“We’re in a hell of a mess here,” said Ohio farmer Chris Gibbs as he worked on his combine at the start of harvest season.

“A severe cash flow mess,” he sighed. “A working capital mess.”

Gibbs, who farms more than 500 acres of corn, soybeans, wheat, and alfalfa hay in Shelby County, along with a 90-head cow-calf operation, described the five-alarm fire raging in the farming community from Trump’s blanket tariffs.

Some growers have called the fallout from his chaotic trade war, and the reciprocal tariffs it provoked, a “farmageddon” that could ruin what made rural America great.

It’s that bad.

The Trump tariffs are shrinking incomes and exploding expenses for farmers, who, thanks to a president they still overwhelmingly support, fear losing their farms.

Many don’t know how much longer they can hang on.

Trump’s punitive tariffs on foreign buyers made their crops less competitive in markets around the world (and drove down prices more) while other senseless tariffs on fertilizer, steel, aluminum, and lumber just sent the cost of doing business through the roof.

The double whammy of Trump tariffs is especially painful for family farms that make up about 87% of all farms in Ohio.

Individual farmers struggle to break even, buy supplies, sell their crops, and build a sustainable future with long-term customers.

But the current tariff dance with Trump keeps them up nights.

Everything a farmer buys “from phosphate and potash to agricultural chemicals, herbicides, machine parts, is up by 50% over the last decade, while our proceeds from the sale of crops is down by 40%,” said fifth-generation Ohio farmer Joe Logan.

The former president of the Ohio Farmers union — a group focused on family farmers — maintained “the industrial agricultural community is chugging right along, raking in billions of dollars” while family farmers are not making any money.

Instead, they’re battling irrational tariffs, rising costs, high interest rates, farm bankruptcies and abiding dread.

How will they move crops without buyers or the major trade deals Trump promised to fix what he broke?

Farmers felt the same creeping despair with the tariff debacle of 2018 when Trump first slapped punitive tariffs on crucial exporters of American crops, including China.

The move caused a tidal wave of financial disaster for U.S. farms and irreparably damaged trade relations abroad.

“Farmers, agribusiness and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) had invested millions of dollars and decades of time to cultivate foreign markets like those in China,” explained Logan, “which, up until that point, bought most of our soybeans.”

But the biggest crop farmed in Ohio was fated to lose its biggest customer then and now.

In 2018, Trump destroyed enduring trade deals in overseas markets and “the trust that we had built over the previous 30 years,” Gibbs said.

“That left us with acute losses because of retaliatory tariffs, primarily from China.”

The U.S. soybean crop dropped 20% in value overnight in the summer of 2018, recalled the farmer from west central Ohio.

“I came out swinging pretty hard with that and was very critical of the president and the policy at the time.”

The tariff madness was enough for Gibbs, a lifelong Republican and former chairman of the Shelby County GOP, to leave his party in 2019 and join forces with state Democrats as an advocate for rural Ohio and America.

Then came 2025 and another blast of Trump tariffs to hammer farmers with shattered export markets and rising input costs.

“This is déjà vu all over again,” Gibbs griped. “We’re back in the same situation but only worse. In the major commodities, corn, wheat, soybeans, sorghum, rice, cotton, prices are below the cost of production, so there’s built-in loss. But we also have exorbitant costs that never recovered since Covid.”

Plus, the front-end cost of farming has been jacked up by Trump tariffs on seed, fertilizer, and machinery.

Farmers in already-thin margins are getting crushed.

Tariffs on imported goods have made it more expensive for them to farm while retaliatory tariffs, imposed by other countries, (in response to Trump’s trade war) mean fewer American crops being sold and, when they are, at lower prices.

It’s a no-win gambit for farmers and the ag industry that generates over $9 trillion in economic activity and supports millions of jobs.

Last year, China accounted for 54% of U.S. soybean exports. This year it bought zero so far.

Not a single soybean from U.S. farmers.

Chinese buyers turned to Brazil and other suppliers for the crop in 2018. U.S. soybean trade with China never fully recovered.

“We did hear that China made a big purchase recently,” said Logan, “but unfortunately that purchase was from Argentina rather than the U.S., so we’re in a world of hurt.”

He believes more farmers are waking up to the hollowness of Trump’s promises for a “golden age” through tariffs but expect the government to bail them out again like it did in 2018.

Trump floated using tariff revenue as farm subsidies.

Farmers will wait, because what choice do they have? And sweat.

“I used to tell my son, when he was just getting started, until you wake up in the middle of the night, 2:30 in the morning, and you got sweat rolling down your face, you haven’t really experienced what it is to farm,” Gibbs said with a rueful laugh. “I’m feeling that now, 49 years in. It’s hard.”

Why does he do it? Why does Ohio’s former U.S. senator, hopeful heir to the MAGA throne, keep damning himself with snarky provocations and self-evident lies? How difficult is it for JD Vance to be respectful, instead of derogatory, honest instead of glibly deceitful?

Every time the vice-president is before an open mic he seems to revert to cutting diatribes about people MAGA loves to hate or alternative facts that bely reality. That’s not leadership from someone a heartbeat away from the presidency. That’s venom masquerading as virtue and promoting Orwellian “War is Peace” propaganda.

Vance has mastered the dark art of manipulating thought through ignore-the-evidence Trumpian rhetoric. He excels at stoking unfounded fear or fanning unquestioned loyalty whenever the boss requires subterfuge as a means to an end.

Hours after Trump unilaterally (and arguably unconstitutionally) chose to launch an unprovoked attack against Iran early Sunday (without the authorization of Congress) Vance was spouting the doublespeak of Team Trump on Sunday morning talk shows to portray America’s abrupt entry into foreign combat with Israel as a proud accomplishment.

To be clear, the U.S. inserted itself into a hot war by impulsively bombing a sovereign nation on the pretext of an imminent nuclear weapons threat — contradicted by Trump’s own U.S. intelligence community.

Iranian leaders called America’s act of aggression against their country “unprecedently dangerous” and a “betrayal of diplomacy.” But Vance peered into network cameras and pretended the unforced decision by the U.S. to drop more than a dozen 30,000-pound bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities was not what it looked like to the rest of the world.

“We’re not at war with Iran,” said Vance with a straight face. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program” — the same one U.S spy agencies and U.S. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard determined was dormant before Trump sent B-2 stealth bombers into Iranian airspace.

“We do not want war with Iran,” prattled the Ohio poser in the wake of the largest operational strike ever by those bombers to take out Iranian nuclear sites. “We actually want peace.”

Despite preemptive attacks certain to inflame greater conflict in an already volatile region.

In an awkward tap dance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vance tried to pivot from his longtime opposition to proactive military intervention in the Middle East.

As an Ohio senatorial candidate Vance was adamant about not supporting military action against Iran on its own soil — even as proxy militia groups escalated attacks on U.S. and coalition forces.

But the staunch isolationist did a 180 on Trump’s recklessness in dragging the U.S. into another sketchy war without an end game.

Trump was smarter than his predecessors when it came to targeting Tehran with American military muscle, Vance argued unconvincingly, so the risk of the U.S. succumbing to another endless war was slim.

“I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,” said the ex-Marine who served in the Iraq entanglement. “I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”

Trump directly threatened those objectives by alienating nearly every international partner and ally of the U.S., aligning with autocratic Russia against democratic Ukraine, destroying the federal national security workforce, and eliminating irreplaceable expertise, decimating global foreign assistance investments, nuclear safety protections, cyber security, and more.

But when Trump plunged the U.S. into a Middle East conflict with his bombardment of Iran, he knew exactly who to deploy to disingenuously frame America’s military pounding of that country as preventative medicine to reset fruitful diplomacy and spur peace.

Vance shelved his skepticism about starting foreign wars without clear objectives or exit strategies and gamely pushed a narrative that Iran essentially had it coming but rest assured the U.S. has “no interest in boots on the ground” or Iranian regime change. Maybe.

Yet the veep deals in dishonesty like a chameleon changes color. A day before Trump announced his bombing strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure, Vance was in Los Angeles lying through his teeth about the Democratic mayor of the city and governor of the state encouraging violent immigration protests.

Then he disparaged a former Senate colleague from California who was slammed to the ground and handcuffed at a press conference when he tried to ask the Homeland Security director a question. Vance referred to U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla as “Jose Padilla” (a convicted domestic terrorist) and suggested his ordeal was “political theater.”

Why did Vance spew “lies and utter nonsense in an attempt to provoke division and conflict in our city?” asked LA Mayor Karen Bass. Why did Vance mock the first Latino elected to the U.S. Senate by intentionally misnaming him?

Same reason he put an Ohio city and its Haitian community in danger with savage lies about pet-eating immigrants: To snag attention, stoke ugly, and distort truth beyond recognition.

A slick Vance played his fellow citizens for chumps with Trumped-up bull that American troops belong on American streets and a wanton act of war by the U.S. isn’t. That’s not leadership. That’s a glib gaslighting from a cringe-making toady.

NOW READ: What are the Democrats waiting for?

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

J.D. Vance has really done Ohio proud these last few weeks, hasn’t he? The lapdog vice-president, with evidently a lot of time on his hands, has managed to be firmly rebuked by Pope Francis, denounced by outraged NATO allies and widely ridiculed for his bizarre ‘masculinity’ rant at a weekend MAGAfest just a month into his tenure. Way to create a buzz/acute embarrassment back home!

What is wrong with J.D.? Have the wheels come all the way off? Why does the 40-year-old awkwardly playing VP keep stepping in it stateside and abroad? Is the “childless cat ladies” charmer acting out unresolved rage from a bad place? Working through some deep-seated anger? Seriously, Vance manifests juvenile cringe, not sober sway, as he settles into his nondescript role as an appendage in the Trump-Musk administration. Even Trump won’t name him as a slam dunk heir apparent. Not good.

For a supposed Ivy League intellectual, Vance sure spouts stupidity on the regular: Honestly, you’ve got to be really off base on Catholic theology for the Vatican to correct your twisted take on love with descending priorities as justification for mass deportations. In Vance’s godawful reading of the Christian order of love concept; (to mesh with his political ideology) family, community, and country come first and everyone outside that concentric circle later or not so much. Which puts migrant families outermost from Vance’s construct on brotherly love for me but not thee from outside our borders.

Francis rejected the VP’s sophomoric theoretical defense of cruel immigration crackdowns as flatly wrong. He urged the misguided millennial to meditate on the parable of the Good Samaritan, “on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” But “American citizens first” nativist Vance has no interest in building a “fraternity open to all,” just an all-white patriarchy focused on baby-making. To that point, he started a holy war (barely a week after inauguration) against charitable organizations across the country that feed, clothe and house refugees and immigrants (i.e., Catholic Charities and Catholic relief groups) by implying they perform their labor of love for federal money — not humanitarian concerns.

“Devout Catholic” convert Vance went all glib and combative on compassion and care for the “least of these” because they included Brown and Black mothers and fathers and children fleeing horrendous homelands for hope. But upholding the dignity of every human being (native-born or not) as a core tenet of Christianity clashes with the core MAGA mission to degrade, shackle and ship terrified families back to the foreign hellscapes they fled. Vance threw nasty and mean into the mix to look tough on dehumanized “illegals” and scorn mercy. He is a dutiful, if not decent, Trump toady.

But the swift rebuttals to Vance’s hollow broadsides from the Church and the pope himself only reinforced the veep’s smallness as a smug sycophant slinging ugly. Whatever reputation Vance may have enjoyed in the past as a thoughtful individual with at least a modicum of integrity is long gone. With a brief stint as a venture capitalist, an even briefer stint as Ohio senator and now VP, Vance is heady with power and hubris over his meteoric rise from bending the knee to a man he once derided as “America’s Hitler.” Then Vance went to the Munich Security Conference recently, not to collaborate with NATO allies on mutual security interests and Ukraine, but to turn on them.

Vance, the shameless election denier in service to an authoritarian regime lawlessly dismantling a democratic republic, had the towering audacity and historical blindness to lecture his European audience on democracy, downplay threats from Russia and China, and publicly court a far-right German party (AfD) that many Germans consider the heirs of Nazi ideas and that sanitizes the Holocaust. His blistering dress-down of European leaders, rightly dismayed over rising extremism and history repeating itself, coupled with his pronounced affection for far-right politicians a week before a crucial German election (U.S. election interference?) was obscene.

The last thing the world needs now is a U.S. vice-president trashing eighty years of foreign policy with America’s closest and most enduring friends. But that’s what a dangerously reckless Vance did on the world stage to compete with Elon Musk and boost his nascent brand as an uber-nihilist bent on destroying plurality for purity and seeding a new world order. It’s wing-nuttery on a disturbingly dark scale. But Vance, for all his performative bravado — whether it’s lashing out at European allies for not welcoming extremism, or engaging in petty posting on X, or weirdly obsessing about “the essence of masculinity” and a “broken culture” that tells you “You’re a bad person because you’re a man” — is a phony.

He morphed from Never-Trumper to groveling suck-up for unimagined power, but he can’t quite pull it off as a poser with a makeover beard spewing stupid and offensive and strange. Vance has been doing us proud by attacking friends, embracing enemies, insulting humanitarians, drawing papal ire, and pontificating laughably on what makes a man a man.

Seriously, what is wrong with J.D.?

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

The quote is attributable to a 1965 sermon Martin Luther King Jr. gave the day after “Bloody Sunday,” when civil rights protestors were attacked and beaten by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In a period rife with ugliness and hate, King exhorted his beleaguered congregation to live with moral courage when faced with grave wrongs or die with soul-killing silence long before you take your last breath.

“A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.” King’s prophetic words should reverberate off the walls in this fraught moment for American liberty and justice as the tyrannical hammer of Project 2025 methodically pounds down the rule of law.

But they don’t. Not to a wide swath of apathetic Americans. Not to their spineless and largely muted political leaders. Nothing drove home the point more than the stunningly suppressed reaction to the presidential pardon of Jan. 6 convicted police beaters who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to hang the vice-president, hunt lawmakers and stop the peaceful transfer of power through mob savagery. Crickets and meh is what we got.

Although the brazen felon holding court in the Oval Office campaigned on pardoning the “patriots” who bashed, tased and blinded overwhelmed law enforcement officers defending the Capitol, few expected that clemency to include those videotaped beating the hell out of cops in front of the whole world. Former DC cop Michael Fanone was beaten unconscious, suffered a heart attack, concussion and traumatic brain injury:

“I’ve been betrayed by my country, and I’ve been betrayed by those that supported Donald Trump, whether you voted for him because he promised these pardons or for some other reason, you knew that this was coming.” He and others who testified in Jan. 6 cases fear for their lives again now that the insurrectionists have been released.

Yet sheeplike Republicans gave Trump a pass on freeing even the most violent Jan. 6 offenders and far-right militia leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy — “to overthrow, put down or destroy by force the government of the United States.”

Ohio’s newly minted U.S. Senator and Trump bootlicker Bernie Moreno defended the pardon of armed rioters on the seat of democracy — “because nobody’s been treated worse” — then, with a straight face, proclaimed himself and Trump big backers of the Blue.

“Nobody is a stronger supporter of law enforcement than President Trump, myself, or JD Vance. We honor and respect law enforcement. When I walk in every morning, I look at the guards, I say ‘Thank you. Thank you for being here, thank you for helping out.’ But these people [the pardoned police beaters] have been treated horribly.”

No, Bernie, the tried and convicted thugs had their due process in court. The gruesome videos of Jan. 6 document who was really treated horribly by MAGA combatants summoned, assembled and sent to the Capitol by Trump to “fight like hell” over his baseless lie of a stolen election. The police who were dragged down the steps, beaten with everything from flag poles and pipes to fire extinguishers and baseball bats, are the victims Moreno sold down the river with sympathy for their attackers. Thanks for nothing.

Some GOP leaders, including Vance, who had previously argued that “obviously” violent protestors should be excluded from any presidential reprieve, were notably mum after Trump’s sweeping amnesty of the horde that pulverized officers and desecrated, defecated and plundered its way through the Capitol while lawmakers ran for their lives. Other cowardly Republicans, like Ohio’s Jim Jordan, hid their disagreement to Trump’s decision with a walk-off line that the pardon was his to make.

No point in decrying the glorification of political violence in service to a sore loser. Trump might invite the insurrectionists to the White House. Not a peep from Ohio Republicans about the hundreds of vindicated criminals released into communities, including Ohio hometowns, or the emboldened paramilitary leaders who threaten to “bring the heat” on those who held them accountable. One pardoned Ohioan considered his crimes for Trump “an honor.”

It’s sick. The horrendous siege of America’s citadel of democracy on live television repulsed the nation four years ago. Today the man who incited that siege to steal a second term recasts it as a “peaceful day” with skirmishes that resulted in “minor injuries” (not critical injury and death) and portrays his rioting red shirts as heroes imprisoned as “hostages.” George Orwell must be spinning in his grave.

Opposition to Trump’s fanciful narrative is nonexistent from Republicans and most of the country doesn’t seem to care. Jan. 6 was bad but whatever. Are we all the walking dead in this country? Trump’s blanket pardons of his most vicious foot soldiers on a mission to forcefully overturn a democratic election was, as an enraged Ohio Democrat Marcy Kaptur said, “a sacrilege against our republic and our constitution…an affront on decency and a violent attack on the rule of law.” Be outraged.

Take King’s sermon to heart. Stand up for what is right in “the fierce urgency of now” because staying silent on what matters will kill your soul.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

This is a split screen moment in America. On one side of the screen, a former president is being memorialized this week not only for his service to country but for the principled life he personified with renowned caring and decency. On the other side of the screen, another former/future president is being remembered this week for the violent insurrection he inspired with his “stolen election” Big Lie before he appears in court Friday for his sentencing on 34 felony convictions.

The cognitive dissonance is extreme. We are peering at a freeze frame of our national schism over what makes America great. Is greatness a twice-impeached Donald Trump, who tried to extort a desperate Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and then conspired to fraudulently prevent president-elect Biden from taking office? Or is greatness reflected instead in the caliber of American leadership the late Jimmy Carter represented as a Naval officer, state senator, governor, and 39th President of the United States who spent decades of his post-presidency as an unassuming global humanitarian?

What makes America genuinely great can’t be the normalization of hateful degeneracy and promised retribution by an authoritarian government of, by, and for billionaires. What has always made America great are those who dream big for the benefit of mankind. History will judge the highs and lows of Jimmy Carter’s single term in the White House, but the standard he set as a true public servant in and out of power is undisputed and universally respected.

The peanut farmer-turned-improbable-president was complex and conflicted, but it was the integrity of his character, his commitment to make a meaningful difference in lives, and his wellspring of compassion that even divided Americans recognized when Carter died. He was seen for what he was: a man of faith who dedicated his life after the presidency to improving the world as a fulcrum for social justice, advancing democracy, and other noble causes.

Carter built metaphorical bridges internationally and actual houses for those who couldn’t afford a place to call home. He was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, handy with a tool belt and hammer, who went to work with other Habitat for Humanity volunteers. “The people he helped could never help him, either politically or financially,” said one observer, “what better legacy could you have to do things for others.”

That was private citizen Carter, from a tiny speck of a town in rural Georgia, who labored in a hard hat on housing construction into his 90s. An earnest, patient, proud man with a generous spirit of selfless giving that goes on in his memory. Is it him, and those who follow his lead, that make America great or those who wrap themselves in the flag and try to burn down the ideals it symbolizes?

Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, D-Toledo, who served in the Carter administration, said her former boss “was a red, white and blue patriot” who didn’t wear his patriotism “on his sleeve like some folks that are beating their chest all the time. It was the way he lived that showed who he was.” Acknowledgement of that kind of admirable was bipartisan. The state’s congressional delegation knew what had been lost.

“Jimmy Carter was a good and honest man who devoted his life to service in the military and government and his work helping with affordable housing,” said Cincinnati Republican Brad Wenstrup. “President Carter’s legacy is one of kindness and humanitarianism,” Mike Carey, R-Columbus, added. “While our politics differed, he served our nation with honor,” stressed Republican Dave Joyce, R-OH-14.

To Max Miller, R-Rocky River, the late president “was a man of integrity. Thank you for your example.” Akron Democrat Emilia Sykes echoed the sentiment that Carter “was a decent and kind man who served as a model for every public servant to emulate.” He was a thoughtful, if not perfect, president who led by moral example — not incendiary tweets or petulant rants beneath the dignity of his office and certainly antithetical to Carter’s personal criterion of respectful conduct.

There was a time when Americans expected no less of their commander in chief. A time, not so long ago, when a presidential candidate who vowed to punish his political enemies, issue blanket pardons of insurrectionists who savagely beat their way into the U.S. Capitol, and order dehumanizing cruelty on a mass scale would have been shunned. When a criminally indicted defendant facing trial in four different jurisdictions would have been a joke as a presidential aspirant.

When a person convicted by a jury of his peers on 34 felony counts and separately of sexual abuse and defamation of his victim couldn’t possibly be elected to the highest office in the land. Yet, on Jan. 20, Donald Trump will again put his hand on a Bible to take the presidential oath he desecrated four years ago by trying to overturn a democratic election.

He has already ranted about the nation’s flags flying at half-staff through his inauguration in mourning for Carter.

America’s split screen has come into focus with the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, the president-elect being sentenced as a felon and the state funeral of the president from Plains, Ga. Grieve for the loss of honorable.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

Timidity won’t cut it in 2024. Neither will playing it safe. When the inmates have taken over the asylum the response cannot be measured and meek. The MAGA Republicans who have made a dysfunctional mess out of state government in Ohio, with petty power grabs and industry-written policies, steamroller through opposition that is measured and meek.

Their federal counterparts, who have surrendered all agency to a twice-impeached felon, fraudster, adjudicated rapist and criminally-indicted defendant in three jurisdictions, pulverize dissent that is tame. The few times somebody — anybody — calls BS on the crazy that passes as governance in Columbus or Washington, people remember why truth, in no uncertain terms, matters.

Recall the Michigan lawmaker whose robust floor speech reverberated throughout the political world a couple years ago. Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow had been targeted by a colleague with an outrageous, baseless accusation in a fundraising email. She fired back against the disgusting Republican smear and called out the GOP’s efforts to “deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues.”

America paid attention.

The blistering rebuke of a “straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom” against those who would cruelly scapegoat “people who are different” was a national shot in the arm to many who felt the same way but couldn’t articulate what McMorrow did. Her speech went viral, racking up millions of views across then-Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Impassioned reason had broken through the madness. Finally.

The first-term legislator was unafraid to confront slanderous hurt and hateful attacks head on. “I know that hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen,” she said. Truer words were never spoken. If only more Democrats, independents and Republicans untethered to the cult of Trump took heed. But they hesitate. Too often.

They cede ground to a militant vocal minority bulldozing through norms and shared values instead of fighting fire with fire. In Republican statehouses across the country, including Ohio, the pushback against exponentially escalating attacks against LGBTQ+ people has been mainly limp to nonexistent. The one-off objections from some seems almost obligatory, less a forceful call to action in defense of human autonomy and dignity and more a resigned surrender to inevitability.

Last week Ohio House Republicans proposed two bills that do nothing to help Ohioans crushed by a lack of affordable housing and rent hikes going through the roof. Nothing to fix the economic distress of millions with mounting bills unable to break even on multiple minimum wage jobs or afford quality day care, reduce food insecurity or feel safe from rampant gun violence.

The right wing legislative specials serve no expansive constituency but do get a rise out of the MAGA base. Which is the point. Not productivity. The art of legislating — enacting smart policy solutions to produce tangible public outcomes — is all but dead in Ohio. Under gerrymandered Republican supermajorities, fixing real problems has been replaced with fanning MAGA grievances and fueling controversies invented on Fox News.

Culture war idiocy and special interest giveaways top the GOP agenda. Evidence of the former is House legislation to defund financially-strapped public libraries over subjective content restrictions (i.e., material “harmful to young people”??) and another equally broad (and probably unconstitutional) measure to criminalize public drag performances “to protect our vulnerable youth.”

Weak or unsustained resistance to the flood of preposterous in state and national politics emboldens corrosive extremism to go even further, to normalize cruelty, to ban more freedoms in the pursuit of happiness that don’t comport with a dystopic theocracy, to purge and disenfranchise voters whenever and for whatever, to work with Big Energy, Big Pharma, Big Oil and Gas and around the will of the people on abortion, legalized weed and gerrymandering.

Passive opposition allows corrupt operators to ignore laws or court orders they dislike, delegitimize jury verdicts they don’t accept, gaslight for jailed insurrectionists — who beat the hell out of police at the U.S. Capital to storm and defile it — as “political prisoners” and denounce the American criminal justice system for rendering due process to a prominent felon MAGA Republicans will nominate for president after downplaying his coup-plotting schemes and pilfering of classified documents (while obstructing their return) as old news.

Ohio Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno predictably came out swinging for his felonious führer. He released a digital ad that savaged his Democratic opponent, Sen. Sherrod Brown, for “standing by [President] Biden even as he turns the judicial system into a weapon to interfere in the presidential election.” Moreno blasted the incumbent senator for “refusing to condemn Biden’s politically motivated witch hunt.”

The Brown campaign had no comment on the ad. The flagrant lies about a New York state case brought against Trump after the U.S. Justice Department declined to pursue it went unrefuted. Reality demanded a forceful rebuttal. The candidate hesitated.

“I’m not a lawyer or a judge,” Brown remarked later about Trump’s felony conviction, “but I’ve said from the beginning that no one is above the law. Ultimately, this is up to the legal system to sort out and for the American people to decide in November.” That’s not fighting fire with fire. Tyranny must be met head-on with the truth in no uncertain terms. The stakes in 2024 are simply too high for timid.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

The holiday intermission between Christmas and New Year’s has traditionally been an excuse to exhale. A brief interlude to unplug and immerse in blissful distractions. But this time seems different. No amount of escapism can keep a palpable foreboding at bay. An epic storm is coming. We are not prepared.

But how can we be? We’re living through unprecedented, unimaginable history-making in America. Wrap your head around a former president twice impeached for extorting a foreign ally (Ukraine) for political gain and for inciting a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. We watched the latter happen in real time on TV in stunned disbelief.

So did the Oval Office Instigator. But he viewed the savage degradation of our iconic citadel of democracy in stony indifference. For hours. The surreal madness that has descended on our country is frightening and exhausting. But beneath the oppressive crazy lurks a projected lunacy far more terrifying than anything we could imagine.

A depraved sociopath who knowingly lied about an election he lost, conspired to corruptly overturn it and lit the fuse of an insurrection against his own government, could be the president-elect a year from now. Next December we could be shellshocked, collectively dazed, as though we’ve fallen through the looking glass with triumphant fanatics singing Auld Land Syne.

Unbelievable but not inconceivable. Picture it. Believe it. A modern-day fuhrer with a bad comb-over — who openly campaigned on being a dictator on Day One — could be awaiting his inauguration for life with a ready-made American Reich of diehard loyalists. Donald Trump has made no secret of his fever dream to grab raw power for himself, like his authoritarian crushes around the world.

He’s increasingly using the dehumanizing language of Nazi Germany, gleefully weaving the words of Hitler into his rally punch lines, calling people “vermin” with the ominous unspoken message that vermin needs to be eradicated. Nazi propaganda is replete with references to Jews as vermin. The fascist rhetoric comes before. It aways comes before.

Trump has embraced it. He is loud and proud of his vile anti-American, anti-democratic spiel. He quotes Putin disinformation as validation and extols the virtues of freedom-killing despots. It’s not a shtick. Take him seriously. Trump is a miscreant on an unholy mission who’s desperate to stay out of jail.

He can only escape accountability for his many alleged crimes in and out of office if he assumes power and aborts pending prosecution. He is cornered (like a rat) by criminal indictments in four jurisdictions. He is charged with 91 felony counts. The evidence against him for defrauding the American government and its people by scheming to change the legitimate outcome of the 2020 election is overwhelming.

Proof of his culpability was reaffirmed by the Colorado Supreme Court in its explosive decision to disqualify Trump from holding the presidency under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause. The court found his engagement in the Jan 6 insurrection indisputable. No dissent on its independent assessment of the facts.

Trump had “the specific intent to incite imminent unlawful action,” the court said about a former president of the United States. Whatever the U.S. Supreme Court decides on appeal, the surrealness of another shameful historic first in America is difficult to shake off. Yet Trump is cruising to the presidential nomination of the MAGA Republican Party, which wholly sings his praise and welcomes his endorsements like manna from heaven.

Even after his attempted coup to stay in power no matter what law or constitutional oath he broke. Even after Trump lied repeatedly about a stolen election that wasn’t and exhorted an angry and armed mob of supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Even after hunted lawmakers and his own vice president huddled for their lives while he fiddled.

Even after he pilfered boxes of highly classified documents to Mar-a-Lago to impress regardless of the acute national security threat he invited. Even after his orchestrated subterfuge to evade and obstruct the efforts of federal investigators to retrieve the top-secret government reports. Even after a (not insignificant) verdict by a jury of his peers that he sexually assaulted a woman and then defamed her.

Even after all the carnage Trump has left in his wake and the upheaval he forecasts by flirting with fascism, the MAGA Party can’t say a bad thing about him. That defies reason and reality for political expediency. Those who put their careers above country enable and elevate a clear and present danger to those of us still reasonably sane in December, 2023.

We shudder at the thought of our Constitution being suspended or terminated under Trump — as he proposed in December 2022, so he could return to the presidency. His vow to wield revenge against political enemies, silence the media and put down protestors in the street with troops is nightmarish. He and his think tank devotees intend to sic the Justice Department on foes with trumped up charges, deploying the Kremlin playbook, and populate the federal bureaucracy with yes-men who pledge allegiance to Trump, not the Constitution.

It’s coming. This storm. Time to face it head on. All is not calm this holiday intermission. But resolve to save the republic is strong. It better be.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.