Up until inside the past decade or so, I always fancied myself a fairly affable guy. Growing up in New Jersey and working in newspapers as an adult demanded a certain degree of tolerance and a wicked sense of humor.

Everybody had their flaws, but we were all in this mess together, so I figured let’s go for the laughs and make the most of it. I was willing to give anybody a chance.

Not anymore.

These days, if I even whiff the foul scent of Republican on you, I’m either going the other way, or right through you.

Lately, I hate Republicans. I mean I really HATE them. I don’t necessarily like that I really hate Republicans, but there is nothing to recommend them. They are just flat mean, morally busted, and are actively trying to kill us. Worse, many of them are doing it with a smile on their face.

How many more hundreds of thousands of Americans would still be alive if we all simply listened to the science, wore masks and got vaccinated? How much more stable would our democracy be if a defeat at the polls was accepted through gritted teeth and graciousness, instead of threats and insurrection?

Instead, Republicans have doubled down on their heinousness and placed an anti-vax ghoul in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services. They have made scientists the enemy, instead of our friends tirelessly searching for answers.

Rather than defend and replenish the lifeblood of any democracy, our vote, Republicans are doing everything in their power to kill it. It’s not a matter of IF Trump deploys the Insurrection Act but WHEN, to put down people who don’t like him or disagree with him, which we know from last weekend alone is an astronomical number.

It really is hard to see how we survive this without an all-out war. More than 7 million patriots were in our streets last Saturday peacefully sending the message that they’ve had enough of this dangerous, abhorrent Republican fascism.

The grotesque, orange would-be king responded by posting an AI video of himself literally s------g on those protesters. Republicans, as always, were just fine with this. Completely normal. Nothing to see here.

The corporate press, which has gone out of its way to enable this madness, barely gave it a mention.

Like I said, this is not sustainable.

It was quite a surprise then, that when I rolled out of the rack today, I resolved to find a better way to talk to Republicans. I’m sure it had something to do with a recent epiphany, but more on that below.

Something has to change …

I didn’t always hate Republicans. Hell, I used to vote for ’em every now and then.

Are you still there …?

A number of my oldest friends are Republicans. We’ve been around several blocks together. These are the people I grew up with; got in trouble with; fought for; whose pockets were stuffed with my secrets … the people I loved.

I know where my old friends came from; how they were raised; whether their mother or father was an ass; where the skeletons were buried … Nobody knows more about you than an old, trusted friend.

Lately, I don’t much recognize too many of my old friends anymore. I reckon I look pretty hazy to them, too. I see the stuff they load up on their Facebook page, and wonder how it is we ended up living on different planets when we used to share the same bed.

This all started with Trump, of course. The guy brought out the worst in all of us. It’s his singular talent. Everybody around him is miserable and angry.

I realize I’m not splattering you with any big revelations here. We’ve all gone through this. Not a one of us hasn’t been touched by this negative, soul-crushing force.

Used to be we could trade political insults. Poke fun at each other. In the event it got too heated we could turn the flame down by simply agreeing too many of our politicians were full of crap. They were just going to screw us all in the end no matter what. There was money to be made.

Much better to believe in a friendship that had stood the test of time, than some political party that would test your patience.

Those were the days ...

Today was going to be different, though. Today, I was going to be the bigger man. I was going to reengage. Bridge the gap. Start anew. Find some reason amid the ashes of these torched relationships …

I blame Barack Obama for this.

I don’t know about you, but I do most of my above-average thinking while lying in bed. There’s not a more honest place than safely underneath the covers, head nestled in a pillow.

Just before I closed my eyes Sunday night, I remembered something the two-term, scandal-free president said on a campaign trail way back when while stumping for Joe Biden. I’ll paraphrase, and guarantee you it was even smarter than I’ll type it. But it stuck, and here it goes:

“Look,” Obama said in his ascending tone, “If I tell your Republican friends they should consider voting for something or doing something, they’ll look at me and laugh. They don’t like me! But if YOU tell your Republican friends they should consider voting for something or doing something, they’ll listen! And they’ll listen, because-they-like-you! They might even LOVE you! So sit down. Talk with them!”

See what I mean? If FDR deserved four terms, this guy should have got at least that many. Imagine how much better off we’d be for it.

Except we don’t allows kings in the country …

Now, here I was this morning, refreshed and ready to bring it. There were holes to patch and old friendships to cement. I would be the better man, and cautiously extend a hand. Maybe, just maybe … I could reconnect with a few of these lost souls.

I figured there was nothing to lose, because everything has already been lost. If nothing else it might add perspective, and make for a half-decent column.

I poured a cup of coffee, plugged into a comfy chair, cracked open the local paper, and said this out loud: “Awwwwwwwww fuuuuuuuck …”

HEADLINE: “GOP Tries to Weaken Law Shielding Whales, Seals and Polar Bears”

Whales, seals and polar bears????? Holy hell, are there three more lovable and majestic creatures on this earth?

Whales, seals and polar bears?????

Is there ANYTHING these detestable Republicans won’t put their filthy hands on and strangle to death?

Here’s the lede of this important story:

BOOTHBAY HARBOR, Maine (AP) — Republican lawmakers are targeting one of the U.S.’s longest standing pieces of environmental legislation, credited with helping save rare whales from extinction.Conservative leaders feel they now have the political will to remove key pieces of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, enacted in 1972 to protect whales, seals, polar bears and other sea animals.

Turns out this story was filed last week and got very little damn attention, because Republicans are coming at us with both barrels. They intend to end America as we’ve known it since the last Civil War.

It’s impossible to keep up with it all, and process this madness, which is all part of their destructive design.

The Republican Party is anti-life, anti-American, and anti-good.

The party that said boogeymen were coming for our cats and dogs, are literally coming after our whales, seals and polar bears.

How damn much more of this are we supposed to take?

So, hands shaking, I put the paper down, and raged to the point of tears.

I decided talking to my Republican friends could wait for a bit, and until I could do it without wanting ’em all dead.

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

MS NOW anchor Katy Tur and contributor Peter Baker took a stab at the mania-grade obsession President Donald Trump suffers over former President Barack Obama, as judged by Trump’s never-ending crusade to try to top the more popular president in speeches, claims and boasts.

“He's really focused and he keeps being focused on this, and he's doing it with Iran too. He's got to be better than Obama," said Tur on her show "The Moment" on Tuesday. "So he brings this up, Peter. He declares that he's going to change [things], he's going to fix it, it's going to be wonderful and he keeps going on about it. … But then he also has to try to top Obama. What is the obsession with trying to top Obama? Why can't he just let it go? The Presidency is over.”

“He's trying to top Obama, because Obama is more popular than him,” said Baker. “He had had a presidency, according to polls, that more Americans supported — then and now Obama, according to those polls, is one of the most popular figures in American life, and I think he just has always fixated on Obama. Why did he talk about the birther lie, why did he sit there and talk about how Obama supposedly wasn't born in this country? And then, of course he was. He's trying to undercut him, trying to undermine him.”

“When he is sitting at that White House Correspondent Association dinner in the audience while Obama is on stage making fun of him, he's was seething,” Baker added. “You can see from the clips, if you haven't been there yourself, you can see the television clips how he was furious at being mocked by Obama and ever since he blamed Obama for all manner of. You know things that have hurt his administration. The Russia investigation is all Obama's fault. Somehow, he's accused Obama of treason. He suggested Obama should be arrested. And yes, as you say on anything, whether it be the reflecting pool or the Iran deal, he has to say he's doing better than Obama when in fact, at the moment it doesn't look like that.”

Other critics say Trump’s fury lies in the fact that Black man continues to top him in both popularity and deed. Trump has even re-posted videos describing Trump as the "King of the Jungle" while depicting the former President and his wife as apes, a frequently used racist trope.

Trump eventually removed the post after Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and even Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker spoke publicly against his post.

But Trump has his own massive popularity problem independent of Obama’s surpassing appeal.

“Well, Katy, the metaphors are so perfect for his adversaries,” said former George Bush and John McCain speech writer Mark McKinnon, referring to Trump’s ick-filled Reflecting Pool. “Metaphors [and the storytelling] are so important, and I'm reminded as I watch the ballroom and the reflecting pool, and just how obvious a metaphor that is for what's going on with the Trump administration, where his priorities are right now. The day that I saw the video of John Kerry windsurfing in 2004 was a perfect metaphor for John Kerry and the flip flop. And we wrote that windsurfing ad in 30 seconds because it made itself, because that perfectly illustrated John Kerry. Well, the reflecting pool and the ball room are perfect metaphors for Donald Trump and the fact that his priorities are not with the American people right now.”

“They want to outdo Obama, but the fact is that, no matter how you draw this up, it doesn't look like there's any possible route to a conclusion [to the war in Iran] in which it is any better and likely much worse than the Obama agreement that was put in place years ago.”

- YouTube youtu.be

President Donald Trump is reportedly using the same “book cooking” to count immigrant deportations that he and Republicans denounced in his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

“The White House plans to start counting people who were quickly removed after crossing the border in its deportation statistics, a change that will put it closer to its goal of one million deportations a year,” reported Brittany Gibson from Axios. Even though Trump and his Republican supporters claimed that Obama was guilty of distorting his record when he used this method, White House Border Czar Tom Homan told the Washington Examiner Trump plans on counting deportations by combining ICE’s work in America’s interior with Customs and Border Protection’s returning people who were caught crossing the borders.

"Deportations are over 800,000, counting the Border Patrol too. We're trying to do the same thing we did during the Obama administration, looking at the numbers, pull the numbers together," Homan told the Washington Examiner. Yet as Axios noted, then-House Judiciary Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas) slammed the tactic in a 2012 press release as “dishonest to count illegal immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol along the border as ICE removals.”

At the time, the committee demanded Obama provide internal agency documents to determine the truth about the forced removals.

"It seems like President Obama is trying to trick the American people into thinking he is enforcing our immigration laws,” Smith claimed at the time. “But no amount of spin can cover up the facts.”

Greg Bovino, who previously served as commander-at-large for Customs and Border Protection, has publicly accused Homan of not being up to his new job.

“He sounds super tough,” Bovino wrote in a post to X. “But zoom in. All he’s actually promising is rounding up the ones who already have known criminal records.” Homan, he argued, “is denying reality.”

Bovino then argued"100 million" other undocumented immigrants "laughing at us” because of Homan’s approach "staying right where they are… until they rob or kill you," adding that mass deportations are necessary and “anything less is just political theater.”

While Bovino did not offer any data to back up his assertions, there are others who argue Trump’s immigration policies are failing. Further suggesting that Trump has not managed to meet his immigration goals.

During their years in the White House, former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush sometimes drew criticism from supporters for being overly deferential to their policy advisors — Obama with Wall Street insiders on economic policy, Bush with hawkish neoconservatives on foreign policy. But President Donald Trump, on the other hand, is known for surrounding himself with staunch MAGA loyalists during his second presidency — a pattern that, according to former National Security Council (NSC) and ex-U.S. State Department official Emily Horne, poses a major threat to the United States from a military/foreign policy standpoint.

Appearing on The New Republic's podcast, "The Daily Blast," Horne warned that no one in the Trump White House is going to stand up to the president when he's making a really bad decision.

Horne told host Greg Sargent — a former Washington Post columnist — "Who actually gets the president's ear is always a real issue of power and access in any administration, but especially in this one. We all know that Trump is a president who listens a lot to the last person who he talked to. And so, whoever gets to talk to him, whoever shapes his opinion, is often just the person that he heard from most recently. And so, I have no doubt that the national security workforce — who are civilian, who serve apolitically, who are military, who serve apolitically — are doing what they always do. They're collecting the intelligence, they're preparing the assessments, they're preparing the battlefield scenarios and the plans, and they're bringing them up. The question is, is any of it getting through?"

The former NSC/State Department official continued, "And one of the things that's really clear is that Trump has weeded out anyone who has access to him who is capable of telling him, 'Sir, that's not a good idea.' Or, 'Sir, if you do that, here are the five bad things that could happen because of that.' He does not want to hear it. And to survive in Trump's royal court, you have to be a yes man or a sycophant. There is no one who can speak truth to power left in this White House."

Horne lamented that although the Iran war "is wildly unpopular across the political spectrum," Trump's loyalists in the White House are afraid to challenge or question his policies.

"As costs continue to rise, as diplomacy continues to falter, and as the chaos continues to reign across the Middle East — not just in the Strait of Hormuz — with no end in sight," Horne told Sargent, "this is a war that is entirely of Trump’s making."

On her new morning show, "Money Power Politics" — which debated Monday morning, June 15 following the popular "Morning Joe" program — MS NOW's Stephanie Ruhle brought on former Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor for a reaction to President Donald Trump's new Iran agreement. And the Never Trump conservative was downright scathing in his assessment.

Taylor told Ruhle, "I'm going to go out there on a limb, Steph, and say I think that this is on track to be the worst deal in American diplomatic history. And look, I say that, recognizing…. that we don't have the text yet. But it's very, very hard to imagine there is a deal here that's any better than the deal we already had. In fact, if the initial reporting is to be believed, the Iranians think they're on a pathway to get $24 billion in assets unfrozen. That would be more than ten times what the Obama administration helped unlock for the Iranians."

The former U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official added, "So, put it another way: We're paying ten times — potentially ten times — what we did before to get the same promise from the Iranians. And in international law, there's nothing that you can say about their commitment to not pursue nuclear weapons that's stronger than a promise. There's no global police force to require the Iranians to not pursue a bomb."

Trump has been highly critical of the Iran deal that former President Barack Obama agreed to during his second term. But Taylor noted that when he was serving in DHS during Trump's first presidency, the president "threw out" the Obama administration's agreement without having "any plan to replace the Obama deal with."

Taylor told Ruhle, "Again, the devil will be in the details, but I have a feeling we're going to see the devil."

Taylor was serving as DHS chief of staff during Trump's first presidency when he anonymously wrote a widely read New York Times op-ed headlined, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration." The op-ed detailed Taylor's efforts to dissuade Trump from following through on his worst ideas.

The conservative Taylor subsequently came out as the author of that op-ed and became openly critical of Trump, supporting Kamala Harris in 2024.

Ruhle formerly hosted MS NOW's late-night show "The Final Hour," and "Money Power Politics" — which now airs after "Morning Joe," hosted by conservative Joe Scarborough and liberal Mika Brzezinski — marks her debut as a morning host on the liberal-leaning cable news channel.