On Trump’s social media posts, he keeps depicting himself in fantasy roles: Superman, Jesus, the Pope, Sci-Fi leader of dystopian death machines & a larger than life military commander. His fantasies are sometimes “official,” communicated to the American public directly under White House insignia, and they frequently come in waves of multiple fantasies at one time. Over Labor Day he indulged and made it public 37 times.

Fantasizing during times of stress instead of working to resolve crises wrought by his own incompetence suggests Trump detaches from reality as a defense mechanism. I’m no psychoanalyst but someone needs to drive a serious conversation about the dangers of what we’re seeing. A sudden shift into immersive fantasy worlds is regarded as classic form of dissociative absorption, where the brain rapidly checks out of the physical world and floods consciousness with an imagined reality to cope with overwhelming real-world stress. The power fantasies also look like an admission: Trump craves supernatural powers like any pre-pubescent boy, but knows he is out of his depth.

Trump’s fantasies often portray themes of destruction. Over Labor Day he depicted himself masterminding space command, pressing buttons on the console to detonate nuclear bombs. In another, he’s leading a futuristic army of androids and killer robots. Neither is safe or sane as he as he actively moves these fantasies toward reality- his administration is accelerating the deployment of a new generation of experimental nuclear reactors, while also pursuing autonomous killing robots programmed to kill without real time human direction.

Standing alone, a president dissociating from reality to spend hours mired in fantasies of world domination is alarming enough. But in the context of what he is actually doing, Trump’s insanity is dangerous and triggers a moral obligation to act.

The world is watching, aghast

Americans are not the only audience watching his impairment; our adversaries, including those who would do us harm, are also watching. Gone are the days of ‘Trump just being Trump,’ as if an imbecilic bully is somehow charming and wink-worthy.

Trump 2.0’s unprovoked aggression on the world stage has forfeited any remaining goodwill and removed any lingering benefit of the doubt: This man means to harm others. Trump has now bombed or targeted 7 nations that did not attack us first: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen, plus alleged “drug-smuggling” boats in international waters. The unilateral executions in the Caribbean Sea, where Hegseth has ordered the deaths of more than 225 people based on unsubstantiated suspicion of drug dealing, is an ongoing war crime. Even if the slaughtered victims were running drugs, no one has legal authority to kill them without interdiction and due process.

Trump also kidnapped Venezuela’s president, “appropriated” Venezuela’s oil, and is now bombing Iranian oil tankers off Kharg Island and the Gulf of Oman, all more war crimes. In Iran alone, his stunted judgment has made extremists more powerful, energy more expensive, and our allies more alarmed, yet few Republicans will admit that his unhinged aggression doesn’t look strong, it looks pathological.

Trump’s domination designs aren’t funny

One of Trump’s infantile fantasies posted over the holiday portrayed the entire northern hemisphere including Iceland, Canada, Central America and the Caribbean as part of the United States. Harmless? France24.com described it as a US 'takeover' of North America, which triggered “widespread ridicule and questions about Trump’s fitness for office.”

The standalone lunacy is bad enough, but real time context makes it worse. Trump started the war in Iran without consulting allies, then turned around and castigated them for not bailing him out from his colossal mistake, blasting them as ‘cowards’ and calling NATO a “paper tiger.”

Although parters reliant on U.S. defense and trade were initially reluctant to speak out, they aren’t keeping mum any longer. As El Pais puts it, “across multiple summits and official declarations, EU officials have transitioned from quiet anxiety to sharp, public pushback.” Shame-naming “the international disorder created by Donald Trump,” our erstwhile European allies are forging new alliances with diminished— or entirely eliminated—ties to the U.S.

World leaders are calling out the danger, why aren’t Republicans?

In one of Trump’s Labor Day posts, Trump depicted himself physically dominating Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, while calling him “Governor.” If there’s any strategy behind alienating a peaceful neighbor through continuous insults, it’s hard to find.

It’s possible that Trump, a reality TV host who bankrupted six businesses and paid almost no federal income tax before becoming president, is triggered by Carney’s staid competence. Carney, elected in large part for pushing back against Trump, is an economist and former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. Carney is widely respected as an economist across major Western economies and global financial institutions, notably in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Trump, in contrast, has a reputation as a corrosive buffoon. In polls, Trump commands the lowest confidence rating of a national leader among many nations.

Trump’s aggressive posturing exemplifies “a hostile attitude from the U.S. toward Western Europe unseen since the end of World War II.” Earlier this year, EU leaders condemned Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward Greenland as a “blackmail tactic,” and warned that Trump’s threats to impose unilateral trade penalties on allies would trigger a "dangerous downward spiral" in transatlantic relations. Fast forward to September, and Trump continues to threaten to stop foreign trade for no sane reason other than to flex the power because he can, harm to his own citizens be damned.

Lawmakers swear an oath to support and defend the United States Constitution; this oath requires them to check any president, including one from their own party, if executive actions cross legal or constitutional lines. Trump crossed that line on his first day back in office, and he’s been crossing it ever since. Republican legislators who fail to remove him despite clear evidence of his insanity and unfitness to serve will end up with American blood on their hands.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Republican Senator Thom Tillis, former Senate Armed Services Committee member, has accused Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth of mismanaging the Pentagon, and is recommending Trump fire him. Tillis wrote on X that Hegseth is “intimidated by competence” and “retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and well-being of our fighting force.”

‘Ginning up culture wars’ to detract from malfeasance describes the entire Trump administration. It also captures how Fox News manipulates 38% of the country to vote against their own interests. Climate change? Corruption? Measles? These illegals are stealing from you.

After forcing credentialled journalists out of the Pentagon last year, Hegseth introduced a new right-wing press corps to replace them. He also started placing online influencers, aka political commentators, in civilian roles to keep his low IQ culture wars brewing. These influencers have been assigned as either “special government employees” or “highly qualified experts” who use social media to deflect from Hegseth’s mistakes, attack critics, and promote Hegseth’s favored viewpoints.

Using federal tax dollars for propaganda is illegal

Although the DOD has refused to answer questions about payment arrangements for Hegseth’s influencers, it is a logical inference that they are being paid with taxpayer funds. Republican Air Force veteran Adam Kinzinger noted as much, posting that it appears the Pentagon “is using your tax dollars to hire influencers on X to put out partisan talking points.”

Using federal tax dollars to pay for political commentary has long been illegal. Section 718 of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act explicitly prohibits spending federally appropriated tax dollars on political propaganda: “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used directly or indirectly, including by private contractor, for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by Congress.” This restriction blocks three separate categories of impermissible communications, including those that “fail to clearly identify the federal agency as the source or sponsor of the content.” Hegseth’s propagandists did not reveal that they were working for the federal government; that took some sleuthing by journalists at the Washington Post and the Bulwark.

All government agencies are legally required to be transparent about the origin of their communications under FTC Disclosure Rules as well. Under federal law, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires social media influencers to clearly and conspicuously disclose any financial relationships or sponsorships they may have. Failing to disclose when social media content is paid for violates consumer protection laws and amounts to deception.

Although it sounds quaint by now to point out yet another way this administration is breaking federal law, paying influencers to disseminate false or skewed information is covert propaganda that assaults the principle of an informed electorate. It is also the hallmark of an autocratic regime.

The Nazi ideology of Hegseth’s troll

In his excellent Substack post, Surviving in a pit of vipers, Robert Tracinski notes that one of Hegseth’s main influencers, Kurt Schlichter, is “pretty much a straight-up fascist.” ‘Pretty much’ is Tracinski being cautious. Schlichter advocates online for using the law to “force Democrats into political submission” and to “imprison dissenters.” Schlichter calls blue state liberals “evangelical Marxists” whom “red state conservatives” must force “by any means necessary” to be “like us,” with “no quarter and no compromise.”

“No quarter,” coming from a retired Army colonel with 620,000 X followers literally means killing adversaries. In war, showing “no quarter” has been an international war crime since 1907. In peace, applying it to silence different political perspectives is blood-curdling.

Schlichter also advocates penalizing “barren, non-familial lifestyles” and banning people in those lifestyles from political participation altogether. He also advocates “nationalizing big tech and academia” in order to “mandate conservatism as their operational ideology.” Schlichter wants to weaponize these institutions to enforce far-right political viewpoints nationwide. Between 1933 and 1945, Hitler similarly eliminated political opposition and forced the German population to align with Nazi ideology.

Hegseth’s reflexive lies put Americans in danger

The dangers of federal propaganda are obvious and the history is bleak, but Hitler didn’t invent state-forced ideology. The founders’ original goal behind the First Amendment was protecting Americans from forced ‘state’ ideology. They would flip in their graves to see this administration rule by propaganda, disseminated by right wing media, Hegseth’s trolls, and Trump and Elon Musk’s own for-profit social media platforms. It’s as if Trump 2.0 is a division of Fox News.

Governing by falsehoods is dangerous in any context, but lying about military operations puts American lives in danger. Hegseth’s lies downplaying Iranian attacks on U.S. assets in the Persian Gulf, for example, disrupted the distribution of food and supplies for the long-suffering troops on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Trump’s lies aren’t helping the war either. Last week he published an AI video falsely depicting the destruction of Iran’s strategic oil terminal, Kharg Island, signaling his cognitive impairment to Iran.

Hegseth seems to have transferred his Fox News propaganda manual to the Pentagon. In March, he called reports that Iran was disrupting oil shipments through the Straight of Hormuz “patently ridiculous” even as satellite imagery proved the reports. He deflected on evidence that the U.S. bombed a school and killed 175 children. He claims the U.S. “never targets civilians” after killing over 200 civilians on small boats in the Caribbean on mere suspicion that they were “narcoterrorists,” and after bombing an Iranian wedding hall with highly precise, guided munitions. And who can forget Hegseth’s early claim of complete and total “obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear capacity after last year’s bombing campaign?

He was lying then and he is lying now, and his culture war trolls are spreading his false propaganda.

Tillis, and a growing chorus Republican critics, are spot on. Hegseth is dangerous. According to Trump, he knows more about war than the generals do, why does he even need a Secretary of War?

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Proving that a lying clock tells the truth twice a day, JD Vance recently quipped that politics have shifted so much that "if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story." Vance was unwittingly acknowledging his own handiwork as he and his intellectually compromised boss flex Steve Bannon’s flood the zone strategy: throw crap on the wall, throw it often, throw it fast, until the American public is so overwhelmed they can’t keep up and turn away.

It’s working. Eighteen months into this nightmare regime, as one act of corruption follows the next, Americans are turning away. One study found that 65% of Americans across political affiliation and age groups are consuming less news due to information overload and fatigue. It’s exactly what Trump wants.

As Trump awards billions in no-bid federal contracts to his political donors, from the no bid multi-million dollar Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool debacle, to hundreds of millions to build a ballroom, to multi-billion dollar no bid contracts to rape and pillage our national parks, his political donors are reaping windfall rewards. His sons aren’t doing too poorly either. After Republicans blew a gasket over Hunter Biden serving on a corporate board, the Trump boys have cashed in big time with an Air Force contract to buy interceptor drones from Don Jr. and Eric (who have no experience in the drones business), Don Jr.’s ownership stake in a mining project that just secured $1.6 billion in government backing (ditto), and a $620 million Pentagon loan for Don Jr.'s venture capital firm. Trump’s crypto scams have caused investors to lose up to $3.8 billion while the Trumps made up to $2.3 billion across the same crypto projects. Now Trump wants to personally profit from his own policy announcements, “selling” early internet access to his social media posts to facilitate insider trading.

Meanwhile, as wealthy individuals spend millions to secure presidential pardons, and Trump’s scheme to establish a separate $1.8 billion slush fund for his supporters refuses to die, the Department of the Treasury just announced that it is destroying its anti-corruption database, the federal registry of shell-company ownership. It plans to destroy all the data it has already collected, to prevent future administrations, future FBIs, future DOJs, and future local police departments from ever seeing the incriminating data. An SNL skit writer could not write this stuff as fast as it’s happening.

Money is one thing, national parks are another

One piece of corruption that appears to be getting through to the public involves the Big Bend National Park in Texas. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security fast-tracked multibillion-dollar, no bid contracts to erect a nonsensical steel barrier wall along parts of the Rio Grande River where cliffs and canyons already rise nearly 1,500 feet and serve as natural barriers to illegal crossings. The administration waivied standard financial transparency, competitive bidding laws, and environmental reviews to award massive no-bid contracts to long time Trump and republican donors.

Robbing the American taxpayers of billions most people can’t comprehend is one thing, robbing them of their national parks is another. Even Republicans in Texas are pushing back. Calling it a “crazed road-building spree,” and an unnecessary "boondoggle," given the region’s "God-given barriers," a bipartisan furor has erupted over Trump’s “monument to corruption” that “no Texan asked for.”

The nonsensical project will cause permanent damage to the environment for no purpose other than rewarding Trump’s corporate donors. It will alter the flow of the Rio Grande River, cutting off flood plain distribution, wreck the feeding routes and habitats of already threatened black bears, Texas Big Horn sheep, and mountain lions, and ruin the business of hundreds of local tourism companies. Now the administration is saying contractors may blast through part of Mariscal Mountain, a 4000 foot limestone ridge in Big Bend. The Center for Biological Diversity said the “extensive dynamite blasting,” would be “the most heinous attack on an American national park” in generations.

Trump’s destruction for profit is straight out of an authoritarian playbook

When I discussed the issue on Thom Hartmann’s show earlier this week (it’s about 10 minutes, you can watch it here), Hartmann characteristically pulled the camera back to widen the perspective. He noted that what Trump is doing— spending billions for unnecessary projects just to line the pockets of his donors—was the same modus operandi of other authoritarian regimes like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin. As Hartmann put it, this is how Orban and Putin “cement loyalty with their oligarchs.” It’s also why Republicans in Congress won’t quit Trump: he’s corrupt, but the spoils spill over into their donors’ hands as well.

In Russia, when communism fell, Russian oligarchs (“apparatchiks”) divvied up Russia’s industry and national resources. As I recounted in early 2025, in I did business in Russia. Trump is importing KGB thuggery, I experienced Russian thuggery first hand. Before I became a 1st A trial lawyer, I was corporate. I was general counsel to a Chicago beverage maker, negotiating contracts and foreign licensing agreements. My client’s biggest customer was Russian, and they tried to misappropriate (eg, steal) my client’s world famous trademark. When I was in Moscow to try to resolve the matter, two things happened: The government representative from what is now called Rospatent (Russia’s Patent and Trademark Bureau) said, point blank and on the record, that my client was at a disadvantage because of U.S. legal prohibitions against bribing government officials. We were already spending millions on the litigation, and it was quite obvious that my adversary had already greased many palms.

The other thing that happened was worse. An American businessman staying in my hotel was murdered, gunned down as he left the building. The LA Times reported that Paul Tatum helped develop the Radisson-Slavjanskaya Hotel into one of the first Western-style hotels in Moscow. Just before he was killed, Tatum said he was in Moscow to “defend his share in the hotel against unscrupulous executives, the Chechen Mafia, and a Russian business culture that wouldn’t play fair.”

That was an understatement. Tatum, according to reports, noted correctly that murder is “a corporate strategy in Moscow.” It’s true. I traveled with a bodyguard because hundreds of business executives are killed annually in Mafia-style hits throughout Russia.

This is the business culture our ‘president’ is nurturing; Russian-style corruption is his natural habitat. Make no mistake: without the rule of law, Americans will be no different from Russians. Trump’s well-rewarded oligarchs- uber rich CEOs who will do anything to destroy the taxing and regulatory state- will slide quite easily into murders for hire.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Heading into midterm season, voters are experiencing Trump’s economic illiteracy first hand, even as Trump, embarrassingly, keeps blaming Biden. If he hadn’t elevated personal loyalty over professional competence when choosing his cabinet, staff would advise him that blaming a long gone predecessor makes Trump look weak, but he did, so they don’t, and here we are.

Trump’s illegal tariffs and un-strategized war in Iran have caused prices to skyrocket globally. His tariffs on essential inputs like steel, aluminum, and clean energy components have driven up operational expenses across the power sector, raising costs that are then passed down to consumers. His war in Iran has also elevated the price of oil energy, travel, and consumer borrowing costs. As global oil markets face increased volatility, prices for gasoline, diesel, heating oil, airfares, and mortgage rates remain significantly higher than their pre-war baselines.

Americans are also just beginning to enjoy Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB), signed into law in July 2025 with staggered effective dates. The bill delivered the largest cuts to food assistance, health care, education programs, and student loan services in U.S. history, in order to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy. Slashing taxes for the uber rich while cutting subsidies for healthcare and the poor, the law also hurt small businesses and farmers while benefitting large corporations. Can you say oligarchic coup?

The BBB also gave a major boost to the superyacht, private jet, and private luxury travel sectors. Massive tax and regulatory gifts freed cash at the top, allowing the top 1% to spend their money on toys for the uber rich, like superyachts. By restoring 100% first-year bonus depreciation for qualifying “business assets” like superyachts and jets, following the BBB’s passage, demand skyrocketed as affluent buyers and charter operators rushed to utilize the tax write-off, helping superyacht sales explode.

Trump’s Big Bill: Beautiful if you’re rich, downright ugly if you’re not

Despite clearly contracting economic indicators, Trump continues to call the affordability crisis a “hoax,” and a fake narrative manufactured by Democrats, much to the consternation of any Republican candidate not guaranteed re-election through gerrymandering. But numbers don’t lie, which may explain Trump’s aversion to them.

The law cut roughly $187 billion from SNAP food assistance, the largest cuts to SNAP in the history of the program, with reductions phasing in between 2026 and 2028, after the midterms. If Democrats regain control of one or both legislative houses, Republicans, by design, will be able to blame them for the cuts Republicans passed. On food assistance, expanded work requirements, more frequent recertification, and the defunding of SNAP-Ed nutrition programs are expected to lower SNAP enrollment by an average of 4.7 million people while reducing nutrition allotments for those who remain. Economists expect these cuts to increase poverty, food insecurity, and hunger among low-income communities.

On the healthcare side, over 11 million Americans are expected to lose their eligibility for Medicaid by 2034 due to increased work-reporting requirements, shorter certification periods, and new copays for poor adults who are living at or just above the poverty line. The law cut ACA marketplace open enrollment, and eliminated special enrollment periods for low-income people. Republicans claim the cuts will reduce waste, fraud, and abuse and encourage people to work, but the cuts fall almost entirely on low-income working households while the benefits accrue to higher earners.

The exploding national debt is another Trump disaster. The national debt rose by a staggering $7.8 trillion during the first Trump administration, ranking “as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration…” This year, the national debt jumped past $37 trillion, despite draconian program cuts nationwide, thanks to Republicans’ out of control spending on Iran, ICE, and building a police state, along with tax gifts to the rich. This debt is not sustainable.

So what are the GOP’s plans to address consumer prices, other than leaving the bill for our children?

Despite the obvious cause and effect of Trump’s tariffs, war in Iran, Big Beautiful Bill, and overall administrative incompetence, Trump continues to blame Biden for nearly every current economic ill. Earlier this week, Trump told supporters in Michigan that the affordability problems they were experiencing were “vestiges of the Biden administration,” then devoted most of his speech to lying about what the United States could look like if “Dumocrats” or “Dumbocrats” win this fall. “I’m one day in office,” he brayed, “and the fake news goes affordability, affordability!’” His audience roared in appreciative laughter.

Trump lacks the economic acumen to understand or care that Biden inherited a covid economic crisis in 2021, and spurred the strongest economic and labor market recovery in modern history. With limited bi-partisan support, Biden modeled the economic recovery package of FDR with his left hand, while galvanizing NATO’s response to Russia with his right. The resulting infrastructure, chips, and manufacturing initiatives had not been seen in the US in half a century. Trump can’t compete, at least not with anyone outside the Fox propaganda network.

So this year, instead of addressing costs, inflation, and a faltering economy, the GOP is relying on messaging instead, framing the Democratic Party as aligned with far-left radical agendas. Sadly, their anti-communist messaging that doesn’t seem to be landing, since most MAGA voters don’t really understand what the term means, but understand that hamburger and gas now cost more.

In every political debate of this midterm season so far, republicans have blamed democrats for problems they themselves have caused. Ultimately, if voters don’t educate themselves, ween themselves off State News, and turn out to vote, we will get the government we deserve.

But fear not, all is not lost. Superyacht sales in the US rose by over 40% following Trump’s first tax giveaway, and continue to rise under Trump 2.0. Surely- hopefully- eventually- someday, that staggering wealth will start to trickle down.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee, hats in hand. The Pentagon is burning through appropriations, with both Navy and Air Force 2026 operations budgets set to run out by the end of July. The war in Iran has depleted key weapons stockpiles, reducing U.S. inventories of interceptor missiles and stealth cruise missiles to less than half and costing over $37 billion to date. To the naked eye, these costs reflect disastrous mismanagement of an unauthorized and escalating war.

On Wednesday, the GOP-led House approved a whopping defense funding bill anyway, authorizing an unprecedented $1 trillion for military spending. Not only did the MAGA wing reward Trump’s incompetent war in Iran with a massive spending boost, it codified Hegseth’s rebrand of the “Department of War,” snuck in Trump’s voter suppression bill, and blocked hormone therapy coverage for gender care just as Hegseth is braying about testosterone levels.

Hegseth expected lawmakers to correct his urgent shortfall, but wouldn’t correct, clarify or explain his own false claims about Iran. Hegseth’s early-in-the-war announcement that Iran’s military had been “destroyed and made combat ineffective” was obviously untrue, but republicans still put an unprecedented $1trillion budget in his hands. Arming a blowhard who delivers braggadocio instead of sober analysis is not confidence inspiring, it’s irresponsible. It’s also scary as hell.

Hegseth’s bloodlust

As a Fox News commentator, Hegseth lobbied hard for presidential pardons for war criminals, leading Trump to fully pardon a Lieutenant convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, and a Major who admitted to the CIA that he killed someone off base in 2010 and buried his remains. For his own activities in Iraq, Hegseth kept a ‘kill board’ totaling up his kills, including dead civilians, providing context for his bloodlust today (“maximum lethality not tepid legality”) and his disdain for restraint (“stupid rules of engagement.”)

Hegseth seems to be grooming U.S. servicemembers for war crimes, taking them to a place where rules and laws do not apply. Added to over 200 extrajudicial killings in South America, they bombed a school in Iran, killing 175 grade-schoolers, and are now bombing Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure and water desalination facilities, more war crimes. Millions of Iranians are living under fire in nightmarish hellscapes, compounding anti-American hatred sure to outlast Trump for generations.

This is the same idiocy that blames other countries for climate-change induced wildfires, while pouring gas on the flames. But of all the mistakes, bloodlust, and incompetence displayed to date, none is more dangerous than Hegseth’s new obsession with testosterone.

Hegseth is mandating testosterone testing

On July 16, Hegseth announced mandatory annual testosterone screening for troops 30 years and older, a new initiative that Hegseth claims will ensure enlistees “have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute ⁠best.” What he didn’t announce is that testosterone supplements can cause infertility, shrink testicles, and drive up red blood cell counts, which thickens blood and raises the risk of blood clots and pulmonary embolism.

Even worse is what T supplements can do to overall IQ and cognitive functioning. Medical studies have tracked how increased testosterone levels can induce aggressive behavior because they also change brain wave patterns.

Although Hegseth and other chest beaters think increased testosterone will make men quicker and sharper, medical research suggests the opposite. The relationship between T and IQ is shaped like an inverted U: cognitive performance is strongest when testosterone sits in a moderate range, and dramatically declines at both low and high ends of the spectrum.

In short, when T levels are too high, men get stupid. While that may explain some of Hegseth’s frequent blunders, excessive testosterone among the troops would present obvious risks.

Too much T rots your brain: How excess testosterone impairs cognitive performance

In controlled studies that raised serum testosterone in healthy men to ‘supraphysiological’ levels — beyond what the body normally produces — researchers measured how verbal and spatial memory changed, confirming a downturn in cognition levels at high doses. Rather than testosterone being simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for the brain, research shows that it can help or hurt cognition depending on where a person's levels fall relative to their own physiological baseline.

This pattern shows up in the medical research repeatedly, across different populations and cognitive domains. But Hegseth’s directive aims to establish hormonal baselines across the force, which cannot measure or indicate how a person's levels compare to their own past historical baseline.

None of this makes testosterone a villain. Men with low testosterone face meaningfully higher risk of dementia, and testosterone loss with age also contributes to cognitive decline. The nuance assuredly lost on Hegseth is that pushing testosterone artificially high — whether through unsupervised supplementation, misuse of steroids, or aggressive hormone therapy — can backfire, and erode memory and executive function. Hegseth seems to think that hormones are simple dials where more is better, but they are biometric signals the brain has evolved to interpret within complex ranges, and stepping too far outside that range — in either direction — comes at a cost.

Will Hegseth have the cognitive bandwidth, or even the professional discipline, to consult medical research before pushing T supplements to millions of servicemembers? Color me skeptical. He’s chief mouth-breather to the most incompetent, anti-science, anti-intellectual administration the world has ever seen. But he knows that when Trump starts deploying the military against U.S. citizens, aggressive soldiers with low brain function will make the perfect Praetorian Guard.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Last week, Trump blasted another announcement of his ignorance to the world, claiming that Canada’s wildfire smoke is an air “invasion,” one that he’s going to fight with… tariffs. Before thanking everyone for their attention to this matter and announcing more punitive Canadian tariffs, Trump deemed Canada “responsible” for the wildfire smoke still blanketing parts of the U.S. “They are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!... This is Willful Negligence!...”

Republican toadies were quick to parrot the idiocy. Meeting Trump’s bombast and raising him one, Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, introduced the "CANADA FIRE Act" declaring a national emergency, stripping Canadian officials of their visas, and expelling the Canadian ambassador until the smoke clears. Moreno announced, “Ohioans across the state are being subjected to hazardous conditions – we will not tolerate this incompetence.” Representative Lisa McClain borrowed Trump’s phrasing and his penchant for turning everything into us vs. them, claiming that Michiganders were “breathing Canada’s negligence,” because Canada is “exporting” their smoke “into our skies.”

Yet another coalition of Republican dunces sent a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney threatening military reprisals. They warned that if Ottawa didn't act, the US military/agencies would “act on our own” by physically crossing the border to perform unilateral logging and fire suppression. Funny how threatening invasion against a sovereign ally is easier than contradicting a petulant boss.

Satire and irony glove up, punch back

While Trump and Republicans try to punish the wind, the internet is having a field day. Mocking the sheer absurdity of the world's largest historical carbon emitter demanding damages for climate-driven wildfires, one plan, the "Build a Sky Wall" Plan, would have Trump construct a massive wall along the border to keep the "illegal air" out. A competing “Weather Bureaucracy” proposal would post U.S. customs agents at the border to issue speeding and littering tickets to wind currents passing through.

Canadian satirist David Hehn presented an initiative to draft every able-bodied Canadian between 16 and 65 to tidy up the Boreal Forest. The Forest Undergrowth Clearing Kindling Operation for Foreign Friends (boss acronym) promises to negotiate with local Canadian beavers to submit environmental impact reports. Canadian internet users, overall, were quick to see the incongruity, with one viral tweet noting: “We'll pay for the smoke as soon as you give us a refund for the acid rain and global warming.”

While this irony may be obvious, another one, more subtle and even more delicious, hasn’t made the headlines. By demanding damages from Canada for the wildfire smoke, Trump and his anti-science republicans are endorsing the legal theory currently pending in 51 lawsuits brought against major fossil fuel corporations. Big oil accountability lawsuits, filed by ten states, fifteen municipalities, and two tribal governments, seek to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for deceiving the public about their role in the climate crisis.

Republicans’ performative outrage over the smoke also implicitly supports legal claims from developing countries now demanding that nations like the U.S. and China, which have emitted the most greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution, assist them financially in addressing heatwaves, floods, disappearing coasts, droughts and crop failures worsened by rising temperatures.

An adult in the room responds

Although political commentators routinely criticize Trump for dismissing climate change as a ‘con job’ while simultaneously complaining about its effects, no U.S. elected official has yet accused Trump of causing Canada’s wildfires through climate inaction. It’s not clear why democrats haven’t come out swinging on this; research shows that the U.S. has directly caused over $10 trillion in climate damages globally since 1990.

At least Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the only adult in this spat, can still state the obvious. Carney countered Trump's accusations by pointing out Trump’s willful failure to address the climate crisis.

Carney replied to Trump’s wildfire threats by noting, statesmanlike, that “fighting climate change is the responsibility of all countries, including the United States.” While Canada is investing in clean energy, Carney noted, Trump is doing just the opposite.

An anti-science moron, Trump is deliberately accelerating climate change

Carney’s right. Trump has systematically rolled back almost every clean air protection; his regulatory rollbacks directly accelerate emissions and global warming. Aside from withdrawing the US from global climate bodies like the Paris Agreement, Trump consistently promotes climate disinformation (“it’s a hoax”) and claims black air from burning coal is good for you. One expects an Executive Order any day now requiring home furnaces to convert to coal.

While Trump engages in coercive, anti-factual measures to benefit his fossil fuel donors, he has halted all federal permitting for offshore wind, closing deals with energy companies to abandon wind farms off California, New Jersey, New York and North Carolina in exchange for investing in fossil fuel projects. His other climate-change acceleration projects include:

• Revoking the scientific declaration that greenhouse gases threaten public health.
• Eliminating federal tailpipe emissions and efficiency rules for cars and trucks.
• Weakening methane regulations and enforcement codes that required fossil fuel companies to fix gas leaks.
• Freezing billions of dollars in incentives for renewables and paying over $2.6 billion to cancel wind farms already under development.

Even Trump, at 80 years old, knows he won’t be around in 30 years when Miami slips into the ocean.

As he engages in unparalleled corruption, starts WWIII out of sheer stupidity, and tries to take the planet into the grave with him, the silver lining in his attack on Canada should be celebrated. Just as his war in Iran is hastening the world’s transition to renewables, his lets-sue-Canada-for-climate-damages policy will make a fine opening exhibit— and closing argument— for plaintiffs suing big oil.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

ICE agents just shot and killed two more innocent people, a man in Texas and another in Maine. Both men were legally authorized to work in the United States; both were shot in the early morning while driving to work.

Neither victim was ICE’s intended target, meaning each man died because federal agents pursued him in error.

Anyone who’s ever been chased—even if just in a nightmare— can imagine the terror of being followed by a masked and armed aggressor in hot pursuit. But instead of waking up from the dream right when he catches you, the masked man chasing you is actually real. He’s not floating at the foot of your bed, he’s at your car door with a loaded gun. He really does pull the trigger, you really do die, and your family really does have to grieve your absence for the rest of their lives.

An American horror story

On July 7, 2026, in Houston, Texas, ICE fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who had lived and worked in the U.S. for over 30 years, recently reaching his goal of owning his own construction company. According to preliminary reports, ICE agents in unmarked vehicles pursued Araujo while he was driving his construction crew to the morning’s job site.

Although agents admit that Mr. Araujo was not even their intended target, DHS is claiming Mr. Araujo “tried to run over an officer” with his vehicle. The three workers in the van with Araujo said no one was in front of his vehicle. They said that Araujo, a life-long construction worker with expensive tools in his work van, thought the masked men chasing them in two unidentified, unmarked black vans wanted to steal his equipment.

Six days later, similar story. In the early morning of July 13, 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. Guerrero was from Colombia, was authorized to work in the U.S., and was also on his way to work when he was killed. Although Mr. Guerrero was not the federal agents’ intended targeteither, ICE claims that Guerrero also “tried to use his vehicle as a weapon” against officers, similar to ICE allegations against Araujo and Renee Good in Minnesota. A witness saw Guerrero “bleeding profusely from the head. He was talking. (Guerrero) said: ‘I tried to stop’” before taking his last breath.

The only definitive proof of what happened in either encounter would be video footage. Authorities have not released any such video, and the agents were not wearing body cams, but rest assured some doctored recording will soon surface on Fox News, cropped and manipulated to blame the victims.

Killing reflexively

Since last year, federal ICE agents have shot at least 21 people, several of whom were attempting to drive away when they were killed. Then, after Senator Markwayne Mullin replaced Kristi Noem as DHS Secretary in March 2026, it seemed ICE began keeping a relatively quiet and lower profile. That was either because Mullin preferred less attention, or because he wanted to avoid making waves while waiting for Congress to grant DHS even more funding. On June 10, 2026, Congressional Republicans authorized another $70 billion for ICE, after DHS had already received an unprecedented and absurd $170 billion last year from Trump’s big bill.

Armed with an un-American, dystopian level of funding, with taxpayers literally buying the bullets now aimed at them, rogue ICE is back, pushing mass deportation levels up to where Stephen Miller wants them.

Although Trump officials are trying to block independent investigations into ICE killings, the truth will eventually come out, as it just did for Renee Good. When all the evidence is finally released, ICE agents will learn that they are not as free to kill as Stephen Miller would have them believe.

Not only can ICE agents be prosecuted, tried by jury, and sent to prison (or worse) for murder, but Trump can’t pardon them. Anyone convicted of murder under a state’s criminal code is stuck with state justice as they languish in that state’s penitentiary.

Federal agents are not immune from state prosecution and never have been

Under state and federal law, a federal agent acting outside the scope of his duties is not immune from state prosecution for murder, manslaughter, or any other crime under state law. Since 1890, the Supreme Court has held federal officers immune from state prosecution only if 1. they were acting within the scope of their official federal duties, and 2. their actions were objectively reasonable.

If an ICE agent is prosecuted in state court, he does have the right to remove his case to federal court, but a case removed to federal court is still prosecuted under state law. Federal procedural law applies, but so what? The state’s substantive law still governswhether or not a crime was committed.

Federal courts apply this strict two-pronged test to determine whether Supremacy Clause Immunity exists in each case, given all the facts in evidence. It is never automatic.

Trump officials are lying to agents about immunity

Steven Miller has claimed on Fox News that ICE agents operate with “complete federal immunity,” and that state prosecutors cannot independently investigate or charge federal agents with state crimes. In Renee Good’s killing, they boldly declared that Minnesota had no jurisdiction to investigate. Whether their position was the product of ignorance, bad legal counsel, hubris, or all of the above, the administration finally conceded error and submitted investigation evidence to state officials this week.

Stephen Miller frequently claims ICE agents have “federal immunity,” insinuating both license and encouragement for them to commit crimes in pursuit of his detention goals. But Miller’s bloodlust must be clouding his legal judgment, because he is demonstrably wrong, and he is risking future incarcerations of federal agents by lying to them.

Federal agents do not have absolute immunity of any kind, and never have, since 1890. Anyone reading this who knows an ICE agent, tell them to watch something other than Fox News, because ignorance of the law will not save them.

This week, masked men in two unmarked vans aggressively chased the wrong targets. They sped, cut them off, then got out of unmarked vans and ran toward them, guns drawn. When the terrorized victims got confused or scared or both and pulled away, officers ran after their vehicles, on foot. When they got closer, in a testosterone-spiked rage, they shot two innocent men, in two separate states, to death. Whether those actions were reasonable, necessary and proper, and within the officer’s official duties, won’t be up to Stephen Miller to determine. It will be up to a jury.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

In May of this year, Todd Blanche signed a one-page order under seal of the U.S. Department of Justice, declaring that the U.S. government hereby “FOREVER DISCHARGES” Donald Trump and his family from pending and viable federal tax claims, and that the federal government is “FOREVER BARRED AND PRECLUDED” from pursuing those claims. Blanche’s order, if a federal judge hadn’t just voided it, would likely have cost taxpayers up to $650 million in lost penalties and back payments.

Although Blanche’s order would have allowed a sitting president to defraud the U.S. treasury with impunity, the outrage quickly passed. It’s just another episode of corruption under the most corrupt administration our country has ever seen, what’s another few hundred million between friends?

But the legal contortions behind Blanche’s order, the unethical legal jujitsu that brought it into existence, are lasting. By orchestrating this deal, Blanche acted in his former client's personal interest, at great cost to his current client—the American public. What Blanche tried to rig up for Trump was a major ethical violation under any legal code of ethics. Even during his confirmation hearings on Wednesday, Blanche seemed confused about who his client was, explaining that, as part of the Executive branch, he serves the president. The U.S. Attorney General, for the record, serves the people, and was created to do so by the Judiciary Act of 1789. Blanche’s confusion over this most fundamental aspect of his role as AG could not be more corrosive to the rule of law Blanche has vowed to uphold.

Blanche’s brazen attempt to hijack the justice system

In overseeing the Department of Justice, any US Attorney General is legally entrusted to enforce our laws in a fair and evenhanded manner, and to use its “investigatory and prosecutorial powers” in a manner that is “free from partisan consideration.” This duty requires, above all else, an Attorney General’s commitment to honor and protect the law above both his personal interests and those of the President who nominated him.

Blanche, after blatantly protecting Trump’s personal, illegal interests over the public’s legal interests, perjured himself when he testified Wednesday in his Senate confirmation hearing. When directly asked if he would resign rather than carry out an illegal or unethical order from Trump, Blanche answered ambiguously, "I'm not going to violate my oath to the Constitution." But he already has, and not just by trying to gift Trump $650 million in waived tax penalties, along with $1.8 billion to reward J6 rioters.

Far worse than the amount of the attempted theft was the way Blanche tried to go about it: by contriving a completely fake federal lawsuit, then trying to hoodwink a federal judge by dismissing the suit after she questioned how one party could be on both sides, then defrauding the American public by claiming there had been a “settlement” of a case that never existed. On July 13, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams issued a scathing order concluding that the whole scheme was an attempt to “manipulate the judicial process” in an effort to lend the “court’s legitimacy” to collusion between Blanche, the IRS, and Trump to enrich the Trumps. She slammed Blanche for abdicating his responsibility to the public, and referred him for formal sanctions by the commission holding his law license.

The New York Bar Association’s warning

Blanche was admitted to practice law before the Attorney Grievance Committee of the State of New York. That means New York— not the federal government, not Trump— holds his law license. If he loses his license, he loses the ability to practice law anywhere in the country, and he could not supervise the work of other DOJ attorneys without engaging in the unauthorized practice of law.

On July 13, 2026, the New York Bar Association submitted a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee holding hearings on Blanche’s nomination to become AG. They vehemently oppose his confirmation, stressing the systemic damage Blanche has already inflicted on the legal system. They point out five distinct areas where Blanche has already violated his oath of office by elevating Trump over the rule of law, and by engaging in conduct contrary to the Rules of Professional Conduct and the DOJ’s own Justice Manual.

The NY Bar Association letter came after 101 former judges filed an official complaint with the New York Commission to “initiate an investigation into Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (Registration No. 4192456) for violation of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct.” In addition to the same ethical breaches identified by the NY Bar Association in its letter to U.S. Senate, the judges’ formal complaint strongly encourages disciplinary action against Blanche for his blanket abuse of authority in using the DOJ to pursue politically motivated investigations and lawsuits against Trump’s personal and political enemies.

The judges also questioned Blanche’s “personal involvement in overseeing the Department of Justice’s botched and incomplete release” of Epstein documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and raised “serious concerns” about Blanche’s interview of Ghislaine Maxwell. The judges point out the obvious: that Blanche remains “burdened” by his conflicts of interest, which “reflect adversely on his fitness as an attorney.”

Republican Senators, fearful of Trump’s promised retribution, are likely to confirm; Senator Cornyn will likely cave and vote with his party. But the Attorney Grievance Committee of New York is equally likely to disbar him, which will make Blanche only the 2nd U.S. AG to be disbarred.

Etched into the limestone exterior of the DOJ headquarters are the words, “Where law ends tyranny begins.” It is not possible to write a more apt warning about what lies ahead.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Thursday night on prime time, Trump called for bolstering election protections he has systematically and deliberately dismantled. Ask yourself why. He obviously thinks MAGA is stupid ("I love my uneducated voters"), but he's acting like the whole country is full of idiots with no attention span and no memories.

Trump destroyed election integrity agencies on purpose

Trump spent the first part of his second term dismantling the entire election protection apparatus, the thing he now insists we need for accurate election results. He’s the boy who cried wolf, only he is the wolf.

Under Trump, the F.B.I.’s task force on foreign influence was shut down. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence got rid of the national task force that tracked foreign meddling in our elections. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been gutted. After the Supreme Court told him he could fire anyone he wanted, he gave pink slips to the entire bipartisan federal agency created to help run fair elections.

And he has appointed a billionaire heir to a housing fortune with no relevant intelligence experience as the new director of "national intelligence."

Trump’s attacks on election-security measures

The Cybersecurity Agency had been a lead federal partner for states on election security efforts since the 2016 election, sharing cybersecurity data, best practices and intelligence concerning foreign interference in U.S. elections. But because director Christopher Krebs validated the integrity (and thereby, implicitly, the results) of the 2020 election, Trump fired Krebs and significantly scaled back the agency’s workforce, funding, and core operations.

The F.B.I.’s task force on foreign influence was also disbanded, along with scaled back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, despite years of warnings by U.S. intelligence agencies that foreign malign influence operations spreading dangerous disinformation were a growing and dangerous threat. Trump curtailed criminal charges for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which required people to register when lobbying on behalf of a foreign nation, directly and significantly aiding foreign interference in our elections.

Finally, Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, lacks the ‘extensive national security expertise’ required by law under the federal statute that created the role. Clayton has scant national security experience; most of his career he’s represented big money/major investment banks in international deals. If there are conflicts between corporate financial interests and national security priorities, which side do you think Clayton will be on? Worse, Clayton has publicly defended Trump’s worst and least supported election initiatives, appearing on television airwaves to promote conspiracy theories about states’ primary election results, proving Trump chose him for loyalty, not expertise.

Trump keeps lying

The NY times reported on Friday that none of the documents Trump released during his speech to support his election claims say what Trump says they do. The documents were released during Trump’s primetime address to convince Americans that they should doubt the legitimacy of U.S. elections, but the print doesn’t match the hype.

He argued in his speech that China helped Biden win in 2020, even though US intelligence concluded it was Russia who interfered to help Trump. The documents he posted online show the opposite: that both China and Russia targeted former President Joe Biden's campaign during the 2020 election.

Trump called for fixing vulnerabilities in our electronic voting system so that “we can never watch a stolen election again.” Perhaps he meant the 2024 results were stolen, because all of his legal challenges to the results of 2020 were laughed out of court due to lack of supporting evidence. Those courts told Trump the same thing he needs to hear after his absurd “stolen election” claims last night: Your personal opinions, Sir, are not evidence.

Trump plans to take over federal elections

To anyone following closely, the purpose of Trump’s speech was to sell a pretext. Trump is laying groundwork to declare a national emergency at or around the time of the midterm elections. He’s desperate to sow doubt around the security of our elections because he knows he will need a strong justification for sending in federal troops.

By now, analysts are warning that Trump will deploy ICE agents to polling places. Whenever asked, Trump has signaled that that is his plan. The National Guard is likely to follow suit. Asked directly, Trump himself refused to rule it out, saying he would “do anything necessary.”

Trump said in his speech, “If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states,” “And we are committing to fix it… before the midterm elections.”

There is no evidence that our elections are flawed, and Trump knows it. So he used his primetime speech to tell us that he is gearing up to put armed ICE goons at polling places to intimidate women and minorities into staying away. Let’s hope it backfires and keeps MAGA at home while everyone else turns out. If 90 million voters stay home again this year, we’ll get the Nazi government we deserve.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

House Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee have released a report describing how the White House cheated the American public on its 250th birthday. It outlines interim findings that the Trump organization put together a shell company to supplant the Congressionally-created commission, America250, with a partisan one, Freedom 250, defrauding donors and pilfering donations along the way.

In 2016, ten years in advance of the country’s 250th birthday, Congress created a nonpartisan commission called America250 to plan and orchestrate the largest commemoration in U.S. history. Its mandated purpose was to encourage all Americans to ‘remember the nation's past, celebrate the present, and look forward to building a promising future.’

America250 spent ten years organizing events, volunteer campaigns, and educational initiatives across all 50 states to celebrate our Semiquincentennial. America250’s slogan, “350 for 250- Engaging all 350 million Americans in celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary,” stresses civic inclusivity devoid of politics.

But last year, after his attempts to pack America250 with loyalists were unsuccessful, Trump created a competing commission, Freedom 250, via executive order. Falsely describing Freedom 250 as the “national, non-partisan organization leading the celebration of our Nation's 250th birthday,” Freedom 250 was incorporated as an LLC in October 2025. Under the National Park Foundation, governed by a board of Trump loyalists, Freedom 250 solicited pay-to-play donations from companies with major federal contracts pending— including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Oracle —to financially support Freedom 250 instead of America250.

Defrauding the nation on its 250th birthday

The report describes how Trump demanded that his name and name-branded politics should dominate the historic celebrations. When America250 pushed back on Trump’s plan as too partisan, he supplanted the commission by creating his own.

After Freedom 250 hijacked federal planning activities, most scheduled performers withdrew from the celebration. They had agreed to perform at a national, nonpartisan concert, but cancelled when they found out it was overtly partisan. Other activities planned by Trump’s Freedom 250 included the very on-brand Military Parade for Trump’s birthday and this year's White House UFC cage fight, along with the controversial Great American State Fair. The latter featured partisan exhibits complete with a confederate flag; the 16-day event caused extensive damage to the lawns and the National Mall. Meanwhile, Freedom 250 continues the Trump-centric assault, planning construction on his 250-foot-tall “triumphal arch.”

Trump illegally billed his July 4 culminating speech on the National Mall as a “TRUMP RALLY”, making himself—not the nation, not our history— the central figure of America’s only 250th birthday celebration. Trump’s rally, replete with partisan rhetoric and fearmongering about Democrats, concluded with “the largest fireworks display ever,” costing taxpayers an estimated $45 million.

Millions for Trump’s cronies

A separate report from Public Citizen describes how a “Trumpified series of events at the public’s expense” awarded over $100 million in no-bid contracts to celebrate our 250th birthday to a network of Trump-affiliated political allies. One of those contracts awarded tens of millions of dollars to Event Strategies, Inc., the same firm behind the J6 attack on the U.S. Capital.

Out of $120 million in public funds Congressionally earmarked for America250 planned celebrations, over $100 million was funneled directly to entities with political ties to Trump, essentially turning it into Trump’s slush fund with little or no transparency, accounting, or public reporting. Overall, Trump’s Freedom 250 received between $65 and $80 million of the funding Congress allocated to America250.

Alas, the fraud and self-dealing didn’t stop there. Aside from the deceptive rebrand, awarding hundreds of millions in no-bid contracts to Trump cronies, inviting pay to play federal contractor donations, and diverting Congressional funds to Trump’s partisan commission, public donations intended for America250 were purposely diverted to Trump’s organization.

Wire fraud and deception are not Presidential activities entitling Trump to criminal immunity

According to interim findings, donors who tried to send money to America250 were misled and given Freedom 250's banking information, meaning contributions solicited in the name of the Congressionally mandated commission were routed instead to the President's substitute entity. As yet unverified, the facts suggests that America250 donors were defrauded through wire transfer instructions, bank account numbers, and routing numbers that funneled their donations to Trump’s Freedom 250 commission.

Trump converted America's once-in-250-years celebration into a parade of self-regard and personal enrichment, embodying our founders’ warnings about men like him. Assuming the evidence matches the allegations, his tactics constitute criminal fraud, and the evidence won’t be hard to track down. Electronic records of online donations and routing can’t be erased; metadata will prove what was sent, by whom and when, and how it was diverted to Freedom 250. Such deception also likely constitutes wire fraud as well as charitable solicitation fraud.

Democratic lawmakers are now demanding a full accounting of diverted donor records and contracts, while Republican leadership has largely blocked information, shielded people involved, and refused to hold hearings on the matter. Democrats, in the minority, have diminished subpoena power, but that is likely to change in November.

Trump’s criminal immunity will be challenged after the midterms; even now, it only applies to “presidential acts” arising from core constitutional duties. Establishing an entity to compete with the Congressionally mandated America250 commission was illicit, extra-judicial, and purely partisan, and very likely exceeds any official, constitutional, or statutory authority. Trump billing our 250th July 4 celebration on the national mall as a TRUMP RALLY sealed the deal.

Trump robbed Americans of a sacred commemoration that won’t come again for many generations, if ever. He wanted to make our nation’s 250th birthday all about him. History books will likely oblige.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Trump’s July 3 anti-communist rant from Mt. Rushmore was pure McCarthyism. In the 1950s, Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare ruined thousands of American lives through politically motivated accusations of communism. Hundreds of innocent people were sent to prison, thousands suffered witch hunts and ruined reputations; some were tormented into suicide.

McCarthy made baseless and sensationalized claims, such as waving a fabricated ‘list’ of 205 alleged communists in the State Department, to elevate himself from a little-known politician into the most feared figure in Washington. Like Trump, McCarthy employed aggressive, evidence-free tactics to intimidate political opponents, silence critics, and consolidate power.

It was one of our nation’s darkest times, and Trump wants a re-enactment for the midterms.

At Mt. Rushmore, Trump tested midterm campaign slogans meant to scare voters into equating recent primary victories for the Democratic Socialists of America with a “communist takeover.” Never mind that socialism and communism are not the same; never mind that many federal programs like Social Security, Medicare, child labor laws, and subsidies are types of socialism in action. “We don’t want communists in our country,” Trump bellowed, warning of “a resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” “a mortal threat to American liberty,” and calling communism “the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”

Trump is the one pushing state-ownership of industry

Trump has repeatedly characterized the Democratic left as ‘hardcore, godless communists,’ an ‘evil’ that threatens the very existence of the United States. Because they have nothing else to run on, the GOP is preparing to double down on false claimsthat the modern Democratic party has capitulated to communism. Speaker Mike Johnson is all in, warning that if democrats win the midterms, the country will “go down some road toward a communist utopia.”

Lucky for Republicans, MAGA doesn’t understand what communism is. Under a communist system, the state owns all industry, and all resources belong to the government. The choke-worthy irony of Republicans’ new red scare is that the only U.S. leader pushing for state ownership of private industry is Trump himself.

It’s not an original observation to note that most Trump accusations are confessions; it’s pattern recognition. Trump accuses adversaries of his own malfeasance so often it’s become a reliable tell. After claiming without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, for example, Trump’s attempts to rig the 2026 midterms have become legion. His accusations of “communism” should be understood the same way: as a confession.

Trump’s unprecedented federal acquisition of private interests

The Trump administration’s pursuit of direct government equity stakes across U.S. business sectors is both unprecedented and under-reported.

Unlike past instances of government seizure or ownership during crises or wartime, this administration is strategically acquiring ownership to generate “public revenue” and to exert government control over corporate decision-making. Trump has already secured government ownership shares in the following sectors:

• Intel Corp.: Trump negotiated a $8.9 billion deal to take a 10% stake in the semiconductor giant’s business, using previously promised CHIPS and Science Actfunds as leverage. Trump insisted on the U.S. government acquiring 433.3 million shares, resulting in partial-nationalization of the semiconductor giant.
• Trump acquired stakes in critical mineral and nuclear firms, including an 8% stake in the nuclear power company Westinghouse. Trump’s Department of Defense secured a 15% equity stake in MP Materials by purchasing $400 million in preferred stock, solidifying Washington’s position as the largest shareholder of the only operational rare-earth mine in the United States.
• Trump’s Commerce Department has acquired a 10% stake in USA Rare Earth—receiving 16.1 million shares—as part of a $1.6 billion debt-and-equity investment package to develop a domestic mine and magnet facility.
• Critical Minerals & Energy: The government acquired a 10% equity stake in Lithium Americas Corp., and 10% of minerals exploration company Trilogy Metals In.
• U.S. Steel Corporation- Rather than a direct economic or financial equity stake, the federal government negotiated a governance stake known as a ‘golden share,’ granting the president substantial control over the steelmaker’s operations.

While these private interests have already been converted to partial state ownership, Trump has also expressed an intention to take ownership stakes in major defense contractors. Trump is pushing partial federal ownership of contractors that rely heavily on federal budgets, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, to ensure that the corporate strategies of top military contractors—who rely on the Pentagon for the vast majority of their revenue— align with Trump’s policies.

It is painfully obvious who the real communist is.

Trump’s oligarchy blends Putin’s Russia with Xi’s China

Trump is fast imposing authoritarian crony capitalism, where major industries and wealth are partially owned by the government, ala China, and partially controlled by a handful of corrupt oligarchs, ala Putin’s Russia. What Chris Christie recently called a “Putin-esque type of corruption and self-enrichment” is making Trump exceedingly wealthy along the way.

Trump’s unprecedented and growing acquisition of government ownership stakes in key industries proves that he is the one marching the U.S. economy toward state control. His and Johnson’s new mid-term slogans about the ‘cancer of communism’ are just more ironic self-owns with vast economic implications lost on their supporters.

Scott Bessent argues that, in grabbing shares of key industries, the administration is reducing U.S. dependence on China. To private industry leaders, and anyone outside the Fox News propaganda bubble, it looks like Trump is trying to beat China by copying it.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Trump embarrassed the US again at the July 2026 NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. The world is watching—our enemies as well as our allies— which means it’s not just embarrassing, it’s dangerous.

Here’s how White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described the NATO summit: "President Trump delivered a marathon, high-energy performance at the NATO summit, holding four separate press availabilities plus a solo press conference and taking unscripted questions from reporters on a wide range of topics. The President commanded every room, gave our allies some much-needed tough love, and left the summit with a stronger NATO and more united free world.”

Leavitt, Fox News, and rightwing media reported this fawning pablum and little else, which explains how 38% of the country still supports a corrupt felon who is openly robbing the country while he stives to start WWIII. To the rest of the world, Trump’s conduct was widely viewed as a highly embarrassing showcase of verbal stumbles, erratic behavior, and mental illness.

What the rest of the world reported

Trump tried to turn the NATO summit, like the nation’s 250th birthday, into a story centering around Trump. He committed repeated errors in the process:

Trump said Spain is ‘worthless’ and he wants to “cut off trade with Spain.” We don’t trade with Spain, we trade with the EU, of which Spain is a member. Trump appears not to understand the difference, or what the EU trade bloc actually does.

He called Zelensky President Putin. Twice.

He referred to the Islamic Republic of Japan.

He couldn’t recall the name of the Iran nuclear agreement hammered out and signed during the Obama administration, calling it "JC P," even though he started a war over it.

He trotted out, once again, his threat to take Greenland. Danish Prime Minister made it clear nothing of the sort would happen.

He praised Turkey’s president, a fellow corrupt authoritarian, and China’s Xi, a communist, but pointlessly insulted previous presidents of the United States. He can’t stop attacking Biden and Obama, whom he has called O-Bum-A. Such a clever guy. He has no idea that these childish insults and jabs at former US presidents paint our nation in a negative light, hurting our standing among peers and adversaries alike.

The worst and most dangerous thing is that Trump keeps demonstrating his fundamental ignorance of the NATO alliance. He has said, repeatedly, that NATO should have helped the US when he attacked Iran, because he is losing that ill-fated war and needs someone else to blame. Trump has called his requests to back his war in Iran a "loyalty test” in a fit of retaliation over their failure to join his attack. But NATO is a defensive alliance, not an offensive one. It is meant to deter aggression, and defend members when someone attacks; it does not attack but exists to deter attacks and Trump can’t seem to comprehend the difference. Trump attacked Iran without consulting NATO allies, can’t understand why most refused to help, and now wants to punish them for his own mistakes even though our allies were following our own defensive charter.

Insulting Italy’s Prime Minister

Beyond the personal gaffes, Trump’s outbursts deeply strained diplomatic relations by insulting and frustrating America’s long-standing allies.

Before he left for the summit, he posted a juvenile meme of Italy’s Prime Minster Giorgia Meloni, falsely depicting her looking up at him with adoring, fawning eyes. Above the photo he wrote, in all caps, “RESTRAINING ORDER NEEDED” as if Meloni is stalking him when in fact he makes her want to vomit. Trump is continuing the sophomoric spat he started with Meloni after she called him out as a lying liar who lies for claiming she “begged” for a photo with him at the G7 summit in France.

Trump stated during an interview that Meloni “desperately wanted the picture” with him and that he only agreed to it because he “felt sorry for her.” Meloni swiftly and strongly rejected that assertion as a lie. She fired back on Instagram that Trump's account was "completely made up" and that, "I and Italy never beg." Trump’s absurd dispute severely strained diplomatic ties with Italy and all of the EU, and prompted Italy's Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani to cancel a planned official visit to Washington.

Trump has turned most of the NATO alliance's major meetings into chaotic spectacles by insisting that the cameras focus only on him, then stumbling over facts, history and strategy he delivers in third grade English.

Global condemnation intensifies

Although Trump later reversed his tone behind closed NATO doors to claim a state of complete "unification," his bizarre statements and erratic performance left European heads of state visibly exhausted, and reinforced worry about his unstable approach to international diplomacy and his mental instability in general. Global condemnation has intensified across the world stage, with foreign leaders, foreign media, and mental health experts increasingly admitting that his erratic behavior is a direct threat to international security.

International alarm had already spiked following previous high-stakes summits where he exhibited similar cognitive slips—such as repeatedly confusing Greenland and Iceland, and mistaking the nation of Iran for Japan. Diplomatic circles were further rattled when Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico openly shared his Trump anxiety with The New Republic regarding Trump's volatile "psychological state." Fico told European Union leaders that he was worried about Trump’s mental health, saying that the president came across as “dangerous” during a meeting the pair had in January at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Fico made the comments at an emergency EU summit over Trump’s threats to annex Greenland. French far-right leader Jordan Bardella similarly described Trump’s foreign policy as "erratic" and "extremely unsteady" and "constantly shifting.’

As reported by global publishers like The Guardian and France 24, foreign media has stopped analyzing Trump’s ‘unorthodox political strategy’ and has instead pivoted to directly and explicitly questioning his mental acuity. The growing international consensus is that Trump’s escalating impulsivity, unnecessary public feuds with global figures like Meloni and the Pope, and cognitive confusion is not so much eccentric showmanship as a display of cognitive decline that endangers the world.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

The most beautiful human experiment in the world is turning 250. Democracy lasting this long is cause for celebration, but an alarming drop in intelligence suggests its future birthdays are numbered.

For nearly a century, average IQ scores in the U.S. rose consistently, but recent evidence flips this trend on its head.

Studies now show a measurable decline in cognitive scores among Americans across most fields. Northwestern University researchers report that test scores in three out of four cognitive domains have gone down. Another confirmed a steady decline in average IQ scores — with each new generation scoring about five points lower than the one before.

Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, explores this dumbing-down process. Analysts today note how it culminated in the election of a functionally illiterate reality TV host as president, an ignorant man who reduces complex problems to binary oppositions: us versus them, black vs. white, patriots vs. scum, opinion vs. science, etc. No doubt our lowered intelligence led 77 million Americans to vote against their own interests; polls before the 2024 election suggested half the country, lied to by Fox News, was about to engage in self sabotage.

Trump’s base today is comprised of Christians who defend Trump’s debauchery; poor people who donate to a billionaire’s Ponzi schemes while he illegally pocketed nearly $2 billion in profits; and pensioners who still don’t grasp that tax cuts for the 1% threaten their own entitlements.

Trump has done nothing for the common man and everything for his wealthy donors, yet somehow, that fact doesn’t seem to compute. To misquote Jesus, the stupid will always be among us. But stupid seems to be spreading in the U.S., and data suggest that excessive sensory stimulation may be the reason.

Our politics reflect a cognitive decline, but what is causing the decline?

Trump’s declaration, “I love the poorly educated” is a self-own as the U.S. slumbers toward Idiocracy, a funny-not-funny satire about Americans in the year 2500 who have lost the ability to think. In the movie, Americans elect as President a dimwitted pro-wrestler- President Camacho- because he is loud and manipulative and they don’t know any better. The Trump sequel writes itself.

Funny as that movie is, America’s declining cognition, reflected in falling logic, language, and reading comprehension levels, is serious. In 1850, unwashed kids aged 6 to 18 were crammed into a smelly one-room school house with no AC and no technology- and often no books- yet still emerged well-versed in Latin, French, humanities and trigonometry.

Today, with whiteboards, laptops, separate rooms for each grade, and teacher/student ratios historically unheard of, student comprehension levels are falling instead of rising. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, math and reading scores for 13 year-olds hit their lowest scores in decades.

It’s our hand held devices, stupid

The explanation may be found in a growing reliance on smart phones, social media and electronic devices that offer addictive and excessive visual and audio stimulation, dulling the brain’s ability to think critically and organically.

Observational studies in human learning have shown a direct link between a child’s exposure to fast-paced television in the first 3 years of life and his subsequent attentional deficits as he gets older. Excessive sensory stimulation (ESS) during childhood has been shown to increase cognitive and behavioral deficits overall. Even rising levels of ADHD among older children and college students are correlated with subjects’ early exposure to excessive electronic media.

More studies are needed on how excessive online stimulation affects cognition and mental health, regardless of age, and Congress may (shockingly) do something about it. In 2023, legislators introduced a bipartisan bill to study how cell phones affect mental health and cognitive development, but it did not advance to a vote.

Over-stimulation, overall, reduces our ability to think

It seems logical that over-stimulating the human brain with loud colors and noises would, over time, reduce our capacity for nuanced and critical thinking. Just as over-reliance on crutches can cause leg muscles to atrophy, over-exposure to electronics and addictive but thoughtless social media can atrophy the learning centers of the brain.

Smart phones aren’t the only culprit. Recent studies have also shown that high levels of noise, including exposure to high-decibel music at home or in the car, and loud, omnipresent television, also leads to cognitive impairment and oxidative stress in the brain.

It’s been reported that 100 million people are exposed to dangerous environmental noise due to traffic, personal listening devices and other sources. Noise pollution has emerged as a risk factor for depression, cognitive impairment and neurodegenerative disorders of the central nervous system leading to emotional stress, anxiety, cognitive and memory defects.

It seems the entire nation could use a long walk in the woods, or an extended visit to one of our 429 national parks — sans devices.

Education levels are affecting U.S. politics

America’s growing political divide may have more to do with education and cognition levels than policy differences. By wide margins, the mostly highly educated Congressional districts in the U.S. elect Democrats, while the least educated districts elect Republicans.

According to data compiled by Politico, Democrats control 77% of the most highly educated Congressional districts, while Republicans control 64% of the least educated districts. The rural poor love Trump even though Democrats deliver kitchen table results that benefit them most: jobs, infrastructure, broadband, healthcare, and industry regulations so trains don’t derail and parts don’t fly off aircraft at 16,000 feet.

Maximilien Robespierre, one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, was known for his attacks on the monarchy and his advocacy of democratic reforms.

As he astutely observed, “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”

Even though Trump’s former advisors widely regard him as an undisciplined moron, he has a preternatural skill: the manipulation of ignorance.

Call it a conman’s intuition.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

In a 6-3 decision breaking on partisan lines, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that Trump can fire Federal Trade Commissioners and other federal agency directors without cause. The ruling overturns longstanding Supreme Court precedent and express statutory instruction that combined to protect the political independence and subject matter expertise of federal agencies for over 90 years.

The ruling presents a novel reading of a president’s Constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” expanding that power for a rogue president hellbent on breaking laws instead of executing them. As Justice Sotomayor put it, “The Court… is elevating (Trump) above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

An activist Roberts Court has now written into existence an all-powerful unitary executive despite elaborate instructions in art. I, II and III to keep the three branches of government separate and equal. Rejecting federal laws that restrict a president’s removal of agency directors to for-cause removal, SCOTUS has made the president all powerful and Congress less relevant, while arrogating scientific and technical questions to itself.

Trump’s corporate donors can now choose their own regulators

Before republicans on the bench rewrote it this week, the Federal Trade Commission Act stated that a President could only remove a commissioner for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” That statute clearly and intentionally barred presidents from firing directors for partisan or corrupt reasons, and from punishing regulators who rule against a president’s corporate donor(s). Vesting a singularly authoritarian executive with unprecedented, expansive powers, the Supreme Court re-wrote federal laws to advance their own political narrative.

Over two dozen federal agencies will be affected, covering everything from the financial markets, the commodities markets, and nuclear power. Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission were all Congressionally designed to be independent watchdogs, enforcers insulated from partisan whims. Now Trump can remove any commissioners who threaten to rule against his allies, assuring that his political supporters will be afforded preferential review, licensing, merger approvals and other rulings.

With Trump’s new latitude to fire any agency head who threatens meaningful regulation, his corporate donors have been effectively empowered to choose their own regulators. Federal laws passed to protect human health, finance, banking, communications, workplace safety, and clean air, soil and water have been rendered functionally meaningless.

Replacing science, expertise and merit with political fealty

Congressionally created and funded federal agencies serve express, statutory purposes written to safeguard the American public. The Supreme Court had protected agency autonomy and expertise dating back to 1935, ruling that some degree of autonomy was necessary for federal agencies to meet specific scientific, economic, communications, trade, health, and environmental mandates. Federal agencies were never meant to be a president’s personal toys with which to reward donors and cronies.

For a president in the habit of accepting lavish gifts and cash from foreign governments, along with hundreds of millions from domestic supplicants, finding even more room for self-dealing, corruption and political favoritism must be heady. For the rest of us, it’s dangerous. We actually need competent people to run the federal government, even in its post-DOGE watered down state.

If Trump declares that every home must be heated by dirty coal, the head of the Energy Commission must try to effectuate that command no matter the harm to Americans’ lungs. If Trump declares that particulate matter, fossil fuels and the widespread use of Monsanto is good for the environment, any EPA director who contradicts him with cancer and death statistics will be silenced through removal. It’s governance by full Idiocracy.

A know-nothing, anti-science president can now follow his gut

To every American outside the Fox News propaganda bubble, Trump has demonstrated astonishing incompetence on all fronts. From economically illiterate tariffs to our defeat in Iran, sprinkled with comically disastrous results in between, an ignorant and arrogant “I follow my gut” Trump revels in rejecting science and expertise as Americans pay the price.

The only thing saving the nation from complete chaos and disaster to date is that several federal agencies had retained some level institutional competence despite Trump (and Musk’s) best efforts to dismantle them. The people Trump brought in to destroy federal institutions were expressly chosen for their lack of competence, which tracks for an administration dismantling the entire federal government to advance an oligarchs’ coup. Trump’s cabinet has widely and apolitically been described as the least competent and least qualified Cabinet in US history, and any federal agency left standing is about to morph into a Trump-affiliated, for-profit private scheme.

Trump has said that Article II of the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want.” The same six justices who handed him immunity for crimes committed in office just agreed with him.

The rest of us can kiss health, safety, banking, and environmental regulations goodbye. The best advice I can give anyone is to 1. Vote, and 2. Buy a damn good oxygen mask.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth just hijacked more promotions of high-ranking service members, this time blocking career professionals with exemplary records who were on track to become one-star generals and admirals. Not only is Hegseth’s behavior unusual, there is no clear legal authority for what he is doing.

Congress entrusted military promotions largely to the respective promotion boards and Secretaries of the Military Departments, not the Secretary of Defense. Although 10 U.S.C. § 629 empowers the President with removal authority, a longstanding executive order limits the Secretary of Defense’s removal authority to grades below colonel or captain, not the general or admiral promotions Hegseth has blocked. The Pentagon’s own regulations restrict grounds for removing an officer from a promotions list to specific circumstances like moral, mental, or professional deficiencies, none of which were present in Hegseth’s removals.

It’s obvious that a disproportionate number of Hegseth’s blocked, delayed, or demoted officers are women and people of color. However, while mainstream headlines suggest Hegseth is motivated by race and gender animus, an even worse—and more dangerous— likelihood is that he is weeding out those he deems “ideologically incompatible” with how he and Trump plan to use the military.

Hegseth likes to emphasize that “every officer serves at the pleasure of the president,” arguing that Trump’s policy goals require removing commanders “tied to the culture” of previous administrations. He argues that past promotions were based on race and gender instead of qualifications, but military records dispute those claims, and there is no evidence that any promotions he blocked were attributable to anything other than merit.

An unqualified hack defends his own

Hegseth, a former Fox News bobble head, is notoriously unqualified to serve as Secretary of Defense, which seems to have been Trump’s point in naming him. He was a mid-level National Guard officer, had no senior leadership role in the military, and had no experience anywhere that qualified him to oversee three million personnel and an annual budget of $800 billion.

More dangerous than his lack of qualifications is his bloodlust. As a media commentator, he lobbied aggressively for presidential pardons for service members convicted or accused of notorious war crimes, including Army Lt. Clint Lorance, convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, and Maj. Matt Golsteyn, who admitted during an interview for the CIA that he and another soldier took an alleged Taliban bomb-maker off base in 2010, shot him, and buried his remains. Trump granted full pardons to both.

In Iraq, Hegseth’s own unit was nicknamed “Kill Company” and he kept a ‘kill board’ that tallied kills, including dead civilians, expressing daring contempt for the military's strict rules of engagement. It’s anyone’s guess what gruesome deeds he got up to. Today, he barks a constant mantra about “war fighters” and “lethality” and sees violence and unrestrained power as a distinct virtue.

Ineptitude with a platitude chaser

Hegseth’s tenure has been marred by a series of high-profile blunders, including the SignalGate security breach, his ‘dirty line’ Pentagon internet setup, and unforced diplomatic errors such as upbraiding NATO allies without understanding the subject matter. Just as Trump governs by spectacle over substance, Hegseth manages by platitude. His attempts to project authority through chest thumping—“Maximum lethality not tepid legality”— like his sophomoric speech to the Generals at Quantico, routinely fall flat and inspire parody.

Hegseth’s embrace of violence over circumspection (“Lethality is our calling card”) while rejecting what he calls ‘stupid rules of engagement’ reveals an almost pathological immaturity. While pushing back against operational restraints, i.e., military rules of engagement, and weeding out generals who don’t suit him, he insists that, under him, there will be “No politically correct wars.”

What he’s really weeding out are legal protocols in order to elevate ‘maximum lethality’ in pursuit of politically incorrect and illegal wars: Trump’s.

History is clear on why the military should never be politicized

Throughout history, authoritarian regimes have tried to put professional militaries under the direct control of their own political movements. Recognizing that an independent officer corps poses an existential threat to one-party rule, in Nazi Germany, Hitler systematically dismantled the autonomy of the traditional Wehrmacht, and required all soldiers to swear a personal oath of loyalty to him rather than to the state or constitution.

In the former Soviet Union, Stalin subjected the Red Army to the Communist Party's political commissar system, embedding party officials at every level of command to monitor ideological conformity. From 1937–38, Stalin’s purges decimated the senior officer corps, to ensure political fealty, even at catastrophic cost to combat readiness on the eve of World War II.

Historical clarity is not confined to Europe. In Maoist China, the People's Liberation Army was not a conventional national military but was the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party. Mao's dictum that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" led to political loyalty campaigns purging those deemed insufficiently loyal. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein constructed an elaborate system of Republican Guard formations and tribal loyalties to prevent any single military institution from possessing enough power to threaten him. Officers were promoted based on personal loyalty rather than merit, and suspected disloyalty was met with execution.

Throughout history, subordinating military professionalism to political fealty, which is what Hegseth is really doing, has produced armies that were reliable instruments of internal repression but dysfunctional when facing real external threats. Since Hegseth and Trump are both fixated on fighting domestic “enemies within” and hope to deploy the military against Americans (internal repression), it’s likely Hegseth’s promotions are less about demographics and more about fortifying top brass willing to break the law, by removing from the ranks those who are likely not so willing.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

A president, by Constitutional design, has no legal authority or direct role in administering, altering, or conducting elections. Authority over the mechanics of elections is legally split between state governments and Congress, leaving no constitutional role for the executive branch.

That did not stop Trump from commandeering the US Post Office with instructions to deliver mail ballots only to people on Trump-approved, Trump-purged voter lists. Trump’s “ENSURING CITIZENSHIP VERIFICATION AND INTEGRITY IN FEDERAL ELECTIONS” Executive Order, issued March 31, 2026, is his bold scheme to wrest election control from the states, which are Constitutionally vested with that authority, to transfer it to the federal government, which is not. On May 29,an eagerly compliant United States Postal Service issued proposed rules to effectuate Trump’s EO. On June 25, a federal judge ruled that “no federal law permits (Trump) to control mail-in voting through U.S.P.S.”

Trump’s fear of the midterms and the accountability they threaten is palpable. Alongside his unprecedented post office ploy, he has ordered FBI raids and DOJ investigations of democratic voter outreach organizations, as he teases the deployment of armed federal agents to polling places. Sending armed troops to intimidate voters is, for obvious reasons, forbidden by federal law, and has not been done by any US president since the Civil War era.

Trump is complementing these nefarious efforts with an all-out appropriation of state voter rolls, from which he has extracted data to build a master federal data base which has also been ruled illegal.

A federal judge blocks Trump’s Orwellian database

Threatening to cut funding to states that refuse to turn over their rolls, he has already sent federal agents to seize voter records in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan. It’s plain extortion: To avoid losing federal resources they have already paid into, states must agree to run their voter rolls through the administration’s SAVE database (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, not to be confused with Trump’s SAVE America Act), to verify citizenship. The SAVE database has been expanded, widely tested, and determined to be deeply flawed. In St. Louis County alone, for example, roughly 35% of the people labeled noncitizens were citizens who registered to vote at naturalization ceremonies.

Trump has been using states’ voter roll data to build an illegal, nationwide database of Americans’ private information including home addresses, social security numbers, and other confidential “data-mined” information extracted by Palantir Technologies, a data mining and analytics firm co-founded by JD Vance promoter Peter Thiel. On Monday, a federal judge put a stop to it.

In League of Women Voters v. DHS, US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that the federal government “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote” by utilizing an unauthorized voter-screening database. The court found the administration’s actions presented “major violations” of the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

A closer look

In her landmark 75-page ruling, Judge Sooknanan excoriated the Trump administration for ignoring federal privacy laws as it overhauled and expanded the SAVE system into what she characterized as a “faulty citizenship checker.” The worst of her criticism was reserved for how recklessly the administration handled Americans’ personal data to expand the program. She wrote that “agencies were scrambling to comply with (Trump’s March 31) Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,” and that in doing so, they “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

She found that the system specifically violated the Social Security Act’s prohibition on disclosing Social Security numbers. The judge sharply condemned real-world consequences, noting that (Republican) states had “partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”

She pointed to concrete examples from Texas where naturalized citizens were wrongly flagged and had their registrations canceled or placed under review, but citizens in Texas are not alone. The SAVE system merged Social Security data with immigration files extracted across multiple state and federal platforms, resulting in widespread data flaws and false positive matches. System studies revealed faulty data matching, outdated records, and user compliance failures resulting in high rates of false positives. These flaws are systemic, flagging citizens as non-citizens across dozens of counties in multiple states.

Big brother by any other name

In June of last year, NPR first reported on the federal government’s massive expansion of SAVE into a Big Brother tool; they also reported that DHS, in partnership with DOGE, had not followed public notice protocols required under the Privacy Act before it expanded the system. Such data integration, resulting in a federally sanctioned, nationwide master list, has never before existed.

A centralized national database of Americans’ personal information has long been opposed by privacy advocates. Although political conservatives traditionally oppose mass data consolidation by the federal government, they set aside such objections for Trump. Conservative legislators strongly supported Trump’s expansion of the SAVE program as a tool to prevent non-citizens from voting after Trump and Fox Newsfalsely convinced them that fraudulent voting was widespread. It wasn’t, and never has been.

Judge Sooknanan rejected the Justice Department’s argument that only a small number of voters might be affected, calling it a “red herring.” She reiterated that the APA mandates that a “reviewing court shall. . . hold unlawful and set aside agency action” that is in excess of statutory authority, contrary to law, unconstitutional, arbitrary and capricious, or procedurally defective. Trump’s unauthorized expansion of the SAVE program was all of those things, leading the judge to set aside and nullify the entire system.

Her ruling concluded with a pointed moral declaration: since the federal government is using an unauthorized, faulty-by-design federal database to attack the sacred right to vote, courts should decline to ‘stand idly by’ while that happens.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

On Monday, Trump announced beginning concepts of a plan to discuss an outline of understanding on how to end the war in Iran. It was Trump’s 39th such announcement since he started the war.

Israeli leaders, ostensible partners in Trump’s war, are now convinced that Trump’s MOU with Iran makes Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal look perfect in comparison, after Trump tore that deal up, calling it "a deal at the highest level of incompetence" and "the worst deal ever negotiated." Obama’s 2015 deal featured highly detailed, multi-decade uranium enrichment caps and verification protocols, while the core mechanisms of Trump’s MOU remain unfinalized and deferred for 60-days. Although Trump’s MOU may pause the fighting he started, it has not established any permanent, legally binding nuclear dismantlement or the long-term inspection protocols Trump initially demanded, and it includes a plan to hand Iran up to $300 billion in damages. The biggest achievement will be the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which, of course, is simply a return to the prewar status quo.

Fox News, after promoting Trump’s attacks on the 2015 Iran deal, reported the MOU saying, Trump “deserves credit for bringing this conflict to this point.”

Fox News manipulated Trump into Iran

Fox may be reluctant to criticize an end to a costly war it encouraged. Fox News and its hawkish hosts played an aggressive role in pushing Trump toward greater military force in Iran — a troubling dynamic critics call a "doom loop" between the White House and the network, a self-reinforcing feedback cycle where the administration's grievances and policies prioritize media spectacle over governance, which in turn shapes presidential policy and messaging.

As early as June 2025, Fox talking heads pushed for war with Iran, encouraging Trump into open conflict. Mark Levin reportedly helped push the June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities by convincing Trump over lunch that the country was just days away from getting a nuclear weapon. When a fragile ceasefire was declared in April 2026, rather than celebrating, many Fox voices including senior security analyst Jack Keane and host Brian Kilmeade demanded it be broken. These voices agitated for the Trump administration and Israel to resume aggressive bombing campaigns rather than continue diplomatic negotiations, demanding Trump restart the war and, in their words, "finish the job." Host Ainsley Earhardt even told Trump that Americans were supportive of escalating aggression in Iran, which was not true.

Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade, and Jesse Watters all floated the idea of flooding Iran with small arms to provoke an uprising. Kilmeade, one of the network's most prominent hawks and co-host of Fox & Friends, proposed relentless U.S. strikes against Iranian targets to "open up the strait," "grab the uranium," and "target bad actors," an apparent embrace of assassination. Other Fox News hosts also pushed Trump to seek regime change in Iran, hosting retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, who called for "putting boots on the ground" and for the U.S. to seize Iranian territory.

This was not commentary or news, it was Fox television personalities directly shaping foreign policy at the highest level.

The doom loop is dangerous

What makes this dynamic especially fraught is the structural relationship between Fox and the Trump administration. Trump has appointed more than two dozen former Fox News hosts into administration positions, blurring the line between media and government in an unprecedented way. When Trump calls into Fox & Friends, he is not just doing an interview — he is engaging a network with an inherent interest in promoting conflict and spectacle. Fox hosts also manipulate Trump with hyperbolic praise: when Trump ordered military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, Sean Hannity said the strikes would "go down in history as one of the greatest military victories," while other hosts claimed Trump deserved "six Nobel Peace Prizes" and a spot on Mount Rushmore. Trump went on to demand—and expect— both honors.

Fox's lockstep promotion of Trump's war reflects the network's calculated plan to keep MAGA enraged and engaged. War framed as a righteous confrontation with a Judeo-Christian undertones is good television. It generates ratings, emotional investment, and brand loyalty. It is what happens when the line between journalism and political advocacy dissolves.

A network that functions as an echo chamber for a sitting president, with hosts who propose military strikes rather than analyze them, and treats war as a network ratings strategy, has abdicated its responsibility to the public and should be held to account. The feedback loop between Fox and the White House helped produce a war that cost American lives, roiled the global economy, and left our allies disgusted. Even if Trump’s MOU miraculously holds, analysts predict the global economy will take months and even years to recover. As the NYT Editorial Board assessed the MOU, “Mr. Trump made a terrible mistake starting this war... The United States is emerging weaker — militarily, diplomatically and economically — and will pay strategic costs for years to come.”

What will Fox News pay? Fox has inflicted lasting damage on our democracy by selling Trump propaganda as news, directly profiting from falsehoods in a classic case of consumer fraud. Fox paid nearly $1 billion for lying about the 2020 election. One wonders what they’ll pay the families of 13 soldiers who died for nothing other than their ratings.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, passed in 2015, is a federal law that requires the President to submit any nuclear agreement with Iran to Congress, prevents the President from lifting statutory sanctions during a review period, and establishes ongoing congressional oversight. Several Republicans and Democrats have called on Trump to follow the law on the Iran MOU, but Trump plans to skip it after alienating voices he’d need to defend it.

Trump’s personal thirst for revenge at home is hurting him on Iran. Congressmen he attacked in pursuit of personal retribution, and who lost their primaries as a result, have no Effs left to give and can now criticize him openly.

Republican Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and John Cornyn of Texas represent precisely this threat, and they came out swinging at the MOU. Senator Cassidy called the deal "the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” Cassidy noted that, “Iran's nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future." Senator Thom Tillis noted the cost of the war, to date: $100 billion. Rep. Thomas Massie criticized the figure as five times what Congress spends on roads and bridges annually. Even Mike Pence said the MOU, "smacks of appeasement," while Sen. Ted Cruz called the reconstruction fund giving "billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us."

Making JD Vance cling to the bottom of the bus

Fifteen weeks ago, Trump declared in all caps that, “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” He sought the fall of the regime, total destruction of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, and American control of Iran’s oil. But under the terms of the MOU, Trump is basically paying Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, financially propping up the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Before talks in Switzerland were cancelled due to continued bombing in Lebanon, Trump tried distancing himself from the MOU by having JD Vance become its face. When a reporter suggested Trump was setting JD Vance up for a fall by sending him to Switzerland, Trump tried to turn the reporter’s comment into a joke, but he didn't deny it.

After Vance made his opposition to the war known, Trump forcing him to publicly “conclude” a war he opposed— on embarrassing terms— looks like a political hit job. Flexing a psychopath’s instinct to blame victims, Trump laughed as if war were a joke and announced that, "If (the MOU) works out, I'm going to take the credit. If it doesn't work out, I'm blaming JD.”

The devil in the details

The White House spent four days attacking leaked drafts of the MOU as pure Iranian propaganda and misinformation. On Wednesday when Axios published the entire text of the MOU, it contained the exact language as leaked. The administration framed the MOU as a “major win” for the US, while nearly everyone outside of Fox News calls it a disastrous foreign policy blunder, one that compromises long-term security in exchange for short-term concessions.

Trump was so eager to get oil flowing through the Strait and stop the slide into another Great Depression, he agreed to:

• Premature Sanctions Relief: The MoU immediately waives U.S. sanctions and allows Iran to resume oil exports and unblock restricted assets on "day one." Critics, like former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, warn that this trades away vital economic leverage before hardline nuclear and regional negotiations even begin.
• Rebuilding the Iranian Threat: Analysts warn that the estimated $300 billion reconstruction and financial package will be funneled directly to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to finance terrorism and accelerate nuclear ambitions.
• Compromised Lebanon Strategy: The agreement's ceasefire provisions require de-escalation in Lebanon without involving Israel or Hezbollah in the negotiations. Israel has already rejected this as giving Iran veto power over Israeli self-defense.
• Bribing Over Shipping Lanes: The deal immediately lifts the U.S. blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran only temporarily allowing toll-free passage for the 60-day negotiation period. Critics point out that the U.S. is effectively paying Iran to stop threatening international shipping, while Iran has already signaled its long term intent to charge “fees” for passage.

So, no unconditional surrender. No nuclear disarmament. No permanent agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz without tolls; Vance said on CNBC that those details remain to be "figured out." But Iran will get a $300 billion reconstruction fund and all sanctions lifted, even without those concessions, which is hard to spin as anything other than US surrender.

Poor J.D.

This is the PR trap Trump pushed Vance into: chief defender of an agreement Trump can’t explain. Trump even admitted that the MOU might “not be the kind of document that I should be signing.” The dynamic is vintage Trump: deliver ambiguity instead of details, spectacle over substance, and proclaim victory while reserving blame for everyone else.

Vance, now clinging to the chassis of the bus, made his own bed. After calling Trump America’s Hitler, he joined forces with him anyway. Vance, along with Trump’s Heinrich Himmler, Stephen Miller, pushed to suspend habeas corpus, the legal foundation of democracy itself, and urged Trump to deploy the US military against US citizens in an effort to shut down mass protests in Minnesota.

Vance struck a deal with the devil in pursuit of raw power and now he’s eating it. He can't criticize Trump, or the MOU, and he can’t remind the country of his own opposition to the war. He can only smile through the embarrassment, putting his own face on the catastrophic loss, while Trump moves on to the next shiny object.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

“It was a bright cold day in April, the clocks were striking thirteen, and the powers in charge of (a State) public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom’….”

So begins a federal court order striking Trump’s Third Reich-inspired “Stop WOKE” Act in Florida, variations of which have spread through the US like a nasty airborne disease.

Invoking George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker slammed Stop WOKE, the authoritarian movement afoot in many US states to forcibly impose the tenets of far right, white nationalism on classrooms, universities, and corporate boardrooms. Since then, a total of 14 states have successfully passed 20 anti-DEI laws, part of Trump’s broader nationwide push; over 80 anti-DEI bills and hundreds of educational gag orders have been introduced across the country since 2023.

What’s this 1st Amendment you speak of?

In addition to book banning, Trump’s anti-WOKE initiatives impose state mandates on speech, dictating how certain topics must be discussed in academic and employment settings as well as in national parks.

In education, anti-WOKE laws impose state control over classroom instruction about gender and race, including America’s history of slavery, the Jim Crow era and its aftermath, and other systems originating in an assumption of racial inferiority long since passed. In employment, stop WOKE laws prohibit corporations from conducting diversity training, seminars, or discussions to promote equality.

Stop WOKE laws in the corporate setting do not just denigrate affirmative action, they endorse white male superiority by banning discussion of any counter-narrative. All such initiatives will be struck down, nationwide, wherever they are challenged, by long standing First Amendment jurisprudence.

Trump’s shameful national park initiative

In national parks, a federal judge just ordered the Trump administration to restore all national park signs that were altered or removed under Trump’s directive aimed at purging "woke" historical and scientific content. In a ruling issued by U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, the court gave the Department of the Interior until July 3, 2026, to reinstall the original materials.

Criticizing the administration's actions as censorship that shared a "limited history" through "half-truths,” the judge didn’t hold back, writing that:

• Trump tried to use a "white-out pen” in an attempt "to rewrite the Nation's history” into a fake narrative perpetuated throughout the nation’s vast national park system.
• Trump tried to promote half-truths, by sharing a "limited history" that removed park signage, educational materials and displays that did not align with Trump’s made-up history reflecting his false, preferred narrative.
• Trump tried excluding vital experiences of women, native Americans, enslaved people, and minorities, erasing entire communities whose contributions, struggles, and achievements form an important part of our Nation's story.

It is difficult to conceive of more ominous state controls than mandates on how history must be taught in national parks and schools, or how corporate trainings must be conducted, contingent entirely on how words could make listeners feel.

Mandating hatred won’t end well

All children of normal empath feel some level of anguish, or some level of distress, when they learn about the worst and most violent episodes from our past. Our nation was borne from a violent and bloody revolution from which oppressive systems emerged. It is a fact, and it is our history, just as it is of many great nations. Teaching complexity instead of avoiding it should be any educator’s goal. Pity the parents (and neighbors) of any child- black, white, or other- who learns about cruelty and violence without feeling any kind of empathic response; a child who learns about the horrors of slavery or the Trail of Tears with no emotional reflection whatsoever should be kept away from pets and small animals.

Trump’s doublespeak for “Freedom”

Anti-WOKE laws also target the LGBTQ community, relentlessly. Despite the fact that no known public K-3rd classroom has ever taught sex education or ‘gender identity,’ intentionally vague ‘Parental Rights’ laws spawned by Trump are proliferating. These laws prohibit K-3 teachers from acknowledging the very existence of gay people, by prohibiting teachers from saying anything about gender or sexuality in any manner that could be deemed not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with (ambiguous, amorphous, undefined) state standards.”

So what happens when a second grade student finger paints a picture of his family complete with two siblings, two dogs, and two mommies? If his teacher comforts him, protects him from bullies, acknowledges his family positively or says anything that could be construed as affirming that kid as he is, the teacher faces state investigation and could be sued and/or terminated. Small wonder there is such an acute teacher shortage.

Trump is the chief architect of vicious culture wars now infecting the country. Governors under his thumb force women to give birth against their will, control parents’ medical decisions if their minor child seeks gender care, suppress and arrest black voters, villify gays, and controls the speech of college professors, state-wide.

As Judge Walker ruled, “The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Republicans argue that, under these Acts, professors enjoy “academic freedom” so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This (position) is positively dystopian.”

A pall of orthodoxy

First Amendment scholars recognize the danger of a president and republican governors who would dictate state-mandated speech in schools, corporations, and national parks, while using state power to silence detractors for daring to disagree.

Supreme Court rulings have long shielded academic freedom and corporate speech from similar government encroachments. SCOTUS has consistently blocked state attempts to “cast a pall of orthodoxy” over classroom instruction since at least 1967. As long as the First Amendment stands, a state cannot “muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark.”

Stop WOKE efforts, Judge Walker observed, are “like the thirteenth chime of a clock: you not only know it’s wrong, but it causes you to wonder about everything you heard before.”

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

I just toured the opulent Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. I love beautiful homes as much as anyone, but this tour didn’t land as intended.

To me, America’s largest private residence, one that took 1,000 laborers six years to build, is a testament to inherited wealth and inequality. The lavish indoor swimming pool was built at a time when most homes didn’t have plumbing. As I walked through the gardens and imported Italian tapestries, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the laborers who built the estates of Gilded Age scions lived in squalor themselves, and could barely afford to eat.

The warning was also deafening: Trump and his corporate backers, pushing an economic regression most supporters can’t even recognize, are taking us back to that era. MAGA keeps buying the same robber-baron con job the working-class finally defeated over a century ago, even as they bear the brunt of it.

Fast foward only a hundred years and we are watching the same well-planned, deliberate, and coordinated effort by a handful of tyrants to dismantle the regulatory state, enrich themselves at taxpayers’ expense, and erode the rule of law. The parallels to the late 19th century are disastrous and obvious.

Robber barons then and now

During the first Gilded Age, robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Carnegie operated under laissez-faire capitalism where laborers were expendable and civil rights were non-existent. The man who built the Biltmore, a 175,000 square foot monument to extreme wealth, inherited his massive fortune from Cornelius Vanderbilt, his grandfather, who built railroads on the backs of starvation wages.

The Gilded Age top 1% claimed that their hyper-monopolies were the natural result of a free market, but in truth those monopolies were protected by corruption: oligarchs openly bribed legislators, crushed labor unions with brutal force, and treated the working class as disposable. Trump’s grid of exploitation, anti-regulation, and legal evasion follows the same formula.

Trump’s entire political apparatus models the 19th-century political machine where Trump is the Tammany Hall boss and the presidency is a vehicle for transactional profits lining his family’s pockets. With the help of corporate-aligned Supreme Court justices, US health and environmental protections have been dismantled to favor big oil and corporations, while education, health care, and food assistance have been gutted to finance another massive tax giveaway to the rich.

This isn’t conservatism; it is an oligarchs’ coup, a return to the robber baron past where laws applied only to the poor.

Trump, Musk and Bezos’ deliberate dismantling of institutions that could check them

Trump’s constant attacks on the judiciary and the press are meant to weaken the only institutions capable of checking his lawlessness and the concentration of wealth it affords his family and donors. His anti-regulation, pro-corporate policies even drive US foreign relations, with his latest National Security Strategy pledge to push “Europe… to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.” Escaping regulations and laws altogether, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are building a private resort on Albanian protected land. Don Jr just married Epstein’s banker’s daughter, with a record $620 million Pentagon loan for his start up to boot. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5 billion, directly profiting from Trump’s war in Iran.

Elon Musk is the modern equivalent of a railroad tycoon, contemptuous of the laws of nations where he operates. Musk has utilized his massive wealth, much of it accumulated through taxpayer-funded government subsidies, to build global communication networks only to weaponize them against democratic institutions. Why? To end corporate regulations/ environmental protections, labor laws, and fair taxation. By bankrolling political disinformation campaigns and turning Twitter into a right wing echo chamber, Musk helps distract voters with manufactured culture wars so they won’t notice their economic rights being stripped away. Gilded Age tycoons controlled the printing presses; Musk controls the algorithms.

Jeff Bezos completes the triumvirate. Much like Gilded Age factory owners who locked workers in unsafe facilities for starvation wages, Bezos built an empire that invades the privacy of its employees and tracks their bathroom breaks while spending tens of millions to fight workers’ unionization efforts. He, like the Robber Barons, also pays Amazon warehouseand delivery staff sub-standard wages. While his employees rely on federal assistance programs just to survive, Bezos builds himself mega-yachts and finances space tourism projects for the rich. The Biltmore would have been right up his alley.

If past is prologue, we’re going to be ok

The central tragedy of our moment is how easily millions of Americans were conned into voting against their own self interests, and remain conned, with the help of Fox News. Informed only by propaganda, working-class supporters defendTrump’s policies because they can’t see that they are directly aimed at their clean water, safe workplaces, and economic survival.

As we drove away from the Biltmore grounds, I looked up the Progressive Era on my phone, America’s response to the Gilded Age. The good news is that gross inequality during the robber baron era led to the rise of organized labor, legal reform, political resistance and antitrust enforcement. If things get bad enough under Trump—SNAP and Medicaid will begin to disappear in October— anger and hunger will morph into political will. If that happens, in 2028, we will balance the high court, reverse Citizens United, and pass a real wealth tax so that we can fix our broken systems.

US history has shown what happens when a handful of corrupt tyrants dictate the laws of the land; it has also shown what happens when voters get fed up.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts, in a not-so-veiled swipe at Donald Trump, stressed that the U.S. Constitution’s “main innovation” was the creation of an independent judiciary. Our Constitutional system of government only works, he emphasized, if power shared between the three branches of federal government remains equal and balanced, and it is up to the Courts, not Trump, to decide what makes it so.

Roberts’ remarks followed the Trump regime’s astonishing flurry of attacks against the judiciary. On April 25, Attorney General Pam Bondi called judges who refused to legitimize Trump’s power grabs “deranged,” then, with characteristic bombast, warned the judiciary, “we will come after you and we will prosecute you.” That same day, Kash Patel had a Wisconsin Judge perp walked out of the courthouse in handcuffs because she allowed a defendant to exit from a side door to the main hall where everyone else, including the FBI, was waiting. Three days later, Karoline Leavitt intimated that Trump could have Supreme Court justices arrested.

Roberts can well see that Trump’s henchmen are attacking the judiciary as the last line of defense against an authoritarian coup. Perhaps more difficult to see is that Trump’s attacks, in concert with his deliberate weakening of national security, are acts of sabotage. He is wrecking our constitutional form of government in an effort to replace it with something else. From this perspective, it is difficult to see Trump’s strategy as anything short of treasonous.

A president who projects his own criminality

Throughout his first 100 days, Trump engaged in wild and unprecedented acts of retribution against the rule of law and anyone who tried to make him answer to it. Last week, describing Trump’s EO to punish and extort lawyers who represented his political adversaries, a federal judge noted that, “No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue” in an attempt to march the country toward totalitarianism.

Aside from metastasizing power grabs, the most common thread running through Trump’s EOs-- announced through a series of White House propaganda papers issued every other day-- is Trump’s projection of his own crimes and misdeeds onto others. Anyone trying to map Trump’s elusive plan of governance need only look at what he purports to attack in his orders, because those are his true intentions. On his first dayin office, for example, Trump issued an EO “Ending the weaponization of the federal government,” dialing weaponization of government power to levels not seen since King George.

Freighted with propaganda, the White House memo regurgitated Trump’s grievances about efforts to hold him legally accountable for his actions, falsely proclaiming as “fact,” under seal of the White House, that, “The prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power.”

Trump then turned these accusations into a plan of action never before seen in American history, ordering the AG, DOJ and FBI to conduct political investigations, arrests and prosecutions.

On brand, Trump accuses others of treason

Determined to rule by fiat in order to bypass both legislative and judicial branches, Trump has issued a slew of incongruent declarations and EOs too wide ranging to list. To squelch dissent and criticism of those orders, he describes critics as ‘enemies of the state,’ and accuses them of treason.

Trump’s presidential memorandum about “leakers” of government information describes as “treasonous” any disclosure of sensitive information for the purposes of undermining foreign policy, national security, or government effectiveness. ‘Undermining,’ of course, is whatever Trump says it is, which means any criticism can be deemed ‘treason.’

It’s a bold intimidation campaign meant to facilitate prosecution and imprisonment of critics in the near future, modeling authoritarians like Russia’s Putin, El Salvador’s Bukele, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. While his left hand attempts to silence critics Putin style, Trump’s right hand is actively sabotaging national security, by:

• Exposing secrets of the US intelligence community on easily hacked commercial messaging apps;
• Making threats to NATO that serve and align with Russian interests;
• Purging career civil servants and replacing them with incompetent loyalists to destabilize the government;
• Pausing or ceasing federal enforcement of foreign bribery laws;
• Trashing security alliances by threatening allies; and
• Ending the Justice Department’s task force on covert foreign influence even as threats from foreign influence are rising.

Step by step, agency by federal agency, Trump is systematically disabling institutions that could interfere with his acquisition of domestic power, while at the same time inviting a foreign attack. Standing alone, each act weakens national security in ways that can’t be measured because the consequences have not yet materialized. Taken in concert, they reflect Trump’s intentional subversion of our national security interests.

Treason

Treason, a federal crime, is defined by the Constitution as ‘levying war’ against the nation; it also includes “giving aid and comfort” to our enemies. Trump credibly has been accused of treason for aiding Russia’s interests over our own. In 2023, his actions in fomenting the J6 attack were also deemed treasonous when the Colorado Supreme Court found that he engaged in insurrection, a decision with roots in the Constitution’s definition of treason. The Supreme Court found a workaround to avoid Colorado’s application of the 14th Amendment on grounds that had nothing to do with—and did not disturb—Colorado’s finding of insurrection.

Treason is defined as the betrayal of one’s country; it is hard to imagine a deeper betrayal than an American president questioning the basic rule of the US Constitution while he actively subverts it.

I have no illusion that the spineless Republican party is prepared to rein Trump in at this juncture; as one Senator admitted, they are all too “frightened” of retribution to do their Constitutional duty. So for now, thanks to a partisan Supreme Court and cowardly federal legislators, we are a nation held hostage by a lawless president of questionable sanity and his power-drunk sycophants.

As America wonders how bad it will get before he is stopped, at least we are learning a shared civics lesson: we are learning why the Constitution prohibits traitors from being elected into federal office.

Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.