The publication last week of a new and innovative report on the causes of colorectal cancer could not be more timely, coming as it does when Americans are debating whether what we eat is killing us prematurely -- and whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" slogan should qualify him to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services, with control over the government's critical scientific and medical research.

At first glance that study -- published Dec. 10 by a team of doctors and scientists affiliated with the University of South Florida and the Tampa General Hospital Cancer Institute -- appeared to confirm Kennedy's charge that seed oils such as those derived from corn, canola (rapeseed) and sunflowers are causing an epidemic of chronic illness, from heart disease and cancer to obesity. Its findings showed excessive amounts of those oils in tumor samples from dozens of patients -- and indicated that gut inflammation by those substances encouraged colon cancer, now the second-highest cause of cancer deaths and a rapidly increasing disease among younger people under 50.

"We don't know the full effects of these ultraprocessed foods on our body, but we do know that that's a major thing that's changed from 1950 onward," said Dr. Timothy Yeatman, one of the study's lead authors, speaking to Scientific American. "Young people today, particularly rural and impoverished people, are being exposed to more of these processed foods than anybody else because they're cheap and they're in all the fast-food restaurants."

Yet if this suggests that Kennedy is right about the dangers of ultraprocessed foods, the arrival of the colon cancer study also proved that he is absolutely wrong about the agencies that he will oversee if confirmed by the U.S. Senate. His standard indictment of the National Institutes of Health, for instance, is that its staff and its output have been "captured" by the food industry; it must be razed to the ground before it can be reformed.

Shooting from the hip as usual, Kennedy has warned that his reorganization of the medical science agencies will be not just swift but instantaneous, with no time wasted actually learning about them and their personnel. "We need to act fast," he said recently. "So that on Jan. 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave."

That would be too bad, because the University of South Florida team delving into the perils of highly processed seed oil products has been awarded a five-year, $3 million NIH grant -- likely approved by the same people Kennedy is now threatening. Going "wild," as President-elect Donald Trump promised he would let Kennedy do, will throw the agency into chaos and probably curtail the kind of valuable research these scientists sponsor.

How ironic that a study supporting one of Kennedy's ideas is being supported by an agency he is seeking to disrupt and perhaps destroy. He has also floated the idea of a "moratorium" on NIH research into infectious diseases, as if we need no longer worry about the flu, meningitis, coronavirus or the many other medical threats ailing the world.

Unlike Kennedy, the scientists who produced the colon cancer study have been careful not to oversell its meaning. They are not claiming to have proved that all seed oils are too dangerous for human consumption, which previous studies show is unlikely, and they are definitely not urging McDonald's to use beef tallow in making french fries -- a shift that would horrify cardiologists, who understand how saturated fats clog veins and arteries.

The Trump gang is bored by the nuances and variables that guide real science, which is why they despise its qualified practitioners and lionize a fraud like Bobby Kennedy. They love the sensational nonsense spread by charlatans like him, even if it kills hundreds of thousands of innocents, as it did during the pandemic. It's a proven method of sucking votes and money from gullible rubes.

Meanwhile, we learned this week that one of Kennedy's top advisers is a lawyer who has sued to halt distribution of the polio vaccine -- an insane effort that might even worry Trump, if he hears about it. So before Senate Republicans let Kennedy go wild, maybe they will think about how his bizarre notions could bring harm to their children and grandchildren. Unlike Kennedy, they might want to aim before they start firing.

The trait most broadly shared by Donald Trump's nominees to top Cabinet posts is an utter lack of fitness for their prospective jobs. Most appear to be afflicted with negative attributes that would automatically disqualify them not only from these highly sensitive government positions but even from much less senior jobs in any normal administration. In that respect, they strongly resemble Trump himself.

Many of them share another outstanding characteristic with the president-elect. They are, like him, relentless grifters who keep monetizing their celebrity on the far right by ripping off the MAGA faithful with overpriced merchandise and other scams.

While right-wing scamming has a long history that can be traced back to the '50s Red Scare, Trump is the modern master of the craft. His persona as business genius always reeked of fakery, while his profiteering extended from the gross exploitation of his "charitable" foundation to multilevel marketing rip-offs and the "Trump University" real estate seminar swindle. More recently he deployed the "big lie" and false advertising to deceive his followers into sending hundreds of millions of dollars to his super PAC.

And during this year's presidential campaign, he roped credulous fans into buying hideous gold sneakers, tacky watches, autographed Bibles, junk digital images, souvenir coins and an array of similar junk. The man embraces avarice (and bad taste) with a zeal that any other head of state would consider shameful.

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But such degraded behavior is now standard on the Republican right.

Lately the grifting career of Pete Hegseth, Trump's troubled choice for defense secretary, has come under scrutiny in The New Yorker and other outlets. As a "veteran's advocate" (who actually advocated severe cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs), Hegseth ran nonprofit organizations that evidently squandered millions of dollars to subsidize his drunken partying and philandering, without achieving any of their supposed objectives. He drove at least one of those outfits into near-bankruptcy before its sponsors finally ousted him.

Less notorious yet equally unedifying were the enterprises fronted by Tulsi Gabbard, who spent tens of thousands of dollars donated to her Defend Freedom political action committee on bulk purchases of her recent book "For Love of Country," boosting it onto The New York Times bestseller list. Mother Jones reports that Gabbard founded another outfit, a nonprofit called We Must Protect, which sucked in almost $128,000, ostensibly to aid victims of the Maui wildfires -- and spent scarcely a third of that amount on grants to the unfortunate Hawaiians. She also ran a couple of PACs that took in hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they devoted to candidates or causes, with their cash mostly going to Gabbard aides and consultants.

Then there's Kash Patel, the conspiracy theorist and former congressional aide named by Trump to run the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which he has vowed to use as an instrument of vengeance against Democratic officeholders and other Trump "enemies." Patel has closely mimicked the classic Trump hustles by developing his own MAGA fanbase, mainly by using his tax-exempt "Kash Foundation" to promote himself and his partisan crusades. The online publicity subsidized by the foundation has enabled him to market "America First" branded clothing, a line of K$H wines, and a nutritional supplement that promises to "detox" anyone who has been vaccinated against COVID-19. (Not surprisingly, as revealed by menswear writer Derek Guy, the ultra-patriotic T-shirts hawked by Patel are manufactured in Central America and Haiti.)

Back in the day, at least a few conservatives were repulsed by this kind of hucksterism, which they saw as demeaning to their party. During the 2016 presidential primaries, Marco Rubio mocked the fakery of "Trump University," highlighted its cheating of veterans and seniors, and denounced Trump himself, declaring that the GOP "cannot allow a con artist to become the Republican nominee for president of the United States."

Rubio's indignation expired long ago -- and since then, of course, he has transformed himself into a sycophant who will soon be confirmed as the con artist's secretary of state. Endorsing the con -- and, indeed, practicing the con -- is the most important credential to hold office as a Republican, and it will be for the next four years.

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Newspaper profiles of Pamela Bondi -- subbed in as President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for U.S. attorney general following the scandalous implosion of Matt Gaetz -- often describe her with a phrase like "longtime loyalist."

The former Florida attorney general's unwavering fealty dates back to September 2013, when a political committee supporting her reelection campaign received a $25,000 check from the Trump Foundation. And the story behind that check foreshadows four more years of exceptionally corrupt administration, when the first felon returns to the White House. It is a tale that revolves around two of the most notorious scams pursued by the president-elect during his career as a "successful businessman," namely the Trump Foundation and Trump University.

Rather than an institution of higher learning, Trump U was a for-profit real-estate seminar that promised easy wealth to the suckers who paid huge sums to learn the Donald's investment secrets and received no instruction of any value whatsoever in return. Over the years before Bondi got that Trump check, thousands of defrauded consumers had complained to her office, demanding action.

And just three weeks earlier, then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman finally had announced the filing of a massive fraud case on behalf of New Yorkers ripped off by Trump University. According to Tristan Snell, the assistant attorney general handling the case, they hoped Florida would join New York's lawsuit "because it opened up the possibility that, if needed, we could pursue additional witnesses and documents" in the Sunshine State, where subpoenas would require Bondi's assistance.

Evidently that possibility also occurred to someone in the Trump Organization. Four days after the dramatic New York filing, Trump executive assistant Rhona Graff sent an email to the Bondi campaign finance director, seeking details of how to make a donation. Made out to "And Justice For All," the ironically named Bondi PAC, that donation arrived by mail on Sept. 13, 2013, along with a note signed by Trump that misspelled the candidate's name as "Biondi" and declared, "Dear Pam, You are the greatest!"

The check was drawn on the Trump Foundation -- a tax-exempt nonprofit organization prohibited from giving money to political campaigns or partisan committees. That was merely one of many examples of Trump's abuse of his foundation's tax-exempt status.

You may have surmised by this point that the Florida attorney general blew off her New York colleagues in seeking justice for the Trump U victims. Snell recalls that after sending the case documents to Tallahassee, "we never heard from the Florida AG's office again."

None of that hindered the legal team led by Snell -- one of very few officials ever to hold Trump accountable -- from winning a $25 million settlement from the Trump Organization after the 2016 election. The proceeds reimbursed Trump's victims for roughly 80% of what they had lost. Two years after he coughed up that punishing payment, the New York attorney general's office came after the Trump Foundation again, charging that its charitable activities were nonexistent and that its expenditures benefited Trump himself.

In the humiliating conclusion of that lawsuit, his lawyers agreed their client would shut down the foundation and pay the remaining millions in its accounts to bona fide charities.

So egregious were the depredations of Trump U that Republicans felt obliged to condemn its swindling. The National Review ran a scathing investigative report headlined "Yes, Trump University Was a Massive Scam." Sen. Marco Rubio, then a Trump rival, denounced Trump U as a "con job," and warned that "we cannot allow a con artist to become the Republican nominee for president of the United States." (The Florida senator's more recent sycophancy has now earned Rubio the opportunity to become secretary of state.)

Every Republican senator who votes to confirm Bondi as the nation's attorney general knows the saga of Trump University. As Snell sardonically asks, "Did Trump just happen to want to make a donation to Bondi a mere four days after the New York AG's case was filed? Really?"

He goes on to demand that journalists and senators interrogate Bondi about this scandal -- and explore its implications for her integrity, her subservience to the president, and her ability to carry out the attorney general's duties.

"We need to make sure this full story gets told -- and any profile of Bondi or analysis of her nomination that does not include this story is itself another example of corrupt complicity." Nobody, in the mainstream media or the United States Senate, should be able to claim they did not know.

Among the sharpest conservative opponents of fascism is George T. Conway III. During a Nov. 14 appearance on CNN, the attorney and activist offered this pithy description of Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Gaetz and Bobby Kennedy, the worst nominees (so far) to Donald Trump's cabinet:

"If you were seeking to destroy the country, the Gabbard, Gaetz, and RFK Jr. picks were exactly the ones you'd make. And that's not surprising. Because Trump is a malignant narcissist, and malignant narcissists, subconsciously or consciously, do seek to destroy." (I should note here that Conway is a friend who wrote the foreword to my most recent book, "The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.")

There may be even more sinister explanations for what Trump is doing -- he appears subservient to a hostile foreign power -- but Conway's warning about the potential impact of his bizarre choices is no exaggeration. Many Americans, probably including the ignorant and arrogant Trump, have little idea what the major federal agencies do or why maintaining their operations is so essential to protecting our families, livelihoods and security. We may be about to find out the very hardest way.

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As many observers have noted, it is difficult to imagine a more absurd appointee than Gaetz to head the Department of Justice, which has jurisdiction over the FBI as well. He has no relevant experience whatsoever, except as an investigative target.

Like his master Trump, former Florida Rep. Gaetz publicly vowed vengeance on the FBI for daring to probe his alleged crimes, which ranged from drug offenses and theft of campaign funds to the sexual trafficking of teenage girls. But the nation's premier law enforcement agency has responsibilities that range far beyond probing the misconduct of a sleazy congressman. While Gaetz, Trump and many of their cronies may be perfectly content to disrupt the FBI's probes of public corruption, thus leaving them unmolested, the rest of us would surely suffer if it is no longer able to investigate violent gangs, prevent terrorist bombings and cyberattacks, and maintain a counterintelligence cordon against enemy spies (although that would surely gratify those Trump fans in the Kremlin).

The thugs, traffickers and spies apprehended by the FBI are prosecuted by DOJ attorneys, either in Washington or by U.S. attorneys around the country, whose operations certainly need no interference from the likes of Gaetz or anyone whom he might choose as his underlings.

So when Gaetz proclaims his desire to dismantle the FBI and DOJ, he may have his own petty reasons -- but the impact of this clown on the rule of law, public order and Americans' ability to conduct our lives in peace and security could be devastating.

In certain ways Gabbard resembles Gaetz. She too is a peculiar and discredited figure with no discernible ability to perform the role assigned her by Trump, overseeing the world's largest and most vital intelligence network. That network includes the CIA, the National Security Agency, the intelligence divisions of the armed forces, and the FBI (which she can assist Gaetz in wrecking). She is a veteran and a former member of Congress, but perhaps just as important is her pedigree as an acolyte of a destructive cult that spun off from the Hare Krishna organization.

Worse still, she has repeatedly demonstrated her allegiance to some of this era's bloodiest dictators -- not just Vladimir Putin, whose propaganda about Ukraine she tried to spread, but Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian despot, mass murderer and Russian client, to whom she provided similar assistance. Russian state television, which has often garlanded Gabbard with favorable coverage, is celebrating her appointment -- but allied intelligence agencies around the world are being forced to reconsider their ties with American counterparts, potentially crippling our capacity to obtain information vital to U.S. national security.

Kennedy, the conspiracy monger and anti-vax profiteer, presents a different kind of menace to our future. He is a proved and inveterate liar, who now claims he isn't an opponent of vaccination when there are hours of video and other indisputable records confirming that fact. More than once he has sat stone-faced while someone played that proof in his presence, and then continued to lie.

Should he actually be confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, with jurisdiction over such agencies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, the likely damage he will inflict on our health and safety is incalculable. We know what he is capable of doing -- what he yearns to do -- because he has left a legacy of human wreckage over the past two decades. His campaign against vaccinations during the COVID-19 pandemic helped to foster the fears that left millions vulnerable and eventually dead. Although Kennedy alone cannot be held accountable for those excess deaths, as statisticians call them, he definitely did his worst.

We may somehow avoid another pandemic, despite the imminent threat from bird flu, but Kennedy's anti-science ideology could bring on an epidemic of measles, if he can get the vaccination rate low enough. He and his anti-vax cronies achieved that deadly goal in Samoa several years ago -- with lethal consequences for dozens of little children. If he can scale that campaign here, the toll could be in the tens of thousands.

Bobby also aims to increase tooth decay among children by doing away with water fluoridation. He plans to undermine our decades-long effort to cure cancer and other modern plagues with a mad eight-year "moratorium" on scientific research. He has a roster of likeminded kooks he wants to name to top positions in the federal health agencies -- and it's mostly comprised of far-right quacks, discredited academics and supplement grifters, with a couple of neo-Nazis sprinkled among them. If he is confirmed, he will bring this rogue's gallery with him.

What stands between our country and the national wreckage portended by these abominable Trump appointees is the U.S. Senate. There is no more important function outlined in the Constitution for that deliberative body, and there has never been a more urgent need for senators to stand up and protect the nation. There are only a handful of Republicans with the courage, integrity and wisdom to stop this catastrophic process -- but only a handful need to act. Nothing less than the fate of the nation is at stake.

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As the tallying of votes approaches finality, with no happy outcome for Democrats, the triumphal narrative proclaimed by Republican cheerleaders needs correction. There was no MAGA “landslide” on Election Night – unless, like so many other aspects of American life, we have decided to diminish what that term has always meant historically.

Donald Trump appears to have won the popular vote by just over two percent, according to the latest numbers published by the Cook Political Report, which netted him 312 electoral votes. While that represented a big improvement on Trump’s weak record in presidential runs (and certainly warrants deep Democratic introspection), it was far from anything that could be defined as a landslide. In California, where Kamala Harris won the state with nearly 60 percent, there are still more than three million votes yet to be tallied..

So let's nudge the Republicans and their media cheerleaders back toward reality.

The last time that a Republican presidential candidate achieved what we have traditionally called a landslide was in 1988, when George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis by eight percent of the popular vote and won more than 400 electoral votes. Ronald Reagan notched two landslide victories: the first in 1980, when he beat incumbent Jimmy Carter by more than nine percent in the popular vote and nabbed 489 electoral votes (although Carter was hobbled by the third-party candidacy of John Anderson, who got nearly seven percent); and the second four years later, when he crushed Walter Mondale with nearly 59 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except the Democrat’s Minnesota home.

And let’s not forget Richard Nixon’s similar trouncing of George McGovern in 1972, when the Republican won 520 electoral votes and 61 percent of the popular vote. (Tricky Dick resigned in disgrace two years later when after revelations about his cheating in that election and numerous other crimes.) Democrats have won big too, notably in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson won 486 electoral votes and more than 61 percent. The last Democratic victory that approached a landslide came in 1996, when Bill Clinton won reelection with 379 electoral votes and came in nine points ahead in the popular vote against the incumbent Bush (who also had to contend with self-funding third-party gadfly Ross Perot).

So no, Trump’s roughly two percentage points do not place him in that category. It’s scarcely more than half as big as President Joe Biden’s margin in 2020, which the MAGA Republicans have repeatedly insisted was no victory at all. Democrats are far more gracious losers (and winners) than the Trump Republicans, who don’t hesitate to threaten and employ violence when they don’t get their way. (Notice how all the pre-election claims of “fraud” suddenly vanish when they win?)

Whatever the final numbers say, this election was assuredly disastrous for the Democrats, the nation, and the world. The damage has only just begun and the recovery remains distant and uncertain. Yet there many signs that the Republican narrative is too simple and simply wrong – from the Senate races that Democrats won in four of the five battleground states to the ballot initiatives where Republican ideologues were defeated on paid family leave, private school vouchers, and especially abortion rights.

The other cliché that Republicans keep repeating as they yammer about their pseudo- landslide is “mandate.” But having lied about their intentions, pretending to disown the authoritarian Project 2025 agenda that they now openly embrace, they have no mandate.

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Over the few days since Donald Trump's election victory, America has gotten a foretaste of the wreckage likely to ensue when he returns to the White House. His promise to endow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with plenary authority over health and food regulation -- and to let him "go wild" -- shows once more how little Trump really cares about anyone or anything but himself.

As Trump and his associates surely know, Bobby has no qualifications whatsoever to direct or oversee any federal health office, no matter how small, let alone a major agency like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration. Their corrupt deal with the anti-vaccine activist -- who has made millions from his attacks on public health -- was premised solely on his sycophantic endorsement of Trump and his perceived influence on the crackpot segment of the American electorate.

So confident is Kennedy of Trump's unconditional support that he has already announced his first policy directive, effective on Jan. 21, 2025: an attempt to curtail the municipal fluoridation of American water that has been in continuous effect in most places for decades. Cities and counties dose their water with tiny amounts of fluoride, a naturally occurring substance, because study after study has proved that it prevents dental decay in children, who are saved from the grave health impacts not only of rotting teeth but the infections and disabilities that can follow.

Yet Kennedy somehow has come to believe fluoride is a poison that must be removed from water systems immediately. Perhaps he was influenced the John Birch Society, which has promoted the idea that fluoridation is part of a left-wing plot against Americans since the '50s. (Stanley Kubrick satirized this nonsense in his 1964 film "Dr. Strangelove," which featured a rant by the fanatical right-wing Gen. Jack D. Ripper, justifying a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union that will end the world: "Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?")

Although it's true that excessive consumption of fluoride can lead to ill effects, the levels of fluoridation in U.S. water systems are nowhere near such levels. That's why the American Dental Association and every other health authority have long supported fluoridation policy.

Whatever the source of his bizarre misapprehensions, Kennedy will sooner or later have to confront the simple fact that the scientific evidence shatters his baseless speculations, as it has on so many occasions. The most recent study of fluoridation's impact on human beings, and especially young children, comes from the University of Alberta in Canada. It was produced in the context of a decade-long debate in Calgary, that province's largest city, over whether to restore fluoride to its water supply after removing the chemical in 2011.

Published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health last February, the study of thousands of children in the cities of Calgary (with non-fluoridated water) and Edmonton (where water is fluoridated) showed that lack of fluoride had serious adverse effects on children's health. It had led to thousands of children suffering tooth decay so severe that they needed surgical care under general anesthesia, which is perilous for young kids and led to lasting impact on their health, schooling and emotional well-being.

Of course, the likeliest victims of Kennedy's conspiracy-mongering are the poor -- including many lower-income Americans who voted for Trump at his urging. Should he succeed in outlawing fluoridation in water systems, it is poor children whose teeth will rot and whose lives will be blighted. More affluent and educated families will be able to provide fluoride treatment for their kids to save them from Bobby's destructive obsession.

The idea that such a radical scheme would go into effect on the first day of a new administration, without due process or reasoned consideration, is exactly the kind of dictatorial maladministration we can expect from Trump. We've seen it before, after all.

But before any such anti-fluoridation scheme proceeds, perhaps someone should demand that Kennedy uphold his recent vow to restore our public health agencies to "their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science" instead of allowing him to impose his wacky suppositions about fluoride on the entire country, without any study or evaluation.

Naming a health czar who parrots the superstitions of Jack D. Ripper is a bad omen of Trump's intentions. We're about to find out how far the new administration will veer into chaos, how much human misery this president will cause on a whim. The prospects are not reassuring.

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With Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House, the nightmare threat posed by him and his fascistic movement will all too soon become America’s waking reality. How the nation descended into this political abyss will no doubt inspire angry debate, but here is one response to this electoral disaster: We aren’t going anywhere and will continue to stand for the Constitution, the rule of law, and the principles of democracy and decency that endure even under aspiring tyrants.

Trump certainly aspires to tyranny, as he has repeatedly warned us, during the 2024 campaign and many times before. We can hope that his vow to use military force against opponents and dissenters and his openly expressed urge to arrest and harm his political adversaries is merely bluster, as his supporters insist. Many voters said they didn’t believe he would carry out those menacing promises, although his most fervent supporters evidently anticipate a campaign of vengeance with glee. Should he attempt such measures, he can expect fierce resistance in the courts and on the streets – and perhaps from military officers who have been trained to uphold constitutional values.

It remains astonishing that tens of millions of our fellow citizens have chosen to be led by a convicted felon -- described bluntly as a fascist by former members of his own cabinet and the military leaders who served under him – who calls his own country a hellhole and incessantly conjures racism, misogyny, division, and hatred to advance himself. What do those voters really want and expect from Trump?

Whatever they may want, what they are likely to get from him is probably not going to make them happy. Should he implement his reckless tariff scheme, much of which he can direct without Congressional approval, the nation’s economy will crater -- and the inflation that so irked consumers is certain to soar. If he tears down the Affordable Care Act, without the alternative plan he has failed to propose for almost ten years, the nation’s health care system will lurch into chaos -- and many of his followers and their families will be left to suffer. And if he orders the mass detention and deportation of migrants, then many actual citizens of Latino origin – a plurality of whom helped him win this election – are likely to be endangered. Appointing conspiracy kook Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health czar or awarding control of the federal budget to Elon Musk are scenarios designed to conclude in disaster. Kennedy's idea of making America "healthy again" would risk the return of lethal childhood diseases we had conquered, including polio and measles; Musk' notion of cutting a third of federal spending would sink the economy and impoverish the middle class. But maybe their fans must find all this out the hard way.

It is going to be a steep learning curve for anyone who expects Trump to make their lives better.

And those grim possibilities are merely the most obviously ruinous potential consequences of this election. We must expect the worst, from federal surveillance of women’s pregnancies to government attacks on the First Amendment. A profound sense of buyer’s remorse may be in store for Trump voters.

In the meantime, however, we must take whatever encouragement is to be found in these mostly dismal results – abortion protections won at the ballot box in several states, for instance – and must demand, both of ourselves and our elected officials, the courage to stand up against this would-be dictator’s excesses. This election has left us with no other choice.

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

If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win the White House on Nov. 5, the Democrats may owe their triumph to the notorious character flaw that plagues the Republican Party of Donald Trump: an irresistible urge to grift.

In an election likely to be determined by a very narrow proportion of votes in a few states, the difference between winning and losing could very well depend on what politicians have long referred to by the initials "GOTV" -- getting out the vote -- a process that involves calling people at home, knocking on their doors, letting them know how and where to vote, and perhaps even providing transportation to the polling place. It is a complex, demanding and essential campaign function that requires literally tens of millions of individual interactions to be orchestrated with exceptional attention to detail. To perform those tasks poorly (or not at all) can transform incipient victory into certain defeat.

It is also a potentially expensive element of a national election, even when most of the job is undertaken by volunteers. That's where the opportunities for grifting arose, after members of the Trump gang realized his campaign's field operations would attract big money from wealthy supporters. And at the forefront of the would-be chiselers in the 2024 campaign was Charlie Kirk, the aging leader of the MAGA movement's youth organization, Turning Point USA. (Kirk's personally profitable stewardship of Turning Point is examined in my recent book "The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.")

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While the "ground game" for a Republican presidential ticket has been traditionally overseen by the Republican National Committee, Kirk used his close connections with the Trump family, especially Don Jr., to seize effective control of the party apparatus. (No doubt the president's eldest son was grateful to Turning Point for bulk buying copies of his book "Triggered.") He succeeded in pushing out RNC chair Ronna McDaniel and promoting his Turning Point PAC as the Trump campaign's principal field operation. (He also persuaded Trump to install daughter-in-law Lara Trump, with no discernible credentials, as RNC chair so she could advance his fortunes.) He announced he would raise $108 million to "chase every vote" in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.

The wholesale abandonment of McDaniel's extensive planning provoked deep skepticism among veteran GOP operatives. They saw no reason why Kirk would need so much cash to get out the vote in three states -- or why anyone should invest in his dubious project. They noted that Turning Point's previous election organizing efforts in Arizona's elections in 2022 had not ended well: Every Republican running statewide that year lost.

But Turning Point's lousy midterm results didn't discourage Trump, who was drawn to Kirk's emphasis on turning out "low-propensity" far-right MAGA base voters, rather than seeking to persuade the unaffiliated or undecided. That strategy has lately devolved into a crusade for the support of alienated young men, who may or may not actually show up at the polls. How Kirk plans to motivate them is unclear.

Not long after McDaniel's ouster, Kirk and his allies began to pressure state and local Republican officials to shift their voter outreach and canvassing programs onto a new platform -- an app marketed by Superfeed Technologies, a private firm that happens to be owned by Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point USA's chief operating officer. Just to keep it all in the family, Kirk's mother-in-law sits on the Superfeed board of directors.

Now perhaps this web of conflict and profit is all perfectly legitimate. And maybe the Superfeed app and Kirk's ambitious vote-herding plan will prove to be a brilliant success. But election experts told the Associated Press in early October that they doubt Turning Point can mobilize enough new or infrequent Trump voters to affect the outcome. They pointed out that record numbers of voters cast ballots in 2016 and 2020, which doesn't leave a large share of likely voters to be organized.

Another sign of weakness is that Turning Point has turned over its outreach campaign in Michigan, which reportedly collapsed, to Elon Musk's America PAC. The Musk effort has suffered from its own widely mocked technical glitches and flaws -- including a scam that allowed its employees to falsify their canvassing records.

Contrast all that sleaze with the Harris-Walz campaign, bolstered by tens or even hundreds of thousands of unpaid volunteers. They are motivated not by love of money but love of country.

We don't know which side will win yet -- but we already know who deserves to win.

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Long before Donald Trump declared he would run for president, his first political adviser articulated the central idea that has come to define both candidate and campaign.

"Hate is a stronger motivator than love," said Roger Stone in 2008 -- and that corrosive outlook is obviously what still drives the Watergate-vintage dirty trickster and pardoned felon (although he now claims to be a born-again "Christian"). It is also what drives the man whose political persona Stone created.

The Trump campaign, and the MAGA movement at its core, embodies a malevolent spirit of hostility that endangers democracy, domestic tranquility and the very future of the nation. Both the candidate and his surrogates persistently spew out a noxious fog of deception and demonization, aimed at dehumanizing vulnerable populations that cannot fight back.

Sounding like a dollar-store knockoff of Hitler, Trump keeps intensifying his racist rants against migrants and minorities he describes as genetically inferior and predisposed to criminal conduct, from eating other people's pets to slitting the throats of young women. He has commenced a tour of cities supposedly overrun by these dark-skinned marauders, even as the local Republican officials have begged him to desist from his absurd lies and violent instigation.

But almost as toxic, and perhaps even more bizarre, is the Trump campaign's increasingly lurid, clamorous barrage of advertising aimed at trans people. So far, the Republicans and their allies have spent roughly $30 million on ads that aim to conflate trans people with murderers -- and persuading them that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is devoted to advancing the interests of those trans killers above all else. While it is true that Harris has supported gender-affirming health care, including for prisoners, it is also true that the federal prison system under Trump provided that same care -- as the law requires.

But what is so weird -- how else to put it? -- about the Trump anti-trans crusade is its hidden underwriter. Behind the spending on much of the MAGA hate propaganda, especially the messages dehumanizing trans people, is none other than billionaire troll Elon Musk. Hatred is a more powerful motivator than love for a twisted character like Musk too, even when the object of that revulsion is his own child.

Now Musk, a pompous proponent of "conservative family values," has often bragged about littering the world with his offspring, possibly too many to identify. But what we know for certain is that he has a trans daughter who has changed her name to Vivian Wilson and successfully petitioned the courts to dissociate herself from her father.

Rarely present for Vivian when she was growing up, Musk has gone so far as to proclaim that his erstwhile son is "dead, killed by the woke mind virus," and mock his own child publicly for being "gay and slightly autistic" from an early age. Vivian says Musk knows nothing about her and has lied about being "tricked" into approving the medical treatment she says saved her life.

It is worth noting here that this same troll, who has reportedly financed millions of dollars' worth of anti-immigrant vitriol online and on the airwaves, is himself a migrant from South Africa via Canada -- and has collected more money from government, both state and federal, than any 10 million working-class noncitizens. His reintroduction of Nazism, white supremacy and outrageous conspiracies and falsehoods on his social media platform X makes him a far greater menace to American communities than those who have crossed the southern border to escape violence and seek a better life for their kids. Before the mass deportation begins, perhaps we could have a more selective approach.

Ugliness and grievance suffuse the Trump movement. They are as visible as a pustulant sore, not only in the would-be president's threatening rhetoric but in the aggressive thrust of his backers. It protrudes in different directions, always exposing the internalized fury of those around him, from his adviser Stephen Miller's desire to destroy immigrant families, to JD Vance's undisguised anger at the unmarried women who remind him of his errant mother, to Musk's festering grudge against his daughter.

An American political campaign, especially for the presidency, would normally seek to promote a vision of the future, an inspiring call to patriotism, or even a platform of policies and proposals. What Trump and his coterie of billionaires offer instead is incitement and the prospect of bloodshed, all so they can profit and loot the Treasury at will. What they are delivering already is a hellscape of hatred -- just as Stone so gleefully warned us.

How unsurprising is it that former President Donald Trump appeared recently at an event supposedly devoted to opposing antisemitism -- and proceeded to deliver a speech dripping with antisemitic innuendo and contempt for American Jews?

Like so much of what Trump says and does, his remarks at the "Combating Antisemitism" affair in Washington, D.C., expressed a bitter grievance. He resents the fact that Jewish voters in the United States remain overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, which means only a minority of them vote for him. He bluntly argued that his support for Israel's right-wing and bloodstained government somehow entitles him to Jewish votes, even though many Jews are critical of Israeli policy and political leadership.

Hours later, at an event for Israeli Americans, he expanded on the same themes but went much further, seeking to scapegoat the entire Jewish community for the electoral failure he now fears:

"If I don't win this election, and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens, because at 40%, that means 60% of the people are voting for the enemy ..."

Aside from his noxious description of his political rivals as "the enemy," Trump's attempt to blame Jews in advance for a Republican defeat at the polls is both absurd and sinister. Absurd because Jews are a tiny fraction of the electorate, mostly concentrated in states where he has no chance to win anyway. Sinister because the MAGA movement that Trump has spawned is crawling with neo-Nazis, white nationalists and antisemites who are already primed to spread hatred of Jews and other forms of racism.

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And he knows it.

Trump's rise over the past decade has seen the mainstreaming of every extremist ideology on the right -- a category that encompasses antisemitism along with racism, homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia and the violent antagonism toward immigrants that he and his vice presidential nominee JD Vance now encourage routinely. As the Republican Party moved sharply rightward under Trump's leadership, the most vicious hatemongers have sprung up to proclaim their bigotry loudly, while proudly identifying as MAGA.

The latest mortifying episode involves Mark Robinson, the GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina, a pious moralist whose raunchy online persona was suddenly exposed by a CNN investigative team. Much of what Robinson wrote on the "Nude Africa" porn site is too scandalous to be recounted on television, including his sexual encounters with his sister-in-law. What could be reported in full were his viciously bigoted screeds. "I am a black Nazi," he wrote, declaring his admiration for Hitler and the genocidal murderer's autobiography, "Mein Kampf."

But here's the problem for Republicans and especially Trump, who endorsed this weirdo fulsomely while comparing him favorably to Martin Luther King Jr.: Unlike Robinson's strange sexual preoccupations, his antisemitism was no secret. He openly posted anti-Jewish and conspiratorial material on social media for many years, and refused to disown or apologize for those offenses. And by now nobody should be shocked that Trump and the MAGA Republicans, including his media claque, have lionized a Black Nazi.

The proliferation of white nationalist and Nazi-adjacent personalities at the highest levels of the Republican Party, directly attributed to MAGA and Trump, is pervasive. Candace Owens, a commentator dismissed from a right-wing website for her antisemitic ravings, was recently invited to headline a campaign fundraiser with Donald Trump Jr. Jack Posobiec, a right-wing operative repeatedly promoted by Trump, has collaborated with neo-Nazis and distributed antisemitic posts on social media. Wendy Rogers, an Arizona GOP state senator, just recently posted Nazi song lyrics on X, which was only her latest antisemitic emission.

The list goes on, including the nasty little pro-Hitler podcaster Nick Fuentes, who dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, as well as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the "Jewish space lasers" theorist.

And then there's Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and close Trump confidant, who not long ago aired a show with a pseudo-historian whose work aims at absolving the Third Reich of responsibility for the Holocaust and whitewashing Hitler. Carlson, long a fan favorite of neo-Nazis here and abroad, approvingly echoed the recitation of revisionist lies.

This is a sickening phenomenon from which most Republicans -- and too many in the media -- have long averted their eyes. Trump may be the most reliable ally of the far right in Israel, but he represents a growing danger to American Jews.

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Exploiting Fear Is What They Do

Of all the falsehoods, evasions and plainly loony remarks by former President Donald Trump during his ill-fated debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, perhaps it was to be expected that his ridiculous lie about the endangered pets of Springfield, Ohio, would go super viral.

While the Republican candidate declared himself the winner "by a lot" (a claim rejected even by many of his supporters), the internet was aflame with hundreds of mocking memes and several music videos that sampled his glowering image and tone of menace as he said, "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there."

Harris couldn't restrain herself from laughing -- and it was impossible not to join her.

While some of us are still laughing, the intention behind that indictment of Haitian immigrants by Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, wasn't funny but deeply sinister. The only conceivable reason to spread that ugly myth, like so many of wild delusions promoted by politicians like Trump and Vance, is to demonize defenseless people, enrage gullible conservatives, and harvest money or votes or both in the process.

By now this industry of profiting from invented grievances is very familiar, having been refined in countless varieties by the generations of right-wing grifters who paved the way for Trump. Decades ago they began by promoting paranoia about communism and civil rights, initially by direct mail, and always with the most outlandish tales: of "barefoot" African soldiers just over the southern border, waiting to invade at the order of the United Nations; of public school teachers indoctrinating children to accept cannibalism and "wife-swapping"; of unions forcing firefighters to let houses burn down. None of these canards bore the slightest resemblance to truth -- yet they induced millions of people to mail checks to crooked political entrepreneurs.

The only difference between then and now is that the Trump campaign expects to profit from its lies via email and credit cards rather than mailed checks. Trump and Vance care just as little for the truth as those direct-mail shysters, unashamed to keep repeating the lie even as the mayor of Springfield, the city's police chief and the very Republican governor of Ohio have sought to explain that there has been not a single case of a Haitian immigrant eating anybody's cat.

Vance claims that his office has received "many" such complaints from local residents, but he doesn't seem to have forwarded them to any authorities. (It's probably safe to assume he's lying about that too.) The smirking senator doesn't care whether the stories are true. He just wants to fan the flames of fury.

It is true, as local and state officials have hastened to note, that the huge influx of migrants to Springfield and the surrounding counties has created real difficulties. Some are cultural and some are simply due to overburdened systems and infrastructure. Local governments had no opportunity to prepare -- and they assuredly need much more assistance than they have gotten from the federal government, which created the problem with good intentions and inadequate foresight.

But what is so impressive - and inspires hope for our country - is how many of the citizens of Springfield have sought to make the best of this challenge, despite the hardships, even as opportunistic politicians and their most racist supporters try to exploit it.

Trump and Vance have nothing to offer except antagonism, panic and potential violence. But Springfield's employers have provided jobs and found the Haitians to be valuable and diligent workers; clergy have welcomed Haitian families into their churches; and the city and county frontline workers, in social services and public safety, have stepped up with compassion.

Even a man who lost his son to a traffic accident caused by a reckless Haitian driver last year has set aside his grief to admonish those who have misused his son's death to incite fear and hate. At a recent city commission meeting, Nathan Clark invoked the memory of his late son. "Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible." He named Vance and Trump, among others, saying, "They have spoken my son's name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now."

It will only stop when the reprehensible exploitation is no longer profitable.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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Years before former President Donald Trump seized upon the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, he insistently promoted another supersized falsehood -- namely that charges of Russian interference in the 2016 election were "a hoax." His minions in the media, from Fox News down to the lowliest web trolls, have incessantly parroted that lie despite the volumes of evidence uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee's bipartisan investigation and the special counsel probe by Robert Mueller.

But now a fresh indictment released by the Justice Department on Sept. 4 shows that the Kremlin conspiracy to rig U.S. elections in favor of the Republican Party is not a liberal myth but a live threat -- and that several of the most prominent MAGA media voices denouncing the "hoax" were themselves on the Russian payroll, taking big money. The charges lodged against Russia Today employees Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva include money laundering, conspiracy and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The indictment describes in detail, with supporting documents translated from Russian, how Kremlin consultants and employees of RT, the state media outlet, directed at least $10 million in funding to a shadowy Tennessee firm known as Tenet Media.

Working under direct control of the Russians were Lauren Chen, a Canadian far-right YouTube "influencer" who also worked for Glenn Beck's BlazeTV, and her husband Liam Donovan. Chen and Donovan launched Tenet and hired major right-wing personalities such as Tim Pool, host of "Timcast," Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, a former Buzzfeed reporter fired for plagiarism, and Lauren Southern, a white nationalist who is also from Canada.

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The idea was to draw their millions of online followers into an audience for streaming Tenet videos -- and the company paid them each hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of them, identified in the indictment as "Commentator-1" and most likely either Johnson or Pool, received $400,000 per month for producing four videos.

Of far more significance than the gamy individuals who joined up with Tenet was the company's deeper purpose, as outlined by the Russians in a document reproduced as part of the indictment. Their project's top "objectives" as the election year approached were to target voters in swing states, Hispanic and Jewish voters, and "residents of conservative states" who usually vote Republican, and to move them toward pro-Russian viewpoints about the war in Ukraine, while undermining confidence in President Joe Biden and promoting discontent over the economy and culture, especially among white Americans.

Its stated "goal" was to "secure victory of U.S. Political Party A candidate" -- which meant to elect Trump as president.

In short, federal investigators caught "Russia, Russia, Russia" -- as a mocking Trump likes to say -- interfering yet again to prop up his campaign. And just as word of the indictment broke, the Republican presidential nominee reiterated his promise to sell out Ukraine for a "peace" plan as soon as he wins election, even before he enters the White House. What Russia spent on Tenet would be pocket change compared with that return on investment.

Although the indictment depicts Rubin and Pool as ignorant of their sponsorship by the Russian government, and presumably duped by the cover story of a "Belgian investor" who didn't actually exist, none of them seemed too curious about who was financing this mysterious windfall. They apparently never imagined that spouting Russian propaganda against Ukraine, as all of them consistently did, might have attracted Kremlin sponsorship. Chen and Donovan evidently knew the venture was subsidized by Russian funds, routed through Mideast banks.

Indeed, Rubin, Johnson and Pool immediately declared they are innocent "victims" of the Russian scheme, defrauded into serving as Kremlin stooges. But they have also suggested, along with a chorus of right-wing defenders on Fox and elsewhere, that the indictment is actually a conspiracy by the Justice Department to censor "conservatives" and frighten gullible voters with "dirty tricks."

So which is it? The ugly truth is that the American Right, deeply compromised by the Kremlin connections of its leader Trump, doesn't care that he or its own media networks have been penetrated by a hostile foreign power. They are happy to take Russian money, or at least are untroubled when others grab those rubles -- just as "conservatives" were once content to secretly accept illicit millions from the Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon or, for that matter, from agents of the German government during the years before World War II.

There are lots of terms to define these acts and attitudes -- some legalistic, others defamatory. But none of those descriptions would include "patriotic."

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Try for just a moment to imagine the explosion of anger on the right if a Democratic presidential candidate -- or any Democratic candidate -- barged into Arlington National Cemetery for a campaign photo op. Imagine the fury on Fox News if such a Democrat had then posted video of herself, on TikTok, with an idiotic grin and thumbs-up pose over the grave of a fallen soldier. Imagine how Republicans in Congress would scream if the errant candidate's aides had not only ignored federal laws governing that sacred American space but even dared to physically assault an Army employee who tried to prevent their illegal invasion.

Now we know with certainty that all of the above and worse transpired in a scheme by former President Donald Trump's campaign as it misused an especially hallowed part of Arlington to promote him and embarrass the Biden White House. And rather than apologize, as Trump never does, he is trying to blame others for his offenses and potential crimes, as he always does.

This unsavory story is still unfolding, but what we know so far should surprise nobody familiar with the Trump pattern of tacky behavior, disrespect for service, and extreme belligerence toward anyone who objects to his depredations. It begins with the Trump campaign seeking to politicize the deaths of 13 servicemembers killed during the final departure of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021. (Never mind that the dismal conditions of withdrawal were set up by Trump himself when he appeased Taliban terrorists, even inviting them to the White House, and caved in to a "peace agreement" that enabled them to seize power.)

Seeking to regain lost momentum against Vice President Kamala Harris following the Democratic convention, Trump aides ignored warnings from Arlington staff about using the cemetery as a partisan stage. They were told explicitly that the rules strictly regulate images from Section 60, where Trump appeared and where graves of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are located. They were also told that while Trump could accompany the families to a wreath-laying anniversary ceremony, his campaign staff should refrain from joining the event.

READ: The real reason corporate media won't cover Trump's attacks on democracy

According to Military.com, the Trump campaign received advance written guidance that "photographers ... or any persons attending for purposes, or in direct support, of a partisan political candidate's campaign are NOT permitted on the (Arlington National Cemetery) installation."

The Trump staffers not only ignored those caveats but bullied their way in with typical jut-jawed arrogance. When a female cemetery official tried to dissuade them from violating the rules, a large male Trump staffer yelled at her and thrust her aside. (Why does that brutalizing behavior sound so familiar?) After National Public Radio first reported what happened, a thuggish campaign spokesman suggested that the Arlington employee was suffering from a "mental health episode." Then his thuggish boss, campaign manager Chris LaCivita, demanded that she be fired for her "despicable" conduct.

The U.S. Army -- by now all too familiar with the former president known for his draft-evasion antics as "Corporal Bonespurs" -- firmly rejected this Trumpian response. Despite the military's general aversion to political controversy, the Army issued an official statement defending its standards and its abused employee -- which said she had "acted with professionalism" when she tried to enforce cemetery rules, noting that during the "unfortunate incident" she had been "abruptly pushed aside," and vowing that Arlington's dedicated staff "will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation's fallen deserve."

Even as Trump tried to shift responsibility onto the Army, the families that invited him to Arlington, and anyone else except himself, his campaign doubled down. But veterans across the country, and indeed all Americans who honor military service, marked this disgrace as the latest in a long list of insults uttered by a man who should never have been this nation's commander-in-chief. No Republican hypocrisy or bullying bluster can excuse it.

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The Trump campaign's attack on the military record of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz -- who served honorably as a volunteer in the National Guard for 24 years -- invites us to remember the military service of former President Donald J. Trump.

Except there isn't anything to remember concerning Trump's military service since he never served. Neither did his two older sons, nor his father, Fred, nor his grandfather Friedrich Trump, who originally came to this country to avoid the draft in his native Germany and was barred from returning there as a penalty for evading military service. It is a fact that Donald and his offspring grew up in the United States, with all the benefits thus accrued, as a direct result of old Friedrich's draft dodging.

That spotty history won't discourage Trump and his minions from their ongoing assault on Walz -- the latest cycle in a long Republican history of denigrating the service of political opponents, nearly always with a barrage of falsehood. The practice is known as "swiftboating," a term that arose from the 2004 propaganda blitz of lies about Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's courageous, highly decorated Vietnam service.

One of the principal authors of that slimy chapter, GOP operative Chris LaCivita, is now running the Trump campaign's mugging of Walz. These are the same kind of "patriots" who once mocked Sen. Max Cleland, the late Georgia Democrat who lost three limbs in Vietnam and earned the Bronze and Silver stars -- and who smirked when Trump derided the POW ordeal of the late Sen. John McCain.

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Trump may think he can smear Walz without consequence by hiding behind his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, who enlisted in the Marines and served, however briefly, in Iraq. Ever the useful tool, Vance has aggressively insulted Walz over a few minor footnotes to the Minnesota governor's service, including whether he carried an assault weapon "in war"; when he chose to retire from the Guard; and what rank he could legitimately claim upon retirement.

None of this amounts to a substantial criticism of Walz or his service -- which is why Republican repetition of these same tired charges every time he stands for office has failed to wound him. (The claims against Walz didn't gain any credibility when Minnesota media revealed that two former National Guard officers had been paid by Republicans to make them.)

As for Vance, the Ohio senator is surely one tough weenie. He deserves thanks for his service. But his record doesn't suggest any zeal for actual battle. During four years in the Marine Corps, he spent six months in Iraq as a "combat correspondent," meaning he interviewed actual combatants and wrote up their stories for service publications. As he acknowledged in his memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy," "I was lucky to escape any real fighting."

Trump was lucky too, in a different way: His wealthy father arranged for young Donald to escape the Vietnam draft, just as George Herbert Walker Bush did for his son George W., who obtained a safe stateside berth in the Texas Air National Guard.

When Trump could no longer rely on student deferments, he abruptly developed a medical condition that made him ineligible for service: bone spurs in one or both of his feet. (He no longer recalls which foot allegedly suffered from this painful ailment.) As a lifelong athlete who has often boasted of his sporting prowess, Trump was no doubt anguished by this sudden crippling condition.

Or was he? As reporters later discovered when he ran for president, both podiatrists who attested to those disqualifying bone spurs had leased office space from the Trump Organization. By 2016, when questions emerged, those doctors had passed away and their records were no longer available. But the daughters of one of them told The New York Times that their entire family knew her father had delivered Donald's diagnosis as "a favor" to landlord Fred -- and that he had been rewarded with exceptional service as a Trump tenant.

Isn't that special? No wonder Trump feels obliged to hug the flag wherever he goes.

Such is the parody of patriotism we have come to expect from the Republican Party, especially under Trump. Actual service to the nation -- a calling to which men like Walz have devoted their entire lives as schoolteachers, Guard officers and public servants -- is dismissed and scorned for partisan gain. Grifters and scammers, who have spent a lifetime serving only themselves, are somehow elevated to cult status.

In this election, those con artists are testing the gullibility of voters yet again. Their success would be America's failure.

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When political observers describe J.D. Vance as "weird," what they usually mean is the Republican vice-presidential nominee's ranting about childless people, his extremism on questions like abortion and divorce, or perhaps his choice of eyeliner.

But there is a deeper level to Vance's political weirdness that places him amid the most sinister political forces in the nation today -- and calls into question the supposed patriotism that motivates him and the "America First" movement he and Donald Trump now represent. To understand what Vance really stands for, and why his ideology is so distant from the constitutional democracy he has sworn to uphold as a United States senator, it is necessary to examine the chief sponsor of his political and business career, a Silicon Valley billionaire named Peter Thiel.

Born in Germany and raised in South Africa, Thiel made his enormous fortune as a venture capitalist and executive in tech companies such as PayPal and Palantir. Attracted from an early age to far-right ideologues like the addled author Ayn Rand, Thiel has identified himself as a "conservative libertarian" and a critic of democratic systems. Not so long ago, he was heard to say that democracy and freedom -- or at least his idea of "freedom" -- are no longer compatible.

If that sounds ominous, it is a sentiment that Thiel has advanced for decades now -- and that has long characterized a strain of anti-government extremism on the American right. It is a worldview that dates back at least three decades, when a self-proclaimed economic guru named James Dale Davidson began promoting it in his investment newsletters and video presentations.

Back then, Davidson's seething enmity for President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton led him not only to make the preposterous claim that they were behind the death of their friend Vince Foster (who had tragically committed suicide) but to insist that Clinton's policies would soon plunge the nation into a cataclysmic depression. The internet boom under Clinton, which boosted incomes and balanced the budget for the first time in decades, left Davidson looking foolish.

Undaunted by failure, he went on to write "The Sovereign Individual," a 1997 tome that predicted the rise of digital currencies, along with other less prescient notions. It eventually won favorable attention from Thiel, who provided a gushing preface to a new edition in 2020, two decades after its original publication, that emphasized its influence on his own political outlook and urged it upon readers as "an opportunity not to be wasted."

Why was Thiel drawn to Davidson's obscure screed? Aside from its advocacy of what we might now call cryptocurrency -- a dubious special interest promoted heavily by Vance ever since his elevation to the Senate -- "The Sovereign Individual" foretold a world ruled by people like him. Governments, nation-states and the social order would all collapse; digital currencies would replace all other forms of money, except among the poorest populations; taxation and regulation of corporations would become impossible. In its conclusion, Davidson and his co-author Lord William Rees-Mogg, a British peer, denigrated democracy as the twin of communism and welcomed the advent of a brutish and largely lawless world dominated by a tiny minority of the super-rich. It isn't hard to imagine that Thiel, who has financed technological research aimed at human immortality, envisioned himself as one of those godlike rulers.

Does Vance agree with Thiel's jaundiced view of democracy? Does he push crypto because digital finance will allow billionaires and their businesses to evade taxes and launder money? Does he look forward to a plutocratic dystopia replacing our republic?

No doubt the embattled Republican veep nominee would deny any such disturbing views. Yet Thiel isn't the only ultra-reactionary influence on Vance. The Ohio senator has also endorsed Curtis Yarvin, a cranky computer programmer who says America needs "a national CEO, or what's called a dictator," and embraced Rod Dreher, an American who now serves the illiberal regime of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban.

All that makes Vance something worse than merely weird.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

With his former vice president sidelined by that near-death experience on Jan. 6, former President Donald Trump had to name a new running mate at the recent Republican National Convention. But his campaign had scarcely announced the selection of J.D. Vance, the very junior senator from Ohio, before they began to feel pangs of regret.

Not only did Vance embody certain of the most unattractive aspects of MAGA -- the Trump pseudo-ideology that highlights the bigotry and misogyny of its standard-bearer -- but he instantly found ways to display his ugliest impulses.

For instance, despite whispered entreaties from campaign advisers, Vance simply couldn't resist the urge to personally disparage Vice President Kamala Harris, soon to become the Democratic presidential nominee. Having previously mocked her as a "childless cat lady" with no personal stake in America's future, he now says she doesn't love our country -- much as the right used to insult former first lady Michelle Obama, who resembles Harris in a couple of obvious ways. (Someone might remind Vance that like Harris, George Washington had no natural offspring but was instead the stepfather of his wife Martha's children.)

The sinister muttering doesn't stop there. Like many other Republicans, Vance has hinted that the vice president is unqualified to serve in the nation's highest office because she is merely a "diversity, equity and inclusion hire," meaning she was chosen for her race and gender rather than her ability and achievements.

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Coming from a fledgling politician who has barely served a year in the Senate -- and accomplished nothing in public service -- Vance's criticism reeks of unearned arrogance. Leaving aside her role in the Biden-Harris administration, with its long list of legislative and diplomatic accomplishments, the vice president has served as a big-city district attorney, attorney general of the most populous state in the union, and U.S. senator. She has compiled a real record of action at every level. Were she a white male, there would be no question about her qualifications for the presidency.

But Vance isn't the only Republican who should think twice before raising the "DEI" canard against Harris. For anyone with a functioning memory, their hypocrisy is ludicrous.

As noted in my new book "The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism," the most obviously unqualified nominee put forward by a major party, before Trump's rise, was that Republican phenomenon and MAGA favorite, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. It was the feckless nomination of Palin that drove the Republican right toward the vacuous populism and conspiratorial paranoia that became Trump's far-right cult.

Nobody doubted in 2008 that Republican nominee John McCain's campaign team picked Palin because she was a right-wing woman. She lacked the minimum knowledge to perform her job as governor, let alone vice president or, heaven forbid, commander-in-chief. What McCain's campaign team learned during their backward selection process -- naming her first and vetting her later -- blew their minds. Her mental cupboard didn't just have a few empty shelves. Her brain was a dark and terrifying vacuum, almost wholly devoid of useful content for a major party candidate. She had vaulted from small-town mayor to governor without acquiring a basic grasp of history and government. She required emergency tutoring on the two world wars, the two Koreas and the Federal Reserve System.

Yet she scorned knowledge and expertise, placing far higher value on her own overrated "common sense," the same bluster that Trump would echo a decade later.

As the first woman chosen for a national ticket by the Republican Party, Palin's novelty obscured the glaring fact that she was not their first deeply underqualified nominee. A dismal precedent dating back two decades existed in the person of Dan Quayle, the young Indiana senator whose surprise elevation onto the 1988 GOP ticket with George H. W. Bush discarded any consideration of competence for the youthful appeal of a blond frat boy.

Quayle was also a version of a "DEI" candidate, intended to attract women voters. But while Quayle seemed to deserve pity more than mockery, Palin projected a bullying assurance that only "elitists" would ever insist on actual command of facts and policy.

The same conservatives who had depicted themselves for decades as the last line of resistance to the "dumbing down" of American culture, standing up heroically against affirmative action for women and minorities to preserve standards, rushed to Palin's defense. They brushed aside her lack of experience and intellect, confident that qualifications and merit no longer mattered to the "real Americans" whom Palin claimed to represent. Nor did they worry that she was the ultimate token, representing exactly what Republicans had always claimed to scorn as quota politics and political correctness.

If anything, Vance has even less useful experience in government than Palin did. Whatever motivated the Trump team to choose him, it surely was not that he is prepared or qualified to sit a heartbeat from the world's ultimate responsibility. That was their decision, which they may already regard as a mistake. But when the Ohio senator and his gang of far-right Republicans spew their snotty insults at Harris, the only proper answer is laughter.

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Here's a member of Congress with too much time on his hands ... and way too little of anything on his mind.

Rep. Greg Steube of Florida is a run-of-the-mill, extremist Republican specializing in such partisan slapstick as trying to nullify Joe Biden's election and install GOP loser, Donald Trump, as president.

But Steube went full-tilt ridiculous when he excitedly announced that, "Tomorrow I will introduce legislation to rename our coastal waters after ... Donald Trump!" This would brand all the seas around America's entire coastline with "TRUMP" logos -- like trapping all of America in a big fat Trump bear hug.

But isn't it rather blah to "honor" an ex-president with obscure boundary waters? It's like a town council voting to put the ex-mayor's name on a drainage ditch. Still, Stuebe hoped that this would charm the MAGA demigod, prompting him to smile on Greg's future election ambitions. Believe it or not, this is what is considered serious congressional business by the GOP!

Republican Congress critters are in a frenzy to kiss up to their convict-in-chief, proposing multiple government gifts for him. Arizona's Paul Gosar, for example, is demanding that the U.S. Treasury print $500 bills bearing a portrait of the Donald. And Florida's Anna Paulina Luna proposes to tarnish the Congressional Gold Medal by bestowing it on the political mad dog who launched the Jan. 6 mob attack on -- yes, Congress! How cynical -- especially since Steube and other Donald worshippers had opposed giving the congressional medal to police officers who had risked their lives to protect them from Trump's rampaging mob.

Meanwhile, how about a more fitting honor for the huckster: Name a federal prison "Trump Tower." Put it in big gold letters!

THE RIGHT-WING TURNS ANTI-CORPORATE! SORTA ... NOT REALLY

Wow. Big political news, folks!

In an astonishing twist, some far-right-wing Republican groups and politicians are demanding that their longtime corporate allies -- such as Walmart, the Koch brothers, GE, and Wall Street banks -- stick to their business and stop interfering in the people's political decisions. One group, the National Center for Public Policy Research, bluntly declares that it now prefers "corporate behavior without partisan influences." It's even urging corporate shareholders to pass resolutions requiring top executives to halt their overbearing political intrusion. What an unbelievable breakthrough for progressive reform!

Well, it would be ... if true. But it's a fraud. NCPPR only wants corporate powers to stop politicking against (SET ITAL) right-wing (END ITAL) issues. Specifically, the tricksters demand that corporations cease all efforts to advance diversity, equality and inclusiveness in American society. Also, they oppose any corporate embrace of pride events, or corporate acknowledgement of America's history of institutional racism. And, they say, corporations should stop all efforts to combat climate change, since right-wing orthodoxy says global warming is a hoax. Forget head-in-the-sand politics, NCPPers want to bury political reality itself in the sand.

Now for the good news: They're buffoons. Even profiteering investors aren't buying their hokum. Their "anti-WOKE" resolutions are being rejected by (SET ITAL) 98% (END ITAL) of shareholders' votes! Even in the rigged system of corporate voting, that's a stunning rejection. Meanwhile, shareholder proposals to support progressive ideals and policies have been gaining ground, now winning a fourth to a third of the vote. That's three times better than the support that such proposals got 20 years ago.

This is further proof that the fundamental political barrier to right-wing extremism is that the vast majority of Americans actually believe in economic fairness, social justice ... and reality.

Among right-wing Republicans, the impending incarceration of Stephen K. Bannon has provoked a torrent of sputtering rage.

"I stand with Steve Bannon!" was the defiant slogan barked by scores of prominent figures on the right, after a federal judge ordered the fascist media personality and adviser to former President Donald Trump to report to federal prison, where he is to begin serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress on July 1. Bannon has begged the Supreme Court to review his case -- and perhaps the corrupt justices will answer his plea, although he is clearly guilty of refusing to testify before the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 insurrection, which he helped to instigate.

But there is a peculiar aspect to the outpouring of support for Bannon on the right. Whether he goes to prison next month or not, he will soon face state charges of fraud, money laundering and conspiracy, in the same New York courtroom where Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts last month.

What makes this scandal so compelling is that the victims defrauded in the swindle allegedly perpetrated by Bannon and his three confederates were all devoted followers of Trump. These MAGA faithful were deceived into believing their money would go to construction of a wall along our southern border. Instead, donations to "We Build the Wall" disappeared into the accounts of its sponsors, including Bannon, who had sworn publicly not to accept any payment, salary or remuneration for this great patriotic effort.

READ: The shocking truth behind the GOP's MAGA lie machine

To describe this multimillion-dollar fraud scheme as "alleged" is a journalistic formality. It is the same criminal conspiracy that led to convictions years ago for Bannon's coconspirators Andrew Badolato, Timothy Shea and a disabled veteran named Brian Kolfage, who gorged themselves on the contributions of hundreds of thousands of true-believing conservatives -- and misused that money to buy luxury vehicles, cosmetic surgery, a golf cart, hotel accommodations, jewelry and lots of other goodies.

Following their indictment by federal prosecutors in Aug. 2020 -- under the Trump Justice Department -- the defendants at first blustered about a "political hit job" and a "weaponized judicial system," much as Bannon still does every day, along with screaming threats to jail Democrats, reporters and prosecutors. But after their lawyers perused the copious evidence compiled by investigators, Kolfage and Badolato quietly made plea agreements.

"I knew what I was doing was wrong and a crime," Kolfage eventually told the court when he pled guilty. "I knew this was wrong, and I'm terribly, terribly sorry for what I did, and I humbly beg the court for mercy," Badolato whined. Shea went to trial, a big mistake that ended in his Oct. 2021 conviction at trial and a sentence of five years.

Bannon alone escaped, at least temporarily, after Trump bestowed a preemptive pardon on "Sloppy Steve" during his final hours in the White House. (Dirty trickster Roger Stone, also a Trump adviser and likewise the beneficiary of presidential clemency, publicly accused Bannon of blackmailing Trump to get the pardon, calling him a "grifter scumbag.")

But New York prosecutors, wise to the former president's misuse of his pardon power to reward those who might have testified against him, proceeded to indict Bannon under state racketeering statutes for perpetrating his "We Build the Wall" fraud in the Empire State.

No doubt Bannon's attorneys can muster some legal arguments against a state indictment that essentially recapitulates federal charges, just as they have argued he wasn't obliged to answer a congressional subpoena. And nobody should be surprised by the hypocrisy of Republicans who want to impeach Biden administration officials for rebuffing congressional summons, while simultaneously excusing Bannon's defiance.

Even if Bannon's acceptance of the Trump pardon were not an admission of guilt -- as it surely is -- prosecutors have assembled an overwhelming pile of evidence, which sent his three coconspirators to prison. There are bank documents showing illicit money transfers, incriminating text messages showing how the scam worked, and wire records showing how Bannon abused a nonprofit he controlled to funnel money into his personal account.

Still, he not only remains popular among the MAGA mob but is lionized by congressional Republicans, "conservative" celebrities and institutional leaders who flock to his "War Room" studio on Capitol Hill. In the Trump era, there is no accountability on the right, no social sanction against felonious misconduct. The miscreants can pretend to be innocent victims, their followers can pretend to believe them, and the culture of impunity spreads like a toxic plume over our nation.

NOW READ: The shocking truth behind the GOP's MAGA lie machine

Ever since Richard Nixon demanded "law and order" while overseeing what America later discovered to be an enormous criminal conspiracy, that Republican slogan has sounded ironic and faintly ridiculous.

Now, with their party firmly in the grip of former President Donald Trump -- a Nixon admirer, a convicted felon and soon to be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee -- Republicans are actively undermining law enforcement and counterespionage while aiding drug cartels, human traffickers and hostile foreign powers.

House Speaker Mike Johnson vowed recently to punish the FBI, as did Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Judiciary Committee chair, because they are furious over Trump's conviction by a New York City jury in a case that did not involve the FBI at all. For many months following the FBI search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, where he had concealed national security documents that he refused to surrender, a growing chorus of Republican legislators has sought punitive action against the bureau, which suffered substantial cuts in the most recent federal budget.

"DEFUND THE FBI," tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a theme that she has repeated countless times. "We must save America. We must destroy the FBI," echoed Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who may worry that the bureau maintains a bulging file on his Nazi-adjacent activities and open advocacy of violence. Greene and Gosar were simply following orders of their maximum leader Trump, who urged Congress to "DEFUND THE FBI AND THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT" after he was indicted for stealing classified documents and attempting a coup to overturn the 2020 election.

Listening to the Trump Republicans day after day, it's easy to become jaded about their insane rhetoric. They will literally say anything to excite their base, in hope that their deluded followers will ring up new donations to the cause. But that doesn't mean their destructive schemes will never come to fruition.

So what would happen if the Trump gang actually gained the ability to "defund" or "destroy" the FBI? It is already happening.

FBI Director Christopher Wray -- a Trump appointee and lifelong Republican whom the former president once described as "impeccable" -- has explained more than once the damaging impact of these GOP attacks on national security and on the effort to protect ordinary Americans from terrorists and other depraved criminals. When Congress slashed the FBI budget last spring --despite years of price inflation -- he warned that those cutbacks would "degrade" the agency's ability to thwart drug cartels, human trafficking, and crimes against children -- all supposedly matters of grave concern to Republicans.

At a Judiciary Committee hearing, Wray bluntly testified that the reductions will mean "hundreds more predators on the loose and hundreds more kids left at their mercy," as well as "scores of threats from China left unaddressed." (If he didn't mention Russia, which is launching active measures against this country every day, perhaps that was because he knows how much more loyal the House GOP caucus is to the Kremlin than the West.)

And yet inflicting cuts on the FBI was clearly the highest priority of the House Republicans in their budget negotiations with Democratic leaders and the White House. It is an attitude that benefits only Mexican gangsters, Russian spies, Iranian terrorists and Chinese saboteurs, not Americans. So why would Republicans elevate this noxious policy?

The only plausible answer is that the "law and order" party has become a haven for crooks and criminals, even more than during Nixon's misrule. The fish stinks from the head, as they say, but Trump's felony conviction only echoed the priors racked up by his associates. Tallying the convictions and indictments of the Trump entourage is a challenging task, with new entries appearing regularly.

Just this week, his former campaign manager and White House strategist Steve Bannon -- who refused a Congressional subpoena to testify about the Jan. 6 plot -- was ordered to report to prison on July 1. Bannon, an aspiring fascist gauleiter, will face a separate New York trial for fraud in September. He joins the long list of Trump aides and advisers, from Peter Navarro to Paul Manafort, who have spent time behind bars -- and those who belong there but got away because Trump pardoned them.

More troubling than the crimes they have already committed, however, are the crimes that they intend to carry out should they regain power in November. Like their demented boss, they shriek constantly about retribution and revenge. The rule of law -- and the agencies created to enforce it -- are only an obstacle to their sinister plans.

No, You're Not a 'Political Prisoner'

"I am a political prisoner," declared former President Donald Trump the day after his 34-count felony conviction.

If we were to take that remark seriously, it would quickly become obvious that Trump is not, in fact, a political prisoner but merely a remorseless criminal. Unlike actual political prisoners, who never hesitate to take the witness stand in their own defense, Trump made the cowardly decision to avoid testifying, despite his blustering promises to do so.

"Yeah, I would testify, absolutely," he said just before the trial began in New York's Supreme Court. "I'm testifying. I tell the truth, I mean, all I can do is tell the truth."

READ: Is Trumpism a movement or a cult?

That claim of candor evaporated post-verdict, when Trump tried to explain why he had chickened out. He vaguely blamed "rulings" by Judge Juan Merchan. He said the prosecution could bring up "anything" from his "great past." He said there was no reason to testify because "they had no case." He said to testify would risk a perjury indictment, an excuse that sounds odd from a man who insists he can only tell the truth.

If Trump were any kind of political prisoner, he would have leapt at the opportunity to speak on his own behalf and to advocate his cause, in the fearless tradition followed by history's legendary political defendants.

When John Brown was on trial for his life after the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, he served not only as a witness but as his own counsel. The militant abolitionist repeatedly spoke in court, at great length, to excoriate slavery, explain the violence he had perpetrated and denounce the "mockery of a trial" that concluded with his death sentence. Nobody can say he didn't make his point.

Nearly a century later, Fidel Castro, also appearing as his own counsel, delivered a four-hour defense summation in court which was sufficiently compelling to be published as a book titled "History Will Absolve Me." Although history will condemn the late Castro for turning away from agrarian reform and democracy to Communist oppression, at least he had the guts to address the court that sent him to prison. (He had led a raid on an army fort to seize weapons, rather than paying off an adult film star for a sexual encounter, so his argument would have possessed a certain dignity that Trump lacks.)

Then in 1963, when South Africa's apartheid government put Nelson Mandela and several of his comrades on trial for their lives, the great democratic revolutionary delivered an eloquent address in the dock that held his listeners spellbound for four hours. Titled "I Am Prepared to Die," as he declared to the court, it laid out in irrefutable detail Mandela's contention that the South African justice system and the country's entire governmental structure were illegitimate -- and his promise to replace it with equal representation for all, a crusade for which he was ready to sacrifice his life.

By contrast, whenever Trump squawks about being a "political prisoner" and decries the authority of a duly constituted court, he sounds like the self-aggrandizing buffoon that he always has been. He had the best counsel that his dumb donors could buy, and those lawyers evidently persuaded him that his long trail of lies, both under oath and in public, would prove ruinous if he dared to take the stand.

Rather than an authoritarian tribunal, Trump faced a jury of his peers, all chosen with the consent of his attorneys, a dozen New Yorkers who faced down his daily abuse as well as the threats of his MAGA goons. The jurors' courage and Trump's bullying call to mind the kind of defendant he truly resembles, a mob boss like Al Capone or John Gotti.

The convicted Trump will have every opportunity to appeal, perhaps all the way to the Supreme Court, where he expects the justices he appointed to rule in his favor, and where two disreputable jurists who should recuse will nevertheless hear his case. But whatever they do, the stain is indelible.

Let us hope that come Election Day, Americans will follow Trump's advice in 2016 concerning presidential candidates under indictment. Back then, he believed Hillary Clinton would soon face trial on bogus charges of mishandling classified documents (the same offense for which he should now be on trial, except for the intervention of another unscrupulous judge).

"She shouldn't be allowed to run," said Trump. "If she wins, it would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis. In that situation, we could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and, ultimately, a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt."

How much more true for a would-be president already stamped "guilty" 34 times.

READ: Is Trumpism a movement or a cult?

The conspiratorial antics of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, as exposed recently in the national media, have raised the gravest doubt about his bias in matters before the Supreme Court -- and provoked demands that he recuse himself from any case concerning former President Donald Trump, the 2020 presidential election or the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Published reports have revealed Alito flew an inverted American flag -- a symbol of Trumpist "stop the steal" propaganda -- outside his suburban Virginia home in Jan. 2021, just days after the attack on the Capitol and while the high court was still considering a 2020 election case. With typical manly resolve, the conservative jurist responded by blaming his wife Martha Ann, who supposedly felt insulted by an anti-Trump yard sign on a neighbor's lawn, for that gross ethical trespass.

As Alito knows perfectly well, there is no excuse for his behavior, even if an obnoxious neighbor annoyed Mrs. Alito. The canons that govern judicial conduct in the lower courts state clearly that what he did was inappropriate, and the Supreme Court's own recently adopted ethical code states it even more plainly: "A Justice should not engage in ... political activity." Moreover, the court expressly forbade all of its employees from involvement in politics.

Of course, Alito did not apologize for the brazenly partisan display at his house nor even acknowledge the fresh harm he has inflicted on the court's already badly bruised reputation. No, he merely issued an arrogant dismissal of anyone who questioned his actions, knowing full well that under the rules the justices have set for themselves, no one is ever going to hold him accountable.

READ: Why Alito’s 'stop the steal' flag story just fell apart

This is not Alito's first or only ethical offense. Last year, the investigative news site Pro Publica revealed he had taken a luxury fishing trip to Alaska with Republican billionaire donor Paul Singer, failed to disclose that gift, then failed to recuse himself from a case in which Singer held a substantial financial interest. Rather than admit this blatant violation, Alito brusquely rejected any criticism of his conduct, which nonpartisan legal experts described as outrageous.

Even if the Senate won't discipline Alito (or the equally tainted Justice Clarence Thomas) via impeachment, he should at least be confronted with a demand that corresponds to his offense. The recusal urged by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), the excessively deferential chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is insufficient.

The proper demand is for Alito's resignation.

Telling this unworthy figure to step down would deliver a brisk message about the minimum standards for a federal judge at any level. And it would say that casually undermining democratic values is unacceptable for a jurist in his elevated position.

What Alito did on those January days is unforgivable for a simple reason. At a time when Trump and his henchmen were seeking to overturn a legitimate election by force and deception, Alito gave an unsolicited public endorsement of their scheme.

By then, Alito certainly knew that the Republican claims of voter fraud, manipulated data systems, foreign interference with voting machines, and stuffed ballot boxes were bogus, with no supporting evidence. He and his colleagues on the court had rejected those claims and confirmed President Joe Biden's victory in their own decisions.

In only one those cases -- which involved Pennsylvania's acceptance of late mail ballots -- did Alito, Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch dissent from the majority's rulings against the Republican plaintiffs. But even in that instance they admitted the number of ballots at stake could not affect Biden's claim to the Keystone State's electoral votes or the election result.

Indeed, the Supreme Court decision in the Pennsylvania case, on Feb. 22, 2021, finally and resoundingly underlined the 2020 outcome and quashed the election deniers. Yet one month earlier, Alito had cast doubt not only on the integrity of the election but on the court's own unanimous affirmation of it, a betrayal of his colleagues and his oath.

A Supreme Court justice has no greater responsibility than to uphold the law and safeguard democracy. When Alito mocked that duty, he forfeited the right to keep his job.

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Nobody likes Big Oil, a monopolistic and heavily polluting industry with a legendary history of abusing its excessive power that can be traced back over the past hundred years.

But Donald Trump has promised to be the oil industry's best friend -- if its bosses give him a billion dollars.

In the latest instance of the former president's mind-blowing corruption, he is reported to have entertained a group of two dozen top U.S. oil company executives at Mar-a-Lago. Over dinner at his Palm Beach sanctum, Trump is quoted as telling the chiefs of Chevron, Exxon, and Occidental Petroleum and their colleagues that if they collectively coughed up $1 billion to ensure his reelection, he would take very good care of their corporate needs.

According to The Washington Post, he promised to toss out all of President Joe Biden's efforts to mitigate climate changes, including new rules aimed at reducing automotive exhaust and promoting electric vehicles. For that measly billion bucks, he vowed to increase oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, where we have already seen catastrophic well blowouts, rescind restrictions on drilling in the Alaskan wilderness, pull down the windmills that he hates, and cancel the recent White House decision to pause new natural gas export permits.

"You'll get it on the first day," said Trump, according to someone who was present and blabbed to the Post. Speaking as crudely as any gangster, he informed the oilmen that they and their companies can easily raise that kind of money, and that paying him off would be "a deal" because of the high return on their investment.

No doubt they found it hard to argue with Trump's logic, since oil lobbyists are already writing dozens of executive orders that they want him to rubber-stamp if and when he returns to the Oval Office.

So is anybody surprised?

Only perhaps by the audacity of Trump explicitly soliciting a gigantic bribe, before a large group of witnesses, at a time when he is in fact on trial for campaign finance offenses and facing scores of additional criminal charges. But he has never felt abashed in displaying his venality. He lives in a world of miscreants who behave much the same way, from his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who sought and obtained an even bigger payoff from the Saudi dictator, to his adviser Steve Bannon, who will face criminal charges next fall for swindling the dopey donors to his fake "We Build the Wall" outfit.

As the eminent journalist Laurie Garrett observed on social media, Trump's attempt to extort the oil industry echoes one of the greatest government scandals in American history, under another Republican president owned by corporate power. Beginning in 1921, the Teapot Dome affair implicated officials of President Warren G. Harding's administration in the crooked leasing of public lands for oil exploration. Harding's Interior secretary Albert B. Fall ultimately went to prison for bribery, although none of the oilmen who paid him off did any time.

What we can expect from a second Trump administration is the most naked orgy of swindling and boodling that this country has ever seen. He thoroughly exploited the presidency during his first term, as outlined in my forthcoming book, "The Longest Con." But his second term, should such a disaster occur, would be the conman's last big chance to score, and he can be expected to enrich himself to the maximum -- at ruinous cost to the rest of us.

Donald Trump, Drenched in Tabloid Sleaze

Back in the antediluvian era of American politics, perpetrating dirty tricks was considered proof of bad character and potentially disqualifying for public office, depending on circumstances.

But as with so many other aspects of public life, the rise of former President Donald Trump heralded a steep decline in political ethics and the way that campaigns are run. And now, after nearly a decade of Trump-style politics, the sleazy conduct exposed in sworn testimony at his New York trial is dismissed with a shrug -- especially by Republicans who ask nothing better of their leaders.

Leave aside for a moment the dubious practice of paying off women -- an adult movie star and a former Playboy model -- to ensure their silence about illicit trysts with Melania Trump's husband. (Donald Trump, who promised a spot on his "Celebrity Apprentice" TV show to porn actress Stormy Daniels, seems to have been paying at both ends.) Evangelical Christians who used to proclaim their indignation about licentious sexuality have discredited themselves thoroughly, which should not surprise anyone who has observed their antics over the past few decades.

What Trump did to silence Daniels and Karen McDougal was unsavory, and his effort to conceal it was probably illegal, but the truly dirty conspiracy involved the smearing of his political opponents.

According to the testimony of David Pecker, his friend and coconspirator who ran the National Enquirer tabloid, Trump and his henchman attorney Michael Cohen promoted the publication of scurrilous lies about his rivals on its front page.

At the same moment that Trump bestowed the nickname "Lyin' Ted" on Ted Cruz, his final opponent for the 2016 Republican nomination, he and his crew were overseeing the publication of outrageous lies about the Texas senator. In spring 2016, the Enquirer featured an absurd story, complete with a doctored photo, claiming that Cruz's father Rafael, an ordained minister, had been consorting with Lee Harvey Oswald just before Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

Insane as that accusation was, Trump used it to distract Republican voters from criticism of him by Cruz. On Fox News, he declared that "Cruz's father, you know, was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's, you know, being shot. ... What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It's horrible." What's horrible, of course, is that Trump knew he was spouting an invented story, because it had been invented to benefit him.

The Enquirer went on to publish more fabricated tales about Cruz, including a claim that he had engaged in at least five extramarital affairs -- again, while the tabloid was covering up Trump's actual and lengthy history of adultery.

After Cruz had been dispatched, and then prostrated himself cravenly to endorse Trump, the Enquirer moved on to smearing Hillary Clinton, a hobby the disgusting Pecker had pursued with gusto for years before Trump entered politics.

"The desperate and deteriorating 67-year-old won't make it to the White House -- because she'll be dead in six months," the paper blared, insisting that the Democratic nominee suffered from brain cancer, strokes, alcoholism, multiple sclerosis and various forms of mental illness, all somehow concealed from the public and press. None of those mythical ailments actually afflicted the former secretary of state, who is still alive and well -- and fighting to defeat Trump.

Much of the fake news published by the tabloid about Clinton was pitched by Steve Bannon, the Trump adviser who swindled thousands of donors to his "Build the Wall" charity -- and only evaded prison thanks to a corrupt pardon. Naturally, Bannon is back and, like Trump, has endured no opprobrium for his amply proven crimes. Instead, he is a powerful influence on the far right and in Republican circles.

Back when Trump and his cronies oversaw the publication and broadcasting of all those falsehoods, he said repeatedly that he had nothing to do with the Enquirer and its raging defamations. He seemed to sense there was some shame in that kind of sick deception. But he and his attorneys no longer need to deny any of it, because on the American right, the worst kinds of deception are accepted and even acclaimed, while their perpetrator is idolized.

And still, they will lecture the rest of us about "morality."

Historical analogies rarely carry much weight, especially in a time when so much about politics has changed so rapidly. To compare what is happening in 2024 to events that occurred over half a century earlier hardly seems useful.

It mostly isn't. And yet the election of 1968, whose outcome proved disastrous for America and the world, looms over the coming months like a foreboding specter.

Despite all the obvious differences in personalities, issues, technologies and ideologies, there is a haunting parallel between then and now in the increasingly fraught debate among Democrats and progressives over a divisive war -- and the alienation of younger and minority voters from the party they would otherwise support.

By the spring of 1968, the movement against the Vietnam War had sparked a sense of furious frustration among young Americans who saw it causing tens of thousands of pointless deaths with no justification or end in sight. Massive antiwar protests swept across the nation's universities and colleges, sometimes resulting in conflict with authorities. Dissent within his own party had inspired not one but two insurgent candidacies against President Lyndon B. Johnson, who declared in late March that he wouldn't seek a second term.

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The assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy snuffed hopes for a fresh Democratic ticket. The nomination fell to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Johnson's personally anointed successor, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. While the antiwar movement was generally peaceful and orderly, the student left had spawned a revolutionary wing whose leaders aimed for confrontation in the streets. The Windy City's conservative mayor, Richard J. Daley, was only too eager to answer them with billy clubs and tear gas.

Chaos and violence outside the convention, instigated by a rampaging police force, deepened the party's split and left millions of young voters vowing to support a third-party candidate or simply abstain.

Flash forward to the lawns and quadrangles of American academia today, where laudable protest over Israel's long, bloody incursion into Gaza is giving rise to a movement against the very existence of the Jewish state, marred by an undertone of antisemitism as well as anti-American ferocity. Leaders of this movement are poised to bring a rerun of 1968 to the streets of Chicago, which will again host the DNC this summer. They're vowing to shun President Joe Biden as retribution for his support of Israel in its war against the Hamas terrorists, who brutally murdered more than a thousand innocents last Oct. 7.

Although I was too young to vote in 1968, I still recall my own passionate revulsion against the Vietnam War and how bitterly I argued with my father -- an Army veteran who also opposed the war -- over his determination to vote for Humphrey. The consequence of any alternative, he warned, would be the election of Richard M. Nixon, a perfidious character who could never be trusted with the presidency.

He was right and I was wrong, as history revealed all too starkly. Nixon lied about a phony "peace plan," won the election and rapidly escalated and expanded the war to a degree that could rightly be deemed genocidal. To win a second term, he embarked on a crime spree the nation had never seen in the White House -- at least until the advent of former President Donald Trump. Nobody thinks Humphrey would have perpetrated those atrocities and felonies.

Whether or not one agrees with Biden on Israel versus Palestine -- and I don't -- he has done nothing that remotely approaches the criminal destruction of the U.S. war against Vietnam. Indeed, he has sought to mitigate the reckless and murderous approach of the Israeli government while recognizing its right to defend itself. Refusing to vote for him as "a message" is an act of purist vanity that could lead to consequences as dire as the Nixon victory. Rather than the "lesser of two evils," Biden is a good president coping with a world of difficult and sometimes terrible choices.

The alternative is Trump, a dictator in waiting who has already mounted a coup and openly aspires to locking up his adversaries. He is an exponent of extremism on every front, including the Middle East, where he can be expected to endorse the most vicious repression of Palestinians and may well lead us into war against Iran -- a catastrophic error that Biden has successfully resisted. He is reasonably suspected of betraying the nation to hostile authoritarian powers. On every other issue, from abortion rights to climate change, his retrograde views are repugnant to young voters.

A democratic election is not an opportunity to display moral hygiene or an audition to join a cool club. This year, as always, voting will be an exercise of choices that are never perfect -- but may just allow us to escape doom.

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Nothing in politics is more difficult than breaking with longtime allies, friends and supporters over an issue of principle. In recent years we have seen the "Never Trump" Republicans take that painful step, sometimes abandoning their party and severing relationships built over a lifetime, with bitter consequences.

And last week we watched as Sen. Chuck Schumer made an equally fateful and agonizing choice when he stood up on the Senate floor to urge elections in Israel that he hopes will oust the Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu and his government. As the Senate majority leader, Schumer is not only the top Jewish American elected official but the highest-ranking member of his faith in this country's history, which means his words carry weight not only in his party but among American Jews, who reliably vote for Democrats by overwhelming margins.

It was a decision that Schumer, as a devoted advocate of the Jewish state, could only have made because he feels an unbearable burden of responsibility for the horrific death and destruction that Netanyahu is inflicting on Palestinian civilians. In the wake of the barbaric Hamas attack last Oct. 7, he supported military action to destroy the terror organization that controls Gaza -- and yet he knows that just purpose cannot justify the reckless and inhumane conduct of that campaign, which is now causing the mass starvation of innocents.

"I'm anguished that the Israeli war campaign has killed so many innocent Palestinians," Schumer said. "I know that my fellow Jewish Americans feel the same anguish when they see the images of dead and starving children -- and destroyed homes." No doubt he knows and laments the ruinous impact of this war on Israel's international standing, just when much of the Arab world has come to accept its existence.

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While Israel's actions probably don't constitute the "genocide" its enemies have claimed, there isn't much question that the far-right government has perpetrated war crimes -- and remains indifferent to Palestinian suffering. The rage provoked around the globe by their torment will not diminish for years.

For many Americans, and indeed many American Jews, including me, the outrages perpetrated in this war are simply unacceptable. For some of us, however, this was no surprise but instead the inevitable result of American action, or inaction, that permitted Israeli right-wingers to thwart any progress toward an independent Palestinian state.

While official US policy supported the "two-state solution," in practice presidents of both parties did little or nothing to insist that either side enter negotiations in good faith. Instead, most American politicians either cheered on Israeli intransigence, and Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, or looked the other way.

Meanwhile, as we have learned in recent months, the Netanyahu government used its own authority to bolster and finance the Hamas extremists, who provided an excuse for their own intransigence. Beyond irresponsible, that shady alliance led directly to the blood-soaked horror of Oct. 7, the vilest atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust.

Until the other day, Schumer endorsed the foolish consensus that has bolstered Netanyahu and his destructive policies for decades. That is why Jewish leaders who continue to back those policies reacted to his courageous speech with anger.

The Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which has routinely rubberstamped Israeli policy with little discernible thought, declared itself "distressed" that the Senate majority leader would interfere in Israel's internal affairs, a criticism voiced by Israeli officials and their Republican echoes. (Never mind that Netanyahu has routinely intervened in American politics and diplomacy without a second thought.) It was distressed, too, that Schumer would suggest the United States should "play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change [the] present course." It accused Schumer of fostering "divisiveness when unity is so desperately needed."

What those Jewish leaders fail to understand -- and what the senator from Brooklyn has come to realize at last -- is that there can be no unity premised on the indiscriminate violence and reckless aggression epitomized by the present government of Israel. As thousands continue to die, Netanyahu has no incentive to seek an end to this war, to negotiate the release of hostages held by Hamas, or to pursue the only real hope for peace and security in the region.

Let's hope Schumer's anguished bravery becomes contagious.

NOW READ: This Moscow fire could spark the big one

If you believed that the Republicans in Congress couldn't sink any lower, recent events have proved you sadly mistaken. House Speaker Mike Johnson, in his latest displays of subservience to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, has made his most wretched predecessors seem like statesmen and patriots. For the first time ever in America, a branch of the government, the House of Representatives, appears to be decisively influenced, if not controlled by a hostile foreign power.

These are not accusations to be made lightly, but the evidence of Republican complicity in purveying Kremlin espionage against the United States is now overwhelming.

On Feb. 23, a federal judge in California ordered marshals to seize Alexander Smirnov at his lawyers' office only days after he had been released on bail by a different judge, with the clear implication that he might be preparing to flee the country. Smirnov is the much touted prime witness in the House Republican impeachment campaign against Joe Biden, accusing the president of having taken $5 million in bribes from Ukrainian oligarchs. It's all a lie manufactured by Russian intelligence.

READ: How Putin seized control of the GOP

Smirnov's initial arrest was ordered by special counsel David Weiss, the Trump-appointed Republican investigating Hunter Biden, who has indicted the star witness for fabricating his entire story and lying to the FBI. In subsequent court filings, the prosecutor charged that the lies transmitted by Smirnov originated with Russian spies.

In other words, the No. 1 Republican witness in the public and repeated smearing of President Biden -- on the floor of Congress and in right-wing media -- was a knowing conduit for Kremlin disinformation. The intent is nothing less than to help elect Trump.

What makes this scandal so much worse -- and so embarrassing to Johnson, if he were capable of shame -- is that Smirnov's deception emanated from the much broader Russian penetration of American politics that began ... when?

Perhaps with that Trump Tower meeting in 2015, when Donald Trump Jr. enthusiastically welcomed the idea of a Russian dossier on Hillary Clinton from a Russian intelligence operative. And then it continued with the Kremlin's cyber assault against Clinton in 2016, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's secret cooperation with a Russian spy named Konstantin Kilimnik. After Trump became president, he withheld weapons from Ukraine while demanding a phony probe of Biden. Trump's blackmail attempt triggered his first impeachment.

Along the way, a gang of Trump associates led by Rudy Giuliani worked with various Putin stooges in Ukraine and elsewhere to invent mendacious nonsense about the Bidens. Giuliani worked closely with Putin crony Andriy Derkach and other dubious characters, who were later indicted for attempting to interfere in the 2020 election.

For years, it has been blindingly obvious that the "investigation" of Joe Biden and Ukraine emanated not from any legitimate source but directly from this country's enemies. And yet while those accusers were repeatedly exposed and discredited, congressional Republicans insisted on pursuing the bogus case invented in Moscow.

But Johnson's undermining of American security has gone well beyond the assistance he and Republicans have provided to the Kremlin in subverting American democracy. Now refusing to fund U.S. military assistance to Ukraine in its courageous struggle against Russian invaders, they have helped Putin gain a critical victory in the battle of Avdiivka and jeopardized the Western alliance that is fundamental to European and American security. Johnson has admitted he's taking his orders from Trump, who worships Putin. The cowardice of Johnson and the Republicans has become crucial to Putin and his savage war.

Johnson has his own little Russian secrets. The speaker must still explain the laundered campaign funds from Konstantin Nikolaev, a Russian oligarch and confederate of confessed convicted Kremlin spy agent Maria Butina. She served a prison sentence here after the exposure of her successful scheme to penetrate the National Rifle Association and other right-wing groups, including some of the "Christian nationalist" outfits that Johnson promotes.

What attracts extremists like the House speaker -- and his puppet master Trump -- to the Russian dictator who looms above them is an authoritarian political orientation that smells of fascism. Putin is a threat from without, and they are a threat from within.

NOW READ: Exposure of Kremlin lies won’t alter course of impeachment

Plainly visible behind the melodramatic release of a special counsel report on President Joe Biden's retention of classified documents -- and its unprofessional partisan personal attack on him -- are several basic facts that ought to be understood by every American.

First is the character of Robert Hur, the special counsel, a Trump Republican who abused Attorney General Merrick Garland's good-faith appointment of him. Hur larded his report exonerating the president with irrelevant remarks that were obviously designed to inflict political damage. By doing so, Hur clearly violated Justice Department protocols and has earned investigations of his own misconduct by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility and inspector general.

It is worth noting that Hur's ridiculously verbose, overwrought document is marred by its slovenly composition. To cite one glaring instance among many, he claims to have found "evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified documents," and then admits more than 200 pages later that "there is in fact a shortage of evidence on these points." (Did the special counsel, only 51 years old, suffer his own embarrassing memory lapse?)

Second is the failure of mainstream media to duly emphasize the memory blips and routinely incoherent blabber of Biden's principal opponent Donald Trump. When the former president wrongly identified Hungarian President Viktor Orban in a recent speech as the president of Turkey, his error received only brief mention on the major cable networks. His repeated mistaking of his primary opponent Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi in another speech got more coverage, but only because Haley kept mentioning it to mock Trump.

Not so long ago, in the trial that found Trump guilty of sexual assault, he gazed at a photograph of plaintiff E. Jean Carroll and told the court that it was a picture of Marla Maples, one of his former wives. Anyone who has looked at Trump's testimony in any number of cases, notably the lawsuits over his phony Trump University, will find dozens of instances when he claimed, under oath, not to remember events, documents and people he knew.

Third and most important is that any comparison of the performance of Biden versus Trump reflects very poorly on the latter -- and quite positively on the current president. From a prolonged economic slump that was largely owed to Trump's mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, Biden has restored the U.S. economy. Although the country has suffered a spike of inflation that is now abating, it was far lower than in other developed nations and emanated from global supply problems, not his policies.

Economic growth and full employment have persisted strongly, crushing the dire and almost universal predictions of recession -- and the financial markets, which Trump predicted would crash, instead have reached record levels. (Now the Republican politicians, who usually measure their life achievement by stock prices, tell us that doesn't matter.) Across the country, Biden's achievements in office are improving American lives and communities, with higher wages, lower drug costs, and the enormous infrastructure program that Trump promised and failed to deliver.

Biden's extensive record looks even better when contrasted with the latest embarrassing antics of Trump and his congressional Republican lackeys. Anyone worried by the arrival of thousands of undocumented immigrants ought to have welcomed the tough -- indeed draconian -- border control legislation agreed by Senate Republicans and Democrats in a deal that would have included defense funding for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, and humanitarian relief for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. That bill, fashioned at the insistence of Republicans, required four months of negotiation, overseen by one of the Senate's most conservative members, James Lankford of Oklahoma.

At a time when Republicans constantly bemoan the threat supposedly embodied by an influx of migrants, Trump suddenly ordered them all to abandon that legislative effort -- and vote down the same powers to close the border and mobilize more resources that he had demanded as president. It was an astonishingly irresponsible act that humiliated every Republican on Capitol Hill, from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker Mike Johnson down to the most obscure backbencher. Thanks to Trump, all of them, except the indignant Lankford, look like craven underlings who put politics above their own definition of national security.

Of course that is how Trump behaves in every circumstance. Constantly shouting and posting incomprehensible, loony outbursts makes him appear insane. And whatever "gaffes" Joe Biden may utter, whatever names he may forget, he still knows far more than Trump ever will -- and he remains steady, reliable and devoted to the national interest.

You don't have to be a follower of Taylor Swift or a fan of professional football to notice the very strange crusade that so-called conservatives have been waging against them. Those icons of music and sport, as American as they could possibly be, are suddenly tarred on right-wing media outlets as secret instruments of a plot by powerful hidden forces -- in the Pentagon, the White House or somewhere in "the deep state," whatever that means.

It is now possible to watch otherwise normal-seeming people on television, including several with their own nightly shows, spreading insane rumors about Swift and her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. In a calmer time, anyone who persistently shouted such lurid nonsense would have been a candidate for long-term residence in what was euphemistically called "a nice home," without access to sharp objects. With deinstitutionalization, they are now paid astronomical salaries to declaim their fantasies on Fox News and its cable competitors. (This is considered progress.)

For weeks, the airwaves and the digital space have been aflame with attacks on Swift and Kelce, promoting the notion that these two attractive, talented and amazingly successful people are not what they seem to be. Consider the recent rant by Jesse Watters, a prime-time host on Fox News, who recently insinuated that Swift isn't a legitimate musical sensation but merely a tool propped up by Pentagon military intelligence for mass manipulation. Watters called her a "psyop," jargon for a government propaganda tool or event designed to influence public opinion and political behavior.

"Have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this?" he asked, questioning her popularity as a musician. "Well, around four years ago, the Pentagon psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting. What kind of asset? A psyop for combatting online misinformation." Of course, like so many other events reported breathlessly by Fox fake news, that never happened. It was just a figment of Watters' monkey mind, which he tried to pass off with a deceptively edited video clip.

It isn't hard to see what inspired the vile slagging of Swift and Kelce (who also committed the offense of getting vaccinated against COVID-19, just as all the Fox hypocrites did when the company required it). She appears to be a Democrat and a supporter of reproductive rights, an opponent of racism, and perhaps worst of all, a symbol of female power and independence. She has backed a few Democratic candidates, including Joe Biden in 2020 -- and Republicans dread the prospect that she'll do it again this year.

Ominously, from their perspective, she has already prodded tens of thousands of her fans to register as voters.

Indeed, the right-wing loonies are warning that the Super Bowl has long been "rigged" for the Chiefs to win, leading up to a romantic Biden endorsement by Kelce and Swift. Pretty sick and, dare I say, un-American.

The craziness is so stupid that it's almost funny. Even some conservatives are begging for it to stop because they fear the political consequences of angering the Swifties, as well they should. But it isn't funny at all.

What thugs like Watters are telling Swift is that she will be punished for disputing their authoritarian and misogynist ideology. Her adversaries have not only viciously insulted her but circulated AI-faked explicit nudes. Naturally, Watters seized on the faked photos as another opportunity to mock and shame a female body. (Don't you hope he gets a chance to meet Travis Kelce in person someday?)

Whether Swift endorses Biden or not, she has performed a great service, simply by impelling the worst people in America to show who they really are -- and how their uncontrollable hatred poisons everyday life in this nation. Let's not forget.

Supporters of Donald Trump often complain about the "liberal elites" who have disrespected them. It is a feeling of cultural grievance that their idol constantly exploits, both to enrich himself with their donations and to defend himself against his critics.

Whenever Trump finds himself under pressure -- in a courtroom, an impeachment or an election -- he tells those credulous followers that it is not he but they who are the true targets of the Democrats, the "deep state," the media, the Republicans in Name

Only, the Biden White House or whomever. That was how he responded to the first impeachment brought against him in 2019 and that is how he answered the huge $83 million jury verdict delivered against him this week in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case.

Trump makes this demagogic argument in full confidence that the MAGA cult will believe him -- and with certainty that they will never realize how deeply he is insulting them.

"In reality they're not after me, they're after you. I'm just in the way," he tweeted when Congress first voted to impeach him. But did that make any sense? It wasn't the MAGA voters who attempted to extort the president of Ukraine, attempting to trade American weaponry for his own political gain (and to frame a political opponent with a phony prosecution).

Surely most of Trump's fans would never consider such a brazen blackmail scheme. Unlike him, they don't have to worry about being impeached or prosecuted; they have neither the motive nor the opportunity to perpetrate the offenses that Trump repeatedly commits.

In the wake of the Carroll jury award, the former president's most devoted associates have adopted the same argument, adding their own frantic spin. Steve Bannon, the convicted fraudster pardoned by Trump in order to keep his mouth shut, and Matt Schlapp, the right-wing activist repeatedly accused of homosexual assault, declared that the verdict foreshadows "the end of America."

On the "War Room" online broadcast hosed by Bannon, Schlapp echoed Trump's baseless insistence that the Carroll lawsuit is a "very coordinated thing" and the product of a "weaponized government" -- when in fact it is simply a civil lawsuit brought by an aggrieved citizen. But Schlapp went still further, warning the MAGA audience that the judgment against Trump in favor of the woman he assaulted would portend their own ruin.

What the verdict proves, according to Schlapp and Bannon, is that the government "doesn't just intend to destroy your career and cancel you on social media, they mean to impoverish you and destroy any opportunity you have in the future. ... If these things continue to stand, all of this unconstitutional illegal activity, we've got nothing left, Steve. I mean it's run to the mountains, run to the catacombs time. ... This $83 million -- this is just the beginning. All of us will be paraded down this gangplank. We won't have our resources, we won't have our homes, we won't have our livelihood."

Why would a sane person put any credence in that hysterical rant? There was nothing "illegal" or "unconstitutional" in Carroll's courageous effort to hold Trump accountable for assault, which resulted in a flood of personal abuse against her that included hundreds of death threats. More to the point, only an infinitesimal fraction of Americans has any reason to worry about being held responsible for an aggravated sexual assault - because unlike Trump, few have ever been accused of rape or assault, let alone by dozens of women.

It is remarkable indeed how many of our fellow citizens are willing to be implicated in the sociopathic conduct of the former president, who tells them every day that they are just like him.

The lesson to be learned from the latest revelations about former President Donald Trump's misuse of highly sensitive classified documents concerns the character of the former president and his cronies: They constantly accuse their political adversaries of the crimes and misdemeanors they have committed -- or will perpetrate -- themselves.

And the more information that is uncovered, the less culpable Trump's targets appear to be -- while his own guilt, and the guilt of his associates, is established ever more firmly.

Nobody who has read the lengthy Florida indictment of Trump, which alleges more than 30 violations of the Espionage Act, can doubt his narcissistic attitude toward the protection of national security secrets. Nor is there any question that he repeatedly lied and conspired to conceal his violations of the law.

But where his behavior once seemed mysterious, we now can see at least one clear motive behind his bizarre and dangerous conduct: the desire for revenge against everyone who had sought to uncover the truth about Russia's illegal support for his 2016 campaign. The "Crossfire Hurricane" folder that disappeared from the White House during the final days of his administration has never been located, which has raised grave alarm in the intelligence community over the potential exposure of sources and methods to our adversaries in the Kremlin.

It is no exaggeration to say that those concerns include the possibility that Trump himself might expose those sources to his friends in the Putin regime. His loyalty to the West is questionable and his debt to the Russian dictator is undeniable

Yet as the underlying events of Crossfire Hurricane unfolded, Trump and his campaign were shrieking incessantly about Hillary Clinton's emails -- urging federal authorities to "lock her up" for these supposed offenses against national security. The facts that have emerged since then have proved that the number of classified documents jeopardized by her actions amounted to exactly zero.

The same pattern of false accusation and true culpability applies to the Clinton and Trump foundations. In 2015, the far-right "strategist" and publisher Steve Bannon, who then became Trump's campaign manager, launched a multimillion-dollar smear campaign against the Clinton Foundation that succeeded beyond his wildest dreams -- including a ludicrously false accusation featured as an "investigation" on the front page of The New York Times. The real achievements of the Clinton Foundation in saving many millions of lives and stemming the AIDS epidemic were submerged beneath a sewage outflow of phony conspiracy claims.

Largely ignored amid Bannon's publicity jihad against the Clinton Foundation were the grotesque abuses of the Trump Foundation, which accomplished no good works and more closely resembled a racketeering conspiracy than a nonprofit charity. Trump's self-serving manipulation of nonprofit tax laws was both comical and shocking. And then a few years later, Bannon himself established an abusive nonprofit -- "We Build the Wall" -- from which he and his criminal confederates admittedly stole millions donated by naive conservatives. He's an unrepentant crook and may yet go to prison, despite the pardon bestowed on him by Trump.

Making a hollow accusation to conceal suspicious behavior (or actual crimes) remains the modus operandi not only of Trump and Bannon, whose corruption is well established, but of the Republican Party leadership they have suborned. That is why congressional Republicans have mounted a fake impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, despite the complete absence of any evidence that he profited from his son's foreign business dealings -- or that those dealings had any effect on public policy while Biden served in the White House.

There is nothing to those charges, as the Republican investigators have inadvertently proved with their bumbling displays of malice. But several indiscreet politicians have disclosed the Biden impeachment's real purpose: to distract voters from the pending indictments against Trump -- not to mention the massive profiteering by Trump, his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner during their years in the White House.

Every accusation they utter is an indictment of their own misconduct.