tall as me yet, but still remarkably and tremendously tall.

So back to this terrible, terrible woman, who could never work in a strip club by the way, for putting out these sanctimonious job numbers yesterday. She obviously hates this country, and for as long as I am around she will never work again. And because of her horrible, disgusting numbers, I will now be the one reporting numbers like this for the foreseeable future, which will basically be a very, very long time because my eyesight is incredibly good as you can imagine, and can foresee many tremendous and not so tremendous things.

Why I’m still the only one who saw me winning the election in 2020.

You’d think I already had enough to do, but these numbers have to be just right, and I will take the time to make sure they are.

For now on, everything I say and report will be the truth, so that you don’t have to worry about it. As your overwhelming president, what is important is what I think is true, because I am really the only one who matters here or knows the truth. I know you appreciate it and worship me when I tell you things straight, whether they are true or not, so you are welcome for me being so straight with you when I could be crooked like Obama.

In addition to giving out all the terrific and sensational numbers we all like to hear, it will also streamline the government process for doing these kinds of things, and save the taxpayer, you, not me (because as you know, I don't pay taxes), lots, and lots of money. So you see I am doing this all for you, and you can thank me for that whenever you feel like it, but just as soon as possible so you don’t forget. Maybe right now.

You’re welcome.

You know, I really can’t believe nobody has thought of this terrific idea before, but I am glad it was me and I expect people will be talking about this for many years and probably centuries. It will be right up there with President Franklin discovering electricity while flying his kite on the White House lawn.

I’m still shocked he wasn’t electrocuted …

That’s a joke, you dummies. Laugh.

What isn’t a joke is all the sensational numbers I will be providing you in the future. You know these outdated elections we have in this country with all the broken down voting machines? Forgot about them. I will be presenting the numbers in the future.

If a result doesn’t sound right to me, I will give you a number that does, and it will be the only thing that really matters.

All numbers for now on will be revised to meet my incredibly high expectations.

I am hoping that if this all goes as planned, you will never have to vote again, and can take more time for yourselves and for me.

You’re welcome.

This will also make things easier for me, because sometimes I need to reward myself for all I have done for you. This isn’t fair to me, but I get it, you can’t think of me all the time, but you can never try hard enough.

I am always here for you, and for me, and plan to be for the next decade or so.

Speaking of making things easier for me, this morning I had another physical with my doctor who told me that my ankles had lost 10lbs. since the last time he checked on them.

This was obviously great news, because I’ve always had sensational ankles. I was always very proud of my ankles and thought they did a terrific job connecting my knees to my feet. Much better than average.

Anyway, after he told me my ankles had lost weight, he made kind of a sad noise.

I asked him why he was making sad noises after bringing me such joy that my ankles had lost weight, and he said, “Well, that’s the good news. The bad news is that you are still 322lbs.”

I told him that number didn’t sound right, especially after all the incredible, sensational work I had done in the state-of-the-arts gym at Mar-a-Lago, home to the fattest steaks and thinnest broads on the planet. Just the other day I walked a plank and bench-pressed my caddie.

So when my doctor insisted on telling me I weighed 322lbs., I fired him.

See how easy that is?

Just so you know, my number is 185lbs., and thanks to that, I’ve never felt better. Light as a feather, and such a weight off my broad shoulders, on which I carry the entire world like Atilla the Hun ...

Well, I’d like to stay here and keeping bringing you incredible numbers, but I have a hard-earned tee time this morning. I’ll be playing with Lindsey, who has become incredibly good at putting numbers on the scorecard that sound right to me.

But before I go, I want to say a prayer for Ghislaine Maxwell, who has been treated so, so terribly by our corrupt, lying, no-good, awful media.

This whole Epstein thing has been incredibly and terrifically hard on me as you can imagine. The guy was stealing girls from me, and now because he killed himself in prison I have to answer for all of it. I don’t know who the jack--- was that was president when all this happened, but I’ll tell you what, he should hang like Mike Pence almost did.

Now they are going after Ghislaine who was babysitting all these girls that Jeffrey was stealing from me. Well, not on my watch they’re not. I expect her testimony will clear everything up. She can get a job at the tall kid’s strip joint, and I can go back to feeding everybody numbers that feel right to me.

This has all been so, so unfair to me.

Where was I? Oh yeah, a prayer …

“Dear Father in the artmost skies. Please bring they shepherds to look down on the flocks of people who walk this earth without sandals. See that their ankles don’t swell too much, and that they bring gold, crypto and mirth to thy cradle of wealth. In Moses’s name we ask that my commandments are heard, and that those who stray from the beast are struck down with lightning from the heavens. -Amen”

Sorry, if that wasn’t as powerful as my usual prayer, but I have spent more then enough time on you this morning, and you can thank me for that the very first chance you get.

You’re welcome.

May God bless the fruits on your plane.

—DONALD J. TRUMP

NOW READ: There's a very simple reason why Trump will never release the Epstein files

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

Let’s get right to it, because time is not on our side, America: Donald Trump won’t order the release of the Epstein files because he is prominently featured in them.

Bare minimum, he associated with pedophiles.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Why isn’t this the end of the road for this monster?

Why isn’t this the only thread that is being pulled on right now with urgency by our bought-off and/or incompetent mainstream media?

Or did I just answer my own question?

Why isn’t every American calling (202) 224-3121 (that's the U.S. Capitol switchboard) and demanding that Trump release the Epstein files like he said he would on the campaign trail?

Thank God, identifying and stomping out pedophiles is not yet a partisan issue in America.

An unheard of 82 percent of Americans — including 76 percent of Republicans — want these files released immediately. And while Democrats are doing what they procedurally can to get at the files, it will take time that we should all have decided by now that we do not have.

Shouldn’t Americans know, and just as soon as possible, the full details of their president's relationship with a man who raped children? And shouldn’t THAT finally end the long, national nightmare we have endured for 10 years, while this dirty old man breaks everything in his blurry sight?

• We know without a shadow of a doubt that the man is a grotesque racist.
• We know without a shadow of a doubt he is a convicted felon, who assaults women.
• We know without a shadow of a doubt he cheats on his taxes even more than he has cheated on all his wives.
• We know without a shadow of a doubt he is a nuclear-powered liar, who is simply incapable of telling the truth, and lied 30,573 times the first time he tried to sink this country.
• We know without a shadow of a doubt he invited Russia to help him win the 2016 election, and then refused to call them on it in Helsinki.
• We know without a shadow of a doubt he is using the White House as his own personal ATM, and by many estimates has already pocketed billions of our dollars in crypto and airplanes, while taking endless vacations to his golf properties all over the world on our dime.
• We know without a shadow of a doubt he stalked girls in the dressing rooms of Miss Teen USA beauty competitions, because “(He's) seen it all before, and (he’s) the owner of the pageant. And therefore (he’s) inspecting it.”

These are his words.

HIS WORDS.

And now we know that the shadow of doubt concerning his real relationship with Epstein and his victims is receding into the light, because this is where we are right now, good people:

Given Trump’s new-found executive powers granted to him by our corrupt Supreme Court that are fit for a king, we can be assured that if there wasn't any damning evidence in these melting files that point to grotesque behavior with stolen children — or even better for him, there were names of his political enemies mentioned in the thing — he would have ordered these files replace the Bible in all these Christo-fascist churches as must-read material for his gurgling and snorting cult. In other words: It would be EVERYWHERE right now. There would be endless celebratory, back-patting press conferences, and Trump would order that it be read slowly, and with emphasis, on the CBS Evening News, which he recently acquired to add to his budding propaganda kingdom. You couldn’t escape it.

Except he’s doing none of this, is he?

Instead, he’s turning that certain color of rust orange, as he bends over at the waist, barrel-butt out, his 6-foot tie scraping his fat ankles, while his little, chubby hands do that weird accordion thing as he lashes out at anybody within his odious vicinity.

He’s posting INSANE distractions on his SOCIAL media channels THAT are ODDly capitalized and carrY the grammatical WAIT of a 4-year-OLD who has Trapped himself in a DOOR jam.

They have quietly moved the disgusting Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's ex-girlfriend and co-conspirator, to a cushy federal prison in Texas. WHY?

Trump has no answers, which is why we need to keep asking this question:

WHY WON’T YOU JUST SHUT UP AND RELEASE THE DAMN FILES LIKE YOU SAID YOU WOULD?

Meantime, the stink has somehow gotten even worse, because there is breaking news that it has taken only six months for Trump to destroy the solid economy Joe Biden helped meticulously build after inheriting Trump’s mess in 2021 following the attempted insurrection.

Trump inherited the strongest economy in the entire world, and has screwed it up in record time. Job growth has stalled again, and is at a 16-year low — or the last time a Democrat was fixing a battered economy left in shambles by a Republican.

Prices are rising, not falling.

Why did anybody think it would be any different this time around?

Here’a another fact that never gets enough attention: Democrats make economies and Republicans break them. Go ahead, look that up.

I could stand to hear a helluva lot more about this, too, because while billionaires are being rewarded like never before in America, the rest of us are getting royally screwed.

The numbers back this up.

Right now, though, I want to know why our president is providing safe haven for pedophiles.

Based on what we know, you’d have to be a damn fool not to believe the worst.

NOW READ: Don't 'have any other choice': Outrage grows in the midwest as political crisis spirals

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.

I am going to start today, by actually giving the America-attacking Trump credit for something: He understands far better than any politician in America that the majority of the American public is comprised of complete morons.

The sooner Democrats figure this out the better. And by sooner … I mean RIGHT NOW.

It’s a national emergency.

We’ve all been tortured by these dreaded political operatives, experts, analysts and partisans endlessly ranting at us about Democrats’ inability to craft a message that resonates with the American public. The party is viewed by roughy 80 percent of America as out of touch and irrelevant. I’m sure I have punished you by writing about this 15 times myself.

And while this is no doubt true, it’s actually far worse than that, because even if Democrats could communicate like Abraham Lincoln, they’d have absolutely no idea how or where to reach the people who need to hear what they have to say.

The Democrats have become expert at going high and talking to each other in the clouds, instead of going low and reaching the tens of millions of morons out there who could stand to hear what they are saying, despite themselves.

Since bursting on the scene like a racist hand grenade in 2015, Trump has proven beyond all doubt he understands the American electorate better than anybody. The man is so sure of himself that he went right out there and said he could shoot one of his supporters in the middle of the street and not lose their vote.

Now, there’s confidence, folks.

When you reckon with the fact that most Americans are morons as Trump has, and start expecting less instead of more, the way forward will seem less daunting.

We don’t have an over-thinking problem in America, we have an under-thinking one.

I’m not wrong about this.

Look, the most important issue facing America, and the entire world for that matter, is climate change. In addition to costing us trillions of dollars, our overheating planet will eventually end all of us if it is not addressed with the urgency it demands.

Spoiler: It won’t be.

It’s hard to get a moron worried about something that they either don’t believe is happening, or if it is, most likely won’t affect them in any meaningful way during what’s left of their moronic lifetime.

When the world ends, they’ll be long gone anyway, so why bother?

I was standing on a beach in North Carolina quietly taking in the breathtaking Atlantic Ocean last summer — true story — when a friendly chap my age approached. We made some small talk before he said quite unprompted that all this talk about climate change was “a bunch of bull----.”

According to him none of it was happening. It was nothing but political hooey designed to get us all worked up.

I’m certain he thought the old, white guy he was talking to would be a sympathetic ear for his moronic denialism, so when I told him that the ocean we were staring at was going to swallow us all whole someday, he said again: “No. That’s just bull----.”

And then just like that he tipped his cap, told me to genuinely have a nice day, and skipped away to assault the next unsuspecting beachgoer with his pale-full of ignorance.

In the year since I was mentally assaulted on that beach, the pyromaniacs in the new administration are doubling down and literally throwing gasoline on our heating planet.

What the hell are we supposed to do with that, Democrats?

I mean we can’t ignore climate change, and must do what we can to mitigate it, but continuing to make it a central campaign issue is worthless because of all the damn morons out there.

I was sure democracy was a pressing issue, too, especially after the violent attack on January 6, 2021. Well, not only don’t most people much care about it, the morons who perpetrated the attack have been hailed as heroes by millions of other morons, and are back out on the street and free to try it again if and when necessary.

So I ask again: What we are we supposed to do with that?

And don’t even get me started about vaccines, a woman’s right to choose, or myriad other issues that are killing all of us …

I began typing this on Monday afternoon and was scratching my head after watching a press gathering in Scotland, where the Prime Minister of UK had just surrendered himself at Trump’s golf course.

You read that right: the leader of Great Britain was a visitor in his own country.

Can you imagine if Sir Keir Starmer roared into the United States and promptly summoned Trump to meet him at his beach house?

That place would be flattened by a tomahawk missile, with Starmer in it, five seconds later.

I actually felt embarrassed for my British family and friends over there, until I remembered that as bad their leader just looked, we are getting the moron who emasculated him back in our White House in a couple of days to water his racist house plant, Stephen Miller.

Anyway, Trump said more stupid things in 30 minutes, than Joe Biden has said in 30 years. Words just came out of the guy’s mouth that meant absolutely nothing. We’ve all seen him do this. On Gaza, for instance, he breathlessly said this:

“We’ll be helping with the food. We have a lot of access to food. We have a lot of food ourselves. So we’re going to get them some good strong food.”

Strong food …

Go ahead and watch if yer brave enough.

And it’s always the steadfast confidence and determined stupidity in which he addresses the world’s most pressing and obvious issues as he discovers them all for the very first time. He’s the 2-year-old who bashes his head with a rock, and earnestly brags to his mother how hard it really and truly-ooly is.

His head, I mean.

And let’s not forget the fact that he was double-dipping by doing business (playing golf) on one of his properties on our dime. But it’s the public servant studying climate change that needs to be run out of her job …

And, hey, I am the guy who wrote the book on this stuff back when I thought it was all just some terrible anomaly and America would get back on track in 2020 after four years of word salads, and 250,000 needless deaths.

I simply underestimated how big our moron problem in America was at the time.

It’s staggering, it really is.

Now, seven years later, Trump’s complete idiocy and lack of command about anything resembling policy have been completely normalized, and I have grudgingly come to understand most average Americans are just fine with it.

Taking somebody’s healthcare away might be serious, but eating their dogs and cats?! Well now … we need to have a serious talk about that one, buster.

So Democrats need to start meeting the majority of Americans where they are: most likely staring at their phones and communicating with each other in Emoji.

Healthcare for all: smiley face

Billionaires are bad: grumpy face

Stop worrying about people like me, Democrats. As a haughty independent who pays attention, you most likely have my vote for the foreseeable future, just as long as voting is still a thing in this country, or you decide to eat my cat.

It’s the disaffected out there you need to start reaching with alacrity by hitting them where they’re at, and preferably with a dumbed-down message any moron can understand.

NOW READ: The one man who has the strength to finish off Donald Trump

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.

I am certain there has not been a time in my life that has stretched out any longer than the three decades that passed between July 23, 2024 and July 23, 2025.

Just a year ago, Vice President Kamala Harris made her first public appearance after taking the baton from President Joe Biden to begin her historic sprint to the White House, while shattering glass ceilings and trying to save America from itself along the way ...

If successful, it would be the most audacious political Hail Mary in American history, during a time we never needed a good woman more.

Wisconsinites had traveled from all parts of the state with little notice to gather in this out-sized high school gymnasium tucked hard in the middle of a brawny suburb that helped wall off Milwaukee to the east.

One by one, Wisconsin’s Democratic royalty sauntered into the place … Gov. Tony Evers, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, and state Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler led a cast of dozens who wanted the teeming crowd in West Allis to know that despite all the recent tumult in the party they were firmly planting their flag with her.

Only 18 days earlier, off a terrible debate performance, Joe Biden had been in the state capitol of Madison in yet another high school auditorium in this battleground state where he literally begged for his political life, before mustering with George Stephanopoulos in a classroom onsite to make the same case to a national audience that evening.

Biden’s speech drew a mostly sympathetic reception from the partisans in attendance, but it was clear as day he was not in the kind of good trouble the great John Lewis would have advocated this late in the campaign.

Outside in the neighborhoods surrounding the school, the atmosphere was surreal. Hundreds of people, who couldn’t get in to watch the speech were turning on their best “Midwestern nice,” politely pleading with Biden to drop out. Others were there to show their support. Still others were there because when the president has traveled to your blue-collar neighborhood, the respectful thing to do is just shut up, and hear him out.

Then there were the pro-Palestinian protestors — always the pro-Palestinian protestors — who brought plenty of noise and heat to the somber event. They were kept at a distance by law enforcement which had descended from everywhere, but with their drums and kazoos nonetheless could be heard 10 blocks over.

I sympathized with their cause, just as I sympathized with the Israeli families who had been brutally terrorized, but all of them simply had to know that Biden would be miles better dealing with this sizzling issue than Bibi’s orange baby, who these days has given Israel’s disgusting, corrupt “leader” a spare room in the White House to help burp Stephen Miller.

That was the day I knew for sure these protesters were clearly prepared to burn it all down for their cause, even if it meant setting that cause back for a decade, by installing a complete madman in the White House. I wonder if they have learned yet that Trump not only couldn’t care less about them, but has it directly out for them?

I’ll leave this sore subject here for now, certain I have somehow insulted both sides …

We know now, that try as he might, Biden couldn’t convince the Big Money, the Big Media, and the Big Mouths in the Democratic Party that he was worth their time, entertainment value, and riches, so the show moved onto Milwaukee 18 days later without him, and with her.

Turns out, she was better than good. She was great.

If her job that day one year ago was to instill calm and confidence, while lighting a fire that would show us the way, she accomplished all three.

There was a real degree of difficulty here, because she was breaking away fast from a boss who had given her a chance, and could not afford to stumble even once getting out of the starting block.

Biden got only a brief mention in West Allis that day, which seemed both cold, and politically necessary. If Biden really was as bad as so many in the party said he was, it would do no good to spend much time appeasing him with platitudes, especially with but three months until the most important election in U.S. history.

Harris looked sensational, as always, in her smart, navy blue ensemble — such a contrast to her obese, orange opponent — and deftly hammered home all her talking points. Women would be protected, Project 2025 was a roadmap for destruction, and there would be more and more jobs coming from her administration.

I left the auditorium that day hopeful, but wondered if beating up on our own so late in the campaign had done more harm than all its intended good …

Despite what I am reading now from the Monday Morning Quarterbacks, who form the scattershot political elite, she ran a damn fine campaign. While her opponent was being given free rein to say and do literally anything without consequence, she plowed ahead and tried to do the most difficult thing in America politics: knock down centuries of misogyny and bigotry, while keeping people focused on character and substance.

She absolutely wiped the deck with Trump in their one and only debate. He wanted no part of a second beating, and stayed as far away as possible while screaming people were eating his supporters’ cats and dogs.

Seriously.

The patriarchy in America weren’t about to give her the respect she earned by standing up to the lewd, woman-abusing cretin that night, much the same way Hillary Clinton never got the credit she deserved for publicly smashing him three times in their debates just eight years earlier.

After all this I wonder if this screwed-up country will ever be ready for a woman to lead us. There is no way we deserve it …

This much is fact: Trump is a physically and mentally diminished monster, which makes him the most dangerous thing in American history. He knew all about Project 2025 just like she said he did, and is using it as a roadmap to dismantle our environment, our healthcare system, our safety nets, our economy, and common decency.

He’s a fascist, mostly because it’s easier ruling with an army than it is doing the necessary hard work it takes to govern all of America. He is a small-timer who has never had that in him.

Human beings have been rounded up and dumped in cages flanked by alligator-infested swamps. The convicted felon is now being hounded for his friendship with a man who rounded up children and raped them.

Billionaires are being rewarded for their loyalty, and working folk are being thrashed simply for their situation in life.

One year ago today, Kamala Harris took the stage in a Milwaukee suburb, and offered us all a chance at a far better way forward.

I’ll never forget that day, or the woman who selflessly accepted the baton from her fractured party, and ran like hell in an effort to preserve our democracy, and protect us from ourselves …

NOW READ: We have to stop pretending this new surrender to Trump is normal

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 President of the United States posted a FAKE VIDEO TO THE ENTIRE WORLD Sunday night, of a kneeling Barack Obama being placed in handcuffs, and we are supposed to go along like it is just another day in America.

This has got to stop, before we wake up one day soon to find it is already too late.

Our working press has so completely lost the thread right now it would be laughable if it wasn't so damn dangerous and disgusting.

The same media that made a meal, and regularly dined off, the America-loving Joe Biden’s allegedly declining cognitive skills during the bulk of his term in office, still can’t bring itself to accurately report on the most dangerous and corrupt person in U.S. history, the America-attacking, Donald Trump.

In fact, it might even be worse than that, because from here it looks like many in the Fourth Estate have completely surrendered to the gruesome man, who already spurred the most violent assault on our Capitol since 1814, and then did nothing but root for its success for three terrifying hours.

Our country is hanging by a thread.

You know it, I know it, and hundreds of millions of people around the world know it, yet our media is still treating it all like we are in the bottom of the seventh inning of some baseball game.

Rather than taking a deep, damn collective breath, and assessing just how rotten a job they are doing reporting on the most significant news story since the Civil War, our media seem more interested in cashing in on the crimes of the century.

When dark places like CBS News aren’t filling their bottomless pockets by intentionally dumbing down their “news” product, they are bowing to the sickening king, and helping him fill his.

This isn’t the first time I’ve raised this alarm, and won’t be the last. I know I am hardly alone, and can see you nodding in sad agreement as you read these furious words, but every now and then I need to take a breath and scream out loud that THIS IS NOT HOW JOURNALISM IS SUPPOSED TO WORK, DAMMIT.

This is one of those days.

HOW, are there STILL not entire news desks in our major media hubs devoted to nothing but this relentless attack on America? HOW isn’t currying favor with fascists across the globe, while punishing democratic leaders, not a 24/7, all-points bulletin?

World wars have started this way, for crying out loud.

And as I’ve pointed out many times, if we lose this war — and right now we are being pummeled by this grotesque administration and its slimy Republican Orcs — the first thing to go will be our editorial independence in this country.

So rather than using the skills and news sense they are taught as journalists to defend this once-honorable profession by simply accurately reporting on this dangerous attack, they are going out of their way to aid and abet it.

How bad is it?

Well, The New York Times decided to lead its front page this morning paying homage to the arsonist, instead of reporting on the horrific damage he’s done with his nuclear-powered blowtorch.

It’s bad enough the Times decided to lead their paper with an “analysis” piece rather than the gory facts. But it gets worse — much worse — when they treat it all like some “unifying” conquest by the sickening Trump as he heroically pulls his revolting base together to keep up their attack on as many innocent human beings as possible in this country.

I guess they figure since they have already normalized caging human beings in alligator-infested swamps where they are forced to eat like dogs, and swiping healthcare from millions so they can slowly die … there’s no reason to make a big deal about a president spending his time in office sharing disgusting, fascist videos that are so clearly designed to tap into his voters’ most base and racist instincts.

The video that the communication staff (Stephen Miller) eagerly cobbled together for Trump shows Obama in an orange jumpsuit pacing in a cell. I will not be sharing the video here, but if you wander off into any of the likely dark corners of the Internet (or Fox News), you can find it.

And if you are saying he did this as a distraction from this slowly developing Jeffrey Epstein story, then you need to clean out your brain, and open your eyes, because we are long past the distraction stages of this active fascist takeover, and knee-deep in all the carnage.

Stop normalizing any of it, just because you and our damn media can’t keep up with all of it.

Trump is in a steady mental and physical decline, and is doing everything he can to drag America through the sewer and to hell with him.

Our mainstream media doesn’t need to follow him there, but they do need to find some high ground, and start reporting on it with some damn urgency for God’s sake.

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.

Type enough opinion and if yer lucky, you might hit on a premise that smells better and better the longer it bakes.

Lately (exactly four weeks ago), I decided there wasn’t a chance in the world the most dangerous and grotesque man on the planet was going to make it another three-and-a-half years contaminating our White House, and the minds of the poor children growing up in all these MAGA households, who might never learn of things like manners, compassion, or the truth.

Donald Trump had just surrendered to the younger, wiser leaders at the G7 meetings in Canada so he could return to the safety of home, a pat on the head from adoring monsters like Stephen Miller, and some much-needed rest in the steel-reinforced bed he punishes each night with his hulking stink.

He had stalked off with his nuclear football, head down, fat, rounded shoulders tearing at his too-tight blue suit … short arms hanging straight down in front of his beach ball belly … that yellow, five-foot tie dangling in front of him like a broken leash.

He was weak, diminished … pathetic.

At the time I posited this:

“Instead of wondering if our country will survive the next three-plus years, this question should be asked instead: Will the grotesque and failing Donald Trump survive that long?”

Since that time long ago in June, I have only been emboldened by my new-found hope and enlightenment. While he continues to inflict maximum damage on Americans every hour or so, the loathsome man who spurred an attack on our country and did nothing about it for three hours, is dying right in front of our eyes.

Last Sunday, in my piece End Date, I put about 1,000 words into making the case, that bare minimum, Trump was crashing:

“He is literally abandoning the world and isolating himself in his safe, golden cocoon. Each day he is becoming tinier and cheaper as his old attention-grabbing schtick now dribbles off his chapped lips and onto his stained bib. He is the old man screaming at people he can no longer see to stay off his lawn. The world doesn’t much care. They are moving on, forming new alliances, because they, too, know how to read an actuarial table.”

Each day he was making my case: He’ll never make it.

Of course had Joe Biden said and done as many stupid things as King Crud, and surrendered at the G7, the media would have carried him away on a stretcher all by themselves. But we know what’s going on here, and CBS-TV only confirmed it this week, when they shot the messenger, Stephen Colbert, instead of the 300lb., orange, America-attacking thug that the brilliant entertainer has been endlessly warning us about.

Walter Cronkite’s CBS, is now a mouthpiece for fascism. Who saw that coming 50 years ago when so many of us of a certain age were huddling around the TV each night watching “the most trusted man in America”?

While we were all busy digesting the news of CBS’ latest massacre this week, we learned that sure enough, Trump was diminishing physically almost as quickly as he was mentally. Turns out, there was a reason for his swelling ankles and dying skin.

I put this this Reuters photo here for your inspection.

I apologize late for ruining your lunch. At least I didn’t provide a picture of his face.

Turns out, Trump allegedly has a condition called chronic venous insufficiency.

Of course, nobody is ever going to know what is really going on with him, especially when he hauls out White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in front of a podium to tell her Christo-fascist stories.

Leavitt wanted us to believe the flesh-eating scab on the back of King Crud’s hand was — are you ready for this? — “consistent with minor-soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin, which is taken as part of a standard cardiovascular prevention regimen.”

Seriously.

You can always tell how big the lie is going to be by the size of the cross Leavitt has slung around her neck at the time.

Whatever is going on with the failing Trump right now, I want to be among the first to suggest he try chugging some Lysol to help with it …

The rare admission that Teflon Don had some serious scratches no doubt had to do with so far unsuccessful efforts to deflect from this developing Jeffrey Epstein story, that they just can’t seem to make disappear.

This could all be settled in 19 seconds, of course, if Trump demanded his personal lawyers in DOJ just release everything they have on the case.

He won’t, though, because he’s guilty as hell. The rotten man who has never seen a woman he wouldn’t gleefully abuse, is now the one being cornered.

You’d think this would be the only thread our media would be pulling on right now, but again I digress expecting anything nudging up to real journalism from so many of these incompetent, bought-off phonies.

Even with the media’s ham-handed treatment of this story, it has had surprising staying power. It turns out some Mega-MAGA in the cult aren’t happy King Turd won’t just show us this “deep state” Epstein list they believe Democrats have suppressed for years.

I will suggest we all keep pushing for the release of this information and doing everything we can to keep this story alive, even if MAGA will eventually come around to their cult leader’s side no matter what.

Look, roughly 95 percent of Trump’s voters know all that “deep state” stuff is complete bull----. Just like they know he is a lying bigot. Just like they know he lost the election in 2020.

By now, we should all understand that they stay with this grotesque a------ for one reason only: He takes great delight in hurting everybody they hate ...

This, more than anything, explains his staying power, and why people who tell me that a President JD Vance would be even worse have it completely wrong, and need only read some history to understand why.

Like Hitler, Trump is once-in-a-lifetime monster who isn’t easily duplicated. His hate is genuine, and touches certain people deep inside their tiny, broken hearts.

Pure evil doesn’t always have an easy definition, but we know it when we see it.

But all monsters have an expiration date, and the spiraling Trump is harrumphing toward his. There will be more health issues and steady decline in the months ahead, until one day, he decides he’s had enough, and would rather spend what’s left of his miserable life pulling political strings from some golf cart, instead of being chained to the White House, and relentlessly fighting off the truth.

He always does the most selfish thing.

He better hurry, though, before the Grim Reaper shows up at the White House one day, and makes the decision for him.

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 grotesque, America-attacking Donald Trump oversees a multi-million person cult called, “MAGA.” He has relentlessly exploited this group of suckers and losers for his personal and political gain, and has pocketed hundreds of millions of their hard-earned dollars to ensure that their lives will be made worse, just as long as everybody else is getting hurt more.

MAGA is a unified group predominated by dissatisfied, angry white people, who see a better way ahead for America by traveling backwards in time when white men controlled everything by stepping on the necks of anybody who dared challenge them.

They controlled our wealth, our courts, our vote, our congress, and our presidencies.

Say what you want about MAGA, and please don’t stop, but with the help of a pathetic American electorate filled with tens of millions of non-voters, they have been very successful in their quest to take us back to the point of no return.

And if you are wondering why so many Americans will eagerly vote against their interests and for the elimination of their health insurance, clean air and water, women’s rights, vaccines, human rights, voting rights, workers’ rights, education, protections from natural disasters, fluoride in our drinking water, and a tax system that demands billionaires pay their fair share, President Lyndon Johnson has your answer:

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

That quote is more than 60 years old and is still the truest thing ever said by anybody in Washington.

Trump’s power over his cult is absolute, and all of them have a crystal-clear understanding that when he shoots one of them on some corner to prove a point, another MAGA is to jump up and land on that corner to proudly take his place.

I’ve written many times that I have given up trying to reason with MAGA or spending even three seconds of my precious time with them.

Well, in the past couple of weeks the monster, Jeffrey Epstein, is back in the news, and wouldn't you know it, I finally agree with the MAGA cult on something: Raping children and covering it up is a monstrous offense.

Epstein, of course, was an accused child trafficker, and ran his operation for the benefit of the rich, and politically powerful white men in America, who have been proving for centuries they can get away with literally anything, thanks to a privilege they swear doesn’t exist.

The list of those who have been associated with Epstein includes Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump; Prince Andrew; Vice President Al Gore; Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel; Billionaire Bill Gates; Actor Kevin Spacey; Lawyer Alan Dershowitz; Governor Bill Richardson; JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank; and hundreds and hundreds more.

Many of these men and their businesses have denied any wrongdoing, despite the fact there has been hundreds of millions of dollars of settlements paid to Epstein’s survivors. Then there are the disgusting men like Clinton and Trump who took dozens of trips to be with Epstein. Trump went so far as to puff his blubbery chest out and brag of Epstein, "It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side …"

In July 2019, Epstein was finally jailed for sex trafficking of minors and was being held without bail. One month later, he allegedly committed suicide in his jail cell. I type “allegedly” because come on … There was too much to lose by too many if Epstein ever testified in open court about the horror show he conducted.

Even MAGA agreed with that.

They were, however, stupid enough to forget that Epstein's original sweetheart plea deal was negotiated by a future member of the Trump administration, and that the alleged suicide happened under Trump's watch, because by last year, they were screaming about the “deep state” coverup of the case.

Well, Trump did what any savvy cult leader would do, and feeling his vulnerability on the issue, quieted everything down by promising (lying) he would release all the government’s files on the case were he to be elected.

As we now painfully know, he was elected and has refused to release the files. His base is good with the former and furious about the latter, and haven’t been shy about letting their cult leader know it.

This is called, “a first” and it has clearly rattled Trump, who might soon be reaching for Jim Jones’ Kool-Aid recipe if this kind of disloyalty from his cult continues.

Which is exactly why all of us must make sure it does.

Trump is nothing but a lying thug, who has gotten away with everything in his miserable life except abusing women. He is positively terrified that a skeleton he thought was tucked away safely in one of those closets with all the classified documents is going to come crashing down on him.

Here is what the convicted felon slobbered out in panic on Wednesday:

substackcdn.com

Yes, it is absolutely incredible that the thing that wrote whatever that is really exists, and worse — much worse — is the President of the United States of America.

As I put this column to bed, Trump turned his ugly attention on Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, to take attention off his Epstein coverup.

And as is the norm these days, the cult leader has only made things worse for himself, because after telling Republicans that Powell should be fired, he said this:

“He’s a terrible Fed chair. I was surprised he was appointed.”

I hope to be among the first to remind you that it was Trump himself who appointed Powell.

That deed done, let’s get back back to fanning the flames of the fire that has fully engulfed the dirty, old man, Trump.

For that, I’ll let his revolting eldest son have the last word:

substackcdn.com

It sure does, sonny.

NOW READ: This jaw-dropping truth about the Supreme Court will make you furious

As Republicans continue their journey backwards in time to a dark place before science, vaccines, critical thinking, diplomacy, and decency, it is important the rest of us understand that it is what is still ahead that really matters — hard as that can be right now.

While I was crashing through my newspapers on Sunday morning, reading about all the Republican blood and gore flowing down off Capitol Hill, I decided to settle my stomach, and try something else.

So I poured another cup of coffee, rubbed my tired eyes, and googled: “ACTUARIAL LIFE TABLE OBESE 79-YEAR-OLD WHITE MAN.”

The answer is roughly 86, maybe even less because all these tables I looked at wouldn't factor in the “obese” part of my hasty query.

You already know whose life expectancy I was looking into …

Donald Trump is a very sick old man, and cult leader, who doesn’t have much longer.

This is a real relief to those of us from the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area who have been sick and tired of this sick and tired guy for going on 50 years. We’ve always known he was a loudmouth, bigot, cheater, and liar, but we didn’t know until 2016 how many of us also thought this loudmouth, bigot, cheater and liar should be president.

That one’s admittedly been a tragic eye-opener for me, and many of my old friends might as well be dead and gone, because I want nothing to do with them.

Other people outside the tri-state area, stumbled onto the guy when he was in debt to seemingly everybody, and was bailed out by landing a starring role as a ruthless businessman on some stupid reality TV show that has contributed to the dumbing-down of America.

By 2015, the mass media decided everybody else needed to be introduced to the career loudmouth, bigot, cheater and liar, and after he descended in the direction of hell on that escalator, they shoved him down our throats in a steady stream.

Thus began the beginning of the end ...

That was 10 years ago now, and easily the longest century in American politics.

He should be in jail for his attack on America, but I’ve written that column before, and would rather focus this one on his end date, which we know for sure is taking up all his time these days.

The ghastly Trump is the most self-involved man on the planet. How else to explain the hours and hours he spends in front of the mirror taping stringy, hyena-colored hair strands to his head and puffing them up just so, while slathering gooey, rust-orange paste to his face.

He looks completely ridiculous, of course, but makes sure to surround himself with a steady collection of ass-kissers, who would never dare tell him the truth.

Billions around the world know, though ...

And it’s when he gets out of his protective, choreographed bubble these days where he really starts running into trouble.

Four weeks ago, I wrote a piece, Stick a Fork Him, because I didn’t (and still don’t) believe that with a chilling 1,430 days left in his grotesque presidency that he has the stamina or the ability to make it to the end.

He is crashing.

I wrote that piece in the wake of his sudden surrender to world leaders at the G7 Summit in Canada. The haggard Trump was out of his tiny element, and in a faraway place.

Mostly he was lost, and outclassed by the younger, smarter leaders who know for sure that time is on their side, and Trump is best when he’s left in his protective, million-gallon Tupperware container.

The diminishing orange man couldn’t even fake a 3rd-grader’s understanding of world affairs, so he did what any outclassed and failing person would do: He just wandered away. He left the meetings early because of “What’s going on in the Middle East” but really because the “dog-ate-my-homework” excuse had finally reached its shelf life.

The world leaders who remained at the summit no doubt let out a deep sigh of relief, and went on with their business professionally and in peace and quiet.

Canada’s savvy new leader, Mark Carney, seated a young, up-and-comer named Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had energetically traveled 5,000 miles just to be there, in Trump’s empty chair.

I still don’t think that this first-class shade and 1,000-watt signaling got enough attention, so let’s do something about that:

www.rawstory.com

That’s the bearded Zelenskyy seated to Carney's left in the chair that had been occupied by the low-energy Trump, who abandoned the meetings to update the color of his face after his long nap home.

Four weeks later, things have only gotten worse for the failing Trump — much worse.

He is literally abandoning the world and isolating himself in his safe, golden cocoon. Each day he is becoming tinier and cheaper as his old attention-grabbing schtick now dribbles off his chapped lips and onto his stained bib.

He is the old man screaming at people he can no longer see to stay off his lawn.

The world doesn’t much care. They are moving on, forming new alliances, because they, too, know how to read an actuarial table.

This weekend the Fox Sewer System released 40-minutes of propaganda from their dear leader as he took a series of scathing questions from his daughter-in-law.

Read that again: HIS DAUGHTER-IN-LAW.

So I’ll bite: What would have been the reaction in the press if Joe Biden had done this?

Even parts of Trump’s odious base are peeling away from him. Not because he is taking their health care away, or because he would rather see them drown than get help from catastrophic flooding that is overrunning so many of their towns, but because pedophilia is a line-crosser even for them.

Rather than releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files as he campaigned on, to expose the “abuse of children by the elites,” Trump is just trying to make the whole thing go away.

Wait’ll these MAGAs find out that Trump referred o Epstein as a “fun and terrific guy who likes beautiful women as much as (he does), and many of them are on the younger side …"

They are promising this isn’t going away, but Trump is …

Regular readers will know I don’t see the end of Trump as the end of all our problems, but I do see it as a helluva hopeful start. He has re-exposed a dark underbelly of America that is only skin-deep. Nobody in my lifetime has been as effective at exploiting race and gender to his political advantage as this sickly old man.

As every hour and day ticks by we are moving closer to his end. That day is coming as sure as I am typing this. Not even a professional, lowlife grifter like Trump can cheat death.

One day, hard as it is to imagine right now, he will be extinct, and it will be our jobs to make sure as much of his gruesome legacy as possible dies with him.

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.

I was listening to a spot on The New Yorker Radio Hour last week, hosted by Editor David Remnick. This show has been a go-to of mine for years — a place I can find some safe harbor from the gathering storm in Washington.

You might have your own opinion on Remnick, or none at all, but I think he’s a smart guy, generally a great interviewer, and has been a part of some damn good journalism for most of my adult life. We are loose contemporaries, both from New Jersey, the same age, got our start as sports writers in the Garden State.

That’s where the similarities crash to a halt.

Remnick went big with his journalism career, landing gigs at The Washington Post and The New Yorker, winning a Pulitzer Prize along the way.

After beating the beat for 15 years, I swerved toward editorial management at midsize newspapers from Maine to Florida, before I helped serve the most important readers in the world — the troops and their families — as managing editor at the most important editorially independent newspaper in the world, Stars and Stripes.

I think it’s safe to say, Remnick and I both know what good journalism looks like, and believe it has never been needed more.

So when he had Fox News anchor Bret Baier on his show to help him sell a book, I grumbled but tuned in. At least I didn’t have to listen to a journalist sell another book, because Baier isn’t one of those. He’s a toothy frontman for the most dangerous lowbrow operation in America.

Baier is on staff at Fox to help legitimize the most crooked propaganda tool in America’s 249-year history.

Without Fox “News” there is no bought-off, radical-right Supreme Court or its tool, Donald Trump. During the past three decades, the station’s 24/7 propaganda has found the eyes and ears of millions of mostly white Americans to help them feel better about themselves, and their morbid fascination with the Year 1952, or thereabouts.

They are all brakes, no progress. An accelerator toward the complete absurd ...

And if you somehow do not think I am telling you the truth, then ask yourself why the most notorious liar in the world has stuffed his staff to overflowing with dozens of lying Fox veterans, including his revolting Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.

Fox helped make Trump, and Trump is busy repaying the kindness.

Remnick gave Baier 40 minutes, and I listened with clenched teeth. I thought Remnick conducted the interview fairly well, except for a few instances when he completely let the guy off the hook.

Baier has been with the propaganda dump for 27 years, and has become very good at playing the innocent “Who Me?” while he gaslights guys like Remnick to sell his soul and his books. He’ll tell you Fox is the innocent and necessary counterpoint to the “liberal media.”

This, of course, is where the trouble starts, because Baier knows there never was any “liberal media” when he was breaking in, and hadn't yet sold his soul to the highest bidder.

The term “liberal media” is sizzling propaganda that has been normalized in too many places as truth.

In more than three decades in the business, I never encountered these so-called boogeymen/women “liberal media” types, because they didn't exist. I’ll bet Remnick didn't either, and I dearly wish he would have said that during his interview with Baier, because that lie is the most toxic of all, and has led to every odious thing that has followed.

Screaming there was a “liberal media” was simply a way for conservative lowlifes like Rupert Murdoch to crash the party, and prey upon 72-year-old white men, who needed to blame somebody for their sore lower back, and all these women and people of color who were nudging ahead of them.

If you can lie to these people and convince them that the media has it out for them, you can slowly begin to pick their pockets ...

The smarmy Baier knows all this, but that eight-figure bribe, er, salary, is keeping him from saying it.

Remnick also pushed Baier on the company he keeps — Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, just to name a couple of the most disgusting people on camera — and wondered how that couldn’t affect the “straight-down-the-middle” journalist’s credibility.

Baier of course praised the opinionated “talent” that surrounds him, and couldn’t bring himself to say a bad thing about them. He just wanted you to know he operates inside some asbestos-fortified bubble, and far away from all that blaring noise.

I’m not sure he really believes this, but maybe it makes it easier to live with himself, because what he really is is the “straight” frontman that lends credibility to all these crooked acts that surround him.

That makes him one of the most dangerous guys at the station.

Essentially, he’s inherited the role the confused, disingenuous Chris Wallace used to play at the place. Both of them know where the bodies are buried at Fox, and neither of them is talking.

Remnick smoothly pressed on and asked about all the golf Baier plays with Trump, and wondered if maybe that didn’t affect his credibility. Baier didn't think anything of it, of course, and shot back, “If the President of the United States asked you to play a round of golf, wouldn’t you do it?”

Here’s where I thought Remnick would hit him between the eyes, because there’s only one correct answer to this question: “Yes, just as long as he understood he is playing golf with a journalist where everything he says is on the record, unless he stipulates instances where they aren’t. And when he cheats, well, that’s is definitely on the record because it reveals character.”

So fair would I be, in fact, that I’d even treat him to my first question: “Who do you think you are serving by playing all this golf?”

Remnick unfortunately never went there, but did ask about Trump’s contentious relationship with the press and the truth. After all, his former paper The Washington Post counted an astronomical 30,573 untruths during Trump's first presidency — an averaged of about 21 erroneous claims a day.

And, yes, the word “untruth” rips me, too, especially when journalists are taught to report things in the clearest terms possible. So the word “lie” works best here.

After a decade in the public eye, we know that Trump does nothing but lie from the time his fat little feet hit the deck in the morning, until the time he puts his nuclear-powered cell phone on the bedside table at midnight.

He’s a psychopath. Truth has no room in his gruesome life. He’s a two-timer and a double-talker.

Here’s what Baier said about that:

“I think it is this cat-and-mouse game. You know, for all of the things he says about the media … he’s reaching out and doing interviews with the same people he says are nasty.”

Baier also intimated that Trump talked to the press far more than Joe Biden did, and I’ll concede that point if by “talking” he means “raging” and “lying.”

Because here’s another thing that needs to be crystal-clear, and should have been put to Baier: ANYBODY can sit down with anybody and just lie to them without any consequences. THIS is the essence of fascist propaganda.

Trump STILL hasn’t conceded the 2020 election. To Baier’s tiny credit, he knows Biden won. And, BOY was A LOT of time spent on this one during the interview. Poor Bret talked about how isolating it was for him in all those rightwing circles to acknowledge Biden won.

Good grief, sonny. BOO-HOO.

THIS is what happens to people at Fox when they tell the truth. But Baier’s hanging in there and playing golf with his master because, well, all that damn money.

Which again begs the question, why is he or anybody, bothering with these so-called interviews, when Trump just uses them to spread lies and hate, while also berating these so-called journalists, while his chubby little hands flap around and do that weird accordion thing?

I’d argue the media needs to think about talking to Trump a helluva lot less, not more. As it is, he’s filling the White House “press” staff with an increasing number of rightwing stooges that are paid to make things as easy as possible on him.

I would have liked to hear Baier’s take on that, too.

Me? I say, starve Trump, and leave him and his thousands of lies hanging on his two-ton soap box. Nothing would make him angrier, and reveal more, which is the role of the working press.

This is not a healthy man.

Finally, if you fancy yourself a journalist, and are going to attend one of these “press” conferences, be ready to call a lie a lie. If you are insulted by the orange, unwell monster, simply say this:

“My job is to make sure I use my access to ask the questions my readers can’t. You can either answer these questions or not — up to you. But you will not insult me. You will comport yourself like a grownup, and we will engage thusly. America deserves at least that much. Now kindly answer my darn question. Thank you.”

(deep sigh)

For an old, cranky journalist, watching the current state of our media, and this fascist creep in our nation, has become just too tough to Baier.

Sermon over.

NOW READ: Trump's new assault is not a sideshow or a distraction — it's the whole game

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.

Summertime used to be fun — relaxing even.

Kids were out of school, driving the adults crazy, while the adults were giving it hell burning up their two weeks of hard-earned vacation, and doing their level best to ignore the kids, so that everybody could get some much-needed space and happiness.

People would collect around a grill for dinner, and report on their day, before separating again to find some good trouble chasing laughs, lightning bugs and pretty girls and boys. If you were lucky, there was time spent by a pool, and if you were luckier yet, toes were curled in the sand of a yawning beach where the waves yanked at us for a dip or better yet, a ride.

Mungo Jerry’s 1970’s hit In the Summertime will always frame the season for me. Have a drink, have a drive, and go off and give it a listen … I’ll be sure to ruin your mood when you return.

We're not grey people, we're not dirty, we're not mean
We love everybody, but we do as we please
When the weather's fine, we go fishing or go swimming in the sea
We're always happy, life's for living
Yeah, that's our philosophy

Politics was almost never discussed during the summer because there was fun to find back then. Yeah, that was America’s philosophy.

We trusted that barring the unforeseen, nobody would screw things up too badly in Washington while we were sheltering from the constant grind.

This summer, we are under brutal attack by a mad king who is intent on getting even for every awful thing that has made him miserable the past 79 years. Because he can’t escape his pathetic life, he is spending his summer making sure ours is as terrible as possible.

Young Trump spent his summers torturing everybody around him, until one day his parents decided even they’d had enough. After he returned home from yanking the ponytails of the girls who couldn’t run fast enough to escape his fat grip, they shipped him kicking and screaming off to a military boarding school so that he could become their problem instead.

Now he’s everybody’s problem.

This summer, 75 percent of America is worried our Democracy is under direct attack. The other 25 percent are doing the attacking, led by the burnt-orange architect of the most violent attack on our Capitol since 1814.

The yacht club bully has grown into the most dangerous person in the world.

America hasn’t been this divided since the Civil War, which is appropriate because we are back to fighting about the same things. Namely: the notion that all men and women are created equal.

People on the left say they are.

People on the right say they aren’t.

Hard as it is to believe, our first Civil War could have been even worse if we didn't have arguably our greatest president in office, Abraham Lincoln.

This Civil War promises to escalate because we have without question our most grotesque president in office, whose singular talent is to split families and vindictively go lower. He’s sees only upside in dividing us.

He’s a got a lifetime of grievances to settle, and a political party in tow that spends all its time on its knees kissing his two-ton backside to appease his grotesque cult, which is only too happy to hurt itself just as long as everybody else feels its pain.

All of this would be plenty bad enough to spoil any hazy, lazy day at the pool or the beach, except, of course, we know it’s even worse, because the political team that has assembled itself in Washington to battle this evil has to be a collection of some of sorriest-ass politicians on record.

Instead of bringing baseball bats to this war for our survival, they are bringing catcher’s mitts.

At a time we’ve never needed bare-knuckle, inspirational fighters more, the opposition party is doing everything it can to give us even less. So a warning: I will not stop typing this until things change: The Democratic Party cannot be taken seriously as long as Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are leading it.

THEY HAVE TO GO.

The only impressive thing about these two relentlessly boring men is their unyielding arrogance. Both act like low-energy robots who are plugged into some 1970 political algorithm that spits out talking points with all the gusto of a short-circuiting word processor.

Who is it these guys think they are connecting with? I mean, besides 86-year-old guys like Steny Hoyer?

It would embarrassing if it wasn’t so damn insulting, but we don’t have to put up this, people.

On Tuesday, in the wake of perhaps the most catastrophic vote in American history, Schumer immediately ran off to post this on Elon Musk’s crooked social media platform. It might be the most 2025 Democratic thing I have ever seen.

Whoa! He got the name of the bill changed! You won’t see this kind of shrewd political maneuvering just anywhere, my friends.

I think Lyndon Johnson just tried to die again ...

And about this bizarre picture HE purposely chose to amplify after the Great Name Change …

Well, that’s the electrifying Schumer himself burying his face in the lectern, surrounded by Senator Patty Murray who is burying her face in her hands, Senator Jack Reed who is burying himself in sleep, and some dude on the lower-right with the thought-bubble over his head that reads: “Please, God, just bury me now …”

THIS is who is leading the Left while Trump and his Orcs drag us into hell.

So now yer asking me who would do better. Well, besides literally ANYBODY, a less vague answer:

In the Senate, up until six weeks ago, I would have advocated for New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. That’s when he balled up his fingers and punched himself in the face by being the lone Democrat to vote for Charles Kushner, a convicted felon and father-in-law to Ivanka Trump, as the new U.S. ambassador to France.

The things people will do for money …

So why not one of the Georgia’s senators, namely Raphael Warnock, who has more fight and passion than the entire New York delegation? Yes, I understand putting people in purple states in these positions is risky, but is there a better state than Georgia to dig in and hold the line?

(And don’t you dare hit me with some seniority argument, when it’s the seniors in the party that have in large part led to this catastrophic mess.)

As for the House? You got me. There are scores to choose from. The one thing I know for sure is that the miscalculating Jeffries ain’t it.

His refusal to back Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race after his convincing victory over the reprehensible Andrew Cuomo was the last straw for me. The people want change, and Jeffries could care less.

Barbaric prisons are being opened in Florida, and millions of Americans are going to pay a terrible price thanks to a monstrous spending bill, so that affluent lowlifes like Trump can keep filling their bottomless pockets with our money.

This long, hot summer is only two weeks old, and promises to only heat up as Republicans eagerly clamor to burn more oil and coal, and leave our planet in worse shape than they found it.

We are in a war for our survival, and Democratic patriots are being led by guys like Schumer, who can’t even write a strongly worded tweet without making a damn fool of himself and his party.

It’s time to put some serious heat on these ineffective fools, and demand change and real fighters at the top, because as hot as this summer is, it well might be our last as a Democratic Republic.

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.

Thanks to a loaded, radical-right Supreme Court that believes in monarchies, not democracy — a group of robed anti-Americans led around by the nose and on lavish vacations by the billionaires who own them — a convicted felon who regards the truth as his mortal enemy now has the power he needs to wage war on the citizens of this country he pillages for his gain.

We are well on our way to becoming the brutal authoritarian country you used to see on TV and say, "Damn, thank God I don't live there ..."

Things are going to keep getting worse until (and if) we can put a stop to it, good people. Could be it’s already too late: we are a full-blown authoritarian country.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson knows full well the trouble we’re in, and offered this clear-eyed dissent Friday against the high court limiting federal judges’ ability to halt the fascist Trump’s hateful executive orders nationwide:

“The court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.”

AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT …

She wasn’t done:

“It is important to recognize that the Executive’s bid to vanquish so-called ‘universal injunctions’ is, at bottom, a request for this Court’s permission to engage in unlawful behavior. When the Government says “do not allow the lower courts to enjoin executive action universally as a remedy for unconstitutional conduct,” what it is actually saying is that the Executive wants to continue doing something that a court has determined violates the Constitution — please allow this. That is some solicitation. With its ruling today, the majority largely grants the Government’s wish. But, in my view, if this country is going to persist as a Nation of laws and not men, the Judiciary has no choice but to deny it.”

In other words, Trump, the convicted felon … the guy who lies as he breathes … can pretty much ignore any law he doesn’t like.

I really don’t know if after this ruling granting Trump a king’s unchecked powers we will make it to the midterms, which are an endless 17 months away. It isn’t hard to imagine Trump ginning up some crisis and then smothering us in executive orders to halt our elections.

And if you think I’m going too far here, I think you are the problem.

Democrats and/or the opposition to GOP fascism need to be articulating what is at stake right now and emulating Justice Jackson’s courage and conviction. Everybody needs to understand we have entered the beginning of the end of a country where the people used to have the power.

And this is going to get so much damn worse so damn fast …

In my piece last week, We just got a deafening message — ignore it at your peril I warned Democrats of all shapes and sizes that if we make it to the midterms “there is going to be some serious bloodletting at the polls in 2026.”

I added for emphasis: “There will be no such thing as a 'safe' seat anywhere, because America is not a safe country right now. People are scared.”

I concluded: “Nothing motivates voters more than fear and anger, and the politician who doesn’t understand that, better be prepared to find some real work.”

Well, what do you know, guys like Andrew Cuomo aren’t hearing this message. After getting smacked at the polls in New York City’s mayoral primary, word is out that he will stay in the race and run as an alternative to the guy who thrashed him, Zohran Mamdani.

Cuomo is doing this because he’s an arrogant, privileged punk given license and a long leash by the Democratic elite who are completely out of touch with the American voter.

Rather than congratulate Mamdani, and tell him he will do everything he can to help him get elected, Cuomo's going to fight him. This is why so many people argue there’s really not much difference in America’s two major parties these days, and why I take heart most people aren’t affiliated with either one of them.

That last part might be exactly what saves us ...

In closing, I want to take you back to an ancient time, one year ago today.

Back then, a decent, hardworking guy named Joe Biden was our president and he was getting relentlessly hammered by our press, Republicans, and a disenchanted electorate for his inability to completely correct the dreadful economy he inherited from the guy who had attacked the country four years earlier — a guy by the name of Donald Trump.

It was the No.1 issue on the board for the majority of American voters, whose hair was on fire about high prices and inflation.

Well, we know how that election turned out.

As I was guzzling coffee and rifling through several newspapers this morning, I came across this story shoehorned onto the bottom of Page 10 of my local paper here in Madison, Wisconsin:

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Turns out, things have gotten worse for the America consumer, not better, but nobody is talking about it anymore, because King Crud and his Crooked Court have given us 20 others things to worry about instead, including our survival.

Our press is flailing, and chasing danger instead of warning us about it.

This is chaos by design, with the goal of unsteadying us, and pushing us all toward surrender. The morbidly obese orange moron has his fat little foot on Lady Liberty’s throat and wants us all to just up and quit.

Well, I’m too goddam mad for that, AND WILL NOT SUBMIT to this clown or his bought-off court.

I am raging and sounding the alarms. I am done looking for leaders where they are supposed to be, and perfectly happy to find ‘em right here in this space.

I say let’s be the answer, and kick some a--.

People. Not parties.

Enough Already.

NOW READ: How to humiliate a bully like Trump

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.

I want to spend just a few minutes on the blockbuster New York City mayoral race, because everybody else seems to be doing it, and very few of them seem to be getting it right.

Zohran Mamdani flattened the establishment Democrat, Andrew Cuomo, in the city’s primary Tuesday because the vast majority of Americans on both sides of the political divide are sick and tired of establishment Democrats and Republicans.

Thanks for reading …

OK, a little more:

Look, the American electorate is angry, scared to death, and finally might be ready for a revolution. I mean, unless you weren’t paying attention to the recent No Kings marches, or that New York City mayoral primary …

Our angry, disenfranchised American electorate is how we got the grotesque Donald Trump again in November, and why Democrats need to start doing a helluva lot more listening to what people are actually saying and doing, and stop trotting out women-groping has-beens like Bill Clinton and Andrew Cuomo to prove my point.

It’s why Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer walks around with two black eyes and a 17-percent approval rating, and why Democrats have never been less popular.

And listen to me: I’m not here to lash out and beat up Democratic politicians because, like it or not, they are the only answer we have to stop Republicans’ sickening, Christo-fascist, authoritarian goose-step toward the end.

I am here to beat up the people in the party who still don’t think it is in some desperate need of radical change, and most of all: some new blood, like Mamdani.

Democrats didn’t lose in November because people didn’t turn out in numbers they hoped for. In fact, new data which reflects how people actually voted is showing us quite the opposite. They lost because, for the first time in memory, they are losing younger voters and minority voters in big numbers.

From the Pew Research Center:

Donald Trump won with a voter coalition that was more racially and ethnically diverse than in 2020 or 2016, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of the 2024 electorate. Young, nonwhite and irregular voters defected by the millions to Trump costing Kamala Harris both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

Add that to the working-class voters they have been hemorrhaging for years, and, well, “Houston, we have a problem.”

But sure, guys like Clinton, Cuomo and Schumer have an answer for all that, despite being the problem.

Serious question: Why won’t they just go away?

Predictably, we are already hearing from some center-Left Democrats and Republicans that Mamdani's progressive policies that would make life more affordable for the majority of Americans are too radical, but minority billionaires like the grotesque Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Trump controlling upwards of 50 percent of our nation's wealth aren’t.

This is absurd.

Why is this so damn hard to understand?

I am going to liberally borrow from a New York Times piece written Wednesday to lay out Mamdani’s '“radical” stances on just a few important issues, and why he, unlike other Democrats, was able to connect with younger voters Tuesday:

Affordability

“Every politician says New York is the greatest city on the globe,” Mr. Mamdani said in his first campaign ad, released eight months ago. “But what good is that if no one can afford to live here?”
So began a campaign tightly focused on the cost-of-living crisis plaguing the city. His platform, detailed on his campaign website, was simple: “New York is too expensive. Zohran will lower costs and make life easier.”
One of his ideas to tackle rising costs was to create a city-owned grocery store in each borough. The stores would operate on city-owned land or in city buildings, buy food wholesale and be exempt from property taxes, which would keep the cost of their offerings down, he said.
Experts say the logistics of such a plan are complex, but similar initiatives are already in place in other parts of the United States. Municipalities in Kansas and Wisconsin have operated similar models since 2020 and 2024, and Chicago and Atlanta are working on their own versions.
To fund his affordability initiatives, Mr. Mamdani plans to raise the corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent, which he says will create an additional $5 billion in revenue. He also plans to charge the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers a flat 2 percent tax.

Transportation

Among Mr. Mamdani’s most distinctive campaign promises is his vow to make city buses free. As a state legislator, Mr. Mamdani worked with Gov. Kathy Hochul to start a pilot program offering free fares on five bus routes for a limited period. (He later sought to expand the program, but the pilot was not renewed.)
Mr. Mamdani supports congestion pricing and has said the tolling program is succeeding in reducing smog and improving traffic in Lower Manhattan. Mr. Mamdani, who was raised in Manhattan and lives in Queens, told The New York Times earlier this month that he does not own a car. He rides the subway every day, he said, and often bikes.

Housing

In outlining his vision for the city, Mr. Mamdani identified the high cost of housing as the leading reason that residents had left New York in recent years. His main campaign promise was to freeze rents for nearly one million New Yorkers via his appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board, which decides on rent increases for stabilized apartments.
He promised to triple the number of available affordable housing units, with 200,000 new homes to be built over the next decade. Mr. Mamdani also said he would double the amount of money the city currently spends to preserve public housing.

Immigration

Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and is a naturalized U.S. citizen, has said that New York City should strengthen its sanctuary laws, which have come under attack during the Trump administration. On his campaign website, Mr. Mamdani pledged to bar Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from city facilities while increasing legal support for immigrants being targeted and protecting their personal data.
“Trump’s ICE has adopted a policy of guilty until proven innocent with immigrant New Yorkers, disappearing New Yorkers from their homes without charge,” he told The Times in April. “Our city should fight for their release while defending the First Amendment and due process rights.”

Child Care

The rising cost of child care is among the most pressing issues for parents in New York City. Mr. Mamdani has promised to make free child care available for children between six weeks and five years old and to deliver “baby baskets” to new parents that would include educational resources and necessities like diapers, baby wipes and swaddles.
For older children, Mr. Mamdani has suggested closing some streets outside schools to car traffic in an effort to reduce the risk of traffic fatalities and pollution affecting students. Mr. Mamdani has also proposed making City University of New York tuition free for all students.

Chilling, “radical” stuff, eh? Only if you are billionaire …

Republicans aren’t scared programs like these won’t work in places like New York, as much as they are terrified they will. THAT is why they are in a frenzy right now blasting them to smithereens. They did the same thing with programs like Obamacare, and social security.

We’ve already tackled why too many Democrats can’t get behind these new, common-sense measures: M-O-N-E-Y. I’d also add intellectual laziness, and a failure to communicate as major, secondary issues.

And nobody is saying the New York City fix is applicable to the fix so many people in the suburbs and our rural areas are in right now. The Democrat best able to articulate how they will address the local concerns of their furious electorate will win going away.

There isn’t a Democrat I have talked to who is satisfied with the direction of the party, but every one of them was at that big march two weeks ago. They want change, and they want it now.

If we can make it to the midterms — and at the pace Republicans are destroying everything in their sight that is a 50-50 proposition — there is going to be some serious bloodletting at the polls in 2026.

Bookmark that.

There will be no such thing as a “safe” seat anywhere, because America is not a safe country right now.

Nothing motivates voters more than fear and anger, and the politician who doesn’t understand that, better be prepared to find some real work.

NOW READ: The horrifyingly probable truth about Trump's humiliation on the global stage

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.

]Once upon a time, an endless seven years ago, I accidentally wrote a book about Donald Trump.

Actually, the book pretty much wrote itself, because I used Trump’s very own best words to satirically annihilate him. We were into the second year of his [gulp] first presidency and it was clear to anybody paying attention the guy was so far out of his element and out over his skis that it was only a matter of when he’d crash, not if he’d crash.

The man was a complete moron, and anybody who couldn’t see that was, well, a …

Anyway, gaining inspiration from his death-defying Mr. MaGoo act of careening around the country making a moron out of himself wherever his fat, little feet had landed, I hit my computer one Saturday morning and started penning a letter to America that would come off the desk of the Moron in Chief, Donald Trump.

But this letter couldn’t be just any letter, my friends. No, this letter had to be Jeffersonian in weight. This letter had to be a Very Important Letter.

So I wrote the thing, had a laugh, loaded it on my website, and then shared it on Twitter.

I did the same thing the next week, and the next week, and the next week …

Turns out they were quite a hit. When a publisher contacted me cold one day and approached me about turning all those letters into a book, I laughed, and she said, “exactly.”

Just about a year later, Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters was born.

I’m not here to sell you that book today, my friends, I’m really not. But I lament that since that book was published, there has been enough material to fill the pages of three more books.

This was all supposed to be over in November, 2020. America’s greatest mistake was supposed to have been shoved away in some padded locker in his seedy country club.

By the time the carnage had ended with his violent attack on America just two months later, I figured like any half-sane person we were finally done with the dangerous moron for good.

Better yet: He’d be behind bars where he belonged.

Even after the three-dimensional, chess-playing law-and-order expert, Merrick Garland, managed to put himself in check by disgracefully failing to prosecute America’s No. 1 enemy, I figured his subsequent tarring as a sexual-abuser by a civil court jury and conviction of 34 counts of falsification of business records simply had to end it. I mean, America wasn’t really going to elect a “law-and-order candidate” who was an America-attacking convicted felon, were they?

So here we are into the 150 most destabilizing days in American history and the moron is somehow back in our White House breaking things like our government into a million pieces, glueing them back to together, and bragging that only he could perform this magnificent black magic. We are being gaslighted like never before, and the sane among us are back to banging our heads against the wall.

We don’t deserve this cruel and unusual punishment, we really don’t …

And of course, where there’s Trump, there’s a social media account that he is absolutely obliterating. And where there’s a Trump social media account that he is absolutely obliterating, there are enough moronic words to write several books.

Yesterday, the moron outdid himself, which is like saying he somehow got even oranger.

Just after 6 p.m. local time, he decided to share this take on what was happening in the Mideast inside his moronic, overly crowded head, no matter what was really happening in the Mideast

And God bless the entire f------ galaxy, with the hope you have the Stamina and Courage not to go into orbit after reading whatever the hell that mess was supposed to be.

I mean, holy hell.

And, yes, I get it. He used the word “God” 40 times to appease the dangerous Christo Fascists, who have put the moron back in power, to beat the rest of us to death with a gold-plated hammer. That’s a column for another day. This one has to do with dealing with the moron who is right front of our eyes.

Look, if your 10-year-old son wrote something this preposterous, you'd be on the phone with his teacher the very next morning begging her to adopt him. Short of that, you’d demand she hold him back a few years so he could catch up to the 6-year-olds.

You needn’t wonder why his parents shoved him in a military boarding school, because they simply couldn’t stand to be around him anymore …

Except this is the President to the United States. Wait: THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!!! And the only people on the Right who can do anything about him right now are either feeding him warped Bible stories to encourage him, or are scared to death he is going sic his cult on them and have them blown to smithereens.

It really is this bad right now.

And if Republicans have a pathetic excuse for their pathetic inaction to curb this man-child’s worst instincts, what is our damn media’s excuse?

Because after The Moron barfed out whatever that was supposed to be above, The New York Times decided to deal with it this way in an email blast just an hour later:

Trump’s Washington

How President Trump is changing government, the country and its politics.

Tonight, I’m covering the unusual way President Trump is posting through the war in Iran.

President Trump offered an olive branch to Iran after a response to America’s weekend strike that appeared calculated to ramp down the tensions. Below, I examine the curious way he did it.

Read all that again …

Saying that Trump is “changing government” is like saying Hitler “changed” immigration. Describing how Trump is dealing with the dangerous mess in Iran that he created as “unusual” is like describing his violent attack to overthrow our government on January 6, 2021, as simply “a day of love.”

Oh, and as I publish this? Iran and Israel are still bombing the bejesus out of each other.

Nine years after Trump asked Vladimir Putin to help get him elected — “Russia, if you’re listening” — and it was subsequently normalized, our corporate media still hasn’t learned its lesson when dealing with this dangerous moron.

People who deal in words, still somehow don’t understand that how you use those words matter.

They still haven’t learned that Trump isn’t just a complete and total moron, he is also the President of the United States.

And that happens to make him the most dangerous man on Earth.

God help us.

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.

Before Juneteenth fades away in the rearview mirror, as yet another Republican president recklessly drives us toward yet another unwinnable war in the Middle East, I want to spend just a few minutes on this federal holiday, and the very old and sickening reasons lowlifes like Donald Trump make a point of hating it.

First, let’s talk about why Juneteenth is celebrated, because I reckon 80 percent of America couldn’t tell you at least that much (and if Trump’s hideous party has their way, it will never be taught at all):

On June 19, 1865, the Union’s Major General Gordon Granger and his troops arrived in the city of Galveston, Texas, which sits hard on the Gulf of Mexico. It was now nearly two and a half years since President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Upon arriving in this port city, Major General Granger let the population there know the Civil War had ended two months earlier, the North had won, and enslaved African Americans there were officially, and FINALLY free. Only months later, the 13th Amendment was ratified, officially abolishing slavery everywhere in America.

Can you imagine what this moment must have been like? It can be argued this is the most significant day in this country’s erratic history.

Why, even Donald Trump himself briefly stumbled into this realization when he said this in 2017, just months after his improbable victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election:

“Melania and I send our warmest greetings to all those celebrating Juneteenth, a historic day recognizing the end of slavery.”

Even if there’s no way in the world Trump actually wrote that statement, it was the thought that counted. Even if the guy who relentlessly pilloried Barack Obama for years with his disgusting, racist birther blather meant none of what he officially put on the record that day, it was the right thing to do.

Predictably, just two months later, the reckless racist was back on the road to hate when he couldn’t bring himself to say a bad word about the white supremacist terror attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, that disgraced America and resulted in the terrible murder of Heather Heyer, along with horrific injuries to dozens of other innocent Americans who were protesting against the vulgar event.

This was who Trump really was. This was the guy who has had countless endorsements from the KKK, and by Thursday evening had endured enough of all these Juneteenth celebrations. So he went out with this reprehensible, grammatically challenged blast. It would be his only public proclamation on Juneteenth, 2025:

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This was classic Trump taking a deep, noxious breath and blowing hot air into his nuclear-powered dog whistle.

He never mentioned Juneteenth once on Thursday, but made sure his racist base knew exactly what he thought of the day. Now into a second term that he will do everything to ensure is an endless one, there is no reason to play it cute any longer as he had very briefly in 2017.

And, hey, that’s a real shame for a guy who spends hours in front of a mirror each morning taping a dead ferret to his head, while liberally slathering orange mud on his graying face just to look pretty …

King Crud wanted everybody to know last night that he was back on the throne breaking wind, and all protocols of decency.

This was the dirty, old man who has repeatedly called Democrats “scum” and earlier this week was standing in his weird way on the White House lawn proudly fondling a flag poll somebody else erected for him.

“It’s such a beautiful pole,” he gushed … (Tell us you have issues down there, without actually telling us you have issues down there, sport …)

This was the low-energy loser who harrumphed out of the G7 meetings Monday night because he can no longer even pretend to be a valuable contributor. He needs his naps, and a regular diaper change.

This is the guy who has proven time and again he has absolutely no ability, nor talent, to govern, but does have an endless capacity to hate. He has never passed any meaningful legislation that helps most Americans, but lately is pushing his “big, beautiful” bill that will coddle and burp the billionaires who stuff his bottomless pockets, while beating the working class into submission.

And even none of that really matters to Trump just as long as he can projectile vomit lawless executive orders, but most important, remind us all of his singular political talent: understanding his party’s endless capacity to hate.

“They’re eating our dogs and cats!!!!”

Back when I was but a cub reporter breaking into journalism, I was told by a growling editor to just “write what I know.” It was good advice, and why in looking back on a lot of my writings in the past decade, I have spent an inordinate amount of time on the subject of race.

I view the subject through the lens of a white man now well into my 60s, who has seen a few things. After a lifetime of living pretty well, I know how good I’ve had it. Like the odious Trump, I have never experienced life on the other side, but I am an expert on what goes on on this side.

I have seen casual and overt racism from white people I grew up with, and others I came to know through the years. It turned my stomach, but too often I let it go, until Trump came along in 2015, and I decided it was time to publicly stand up and put it down wherever I see it.

I have lost many old friends, and gained many new ones, whose heart and pride have had a profound effect on me.

So here is what I know as a white man: Racism continues to be America’s most difficult issue to grapple with, and the reprehensible Donald Trump exploits the volatility and the heat that comes with it to split us in two.

He does this because he is a damn bigot.

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.

Maybe I’ve had this all wrong, my friends …

Maybe if, instead of wondering if our country will survive the next three-plus years, this question should be asked instead: Will the grotesque and failing Donald Trump survive that long?

Here’s where I dutifully remind everybody, after first reminding myself, that it has been only 147 days since this repellent, racist degenerate placed his right hand in the vicinity of a Bible and was sworn in a second time, to finish off what he started in 2017.

147 DAYS.

My God, entire decades have felt shorter.

Trump has surrounded himself with a cabinet that is right out of the bowels of Rupert Murdoch after an all-you-can-eat offering of chicken-salmonella on the barbie.

Hegseth, Noem, Kennedy, Loeffler, Bondi, McMahon, Gabbard, Duffy …

Every single one of these clowns got their jobs, not because of any stellar qualifications or abiding allegiance to our country, but because of their appalling capacity to bow over and over again to their huffing and puffing ringmaster.

So while they have been bringing back measles, making air travel a literal death-defying high-flying act, texting top-secret information to our enemies, and defending the indefensible in court, their dear leader has been shuffling his fat little feet and backing himself into a corner.

He thought it would be easier to knock Americans into submission, and after watching us collectively punch ourselves in the face for the second time in eight years in November, I almost can’t blame him. It takes a lot of unmitigated gall to vote for a racist, America-attacking convicted felon who hasn’t told the truth since his parents locked him in a military school because they couldn’t stand the sight of him.

No country has done more truly wonderful things — “we must take that beach no matter what!” — and truly horrible things — “there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” — than the United States of America.

Except, having successfully cornered himself, the ignorant fascist is finding out in record time that his options are actually limited.

I’ve repeatedly warned since the first days of this mess of a presidency that it was only a matter of time before Trump used our military for him and against us, but I have to admit I am surprised how quickly he played this toxic card.

Trump was dealt a precarious hand by an unbalanced American electorate that needed to be finessed, but decided to play it like he held a mandate. He got sloppy because we are finding out he’s old and tired, and wants nothing to do with the job.

He knows he’s losing, and now must publicly carry out his four-year sentence.

• He’s losing in the court of public opinion where his negative approvals have already shattered records.
• He’s losing on the economy, which was somehow a strong point for him. (And this historic misnomer really needs to be addressed because Republican administrations are provably horrible for the economy, yet grade out better than Democrats who restore them.)
• He’s losing on immigration, because most Americans don’t like seeing families senselessly ripped apart like some 1930s Nazi Germany redo.
• He’s losing independent voters in droves because there is finally an understanding that his “Big Beautiful Bill” will pad billionaires’ pockets while hurting millions in his cult, who might snap out of their trance when they can no longer afford the things that cure what ails them.
• He’s losing everywhere, because damn if he isn’t being absolutely annihilated and mocked by anybody who isn’t a full-throated fascist on the world stage.

He harrumphed out of the G7 meetings because he can no longer even pretend to be a valuable contributor. He needs his naps, and a regular diaper change.

He is using a putty knife these days to cake on the brownish-orange mud to his hideous gray-white face in an effort to become a more distinctive person of color.

There’s a real irony there that I’ll point out with both index fingers, while letting my middle ones signal my absolute contempt for this vulgar, America-attacking loser.

Following one of the most consequential weeks in America history, which saw Trump host a MAGA rally on a U.S. Army base and grift off our soldiers; No Kings rallies that were attended by millions of Americans in literally every corner of our country; when two lawmakers and their families were brutally attacked in their homes by a member of Trump’s cult; and a military parade to celebrate his birthday was somehow even more pathetic and sad than most of us thought it would be … Trump is on the losing end of a poorly played hand, and I promise you is looking for an opportunity to cash out.

He’s 79 going on 100, is hated by most of the world, and now must spend what little time he has left on Earth trapped in a tiny, miserable world of his making.

That’s quite a legacy.

I’m not completely counting him out yet, because of his unique capacity to hate. It’s all he has left. Everything he continues to do will be for him first and America second — if it at all.

In that regard, he’s never been more dangerous.

While I’ve admittedly had my doubts about what, if anything, would drive Americans into the streets to rise up against this madman, they have mostly been extinguished following Saturday’s marches.

I am more confident as I type this piece today than I was on Friday night that Americans are capable of meeting this moment. I am more confident than ever that people, not parties, will save our democracy.

We have seen this before in this tumultuous country when truly heroic people sacrificed life and limb on the battlefields, and fought with all their hearts in our streets and in our courts in the never-ending quest for equal rights.

The battle has once again been joined.

We are but 147 days into a hateful regime that is scheduled to go 1,461. We are roughly a tenth of the way towards its bitter end.

There is no way the low-energy, miserable Trump makes it.

NO.

WAY.

I say we pour it on, and finish him off.

NOW READ: The danger of getting used to the unthinkable

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.

Political parties and their politicians have never been less popular, and I’d argue it’s about time.

This probably isn’t something a guy who makes his living writing about this toxic environment should be on his high horse touting right now, but let’s face it, for the most part, our politics have become big-money recycling efforts stuffed to overflowing with worn-out ideas, and double-talkers who only go away to write books.

They have become an unwelcome, outsized portion of too many of our lives, and nag at us for more of our time and treasure.

Fact is, warts and all, we got ourselves into this mess and we are the only ones who will get us out. We’ve assigned too much power to mere politicians and their money-laundering machines to clean things up when we’re the ones with all the power.

While I’ll never vote for a Republican again during what’s left of my life, because I prefer our public servants weren’t members of a cult, I’m plenty disappointed with too damn many Democrats these days.

This would put me in the vast majority of America, by the way, and the sooner the over-served party I vote with starts getting that, the better it will be for everybody.

Truth is, most Americans aren't affiliated with political parties, and aren’t running around with their hair on fire. They have lives to lead, children to raise, dogs to walk, marriages to hug, bills to pay, and politicians to ignore.

I see their political inaction as dangerous and even selfish, but I grudgingly get it.

They aren't tuned into Fox or MSNBC or CNN or any of these other dreadful places where sharpies draw seven-figure salaries to creatively warn us that the end of the world is coming each day in an effort to draw coveted viewers, who will dutifully tune in tomorrow, no matter what happened yesterday.

For most of America, the constant partisan noise that is flowing downhill off of Capitol Hill and echoing in their ears is just making their difficult lives more difficult.

I have come to understand I am way the hell out of balance right now. I’m overwhelmed by the madness, and lately a bit underwhelmed by the things that truly matter like my family, and all those beautiful animals out there.

It’s not them, it’s me.

I’m a relatively fit dude, who loves a good hike or a swim, but for the first time in my life my blood pressure’s running high. The doc asked me about any recent lifestyle changes that might explain it, and I shook my head and flashed one of those “are you kidding me; have you seen WHAT is in the White House?” kind of smiles.

So I’m cutting back on the salt, and keeping my eyes and ears open for some clear air and perspective.

As to these damn politicians and parties that are eating the majority of us alive, I have a prediction for you: We’re going to be OK, because we are slowly discovering they don’t matter as much as they seem to think they do.

And if you are asking, “What kind of drugs are you on, Earl? Have you seen what is going on in Washington?” I am answering with a question: “What did you see in November that I didn't?”

The Democrats are running the same old tired leadership and messaging out there that lost back then, and the reprehensible Republicans are mistaking all that for a mandate, while losing one special election after another. They got a big, beautiful bill out there, that is going to hurt tens of millions of Americans, and make things easier for billionaires, and ironically for Democrats, who are going to win elections despite themselves because of it.

I swear to you there’s not a single person I talk to on the Left who doesn’t think we deserve better. NOT ONE. And I’ll bet you a shiny quarter that you are hearing the same thing.

It’s OK to admit that, people. I’d argue it’s even necessary if we want the change we think we deserve.

Most Americans, no matter which way they lean politically, have decided they have better things to do than hold their breath while the tails of the bloated big-money oligarchs wag all those political dogs.

These days, all you have to do is look down to see that America’s two major parties are in the gutter. Endless polling backs this up. Most of this actually has Democrats in worse shape than Republicans.

Here’s just one of those lopsided polls that back up all my assumptions. I’ll share a pair of slides from that poll here, and ask you to focus mostly on the “neither party” columns:

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Like I said, a lot of people in America are fed up with the state of our politics, and have no faith in the politicians to fix it.

And I’ll admit it, these numbers irk the hell out of me as a liberal, but I’ve been around long enough to know America lacks taste. We are a mostly fat, ignorant nation isolated by the two largest oceans in the world, and enough weaponry to blow up the Milky Way.

We are armed and dangerous.

Hell, it’s the un-evolved Year of 2025, and we’re still spending our time warning about the end of our democracy, hollering for a woman’s right to choose what is best for HER, and that diversity, equity and inclusion are all about fairness, not favoritism.

You’d figure climate change would be accepted as reality by now, and everybody would get that vaccines save lives.

It’s helluva lot to process.

There’s been too much idolization of politicians the past couple of decades or so, and I figure social media has a lot to do with it. You want to idolize something, maybe start with our teachers and nurses, who don’t have time for all this political bull----.

I’ve been on the streets protesting five times since November’s massacre, and can tell you that the people I’ve run into aren’t there because they are fighting for the Democratic Party, they are there because they are angry, standing up for themselves, and want some damn change in this country.

The politicians have mostly avoided these things, because I reckon they have nothing to say that the people haven’t heard before.

The Democratic Party needs a complete reboot, and to work on understanding what people are really feeling outside the Beltway. The people in the party who understand that first will fare handsomely later.

I’m not wrong about this.

So now we see who is really listening, and who just wants to hand us more of the same.

Until then, I’ll see you in the streets.

Now pass the low-sodium salt …

NOW READ: Trump's sinister plot to overthrow democracy met with defiance — and true patriotism

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.

As I was typing a piece on Saturday morning, endeavoring to stitch together Flag Day, our army’s birthday, and the peaceful marches against tyranny that were going off all over the United States of America, I got a chilling news bulletin — that two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses had been shot in their homes by a madman impersonating a police officer.

This is what I knew as my fingers hit the keyboard:

State Representative Melissa Hortman and husband, Mark, have died in the attack at their home in the Minneapolis suburbs. State Senator John A. Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were also shot multiple times at their house in a nearby suburb, but remain alive.

Minnesota Gov.Tim Walz has called this a “political assassination.”

This will be a developing, gruesome, and very American story for some time to come. I want to be careful to honor the victims while channeling my sadness and rage at the state of things in my country in as precise a manner as possible.

So let me start here:

What happened in Minnesota can surprise ABSOLUTELY NOBODY who has been paying even the slightest amount of attention to the sickly state of America in 2025.

It is perhaps the most predictable thing I have seen coming in the roiling wake of a week in which we have seen a U.S. senator — a son of Los Angeles — tackled and handcuffed for simply asking a puppy-shooting, ineffectual wax figure to explain herself, and to stop lying about the reason for her agency’s invasion of the city he grew up in. There were no apologies for this disgusting incident.

We have watched helplessly while human beings, one after another, have been swept off our streets by masked monsters, who may or may not be impersonating government law enforcement officers.

We have watched as this grotesque president whipped young, impressionable soldiers into a frenzy and made sure to empty their pockets and fill his by selling them his warped MAGA memorabilia on one of our army bases.

We have gone so far past the unimaginable, it is impossible to know where to begin to connect with the normal.

But let me be crystal clear on this: ALL OF IT lies at the fat little feet of the convicted felon, who attacked this country on January 6, 2021, did nothing to stop that attack for hours and instead rooted for its success, and has continued to intentionally throw gasoline on the raging fires he has so eagerly stoked, starting in the vicinity of 2010 when he questioned President Obama’s citizenship.

THAT was the catalyst for everything that has followed, and has lead us to lawmakers and their families now being slaughtered in their homes.

IT IS ALL ON HIM.

Perhaps I am not helping right now, but like so many of you I have grown weary and disgusted waiting for people with heft and alleged status to say what we all know to be true.

The gaslighting has gone on long enough.

My God, this mess of a man stood in our nation’s capital in that odd way he does … ample a-- out, jutted, orange chin forward … and did his best Mussolini impression by keeping the tanks running on time on their way down our streets.

Are you reading this????????

TANKS.

All this to honor himself on his 79th birthday. If there is any good news here, and you have to squint hard to see it, he has climbed another notch on the actuarial life table.

I have said enough for now, my friends. Like you I am aching inside. My fury wringing out tears …

I took part in our march here in Madison, Wisconsin, joining tens of thousands of other hearty souls who love their country enough to assemble peacefully on her behalf.

We are still the lucky ones. Nobody has turned their guns on us — yet.

NOW READ: Trump just got a wake up call as he tries to escalate his war on defiance

(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.)

By now, you have most likely heard of the disgraceful appearance by Donald Trump at Fort Bragg in North Carolina on Tuesday.

The convicted felon’s remarks to Army personnel were partisan, incendiary, anti-American and belong in a dumpster and/or Mar-a-Lago, not a United States military base.

Except it was even worse than any of us thought ...

Thanks to some stellar reporting by Military.com, we are learning today that U.S. taxpayers essentially funded a vulgar MAGA rally at a U.S. Army facility.

The appearance by the president of the United States of America had NOTHING TO DO with the morale and good order of our troops and everything to do with HIM, as he stirred these young men and women into a partisan frenzy.

Things were so out of hand, that there were actually booths set up to sell grotesque MAGA merchandise and memorabilia to our troops. This didn’t just cross a line, it obliterated it, and was against myriad Defense Department regulations.

From military.com reporting:

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I am admittedly shaking with rage as I type this, friends, because as a veteran I could have never conceived of something like this in my lifetime. These are the kinds of things that happen in other troubled countries — many of which WE actually have helped to liberate with our blood in the past.

I want to keep this missive brief, because I encourage you to read and share widely the comprehensive piece that I linked to above. Please do this.

As the retired managing editor of Stars and Stripes, the editorially independent newspaper that serves the troops and their families overseas, I want to commend the continued good work the folks at Military.com are continuing to do stateside. I assure you they are experts on the military, and wedded to top-notch journalism. Their work has never been more important as the U.S. slides toward fascism.

We are in the most precarious moment in our nation’s history since the beginning of the Civil War. Anybody who is not reporting it this way is dangerous, completely out of their depth, and should not be taken seriously.

Since day one of this anti-American administration I have been warning with some precision that we were heading toward this terrible juncture, and I wish nothing more than to report to you that I was wrong.

Turns out, I actually underestimated the pace of our descent into authoritarianism. Unless there is some significant pushback by our military, fellow citizens, the press, the Democrats and the reprehensible Republican Party, it is hard to see how we survive this.

Before signing out, I am again calling on our military leadership past and present, and fellow veterans everywhere, to speak out loudly against this ongoing attack THAT WE KNOW IS WRONG.

For now, stay strong, lean on each other, and call your political representatives (202-224-3121) to make your voices heard.

As the reprehensible Donald Trump hunkers down in his belt-high filth, and attacks the U.S. for a second time, I want to urgently underline the danger we are in right now, while also expressing again what an extreme insult this gruesome man, a convicted felon, is to anybody who has ever worn the uniform.

What we are seeing in Los Angeles, and what I promise you the draft-dodging coward will bring to more of our cities in the coming days and weeks, is rooted in bloodlust and cowardice and is a hallmark of fascism.

By words and by deed, it is clear as day that Trump has absolutely no respect for the United States of America which he has already violently assaulted once, nor our men and women who wear the uniform, because like any authoritarian leader he sees them as servants to him, and not our country.

Read that again.

Once you understand that Trump will use his presidency and whatever is left of his miserable life to settle scores and return the favors of the crooked dictators, billionaires, and wobbly weaklings in his political party who helped install him in office, you can better prepare for the hell that’s most assuredly coming.

And when that hell arrives, we must ensure that it is he, not us — who feels the terrible heat. This country cannot stand by while a lewd, tin-pot dictator uses our troops to attack us, on behalf of him.

After all, Trump is a proven America-attacker, NOT a defender.

Rather than calling in the National Guard on January 6, 2021, to defend this nation and overmatched local enforcement officers under siege from his assembled mob during the most violent attack on our Capitol since 1814, he sequestered himself in a room in the White House and seethed for hours while rooting for the attack’s success.

To me, as a United States Navy veteran, and an old man who loves his country enough to call it out when it has fallen off the tracks, Trump’s attack on America was the most disgusting, anti-American, unpatriotic thing I have ever witnessed from a U.S. citizen — much less a president.

And it got worse, because it always does with this abomination of a man ...

Just four years later, and with lightning speed, Trump pardoned those enemies of America who attacked us, because he knew he was going to be asking more from people who, like him, have proven they could care less about our country, and our laws and elections that guide us.

Since disgracing his office for a second time, Trump has surrounded himself with the very lowest of the low in his noxious cabinet, including his reprehensible Secretary of Defense, the hard-drinking Fox News host, Pete Hegseth. When the bumbling Hegseth isn’t casually sharing top-secret intelligence with our enemies, he is bringing out the absolute worst in people, and in this case our military.

In Trump’s dirty mind, when the time came for him to conquer the U.S., he was going to need troops and so-called leaders who were willing to go along with his worst instincts. He would need lowlifes like Hegseth to circumvent military leadership if necessary to make sure his carnage became a terrible reality.

There would be no Gens. Mattis, Kelly or Milley to stand in his way, and check his worse impulses this time around.

So now, as the unstable Trump escalates and warns he will “send our troops everywhere,” we are quickly getting to the dangerous point of no return when we must hope our military will not to obey unlawful orders from a Commander-in-Chief who could care less about them or our Constitution.

Like it or not, that’s a mighty big ask.

Look, I am many things but I am not naive. I know that many — far too many — active duty military and veterans align with this terrible MAGA cult. Despite the oath they took, they are not immune from the homophobia, racism and misogyny that has intentionally been injected into the bloodstream of a country that has always been susceptible to these diseases.

As a vet, I rage at these people, and wish I could shake some damn sense into them.

I cannot tell you what I would have done as an enlisted man all those years ago had I been ordered to barrel into one of our cities and violently engage with my fellow citizens, but I can tell you that it would have made me absolutely sick to my stomach.

I can also tell you that far better men and women than myself have laid their lives down protecting America from psychopathic fascists like Trump.

Anybody who enlisted, and took an oath to conquer a U.S. city does not have their head, nor their values, screwed on straight.

That Trump putting our best and bravest in this terrible position is a horrible insult, and just the latest proof that he has absolutely no respect for the United States of America or our military that protects us.

The hour is late, and it is time for every veteran across this nation to stand up and make our voices heard.

THIS CANNOT STAND.

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.