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

There is no him without them.

Read that again.

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

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

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

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

“Show us your birth certificate, Barack Obama …”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s stop right there for a second.

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

It truly is a white’s house.

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

He smiled.

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

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

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

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

Turns out, Trump knows them better than you do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which of course makes it worse.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all a big, damn joke to them.

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

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

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

Vote for Democrats.

I know, I know … but listen to me:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That starts RIGHT NOW.

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

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

Actually it is worse than that: They are bigots.

Do not make me explain this to you again.

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

On June 1st, despite a ceasefire ostensibly underway in the US-Israeli war on Iran, Israel’s prime minister launched a major escalation against Lebanon, including threatening airstrikes against the Lebanese capital. The US president called the Israeli leader, furiously demanding an end to Israel’s escalation. Six days later, Israel attacked Beirut’s southern suburbs, long understood to be a red line for Hezbollah. The Lebanese resistance organization launched a limited response, sending 11 rockets towards Israel, almost all of which were intercepted; no one was hurt or killed. Trump called Netanyahu again, telling him in a brief call that now that Iran and Israel had each “had their fun,” that Israel should stand down.

Commentators across the Middle East and beyond debated whether Netanyahu would abide by Trump’s demand. What virtually none of them mentioned was that Trump had refused to even mention his most important pressure point: that if Israel resisted his order to stand down, the US would simply stop sending tons of weapons and tens of billions of dollars to the Israeli military. The close but sometimes divergent interests of the Middle East’s two powers, the global and the regional, was on full display.

It’s now been 106 days since Trump launched his preemptive and illegal military attack on Iran. On February 28, 2026, the world awoke to the fury of a new war in the Middle East after the United States and Israel had launched their joint assault against Iran, with President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu standing shoulder to shoulder against their common foe. Claiming unbridled hegemony was on the agenda for both.

The US-Israeli war on Iran is rooted in longstanding US imperialist strategy and Israel’s national goals.

Today, with yet more fresh promises of a so-called “peace deal” that is nearly ready to be signed by Trump and Iranian leadership, the Israeli military is bombing the suburbs of Beirut despite ongoing claims of a “ceasefire.” Trying to understand the current doom loop, it’s vital we remember how we got here.

In the opening salvo of the US-Israeli attack, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, along with an unknown number of other top military and political leaders, was assassinated with a ballistic missile. Just an hour later, the US fired a Tomahawk missile directly at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in the northern Iranian city of Minab—killing 156 people, 120 of them children, and destroying the school. The war’s official reasons, initially, were to eliminate the ostensible threat of Iran creating a nuclear weapon, and to destroy its conventional military capacity. The no-daylight US-Israeli partnership, Trump and Netanyahu as BFFs, the collaboration between the US and Israeli warplanes, bombers, drones, missiles… all seemed seamless and perfect.

Three months later, and half a dozen or so “ceasefires” announced, renounced, ignored and denounced, headlines around the world gleefully recounted a Trump phone call with Netanyahu. Focused on Israel’s escalating bombing of Lebanon threatening to derail the latest US-Iran ceasefire, the June 1 call reportedly started with Trump telling Netanyahu “you’re f------- crazy—you’d be in prison if it weren’t for me.“ The US president then went on to his ”Everybody hates you now“ remark. ”Everybody hates Israel because of this,“ he reportedly said.

Trump acknowledged saying it, and then, as is his usual style, moved on, quickly reclaiming his friendship with the Israeli prime minister. As was true with so many earlier ceasefires, Israel continued its massive bombing and its brutal occupation of south Lebanon, making a US-Iran ceasefire impossible. In the meantime, throughout the months of the war, commentators, politicians of all stripes, journalists and analysts across the globe were struggling to figure out what that war was actually being fought for.

War for What?

Real fear of an actual nuclear bomb was certainly not the answer. After all, US intelligence agencies have agreed for years that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

Despite that clear assessment, US B-2 stealth bombers still dropped 14 of their 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs on Iran’s civilian centrifuges at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz at the end of Israel’s 12-day war in June 2025. Trump and his supporters bragged of having “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. And then, eight months after that, in the early days of the US-Israeli 2026 war, those B-2s were back in the air, dropping more 30,000-pound and some smaller versions of the bunker-busters on Iran. Seems they don’t believe even their own intelligence agents.

They thought they could impose imperialism on the cheap—but it turns out not everyone is playing that game.

Rationales for the sudden war in 2026 (launched in the midst of US negotiations with Iran for a long-term ceasefire) were tossed around like confetti, ranging from stopping a nuclear threat (which of course didn’t exist because Iran didn’t have, wasn’t trying to make, and hadn’t even made a decision to try to build a nuclear weapon), to ending Iran’s support for its regional allies, to destroying Iran’s navy, to crippling its missile capacity, to protecting Iranian civilians or maybe encouraging a popular uprising, or perhaps even full-scale regime change. Later, once Iran had responded to the attacks by closing the Strait of Hormuz, Trump shifted to trying to justify the war as a means of forcing the reopening of the Strait, in effect waging the new war to get back to the situation that had existed until the US and Israel launched the war in the first place.

Not a Senseless War

None were very convincing arguments. The popular view emerged that this was a pointless war, being fought for nothing. But that was wrong—there was a purpose. Actually, there were several. The Israeli prime minister has shaped his political career, for more than 35 years, around the claim that only he could bring down the Iranian regime, falsely claiming it as an “existential threat” to Israel. (In fact, even if Iran changed its internal decisions and decided to try to build a nuclear weapon some day, it would not represent an existential threat to Israelis but only to Israel’s 47-year-old nuclear weapons monopoly in the Middle East.) Netanyahu needed the war to continue—any ceasefire, under any conditions, would weaken him politically.

On the US side, some of the war’s goals had to do with the personal obsessions of the president and his minions. Trump’s fixation on expanding US power around the world, and more importantly being seen as presiding over a return to the glory days of unchallenged US global domination, remain a driving force—as does his determination to “get a better deal” than Obama did with the successful Iran nuclear deal in 2015. For his self-defined “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth, the pageantry of a powerful military—not only “the most lethal” force in the world but more white, more male, and even more slim than any other army—could compensate for Hegseth’s lack of experience. For Secretary of State Marco Rubio, all roads lead to regime change in Cuba—and supporting all of Trump’s military assaults, including attacks on fishing boats in the Caribbean, kidnapping the president and seizing the oil resources of Venezuela, bombing Yemen, Somalia and Nigeria, all help set the stage for his life-long goal of destroying the Cuban revolution.

The Search for Hegemony

All those personal obsessions likely played some roles. But the US-Israeli war on Iran is also rooted in longstanding US imperialist strategy and Israel’s national goals. While Trump has shown himself for years as far more committed to maximizing his own and his family’s wealth and power than he is accountable to any particular faction of US capital or US elite power (except perhaps “the billionaires,” writ large), the trajectory of imperial expansion, especially in an era of greater and rising powers around the world, continues to shape much of US policy.

That is where the search for hegemony comes to the fore. For Israel—and especially for its longstanding prime minister—the attack on Iran both demonstrates and reinforces its role as unchallenged regional hegemon. That means asserting its power—a derivative power, given its strategic dependence on the United States, but power nonetheless—to seize land, dispossess and expel whole populations, and exert permanent control over countries, economies, and people—whenever, wherever, and for however long it chooses. Without being held accountable.

For Israel—and especially for its longstanding prime minister—the attack on Iran both demonstrates and reinforces its role as unchallenged regional hegemon.

To be recognized as the regional hegemonic power in the Middle East, Israel needs to not only “mow the grass” in Lebanon and in Gaza (as well as arming and empowering ideologically driven settlers in the West Bank to escalate their violent seizure of Palestinian land and ethnic cleansing of its population), it needs to continue to weaken, threaten, and when possible (with US backing) go to war against Iran, its sole challenger for regional control.

Mowing the Grass

Israelis—military and government officials, academics, journalists and others—routinely use the term “mowing the grass” to describe Tel Aviv’s consistent attacks against Israel’s neighbors. The phrase was first coined to describe Israel’s brutal 22-day assault on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, that began the day after Christmas 2008 and killed more than 1400 Palestinians, most of them civilians and including 300 children. Since then, it describes the frequent attacks on Gaza or Lebanon—ostensibly aimed at militant organizations but designed originally to kill massive numbers of civilians, displace hundreds of thousands or millions from their homes, and destroy huge swathes of homes, schools, churches, mosques, businesses—to remind everyone who it is who actually holds power.

Israel is saying that it will not allow Iran to remain an obstacle to Tel Aviv’s claim of full-blown dominance of the region. Netanyahu is making good of the threats he’s issued for the last 30 years.

Iran has historically been the main obstacle preventing Israel from consolidating that regional hegemonic role, and part of Netanyahu’s political power depends on his ability to keep the US-Israeli “special relationship” strong and to deal effectively with Iran. So going to war against Iran in complete and willing partnership with the United States serves to strengthen his still-shaky political position. What’s different now is that Israel is saying that it will not allow Iran to remain an obstacle to Tel Aviv’s claim of full-blown dominance of the region. Netanyahu is making good of the threats he’s issued for the last 30 years.

So Netanyahu remains committed to continuing this war against Iran, opposing ceasefires regardless of their terms—and most recently, escalating attacks against Lebanon precisely because they could prevent or shatter any ceasefire. Following the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire in 2024, UN peacekeepers on the ground documented more than 10,000 Israeli violations of the agreement in just the first year. When a wobbly US-Iran ceasefire was announced on April 8, 2026, Israel responded with massive force against Beirut, launching more than 100 airstrikes within 10 minutes across the capital and killing 357 people, many of them civilians and at least 101 of them children and women.

Back in the USA….

For the United States, going to war against Iran could strengthen Washington’s longstanding commitment to maintaining global domination—a goal particularly relished by its power-obsessed and erratic president. The war was designed to both demonstrate and bolster the US role as unchallenged global hegemon. And doing so arm in arm with Israel, the regional version.

What a team they thought they would make. What they didn’t reckon with was the reality of Iran—its military, its government, its people. While there is no question US-Israeli military might massively outstrips that of Iran, it turned out that Tehran was able to use its not-insignificant drone and missile capacity in ways that maximized its power.

While there is no question US-Israeli military might massively outstrips that of Iran, it turned out that Tehran was able to use its not-insignificant drone and missile capacity in ways that maximized its power.

For example, Iran’s relatively few strikes on US bases and sometimes domestic facilities in the surrounding US-backed Gulf states had political consequences beyond their comparatively low levels of casualties. They showed how “protection” in the form of US military bases, weapons and troops in those countries did not keep their people safe, but rather laid a target on their backs. Most especially, Iran’s few direct attacks on ships attempting to cross the Strait of Hormuz early in the war, had the much broader effect of shutting down the vital waterway entirely, as shipowners and insurance companies refused to take the risk.

Miscalculations

When Israel carried out its guided missile attack on the first day of the war, killing the supreme leader and a number of other top officials, the cheering in Washington and Tel Aviv reflected the assumption that the decapitation of the government would lead to chaos and its inability to function. The cheerleaders were wrong. As Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr noted in Foreign Affairs, the US and Israel “expected a quick victory through targeted assassinations of Iran’s leadership. But decapitation did not produce regime collapse. Instead, it opened the door for a new generation to take over.” Not only did Khamenei’s son take over his father’s position, but younger military, political, and business leaders filled in the gaps across the structures of power.

And while the Iranian leadership had been significantly weakened by public mobilization against both governmental inability to solve the escalating economic crisis and its increasingly repressive attacks against protesters, it appears it was not further weakened by the US-Israeli assault. As Nasr and Bajoghli describe the situation, the public anger of January 2026 in response to escalating repression of the mass uprisings, didn’t disappear with the US-Israeli assault. They wrote:

The war’s destruction has been vast: public infrastructure, factories, schools, hospitals, historic monuments, and even entire neighborhoods lie in ruins. As Israeli and American bombs and missiles pummeled the landscape, Trump threatened to arm separatists, redraw Iran’s borders, crush its economy and annihilate its civilization. Together, these military and rhetorical assaults provoked a nationalist reaction that cut across political divisions. Public anger has not disappeared. The grief, frustration and accumulated resentment of decades of misrule and repression remain. What has changed is the political landscape in which those feelings find expression. Dissent is now refracted through a national struggle against a foreign enemy that Iranians compare to Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian empire in the 4th century BC; the Arab armies that invaded in the 7th century AD; and the Mongols, who came six centuries after that.Contrary to American and Israeli expectations, the war has not sparked street demonstrations. The longer it went on, the less the regime appeared threatened by public uprisings. Iranian society mobilized not against the state but alongside it, holding daily rallies across the country, forming human chains and gathering on bridges threatened by Trump. The sharp divide between state and society that had characterized Iran in January blurred—not through persuasion or repression, but through the shared experience of living through the bombing and witnessing its destruction.

Palestine

There was another reason for the US-Israeli war, that explains at least the timing, if not the overall rationale—Palestine. Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza for two years and eight months. There are now more than 73,000 known, identified, named Palestinians in Gaza who have been killed by Israeli bombs, tanks, bullets, drones, missiles, almost all paid for (and to a large degree produced) by US taxpayers. Thousands more lie dead under the rubble of what were once the cities, towns, refugee camps of the decimated Gaza Strip. The statistics belie the lives lost—babies, elders, children. Journalists and health workers in staggering numbers. And Israel’s genocide continues, people are still being killed by Israeli bombs, tanks and drones, as well as deliberately-imposed shortages of water, food, medical supplies, shelter.

The Gaza genocide is not unrelated or incidental to the US-Israeli war in Iran—it is a primary enabler. It is precisely the level of impunity, the absolute lack of accountability for any of the perpetrators of this crime against humanity, that has given Israeli and US leaders the confidence to go ahead with what many have called the “Gazafication of Iran” and the “Gazafication of Lebanon” without fearing there might be a price to be paid.

The Gaza genocide is not unrelated or incidental to the US-Israeli war in Iran—it is a primary enabler.

The international arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Israeli leaders (Israel assassinated the Hamas leaders who were similarly charged) are ignored in most of the US-allied countries that Netanyahu and his former defense minister might want to visit. South Africa’s unprecedented effort to hold Israel accountable at the International Court of Justice for its violations of the Genocide Convention resulted in a powerful preliminary ruling that Israel’s actions plausibly do constitute genocide. Israel was ordered to carry out specific actions—starting with an end to killing people in Gaza—but it has yet to face any consequences for ignoring those orders. And no one knows when the final ruling might be issued—or if it will lead to some level of enforcement, either in the United Nations, by a coalition of governments, or, most likely by a newly-enraged, newly-engaged global civil society ready to move with ever greater energy, strategic clarity and political power to impose serious consequences on the governments and individuals responsible for the first genocide in history to be carried out openly, proudly, and visible to the world.

War Over War

For now, while the war against Iran continues, it looks like both Israel and the United States are moving into a different phase. They are still looking to claim power, still working to reshape political relations and consolidate regional and global power across the middle east. But rather than simply escalating again, as Israel still is in Lebanon, or continuing a grinding daily assault as it still is in Gaza—both actions armed and paid for by the US—they are facing some changed circumstances. Just maybe Washington and Tel Aviv are finding that it’s harder than they thought to re-order the whole Middle East—and to do that in tandem is harder than ever.

Trump seemed to think he could accomplish something dramatic and “beautiful” in Iran—encourage a popular uprising, maybe seize the oil and replace the leadership’s political orientation as if it were Venezuela—but then found that wasn’t so likely. Turns out Iran is not Venezuela. Netanyahu has massive public support among Jewish Israelis for continuing the war in Iran, though support for the war in Lebanon is not so popular. (It should not be forgotten that after 18 years of occupying South Lebanon, Israeli troops were finally pulled out in 2000 primarily because the government could not survive the mobilization of Israeli mothers angry that their sons in the IDF were occasionally being killed by Hezbollah’s retaliation actions..)

Trump seemed to think he could accomplish something dramatic and “beautiful” in Iran—encourage a popular uprising, maybe seize the oil and replace the leadership’s political orientation as if it were Venezuela—but then found that wasn’t so likely.

At home Netanyahu may be able to get away with claiming victory over Iran even if a ceasefire is imposed, by continuing Israel’s longstanding practice of assassinating Iranian scientists and political/military leaders, and occasional bombing raids. But Israel’s plummeting losses in the war of global legitimacy are certainly not likely to be reversed any time soon. The most recent Pew survey indicates sky-high majorities holding negative views of Israel and Netanyahu around the world—up to 95% in Pakistan, 78% negative in Sweden and Spain.

The global Palestinian rights mobilizations and the even broader movements for ceasefire and an end to genocide of course play a major role. Social movements and civil society activists around the world will continue to hold up the ICJ decisions and the UN General Assembly resolutions requiring governments to impose arms embargoes, boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.

And as the Strait remains closed and food shortages mount in the poorest countries, as Arab governments fearing public opposition at home reduce their ties with Israel and reject expansion of the Abraham Accords, and as Israel continues to kill Lebanese and Palestinian families, Trump’s claims will be less likely to be believed. With the mid-terms only a few months off, his claims of “We’re the winner, we won” are already ringing increasingly hollow. It doesn’t mean he won’t make the claims, it just means they’re not going to work.

For Trump, given the unexpected level of resilience in Iran, Tehran’s access to a virtually unlimited supply of cheap drones that are doing real damage to Gulf Arab states hosting US bases and troops, and its willingness to close the Strait as a pressure point with global ramifications, it’s going to be difficult to claim this war as a victory.

The search to consolidate regional and global power continues. It’s a big part of the reason the US and Israel are launching new wars and escalating longstanding attacks. People are still losing lands and lives as these hegemons rely on war to consolidate their positions. But neither Israel in the Middle East nor the United States in the world are unchallenged. They thought they could impose imperialism on the cheap—but it turns out not everyone is playing that game. The search for hegemonic power is far from settled.

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

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

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

I’m not done.

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

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

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

Sorry, I’m not done yet.

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

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

Can you imagine?

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

What would all those sanctimonious MAGA farmers say about that?

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

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

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

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

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

Can you imagine????

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read that again.

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

Finished.

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

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

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

That is most likely you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, I just can’t let that happen.

Can you?

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

This week, the president has hit the floor in his support. A new Reuters poll found that Donald Trump's approval is 35 percent. A new Q poll found that it's 33 percent. Nate Silver said it's lower than Joe Biden's was after the Disaster Debate. While there's hope his numbers will keep falling, they probably won't. A third of America is descended from the original confederates. Trump is burning up their lives and fortunes, but they're stand by their man.

I could be wrong, but whether his numbers keep falling may be beside the point. The real question is whether Trump's supporters show up in defense of his administration in the coming congressional elections. Tuesday's primaries suggest an answer in the affirmative, as they knocked off Republicans Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

However, their defeats might say more about them than about Trump. Cassidy voted to removed him after the J6 insurrection. Massie has been a vocal Trump critic. Both men were marked by maga. Anyway, the point of the movement was to be anti-Republican. They show up to punish Trump's adversaries, not necessarily to support Republicans. Polls suggest that maganites are hardcore partisans, but what made maga a movement is that many are not.

Trump took supporters on a decade-long moral vacation. He freed them from the ordinary constraints of decency. He vowed to punish their "enemies," especially uppity women. And he promised they would all get rich. In turn, they believed Trump would spare them from the consequences of their own desires.¹ In the end, he didn't. Their cost of living is soaring higher. The pain of tariffs and war is increasingly intolerable. And now they feel betrayed.

Some of them even feel like Joe Biden was better. A recent poll found that six in 10 Americans think the economy was better under the former Democratic president. They are right.

That said, the likelihood of a Trump voter picking a Democrat in November is very low, but the likelihood is very high of Trump voters returning to their natural state as nonvoters. Trump didn't woo swing voters. He amassed winning coalitions by adding people who did not vote prior to his entry onto the political scene. What they desired was Trump and everything he represented to them. That desire has backfired and now they lost hope.

"They’re s------- themselves because nobody is going to vote," a Trump voter told NOTUS. "You will have your boomer Republicans who watch [Sean] Hannity and all that stuff go out and vote. But people like me, normal people, dealing with the cost of living, we’re not voting."

The demoralization that's pushing maga back into nonvoter-hood is compounded by Donald Trump's other big problem – the activation of Americans who might otherwise be oriented toward the Democratic Party but who stayed home during the last presidential election. The couch can no longer hold them down, as gas prices are surging, food costs are soaring and health insurance is impossible. The magnitude is such that Mike Duggan ended his bid as an independent candidate for Michigan governor, because "our internal polling showed the intense anger over gas prices and Iran was boosting Democrats in every office nationally."

Maga is demoralized. Democrat-leaning nonvoters are energized.

There's room for independent candidates.

I don't know if we can trust nonvoters who say they're going to vote. (CNN's Harry Enten said they are "p----- off" and "absolutely" will, while noting that only 48 percent of them said they were "almost certain to vote.") The fact remains, however, that anger is highly motivating. Beyond other considerations, anger has probably determined the outcomes of all but one presidential election since Barack Obama's victory. That year's panic brought a ton of nonvoters to his side. (A Democrat has not won Indiana since.) Moody's says odds of a recession are reaching 50 percent. It's only mid-May. Voters are mad. Nonvoters are madder.

The Democrats talk a lot about how to win over Trump voters, but not about how to harness the compounding rage of nonvoters, and then turn them into Democrats. The presumption seems to be that Trump voters will stick around, but hardcore partisans, who make up his floor of support, will never vote Democratic. Trump was the reason many maganites surfaced in the first place. He's the reason they will likely go back underground. That leaves some swing voters to fight over, which is fine, but there are 90 million people in this country who did not vote in the last election. A bunch of them now say they will vote this year.

The Democrats act like there's only so many voters to go around, so they have to be careful about the kind of message they send. It can't be too "anti-Trump," whatever that means, and it can't be too "progressive," whatever that means. Apparently, there has to be a sweet spot between pro-democracy and pro-"working class," which may be the lesson of 2024, but 2026 is made profoundly different by the fact that Trump is burning up the economy. Inflation is expected to reach 4 percent next month. Chris Murphy said the key to winning over Trump voters is to "unrig the economy and unrig the democracy," but forget about Trump voters. Say it to the millions of new voters who are about to demonstrate how p----- off they are.

Could we really be at the point where Republicans have had enough? Or will they regroup after the holiday, after getting fresh threats from Donald Trump—and perhaps violent warnings from his thugs—and once again bow to him?

That remains to be seen. But this week we saw something we’ve yet to see in Trump’s second term: The GOP completely melting down, canceling votes, going home, angry at one another and at Trump, all tearing one another apart. Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other leaders stood there bewildered, trying but failing to explain this mess to the press.

We like them tearing one another apart, for sure. The outrageous, unprecedented $1.8 billion terrorist slush fund, coming right after the billion dollar ballroom, was enough to throw Senate Republicans into chaos and recriminations, with Sen. Mitch McConnell, to offer just one example, attacking Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—who’d stunningly accused critics of just not understanding how normal all of this is—charging that he was engaging in “utterly stupid, morally wrong” behavior.

Given a June 1 deadline by Trump to re-open the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration agencies, Senate Republicans crashed and burned, leaving town and blowing through that deadline. Democrats have been enormously successful at stopping funding of ICE and DHS’s immigration enforcement agencies, keeping them shut down (even as ICE has plenty of money from the big bad bill).

The GOP has been forced to try to pass the ICE funding via budget reconciliation, which only requires 51 votes. But then Trump made them add the ballroom with a price tag of a billion dollars—previously supposedly being paid by private donors—into the bill. The Senate parliamentarian ruled the ballroom couldn’t pass in reconcilation. In the meantime, on his revenge tour, Trump destroyed the careers of both Senator Bill Cassidy and Rep. Thomas Massie, who now appear to be going on their own revenge tours against Trump until the end of their terms.

Trump always does himself in. Cassidy, fresh off losing in his primary last week to a Trump-backed MAGA candidate—as Trump was determined to slay Cassidy after he’d voted to impeach him for inciting an insurrection back in 2021—voted for the war powers resolution in the Senate, this week becoming the deciding vote to finally pass the measure that would mandate Congress decide on the war in Iran.

And Senate Republicans became livid with Trump on Tuesday for endorsing Ken Paxton in next Tuesday’s Senate primary runoff in Texas, after they’d spent millions trying to help Senator John Cornyn keep his seat. As I wrote earlier, some Senate Republicans think the GOP could lose Texas because of Trump’s endorsement. Even if they win they will have to spend tons of money in Texas, at a time when the Senate is now in play and they need that money elsewhere. Why the hell should they help Trump, they surely were asking themselves, if he wasn’t going to help him?

Cassidy, unchained, then made it clear he was not about to fund any ballroom for Trump. (By the way, politicians like Cassidy are not to be lauded now; they went along with it all when they thought they’d be saved, and ultimately they’re cowards.) So did several other Republicans in the Senate. The ballroom was pretty much doomed. Democrats had been ready to add a ton of amendments about the ballroom and make Republicans vote on it.

But once that was out of the way, Democrats had something else about which they could add amendments to the ICE funding bill: the terrorist slush fund, taxpayer dollars stolen by Trump and his crooked acting attorney general in a bogus “settlement” on a bogus “lawsuit.” The idea that money would be going to people who committed all kinds of crimes—the Orwellian “Anti-Weaponization Fund”—including violent criminals who’d attacked the Capitol and bludgeoned cops, landed like an atom bomb on Capitol Hill. The story blew up across the country—people were outraged—and you know the congressional switchboard was jammed.

Again, how stupid is Trump? You would think that as inflation continues to soar and gas prices are skyrocketing as a result of his badly managed war of choice, he’d at least wait on establishing this “fund” for a few days, until the DHS vote was passed. Sure, it would still be an issue moving forward and cause a blowup among the GOP anyway—and is another disaster for them for the midterms—but you’d at the very least get DHS opened up and have Republicans going home with some sort of accomplishment.

But no, they go home instead to an uproar from their constituents about this “fund” in addition to the war and gas prices.

But wait, it gets worse. After the Senate passed a war powers resolution—thanks to Cassidy, who Trump could have counted on sticking with him if he’d not backed a primary against him—more Republicans in the House got some balls. Just before the House was to vote on a war powers resolution on Thursday, bumbling House Speaker Mike Johnson pulled it because he didn’t have the votes, and, like the Senate leader, sent everyone home. This was beyond embarrassing and just contributed to the GOP meltdown. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania—a Republican who was going to vote for it—said the votes won’t be any different when they come back, so they should have just voted.

Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan rightly called the GOP “chickenhawk mother-------.” This is beyond a s--- show. The GOP seems to be coming apart at the seams, under the weight of Trump, who has no clue about what he’s doing.

Apparently, the anger among GOP senators over the slush fund—and the fear of taking votes—was compounded by Todd Blanche privately meeting with them Thursday, in what was described as a contentious meeting that became a disaster.

This is how we know the White House is freaking out too, unable to manage Trump or the Congressional GOP. By sending Blanche to answer questions before senators earlier in the week in a public hearing—at the last minute canceling a trip he’d planned—they clearly weren’t expecting the uproar over the slush fund to be so big. As with the war in Iran, they were completely unprepared. The private meeting with GOP senators didn’t change anything, and seemed to make it worse.

All of this shows that while Trump is simply out of his mind—nothing surprising—the White House is in a bubble, as most Republicans have been. But Senate and House Republicans are starting to experience reality outside the bubble. It’s all becoming too intense for them. Again, we’ll have to wait to see if this is a real breaking point, but so far it’s looking like their turmoil will continue. And Democrats just need to keep stoking it.

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

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

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

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

Because it actually could have been worse …

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

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

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

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

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

Troops would be in the streets just in case.

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

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

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

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

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

Adding …

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

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

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

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

From that story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vote.

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

When Donald Trump was about to miss an interest payment for his dying Trump Castle casino in 1990, his father Fred bought nearly $5 million worth of poker chips to save him from default. When Trump was indicted for inciting the January 6 insurrection, the Supreme Court ruled that he could not be charged because an auto golpe is a core duty of the president. Judge Aileen Cannon used a technicality to dismiss the criminal case against Trump for hoarding stolen classified documents in the bathroom of his spy-riddled golf club. As inflation spikes, gas prices surge, and the world teeters on the brink of a recession, congressional Republicans are demanding a billion dollars to build the gilded ballroom after Trump bulldozed the East Wing of the White House without collecting enough corporate bribes to cover the project.

For nearly 80 years, someone has always saved Trump from himself. With the Strait of Hormuz, the president has finally created a mess so big that no one can save him. No one is coming to the rescue. NATO can’t and China won’t.

Last week, Times columnist Tom Friedman begged NATO to help Trump unblock the strait, which carried 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas before Trump attacked Iran. Friedman urged the NATO nations to look past the fact that Trump keeps threatening to destroy NATO and seize the territory of member states Canada and Denmark. Friedman urged America’s closest allies to “get over” all that and join a great armada to liberate Hormuz. “I know this is a big ask,” he wrote. It’s worth it, Friedman argued, because it’s simply too awful to imagine a Middle East with Iran controlling 20 percent of the world’s oil and lording that power over its Gulf State neighbors.

NATO can’t join an operation to liberate the Strait of Hormuz, because there isn’t one. There’s only the US naval blockade of Iranian oil exports. The blockade puts economic pressure on Iran, but it doesn’t force them to stop attacking ships.

Commercial ships are soft targets with risk-averse owners. If they don’t feel completely safe, they won’t go. Any effort to liberate the strait by force would have to get the risk down to practically zero before shipping would resume. And then we'd have to keep it up forever. The Strait of Hormuz had never been closed before Trump attacked. There was always a question of whether Iran could get away with closing it. Now we know.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth insisted before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the US could open up the strait militarily Trump if wanted.

“If that's true – and that's not what has been testified to us in private briefings – why haven’t you done that already?” asked Senator Chris Murphy.

“Ultimately a preferred long-term approach would be a deal where they open it up,” Hegseth replied.

“[A]s we talk about trillion dollar plus budgets for our military, it appears that a very small budget is holding us hostage in the straits of Hormuz,” Senator Dick Durbin observed.

Durbin is right. It has become a thought-terminating cliché for Trump that Iran’s navy is at the bottom of the sea. But Iran doesn’t need warships in order to freeze shipping through the strait. It just needs enough fast boats, mines, drones, and missiles to scare off unarmored commercial ships and their insurers.

Last week, Trump was expected to seek China’s help in resolving the Hormuz crisis during his summit with Xi Jinping. China has leverage because it buys 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil. If China wanted to pressure Iran to resolve the crisis, it could. However, we learned Thursday that, while China conceded that Iran shouldn’t charge tolls in the Strait of Hormuz in theory, it’s not going to do anything to stop it.

China has little incentive to intervene. When the war began, China’s emergency oil supply was triple that of the United States. China is an ally of Iran and an adversary of the US. While Trump was in Beijing, Iran made a big show of letting Chinese ships out of the Strait of Hormuz, just to drive home that point. The blockade is hurting China, but it’s hurting the US more. If Iran ends up charging tolls on the Strait of Hormuz, much of that cash will flow to Chinese arms makers and ship-builders. Iran’s probably going to buy a whole new navy from China.

Meanwhile, a series of devastating leaks has shattered Trump’s rosy picture of Iran’s remaining defenses, and its economic resilience. Iran has retained about 70 percent of its pre-war missile stocks and mobile missile launchers. Critically, it retains access to 30 of 33 missile-launching sites along the strait.

It’s not just the US intelligence community saying so. “Everybody knows that Trump and Hegseth are talking nonsense when they make claims to have destroyed Iran militarily,” a senior NATO source told the Telegraph.

Another leaked CIA assessment estimated that Iran can hold out for at least three or four more months before facing more severe economic hardship. Not everyone is so optimistic. “The leadership has gotten more radical, determined and increasingly confident they can outlast US political will and sustain domestic repression to check any resistance” inside Iran, an anonymous official told the Post, “Comparatively, you see similar regimes lasting years under sustained embargoes and airpower-only wars.”

The blockade is causing Iran major economic pain, but this is an existential fight for the regime. They know that if they can just outlast Trump, they can come out of this conflict with a huge influx of cash and strategic preeminence in the Middle East.

Trump has spent a lifetime rebelling against reality. In the Strait of Hormuz, he has finally run up against a reality too stark to spin or ignore. The strait was free and open before Trump attacked. Now it is closed and Iran has set up a permanent mechanism to extract rents from passersby. It’s tempting to think that all of Trump’s terrible policies can be reversed, but some blunders are unfixable. In all likelihood, this conflict will end with Iran charging tolls on the Strait of Hormuz and reaping billions of dollars in windfall profits that will be plowed back into its military and its nuclear program.

Ex-DHS official Miles Taylor said President Donald Trump should get ready for an ugly world once he’s out of the White House after prosecutors begin to chew on his obvious allegations of corruption.

“It's clear there's no one telling him ‘no’ inside,” said MS NOW anchor Chris Hayes, referring to Trump’s attempt to convince his own appointees to hand him a whopping $10 billion settlement while president. “And if there were ever a clearer example of that, to me, it is this there is no one saying you cannot give yourself $10 billion from the us treasury.”

“He should not spend the presidency lining his pockets. He should be preparing to line his prison cell,” said Taylor, who exited Trump’s first presidential term after numerous legal outrages. “I don't mean that hyperbolically. He is guaranteeing, by doing things like this that he'll spend the rest of his days after this administration in courtrooms, in depositions, and potentially incarcerated. This is a corrupt act. This is a high crime and misdemeanor. And anyone who is enabling it, I would tell them right now — because I've been in your shoes inside his administration when he asked me to do illegal things. Don't bet that this man's going to pardon you.”

“Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer told Hayes that most Americans innately knew Trump was corrupt and “priced corruption into the baseline with Trump” when they elected him — but that was only because they expected him to deliver a better economy.

“The corruption matters a lot more when gas is $4.50 [a gallon], when prices are up, when the economy is not going well, and the president's broken his core promise,’ said Pfeiffer. “The president was elected to lower prices. That's why people put him in office. He is not doing it. What is he doing instead? He's doing a bunch of corrupt stuff to make himself richer, to make his rich friends richer. And that is a very, very powerful argument I think can have real purchase in the midterms.”

Hayes compared the Trump family enriching itself with the White House to the antics of Chinese President Xi Jinping, or the Viktor Orban family in Hungary, but Taylor said this was a bad comparison.

“It's absolutely what it looks like. But … the difference is, in a lot of those places, they got away with it,” said Taylor. “And again, here's the message to people inside the administration: I'm telling you, do not count on the mob boss to protect you. You will not get away with it. He may try, but [former AG] John Mitchell went to prison for Richard Nixon. And I'm sure Mitchell and the others who were prosecuted didn't feel like they got a good end of that deal.”

- YouTube youtu.be

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mathematically, things just don’t add up anymore.

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

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

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

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

And what is Republicans’ answer to that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump isn’t just breaking norms, he’s running a live experiment on the limits of American power. Each move is a test: How far can a president go? What laws and how much of the Constitution can be ignored? And, most importantly, will anyone actually stop him?

It took the King of England to remind Congress that their job is to restrain a president, not cheer him on no matter what. Charles III said:

“The U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”

King Charles was essentially begging Congress to restrain Donald Trump’s imperial overreach, the most glaring example of which is his starting a war with Iran without congressional approval and in violation of both the US Constitution, the 1973 War Powers Act, and the Geneva Convention.

It’s a lesson America first lost touch with when President Harry Truman got us into the Korean War without Congressional authorization, was amplified by LBJ and Nixon in Vietnam and Reagan in Granada, and has since led through a series of modern presidential actions straight to Trump joining Netanyahu to bomb Iran without Congress, provocation, or legal basis.

Both parties have been complicit in this, generally in support of their own presidents while questioning the actions of presidents of the other party, but the actions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — and Obama’s failure to respond to them — most directly led to Trump’s excesses.

George W. Bush came into office wanting to start a war with Iraq as a strategy to get himself re-elected in 2004 and “have a successful presidency.” In 1999, when Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz to pen the first draft of Bush’s “autobiography,” A Charge To Keep.

“I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004. He told Baker that Bush said:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Cheney, meanwhile, was in a world of trouble because of a huge asbestos bet he’d made as CEO of Halliburton in 1998. The company was facing possible bankruptcy.

In July of 2000, Cheney walked away with $30 million from the troubled company and the year after that, as Bush’s now-Vice President, Halliburton subsidiary KBR suddenly received one of the first no-bid no-ceiling (no accountability and no limit on how much they could receive) multi-billion-dollar military contracts that arguably rescued the company.

Bush and Cheney both had good reason to want to invade Afghanistan in October 2001 for their own selfish purposes, the law and public good be damned.

— Bush was unpopular and seen as an illegitimate president at the time because his father’s corrupt appointee on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had cast the deciding vote in the Bush v Gore lawsuit that made him president; he wanted a war that would give him legitimacy and the aura of leadership.

— Cheney’s company was in a crisis, and Afghanistan War no-bid contracts helped turn around Halliburton from the edge of bankruptcy into one of the world’s largest defense contractors today, adding a fortune to Cheney’s family’s holding of Halliburton stock.

Under Bush’s and Cheney’s command, American forces committed numerous war crimes — including torture, murder, slaughter of civilians including children, and kidnapping/rendering to “black sites” — that earned America universal condemnation. Our reputation was damaged, but, even worse, the precedent of an untouchable, unaccountable presidency was established.

That could have been stopped by Congress, but the body failed; the crime was then compounded when Barack Obama came into office in January, 2009 with a 257-198 Democratic majority in the House and a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. They had real political power, but instead of holding these two liars and war criminals to account, President Obama said, when asked if he was going to prosecute them:

“I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

When he and Democrats in Congress took that position — much like House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying this Sunday on Fox “News” that impeaching Trump is not a priority if they take power in this November’s election — they let Bush and Cheney off the hook and thus pretty much guaranteed that Trump would overreach and commit war crimes, as he has done.

After all, if Obama and congressional Democrats let Bush and Cheney get away with what everybody in America knew was a series of deadly lies that cost us both lives and treasure, why would Trump think that any Democrat would ever try to hold him accountable for the same thing?

Which is exactly why it’s so important for Democrats to abandon appeasement and hold Trump accountable for his many crimes in office — from taking bribes and selling pardons to tearing down part of the White House to bombing Iran — if they regain the power of the subpoena and impeachment this fall.

Instead of telling Trump in advance that he’ll skate just like Reagan, Bush, and Cheney did, Jeffries and Schumer should be loudly proclaiming that there will be accountability.

This sort of behavior — by presidents of both parties — has to stop. It’s wrong, it’s illegal, it’s unconstitutional, and it destroys the world’s confidence in America as a moral force.

Taking on Trump is also good politics.

A recent Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll found 55% of all voters support impeaching Trump, with especially strong backing among Democrats. One-in-five of Trump’s own voters want him impeached and at least 85 members of the House are on record for holding him accountable. A Quinnipiac University poll found that fully 95% of Democrats support prosecuting Trump on federal charges.

A hereditary king praising restraints on executive authority before the U.S. Congress was both historically ironic and politically elegant: King Charles III was reminding Congress not to tolerate a man trying to become the kind of ruler our Founders rejected. As he pointed out, free nations only survive as free when executive power is answerable to Congress, the people, and the law.

Democrats damn well better be paying attention.

At some point, this stops being just about Trump. It becomes about whether the United States still believes in accountability at all. Because if the answer to every abuse of power is still “nothing,” then the destruction of American democracy isn’t just continuing, it’s succeeding.

The past terrifying week has caused me to wonder: How did America ever get to a point where one man, backed by the military might of the United States, could credibly threaten death to an entire civilization?

I’m also wondering how 19 super-rich American households could have added $1.8 trillion to their wealth in just the last 24 months — roughly the size of the economy of Australia — while the rate of child poverty in the U.S. has more than doubled, from a low of 5.2 percent in 2021 to over 13 percent now?

How have we come so perilously close to climate catastrophe, with spring temperatures in the Western United States already shattering records — and yet governments are spending over a trillion dollars a year subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and banks have channeled over $3 trillion to fossil fuel companies since the Paris Agreement, while there are almost no funds to protect living ecosystems?

How have we allowed artificial intelligence, the most powerful technology the world has ever seen, to threaten millions of jobs; make vulnerable the software that runs our financial, energy, and defense systems; and potentially destroy the human race — while allowing it to amass so much political power that it eludes all guardrails and regulations?

I have served at the highest levels of the U.S. government. I’ve watched our political and economic systems grow and change over the last 50 years, and I’ve spent much of that time writing about their evolution. I’ve never been reluctant to accuse those in power of abusing their authority.

While I have some ideas about how and why our system has sacrificed democracy and critical thought to the false gods of greed and growth (anyone interested in my tentative thoughts is more than welcome to read my recent Coming Up Short), I cannot state with certainty how we arrived at this point.

Yet notwithstanding how we got here, how do we change course? I refuse to accept that we cannot, or that it’s too late.

On Friday, I taught students who are seeking degrees in public policy. They wanted to know why — given all this — I remain optimistic.

I told them that I have faith in the goodness and reasonableness of the American people when they become aware of huge problems that threaten our and the world’s existence. And that the problems I’ve mentioned have now reached such size and dangerousness that the public can no longer ignore them.

We are, I think, coming to a tipping point in how we understand the challenges to our continued existence.

As author Jeremy Lent has written:

“A civilization built on a different foundation would start from an acknowledgment that the deep interconnectedness of all life is not romantic aspiration but scientific fact — confirmed by complexity science, systems biology, and Earth science, and affirmed by wisdom traditions of cultures that never lost that understanding.
From this recognition, different goals follow: not perpetual growth but setting the conditions for all people to flourish on a regenerated Earth. Not maximization of returns on capital but the kind of reciprocal, mutualistic relationship with living systems that makes long-term human wellbeing possible.
There is no blueprint that will save us. No one person or group can design in advance what such a civilization will look like in its particulars. But a framework of core principles can orient us — the way a distant horizon orients a traveler moving through unmarked terrain.
You may not yet see the exact path, but knowing the general direction changes everything about which opportunities you embrace and which you recognize as alluring detours.
The trance that keeps us from seeing this is powerful. But it has been broken before. Every paradigm that once seemed like reality itself — the divine right of kings, the natural inferiority of women, the Earth at the center of the universe — turned out to be a myth that was shattered.”

I agree with Lent. It’s time to eschew the myths that contributed to the reelection of the most dangerous person ever to occupy the White House, myths that continue to limit our beliefs and imaginations: that widening inequality and an ever-larger military are necessary and inevitable, that we need a billionaire oligarchy to guide our economy and a “strongman” to lead our government, that a political revolution founded on returning American democracy to the ideal of self-government would be too destabilizing, that continued growth of the Gross Domestic Product is an unmitigated good, and that more “productivity” and “efficiency” are always beneficial.

The most dangerous myth of all is that there is no alternative to the path we’re on, that we have no control over our destiny, and that, just as it was inevitable that we came to where are, our unraveling is similarly inevitable.

I refuse to accept this deterministic myth. The first act of genuine systemic change is to stop believing it.

It’s been a terrifying week, but one that is awakening millions of people.

Thank you for being an ally in seeking a better world.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Well, I guess it’s reassuring to learn that gasoline prices have nothing to do with Trump’s war. And that we’re winning against Iran. In fact it’s won! Better than anybody could ever have imagined!!! Although we’ll be there another few weeks... And maybe we’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age… And he needs another $200 billion… And let’s activate the draft (except for Barron, who has congenital bone-spurs.…)

One day, we’ll look back on last Wednesday’s speech as the moment it became impossible to ignore. Not just the policy or the war, but the man and his growing mental and emotional disabilities.

Because what’s now vividly clear — and increasingly dangerous — is that Donald Trump isn’t just prosecuting a war against a major, wealthy, modern, 2,500-year-old Middle Eastern empire that is politically and militarily aligned with Russia and China: he’s doing it while he’s visibly unraveling.

Go back just a few weeks.

On February 28th, as the first strikes loomed, Trump told Axios he could “go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days.” He was calling for total conquest or a quick hit in the same sentence, the same breath.

By March 1st, he’d shifted. The war had “always been a four-week process… it’ll take four weeks — or less,” he said, according to the Washington Post. That same day, it became “four to five weeks.”

On March 2nd, he claimed we were already “ahead of schedule,” still referencing that timeline. But on social media, tracked by New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, he added something else entirely: wars, he said, could be fought “forever.”

Really? Forever. Four weeks. Two days. I guess we’re just supposed to pick one?

By March 7th, he was calling the war “a short excursion” (the proper word is “incursion”) while also saying it would continue “for a little while.” On his Nazi-infested, failing social media site he bragged that “we’ve already won.”

On March 9th, he said the war was “pretty well complete.” In an interview summarized by TIME, he insisted there was “nothing left in a military sense,” even as the fighting continued, and he predicted it would end “very soon.”

Two days later, March 11th, he declared, “We’ve won… in the first hour, it was over.” Then, on March 13th, it would last “as long as it’s necessary” — but also “not long.” By March 17th, he was rewriting history, claiming it had been “essentially largely over in two or three days.” And yet by March 31st, he was telling Reuters it would take “two weeks, maybe three” more.

And now he’s using genuinely obscene and entirely un-American language like “bomb them back to the Stone Age” that seems to invoke nuclear war.

This isn’t strategy, spin, or political 3-D chess: something is deeply wrong with this man, and American troops and Iranian schoolchildren are dying because of it. And it’s not just Trump’s critics or “liberals” noticing his rapidly increasing mental deterioration.

Laura Ingraham — hardly a member of the resistance, but a longtime Trump ally and one of the most reliable voices in the billionaire Murdoch media ecosystem — raised the question of Trump’s ability to “understand the complexity of this” out loud on her show.

“Was the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning?” she asked. “And was he then able to take it all in and understand the complexity of this, how complex it could actually get?”

Meanwhile, major conservative figures like Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, and other online and podcast-based influencers who once embraced Trump are starting to peel away, disturbed by the chaos and the drift toward a wider war that never would have happened if we’d had a rational president in control of his faculties and willing to listen to the experts around him.

None of this surprises longtime Trump watchers like his brilliant niece, psychologist Mary Trump, who wrote about his “decompensating” mental state:

“This isn’t a joke; this isn’t one more thing we can sweep under the rug. This issue, which is infinitely more important and serious than the... emails, needs to be on the front page of every newspaper…”

Trump is running the United States the same way he ran his businesses, but worse. Impulsively, recklessly, and with a long, well-documented history of failure. This is a man, after all, who bankrupted casinos; businesses so structurally profitable that, in normal hands, they’re almost impossible to kill. A man whose corporate history is littered with collapsed ventures, unpaid contractors, lawsuits, and burned partners.

Back then, it was just his own inherited wealth that he was destroying. Now he’s ruining America’s economy, our international standing, and has set up a military disaster in the most volatile region of the world. All while it appears he’s melting down.

Nuclear-armed powers are watching and American troops’ lives — and potentially millions of others — are now on the line. Trump’s lifelong pathological lying, his sociopathic disregard for anybody but himself, and his impulsivity are now all colliding with literally life-and-death stakes that make wrecking an airline, a steak business, or a casino seem insignificant.

First of all, he appears increasingly drunk on power, both in person and online. The bizarre, overblown language of his social media posts — “we’ve already won,” “militarily WON,” his declarations clearly detached from observable reality — increasingly read like something from a spoiled, over-emotional, always-got-his-way adolescent. Tearing down the East Wing. Running multiple grifts. Attacking foreign countries. Picking unnecessary fights with allies. Hanging Putin’s picture in the White House.

Second, unlike his first term, this time Trump’s surrounded himself entirely with toadies who are absolutely terrified to tell him no or even gently contradict him. The guardrails to impulsive or destructive behavior, the professionals and experts who surrounded him nine years ago and restrained him, however imperfectly, are long gone, and what’s left is an horror-movie-funhouse echo chamber of groveling flattery and silent, breath-holding fear. His cabinet meetings are downright shocking. He’s forcing Marco Rubio to wear shoes that don’t even fit.

And third — the part nobody in the GOP or the billionaire-owned rightwing media wants to say out loud — is the reality that he’s pushing 80, and it’s showing.

The contradictions are sharper, his claims more disconnected from reality, and his rhetorical tics like “more powerful than anybody ever imagined” feel like they’re coming from somebody who’s genuinely disoriented. His public comments and posts are becoming more erratic, more grandiose, and more uncoupled from the real events that the rest of us can easily see. It’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” except nobody near him has yet been willing to point out his nakedness.

This isn’t a partisan critique: I’m just observing a pattern that others have noticed as well. And it’s accelerating at a uniquely dangerous moment in world history.

James Madison warned us that war is “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” War, he noted, concentrates political power, erodes accountability, and creates the possibility that a president can essentially turn himself into a dictator.

So, that’s where we are now: a war launched and incoherently narrated by a man whose own words seem to randomly fall all over themselves. Who’s visibly losing it in real time.

A commander-in-chief who treats our troops like they’re objects, toy soldiers with tin tanks and planes, rather than human people with families and hopes for the future.

A government that’s drifting toward disaster, with congressional Republicans and his cabinet members too terrified to even squeak out the tiniest objection or concern.

This has gone way beyond politics; we’re now talking national — and, perhaps, planetary — survival. It’s way bigger than one sick old man who slathers his face in orange makeup and compulsively plasters everything around him with gold paint.

Republicans in Congress and the cabinet must decide whether their loyalty is to an aging, mentally ill, demonstrably incompetent man or to the nation and world he’s put at risk.

Because the cost of continued inaction here isn’t some abstraction; it’s already being paid in American blood and treasure, and could easily lead to an escalation that no one can deal with if it really starts to spin out of control. The echoes of World War I are too loud to ignore any longer.

There are two immediate constitutional remedies: Impeachment and removal from office, or the 25th Amendment.

If even a handful of Trump’s cabinet members can summon the courage to deal with the reality that we all saw last Wednesday, they could force him into retirement. Alternatively, if enough Republicans in Congress choose country over career, they could impeach him and thus end this crisis before it spirals further.

But the clock is ticking, the prime ministers of Great Britain and Australia are already warning their people, and strongman autocrats like Putin, MBS, and Netanyahu are rubbing their hands gleefully as America crashes and burns.

If we’re serious about avoiding a wider war — or worse, a global one — we may not have the luxury of waiting for November’s election; we need to push a few brave Republicans (if we can find them) to join all the Democrats and take action now.

Because last week's speech not only failed to tell us where this war is going but starkly shoved in all our faces the reality of how far gone the man leading it already is.

Margaret Ryan, the top enforcement official at the Securities and Exchange Commission — the agency tasked with investigating insider trading and other illegal activities in financial markets — abruptly resigned last week, after just six months on the job.

Reportedly, Ryan wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges of fraud and other misconduct, including against Trump’s inner circle. But the SEC’s chairman, Paul Atkins, and other Republican appointees to the commission wouldn’t let her.

When Trump appointed Atkins chair of the SEC, he was co-chair of the Token Alliance, a cryptocurrency advocacy group, and he owned $6 million worth of holdings in crypto-related businesses.

During Atkins’s time at the SEC, the commission has dropped or settled numerous lawsuits with cryptocurrency companies and adopted a lax regulatory approach to fraud.

It’s also avoided politically sensitive cases — such as, let me hazard a guess, insider trading by Trump’s family and cronies.

Why do I mention insider trading by Trump’s family and cronies?

Because on Monday, March 23, at 7:05 a.m. ET, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Washington had held “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS” with Tehran over a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION” to hostilities.

Immediately, the stock market roared to life. The S&P 500 futures soared more than 2.5 percent before the opening bell. And oil futures (bets on the future prices of oil) plummeted, dropping 14 percent in a matter of minutes.

But something very peculiar happened 15 minutes before Trump’s post.

I apologize in advance for giving you a bunch of charts, but it’s important that you see exactly what happened at 6:50 Eastern Time Monday morning.

At 6:49 a.m. ET, traders placed 734 bets on crude oil contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange. One minute later, at 6:50 a.m., that number had jumped to 2,168 — equivalent to about $170 million.

At the same time — 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement — West Texas Intermediate futures also saw a huge spike in trading activity.

The same pattern was seen in contracts for Brent crude, the other major oil benchmark. Between 6:48 a.m. and 6:50 a.m. ET, the volume of trades rose from 20 to more than 1,650. That’s about $150 million in contracts.

A similar spike in trades occurred between 6:49 a.m. and 6:50 a.m. ET in futures contracts for the Standard & Poor 500 stock index, the Euro Stoxx 50, and other stock markets.

At 6:50 AM ET, $1.5 billion in notional value of S&P 500 futures contracts were bought.

In other words, 15 minutes before Trump announced that the U.S. would postpone strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure, the volume of stock market trades mysteriously spiked and the price of oil just as mysteriously plunged.

Yet at that time — 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement — there were no public indications that any serious talks had been taking place between the U.S. and Iran.

So this huge spike in stock market trades and drop in oil futures must have been made by someone, or some people, who had prior knowledge of Trump’s announcement.

This person or these people made a boatload of money off this inside information.

But who was the inside trader, or traders, who placed such huge bets on Trump doing exactly what he did?

Could it be, say, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who is one of the people representing the United States in negotiations with Iran, and is also operating a private-equity firm with over $6 billion in investments, heavily funded by Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, especially Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund?

Or Steve Witkoff, who’s also representing the U.S. in these negotiations and who also has his own investment firm?

Or Howard Lutnick?

Or Melania?

Or all of them?

Who knows?

The Securities and Exchange Commission is in charge of policing against such insider trading. On the basis of the trading I mention above, ordinarily the SEC by now would have opened an investigation.

But so far, nothing.

This isn’t the first time spikes in betting have occurred just before Trump did something unexpected.

In January, wagers surged on Polymarket, a crypto-powered predictions platform, as bets were made on Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro being out of power by the end of the month. Hours later, he was seized by American forces. (One account made more than $436,000 from a $32,537 bet.)

Why should we worry about people with insider information profiting in the stock market, futures markets, or even crypto-powered predictions markets?

For one thing, it’s unfair. It hurts average investors while increasing the wealth of certain people who know, for example, what Trump is about to do (including Trump and members of his family).

For another, such rigging erodes public confidence in market fairness, which ultimately destroys markets. Put simply, if the public believes the market is rigged in favor of privileged individuals, they may withdraw their investments.

This is why the Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to police the market against insider trading.

And why we should all be concerned that the top enforcement officer at the SEC abruptly resigned last week because the SEC’s chairman and other Republican appointees wouldn’t allow her to be more aggressive in pursuing charges of fraud and other misconduct against Trump’s inner circle.

And why what occurred Monday morning, 15 minutes before Trump’s public announcement, is so damned troubling.

Friends, there’s a word for this. It’s called corruption.

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.