Lately, I have been thinking about the word “freedom” and how that word has been twisted into unrecognizable wreckage by a Republican Party that uses it as a sad excuse to brutally hammer tens of millions of Americans into submission, including themselves.

America is supposed to be the land of the free, but try telling that to a pregnant woman who is faced with a crushing decision about what’s best for her, or Alex Pretti or Renee Good who were shot dead in the street by government thugs for freely standing up against violent authoritarianism. (Government thugs, incidentally, who are still free among us to kill again as I type this.)

I was finally spurred to put words to my thoughts about freedom after attending a casual meeting of do-gooders here in North Carolina last week, which veered into the importance of cleaning up our coastal waterways, so marine life are free to flourish without the man-made threat of being violently choked to death.

A younger woman told the story about how plastic bags had been banned in the Outer Banks of the state in 2009, because their overuse had become a hazard to beach life such as sea turtles. The ban was actually popular among a majority of the residents and businesses, and worked just fine until a Republican representative on the island, Beverly Boswell, decided she’d seen enough of all this good, and decided that telling people how they should sack up there groceries was an infringement on their freedom to be just as disgusting as they wanted to be.

Well, no surprise this stirring Braveheart moment caught on like wildfire with Republicans across the state, and by 2017 the ban was repealed by the GOP majority in the legislature in the name of freedom.

It became known as North Carolina’s ban on bans.

You read all that right.

I have grown weary hearing about this cultish party’s distrust and full-blown hate of our government in the name of freedom, but lack of distrust in the head of that government, Donald Trump, who is easily the most dishonest, self-serving man in United States history.

It is impossible to describe just how stupid and weak they look and sound, but I’ll take a whack at it ...

You see, the Republican Party wants us to believe freedom exists to give them the right to do whatever the hell it is they want when they want, and oppress people they don’t like all in the name of some perverted notion of law and order.

Well, we simply have to know by now that Republicans don’t stand for law and order or freedom. In fact, they absolutely loathe them. Why, they helped give a 34-count convicted felon, who stood up the most violent attack on our Capitol since 1812, the keys to finish us off for good.

That isn’t called freedom, it’s called treason.

Freedom isn’t the reason they absolutely love our U.S. troops patrolling our U.S. cities. Control over those cities is.

It gets worse (more pathetic), because these so-called freedom-loving Republicans inside our Congress have handcuffed themselves to Trump’s altar, and are told what to say and when to say it by their shriveled up, 80-year-old, orange wannabe king, or else.

Such freedom, eh?

They have been stripped of original thought, and believe only what they are allowed to by an abusive slob, who is mentioned in the Epstein Files tens of thousands of times, has lied hundreds of thousands of times while in office, and regularly beats Republican legislators into submission.

Picture Lindsey Graham …

Now picture the dangerous, anti-American tongue-draggers at the J-6 insurrection attempt, who were given the freedom to do it all that again, after being pardoned by the dangerous slob, who was given the freedom by our busted Supreme Court to do whatever he likes without consequence.

That isn’t freedom, it is authoritarianism.

Of course the damndest thing about all of this is just how freely these low-wattage idiots are hurting themselves in their never-ending quest to oppress everybody else.

Best I can see, Trump has not done a single thing to make their lives better, except hate the very same people they do.

Otherwise, he has made it harder for them to get the most basic things in life like affordable medical care, broadband access, unbiased news, clean air and water, and matching funding to keep their schools, parks, ball fields, libraries, streets, buildings, and neighborhoods thriving.

Even the gasoline they chug by the gallon is more expensive now.

And, say, what about freedom of choice or freedom of speech?

What about the freedom to read what they want?

What about freedom of the press, or freedom from all that religion they are throwing in our face?

How about the freedom to be who you want to be, or freedom from these damn billionaire-run monopolies who choose what we buy and where we can buy it?

All this freedom they seek is killing them and us.

Still not convinced?

Their warped sense of freedom has allowed them to finally unshackle themselves from all this dreaded science that has saved millions and millions of lives over the years from things like the Measles, which they believe they should be free to spread again.

Science used to be relied on to increase life expectancy, but thanks to all these Republican freedoms that is on the decrease, too.

They have given predatory insurance companies the freedom to ignore our claims, and raise our already sky-high premiums — that is if we can even afford to carry insurance in the first place.

By giving our government the freedom to deregulate corporations they are free to once again kill generations of people and animals from toxins that the scientists warned were lethal.

Their march for freedom has led to cuts in disaster relief that aids and comforts them when their towns are blown to pieces by catastrophic storms and fires that are far more severe than they used to be because of a rapidly changing climate. Republicans will look you straight in the eye and swear that isn’t happening, even if those predatory insurance companies are using the very science they distrust to defend devouring their savings.

That isn’t freedom. It is willful ignorance.

Look, I could go on here, but 1,000-plus words on this subject is enough for now, and you should be free to go.

Republicans’ bastardized notion of the word freedom, is slowly strangling all of us, and that is by design, people. The truth is Americans have never been less free in my lifetime, and it is getting worse by the minute as fascism runs through the GOP’s hardening hearts and into our democracy’s veins.

All of which has led me rather unintentionally to all-time liberal Kris Kristofferson’s immortal, obfuscatory lyrics that were belted out by the incomparable Janis Joplin in the hit single, Me and Bobby McGee:

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose … Nothin', don't mean nothin', honey, if it ain't free …”

Fifty-five years later I finally get 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, and follow him on Bluesky here.

The 2026 White House Correspondents' Dinner is this Saturday, so let me be blunt: If you fancy yourself a journalist, and I hear you were within a mile of this event I will cut you off cold.

Anybody who decides to share the stage with the greatest threat to a free press and the United States of America in my lifetime, the appalling Donald J. Trump, should never be allowed to carry a press pass again.

I’ve had more than enough of these phonies disgracing what was once one of the most important vocations in the world. By checking their backbones and credibility at the door to self-serving events like these, they are going out of their way to make a mockery out of the profession.

Before cutting them to pieces, and laying them bare, I will make exceptions to any so-called journalist who attends this nauseating event and makes a loud point of standing up, turning his or her back, and walking out of the place the minute Trump begins to run his big, fat mouth.

Otherwise, the rest of them can all go straight to hell.

Truth is, many people who have worked for and with me in the business over the years will know I never had a soft spot for this sort of stupid back-patting gala of me-first media elites, but tolerated it through clenched teeth.

Every person who attends this event knows full well they are doing so to make news, instead of cover it. They know that this is one of journalism’s highest crimes.

Unfortunately these days, too much of the attempted journalism I see from our corporate media is nothing but a series of high crimes.

Most of the people who will be shoving their mugs in front of the cameras Saturday night are the same lost souls who were unable to spot one of the most significant news stories in United States history — the attack on democracy — in the run-up to the 2024 election, and instead covered it like some meaningless, back-and-forth horse race.

Even they should be able to see where that has gotten us now, as our democracy teeters on the edge of extinction.

It’s absolutely perfect then, that Weijia Jiang, is the current president of the stupid association hosting this spoiled dinner. Jiang works as a correspondent at CBS “News” — the place that has made a pathetic spectacle of itself by surrendering to the man and his administration they have invited to spit all over everybody, and the notion of free speech in America.

Here was Trump’s noxious, public response to Jiang’s insane invitation last month:

“The White House Correspondents Association has asked me, very nicely, to be the Honoree at this year’s Dinner. It will be my Honor to accept their invitation, and work to make it the GREATEST, HOTTEST, and MOST SPECTACULAR DINNER, OF ANY KIND, EVER!”

Oh, well, since they asked him “very nicely ….”

How is it they STILL can’t understand they are dealing with a spoiled toddler holstering nuclear codes in his soiled diaper, who needs consequences, not coddling?

Jiang continued to outdo herself with this quote:

“(The dinner) reinforces the importance of the First Amendment in our democracy. Our choice to gather as journalists, newsmakers and the president in the same room is a reminder of what a free press means to this country and why it must endure.”

Sorry, and excuse my French, but what the f--- does that even mean?

Because gathering together in a ballroom and rubbing greasy elbows with a man who has called you “the enemy of the people” and your work “fake” has to be one of the weakest, most pathetic things I have ever seen.

You know what really exhibits the meaning of a free press? Holding power to account, Weijia.

Good God.

You are making it crystal clear you have zero respect for the business that I, and thousands of others gave our professional lives to. You are making fools of the journalists who paid the ultimate sacrifice by laying their lives down to tell us all what was happening on the battlefield, the storm-ravaged country, or myriad other dangerous places of upheaval around the globe.

And what of the journalists who covered the attack on the United States Capitol January 6, 2021, by the man you are honoring Saturday? The very man who has since pardoned the thugs who stomped law enforcement officers to near death and threatened to murder politicians that day.

Unless, as the ace reporters you somehow fancy yourselves, you really don’t think Trump had anything to do with the violence that day …

What is wrong with you people? Does it mean THAT much to you to fall at the fat, little feet of a sick, demented man who is trying to end us just as sure as I am typing this?

How about getting to the bottom of that, instead of some overpriced, dirty martini.

Among other heinous things, Trump has relentlessly attacked, and banned the Associated Press from the White House, defunded Public media, defended the Saudis for their brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, pulled credentials from news organization that have covered the Pentagon for years, and raped one of the most important papers in the world, Stars and Stripes, where I spent 11 years of my career.

He has called women reporters like Weijia Jiang “horrible” “stupid” “ugly” and “piggy.”

And it somehow gets worse …

From reporting in the Daily Beast Monday:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who last week compared the media to the Pharisees, a vilified sect cited in the Bible, is expected to sit at a table with CBS News.

This is almost too appalling to type.

I see more than 250 former broadcast journalists, including Dan Rather, Ann Curry and Sam Donaldson, delivered a letter Monday urging the dinner’s organizers “to forcefully demonstrate opposition to President Trump’s efforts to trample freedom of the press.”

The letter starts this way:

“We, the undersigned, call upon the White House Correspondents’ Association to use the occasion of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, to forcefully demonstrate opposition to President Trump’s efforts to trample freedom of the press.”

It goes onto to say:

“These are not normal times, and this cannot be business as usual with the press standing up to applaud the man who attacks them on a daily basis.”

And:

“Continuing in that spirit, we believe the White House Correspondents Association should take stronger action by issuing—from the podium—a forceful defense of freedom of the press and condemnation of those who threaten that freedom, followed by a standing toast to the First Amendment and a pledge to continue upholding such a critical cornerstone of our democracy.”

I respect them, and appreciate their efforts, but doing my best folksy, deep-voiced Rather impersonation I inject this:

“Do not let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

The truth is, the normalization of the abominable Trump by our corporate media has had a more devastating consequence to our democracy than just about anything I can think of.

They have normalized racism, abuse, toxic dishonesty, and even treason.

On Saturday they will normalize authoritarianism, by standing alongside a fascist thug, who has spent the past year-plus taking a wrecking ball to our White House, erecting statues carrying his repulsive name, and hanging banners of his ugly face from our public buildings to honor himself instead of America.

He is treating Washington D.C., like it is just another one of garish country clubs.

Or did the White House “working press” somehow miss all that on their way to honoring themselves Saturday, and forgetting who they are really supposed to serve: the American public.

(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.)

It has been another long, brutal week of lies, misdirection and lawlessness from Donald Trump and his political party of sycophants, who spend the majority of their time somewhere in the vicinity of their master’s wobbly knees.

Prices are soaring, our democracy is crumbling, we are seemingly at war with the world to include the Pope, and the corporate media, or whatever you want to call ‘em, still have no idea what to make of any of it.

All this is especially galling to their consumers, who are angry as hell and scared to death as we try to navigate through the most precarious time in America since the Civil War.

You don’t need guys like me to tell you we won’t survive three more years of this, but you do need guys like me to tell you it’s a pretty big, damn news story that has somehow been grossly under-reported by what passes for that media.

The President of the United States is a serial liar, who can’t be trusted to tell the truth, and why this isn’t included in every single story about him completely escapes me, it really does.

I have pounded the table about this before, and don't intend to stop now.

Our feeble press acts as if seeking comment from the White House, no matter how devoid of truth it is, is somehow practicing journalism.

As a career journalist, here is what I have to say about that: NO IT ISN’T.

If you ask a known liar a question, you better point out that he is a known liar in your coverage, and then fact-check the hell out of every bit of it.

“Trump says this, now Trump says that” is not journalism. It is lazy, dangerous, and serves only one person: the liar.

This morning while I was poking around all the likely news sites critiquing our media’s work and celebrating the good reporting when I was lucky enough to come across it, I noticed that the Strait of Hormuz seemed to be closed again.

“Huh,” I grunted sarcastically to myself.

Why just last night the guy who lies about everything told the media and us that the Strait of Hormuz was open. They even had it in 100-pt type.

Guess he was lying again.

Here’s an approximation of what my newsfeed has looked like the past few weeks, my friends:

STRAIT OF HORMUZ OPEN, TRUMP

STRAIT OF HORMUZ CLOSED, IRAN

STRAIT OF HORMUZ OPEN, TRUMP

STRAIT OF HORMUZ CLOSED, IRAN

Well it turns out it’s closed again, though the headline type was much smaller this morning.

Here is the The New York Times’ header as I type this:

Iran’s Military Says It Has Reimposed ‘Strict Control’ of Strait of Hormuz

All this would be comical if is wasn't so damn sad, so let me help everybody out here, with the hope of moving on from this journalistic stupor we are in:

The Strait of Hormuz will be open when Iran says so.

Sorry, that’s just how it is, no matter what the guy who lies approximately every other minute alleges.

And one more time for emphasis: Please, stop repeating his lies, dammit.

Here’s more truth: As long as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is intact, ships will not be able to navigate the strait safely. The IRGC is not a part of Iran’s regular navy, and has been wreaking havoc in the region for decades. Back in my Stars and Stripes days, we used to deal with them all the time.

THAT THEY ARE STILL ACTIVE IS NOT A SURPRISE.

Sorry for hollering at you there, but good grief.

I actually searched for some sound reporting on the IRGC to see what they were up to these days, and wouldn’t you know it, I ended up right back at the NYT that broke out a meaty story on the group THIS MORNING.

Again, sorry for hollering but if the NYT has reporters telling us that the Strait of Hormuz is nearly impossible to open safely, why are the managing editors and decision-makers in their newsroom parroting whatever Trump is lying about as pertains to opening it safely?

Incredible, isn’t it?

This is from the reporting on IRGC that their managing editors are apparently ignoring:

“Iranian warships sunk by U.S. and Israeli attacks litter naval harbors along the Persian Gulf coast, but what is sometimes called a “mosquito fleet” lurks in the shadows.”

That’s a great lede.

Here’s more:

It is a flotilla of small, fast, agile boats designed to harass shipping, and it forms the heart of the naval forces deployed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a force separate from Iran’s regular navy.
These boats, and especially the missiles and drones that the Guards navy can launch from them, or from camouflaged sites onshore, have been the main threat stymying shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

Even more:

“The I.R.G.C. navy works more like a guerrilla force at sea,” said Saeid Golkar, an expert on the Guards and a political science professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
“It is focused on asymmetrical warfare, especially in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz,” he added. “So instead of relying on big warships and classic naval battles, it depends on hit-and-run attacks.”

Finally:

The boats are often too small to appear on satellite images, and they are moored along piers within deep caves excavated along the rocky coastline, ready to be deployed in minutes, analysts said. Their arsenal poses a major threat to commercial ships in the gulf and the strait.
“It remains a disruptive force,” said Adm. Gary Roughead, a retired chief of U.S. Naval Operations. “You never quite knew what they were up to and what their intentions were.”

All this wonderful reporting was tucked inside the paper that only last night was trumpeting Trump’s lies that the strait was open.

Again, as a journalist that is maddening. As a Navy vet, I take no pride in the fact that the most powerful navy in the world is handcuffed right now to eradicate the IRGC without tremendous risk to its sailors, which is Reason No. 1 that going into Iran with absolutely no thought or planning was reckless at best and criminal at worst.

Right now the only way the strait opens is with a significant military escalation that will endanger thousands of American lives, or if Iran gets what it wants from our lying, incompetent White House.

Iran has the upper hand.

Trump’s incompetent leadership has led us headlong into this hell hole, and we are all paying for it with U.S. treasure and American lives.

The quickest way to end this nightmare, and this madman’s appalling presidency is to stop repeating his lies, and instead start holding him to account.

This nonsense has gone on long enough.

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.

“The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters!”

“Blessed are the peacemakers, but woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

-Pope Leo XIV, Thursday speaking to thousands in Cameroon

Before I begin my very short sermon today, I ask you to read the above thunderbolt again, and share it widely.

We are watching history unfold as the Catholic Church publicly makes it clear as day that it stands against anybody who will prostitute the name of God for his own sick, and ill-gotten gains as the morbid Donald Trump continued to do this past weekend with this sickening image.

This is but one example, of course, of this detestable man’s disregard for humanity, religion, and all that must be held as decent in this world. For more than a decade the good and righteous have watched with rage and horror as Trump burned the contents of the Bible to ashes with his grotesque actions and “filth” and it is about time people of moral standing like the Pope are standing with us to put this evil down once and for all.

I cannot recall a time in recent world history when more loaded words have been spoken by a person of such global repute. Leo’s words were shot out of a cannon and aimed directly at the lawless, immoral men like Trump across the globe who are busy trying to drag us all into the “darkness and filth.”

There was no nuance here, because these devils must be stopped dead in their tracks, before it is too late. And as many of us know “too late” is menacingly banging at our doors.

It cannot be overstated how important it is that this Pope from Chicago has injected himself to the front of this battle for what is so clearly good against what is so clearly evil.

You do not have to be a religious person to understand the importance of this history-making moment.

-Either you believe we are in a life-or-deaf struggle against good and evil or you don’t.
-Either you believe our democracies around the world, and certainly here in America, are under extreme threat or you don’t.
-Either you believe our rights as citizens and people are under extreme threat or you don’t.
-Either you believe that everything has to be done to preserve our human freedoms or you don’t.
-Either you believe people like Trump are moral vandals and “filth” or you don’t ...

We now know without a shadow of a doubt what the Pope thinks, and he is shining his powerful light across lands and seas as he calls for this public reckoning with evil.

And lest you think Leo’s words Thursday were directed only at Cameroon’s own separatist conflict, the Vatican was rocket-quick to clarify that. From AP reporting:

“Vatican officials have made clear that on this trip, he is preaching the Gospel message of peace that surpasses borders and continents, and is meant for all those responsible for the wars and exploitation ravaging the Earth.”

The Catholic Church has now come out strong against the Trump regime and drawn a line in the sand. Now we watch to see how the 55 percent of Catholics who supported Trump in the 2024 elections respond.

I wrote extensively on this subject Tuesday, typing:

“The battle has been joined against the maniacal Trump by his countryman Pope Leo XIV, and as a righteous man and warrior for what I believe is good and right, I welcome him with open arms.”

On Thursday Leo only intensified his warning that the course we are on is simply not sustainable, and he intends to make good and damn sure everybody knows it.

Perilous times call for leadership and courage, and too damn many of us have been left alone to fight the evil on the lawless political Right that wants to end us.

I welcome the Pope to this fight, because as I also typed Tuesday:

“I might not be a Christian, but I know an ally when I see one.”

The patriotic phonies and racists who have propped up this orange Antichrist have been put on notice. You can abandon this evil man and join the rest of us democratic crusaders who are standing up for what is good and right, or your reckoning might be coming.

But I’ll let a man who speaks for God say it:

“Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

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.

Hard as it is, I’d like you to view these four images, before we have a serious talk about the much-needed and immediate response to this assault on the senses and the Holy See.

I am sorry for putting you through that, I really am, because if you are a person that possesses even a shred of decency, it is a dizzying attack on your mental well-being, and impossible to process.

It is breathtaking in its raw idiocy and sheer hate.

That anybody could produce such incendiary bile speaks to the sad fact that anybody can possess unbridled hate and ignorance in this world. That the “anybody” in this instance is the President of the United States of America should be a showstopper, and the final straw of the saddest 10-year stretch in this country’s 250-year history.

Donald Trump needs to be removed from office. You know it, I know it, and tens of millions of people who aren’t reading this piece know it.

Well, somehow 99 percent of the mainstream media in America don’t know it, are too damn scared to say it, or have absolutely zero understanding of their jobs as journalists and their duty to warn the people they serve of the extreme danger we are facing right now.

Trump is capable of anything, and also sits atop the largest nuclear stockpile in the world. He is growing more desperate and unhinged every day, and everything should be done to stop him to protect us.

You know who else knows this? Pope Leo XIV.

I’ll get to him in a minute, when I am done setting the morbid scene, and the short past that has somehow dangerously been normalized in present-day America.

Just 12, short years ago, not a person reading this thought they would ever live to see this kind of madness emanating from our White House on a daily basis. This is the kind of unhinged behavior we’d expect to see from the authoritarian leader of North Korea.

Looking back, maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised.

The unhinged, scary reaction on the Right to Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was yet another sad indication that the Civil War in America was never fully decided, and just rolled around uncomfortably below the surface in an uneasy truce.

The incendiary Tea Party movement was kindled from the ashes of a failed war, a decimated economy and John McCain’s presidential loss, and birthed heartless sickos to take over the Republican Party like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Ted Cruz.

Essentially they set the dirt-low standard for what would follow as warm up acts for what would eventually crawl upon stages all over America at something called, MAGA rallies.

Anything went in these rowdy events because everybody was a target. Rebel flags were as common as moths to light in these hate fests. The two-time election of a Black man and healthcare for all was a bridge too far for these phony patriots, and they were drooling to get even.

The Civil War truce was officially over.

The leader of this bowel movement was a stone-cold bigot, who had proved his low-class mettle by steadily slogging through the mud and incessantly trolling the hated Obama with his ugly, racist birther attacks.

It was incredibly ugly, and as it turns out, the beginning of the end of the last vestiges of civility and decency in the Republican Party.

Military veterans like myself naively told anybody who would listen that we were better than this, and would never succumb to that kind of overt hate from a draft-dodging bigot.

That was the last time I ever overestimated this below-average country again.

Instead of calling these venomous attacks what they were, our media labeled them “political differences.” Incessant lies were called “mistruths.” Foreign attacks on our elections were not dissuaded by Republicans, they were publicly invited. “Russia, if you’re listening …”

Donald Trump had been normalized by a media which willingly lost its credibility, because of its inability and/or refusal to report on this monster and his threat to this nation accurately.

Even worse: Many people of religion publicly supported Trump, which is why I have always been deeply suspicious of all religions. I tried various forms of Christianity over my long lifetime, and discovered it did absolutely nothing for me.

Suddenly people who loudly supported the virtuous Jesus Christ, were also good with the loudmouth Donald Trump, and that just seemed wildly conflicting, and why religion is a very dangerous weapon when it isn’t holstered properly.

Maybe that’s changing.

In the past few weeks, religion has become an answer in addition to an enemy of America and her democracy.

I am grateful that Pope Leo has thoughtfully, politely and forcefully injected himself into this conversation about this life-or-death issue concerning America’s democracy.

While in my mind it is fair to question many aspects of the Catholic religion, I do believe this man is a person of moral standing and maybe more important, is an American. That would make him the most qualified Catholic in the world to speak about what is happening inside his country, and even if all of the 55 percent of Catholics who somehow supported Trump in 2024 aren’t listening, I damn sure am.

He didn’t need to be doing this but he is, and everybody fighting for good and decency should welcome him and his voice to the important fight.

After the repulsive Trump posted his incessant screed, Leo came back strong:

“I have no fear of the Trump administration, or speaking out loudly of the message of the gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the church is here to do.”

He wasn’t through:

“We are not politicians, we don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective he might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the gospel, as a peacemaker.”

A week earlier, Leo criticized Trump’s public threats to “wipe out” Iranian civilization, and said: “Attacks on civilian infrastructure are abasing international law” because that’s exactly what they are.

He then went full-on activist and urged people to contact leaders and members of Congress to call for peace. He didn’t provide a phone number, but I will: (202) 224-3121

Then he said this:

“God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

In response to this, I am seeing many Republicans urging (warning) the Pope to stay out of politics, and because I am not the Pope, I will politely tell them to stick it where the sun don’t shine. I will also tell them to shut their big yaps, and keep their damn, two-faced religion out of our schools, city halls and the workplaces where it does not belong.

Just this afternoon Leo showed no indications of backing down and released this letter of concern about democracy:

“Lacking this foundation, (democracy) risks becoming either ⁠a majoritarian tyranny or a mask for the dominance of economic and technological elites.”

Read that again, because it is smart, and on target: “⁠a majoritarian tyranny or a mask for the dominance of economic and technological elites ….”

That is EXACTLY what is happening inside America.

He went on in the letter to urge democratic societies (America) to avoid any temptation to hoard power:

“Temperance … proves ⁠essential for the legitimate use of authority, for true temperance restrains inordinate self-exaltation and acts as a guardrail against the abuse of power.”

Again, perfectly put: “inordinate self-exaltation and acts as a guardrail against the abuse of power.”

Sound like anybody you know?

So the battle has been joined against the maniacal Trump by his countryman Pope Leo XIV, and as a righteous man and warrior for what I believe is good and right, I welcome him with open arms.

I might not be a Christian, but I know an ally when I see one.

Trump and all his accompanying evil must go.

Can I get an amen?

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

I’ve heard more than enough from people who are attributing Donald Trump’s hourly low-grade filth and evil to some alleged bout with dementia, or any of the other terrible effects from Alzheimer’s disease.

I’m not sure why so many feel the need to ascribe dementia to a lifetime malignant narcissist, who has tragically lived his entire nearly 80 years on this planet serving exactly one person: HIMSELF.

I think it is important to be precise about what this repellent man is, and what he isn’t.

What he is:

A racist, a woman-abuser, a convicted felon, a serial liar, a thief, a huckster, a user, a cheater, a phony, a complete moron, and a deviant, all of which have congealed to make him a monster, and the most dangerous thing on earth.

Trump is dead inside, and best we can tell, this goes back to close to the point of his birth to a mother who couldn’t stand to be around him, and shipped him away the first good chance she got.

Here is what else he is:

An orange power tool being used by billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg so they can have unfettered access to our pocketbooks, mine our nation’s wealth, and access the halls of Congress to buy off one political weakling after another. As long as Trump gets his cut, he will run interference for these grotesque men, and then hang himself in the shed of our White House next to the other power tools to be used again and again and just as long as the money rolls downhill into his bottomless pockets.

Blaming dementia for Trump’s inhumane actions comes dangerously close to rendering him a sympathetic victim — a guy who has no control over where he goes, what he says, and what he does.

Trump knows exactly what he is doing, people.

His evil is calculated, and effortless.

Just look at the filth he has very intentionally surrounded himself with: The two Stephens, Bannon and Miller, JD Vance, Russell Vought, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel, and his odious, snotty sons, and son-in-law. Then of course there are the revolting trio of Supreme Court Justices he appointed, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, who along with the reprehensible Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, and the feckless John Roberts are the most lawless group of people who have ever disgraced that chamber.

All these men (besides the doe-eyed Barrett) didn’t just happen to fall into these positions by mistake. They were carefully selected and loaded with purpose into the magazine of Trump’s weapon of mass destruction, which is otherwise known as his presidency.

These irresponsible claims of Trump’s dementia are also insulting to the tens of millions of people who have dealt with this terrible condition. My mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s when she was 62. She officially died at the age of 70, but had left this earth at least five years before that.

She was locked inside a world I know she hated, and surrounded by people who loved her, but were unable to reach her and set her free from her terrible bondage.

If you have dealt with this, or worse, are going through this now, you have my profound regards, and sympathy. Nobody should have to deal with this, and count me as a person who advocates for a peaceful, painless way out after the mind has long ago exited. I know this is what my mother would have wanted.

That is what compassion truly looks like.

Look, Trump may have dementia-like symptoms, but none of this is at all new.

He’s just an old, angry bigot, who is taking out the pain that courses through his trash can of a body on everybody else. He is a physical mess of a man, who harrumphs around on his swelling ankles looking for the next helpless victim to tackle.

He’s a miserable person, who relishes taking everybody down around him, and the latest proof that money can’t buy happiness.

When he has finally and blessedly taken his last breath, he will be remembered as one of history’s most evil, destructive men — that is, if he doesn’t drop the bomb first after a particularly tough day of screwing things up. Nobody can say with a straight face that this isn’t possible, and why he needs to be removed from office.

For now, and until then, let’s be careful about rendering Trump as a man who has no control over what he is doing, and instead call his condition what it really is: HATE.

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

I am still wondering what the hell we are supposed to do with the people who voted for Trump upwards of three times, the anti-Americans who are somehow still with him, and the abhorrent, lazy, self-serving people who can’t be bothered to vote at all.

America is a complete disaster area that is littering the world with our radical right-wing trash, and ten of millions of us who predicted this would happen are owed a damn apology, and need to be listened to exclusively going forward.

So let me say this with precision: We were right about all of it.

And while that won’t change one damn terrible thing that has happened since that pitch black November night in 2016, I do think that for mental health purposes, it is important during this time of war and want, that the real patriots in this country hear this from time to time.

And let me be crystal clear about this, too: Predicting all these atrocities had nothing to do with possessing a brain, and everything to do with common decency.

A serial liar, and career woman-abusing bigot should have never been given the time of day much less a place on a ballot determining who would ascend to the most powerful position in the world.

That this is even minimally debatable is the problem.

America is hanging by a thread, and exposed to the corrupt whims of a mad, sociopathic convicted felon and wannabe king, and his hand-picked, bought-off conservative Supreme Court jesters, who have handed him the keys to the faltering American kingdom.

If you saw Trump’s so-called speech last night on God knows what, or even small snippets of the thing, it simply has to be clear as day that this wreck of an old man is nothing but a blown inner-tube with a malfunctioning release valve.

He is incoherent to the point of his own distraction, and the only thing we got last night for certain was confirmation of his endless capacity to lie with reckless abandon, and that things are about to get a whole lot worse.

Essentially, Trump has dragged this nation to the edge of the cliff, and is threatening to give us a final shove if we don’t submit to his incompetency, and start seeing things his way.

He’s not governing, because he has no talent for it. He’s not reversing course, because his broken transmission is stuck in fourth gear, and the padding on his brakes failed around the time his racist parents threw him out of the house, because even they could no longer stand to be around him.

He’s a runaway maniac careening out of control and using the rest of us as human bumpers.

He spends his day relentlessly insulting and rooting against the 70 percent who didn’t support him, and flat screwing the 30 percent who did.

I guess I am making a big deal out of this today, because every now and then the “We Told You Sos” need to rub it in everybody’s faces to keep our release valves functioning.

So hear this: Trump will kill every person on earth to avoid the insult of admitting he was wrong about anything.

I’m not wrong about this, and it should scare the hell out of anybody who has been paying any attention to this unnatural disaster.

He’s been wrong about everything except for the fealty of his base, and an inhumane Republican Party that will stay with him no matter what, because they somehow can’t find their way out of the corner they themselves have backed into. Like Trump they have no brakes. Trouble is, they are stuck in reverse, and won’t stop until they’ve reached 1852.

No surprise that while in the middle of typing all this, Trump continued the scapegoat phase of his failing regime. Trump fired his puppy-killing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem three weeks ago, and today Attorney General Pam Bondi was kicked down the stairs behind her.

This will not surprise even a single one of us Anti-Trumpers, because the first to go from this repellent White House was always going to be the revolting women like Bondi and Noem, who traded their self respect for the chance to be seen for who they really are.

Trump hates everybody, but he really hates women.

He has proven time and time again that he possesses an endless allegiance and affinity for grotesque, abusive men like Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Stephen Miller just as long as they dutifully stay in line.

Incompetency had little to do with Bondi’s firing, though there’s not a Anti-Trumper you’ll speak to who didn’t know she lacked the qualifications for the most important law enforcement position in the country.

No, Bondi is gone because apparently she was incapable of lowering herself completely into the sewer, which is a baseline qualification for anybody who works for Trump. That she didn’t eat and swallow the tens of thousands of mentions of her former boss in the Epstein Files, sealed her fate.

Still, she wanted to prove to everybody that her lack of self respect was fully intact when she released this bizarre statement after her firing:

"Over the next month I will be working tirelessly to transition the office of Attorney General to the amazing Todd Blanche before moving to an important private sector role I am thrilled about, and where I will continue fighting for President Trump and this Administration."

I suggest we take that as a threat.

So now another unqualified white man, Blanche, will take over until Trump can nominate an even more unqualified white man as a permanent replacement to Bondi.

Blanche was Trump’s personal attorney before infesting our DOJ.

Rumor has it the grotesque Lee Zeldin is a frontrunner for the job. Zeldin is currently working 24 hours a day to make sure our air and water are plenty polluted in his capacity as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Whoever gets Trump’s stomp of approval will be confirmed by the lawless Republican Senate with the disgraceful Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) in tow.

Here’s where I also remind you that attorney generals are supposed to work for US, not the president. I feel the need to point that out because like a dumpster full of other discarded normalities, Trump’s incestuous relationship with his attorney generals is both gross and thoroughly un-Democratic.

You also won’t see that mentioned much, if at all, in today’s reporting, because so much of the atrocities happening right now have been completely normalized.

Say, did you know the killers of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are still out there free as a bird to kill some more, because people like the odious Bondi are protecting them?

See what I mean?

Normalized.

Look, all this wasn’t written in a huff today to make you feel any better or worse about what is going on in America right now.

It was written because every now and then, people need reminding that there are a bunch of us who aren’t surprised by any of it, and even warned this would happen.

We are owed a damn apology, but if you can’t bring yourself to do that much, the least you can do is just shut up and start listening to 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, and follow him on Bluesky here.)

I was triggered by The Atlantic yesterday morning, and simply have to fire back for the record.

This screenshot might read as a minor offense, but when piled like kindling onto the red-hot embers of countless other examples of our corporate media soft-pedaling the most dangerous, corrupt regime to ever visit our White House, it’s no wonder we have a fire burning completely out of control in the United States.

Here’s the assaulting item:

“Mixed” messages. THAT’S what The Atlantic headline writers have assigned to Donald Trump’s incoherent lies, pontifications, insults, threats, backtracks, rage, double downs, doubles backs, and abhorrent treatment of the entire world because of the chaos that bangs around inside his fat head.

When will this gaslighting stop from media organizations that have catastrophically failed us the past decade?

Just what in the hell is going on here?

Trump is a human dumpster, a collection of the foulest character traits ever piled into one man.

His mouth is a sewage pipe.

He is a racist, a misogynist, an unrepentant liar, an autocrat, and a convicted felon. Nothing I typed there should be in any dispute by now, and would easily survive the most strident fact-check.

So why isn’t this included in all the reporting about him for necessary context?

The Atlantic is hardly the only member of the corporate media who has normalized the abhorrent, and incapable Trump.

The corporate media has failed us to the point that our Democracy is now hanging by a thread. I have typed extensively about this for years, and will say again as a man who spent 30 years around newsrooms that it galls me to no end.

I have concluded that either the editors in these newsrooms are incompetent, or they need Trump around to keep their enterprises profitable.

I will readily concede, it is probably both.

But back to this piece in The Atlantic, which framed their video this way:

“Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; David Ignatius; and Missy Ryan, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Watch the full episode here.”

This was a polite, meaty discussion that for the most part was critical in a pinkies out sort of way about this asinine war. Being from the polite, upper-crust media elite, all five of the panelists successfully avoided calling the war exactly what it is: an utter and complete cluster----.

Essentially, they spent the better part of the show trying to do what Trump has so far proven completely incapable of: explaining just what the hell it is we are doing in Iran.

It was the kind of discussion you might get when the grownups discuss what to do with Uncle Billy, who simply can’t stop wandering into traffic with his pudding.

Trump is easily the most dangerous man in the world, and this is what needs to be reported with urgency.

The time for polite avoidance simply has to be over by now.

I have argued that if they had covered him this way the first time around, there would have never been a second or third time.

Here’s what needs to happen right now:

Our media needs to stop reacting to what Trump is doing, and start anticipating the worst before it happens. It does little good to tell us the house is burning out of control when you could have told us an arsonist with a blowtorch was roaming the neighborhood beforehand.

Starting now, every single piece on him should include the following for proper context and accuracy:

-He is a serial liar, who cannot be trusted to tell the truth about anything.
-He is a convicted felon, who was protected by the Supreme Court from being held accountable for crimes like his attack on America.
-He is a racist.
-He is a misogynist, who has attacked women verbally and physically. Start calling him that.

This is how any story about Trump should read: “President Trump, who is a serial liar, misogynist, racist, and convicted felon alleged this morning that … [fill in the lie].”

They could also stand to start working into their stories about the fact that Trump appears in the Epstein Files an astonishing 38,000 times. These are just the files his lawless, crooked Justice Department has allowed us to see.

Read that again.

All of these things are relevant, and provide the much-needed context to remind and inform us all of the sociopath who is in a position to finish us off.

STOP NORMALIZING HIM.

That we aren’t already at this place, speaks to the media’s shoddy job covering this deviant since he started blocking out the sun in 2015.

Either you believe we are in a national emergency or you don’t.

If you don’t, then kindly surrender your press passes, because you are incompetent as hell and unable to identify the most important story in America since the Civil War.

If you can’t see what is happening you are stupid, unserious people that shouldn’t read a news story, much less type one.

If you do see it that way, but refuse to report it that way, then you are aiding and abetting the end of our Democracy, and no better than Trump himself.

What never came out of that damn Atlantic roundtable was a much-needed, urgent discussion about removing this tyrant from office, which is most certainly going to need to happen.

We cannot survive three more years of this nuclear-powered assault on our country.

Removing Trump from office, and holding the monsters to account who are appeasing him, should not be seen as a stretch, or some faint hope, but completely necessary.

Does anybody think Trump is capable of taking a deep breath and reassessing the hell he is inflicting on the entire world right now, starting with his own citizens? Or is it more likely he will escalate and put us on the brink of extinction, and the point of no return?

Again: The arsonist is roaming the neighborhood with a blowtorch. Are you going to report it this way, or wait until we are all engulfed in flames?

Our mainstream media needs to sit with this, and consider how they go forward with their coverage.

There’s only one correct course of action, and they better get it right, because there will be no second chances.

This is a national emergency.

Report it that way.

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.

While working my way East the past week from Wisconsin, I spent a lot of time behind the wheel of my car ruminating about Trump supporters, and more specifically, just what in the hell it is that can possibly make them tick.

Why are they so gleefully putting our country, and themselves, through all this unnecessary pain and hurt?

People who spend their precious time around here, will know I blame them for everything right now.

Simply: Without them, there is no him.

For the past decade this mouse of an orange, old man has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that his only talent is going lower. He is incapable of lifting America up, and instead spends hours and hours each day tearing us down and dividing us.

Trump is not interested in making America better — much less great — he is getting off on repeatedly abusing her for his enjoyment like so many other unfortunate souls who have crossed his grabby path.

He is not interested in world peace, only total chaos. He has not created jobs or wealth, only crashed our economy, and made himself and the billionaires like Elon Musk who own him richer. He has not made our failing healthcare system better, only more expensive and less responsive. He has not protected our retirement savings, he has looted them. He has not made us safer, he has made his odious political base more violent. He has not made our air and water cleaner, he has intentionally polluted them. He has not provided workers protections, he has torn them down, and left them exposed. He has not made it easier to raise our children, he has made it harder. He has not improved our schools, he has tried to close them. He has not made life more affordable, he has made it far, far more expensive. He has not tried to unite our country, he has taken out a golden sledgehammer and smashed it in pieces.

So what is there to recommend this man?

Until proven otherwise I always circle back to what I believe are Trump’s two main attractions to his cult: cruelty and bigotry.

There is a robust group of truly terrible people in America who have illustrated there is no known pain or sacrifice to our civil liberties or pocketbooks that they won’t absorb just for the satisfaction of watching some poor kid of color go without something they don’t think he or she should have.

If I have this at all right, and Trump’s unlimited capacity for cruelty and bigotry are relentlessly attractive to tens of millions of our fellow Americans, then imagine the terrible toll it is taking on the rest of us.

What are we supposed to do with this? How are we supposed to carry on through this homemade madness?

I’ve been giving that a lot of thought, too.

The day after arriving in North Carolina, I donned one of my favorite T-shirts. I didn’t wear it so much for effect, but because it’s comfortable and I like its message.

While standing in a supermarket checkout line, the woman behind me leaned in and quietly said, “I like your shirt.”

“Oh, wow, thanks,” I said. “Very kind.”

Then I remembered the shirt I had on, and realized she was attracted to the message and not the shirt!

“Oh … yeah,” I said. “Scary times we’re in.”

“They are,” she said.

“There are more of us,” I said.

“I hope so,” she said.

“There are,” I said defiantly.

I told her to keep the faith, grabbed my supplies and off I went.

We were both better for the exchange — two strangers coping with the dread that is enveloping this country and rediscovering they aren’t alone.

This happened two more times over the course of the day — strangers leaning in and quietly telling me how worried they were.

I have been given this a lot of thought, too.

Good people are scared and suffering silently in America. They are looking for hope wherever they can get it.

The late Jesse Jackson used to say, “Keep hope alive,” and that has never been more important now.

This is why Saturday’s No Kings rallies were so important. They provide a community for people who are tired, scared and just fed up with it all. There is nothing like rubbing shoulders with other people who share your concerns and core beliefs. They are a celebration of the good and decency that is still out there in America in abundance, and we need to shout that out.

It is also why we need to work these kinds of celebrations into our daily lives. We can’t be shy about leaning in and telling other patriots we stand strong with them. Just making a call to a friend, or a chat with a neighbor can provide the much-needed fuel to carry on.

We need to get louder and prouder, and celebrate our patriotism, decency, and love for a country that needs a hug, not a wrecking ball. We don’t need to be obnoxious, there is enough of that in America right now, but we do need to make it clear that what is happening to our country IS NOT OK.

There is nothing normal about a president who wants to “bomb our little hearts out” or brags that he “can do anything he wants” to another country like Cuba.

There’s nothing normal about ill-trained, masked government thugs in our streets murdering us. There is nothing normal about hunting down and separating children from their parents and caging them.

A man who will put his ugly face and name everywhere including our money, belongs in the Kremlin, not our White House.

Can we stop here for just a minute and consider the outrage if Barack Obama had started naming American institutions after himself, while demolishing our White House? The man wore a tan suit one day, and half the Republican Party fainted.

None of this is normal, and it’s time to be more vocal about this.

I started Enough Already nearly a decade ago, because at the time I was sure electing a racist deviant like Trump even once was a horrible mistake that needed correcting.

Nearly 10 years later, I am still here, and I am still saying the same thing with plenty of battle scars to prove it. This was a tougher fight than I expected, because it turns out my country was a lot sicker than I thought.

I intend to stay at it, and I know you do, too. And that gives me strength, because I am not alone.

I intend to be here when America takes care of all her people again, and is once again a friend to our allies around the world.

I promise you those days are coming, and I’ll give you the shirt off my back to make that happen.

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.

After singlehandedly closing the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the entire world, and bringing about needless death and destruction, I see Donald Trump is contemplating surrender to Iran.

Of course the man with the “best words”is not putting it quite that way this morning, because the man with the “best words” was working overtime, hands flailing away while playing his invisible accordion, as he tried his best to talk his way out of a catastrophic mess that was entirely of his own doing.

After a weekend of golf, and bragging to guests on the patio of Mar-a-Lago about the size of the engine in his diesel-powered golf cart, Trump bloviated in that spoiled-snot, idiotic way Monday morning that at some point during his weekend of leisure we had “very strong talks” with Iran.

Really, pal? “Very strong talks?”

Oh, well, if they were “very strong” I guess that does it, and we can all relax now, and get on with our lives.

Can we finally stop giving this supersonic moron a pass for his diarrhea of the mouth, and making up conversations that never happened? This has been going on for the better part of a decade, and we really need to circle back and decide again we have had more than enough of this, and simply have to get back to expecting more from a president.

Trump opens his big, fat mouth, random words just fly out of it, and the press reports them unchallenged and almost completely without context.

I wrote the book on it several years ago, and finally surrendered myself, because it was clear as day too many Americans were just fine with having a complete, dumb-s--- for a president.

I am way past sick and tired of these Americans, but more on that for another day.

Trump is a stupid idiot, and is not only incapable of deep thought, but any thought. He is a hyena with a reusable “get out of jail free” card, who has been led around by his ridiculous, painted orange nose his entire miserable life through failed businesses, marriages and now presidencies.

Only hours before telling the world about his fictional “very strong talks” with Iran, he was asked about the horrific collision at LaGuardia Sunday night, and he said this: “They made a mistake. It’s a dangerous business. That’s terrible.”

“They made a mistake.”

This is the nuclear-powered idiot who casually thrust the world into an unnecessary, intentional, catastrophic mistake that we will all be paying for for years, and long after he is blessedly gone.

He has no idea what he is doing.

Let me try that again:

HE HAS NO IDEA WHAT HE IS DOING.

This needs to be said over and over again.

He is a failure of a man, who lost this stupid, senseless war the minute it started.

Thousands of human beings are needlessly dead, among them school children, and members of our military, both of whom he could care less about. He treats them all like so many Big Macs to be devoured to feed his endless appetite for chaos, and affirmation he never got growing around people who loved him so much, they just couldn’t wait to kick him the hell out of their cavernous mansion because it wasn’t big enough to keep them all separate, and from killing each other.

And when the real fighting started, he chickened out of that, too, because service to himself is more important than service to his country. Trumps don’t love this country, they feed off it.

None of them serve.

So Trump is surrendering today after his “very strong talks” because last week Iran used small, cheap weapons to blow up energy complexes in Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. This is easy as pie, and was never given any consideration from the dry drunk and human oil slick, Pete Hegseth, who is leading a military that as a veteran, I still believe deserves so much better.

The longer Trump’s idiotic, unnecessary war goes, the more damage will be inflicted on these gas and oil reserves that have a disgraceful and outsized impact upon world order.

If only there were cheaper, safer options to oil out there …

For its part, Iran has denied there were any talks at all this weekend, much less “very strong” ones, and will be content to wait out Trump and all those invisible voices in his head, until he has extinguished every bad option on his supersized menu.

Here is the statement they posted on social media:

“No negotiations have been held with the U.S. Fake news is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets.”

This was a senseless war, started by a complete sociopath and failure of a man, whose second term in office has been an authoritarian disaster area, and we will pay through the nose for both of these things for many years to come.

Like this barbaric regime itself, nothing good was ever going to come out of this sad chapter of American history.

But since very strong words carry the day in America these days, here’s a few more: Trump and his bloodthirsty regime can all go straight to hell.

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

I spent the first hour of my day, reading story after story essentially saying that Donald Trump “miscalculated” in his catastrophically stupid war in Iran, which would seem to make the big damn assumption that this utter and complete moron “calculated” ANYTHING in the first place.

In fact, The New York Times headline had it this way atop their meandering story: How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War

That’ll be about enough of this damned nonsense.

This war never made any sense to anybody with a brain in their head, because here was what we knew for sure in its lead-up, and what we still know right now: Trump is a dangerous and impetuous idiot, who is capable of anything including attacking his own country, which is why his attack on Iran shouldn’t surprise a soul.

If I had to guess what was behind this insanity, I’d venture that in the last month or so, somebody inside the White House with a semi-cool head, and most likely his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, was able to finally chase him off the golf course for 45 minutes, and force-fed him some unsavory polling numbers to go along with all those Big Macs that pointed to a looming disaster in November, if he didn’t change course but quick, and do something about them.

Trump heard that as a great chance to go bomb another country, so he invited his boss, Bibi Netanyahu and his 22,000 pages of war plans to share an unhappy meal, while they discussed how to deploy their human oil slick, Pete Hegseth, to carry out their favorite war crimes.

But that’s just me speculating about why we are in Iran right now when even Trump and his wreck of an administration can’t seem to tell us for sure. They change their story by the hour, and our service members and their families are paying a terrible price for it.

This was a totally preventable manmade disaster in the most volatile region in the world that is intensifying by the minute.

The dead and wounded are mounting, and that is our horrifying reality right now.

The most gruesome look at where we really are came from this eye-opening blast from Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy on Bluesky Tuesday night. This sets the terrible scene right now better than I could ever hope to.

So essentially we are just bombing the bejesus out of the place and hoping victory will somehow rise out of the rubble. Calling these so-called plans “incoherent and incomplete” is about as nice as you can put it, but I do appreciate this senator’s direct approach to telling America the truth, because truth is the one thing you will never, ever get from the most notorious liar in American history.

We are in a very, very dangerous place right now, because America’s No. 1 convicted felon has managed to stick a gun to his own head and hold himself up. It really didn’t have to be this way, but anybody who has been paying even the slightest amount of attention the past decade or so knew this is exactly what would happen.

Trump actually entered his second term in decent shape, had the House and Senate falling at his fat little feet, and the political winds at his hunched back. In just 14 months, he’s incinerated all that goodwill, and his Republican House and Senate is starting to take on water.

Trump is failing everywhere, and I am telling you right now there is panic in the Grand Ol’ Party as we steam toward the midterms.

If the elections were to happen tomorrow, the Republican Party would most likely lose the House by 30-to-50 seats. Even the Senate would swing to Democrats with victories in just four of these flippable states: Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Montana.

Trump would be no less dangerous — and maybe more so — but at least we could gum up his dirty works, and stare the rest of the world in the face and not be completely laughed at.

A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll is out today with some stunning numbers.

Consider that Trump’s two strong points entering his second term were the economy and immigration. Now take a look at this:

-35% of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the economy, while 58% disapprove.
-40% of Americans approve of how Trump is handling immigration, while 57% disapprove.

These are devastating numbers for Republicans, but it gets worse, because perhaps the most important tell for what voters will do when they hit the voting booth is how they are feeling about both parties at the time, so get a load of this:

-53% of registered voters said they would support the Democratic candidate on the ballot in their district, compared to 44% who said they would support the Republican.

Generally any party garnering a number above +5% is jumping for joy. This +9% spread has no doubt triggered a tsunami warning for Republicans, and jibe with recent election results in which Democrats have been hammering Republicans in one election after another.

Here’s are some other random numbers from that poll:

-Trump’s job approval rating among Americans is 38%, while 57% disapprove of the job the president is doing, and 5% are unsure.
-Americans are nearly twice as likely to strongly disapprove (50%) of the job he is doing than to strongly approve (26%).
-55% of Americans say the state of the union is not very strong or not strong at all. 45% think the union is very strong or strong.
-More than six in ten Americans (61%) also report that the nation is headed in the wrong direction. 38% say the U.S. is moving in the right direction.

This points to a president and a party that is failing at historic levels. It is every bit as bad as most of us thought it would be after throwing our hands up in disgust at a country that is capable of literally anything except electing a woman to lead our country.

Which leads to our cold, hard reality right now. To hash that out, I’ll return to a piece I typed just two weeks after his election two Novembers ago. It is still the most read thing I have ever published. Here is the lede of that offering:

“I considered waiting to publish this dire warning about what will be coming in the wake of the America-attacking Trump’s inauguration in two months, because too many good people are being asked to process too many terrible things right now.
This simply had to be put to paper, though, because I would be remiss if I didn’t urgently warn you that Trump’s takeover of our military is at the top of his dirty to-do list, and at the tip of his toxic spear in his quest to murder our Democracy.
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, and slobbery weaklings in his political party, who helped put him back in office, you can better prepare for the hell that’s most assuredly coming.”

I actually considered not reminding you again of this today, but because you pay attention, you fully know what is at stake right now, and what this madman is capable of doing.

Since returning to our White House, Trump has misplayed every card on his table, and is now turning that table upside down, and treating it like so many bottles of ketchup.

He is cornered, failing, and lashing out.

Because he is incapable of calculating anything clearly, as we discussed up front, he will do what he does best and scream and moan. His problems will be everybody else’s problems. He is capable of anything, because he is an incapable president.

With that backdrop, here is how I ended that piece 16 months ago, and how I will end this one today:

“Throughout history, supposedly good men have been talked into doing heinous things because of blinding misjudgment, weakness, or rocket-fueled ambition.
Trump is counting on this weakness to exploit our military for his rotten gains because NOTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America. EVERYTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America.
This is not a story of hope, my friends, but words of warning.
Like it or not, and as tired as we are, we must be vigilant and NEVER accept this as anything approaching normal in this country.
A repulsive coward who never had the guts to serve will do everything he can to get our armed forces to serve only him.
WE must be the resistance.”

(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.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally Maine …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read that again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The truth will be nowhere to be seen ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read that again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here goes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How dare they …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such a role model. Such class.

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

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

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

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

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

The other day, an old musician friend of mine in Nashville, sent along a zinger he knew would wind me up.

He’s only too aware I’m an easy target these days, because try as I might to stay loose during this relentless GOP attack on America, I’m wound tighter than one of his piano strings.

My troublemaking buddy had just come across a column in USA TODAY that needed to be seen to be believed, so he made sure I did just that.

It confirmed my worries that USA TODAY has almost become a caricature of itself in its decades-long pursuit of playing it straight down the middle to offer us both sides of a story or issue, even if one side is taking on water as it sinks deeper into the sewer.

Before getting out my plunger and clearing their latest clog, a quick word about that paper: I used to really like it. It wasn’t pretentious, and when it was born in the early-1980s was a lively alternative to the stuffy national papers like The New York Times.

We used to call it “reader friendly” in the newspaper business. If you laid a copy of USA TODAY and The New York Times next to each other, the former invited you in, and the latter stiff-armed you away.

Sadly, both papers have lost their way during the most dangerous time in America since the Civil War. Instead of treating the Republicans relentless battering of our democracy with the urgency it deserves, these papers have gone off looking for something comparable on the other side that simply doesn't exist.

On Monday morning, USA TODAY continued its death march, when it broke out a column from one of its pundits, Nicole Russell, who wanted the paper’s readership to know that she resented being thought of as a bigot even if she proudly and defiantly supports one.

Here’s the column, with the wordy slammer: “I CAN BE LET DOWN BY TRUMP WITHOUT REGRETTING VOTING FOR HIM”

Here’s the subhead: Voting for President Donald Trump doesn’t make us racists or bigots. His poor choices and mistakes are his own.

You can see where this was going …

I had to check several times to see if what I was reading was parody, but decided when I finally ended this free-flowing abdication of decency that it might have described a Trump supporter better than anything I have come across.

It was certainly an improvement on anything I had written on this sore subject, and longtime readers will know I’ve hammered away at it with regularity.

I’ve been pretty plain that proud MAGAs like Russell vote for Trump because of the racism, not in spite of it.

Seems pretty simple that if you support a bigot, you are a bigot, and there’s nothing lower than that.

By my reckoning, racism shouldn’t be treated as just a pesky little thing, because it is the thing.

I’ve had it with people like Russell, who have given themselves the privilege to minimize pollutants in our lives, just so they can breathe easier while acting out their warped beliefs.

And who are people like Russell? Well, when she started one of her death sentences this way: “As a Christian and conservative …” she gave the whole deadly game away.

Because as we all painfully know by now “Christian conservatives” are real paragons of virtue in 2026 America — poor put-upon souls who have heard enough about all those inconvenient truths in those silly history books that should just be banned for nagging us about unimportant stuff like our our ghastly bout with slavery, and myriad human rights abuses.

In their upper-crust Christian lives, there’s only one book that really matters, you see — the one featuring the brown, liberal guy who stood against social injustice, and preferred people were fed, clothed, and treated equally. He also didn't seem to be a real fan of compulsive sinners, who refuse to apologize for anything.

Except they’d rather just forget about that last part, so they can stay good and comfortable in these phony, pillowy lives they’ve weaved for themselves.

These people are just too damn much to take.

Russell excused her racism by typing, she’s “made peace with the fact that democracy is imperfect and that politicians are flawed.”

Failing to return a call from a constituent is a flaw, depicting Black men and women as apes, is despicable and should never, ever be tolerated from anybody, much less the President of the United States.

It is a deal-breaker and should damn well be a job-ender.

By the end of her whitewashing of the orange bigot, Russell worked her way to this special place:

“But for now, Trump's improving America more than (Kamala) Harris ever could have. That's why I'd vote for him again, even if I keep having to defend it.

“Improving America …”

She is telling us that there is nothing he could do that would shake her defense of a vile man who bragged he could shoot somebody like her in the middle of the street, and still wouldn’t lose her support.

He knows her better than she knows herself.

She is an unmovable object, and will defend whatever comes tomorrow no matter what happens today.

You know, maybe instead of scolding Russell for her defense of a disgusting bigot, I should have saved everyone a lot of time, and just spoken to her in wholesome, conservative Christian language that she understands and condones:

“Quiet, piggy.”

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 you get on with your weekend, I want to grab you real quick, and publicly address the chalkboard-scratchers out there, who are making a lot of noise, and our way forward in this country a whole helluva lot harder than it needs to be.

I am talking about the doom-and-gloomers, who seem to revel in reminding everybody how hopeless everything is these days. You know the type. They’re the ones who bring umbrellas to fight off a sunny day.

For the past three weeks, we have been hearing every other hour or so how Trump is going to interfere with our elections in November. The notion that the America-attacking blowhard would try something like this comes as absolutely no surprise to patriots who have been paying attention to what is happening in America.

Seems our legacy media has finally crashed upon the place we’ve been making our stand for the past five years.

Gee, Trump’s a threat to our elections?

No kidding.

Good thing they aren’t in the news business, because they would have completely failed in their mission to inform their readers.

Trump’s attacking America with abandon, by sending armed thugs by the thousands into our cities to beat and murder the people who live there.

The resistance has been brave and resolute. Armed only with whistles, and righteousness, our fathers, sons, daughters and wives are peacefully standing up to these masked, anti-American cowards, who have decided to spend their miserable lives taking orders from a 79-year-old baby who is in constant need of a diaper change.

The resistance has been everywhere, and most notably at the ballot box where Democrats are winning elections they were expected to lose, and Republicans are losing elections they were expected to win.

Morning’s risen in America and the sun is poking through the clouds again, but here come the people with all those damn umbrellas.

We say: “The Left is starting to really roll, and is fighting like hell.”

They say: “Yeah, but …!”

We say: “We have flipped scores of seats in the past year, and won elections that were supposed to be nail-biters by several miles. The Republicans haven’t flipped ONE, and are flopping around on the deck like so many sucker fish.”

They say: “Yeah, but …!”

We say: “A Blue tsunami is gathering strength, and a reckoning is coming in November.”

They say: “Yeah, but!”

Well, I say take your “yeah, buts” and stick ‘em where the sun don’t shine.

I am done listening to people who want to remind everybody what is wrong, instead of what is most certainly right. I can’t have these people hollering at me to “do something” when like so many of you, all I am doing is something, and we are finally getting some tangible results.

We are up against an untapped firehouse of fascism with squishy lawless billionaires priming the pump. We are handling a lot here, and the “yeah buts” seemingly can’t wait to tell us that what we are doing in defense of this deluge won’t be enough.

I’ve noticed there is a smugness to these entitled people who make it their jobs to bring everybody else down to their hopeless level.

They are bad news in blood-stained print, and making some difficult times in this country even harder.

I can no longer have people like this in my life.

Look, nobody is arguing we aren’t in the middle of a catastrophic mess. Good lord, like so many of you, I spend hours each day fretting about it myself.

The minute the 2024 election was called for the most revolting man in United States history on that horrid November night, I knew we were in deep, deep trouble.

You did, too, because you have the audacity to give a damn.

In the ensuing days I had many people contacting me directly. They were scared, mad and worried. They asked, “What the hell are we going to do?”

I understood the upset, and the fear, but the question confused me.

If there was any other answer besides “fight like hell” I wanted to hear it, because it seemed to me — and still does — like that was all we could do.

And we have, dammit.

People, not so-called leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in the broken Democratic Party, have led the resurgence. We have stood up and fought back. Now they are showing signs of listening to us, and that is how things will get done going forward.

So now Trump is slopping out loud hints that maybe elections shouldn’t settle things in this country, and if you have been paying even the slightest amount of attention the past decade it will come as absolutely no surprise.

Trump is a wannabe dictator, and wannabe dictators say out loud the bone-chilling things they wanna do.

This nuclear-powered weakling wants you scared.

He’s got the “yeah, buts” right where he wants them, because while we are fighting our a---- off, the “yeah, buts” who are allegedly on our side have already quit.

Turns out they are as fatalistic as Trump.

Know this: Every time this two-ton, orange lout hits his steel-reinforced rack and plugs himself into his phone at night, he knows his days are numbered. He’s as unpopular as hell, his health is failing faster than Stephen Miller in a history class, and he’s scared to death.

When he tells us he doesn’t like elections he is projecting weakness not strength.

He’s scared because we are winning those elections at an astonishing clip, and have shown up, hearts beating out of our chests at rallies all over the country.

Hell, there are people in my town who are fueled with pure dynamite. They muster on busy corners each day with placards and their righteous voices and let everybody know good and damn well they are NOT giving up the ship.

There is still much work to do defending America, and the “yeah buts” need to stay out of our way.

Our elections will happen, and we will absolutely destroy these abhorrent Republicans who loathe democracy. Will Trump throw a tantrum? Will he whine that it was all rigged? Will he convince some tongue-dragging lawyers to file a bunch of lawsuits?

Of course he will. You can count on that.

Will we deal with that, too, when the time comes?

You bet your a---- we will.

But if you are a “yeah, but” who still has to rain on everybody’s parade, why don't you head up to Minneapolis and tell those patriots that it’s hopeless.

I’d pay good money to see the reception you’d get.

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 the repulsive Trump regime makes America a far more dangerous, inhumane place by the hour, I have a common-sense solution that would make us far safer immediately:

Ban guns.

Make it so only our military can carry weapons on their bases or in a theater of battle.

That’s it.

Picture it: an America with no guns.

Our children would be safe in school. Our neighborhoods would be positively dreamy. Life expectancy would rise, and America might just get a shred of respect from the rest of the world, which looks at us these days as the complete maniacs we most certainly have become.

But you think I’m the one who has completely lost his mind.

Never happen, Earl. Guns are here to stay.

You know, it wasn’t so long ago, that some sort of meaty gun control actually looked doable. Back then, when America was at least semi-sane, gun control was my No. 1 issue.

I railed about it. I marched for it. I joined gun-control groups, and put some of my limited treasure in furthering this noble cause.

Hadn’t we seen enough of our children brutally slaughtered in all those classrooms?

Enough Already is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I used to tell people at the time that I was a reasonable man, and because I was a reasonable man, I would entertain compromise on this vital issue.

Since I wanted ALL guns banned — every damn one of them — and you wanted all guns legal — every damn one of them — we could meet somewhere in the middle.

We could adopt common-sense legislation. Both sides might not be completely happy, but we would be safer.

Guns kill people. No guns, no deaths. Fewer guns, fewer deaths.

Well, we all know what happened.

America’s biggest killer, BIG MONEY, got involved, started threatening lawmakers at a gunpoint, and they all but surrendered on the issue.

Oh sure, a few things got done to make us minimally safer, but there have never been more guns in America than there is right now. There are so damn many of them that it has become impossible to count them all, much less track them.

Most experts have it in the 500 million range.

I look at that astonishing number and wonder why I come bouncing in here with hope about anything sometimes …

The guy who wants no guns, is living in a country with more guns than people.

Tell me again how great we are …

And because this is America, and the only thing we know for certain these days is that things can always get worse …

They have.

On the year of Lady Liberty’s 250th birthday, we have unnamed, armed, roving government agents marauding through our streets. They are caging and murdering us with absolute impunity.

Land of the free?

You are kidding me, right?

Since ICE has been unleashed by its fish-lipped, dead-eyed, puppy-killing leader, Kristi Noem, there have been 16 shootings by on-duty, unidentified federal agents patrolling U.S. cities and towns during the past year. This includes, of course, the cold-blooded murders of Minnesota protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

There have been beatings, gassings, and human beings being disappeared in concentration camps. It has all blown past appalling, and into the dark realm of the unimaginable.

ICE needs to go, because short of getting rid of guns in America, the elimination of a federal agency that treats people like targets on some shooting range or Noem treats a puppy, would be a step toward decency.

But since eliminating ICE completely is close to an impossibility unless and until Democrats take back the White House, the party of good and decency should do everything it can to pull the fangs from these grotesque agents’ masked, dirty mouthes.

This starts by putting demands on Noem’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) before it gets a drop of OUR money.

The following is a list of the 10 guardrails on ICE that Democratic leadership presented to Trump’s grotesque Republicans before DHS funding expires Friday:

1. Targeted Enforcement – DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant. End indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards. Require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
2. No Masks – Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.
3. Require ID – Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name. Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
4. Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
5. Stop Racial Profiling – Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent or their race and ethnicity.
6. Uphold Use of Force Standards – Place into law a reasonable use of force policy, expand training and require certification of officers. In the case of an incident, the officer must be removed from the field until an investigation is conducted.
7. Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight – Preserve the ability of State and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidents. Require that evidence is preserved and shared with jurisdictions. Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.
8. Build Safeguards into the System – Make clear that all buildings where people are detained must abide by the same basic detention standards that require immediate access to a person’s attorney to prevent citizen arrests or detention. Allow states to sue DHS for violations of all requirements. Prohibit limitations on Member visits to ICE facilities regardless of how those facilities are funded.
9. Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking – Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities.
10. No Paramilitary Police – Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers carry during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.

They ended their proposal this way:

These reforms should apply to all federal activity, whether funded by FY26 appropriations, the OBBBA or any other act.
Furthermore, there are steps that the Trump administration has the power to take right now to show good faith, including fully ramping down the surge in Minnesota and removing Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem from her position.
These are common sense solutions that protect constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement.

Short of eliminating ICE altogether, I fully endorse this proposal.

Now we see just how serious Democratic Senate and House Leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are about standing behind their words.

I have been hard on both of these men, and think Democrats are overdue for new leadership. But I also know Republicans are horrid, disgusting people, who will continue doing everything in their seemingly unlimited power to back a lawless regime that by words and deeds is intent on incinerating our Democracy, and the notion that all men (and women) are created equal.

Democrats must hold the line here.

If you somehow still aren’t convinced about the danger we are in right now, consider that on this date in 1936 — exactly 90 years ago — Nazi Germany passed a law investing the Gestapo secret police with absolute authority exempt from any legal review.

Here’s a word from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Gestapo. The parallels to ICE are absolutely chilling:

The Gestapo’s mission was to “investigate and combat all attempts to threaten the state.” In the Nazi view, threats to the state encompassed a wide variety of behaviors. These behaviors included everything from organized political opposition to individual critical remarks about the Nazis. The government even defined belonging to certain categories or groups of people as threatening. To combat this wide array of potential threats, the Nazi dictatorship gave the Gestapo enormous power.
One way in which the Gestapo carried out its mission was by enforcing new Nazi laws. Some of these laws broadly defined criticism of the regime as a security threat. For example, a December 1934 law made it illegal to criticize the Nazi Party or the Nazi regime. Telling a joke about Hitler could be categorized as a “malicious attack against the state or the Party.” It could then result in an arrest by the Gestapo, trial before a special court, and even imprisonment in a concentration camp.
But the Gestapo went much further than monitoring individual behaviors. They implemented Nazi ideology, which defined entire groups of people as racial or political enemies. Membership in the Communist Party or a Jewish background was enough to make someone a threat to the state and subject to Gestapo attention.
The Nazi regime gave Gestapo agents a great deal of power to decide the fate of the people they arrested.
The Gestapo had the final word.

Nobody in America can say they haven’t been warned.

Nobody in our government should ever be allowed to murder Americans and say, “they were just following orders.”

If Republicans continue to get their gruesome way, America’s 250th birthday will be her last.

We must fight for her, and US with everything we have.

That starts with putting guardrails on murdering ICE right now — unless you want to tell me a country with 500 million guns can’t be wrong …

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 like to extend heartfelt congratulations to my friend Chasity Martinez on her win tonight. I look forward to working with you for the good of the people in District 60. And to every voter, regardless of how you cast your ballot, I remain committed to this community — its families, its future ... To serve where I can, listen and help move our district forward. I express my deepest gratitude to everyone who played a role in this extraordinary journey. This experience has been truly life enriching and I want to acknowledge the collective effort that made it so special. Sending love and blessings to all.”

These soaring words were articulated by Republican Brad Daigle in the moments after losing to the Democrat, Martinez, in the Louisiana House District 60 race Saturday night.

I share them with you, because I really wasn’t sure Republicans gave speeches like this one anymore. Their petulant leader, after all, is the sorest, most pathetic loser in American history.

I found Daigle’s full remarks on Facebook this morning, and they immediately brought my temperature down about 28 degrees, and in the neighborhood of something approaching normal.

As you well know, my friends, the bad news comes at us seemingly by the hour these days, and keep us burning hot to the point of unhealthy.

There’s not a day that goes by I am not raging at the odious Donald Trump and his revolting, nasty cult who so gleefully pour gasoline atop the bonfire they have started in America.

They delight in hurting us, because that is what sadists do.

You pay attention and care at your own risk ...

So I had intended to sit down and write extensively (again) about the racist monster atop Daigal’s party, by underlining in bold print that it simply has to be completely unacceptable to have a hardcore bigot inhabiting the people’s White House.

Trump’s sickening depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes Thursday night, was grotesque racism in its rawest, ugliest form. It is not just a vulgar reflection of him, but the people who vote for him.

Because while the intention of Trump’s deranged video was to kneecap the Obamas, who tower over him with their grace and dignity, it was also meant to feed racist, red meat to his starving, single-issue political base, to keep them in his corner and always drooling for more.

If we are to believe this disgusting hate does not reflect all, or at least most, Republicans, then why haven’t all, or at least most Republicans come out strongly against it?

With very few exceptions, their silence has been disgusting. They are disgusting.

The classy Obamas have not directly responded to the most overt racist attack by a president against another president in American history, but as a white man I damn sure will.

The dead-inside Trump makes me sick. He is unfit for office — a lifeless, broken-down old bigot. He is the very worst among us.

I spit on him.

Anyone who has even the slightest inkling of what separates good from evil, should be calling for his immediate removal. It is not good enough to stand aside and say nothing. Silence is an endorsement of the worst kind of evil there is, and if we can’t hold the line on at least that much, to hell with us …

I’ll let those comments stand until the next time America’s most notorious bigot goes lower, because as we are all so painfully aware by now, it is his singular talent.

Now, just a few words on that stunning Louisiana race Saturday night that temporarily at least, lowered my temperature by providing one of those flickers of hope that have become so damn hard to see the last decade or so ...

Martinez, who describes herself as “a mother and community advocate,” was just the latest Democrat to roll to a convincing victory in a special election in a district the orange bigot won.

Trump defeated Kamala Harris here 56%-43% in 2024. Last night, Martinez blew past Daigle by an astonishing 62%-38% margin. That is a whopping 37-point swing, and follows a similar 31-point swing last Saturday in a Texas special election.

These kinds of shocking results have been commonplace the past year and signal a Democratic wipeout of Republicans in this year’s midterms. I believe the Democrats will flip at least 50 seats in the House, and take back the Senate.

This is why, of course, there is all this talk of America’s sorest loser doing whatever he can to poison those elections.

Well, those elections will happen, and I’ll have plenty to say about that later.

Today, I want to end with what transpired between two Americans most of us have never heard of, in a political district most of us couldn’t name, in a state many of us have never visited.

Once upon a time, deep in the heart of Louisiana, two candidates fought hard to get elected. The people peacefully voted, and waited for the result. When the counting was done, the winner thanked the voters and her opponent, and the loser did the most American thing there is and gracefully conceded to the winner.

Everybody lived happily ever after.

That used to be an America story, and Saturday night it was 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.

You are going to hear a lot about the word inevitable in this space the next nine months as America tries to shake off this Republican fascist assault while rumbling toward the most important elections in her 250-year history.

1. It is inevitable Democrats will smash Republicans in November’s midterm elections.
2. It is inevitable that the fascist felon, Donald Trump, will do everything with the power anointed him by his crooked Supreme Court to stop those elections and/or change those results.

So let’s begin by focusing on the first inevitability, because if we can effectively communicate the inevitable outcome of this year’s election, the blowback from the orange windbag in the our White House will be nothing more than another one of his hourly, noxious gusts. Only the terrible smell will have any credibility.

As sure as I am typing this, Democrats will take back the House and Senate this year.

We need only lean on past results, not iffy polls, to make our airtight case that a Blue Tsunami is most certainly coming, because its mighty spray has already started blowing across our electoral landscape the past year.

Since miserably failing to answer the call in the crucial Nov., 2024 elections, the American electorate turned out feverishly in one election after another in 2025, and put Democrats in office everywhere.

It is has been a one-of-a-kind effort, and a thrilling ride.

Here is what I typed two weeks ago about all that:

The truly good and decent people in America poured their hearts out, took to our streets and our ballot boxes, and did what they could to fight past their mental anguish. They crawled over those do-nothings who litter our lives, and exacted many beatings on the regime that means to end us.
Democrats flipped 21 percent of all the GOP-held legislative seats that were on the ballot throughout 2025.
The Republicans, on the other hand, flipped exactly zero Democratically held seats.
Let me type that again: The Republicans flipped ZERO seats.
This rebuttal to pure evil is even stronger than the one we experienced in 2017 in the wake of Trump’s first win, when Democrats flipped 20 percent of all GOP-held legislative seats up for election. The following year’s epic Blue Wave saw Democrats gain 40 seats in Congress, flip seven governorships, and significantly eroded Republicans’ huge advantage in the Senate, all but putting the ghastly Trump in check.

Since that telling, Democrats continued their momentum into 2026 with a staggering victory in Deep-Red Texas this past Saturday when Democrat Taylor Rehmet walloped his Republican opponent Leigh Wambsganss by 14 points in a senate district that Trump won by +17 in 2024.

That is an almost unheard of 31-pt. swing in a state that has been the Democrats’ great white whale for decades. Try as they might, they have not been able to recapture the gerrymandered, voter-suppressed electorally rich state.

On Saturday, though, they put a helluva scare into Republicans and pumped new life into the hardworking folks on the Left down there who have been telling us we can do this.

Consider that the Democrat, Rehmet, won this State Senate seat in a blowout despite being outspent 5-to-1 by his Republican opponent, who also had the endorsement of one Donald Trump, which is starting to looks a lot like the literal kiss of death to me.

The Republican regime is a bloody mess and even people deep in the heart of Texas aren’t having it.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) heard that bomb go off in Texas, and said this:

“A swing of this magnitude is not something that can be dismissed. Republicans should be clear-eyed about the political environment heading into the midterms.”

DeSantis watched helplessly as the average Democratic shift from Left to Right in the Sunshine State last year was a sturdy 17 percent in their special elections. Miami elected its first female mayor ever, and first Democrat in 28 years.

Dan Pfeiffer, a longtime Barack Obama adviser was also seeing inevitability when he placed this nugget on various social media channels:

“The results from the special election in Texas are even worse for Republicans than they look. Every Republican on the ballot should be scared s-------.”

Let me put it to you this way:

Fact is, if you had a special election ANYWHERE in the United States right now, the Democrat would over-perform, and likely by a significant margin as we saw again in Texas Saturday. Massive victories by Democrats in the midterms are inevitable.

Before moving onto your concerns, and sprinkling a few caveats into my analysis, I want you to consider something else: While Democrats have been doing all this winning, they have been outspent by the losing Republicans by tens of millions of dollars.

Here in Wisconsin alone, Jeffrey Epstein’s billionaire buddy, Elon Musk, tried to buy votes and burned $25 million in last April’s Supreme Court race, only to watch as his bought-off Republican candidate lost by double-digits in this 50/50 state.

In fact, right now the Democratic National Committee is trailing the Republican National Committee by $100 million in fundraising.

This is an eye-opening number and the strongest indicator yet, that people, not parties, and certainly not these grotesque billionaires, are handling this attack on America.

I say it is about damn time.

The quality of the candidate, not the quantity of cash in their bank accounts will get this done. The American electorate is energized, in our streets, and are doing a heroic job of handling this.

So now some caveats, so I can save time later responding to inevitable pushback that will sound something like this:

-Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, Earl ...
-Don’t pay attention to the past, concentrate on the future, and vote like you never have before …
-Trump will do everything he can to make sure we don’t vote in November, and if we do will get his fat little hands on our election apparatus to try to change the results.

I concede and endorse the first two points, but want to close out by addressing the third:

Trump will do whatever he can to throw a three-ton monkey wrench into the midterms. He is not even hiding it.

It is inevitable … and we need to make good and damn sure that everybody knows what this lowlife is trying to do, so that when he does it, we can slam his fat, little hand in the cookie jar.

Just Monday, while giving a slobbery, low-energy interview on failing Don Bongino’s idiotic, rightwing bro-cast, Trump said this — one failed public servant to another:

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

This is hardly the first time Stupid Putin has wandered into these fascist waters. He is seeing the same election results we are, and is panicking.

-Instead of doing a course-correction, and working to lower prices, he is raising them with his moronic tariffs …

-Instead of getting his masked murdering thugs out of our cities, he is doubling down and defending them …

-Instead of defending the United States and aligning with our allies, he is atttacking them …

The old, and quickly diminishing Trump is going full Mussolini, because he has no idea how to govern or build coalitions. He has been a complete, unmitigated failure, and every day more and more Americans see it.

It is our job to continue to get loud, and demand better. It’s our job to do everything we can to make good and damn sure everybody is aware of our successes, and of the Blue Tsunami that is most assuredly coming in November.

Because when Democrats are controlling everything but that rotten White House in nine months, it will have happened because everybody knew good and damn well it was inevitable.

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 don’t like these polls that ask if we simply “approve or disapprove” of the job Donald Trump is doing. These words just seem wildly inadequate in this case.

So today I’d like to speak to (and for) the 60 percent or so of us Americans who not only “disapprove” of Trump, but see him at bare minimum as dangerous, grotesque and revolting.

We have our reasons, and they have merit. We refuse to be gaslighted and still know good from evil.

Before I climb on my soapbox and preach a bit more deeply about this, I wish everybody could understand just how difficult it is to share our country with the 40 percent or so of Americans who “approve” of this one-man plague on the world.

This still positively blows our minds, and is why we ask this question all the time:

“How can ANYBODY support THIS?????”

This has been going on for 11 years, and I bet I ask myself that question 13 times a day. I know that some people ask this question hundreds of times a day, because there is no way this makes sense to any rational, caring person.

It’s also a little confusing to the rational thinkers why our legacy media spends so much time with MAGA and so little with us. They write stories like this: “We visited a Pennsylvania diner and talked to 13 people who voted for Trump, and this is what they are telling us now.”

I hate these stories, but I admit I sometimes read them. Many of the people featured in these cheap pieces are ignorant, uninformed, and complete strangers to the truth.

I’m not being mean here, I’m just being accurate.

And these people are never asked the right questions that might help the rest of us understand their derangement, and lust to vote against their interests like this one:

“What does it say about you that you support, and in many cases, love such a provably vile, and disgusting person?”

We need to hear the answer to this question.

And why don’t they come to my hometown in Madison, Wisconsin, and interview 13 of us who didn’t vote for Trump? That would make for some colorful copy.

I guess this fixation on talking to Trump voters originated in 2017 during the first year of his first term when the entire country wasn't completely gaslighted yet, and it was fair to wonder how a man who is so singularly racist and vile had captured a political party, and won the presidency.

Leading up to the vote, most of the Republican Party was wondering the same thing. Right, Lindsey Graham?

This was Sen. Graham (R-S.C.) in 2016:

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

After all, Trump had mocked the disabled, openly asked for Russia’s help and got it, spoke about women in disgusting, degrading terms, denigrated Gold Star families, called for his opponent to be locked up, and had his racist dog whistle replaced 123 times on the campaign trail, because it kept clogging with his never-ending stream of hateful bile.

Ten years later, this has all been normalized, even as it has gotten so much worse — so bad in fact, that a lot of that very same legacy media now work for Trump.

We are now into the stage of our transformation from Democracy to fascism where the media who don’t work for Trump are being arrested.

This would have been impossible to imagine 11 years ago.

So …

“How can ANYBODY support THIS?????”

I am being driven mad by this question, and if I can’t get an answer to it, I want the vulgar people who do support this heinous man to know why we will never stop asking it.

Because at the end of the day, it’s really not Trump who is the problem, it is his disgusting supporters. Without them, he’s nothing, which might be the most maddening thing of all.

Just this morning I learned that the newly released Epstein Files contain more than 4,500 documents that mention Trump in an investigation where children and young woman were brutalized, raped and tortured.

That number is climbing by the hour and is absolutely staggering.

Trump’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein’s torture ring makes him at best a lowlife who repeatedly rubs shoulders with the very worst people among us, and at worst a violent pedophile.

We already know that Trump is a serial abuser of women, which in one case a judge called rape. We already know that he has slept with many women while married and used campaign funds to pay for their silence. We already know he has called women all manner of vulgar names.

We already know that Trump doesn’t respect women, he positively hates them.

So I’ll ask again:

“How can ANYBODY support THIS?????”

And before I keep going, here’s another question the 60-percenters wonder about: Why do all these so-called Christians love him so? I mean gobs of them.

I haven’t been to church in a while, but I am certain Jesus didn’t call women vile names, or hurt and grab them wherever and whenever he wanted simply because he thought he could.

It really bothers us that people who throw the Bible at us support a man who should be rotting in hell.

And what about all his lying? Again, not something Jesus endorsed the way I understand it.

As I type this, Trump has told in the vicinity of 100,000 lies since bursting on the political scene in 2015. The Washington Post had it at 30,573 after his first term alone.

Can we pause for a second and at least consider this prodigious number?

He somehow lies more each day than we ask the question:

“How can ANYBODY support THIS?????”

Consider George Washington chopped down his father’s beloved cherry tree as a child and couldn’t live with himself, because he couldn’t tell a single lie.

Well, Trump has singlehandedly clear-cut a 10,000-acre swath of the Allegheny National Forest with his forked tongue, and never apologized for any of it.

So another question: Why, after Trump says anything — anything at all — aren’t we reminded that he is simply incapable of telling the truth?

Seems important. It’s good journalism. Context. A guy who never tells the truth can never be believed. Readers and viewers should be reminded of that all the time.

It was all that lying after all that led to his casual stroll with treason ...

After losing the 2020 election by 7 million-plus votes, he lied that he won. This is now known as The Big Lie.

That lie got so big and bad that it led to violence and an attempted coup. Law enforcement officers were beaten to a pulp, our Capitol building was pummeled and damaged, his vice president threatened with hanging, our Speaker threatened with murder, and Trump told the people who did all of this that “he loved them.”

Somehow, Trump was not convicted for the worst assault on our Capitol since 1812, for reasons that make my blood boil, but that still makes him at best the most dangerous liar in American history, and at worst a stone-cold traitor.

These days, he is raiding election offices in Georgia, just to let us know, that next time he will find enough votes, by simply incinerating the ones he doesn’t like.

“How can ANYBODY support THIS?????”

Which takes us at long last to the never-ending racism, and what may well be the answer to that burning question ...

I have theorized for some time now it is his not-so-secret poisonous sauce — the glue that holds it all together for the diehard 40-percenters.

Trump says and does the awful things they think, so they don’t have to, and they positively love him for it.

He’s their garbage man.

In exchange for their abiding love and money, he collects the very worst inside them, and dumps it all over the rest of us. There is nothing he won’t say and nothing he won’t do.

Innocent people are being shot dead in our streets by his masked government agents, and children are being rounded up and shoved away in God knows where.

Except Trump and his supporters’ bigotry is not going unanswered.

Thousands are in those streets bravely defying these blood-thirsty scoundrels, and standing up for what is most certainly good and right.

They are peacefully pushing back in the bone-chilling cold, and letting the entire world know that America the beautiful is not dead yet.

They are the very best of us, and as we battle our way through this, and try to hold onto our democratic freedoms, maybe a different, more proactive question needs to be asked over and over again:

“How can ANYBODY not support THEM?????”

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.

Both of my daughters live in the United Kingdom. That makes me one of the luckiest and unluckiest dads in the world.

My girls are married to a pair of blokes from sturdy Northeast England, who I can’t help but love with all my heart. And believe me, I looked for every reason not to, because when a dad’s daughter is to be married, her partner better love her more than he loves himself, or else …

I don’t see my daughters, who have dual citizenships, or their top-ranked husbands near as much as I’d like, which is the part that makes me unlucky. That these days, they are safe and far away from one of the most dangerous countries in the world makes me lucky.

America is no place for smart, tough, kind-hearted souls like my daughters.

My youngest daughter, and her husband I can’t help but love, are due for a visit in April, but we are in the middle of a discussion that I never thought possible before Nov. 8, 2016, when hate blew a hole through America’s shrinking heart, and I saw for myself just how sick we had become.

As this hate tries to overwhelm us, we are talking about putting off this visit. I am deeply, deeply depressed, and angry as hell it has gotten to this point.

Here is part of what daughter, Kristin, dashed off to me in a missive Tuesday:

“… I wouldn’t have visited Germany in 1939, and I don’t really want to give any of my money to America at the moment. It feels weird to visit a country that’s literally murdering their citizens in broad daylight with no repercussions and that has detention centres (concentration camps). It feels morally extremely tricky. It just feels horrific to pop over to an awful place that stands against a lot of the stuff I stand for.”

“An awful place that stands against a lot of the stuff I stand for …”

She’s right about every bit of that, and it kills me to say it, because I miss her so bad my heart hurts. Maybe if she’d unsubscribe from my work she wouldn’t see things so damn clearly.

I’m joking of course, because no matter what I’m banging on about here, there are millions and millions of others around the globe like Kris who see very clearly what is happening in America right now.

History is still an important subject in places like Europe and the UK, and history is what should be ringing in our ears right now, because it can instruct where we are and where we must go, or else ...

Trump and his fascist Republican Party are soulless, evil ghouls who are setting the stage to break us for good. If you can somehow forget their recent murders, then simply consider their absurd stands against vaccines, science, foreign aid, domestic aid, clean air and water, books, voting rights, human rights, affordable healthcare, NATO, and the truth.

The truth is, America deserves to be shunned by anybody with a beating heart.

While we’ve never been the great nation many of those GOP ghouls want you to believe, you’d be hard-pressed to point to a time in recent memory that we’ve been this distinctively rotten.

And here’s more truth: I can’t stand many of the poisoned people I share this country with. They are dangerous, and sicken me to the core.

After the first Trump iteration ended with his violent coup attempt, I hoped there was still a chance we could pick up the broken pieces and glue them together again. I hoped that maybe after the treasonous assault that billions of people across the world witnessed on TV, Republicans would acknowledge their massive mistake, and join the rest of us who believe in the rule of law. I hoped they would join us in doing everything to make sure that kind of high-test evil never happened again.

Not only couldn’t they do that much, they doubled down with their endless supply of bile, and now seem intent on finishing us off no matter what. There are no lines left they won’t cross. They are led by a devil, who has never apologized for any one of the thousands of truly gruesome things he has done over the course of his miserable life.

I gave up on them when they gave up on decency.

There’s no meeting in the middle when one of the two major parties have thrown themselves at the feet of the most dangerous man in the world since Adolph Hitler.

While creeping up to this terrible place over the decades with illegal wars for profit, and double-talk on the environment, America has finally officially reached the point where it no longer enjoys the benefit of the doubt from the rest of the world.

This is an incredibly sad and dangerous place to be, because isolating ourselves from our neighbors doesn’t make us stronger, it makes us weaker. It doesn’t make us smarter, it makes us dumber. It doesn’t broaden our horizons, it cages us in ignorance.

Our longtime allies have had enough of us, and will no longer believe us when we say it can never happen here, because they can so clearly see the worst has already arrived, even if too damn many people who should know better still won’t see it.

Through Revolutionary wars, Civil wars, World wars and illegal wars, America still tenuously hung onto its diminishing reputation as a force for good. We used to fight against fascism, not embrace it. Thousands have gone to their graves in our righteous wars fighting for what used to be America’s greatest ideals. You’ll find many of their graves stretched out one after another in proud, uniformed white lines on so many battlefields in Europe …

Joe Biden did everything he could to restore order and America’s place among its worldly friends, but there were just too damn many people intent on destroying us from within to allow that to happen.

Day after day, Republicans and their slobbery, lifeless billionaires have been attacking America with a vigor, and for the life of me, I can’t understand how the hell everybody here can’t see this.

You don’t starve your populace of life-saving medicine, science, and programs that help them, if you really care about them.

It’s no wonder South Carolina is now dealing with the largest measles outbreak in the United States since we declared that disease eliminated more than two decades ago.

Truly sickening.

I won’t turn this column off before acknowledging that Europe and UK are not as pure as wind-driven snow, either. They have bloodthirsty, racist far-Right political elements that hang around those places like the measles. They are beating them back, however, and standing together.

These terrible days, however, they are doing that without our help which would be bad enough, except we are also going out of our way to make everything just as hard as possible.

Because that’s what fascist, low-class bullies do, while winking at Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who positively delights in all this.

I spent many years living overseas for most of George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, which was punctuated by that damn war in Iraq. I did my best to explain to my friends and colleagues in the Far East and Europe that many Americans opposed that illegal atrocity.

Some gave me the benefit of the doubt. Others were rightfully suspicious. When Barack Obama was elected I was finally able to puff out my chest, and get some of the doubters off my back.

That was a long time ago now, and things have gotten considerably worse.

America is burning, and intent on taking everybody down with us.

I am still hoping I will see my daughter in April, but I have a hard time telling her that staying as far away as possible right now isn’t the prudent course.

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.

Today is the saddest most depressing day in America since Nov. 5, 2024, when anybody with a brain in their head or a heart in their chest knew what was most assuredly coming.

Somehow that didn’t include myriad universities, corporations, media outlets, and even members of the opposition party, who surrendered to this murdering fascist regime almost before it got going, thus greasing the skids for this homegrown national emergency.

I hold them in contempt, and will do everything possible to make sure these cowardice sellouts pay for their betrayal.

And about that media … Try as I might, I just couldn’t get through the newspapers this morning.

I know what I saw on my screen on that frigid Minneapolis street Saturday. There are in fact two sides to this story: The right side and the wrong side. I have heard more than enough from the latter side to last one-hundred-and-fifty lifetimes.

If you are still covering Donald Trump as anything but a violent, lying lowlife you have no credibility. And if you have no credibility you are worthless as a news source.

If you are looking for the truth simply start believing your eyes, dammit.

Our government — let me type that again — OUR GOVERNMENT has been infiltrated by billionaires and well-paid racists to pull OUR money away from funding good and necessary things like healthcare, daycare, and clean air and water, to pay for murder in our streets, and control over US.

They are doing whatever they damn well want, ignoring the law, and crushing dissent.

This is called fascism.

And because we are dealing with a fascist regime, our so-called “Justice” Department has exactly one client, and it isn’t the United States of America. Their client is a despicable, 79-year-old America-attacking thug, who’s deader on the inside than he is on the outside, and fears only one thing more than the truth: our vote.

Because that more than anything is what all this is about, and we must shout that out.

Trump and his murdering regime are readying their burning playing field to make it so Americans cannot do the most democratic there is this November by walking into a voting booth and deciding who we want to work for us.

If you are not seeing this being reported this way turn off that newsfeed and be done with them forever. Time is too short to deal with this dangerous nonsense any longer.

Fact is, we are an isolated country jammed tight between two oceans, and employ the biggest, most lethal military in the world, and enough bullets among our civilian populace to kill everybody in the entire world, and still have billions, and billions of rounds left over.

We are not a great a country, and never have been. We are country that aspires to greatness, but right now is falling flat. On this frigid Sunday afternoon, America has never been uglier or weaker in my long lifetime, because in addition to all those surrendering institutions I mentioned above, too damn many people just don’t give a good goddamn either way.

As I pointed out in my wide-ranging piece Thursday, (which I’ll be honest with you feels like three works ago), these are the people I loathe most of all. If you don’t care about the hell that is going down right now kindly haul your a-- on out of here, because you are not needed.

Look, I am not here today to make you feel worse — I reckon that would be impossible — but I am here to acknowledge your pain, anger and fear. We all need a place to hang all that, and this is as good a place as any I can think of.

I’m depressed and angry, sure, but I’m not going anywhere. I will fight these b------- with all I got, and will be here when we get to the other side.

Because WE WILL get to the other side, good people.

Politics as usual will not get us out of this mess because it is politics as usual that got us into it. Trump’s threat has somehow been underestimated by too damn many for too damn long.

But not by you.

No, you have known all along what would happen if this lawless son of a b---- got another crack at finishing off what he started on January 6, 2021.

We all watched that, too, and now because nothing was done about it by people we put our trust in, we are watching this happen all over again as the same damn man and his same damn thugs are murdering innocent people in our streets right now.

As we figure our way out of this, because we have to figure our way out of this, everybody needs to know this for sure right now:

We were right about all of it, and it’s about damn time everybody started listening to 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.

Stars and Stripes is an editorially independent newspaper that serves the troops and their families overseas.

News this past week that President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are considering interfering with this newspaper’s congressionally mandated mission to provide a paper to the troops free of any interference from outside the newspaper’s editorial chain of command should concern all Americans.

Any unlawful intrusion of this newspaper’s crucial mission would be a detriment to the military readers it serves, and anti-American in nature. Stripes has never been the military’s newspaper. It is the military’s hometown newspaper that reports on the military for the military, and is supplemented with the same stateside news they would expect from any other editorially independent newspaper.

The paper is a non-appropriated fund entity and receives approximately a third of its operating budget from the Pentagon with the rest coming from other sources such as advertising, single-copy sales, and online subscriptions.

Stripes reporters are with the troops during war and peace, and experts on their subject matter. There are countless examples over the years of the paper reporting on important issues that have resulted in positive change for its readers.

Its award-winning 2003 Ground Truth series reporting on conditions on the ground in Iraq alerted military leadership of troops’ concerns in that theater of war.

From that reporting:

“With so many voices clamoring for attention, Stripes decided to try to find out what the ground truth was in Iraq. What were the concerns troops had as they watched their mission change from storming Baghdad to patrolling it? Were things as bad as some servicemembers said? Were conditions as good as others said?”

What Stripes discovered in their reporting led to bipartisan action in Congress to address our troops’ concerns.

I am calling on Congress to once again reassert the importance of Stars and Stripes as it did when Trump went down this perilous road in his first term. Trump correctly reversed course, and posted this on social media channels at the time:

“(Stripes) will continue to be a wonderful source of information to our Great Military!”

He was as right then as he is wrong now.

While I haven’t set foot in the Stripes newsroom in 17 years, I still believe it to be the most important newspaper in America serving its most important readers. It is a lasting symbol of our country’s occasional capacity to flash greatness.

It is detestable that Trump and Hegseth do not believe our troops deserve a newspaper that advocates for them and their families. It is truly sad they don’t believe our brave troops deserve the same rights, information and freedoms as every other American.

Stripes has been a part of the fabric of this country since the Civil War. It is as American as apple pie. It has survived many decades before this administration came along, and it is crucial it is still around long after it is gone.

D. Earl Stephens, United States Navy Veteran, and Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes, 1999-2009

Disclosure: AlterNet Publisher & Editor-in-Chief Roxanne Cooper served as Stars & Stripes' Director of Advertising and Marketing at their Tokyo facility from 2002-2003 and at their Washington, DC headquarters from 2003-2004.

As I type this from the battleground of Madison, Wisconsin, America and our allies are under steady attack by a 79-year-old, deranged felon with mommy issues, a nuclear arsenal at his disposal, and a gutless Republican Party which is leading from the vicinity of his fat behind …

It’s all about Trump all the time, because the foul-mouthed lout has beaten most of our legacy media, universities, corporations, military, and his subservient weaklings in his pathetic party into submission.

A racist, un-evolved moron, who lies as he breathes, has done all that.

Who says America isn’t the land of opportunity?

It’s even worse of course, because fully 60 percent of America positively hates his guts, and spend hours each day seething as the old man-child snorts, sneers, and destroys for profit as much of our 249-year-old history as he can get his fat, little, purple hands on.

He’s dead on the inside, but reflexively knows just where to go on the outside to drive us all crazy, and America into the swamp he’s always whining about.

Right now the dead-inside man is in Davos, Switzerland, insulting as many of our allies as possible, before he gets his weekly report card from Putin, and the billionaire oil slicks, who are making all this mayhem possible.

We’re just citizens trying to save our country. He’s using the power of our government to destroy it.

It’s a wonder we all haven't died of our rage, which I am quite certain is a part of his diabolical plan. He thrives among the chaos, the lies, the murders, the hate, the vindictiveness, the rapes, and the carnage. He can never get enough. So he presses ahead each day always going lower — always searching out our pain points to exploit them, and really rub it in.

Most human beings aren’t programmed that way. His unlimited capacity to inflict hurt disorients us, and feeds his blood-thirsty party. Murdering a mother in cold blood in the middle of the street, and watching as it is celebrated by millions of our fellow citizens isn’t something decent people can properly process.

Lynchings like these were supposed to be a thing of the past in America. Now an entire political party holds them up as a return to “greatness.”

Don’t you dare tell me both sides are the same …

Then there are your friends and families who support all this. Turns out they are broken in ways we never imagined. “Was he always a racist?” “Does she really believe Trump is acting in anybody’s interests but his own?” “Does he really believe Jan. 6 was OK …?”

With the insidious help of state-run, right-wing propaganda they are living in a reality that might as well be two galaxies removed from your own. Try as you might, you can’t reach them.

It’s terrible it really is, because we know now, they are never coming back. Everybody makes a mistake once, but three times is criminal intent.

And speaking about intention … How about the selfish people who don’t bother to pay any attention at all …?

They defiantly say things like, “I got enough going on without paying attention to politics.” Or the dreaded, “They’re all the same.” Or, “I just can’t deal with this. You are ruining my happy place by talking about it.”

They busy themselves in their bubbles, leaving the rest of us in the cold to deal with this catastrophic free-fall back toward the 1850s.

I would like to strangle these people, I really would. Many of them know better, because they understand what happened in Europe in the 1930s, which makes their gross inaction that much more intolerable, and inexcusable.

So that’s where we are right now, good people, but it’s not exactly where we’ve been the past year ...

Yes, we have seen a few things, but our actions spoke louder than our words in 2025.

In fact, the opposition to Trump and his sheer madness had one helluva year striking back against the evil empire. The truly good and decent people in America poured their hearts out, took to our streets and our ballot boxes, and did what they could to fight past their mental anguish. They crawled over those do-nothings who litter our lives, and exacted many beatings on the regime that means to end us.

Democrats flipped 21 percent of all the GOP-held legislative seats that were on the ballot throughout 2025.

The Republicans, on the other hand, flipped exactly zero Democratically held seats.

Let me type that again: The Republicans flipped ZERO seats.

This rebuttal to pure evil is even stronger than the one we experienced in 2017 in the wake of Trump’s first win, when Democrats flipped 20 percent of all GOP-held legislative seats up for election. The following year’s epic Blue Wave saw Democrats gain 40 seats in Congress, flip seven governorships, and significantly eroded Republicans’ huge advantage in the Senate, all but putting the ghastly Trump in check.

The opposition has never been stronger, but this time is being led by the boots on the ground, instead of the empty suits in Congress. That’s a key distinction, but more on that in just a few.

On Tuesday, New Jersey Democrat Mikie Sherrill was inaugurated to be that state’s 57th governor. Sherrill absolutely battered the Trump-endorsed candidate last November. Like Abigail Spanberger’s smashing victory in the governor’s race in Virginia, it signals a Blue Tsunami that is most assuredly coming the Republicans’ way this November.

And while I am rallying here, let me duck in a quick, Go Navy! Sherrill was a Navy helicopter pilot, who bravely served her country, unlike the burnt-orange draft-dodger who attacked it.

It might not feel like it, but there are millions of veterans like myself, who know the difference between people who truly love and care about their country like Sherrill, and people who use and abuse our country like Trump.

We all need to make ourselves heard, because we understand good and damn well the oath we took, even if too many in today’s military leadership don’t.

Now let me quickly address what you are no doubt thinking: Trump and his Orcs are going to try to interfere with this year’s elections, or shut them down altogether to prevent that Blue Tsunami from coming ashore.

It’s a legitimate worry, and why we need to talk openly and honestly about it, instead of kicking it aside as folly. There’s been too much denialism on a host of fronts from the Democratic Party for my liking.

Trump and his party are evil, and will do every single thing they can to destroy us. Unless we are operating under that assumption, and are prepared to do everything we can to stop it, we can never prevail.

On Tuesday, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was asked by NPR if she thought pro-Trump forces would attempt to interfere with November’s elections.

Here’s what she said:

"It would be a mistake to assume that they're not going to. So I don't know precisely what it is that they might come up with. But we've got smart, sophisticated, savvy people around the table that we will continue to get prepared."

Asked about fears that Trump’s immigration crackdown — deploying thousands of masked thugs into American cities — would become a tool for controlling elections, Whitmer said this:

“I don’t think it’s paranoia to have that concern.”

She said Democratic governors are discussing how to respond, and performing “table top” exercises, though she gave few specifics. “There are important reasons that I’m not going to go into a whole lot more detail.”

That’s chilling, yes, but it is also an opposition party that is slowly starting to understand the stakes. There can be no more warming our hands in front of the fire and welcoming fascists back to our White House. No more pretending that all this will just fade away by employing politics as usual.

Because THAT’S what we were getting from most Democrats in the wake of that terrible November, 2024 election.

This is the most dangerous time in America since the Civil War, and anybody who won’t acknowledge at least that much isn’t worth our time or treasure.

We need fighters, not fawners.

We need people like Sherrill, and Spanberger who know the stakes, and will do everything with the power we have given them to fight for us, and help protect America from itself. These impressive women won because they listened to us.

We the people have more power than we know, and it’s time we made good and damn sure everybody remembers that.

So far, our resurgence has been a people-led revolt, which the Democratic Party Machine has had very little to do with. We have done all this despite the party, not because of it.

We have demanded change, and are leading from the front.

When the calendar turned in 2025, our Democratic “leadership” did nothing but re-elect basically the same people to power who were walloped in 2024.

This is absolute madness.

Chuck Schumer in the Senate, and Hakeem Jeffries in the House survived the massacre, and shortly after Ken Martin took the helm at the hapless DNC.

This very well might be the most uninspiring leadership team ever assembled anywhere for anything. Schumer with his strongly worded letters; Jeffries with his monotone, calculated robotics; Martin so transparent you can see right through him ...

Inspiring leaders like Zoran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race were left out in the cold by fellow New Yorkers Schumer and Jeffries, the latter of which only endorsed him when it no longer mattered. The worthless Schumer couldn’t even be bothered to do that much.

Tell me you’re completely bought off without telling me you are completely bought off.

Through it all, Mamdani prevailed, because it turns out people are craving bold, brave leadership, not more of the same old bull---- from the stale leadership in the Democratic Party.

Mamdani is a generational political talent, and won because he has vision, is not afraid to speak truth to power, and stands for what is most certainly good and right. You can do that when you don’t come off as scripted, boring phonies, who are worried about offending donors, Hakeem and Chuck.

The top of the party feels old, tired and out of touch. You know it, and I know it. So what’s taken so damn long for THEM to know it?

Voters are mad and they aren’t taking it anymore. Out with the old and in with the new. These damn parties and all their money have gotten too big in America. Citizens United saw to that. Now its time for the citizens to truly be united and take it to the man, and never stop taking it to him.

The next 10 months will be the most important time in American history. If we don’t charge past whatever might be standing in our way and vote in obscene numbers, it is is very fair to say we will never get another chance.

But if we do this right, and WE lead as I know we can, there will be an epic wipeout of the Republican Party in November that will be too big for even them to ignore. The 80-year-old, quickly diminishing Trump will be weaker than he’s ever been, and his party will be a fractured mess scurrying to find the nearest hole.

They will be the past.

The future will be ours.

So we make it so.

Power to the people.

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

We are in the middle of a national emergency.

Anybody who has the guts, decency, and love of country to pay attention to what is happening in America right now knows this.

While burning the midnight oil (gin) Thursday evening, and unzipping one horrid story after another exposing yet more terror from inside the anti-American regime in our White House, I wanted to be absolutely sure that all the hell we are witnessing is what we think it is.

It is important to be precise about what we are up against, so we can effectively counter it with the necessary heft, and tactics.

So I clicked into my favorite browser and typed in these three words:

What is fascism?

Here is what appeared on my screen thanks to AI that is quickly overrunning our increasingly dumbed-down, and numb society:

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian political ideology and movement characterized by extreme nationalism, a strong centralized government led by a dictator, suppression of opposition, militarism, and prioritizing the nation or race above the individual. It promotes social hierarchy, often racism, and severe economic and social control, opposing liberal democracy and individualism while often aligning with powerful business interests.

Here is the Miriam-Webster definition for the sticklers out there:

Fascism : a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition

Yep. It really is that bad right now, people.

Some Americans will know Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Germany’s Adolf Hitler, and Spain’s Francisco Franco were all murdering fascists that the United States once bravely burned lives and treasure to help stop dead in their tracks.

These days, Russia’s Vladimir Putin most prominently carries the fascist banner, while dragging his orange puppet in tow, the America-attacking Donald Trump. Under Trump’s fascist regime, America has joined Russia with big talk of attacking NATO countries instead of defending them.

This should be absolutely incomprehensible.

But you’ve read this far and still somehow aren’t convinced Trump and his party are fascists … Or, there are certain increasingly dangerous people in your life who consume nothing but state-run propaganda like Fox, and never believe a single word you say anymore.

Well, I suggest you send them what I will type next, so they can never say they weren’t warned or complicit in this ongoing attack on America.

Diving into deeper waters researching this piece, I came across a list headlined Characteristics of Fascism. I had seen this before in passing, but am now happy to attribute it to New Hampshire’s Keene State College. And an aside: I lived in Maine for several years, and was always envious of neighboring New Hampshire’s state motto: Live Free or Die.

That has never been more relevant than it is today.

Anyway, here is the list that defines fascism from the good people at Keene:

• Powerful, often exclusionary, populist nationalism centered on cult of a redemptive, “infallible” leader who never admits mistakes.
• Political power derived from questioning reality, endorsing myth and rage, and promoting lies.
• Fixation with perceived national decline, humiliation, or victimhood.
• White Replacement “Theory” used to show that democratic ideals of freedom and equality are a threat. Oppose any initiatives or institutions that are racially, ethnically, or religiously harmonious.
• Disdain for human rights while seeking purity and cleansing for those they define as part of the nation.
• Identification of “enemies”/scapegoats as a unifying cause. Imprison and/or murder opposition and minority group leaders.
• Supremacy of the military and embrace of paramilitarism in an uneasy, but effective collaboration with traditional elites. Fascists arm people and justify and glorify violence as “redemptive”.
• Rampant sexism.
• Control of mass media and undermining “truth”.
• Obsession with national security, crime and punishment, and fostering a sense of the nation under attack.
• Religion and government are intertwined.
• Corporate power is protected and labor power is suppressed.
• Disdain for intellectuals and the arts not aligned with the fascist narrative.
• Rampant cronyism and corruption. Loyalty to the leader is paramount and often more important than competence.
• Fraudulent elections and creation of a one-party state.
• Often seeking to expand territory through armed conflict.

Chilling, no?

This defines the fascist Republican Party to a T. It should be sent out far and wide to everybody you know — mostly the ignorants and those in denial — and pinned to your refrigerator with this subject line:

Fascism isn’t coming to America, it is here.

Republicans’ brutal attack on Minnesota is just the latest chilling example of the fascism that washed ashore on Nov. 5, 2024, when tens of millions of disgraceful Americans couldn’t be bothered to vote. Innocent wives are being gunned down in our streets by Trump’s paramilitary group, ICE, which is comprised of lawless, jackboot thugs, many of whom were last seen attacking our Capitol in 2021.

They are no longer “standing back and standing by” as their thuggish leader ordered them to in the lead-up to the 2020 election. They are in our personal business and violently coming for our freedom.

Except now, of course, these lowlifes are wearing the very masks they loathed during the killer pandemic their orange leader lied about during that terrifying chapter of American history.

Armed groups like this are also hallmarks of fascist regimes.

Trump, America’s most notorious insurrectionist, is almost sure to invoke the Insurrection Act to finish off Minnesota, on his way to trying to finish off the rest of us.

This would allow the coward, who is a draft-dodger, to use our armed forces in conjunction with his paramilitary group to carry out law enforcement functions in our cities. They would usurp local law authority, and be used to make arrests, conduct searches, threaten citizenry, and generally kick the stuff out of anybody they deem a threat.

I believe this has been Trump’s goal from Day One of his fascist regime, and have written extensively about it. I typed these words the week following his election in 2024:

NOTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America.
EVERYTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America.

As a United States veteran who served to protect us from fascists like Trump, I would have paid anything to be wrong, but here we are.

Now let me lay something else on you that I fear I will also be right about: The use of these troops is only a start, because Trump’s real aim is to prevent any further free and fair elections in America.

He will do everything with the unlimited powers his bought-off Supreme Court has given him to prevent this year’s midterm elections. There is not a single thing I have seen from the lawless, felon Trump that allows me to form any other conclusion.

Fascist Republicans have been getting hammered in election after election since 2024, and know full well they are all but certain to lose control of Congress if Americans are allowed to do the most Democratic thing there is this November: VOTE.

Expect Trump to continue to attack other cities in the coming months using the fascist Minnesota playbook to ‘discourage’ people from showing up at the polls, or by simply declaring a national emergency and stopping the vote altogether.

Just last week, Trump stated that he erred in not seizing voting machines after the 2020 election, and his 7-million vote loss to Joe Biden. That, of course, subsequently lead to his violent insurrection attempt, and the Big Lie that still hangs over America like gray, Moscow smog.

Then there’s this excerpt from an unhinged interview with Reuters published Thursday afternoon:

The president expressed frustration that his Republican Party could lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate in this year’s midterm elections, citing historical trends that have seen the party in power lose seats in the second year of a presidency.
“It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

It’s fair to assume Trump will do everything possible to prevent any further elections in America. Will he succeed? Well, a lot of that has to do with us, and how we proceed in the coming days and months.

Our legacy media, with notable exceptions, has proven itself close to worthless in covering and defining the greatest threat to America since the Civil War. Many of the media companies that inhabit this shrinking space still can’t even call Trump a liar, much less a fascist.

And what of the leadership in the Democratic opposition?

Are they up to the task?

Are they up to doing whatever is necessary to stand up for us, and protect us from this fascist threat?

Millions of us have been in the streets the past year. Are our leaders listening to us?

I’ll just ask this question outright: Are Chuck Schumer, Ken Martin and Hakeem Jeffries really the best leaders we have to deal with this threat?

If you have your doubts, now is the time to make your voices heard and demand better, because we will not get a second crack at this. Once we lose our right to vote, and our Democratic freedoms they will most likely be gone for good in our lifetimes.

Now that we know what we are up against, we must do everything we can to stand against it, and demand better.

Live free or die.

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.

Truth is under siege in America, good people, because without it there can be no justice — which is just how the most notorious crook and liar in United States history wants it.

In Donald Trump’s grotesque and larcenous mind, free and fair elections cannot be believed. Violent coup attempts we all watched on TV never happened. Mothers being murdered in cold blood in our streets by masked marauders are perpetrators, not victims. Vaccines that have saved millions of lives are actually unhealthy, and not to be trusted. The worst job numbers in 22 years are not to be believed ...

Up is down.

(Renee) Good is bad.

It is a lot to take.

Since bursting on the political scene with all the subtlety of the Bubonic plague 11 years ago, Trump has told tens of thousands of lies and mistruths. The Washington Post pegged it at a staggering 30,573 at the end of his first term.

That works out to just shy of 21 lies per day — and these are just the lies we know about, and can drastically affect our daily lives.

Can you imagine how much this guy lies on the golf course?

That violent coup attempt, which was the worst attack on our Capitol since 1812, was spearheaded by his Big Lie, which he refuses to stop telling because it is the gasoline that helps to keep his hellish fires raging in his quest to incinerate our Democracy.

Trump’s lying isn’t a part of the story, it is the story, and amid all the chaos and pain he is eagerly bringing us, we are becoming dangerously close to forgetting that.

U.S. President Donald Trump and lady Melania Trump depart for travel to Texas to tour areas affected by deadly flash flooding, from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 11, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

U.S. President Donald Trump and lady Melania Trump depart for travel to Texas to tour areas affected by deadly flash flooding, from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 11, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstU.S. President Donald Trump and lady Melania Trump depart for travel to Texas to tour areas affected by deadly flash flooding, from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 11, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

We simply cannot trust the President of the United States of America, and the ramifications of that are terrifying.

Trump is a provably terrible, terrible person. This is beyond dispute and something called a fact:

• He has repeatedly verbally and physically abused women.
• He is a proud racist, who has received endorsements from the KKK, myriad white supremacist groups, and murderers like Vladimir Putin.
• He has stolen from charities, and belittled the disabled, and Gold Star families.

The list of truly terrible things he has said and done is endless, but rather than taking up too much of your time rubbing all our faces in his bile, I’ll ask this question:

Why aren’t so many of these things, but mostly the fact that he is an incessant liar, not included in every single story or report about the most dangerous man in the world, and/or his army of fascist enablers in the Republican Party?

This was the crux of my latest piece, in which I grabbed the New York Times by its starched, white lapels and tried to shake some damn sense into them, and the amateurs running their newsroom.

In that piece, I argued that every time our legacy media turns around a meaty story on this grotesque man without mentioning those terrible things, they are doing their readers, viewers, and listeners a disservice.

It is vital background information and context that must be in the reporting about this vile man any time he is making one of his thousands of unsubstantiated claims.

Journalism is about getting at the truth, and then reporting it.

That’s it.

If you are going to report on what the president is telling you fine, but you damn sure better provide context to your reporting.

Just reporting, “Trump said this [fill in the unhinged claim here] on Tuesday,” won’t cut it, unless you also report that the claim is highly suspect because he can’t be counted on to provide the truth.

In fact: He is a liar. Nothing he says can be believed, even if occasionally he swerves into the truth.

Knowing this — and we do without a shadow of a doubt — this is how his claims should be reported: “Trump, who has told tens of thousands of lies and mistruths in the past ten years, made this claim on Tuesday …”

That is accurate reporting.

Any news organization that is not accurate, is not credible. Any news organization that is not credible is not worth anybody’s time.

I am not wrong about this.

Look, I don’t enjoy kicking the crap out of the New York Times like I did on Thursday, though it is my job to do so, when they are not doing their jobs.

At a time when partisan propaganda and lies clog our information highway and are destroying our country, we desperately need places like the New York Times to cut through it all and report the truth.

I don’t know a lot of things, but I do know journalism, and journalism has gone off to die at too many of the once-dependable places along that information highway.

God willing I intend to stay in this fight on behalf of the truth, and the United States of America, until my final breath. As a veteran, I owe the truth, my country, but mostly you at least that much.

Donald Trump is trying to make truth optional in America. If nobody can be believed, nothing can believed. If nothing can be believed, then the most notorious liar in American history will never be stopped.

Don’t stop telling the truth, patriots. We must cling to it and never let go.

Shout it out.

It is the only thing that will truly set us free.

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.