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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I reckon they’ll be reacquainted soon enough …

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

I haven’t been the same since.

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

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

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

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

Well, in November of 2016 we got our answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No them, no him.

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

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

Did they really think that little of America?

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

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

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

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

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

They are winning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incredibly, it was only the beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d bet against it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You could have quit, but here you are.

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

Truth from lies.

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

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

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

It has been a long 11 years …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is our fight, and we got this …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Champagne corks popped all across America.

That celebration lasted only 12 hours.

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

Pence was threatened with hanging.

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

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

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

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

It unforgivably never happened.

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

He told them that he loved them ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgia must be on all our minds right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grow into WHAT, Lindsey?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holy hell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here it is:

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

Read that again.

Anybody want to tell them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And about NATO:

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

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

Democrats can’t go on like this …

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

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

Anyway …

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

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

Two days later, the tyrant attacked them.

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

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

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

They are out of excuses.

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

Well, the dog finally caught the car in Maine.

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

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

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

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

Either you are from Maine or are from Away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or used to …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OVER.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are worried about the Democrats’ extreme positions.

Yep, I know …

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

I’ll wait.

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

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

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

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

That means they need to get with it PRONTO.

So let’s try this:

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

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

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

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

Every accusation is truly a confession.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Try this:

THE MANY WAYS TRUMP IS TRYING TO STEAL THE MIDTERMS

There, better.

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

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

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

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

But Democrats are “extreme” …

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

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

So one more time:

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

Please spread the word.

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

After many decades of inspiring exploration, the development of life-saving vaccines, social progress, and righteous wars against genocide and hate, America the not-so-beautiful is celebrating her 250th birthday Saturday with a lying, orange 80-year-old bigot in our White House, who hates science and reading, and is losing a war with algae.

It’s very disheartening, it really is …

There will be no celebrating around my house on Saturday, just thanks that the day only lasts 24 hours.

On our nation’s birthday we are being held up by a loathsome convicted felon who has made the most powerful city in the world look tiny and cheap, and exactly in his image.

We are the laughingstock of democracies around the world, and fascists’ favorite color.

Trump is everything we knew and feared he was, and Saturday for me will be just another day when I continue doing everything in my power to help rid ourselves of him and his repellent kind.

Independence from him (and them) is all I am interested in right now.

I have heard people make the plea not to let Trump and his America-attacking cult ruin this celebration of stubborn staying power, but the truth is 2026 was already ruined for me in 2024. That’s when America doubled down and repeatedly punched itself in the face in an absurd attempt to finish itself off for good.

When Trump was reelected, it was a brutal verification that 2016 wasn’t some cheap one-off, just a warmup act for our annihilation. Trump had once again acquired the most powerful military in the world, and this time was happy to let everybody know he was going to use it everywhere, including against Americans.

Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Washington and scores of other cities are under attack by the slobbery, draft-dodging coward, who has never served a single thing except himself.

He simply refused to go away after attacking our country on Jan. 6, 2021, and lurked everywhere like career abusers always do, just waiting for his chance to threaten and pounce on a victim who had the gall to push him away.

Joe Biden, along with Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, were unable to keep us safe from the greatest homegrown threat to America since the Civil War, and I have run out of words to lash out about that in complete disgust.

I wish Biden well, I really do, but when he welcomed Trump back to the White House in front of that crackling fire, it would have been fine if I never heard from him again.

That was the saddest day of all for me, because I knew for a fact I was played for a damn fool, and I am too old to suffer that kind of indignity. You get no second chances with me when it comes to loyalty, and I suppose that is a strength and a weakness.

But I know who I am, and what I stand for, and surrendering to hideous people like Trump isn’t one of them.

Even if I couldn’t think any less of my country on that sorry day it reaffirmed like never before that we the people have the power if only we’d use it. These money-inhaling political parties were only getting in our way to something better.

My sadness turned into righteous anger, and for all this hell we are dealing with by the hour, I am actually feeling pretty good about our chances of pulling our country out of the Republicans’ roaring fire.

We have found each other, picked ourselves up, and for the most part, have learned to verify before we so easily trust. I’m not much interested in how Democratic you are, only that we share a common goal of righting wrongs, and returning this country to the people who love it enough to fix its many ills instead of belligerently calling it great.

Most Democratic politicians were somehow slow to get this after our humiliating defeat in 2024, but many are coming around now, because they can feel our heat. The party overall is about as popular as Trump, and has a leader in the Senate who is even less so.

As an Independent I am not here to stomp on the Democratic Party, but I am here to help the party grow stronger, more diverse, and less stupid.

Right now as I type this — with the country staring at its most important elections ever — silly factions in the party are slapping each other around to see who can get a seat at the head of the kiddy table. They control nothing, and are proving it by having a pathetic food fight while the billionaires eat our lunch.

It is absolutely insane it really is, because nobody is completely right or wrong, but they better be completely against MAGA, which is the only thing that matters right now. Purity tests only help Trump muddy our waters, and nobody — I mean NOBODY — is dirtier than he is.

Look, if a centrist like Abigail Spanberger works for Virginia, I am happy to live with that. If a Democrat socialist like Zohran Mamdani works in NYC, right on. If Progressive Graham Platner can FINALLY rid us of the disgusting Susan Collins in Maine, you go, buddy. If a Christian like James Talarico can topple Texas, my ten-gallon hat’s off to him.

I am not Christian, socialist, progressive, or centrist, just an old Navy vet who wants to kick the Republicans’ a---- in November.

That the Left is still engaged in this petty, nuclear-powered idiocy is just too much to take. So a plea from the bottom of my heart and the pit of my roiling stomach:

KNOCK IT THE HELL OFF WITH THE DIVISIVENESS.

We need to get over ourselves. I have no idea of everything you want in a candidate, dear reader, but I am 100 percent sure I know what you don’t want: more Trump and his fascist regime.

So yeah, I’ve heard more than enough about July 4th, 2026, and want all the focus on November 3rd, when we will have a real opportunity to celebrate our independence.

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

As many of you know by now, I am busy settling into my new desk in my latest home state of North Carolina.

Settling in means changing licenses, license plates, utilities, insurance, and all the punishing bureaucratic stuff designed to make us scream out in pain. Nothing’s as easy as it should be, and I swear to God it is designed that way.

Leaving Wisconsin after 15 years also meant losing my loyal barber.

Ka was as good a guy as I have ever known, and did more with less than any barber in the world. How he turned that tangled mess on the top and sides of my head into something almost presentable I’ll never know.

He was also liberal as hell, which is important to me.

I am one of those people who simply will not give my money to anybody who supports the fascist regime that is wrecking America right now. I have a talent for sniffing these people out. I quickly work the sorry state of the United States into my initial conversation with a prospective contractor or business owner in the first two sentences of my interaction with them.

When they ask how I am doing I will tell them something along these lines, “Not good, man. We got a racist traitor in Washington who belongs in jail, and is instead wrecking our White House. So how are you doin’?”

Then I wait, and if they tiptoe around my rejoinder I point them in the general direction of the door.

Easy peasy.

I realize this isn’t a subtle approach, but New Jersey natives generally aren’t subtle people. Subtlety will only get you run over in the Garden State, where you learn at a young age that the shortest distance between two points is straight ahead.

So after getting scalped by two different wannabe barbers in my new home, I booked an appointment with a woman who came with a strong recommendation from my wife who successfully found a hairstylist who somehow makes her even prettier.

That’s when the sun came out.

I knew the minute I sat in the barber’s chair Nina was my kind of person. In fact she beat me to the punch, because when I gave her the Jersey, “How you doin’?” she answered this way, “I am just waiting to wake up on some beautiful morning and find out he’s gone …”

Yowza. (Unfortunately, he’s still here as of this writing.)

Turns out Nina’s done a lot of traveling like myself and ended up by the sea, because why wouldn’t you? She started her journeys in Northeastern Pennsylvania, though.

Pennsylvania used to be the Republicans’ great white whale. Every fours years they would get tantalizingly close to harpooning a presidential contest and putting the Keystone State’s generous haul of electoral votes in their column only to be left just short.

Democrat Ed Rendell, who served two terms as governor of the place between 2003-2011, famously said this about his state: “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia to the East, Pittsburgh to the West, and Alabama in the middle.”

Well, in 2016, Donald Trump and Alabama won, and Pennsylvania officially became a dreaded swing state. Joe Biden won it in 2020, and Trump won it back in 2024.

As a New Jersey native this just gave me another reason to curse Pennsylvania. It’s pretty much a border rival thing, but Pennsylvania has turned into Ohio East, which will surprise nobody in New Jersey. (NOTE: Here’s where I am losing Pennsylvania and Ohio readers. But, really: JD Vance, Ohio????)

Please don’t take it personally, good people. After all, I’m from Jersey, and let’s face it, nobody gets kicked around more than we do.

Anyway, I have a lot of friends from Pennsylvania, and on Friday I made a new one.

Nina grew up in Easton, Pa., which is hard on the Delaware River. And because it really is a small world after all, I told her that my ex-wife grew up in Phillipsburg, N.J., on the other side of that river. The two towns are rivals and separated by a bridge.

The area is also located in the Lehigh Valley, and one of those swingy political areas, where the party faring well among this sample of voters, will most likely be the party faring well in other places like it across the country.

While Nina was spinning magic on my head, she told a variation of a story I have heard too many times before: many of her family and friends voted for Trump, and that has made their relationship as bitter as an unripened lime.

I told her I was sorry as hell about that, and added that I had lost a lot of friends to this cancer myself. I told her that I have cut ties with them, because defending bigotry, misogyny, and the attack on America were deal-breakers.

I spent several years after the blast in 2016 trying to reason with my friends, but banging my head against the wall hurt a lot less. I left it with them this way: “If you come around, and realize the damage you have done, I’ll be here waiting and we can talk.”

Nobody has come around.

Nina approached this differently. She says she stays in touch with many of the people who have made their sickness our problem. I told her I saluted her patience, and asked this burning question: “How do they like what’s going on now?”

“They hate it,” she said.

That’s when I sat up in my chair at the risk of getting my ear chopped off.

“Oh, really,” I said with surprise.

“They think he is a lying pedophile, and they feel stupid for voting for him.”

“REALLY?????” I shouted, before composing myself.

“Yup. Really.”

Now Nina’s a lot younger than I am, because most people are. She represents a generation who have pretty much only known Trump as their president and attacker. Their sample size is limited, and they don’t carry around the baggage from administrations past — both good and bad.

The people Nina talks to know things are getting more expensive, that we are engaged in yet more unnecessary wars, and that Epstein’s corporate buddies are still free to rape more kids.

Things are getting worse, not better.

So basking in Nina’s heartening report about her friends in NE Pennsylvania, I decided to risk a final question: “OK, it’s great your friends have come around to this evil SOB, but how do you see them voting in November? Will they stay with Republicans or give Democrats a try? Or worse, will they not vote?”

“Oh, they’ll vote,” she said. “They’re pissed. And it won’t be for any Republicans.”

I guess I could learn to like Pennsylvania …

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.

“… 'facts are stubborn things,' as John Adams said. And the central fact of our time is that we are led — I am using that verb in the loosest sense — by a man whose idea of courage is bullying, whose idea of honor is knavery, whose idea of loyalty is convenience, whose idea of patriotism is self-idolization, and whose idea of principle is anything that suits his need and his pleasure. Now excuse me while I throw up.”

These are tightly knitted words I strongly endorse, and have even written on countless occasions (er, in so many words) but didn’t this time ...

I really like the ordering of this phrasing, to include the last line, because this writer like so many of us, has been laid low by what we have been fed in a steady stream by the human dumpster, Donald Trump, as he empties his raw sewage atop the American people, and then watches as the Republican treatment plant sanitizes it and processes it into the manure that has helped grow this dangerous Christian white supremacist cult across this roiling country.

This writer is part of a corporate media that has also done more than its share to help turn the rancid stink of this regime into something resembling a flowering killer weed that can still somehow pass their smell test.

But maybe the stink has started to become too unbearable for even them, because here is what else this writer had to say this morning from his perch atop one of the most venerable newspapers in world history:

“I’m struck by the way in which authoritarian pretensions and atrocious taste always seem to go hand in hand. Maybe it’s that moral ugliness tends so often to produce aesthetic ugliness. Whatever the case, the job of the next president will be to erase every vestige of Trump from the White House and any other federal property. Getting rid of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center was only a start; I look forward to seeing the East Wing restored to exactly how it used to be.”

Hear, hear!

Write away, dear poet! You are on a roll! Don’t stop now!

Reading these words through an editor’s lens I wouldn’t change a thing. Why, this is exactly what you’d expect from a scribe with a keen sense of observation, who believes what is right in front of his discerning eyes, and knows full well what has been happening to this country since this orange, racist conman evolved into the most dangerous man in the world.

So who is this deft writer? Who is this brave fellow, who can so clearly see the burning light of righteousness through all this never-ending right-wing darkness?

None other than Bret Stephens, one of The New York Times’ loudest conservative voices, and a guy who has never met a single, pro-American liberal idea he liked …

I almost fainted when I read this piece this morning. And while there isn’t a thing I can do about the paywall, I will say with a shout that it’s high time this guy has finally written something worthy of a Stephens …

Because had this Stephens written the other Stephens’ words, they would have landed softly in the laps of the good people who have known for the past 12 years that the rise of Trump has meant the fall of America, and not the people who really need to see them.

I know that my writing too often only serves to confirm what my enlightened readers already think. While I’d like a wider audience, I believe I perform a necessary function, because sometimes just knowing you aren’t alone with your worry can provide the strength to carry on with saving yourself first, and America second.

Today, I smell hope, and am sharing this with you because we are starting to see some hard evidence that at least some of Trump’s most ardent supporters have finally discovered what so many of you have known with certainty the past decade or so: The wrinkled tangerine emperor has no clothes, or any ideas that are worthy of our Democracy.

His polling is abysmal. An NPR poll out this morning shows just 33 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the economy, while only 36 percent approve of the (hit) job he is doing overall.

Yes, yes, those numbers will always be too high, but here’s where I remind you that in 1950s Germany, a decade after the monstrous Hitler, 40 percent of the population believed the country was still better off with him in charge.

In other words: The rot is deep, and simply changing direction and leaders is not enough, as we so painfully discovered in 2021, when an entire party welcomed the American-attacking monster back in, and the other party didn’t do enough to keep him out.

There is still real tough work to do, and in fact, we now find ourselves in the most precarious place in our nation’s history since the run-up to the Civil War.

We have ample evidence that Trump is most dangerous when he is cornered, and losing his inner fight with the terrible voices that scream at him inside his fat head.

He still has scores of useful billionaires stuffed in his pockets, and a perverted U.S. military with a drunken, racist leader at the top of its rusty chain of command that has not sufficiently proven it is capable of disobeying an unlawful order.

The only way Trump survives his man-made catastrophe is to increase the tempo of his attacks on us, and our vote. He is incapable of reconsidering his positions, or admitting that he is failing as he gasps for air.

We have dug a hole so deep in this country that eventually, like it or not, we are going to need a few Republicans who at least still have a faint understanding of what love of country really means to help pull us out of this horrific mess.

That’s what happens after an election in which you lose the House, the Senate, and the Executive — all three of which are stood up by the most crooked Supreme Court in American history.

Now that we’ve surrendered to Iran in Versailles of all places, our White House looks like a bombing site, and Trump is being exposed by the people who used to dress him up, it is becoming clearer with each passing hour that this failed regime is choking on its noxious racism and ineptitude.

Yet even people like the other Stephens can’t be fully trusted, because while he’ll write that Trump’s name must be wiped from everything, I guarantee you he still somehow sees a magic Republican holding the scrub brush.

The other Stephens is an arsonist who helped start the fire, but still cleverly refuses to admit his dangerous part in stoking it. Maybe that’s coming, but for now he continues to completely miss the point:

“… you’re also looking at a Republican Party that, ever so gingerly, knows that the country is souring on Trump and also knows that, one way or the other, it’ll soon have to move past him, too. The great question is, how?”

Answer: By looking in the mirror, and the rot that is staring back, Bret.

Your party is an anti-American, and anti-humane cesspool.

Dump ‘em.

You can do it, sport, and thank this Stephens later.

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 United States is not a grotesque, racist country because of Donald Trump. It is a grotesque, racist country because of the absolutely deplorable people who support him.

There is no him without them.

Read that again.

Without his disgusting supporters, the America-attacking Trump would have been nothing but another wealthy, women-abusing white guy using the money that was handed to him by his sugar daddy to try to stay relevant hawking his broken products, bankrupting start-ups, begging for attention, and cheating on the golf course in the relative obscurity of his leveraged, tacky Florida country club, where the golden bathrooms are overflowing file-holders for all his lost causes.

In other words, he would have been just another filthy-rich Republican …

Except Trump, and his nuclear-powered narcissism just wasn’t content with all that, and desperate for any kind of relevance decided he’d start dealing America’s best-selling product during the past four centuries: hardcore racism.

He knew if he could get his orange little hooks into people and get them to believe he was every bit as big a racist as they were, there wasn’t a single thing he couldn’t claim for himself in America, including the presidency.

“Show us your birth certificate, Barack Obama …”

I have written variations of this piece before, because I have decided that it can never be written about enough. If I have my way, these words will serve as seeds to continue growing a movement and amplifying the powerful words of great artists past and present, who have spent their lives climbing mountains to make sure their message echoes across a country that so badly needs to hear it.

As an aging white man with a pen, I cannot think of a more important topic to lean into, because as long as the color of a person’s skin matters more than their character, we are all living in poisoned, debilitating air.

As long as this idiotic, toxic thing can be exploited to divide us, and hold people down, we are proving without a shadow of a doubt that human beings are the least evolved of God’s living creatures.

Do I expect this bigotry will stop because of the words I put to paper? Of course not.

But that misses the point, too, because this really does need to end just as soon as possible, people, and we all should be doing what we can to put the brakes on it. There is nothing stopping us from doing at least that.

How long will we continue to live with this national emergency?

Just the other evening, during a fake wrestling match on our White House grounds — go ahead and read those 14 words again — a frontal-lobe challenged wrestler named, Josh Hokit, thanked Trump directly for hosting the pathetic event before adding: “And lastly, Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

Let’s stop right there for a second.

THIS is what has become of our once hallowed White House grounds. It is now a ghastly plantation, where horrid racism is given the oxygen it needs to breathe by a beady-eyed loathsome orange master who died inside years ago.

It truly is a white’s house.

Trump, wrinkled orange chin jutted forward and celebrating himself while he burns America and the world to a crisp, accepted the bigot Hokit’s words as if they were a bouquet of roses, and smiled.

He smiled.

The President of the United States smiled when a former First Lady was publicly insulted on public property with one of this country’s most insulting, and sickening racist tropes, and all on taxpayers’ dime ...

In other times during my many decades on this earth that ghastly snapshot would be everywhere by now, and roundly condemned by members of both political parties. It would be the beginning of a scandal that would not end until bare minimum, the White House issued a public apology, and showed contrition for such a grotesque, bigoted act.

Except as we close in on America’s 250th birthday, the white’s house has not done any of that.

They have not done any of that because they know that their abhorrent base — many of whom are your white family and friends — love every bit of it.

Turns out, Trump knows them better than you do.

He knows that dragging brown people down lifts them up, and makes them feel good about themselves.

These people didn’t vote for Trump three times because they thought he would improve their lives — there’s been ample proof none of that happened — they did it because he was going to make the lives of the people of color in his country just as miserable as possible.

There’s more than enough proof to back up that claim.

People of color were going to get knocked down and stay down this time. There would be no more voting rights or equal rights measures, because they had inconvenienced enough white people’s lives.

This was all favoritism, not fairness, and in their polluted minds there was nothing fair about lifting people up, who had been held down in chains. Couldn’t these ungrateful Black people have the decency to thank them for removing those chains? Hadn’t these poor white people done enough already?

Well, this time Black people were going to finally learn their lesson and their place in America. This time they were going to be publicly insulted on our White House lawn, caged, and have their voting districts removed. Any institutions, whether it be universities, companies, or media empires that didn’t go along with this would be threatened and severely punished if they dared to speak out against it.

These friends and families of ours — in my case, former friends and family — who STILL support all this are bigots, plain and simple. THEY are America’s greatest sin.

And I know what a few of you white people are thinking right now. I can hear your shuffling feet and pathetic excuses from here. “Well, sure my husband supports Trump, Earl, but I know for a fact he doesn’t like it when Trump does racist things like that.”

Which of course makes it worse.

Because if you vote for, or give safe harbor to a person who acts like a bigot, you are a bigot. You actually know better, but are content to quietly let the cancer spread.

You aren’t the bigger person, you are a sniveling coward.

If one of your husband’s friends told him that you looked like an ape, how would you expect him to react?

Remain friends with the disgusting creep, or belt him in the mouth?

The people I know who support Trump are broken, and simply refuse to be fixed. They somehow think it is their right to inflict themselves on the rest of us, and be just as cruel and odious as they want to be.

It’s all a big, damn joke to them.

These people are cheap shots. Weak. They tried playing me for just another white guy who would go along with all their noxious, racist bile they had done such a clever job of hiding up until 2016. After a decade of screaming at them, I have finally just had to let them go on off and wander in their darkness.

I am no longer worried that my pointed words hurt these people, I am much, much more disheartened that they can’t feel them at all.

So what to do about all this, besides publicly and loudly condemning it and them, while shaking the people who don’t consider this at all? What to do besides standing with people who are worth our loyalty, love and attention?

Vote for Democrats.

I know, I know … but listen to me:

Democrats for all their flaws have passed every important piece of legislation in my lifetime. They give, they don't take. They are not perfect because nobody is.

We simply have to overcome the Republicans’ attacks on America and stand up for her by turning out in overwhelming numbers at the polls to win as many elections as we can.

Again, I realize I am not breaking any news here, just underlining it, and sending it out in boldface type. This means voting for — and better yet working for — the Democratic candidates on the ballot.

Read that again, because I swear to God, if I hear Democrats griping about the candidates who have won their primaries fair and square, I am going to gnaw my keyboard in two, and then come looking for you.

Do you STILL think Kamala Harris wouldn’t have been a far superior president to the repulsive Trump???

I am already seeing this highly stupid crap going on and it positively blows my mind. We stand to lose it all in November unless we can get out of our own way and not let the search for the perfect get in the way of the common good.

Democrats, left-leaners and Independents like myself need to stick together like glue until November. We must become inseparable and walk as one.

That starts RIGHT NOW.

Yes, I have been constructively critical of Democrats in the past, because the party desperately needs some tough love. I do what I can between elections to make sure my team is ready to win, but when election season rolls around the Democrats get my love and my vote every single time.

Anybody who can’t do at least this, needs to stop pretending they are above it all, and start realizing they are part of the problem in America.

Actually it is worse than that: They are bigots.

Do not make me explain this to you 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, and follow him on Bluesky here.

As the smoke finally started to clear following Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, and Donald Trump’s violent attack aimed at overthrowing our government just two months later, I wrote a piece castigating our disintegrating working press in the United States.

The thrust of my write was this: If you were addressing ANY Republican about ANYTHING, your first question simply had to be, “Do you believe Donald Trump lost the 2020 election?”

After all, The Big Lie that Trump had won was the catalyst of his Big Attack on January 6th, and simply had to be put down, refuted and corrected for the record by all means possible.

If after this question was asked, the Republican either refused to answer, was evasive in any way, or worse, flatly denied that Biden won, the follow up had to be this: “Show us the proof you have to back up these dangerous assertions.”

If they could not provide any proof, the interview was over.

Done.

Finished.

There was simply no logical reason to continue talking to a desperate pusher selling a noxious, destructive lie aimed at poisoning the lifeblood of our Democracy.

Allowing dangerous propaganda and people like that to litter our airways and print, wasn’t just irresponsible journalism, it was aiding and abetting Trump’s attack on America.

Besides, he had Rupert Murdoch’s goons at Fox for that.

Well, we all know by now that my pleas to shut these people down were roundly ignored — if they were even heard at all — and because of that, 2024 might be the date that’s etched in the tombstone marking the end of the great American experiment.

The Big Lie hangs over America like a dark, menacing cloud, while too many in our broken press carry on like it is just another sunny day.

As a longtime member of that press, I have sadly come to understand that incompetence, ratings, and money are behind their failures to do even the most minimal thing required of sound journalism: report the truth.

Their inability and/or refusal to sound the alarms of what was coming if God forbid Trump won another term were amateurish and outrageous. How could they have ignored the biggest story since the Civil War?

Why weren’t Democracy Desks set up in every newsroom across America that did nothing but report on Trump and his Republicans’ brazen attack on our nation that was so obviously buttressed by a corrupt, lying, bought-off Supreme Court, whose majority they appointed?

Wasn't it obvious what would happen if Big Lie Republicans ever regained Executive power again? Was there ever really any doubt among the people who were paid to pay attention that Trump would get the blessing of his court to be just as disgusting and anti-American as possible by carrying on as their mad king?

How could this have been missed by the very people whose job it is to cover these lowlifes?

It took no time at all for Trump to lay waste to our government, and for armed troops to litter our streets.

He is placing his name everywhere and on everything, and God only knows how much of our money has landed inside his bottomless pockets.

Fascism is here, and our damn media barely fired a warning shot.

I’m long past the stage where this shoddy, irresponsible “journalism” has broken my heart, and am now just plain furious. Surrendering the facts to Trump during the past decade has to be one of the most pathetic things I have ever seen.

So when the orangey, puffy Trump arrived on the set of Meet the Press Sunday, and started with his anti-American bilge about elections being rigged again, I was shocked when he got some actual pushback from the show’s host, Kristen Welker.

Here’s what went down:

Trump lied that the California gubernatorial race was “rigged.”
“It’s four days and they aren’t even close to counting ballots,” he harrumphed.
Welker correctly asserted that this is how California has always counted votes, and Trump shot back:
“Do you know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election.”
Welker asked for any evidence of cheating, and Trump started his tantrum:
“They’re crooked, just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked. And Meet the Press is crooked.”
Welker pushed back again, and Trump whined like baby:
“You’re either crooked or you’re stupid. You play right into their hands with this crap. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged.”
Trump then arrived where always does, and hauled out the Big Lie that he won the 2020 US presidential election.
Walker wasn’t having that and pressed on. That’s when the grotesque Trump, who was nearly in tears at this point, said this:
“Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough.”
But not before snarling:
“Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

And just like that he was gone, like a loud fart pushed out of the room by an air-purifying exhaust fan ...

Congratulations to Welker for holding her ground and her nose during that interview, but the damage has been done. The America-attacking Trump’s Big Lie is louder than ever, and our press, with a few exceptions, has all but gone quiet correcting it.

On Monday afternoon, Trump’s pointy-nosed puppet, Speaker Mike Johnson, pawed through the halls of Congress parroting his master’s election lies while a clutch of reporters nipped at his little heels. Johnson who lies as he breathes like so many of these odious Republican Christians was asked for proof the recent California election was “rigged.”

He somehow said this without generating a lightning strike: “Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it's impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here.”

Oh, we sure do, sport ...

Anybody who is still somehow wondering what November’s gerrymandered, Jim Crow elections are going to look like got another preview the past few days. Any close race led by a Democrat will be rigged by “diabolical” means, and any close race led by a Republican will be just peachy-keen.

This is all the result of that Big Lie which has never been properly addressed as the anti-American cancer it most certainly is, and corrected once and for all for the record.

While I long ago abandoned the shoddy, corporatized media for the clear air of independence, it won’t stop me from demanding that my former misguided brethren finally do their jobs, and set the record straight on that lie.

So one more time, people: Any time you are talking to any Republican before Election Day like you did Johnson Monday, the first thing you ask is who won the 2020 election.

If they won’t answer, or deflect and lie like Johnson, then correct them for the record, and shut them and the interview down. Do not give them a platform to perform for their sickly orange king, while helping him attack the foundation of this country.

There’s been more than enough of this the past decade.

Do that? You are doing your job.

Don’t do that? Go 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.

Let’s start with some questions today, before we arrive at the answer.

What if Kamala Harris had become president, promptly leveled the historic East Wing of our White House, and then spent each day like a petrified drama queen shrieking that taxpayers should purchase her a new ballroom?

What if Harris had spent her time in office plastering her face and name on inanimate objects, while food prices she promised to lower spiraled out of control, and then belittled the people who dared mention this?

I’m not done.

What if Harris and her administration had spent their time attacking science and vaccines and then did nothing as Measles — MEASLES — made a deadly comeback across America?

What if Harris had become president and picked silly and insulting fights with our NATO partners who have been with us since WWII, while threatening to invade Greenland like some petulant child?

What if after running a campaign on no new wars, Harris appointed a drunken, racist talk show host to be her Secretary of Defense, who then proceeded to commit a series of war crimes, shared top-secret intelligence with God knows who, brazenly blocked military promotions of women and people of color, and then led a moronic war in Iran that has only succeeded in making America a more dangerous and expensive place?

Sorry, I’m not done yet.

What if instead of supporting Ukraine during their heroic fight on the frontline of democracy that benefits America, Harris berated its leader and then rolled out the red carpet for the murdering fascist, Vladimir Putin, on U.S. soil?

What if instead of prosecuting law and order, Harris appointed HER personal lawyer as OUR attorney general and then went about spending billions of taxpayer dollars to reward the traitors who attacked us on January 6, 2021?

Can you imagine?

What if Kamala Harris had become president and leveled idiotic tariffs on every country she could locate on a map that resulted in making things more expensive for Americans?

What would all those sanctimonious MAGA farmers say about that?

What if instead of answering questions from the media, Harris called them names like piggy, and enemies of the people?

What if after becoming president Harris stayed awake at night hate-posting unhinged bilge directed at 70 percent of America?

What if Harris had become president and got into a bitter feud with the Pope?

What if we found out Harris had been mentioned more than 30,000 times in the Epstein Files, and was a longtime friend of the child-rapist?

What if Harris had become president and spent the first 17 months in office spending more time at Walter Reed Medical Hospital than she did with her husband, and then publicly bragged about passing basic cognitive tests while being held up on swollen ankles?

Can you imagine????

What if Kamala Harris had become president and invited thousands of Blacks to immigrate to America from South Africa, after saying she was closing our borders?

What if Kamala Harris had become president and led a government-wide attack on rural white voters by making it as hard as possible for them to vote?

What is Harris had become president and depicted herself as Jesus Christ in a social media posting?

What if Harris had become president and filled her cabinet with unqualified rightwing talk show hosts and billionaires, whose only talents are filling their bottomless pockets with our money?

What if after becoming president, Harris did everything in her power to strip people of their healthcare, and medicare and medicaid benefits to benefit corporate raiders?

What if after becoming president, Harris set about putting actions in place that will pollute our air and drinking water …?

OK, I’ll stop there, my friends, because we all have things to do this morning while we carry on through the most insane, destructive timeline in American history.

The truth is none of those things would have happened had Harris — or ANY — Democrat been elected president, because we — Democrats and Left-Leaners — would have never allowed it, nor elected anybody — much less a convicted felon — who even hinted at these appalling attacks on America, Americans, and our standing in the world.

It must be said often, and out loud that in 2026 America, our two major political parties are publicly held to completely different standards.

In fact, one of them is held to absolutely NO standards at all.

Read that again.

This is indisputable, and we simply must get to the point where we accept at least this much, or we are done for good.

Finished.

That this ongoing and brutal numbing of our sensibilities has somehow been normalized to such a truly terrifying degree by our media, as well as the people and institutions who are charged with monitoring the America condition and the threats facing her citizens, is a terrible, terrible tragedy, it really is.

The annihilation of the barriers that used to separate good from evil and right from wrong have transformed America and its insane military might, into the most dangerous country in the world. When anything can be justified — even an attack on OUR OWN CAPITOL — everybody is in deep trouble.

We are spiraling out of control, and on the brink of losing our democracy for good, and the people who dare to pay attention — the blessed woke — know it.

That is most likely you.

This disregard of the truth, and just plain human decency is taking a terrible toll on average, good-hearted people in this country who have watched, jaws dropped, the past decade as millions have been given permission to willingly surrender to their very worst instincts, while following a grotesque man and party that are leading us to our bitter end.

That many of them are friends and family has been almost too much to bear and comprehend. How long have they carried this disease inside them? Can they be cured?

Either way, they and their debilitating weakness, and a busted media that tries to understand and excuse them, are to blame for our demise.

We feel powerless to get through to them to stop their madness, because they have been provided cover and coddled by the people and institutions I mentioned above, who have somehow accepted this as our new normal.

They are weak in mind and heart. They are the lowest among us, and refuse to lift themselves up, or even consider the damage they are doing to a country that they think even less of than themselves.

Well let me tell you something: I have no trouble stepping on them to get to higher places where we can properly survey the damage they have caused and set about repairing it.

I will not get over this or them. I will call them out and our condition in America for what it is: hideous.

The normalization of this ongoing rot inside our White House simply has to stop — or bare minimum be recognized for it is — if we are to have any hope of carrying ourselves as a half-decent nation making an honest run at once again searching for the common good.

That starts with recognizing the truth, and shouting it out, instead of normalizing chaos and odious behavior.

And if that truth hurts the people who are wrecking our society, then there is still a sliver of hope, because at least we will know they aren’t completely dead inside.

These aren't normal times we are living in unless we just surrender and accept that they are, my friends.

Well, I just can’t let that happen.

Can you?

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

After wiping the lack of sleep from my eyes, and pouring some midnight-black coffee into my overused mug, I fell into my office chair, flipped on my computer, and cautiously waded into my morning newsfeed.

It took me but three seconds to sadly realize that I hadn’t gotten the news I’d hoped for, so I sighed, and hit The New York Times front page to assess the overnight damage.

Here are the gruesome headlines that greeted me:

-Hospitals See Diseases Resurge as Vaccinations Decline
-Extreme Water Shortages in the West
-Hegseth Strikes Female and Black Navy Officers From Promotion List
- Trump backs off Plan for $1.8 Billion Fund That Drew Political Backlash
-Israel Strikes Southern Lebanon
-Trump Announces Stricter Rule For Medicaid Work Requirement

There was no above-the-fold mention of the idiotic, dangerous war in Iran, our rocketing gas prices, or the millions of Americans who are being forced to use credit cards to feed their families or account for through-the-roof healthcare prices because there is only so much bad news that can be squeezed onto a screenshot.

There was nothing about out-of-control inflation, rising interest rates, or the crumbling value of the dollar.

There wasn't a thing about corporate America’s environmental terrorism, and steady assault on our clean air and water.

The endless assaults on our vote, and resurrection of the Jim Crow South were now an active crime scene to be treated with the occasional gory update.

If you are an American out looking for any good news at the moment, you better pack a lunch, and let your loved ones know you might not be returning for dinner.

Our White House and the once pristine grounds that surround it are a metaphor for the wreckage King Trump and his corrupt Republican court have inflicted on what was once the world’s premier democracy.

In just over 16 months, we have been reduced to a budding third-world country that is being crushed by out-of-control billionaires who are in our elections and our homes. They are being provided cover by a bought-off radical Right Supreme Court majority that has no notion of what law and order really means as it protects the insane whims of the convicted felon that appointed half its soulless members.

And here — RIGHT HERE — is where it’s worth reminding everybody that things did not have to be this way and were not this way under the previous administration, which offered a hand up to people in need, and provided millions and millions of good jobs while rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure in every state of the union — not just the red, purple, or blue ones.

Here’s where we must note for the record that while Joe Biden was not a perfect man, he was a patriotic one who spoke of all Americans — Democrats, Republicans and Independents — as being a part of the whole, and did not rip apart large segments of our colorful democratic fabric to ram through a dark agenda.

He was a man of deep faith and conviction, who actually went to church every Sunday.

He spearheaded the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in U.S. history. All it did among scores of other good things was fight climate change, cap out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients, and provided $2,000 per year of aid, while enabling Medicare to actually negotiate drug prices.

He pushed through the CHIPS and Science Act which chiefly provided billions in incentives to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing, reduced reliance on foreign supply chains, and celebrated science as a beacon of discovery instead of an enemy of the state.

He expanded minimum wage for federal workers, provided scores of other workers protections, including making good and sure they got the mandatory overtime they deserved for their efforts.

He ended the longest war in history in Afghanistan, after the previous slobbery president had surrendered to the odious Taliban. He stood firmly with Ukraine, and expanded and strengthened NATO to stand against Putin and Russia, not with them.

Our allies across the globe also stood with us back then, instead of turning their backs in disgust and dismay as they do now.

All of this was done during a four-year term that started with a lockdown following a terrible Republican attack on our Capitol, and under the sorrowful cloud of a once-in-a-century pandemic that killed more than one million Americans.

I did not start this piece intending to prosecute such an ardent defense of the Biden Administration, but I am glad that I arrived at this place.

An enormous amount of good was done during his four years, and I look back at them reverently, and with a sinking heart.

We were safe back then.

Were there warts and blemishes? Of course. The record will show a good-hearted, aging man in declining health, who was too stubborn to acknowledge the residue of Father Time, and the toll it had taken on him.

He should have served one term as he promised, and bowed out heroically, to let a younger crusader lead from the front to build on all his good work.

He also had a blind spot the size of Kansas for an attorney general, who simply refused to do the most important thing in his job description: protect America. Instead he dithered while the most dangerous man in the world — the man who had already violently attacked us once — rebuilt his army of Republican Orcs, and readied for another assault to finish us off for good.

In the end, the disgraceful Merrick Garland even refused to protect Biden himself ...

These things are simply unforgivable, because they left all of us exposed, and without protection. Armies are in our streets and masked government agents are shooting us dead.

We have a mad king who demands loyalty instead of earning it, and has no talent for governing and pushing tough legislation through our House and Senate that helps Americans like Biden did.

Trump is a petulant punk and a no-talent negotiator who has used that bought-off Supreme Court he built in his grotesque image, and Mike Johnson’s pathetic GOP House of used playing cards to steamroll his way toward the demolition of our White House, and the use of taxpayer dollars to compensate the lowlifes who attacked us on Jan. 6, 2021.

He’s breaking the backs of working folks in America in myriad ways to include all these damn MAGA farmers, who are currently getting screwed almost as badly as the people of color who tirelessly work their fields just for the privilege of pocketing some chump change, and a leaky roof over their heads.

Trump has proven beyond a shadow of any doubt that he could not only shoot one of his racist supporters in the middle of some street and not lose their vote, but could also swipe their family’s benefits and leave them destitute in that street just to really rub it in.

America is a leaking sewer, and crumbling under the bloated weight of all these hideous billionaires, who are squeezing the life out of us and our budgets.

As we stumble toward one of the most somber Independence Days in history, America is going it alone on the road to nowhere. We aren’t leading from the front, we are falling behind.

Even if you don’t completely share my assessment of America 2026, this much must be acknowledged if you have even a shred of decency and an honest heart: We are not better off now than we were two years ago.

Not even close.

(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.)

When the oppressive Republican regime that is taking a sledgehammer to our rights and sensibilities is finally gone — and it WILL be gone — the arts will still be here filling up our lives and our hearts.

Lately, I have found myself reflecting on this lovely certainty, and am bolstered by its power to fill me with much-needed hope.

Our fight for our survival will be buttressed by the arts and our artists, and I can feel this in my bones, my friends.

Last Friday, after Stephen Colbert was kicked off the noxious CBS airways for good, I celebrated his choice of using his final show on our music, not politics, to celebrate his legacy as well as the road ahead.

The arts have the superpower to reflect where we are, where we’ve been, and where we are going. They can sustain us and lift us up, as we deal with the most dangerous times and people since the Civil War.

There was some significant news broken on the arts front again this week that deserves some reflection and attention.

First, the odious Freedom 250 concert that Trump’s fascists have been ginning up in conjunction with our ailing nation’s 250th birthday, saw its already pathetic lineup of musicians take a significant hit, when some of the artists who were scheduled to perform finally caught on to what this event was really about.

To be fair, it was not a venerable list of musicians to begin with, but since all of them have given their professional life to music, they do get a piece of my respect. The music business is a tough go, so if you have persevered, and even found modest success, you have lived a life to be envied.

If you use this music to assuage bigots and misogynists, who mean this nation harm, you have completely lost your way.

On Friday, Bret Michaels, who is most likely best known (if he is known at all) as the front man for the heavy metal band Poison, decided it best if didn't lend his name and music to a regime that poisons our air and water.

Michaels, who will never be confused with Bruce Springsteen politically, or in most any way, actually, released a statement explaining why he dropping out that included this:

“Concerns have also been raised regarding the safety of my fans, band, crew, family and myself, including threats that are completely unfounded and unforgivable.”

So, in other words, Michaels caught wind that this gathering is quickly shaping up to be another one of Trump’s January 6th renderings, where entitled, violent losers scream and whine and take out their pain on everybody else.

This is what Trump refers to as art.

Man, I’ve had enough of these people.

Because of them, our nation’s capital is probably best avoided during this stupid, self-serving gala that will most certainly be conducted in Trump’s despicable image, not ours.

Country singer Martina McBride, who might have been the most reputable performer on the billing, also dropped out a day earlier, which is significant because while she has kept her political views fairly quiet, her husband, John, is a vocal Conservative.

McBride’s decision to bolt was the right one, even if like Michaels she is trying to convince people that she was lured to perform under false pretenses.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m happy people are pulling out of this thing for any reason, but anybody who signed up thinking it wouldn’t be a fascist cesspool simply hasn’t been paying attention.

Regular readers will know that these are the people I can’t stand most.

WAKE.

UP.

Better yet, get involved and use your influence and your music to save this country from an authoritarian regime that means us and YOU harm.

Friday brought yet more news on the art front when a federal judge ruled that Trump must take his despicable name off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

This was always a low-class insult to Kennedy, the arts, and anybody with even a shred of decency in this country. It was yet another assault by a career abuser who wrecks what he can’t have. In this case: good taste.

Let’s be crystal clear about Trump’s true affiliation to the arts.

So here goes with some righteous precision:

Trump is an unread moron who’s appreciation of the arts is confined to dashing off birthday cards of headless, naked women to his rapist buddy, Jeffrey Epstein, devouring reality TV shows while eating Happy Meals, and pursing out his lips and harrumphing around a steel-reinforced stage on his inner-tube ankles as “YMCA” blares from nuclear-powered speakers in the background.
Slobbering his grotesque name everywhere including the Kennedy Center is his chief motivation, followed by taking a meaty swipe at anybody who can carry a tune, or recite a poem, and understand that the Beatles weren’t insects, and Prince didn’t live in some castle.
He’s an incurious moron, who as always, is trying to drag an entire nation down to his mud-low standards because he hates the loneliness inside the cavernous bunker that is carved out deep inside his thick head.
-End

Of course, Trump has said he will challenge this decision, because he’d rather fight to get his way like a 2-year-old spoiled brat, than serve the citizens of a country that is crumbling under the weight of heavy prices, loathsome racism and misogyny, and costly, unnecessary wars.

So as we close in on our ailing nation’s birthday, I suggest we all celebrate it in our own way. Personally, I will spend it by doing everything I can to make sure this birthday isn’t our nation’s last.

Any hoopla can wait until our country’s leaders once again conduct themselves in the image of Lincoln and King, not Putin and Stalin.

There is a lot riding on how our nation’s true patriots comport themselves as we face this daily assault on our common senses by a despicable man and party who have lost all respect for themselves and this country.

Last week, we discussed the increasingly favorable political environment for Democrats as we steam toward the crucial midterm elections in November.

In that piece, I referenced a couple of recent polls from The New York Times and NPR that show a Republican Party in descent and a Democratic Party on the rise.

From that write:

“… there are signs everywhere that upwards of 70 percent of Americans do not like what is happening in their country right now. Whether that matters or if it is too late is still up for debate, but at this moment, America still has a shot to save itself in the nick of time. Even in this redistricted mess of a country, if things continue to go along this way Democrats will take the House, and actually have one helluva chance of taking the Senate.”

Things have gotten no better for Republicans since then. Tuesday night they once again slammed a door on their toe, and did all they could to help the suddenly fleet-footed Democrats to win their first statewide election in Texas in 30 years.

I know, I know, we’ve heard this one before, but when Republicans in the state voted for Donald Trump’s despicable Ken Paxton to run against Democrat James Talarico for that Senate seat in November, they gave us all permission to dream the impossible dream.

By putting his decaying thumb on the scale for his fellow crook, Paxton, Trump all but wiped out the chances for incumbent Rep. Senator John Cornyn to do what he has been doing since ascending to the Senate 24 years ago: win.

Thanks to Trump, impressionable Republicans in Texas overwhelmingly supported "a true MAGA warrior" who like so many MAGA warriors before him has little regard for the law. Paxton has been indicted on felony securities fraud charges, bribery, dereliction of duty, obstruction of justice and abuse of the public trust, just to name a few violations.

Did I mention that this lawless lout is the state’s attorney general? Can we at least stop for a minute to consider the absurdity of this? We are now to the point that if you really want to make an impression on Trump, it’s best doing it by abusing the public’s trust.

Talarico wasted no time framing Paxton’s crooked political picture by releasing a video Tuesday night.

In it he says:

"Something just happened in Texas. The most corrupt politician in America just became the Republican nominee for the United States Senate." He accused Paxton of using his office to “enrich himself.”

He added:

“That kind of corruption is the rot at the core of this broken system. It’s why we can’t afford anything. It’s why we can’t get ahead no matter how hard we work.”

Paxton is eminently more beatable than Cornyn, so I’ll just say this out loud right now: Talarico will beat Paxton.

Are you still there?

What’s more, the cantankerous Nate Cohn of The New York Times actually has an astonishing take on this one that reads almost too good to be true. Without saying he agrees with my pick, he strongly agrees it is a very distinct possibility.

In his piece on Wednesday, A Blue Texas May Be More Than a Dream for Democrats, he lets the numbers do the talking, and they are shouting at a Texas-size upset in the Lone Star State. He cites two chief reasons to buttress his argument:

1. Paxton’s absurd candidacy: The man is a walking crime wave, and in the middle of an ugly public divorce. Because really, what kind of woman could stand to be around such human rot?
2. A monumental shift in Hispanic voting tendencies since the 2024 election.

Cohn:

“Texas is one of the most diverse states in the country, and national polls show Democrats surging back in support among young and nonwhite voters — and especially Hispanic voters.”

More:

“In the latest national polls, Mr. Trump’s gains among Hispanic voters have vanished — and the Republican grip on Texas is in danger as a result. The latest New York Times/Siena poll is representative: It shows Democrats ahead by 30 points, 54 percent to 24 percent, among Hispanic registered voters nationwide. That’s better than Joe Biden’s margin in 2020 and getting close to Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016.”

One more for the win:

“Or consider another example: Imagine we adjusted the results of the last presidential election by shifting each racial demographic group’s support to match the latest Times/Siena poll results. Based on the poll’s findings, Texas would be expected to tilt Democratic in this national political environment.”

Texas would be expected to tilt Democratic in this national political environment.

Amazing is the best adjective I can come up with. Texas has been Democrats’ great white whale for decades. Time and again, we hear how close they are only to come up short — and in too many cases wildly short.

Not this time. And I’ll bet my sterling reputation on that.

And while we are floating on air, another prediction: When the Democrats win in Texas it will translate to a majority in the Senate.

If this becomes a true “wave” election — and I believe it will — Democrats should be expected to win what should be tight races in Georgia, New Hampshire, Michigan, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio.

By holding three seats — Georgia, New Hampshire and Michigan — and flipping Maine, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas, the Senate is theirs.

But since we are soaring at 30,000 feet, there are yet more combinations to unlock the Senate for Democrats in this suddenly balmy political environment above all the dark-gray clouds we have been stuck in since November, 2024.

Alaska, and their popular Democratic candidate, Mary Peltola, would be very much in play for a flip, and it would not shock me if one or two of five other states — Iowa, Montana, South Carolina, Florida and Nebraska — swapped a Republican for a Democrat.

The nut of all this? It is not crazy to say the Democrats have a real shot at flipping the Senate Blue in November.

In fact, I expect it.

This would put a screeching halt to the Trump regime’s odious agenda, but maybe even more importantly would protect the Supreme Court from any further Republican erosion for a minimum of two years.

As bad as this 6-3 radical Right Supreme Court has been, picture what a 7-2 advantage would like if, God forbid, something happened to one of the three liberal justices on the Court, or even what a 6-3 advantage would like if Trump can convince (threaten) one of the older justices on the Right to drop out, so he could nominate another smug liar in the Brett Kavanaugh mold who would be around to help wreck America for another 30 years.

Something simply has to be done with this Supreme Court, but I’ll hold fire on that one for another day. For now, the American voters must do their part to ensure things don’t get worse, and that means showing up to flip the Senate five months from now.

Thanks to Trump, it is right there for the taking.

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

Donald Trump’s rapid descent into his own special hell is gaining speed. This hulking, demented racist conman will eventually land with a thud, with only the billions in cold, hard cash he has drained from the American taxpayer to cushion his collapse.

Our standing on the world stage has taken a hit we might never recover from. We have no allies, only old neighbors who are watching in disbelief as the big, old white house on the block burns out of control.

Our air and water is getting dirtier by the hour, and food prices are higher every time we wander into a store. Women have less rights than they did 50 years ago, and the Jim Crow South is back. Our government has been dismantled by greedy, billionaire Orcs, so that it works exclusively for them and not us.

America has never been worse off, and that is the best we could have hoped for following that ghastly election in November, 2024, which handed Republicans the Executive, the Court, the House and the Senate.

Because it actually could have been worse …

In the worst-case scenario, Trump would have been an incoherent madman able to rein in his worst instincts as a subhuman, and worked diligently to at least give the phony appearance he was doing all he could to keep prices under control, and America out of any asinine wars.

He would have worked quietly behind the scenes raking in cash to ruin us at the behest of those billionaire Orcs, and most Americans wouldn’t have been the wiser.

As we have painfully learned over the past decade there are more than enough shallow people in America who are willing to go along with almost any abomination — including the caging of children — just as long as the gasoline they are pumping into their hulking vehicles is as cheap as they are.

Under this worst-case scenario enough Americans would have gone along with Trump’s very worst, because somehow they would have continued to believe the fantasy that their lives would improve, even if every metric told them otherwise.

Republicans’ chances going into midterms would be decent. There would be no talk of Democrats taking back the Senate, and plenty of predictions that Republicans would actually increase their advantage.

Troops would be in the streets just in case.

Three-dollar gas can mask a world of hurt in America.

Well, that worst-case scenario didn’t come to pass, and there are signs everywhere that upwards of 70 percent of Americans do not like what is happening in their country right now. Whether that matters or if it is too late is still up for debate, but at this moment, America still has a shot to save itself in the nick of time.

A New York Times/Siena poll released Monday has Trump’s approval rating at 37 percent, which is the lowest number in that paper’s polling since Trump hulked on the scene in 2016.

Under the headline: Trump’s Approval Sinks Amid Unpopular War, Darkening GOP Prospects the case is made by the paper that …

“… no president’s approval rating has been under 38 percent for more than a few days in the last 17 years. If there has been a floor during this partisan era of politics, Trump’s ratings today have fallen to it.”

Adding …

“The most immediate political consequences is that Democrats appear increasingly well positioned for the midterm elections in November. The poll shows Democrats have a double-digit lead, 50 percent to 39 percent, when registered voters are asked which party’s candidate they’ll support for Congress.”

If you are one of those people saying right now that it is insane his approvals are that high, I will readily agree, but one of us hasn’t been paying attention to the past decade during which America has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it isn’t even a good country, much less a great one ...

Under this best-case scenario we simply must accept that historically low approvals is the best we can hope for as we steam toward the latest most-important elections of our lives in November.

The NYT poll mirrors an NPR poll two weeks ago that I typed about extensively.

From that story:

More than 80% of Americans say pain at the pump is straining their household budgets and a striking majority blames the president, according to a NPR/PBS News/Marist poll. The poll found that President Trump faces his lowest popularity ever and is experiencing major declines with key demographics since being sworn in for his second term. Most Americans said the economy isn’t working for them. The war in Iran — which has directly led to higher gas prices — is increasingly unpopular. Those challenges have given Democrats a distinct advantage in the midterm elections. When asked which party’s candidate they’d vote for if congressional elections took place today, Democrats led by 10 points.

Even in this redistricted mess of a country, if things continue to go along this way Democrats will take the House, and actually have one helluva chance of taking the Senate.

This would have been unheard of if Trump was able to quiet the voices in his head and control himself and all his worst instincts.

Right now, Trump is a nuclear-powered drag on his party, and even better yet in true authoritarian fashion is refusing to accept this reality.

Like unpopular fascist leaders before him, he is cloaking himself in his own sad realities and surrounding himself with yes men, who will readily carry his garbage and dump it all over Americans.

America is not a pleasant place right now, and only promises to get worse.

At this stage of Trump’s disastrous presidency it is very sadly all the Democratic opposition could have hoped for.

Vote.

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 do the cooking in the family, so I’m also the guy who shops for the groceries.

Truth is, I like doing both just fine, because sitting down for a good meal is one of life’s underrated treats.

When I was done this morning corralling the goods at the local market that I hoped would get us through a few day’s worth of semi-fine dining, I aimed my shopping cart into an empty checkout line and started offloading my supplies.

Experienced shoppers will know that there’s nothing like the privilege of scooting into an empty line at the grocery store. Better yet, this welcoming aisle was being staffed by one of my favorite cashiers, Betty.

All signs were pointing to a better-than-average day.

As I greeted Betty, and put the last of my stuff — the breakable items — on the conveyor belt, she asked with a smile if I’d found everything OK. Salty grocery-store navigator that I am, I told her I had, but with things so slow in the place, decided to make the opportunity for some small talk while driving toward a larger point.

“No offense, Betty,” I said politely, “But I found everything to be too dang expensive, if I’m being honest here. I mean, $13.72 for this little pouch of coffee? $5.45 for three apples? $6.75 for a box of cereal? I’m wondering just how long we are supposed to put up with this.”

She hardly batted an eye, and said, “No offense taken, honey, that’s why I have to work here at 72, so I can afford to eat what we’re sellin’. I figured I’d be long retired by now, but I just don’t see that happening anytime soon.”

“Well, that’s one nasty riddle,” I said. “I’m sorry about that, Betty.”

“Could be worse, I suppose,” she said with rueful resignation.

“I guess,” I said, before pushing my cart and my point forward, as a manager nudged closer, “I thought everything was supposed to get cheaper on Day 1 of Trump’s presidency. I mean, that’s what he told us.”

That’s when she laughed out loud, handed me my receipt, and we both decided that we’d struck a sad but fitting end to our interaction.

Truth is, America is a very bad joke right now courtesy of a very bad man, and a ruthless party and lawless court system, which are hell bent on making things great for themselves, and just as hard as possible on everybody else like my friend, Betty.

If high food prices were the only thing ailing America, it would be bad enough, but they are but one sore subject on a Republican report card that’s so bad right now, even a hungry junkyard dog wouldn’t eat it.

Mathematically, things just don’t add up anymore.

Gas prices are soaring and inflation and interest rates are back on the rise thanks to Trump’s idiotic tariffs and greedy billionaires and corporate raiders who won’t stop tapping people’s wallets until they have picked them dry. Oh, there’s still plenty of money to go around in America, but these days most of it stays in the fat little hands of the One Percent, who are getting richer by the minute standing on the tired backs of the Ninety-Nine Percent.

If Republicans had any sense of history — another subject on that report card that they are failing miserably — they’d understand that’s exactly how things work in monarchies, one of which we fought and defeated 250 years ago for our freedom.

They’d also learn from hard lessons of the recent past, that burning American treasure and countless lives in a region of the world where oil is worth more than human rights is a fool’s errand, and will end in no good.

And it’s no wonder the American experiment has gone so poorly when the subject of science is the enemy of the people, and is no longer even a part of the curriculum of the political party in charge. Our planet is heating toward the point of extinction, and we are but one serious virus away from total catastrophe.

And what is Republicans’ answer to that?

Tapping a whacko anti-vaxxer with zero training in medicine, academia, or scientific research to lead the response to our next medical emergency. Let’s face it, RFK Jr. is a ghoul, who lacking his famous family’s credentials, would just be some roided out, chestnut-colored freak leering at women at the local gym. Instead, he is in charge of our Department of Health and Human Services and that continues to be just too absurd to imagine.

Meanwhile, the smarmy Lee Zeldin is heading the Environmental “Protection” Agency, by attacking it and Mother Nature. It’s like putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department.

The emphasis on the subjects of English, literature and the languages couldn’t be a lower priority in America, because have you heard what comes out of Trump’s dirty mouth each day?

America is at the back of the world’s class and failing catastrophically right now, because we have the dumbest, most destructive people ever at the head of our government. They are from a privileged, unsympathetic upper class, who are so out of touch with what ails regular folks like Betty, it has gone past low-class ignorance and right to highly insulting.

The American dream has gone off to die on the patio of Mar-a-Lago, where billionaires muster their pompous asses to pick away at shrimp cocktail and the bones of the people they are eating alive, while kissing the ample ass of the man who is making all of it possible.

They’re not thinking about people like Betty, they’re thinking about themselves first, and Americans second.

Our elections are coming fast, and if these lawless buffoons aren’t careful our vote could get in the way of their good times. Used to be when a president and his political party got everything wrong like these Republicans have, the American voters would give ‘em a failing grade at the voting booth, and demand they start flying straight or else.

Except these arrogant losers are making it clear they aren’t much interested in receiving, or even making the grade. So they are busy leaning on our crooked courts to rig the test by making sure as few of us as possible can hold them accountable for their ongoing theft of our democracy.

Rather than fight on principle, they are cutting and running and avoiding the subject altogether. They are taking the coward’s way out, and we simply cannot let them get away with it.

It is on every single one of us then to ensure that we do everything in our power to take these anti-American low-class clowns to school in November.

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 comes at us in waves …

It relentlessly pounds away at our heart and soul, threatening to break us in two …

This week it again washed ashore in all the likely places — Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, and finally our corrupted, irredeemable “Supreme” Court housed in what was once the world’s cradle of democracy, Washington, D.C.

Donald Trump’s Republicans not only refuse to atone for America’s original sin, but are intent on re-injecting its poison into a new generation’s veins just to make good and sure we never properly heal.

Anytime our so-called united states get within striking distance of truly congealing into a democratic republic where there really is liberty and justice for ALL, the well-funded GOP fiends, who stay plenty flush by dividing us, spread their unlimited cash and outsized influence to make sure the crack between us widens and can never be crossed.

Nothing scares these morally busted garbage peddlers more than a cohesive electorate, or a fair election.

The reality of a Black president, and a Black woman vice president was so unbearable for these bog-snorters and their shattered moral compasses that the final House district in Tennessee that stood on a foundation of fairness and true representation was set aflame by their tiki torches Thursday.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is now just a relic from a time America at least gave the appearance it was interested in evolution.

The Republican Party has become so brazen in their odious efforts to erase Black people, they no longer feel the need to wear hoods while they pile high barriers to voting booths, and leadership positions in our government, universities, and places of influence.

This is a national emergency.

Better to just incinerate a healthcare program that insures tens of millions of Americans with no viable alternative in place, than to continue anything with Obama’s name on it.

Better to enter an unwinnable and costly war with Iran than continue with the peace our nation’s only Black president brokered in our planet’s most volatile region.

At its core America is a racist country, and there is plenty of dirty money to be made by the clutch of bankrupt billionaires who spend all their time keeping it that way.

America is not, nor has it ever been, a great nation. The insistence on implying anything different is borne of weakness not strength. We are a dark room without mirrors. We can’t bear to look at ourselves, so we look outside our windows and find fault with others who don’t share our skin color.

If actions are stronger than words, then a nation that engages in one senseless war after another, steps on the necks of its own citizens, and confuses a truly rich life with one of wealth and appalling privilege is a complete and utter failure.

It is not remotely great.

Time and again, America has diagnosed its sickness, and made good-faith efforts to cure it, before grotesque men like Rupert Murdoch have decided there was no money to be made in a nation strong enough to admit its weaknesses.

Exploiting our original sin for their gain is, to quote Hillary Clinton, “deplorable.”

I have seen far too many people of both political parties say we cannot make everything about race. Well, I say we can no longer afford not to, because looking away has never worked.

Without fail, these pleas come from the mouths of white people, who are either insulated from hard truths, or worse are just too cowardly to address this terribly sad reality.

I cannot pretend to know what is truly inside a Black man’s heart and mind, but I can seek it out, and do what I can to help with their centuries-old afflictions.

Better to look like a fool while running a good and noble errand in the name of equality, than doing the fool’s work of pretending everybody is good and equal in America.

As an old, white man I am highly qualified to diagnose my condition which is, and always has been, privilege. Too many white men were born halfway up the ladder, but confuse it with making a mighty climb. These are the people who go through their empty lives holding onto a lofty status that was never earned.

There are the people who are inside this corrupted Trump White House who are almost too stupid and ridiculous to imagine. Forget the president, what about his crooked, no-talent cabinet that includes Pete Hegseth, Markwayne Mullin, Lee Zeldin, Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, Sean Duffy and RFK Jr.?

None of these people got their jobs on any merit. Quite the opposite: They got their jobs because of their allegiance to a broken and bigoted man, who grew up in a world where loyalty and respect weren’t earned, but claimed by a wretched, cold hand holding tight to a whip.

There has never been a single time and place in history where diversity, equity and inclusion was needed more, because America has never been sicker.

This strain of bigotry might be the most lethal one yet, because it is coming from the very top of our government, and filtering its way through our elected offices, our military, our highest courts, and into our schools.

It is crawling over us, and there are seemingly no barriers to prevent its spread … except one: US.

We must all do what we can to turn racism away, and stay true to our hearts. We must rally like-thinkers, and amplify our quest to finally and once and for all address America’s inequity, and grab it by its roots and shake it.

We must call it what is.

Silence is not an option, only a pacifier.

Until this is finally done — and it must be done — millions of beautiful people will continue to suffer needlessly for simply entering this world a certain color.

Is there really anything more sickening and tragic than that?

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.

Let’s start our Wednesday by enjoying this delicious nut graph from NPR on their recent polling which reflects Trump and his GOP’s epic failures, and what that might mean for November’s key midterms:

More than 80% of Americans say pain at the pump is straining their household budgets and a striking majority blames the president, according to a NPR/PBS News/Marist poll. The poll found that President Trump faces his lowest popularity ever and is experiencing major declines with key demographics since being sworn in for his second term. Most Americans said the economy isn’t working for them. The war in Iran — which has directly led to higher gas prices — is increasingly unpopular. Those challenges have given Democrats a distinct advantage in the midterm elections. When asked which party’s candidate they’d vote for if congressional elections took place today, Democrats led by 10 points.

Pour another cup of coffee. Grab a danish. Now read that again. Let it soak in, and then we can discuss it a little further for a few minutes before we all go off to whistle while we work.

-The poll found that President Trump faces his lowest popularity ever …

-Most Americans said the economy isn’t working for them ...

-The war in Iran — which has directly led to higher gas prices — is increasingly unpopular ...

That ghastly noise you are hearing right now is a result of the sheer panic emanating from the offices of the nearest GOP rep to you. Thanks to their submission to the fascist Trump, they will have nothing but pain to run on the next six months.

Watching those reps — particularly in close congressional districts — trying to support their moronic president on one hand, while trying to delicately separate themselves from him with the other will be entertainment you just can’t find anywhere.

These people are called burnt toast.

Now for a caveat: As I typed Tuesday, we are now six months out from the most important elections of our lives, so nothing can be taken for granted. We have a deranged president, who instead of working toward consensus, is rallying his billionaire orcs, and soul-suckers in his broken cabinet to step on our necks in an attempt to finish us off.

Trump is failing spectacularly on every level, and rather than admit it, he will continue tossing grenades at our election apparatus and the American voters. Rather than fix his problems he will relish in making them ours.

That said … this poll is a real eye-opener.

OK, one more caveat: Yes, yes, I agree, how ANYBODY can still support this America-attacking, lying bigot is an ongoing sad commentary on America. The guy should be rotting in jail, but like it or not, we all must live with the reality that fully 35 percent of the American electorate is broken and refuse to be fixed. The people who told us for four years under Joe Biden that rising gas prices were a deal-breaker, are now looking under their hoods, while their orange idol makes their lives more expensive and meaningless.

It’s a cult.

Moving on …

The number that really stands out to me in this poll is that 10-pt. edge Democrats are currently enjoying on the congressional ballot test.

From NPR:

The ballot test asks which party’s candidate they would vote for if congressional elections took place today.
Democrats also have the edge on enthusiasm to vote, which is critical in midterm years when turnout is expected to be lower than in presidential-election years.

For some perspective, in the lead-up to the 2018 midterms, the Democrats’ had that exact 10 pt. margin in enthusiasm, and it fueled the Blue Wave that swept onto the beaches and across the American countryside.

The Democrats flipped 40 seats in the House that year and picked up seven governorships. Democrats would end up netting more than 8.6 million voters overall, or an eight-pt. margin on Election Day. That’s down from the 10-pt. margin the polls predicted, but still a convincing wipeout.

Democrats would sign on to a similar margin right now for November’s elections, but while we’re feeling good about things for a change, let’s hope for 10 this year, and make it 11 for a good measure.

Unfortunately, gerrymandering will mitigate some of the gains, but if this number stays within two or three pts. of 10, it will be a complete blowout — the kind we must have in November to hammer Trump’s odious party into submission, and send a signal loud and clear that the Trump regime cannot stand.

Maybe most important: If this number stays in the vicinity of 10, Democrats will almost certainly win the Senate, which would slam the brakes on Trump’s endless designs to celebrate himself, and turn Washington, D.C., into nothing but a cheap version of Moscow.

All this is not entirely a surprise. Since 2024, Democrats have been winning all over the map, and flipping seats in red, blue and purple states. That is the result of the work YOU are doing on the ground to protect America from Republicans’ ongoing attack.

Hard as it can be through all the blood, sweat and tears, we are doing what we can to hold the line. Maybe more important: We are doing all this while imploring the party we vote with to do more, and stop playing patty cake with the damn Republicans. We are reminding the Democratic National Committee, that if they persist to exist they damn well better start listening to the people who really run things: US.

Keep it up.

There will be more polls and endless analysis like this in the lead up to the midterms. You can count on more pain coming from the rubble of our White House and bought-off Supreme Court. But for today … just today … Why not enjoy this good news, while we navigate through the mayhem that is Trump’s America?

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.

Like you, my friends, I am dealing with a lot of grief and anger about the terrible state of affairs in the United States of America right now.

I’ll be honest with you, the Conservative Supreme Court’s appalling decision to shove a knife in the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 sent me right over the edge this week.

Similar to the decision to bury Roe before it, this was a decided retreat and two significant steps backwards on the long, muddy road toward progress, as well as this flawed notion of liberty and justice for all …

I have now lived long enough to see the birth and death of these two things, and as a liberal, and a patriot I grieve their loss. These were terrible, destructive decisions that have diminished us both as a people and a nation.

I know you feel the way I do, because we have the audacity to care, good people.

By steeling ourselves with the courage to dig in and stand against the terrible forces who toss evil in our faces by the shovelful, we have opened ourselves up to a world of blinding hurt.

Yet here we are.

Tired as we are, we don’t look away or run for cover. We wear our hearts on our sleeves and stand in there and fight like hell.

We are liberals, after all, and people come no tougher than that.

As I get old, I grow ever more comfortable inside my worn skin. I know who and what I truly believe in, as well as the things worth fighting for.

When I take my last breath, I will do so knowing I put up a good, righteous fight.

So what is it I (we) liberals believe in? I thought about this at length yesterday, and put together the following partial list. I say partial because it is impossible to recite all the good we do for Americans and the world.

The word liberal has gotten a raw deal in my lifetime, and I am past sick and tired of it. America is damn lucky to have us.

I am proud to be a liberal.

Here’s why, as well as what I believe in:

• I believe people of color have been getting screwed in this country for centuries.
• I believe women in this country have been getting screwed in this country for centuries.
• I believe as a white man born of privilege that was never earned, I have a responsibility to advocate for these two groups to help lift them up and earn their respect.
• I believe war should be the last resort — I mean, the absolute LAST resort — to solve disputes between nations.
• I believe as a United States veteran I should speak out against wars, and work for peace.
• I believe toxic male masculinity and the bro culture is a dangerous, pathetic overcompensation by little men like Pete Hegseth.
• I believe if more women were in charge, there would be less war and less acrimony.
• I believe that is indisputable.
• I believe in the arts. They are everything.
• I believe we should do everything possible to make it as easy as possible for the citizens of the United States of America to perform the single most important act there is to ensure our survival as a democratic republic: VOTE
• I believe nature is sacred, and must be protected.
• I believe keeping our air and water as clean as possible shouldn’t be a wish, but a law.
• I believe anybody who harms nature should be treated with the same consequences as anybody who harms a person.
• I believe corporations should be taxed at the same rate I am.
• I believe there is no reason whatsoever for billionaires.
• I believe as a veteran, the budget of the bloated Department of Defense is a dangerous, unnecessary joke and should immediately be cut in half — and half more, after that.
• I believe the other halves of that money should go first toward making sure every child gets enough to eat each day, and our seniors get the first-class care they damn well deserve.
• I believe the Department of Defense should be renamed the Department of Well-Being.
• I believe access to affordable healthcare should be a right.
• I believe there is nothing more important than treating everybody with dignity.
• I believe people should mind their own damn business.
• I believe love is love no matter where and how you get it.
• I believe clean energy should be the present not the future.
• I believe every child has a right to a top-notch education.
• I believe teachers should have their salaries immediately doubled with funding from the Department of Well-Being.
• I believe as a white man that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion make America a more just and better place, because DEI is not about favoritism, it is simply about fairness.
• I believe that can’t be said enough.
• I believe there should be reparations paid to descendants of slaves, because owning, chaining, beating and lynching other human beings is an abomination, and is a cancer that still runs through America’s hardening veins today.
• I believe this is obvious as hell when you compare the living standards and wages of Blacks and whites in America, as well as their accessibility to the voting booth.
• I believe if you don’t believe this, you are simply lying to yourself.
• I believe if you are lying to yourself, you probably voted for the racist Donald Trump, the most notorious liar in the world.
• I believe better days ahead, because I believe liberals never give up and keep pushing forward no matter what.

Again, this is but a partial list, and I apologize if I missed things that are dear to you as fellow proud liberals.

Know this, though: I am proud to know you.

Thanks for being in my life and helping to fill it up. Thanks for your friendship, readership and support. You are the people I will remember when I finally go off to join the dogs and cats in my life who left this troubled world before me.

You are liberals after all, and the best there is.

Don’t you ever forget it, dammit.

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.

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.