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— So, we’re back to firing squads. In the year 2026, the United States government has officially decided that lining up human beings and shooting them to death is an acceptable use of federal power, as Todd Blanche announced this week. And the loudest voices cheering it on are the same hypocrites who never shut up about being “pro-life.”
Joe Biden got this right when he suspended the federal death penalty, and he got it right for exactly the reason he said: he’s a Catholic, he’s a Christian, and he actually believes what those traditions teach about the dignity of human life.
The Catechism is not subtle on this. Pope Francis called the death penalty inadmissible, full stop. John Paul II spent years pleading with governors and presidents to spare condemned prisoners. When the government kills someone in our name, we’re part of it. Our tax dollars buy the bullets, our flag flies over the chamber, and our silence is the permission slip. It coarsens us, and drops us into the category of brutal dictatorships that routinely kill their own people. Strapping a man to a chair, shooting him, or pumping him full of chemicals while witnesses watch through glass, isn’t justice: it’s ritualized brutality.
Firing squads. In America. In 2026. G-d help us, because we are clearly not going to help ourselves.

— Trump’s approval rating and Americans’ economic sentiment collapse together. We’re not yet in a depression or even a recession, but 45 years of Reaganomics — gutted unions, frozen minimum wage, taxes on working people but not billionaires or giant corporations, jobs sent overseas, student debt, exploding medical and housing costs — have left people feeling like we are.
Trump promised to fix it. Instead, he’s made it so much worse that he’s set a record no president wants. His net approval on the economy has cratered to minus 32 — the lowest of any president at this point in any term in modern polling history. Biden, whom Trump mocked relentlessly on the economy, was at minus 25 — seven points better. George W. Bush, also minus 25. Jimmy Carter, the punching bag Trump has invoked for a decade, was at minus 22, a full 10 points better.
Trump entered his second term at plus six, elected because voters trusted him over Kamala Harris on the economy; that’s a nearly 40-point collapse in just over a year. Tariffs, chaos, family grifts, and billionaire giveaways are the economy he’s delivered, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better because of his blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
Reagan built the trap. Trump inherited it, promised to smash it, and instead sprang it on the very suckers voters who elected him.

— Has Trump’s mental health deteriorated so badly he’s a danger to the world? Even his longtime friends are saying yes, now on national television. On Morning Joe Friday, Rev. Al Sharpton — who has known Trump for decades as contemporaries in New York City society — told co-host Jonathan Lemire that Americans should be worried about the president’s state of mind. The trigger: a 79-year-old president posting on Truth Social well after 2 a.m., only to resume again five hours later, ranting about prosecuting the Clintons and whatever else crossed his mind.
Sharpton called the behavior unstable, which is an understatement. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is doing a better job managing the White House than anyone did in term one, but as Sharpton put it, “they’re not containing him.” In the middle of the night, alone with his phone, the president can flip everything from policy to prosecutions to war. America now has a sleep-deprived, paranoid 79-year-old with the nuclear codes who’s awake at 2 a.m. posting rage into a phone and nobody can stop him. What could possibly go wrong? It’s long past time for Congress and his Cabinet to act.

— Brown skin, speak Spanish, even US citizens get deported by Trump’s ICE. Brian José Morales García, 25, was born in Denver and spent much of his life in Mexico where his family lived. When ICE picked him up during a “routine traffic stop” looking for brown-skinned people (now authorized by Pillsbury Doughboy/accused-rapist Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court), he begged to be allowed to go home to get his birth certificate and ID. They said no and shipped him to Mexico.
Here’s the kicker: no U.S. citizen is legally required to carry proof of citizenship while riding shotgun to a job site in Fredericksburg. Morales had his birth certificate, his Social Security card, and hospital records from the Denver hospital where he was born: his lawyer has them all. DHS still insists he’s lying and hasn’t bothered to explain away a single document. A ProPublica investigation found more than 170 U.S. citizens were detained by ICE in just the first nine months of Trump’s second term. Morales is the first we know of who was actually deported. He won’t be the last.

— Trump continues to help Putin by coming up with ways to “punish” NATO allies as he tries to fracture the alliance. The Reuters-obtained memo, reportedly drafted by Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby, floats suspending Spain from NATO for refusing to let the U.S. use its Rota and Morón bases to strike Iran, and even includes reviewing the U.K.’s claim to the Falkland Islands, a gift-wrapped favor to Trump’s buddy Javier Milei in Argentina. NATO’s own charter has no mechanism for expelling a member, so this is pure vandalism. Every headline about Washington threatening Madrid or London is another night Putin sleeps well in the Kremlin.

— DeSantis wants to further rig Florida’s electoral maps for Trump. Florida’s constitution flat-out bans drawing congressional districts with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party,” a rule Florida voters themselves approved. But on Tuesday, Ron DeSantis is calling lawmakers to Tallahassee to do exactly that. His plan is a three-tiered end run: draft the maps in secret inside the governor’s office so there’s no paper trail, hide behind executive privilege when the lawsuits come, and run out the clock under the Purcell Principle, which discourages judges from fixing maps close to an election. Republicans already hold 20 of Florida’s 28 House seats even though in the last statewide election Trump got 56% of the vote, not the 71% representation Florida Republicans already have in the US House. DeSantis wants three to five more.
This is what the national redistricting war Trump launched in Texas actually looks like up close: elected officials openly admitting they can’t win a fair fight and plotting how to avoid one. Virginia Democrats just punched back with voter-approved new districts of their own, up to four more Democratic-leaning seats, because, sadly, when one side is cheating, refusing to cheat back is called “losing.”

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— Trump Moves Toward $20 Billion Iran Deal After Blasting Obama for Far Less. Remember when President Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2015 (which ended their uranium enrichment and led to the release of 4 US hostages they held) and part of the deal was to return $400 million of their own money to them that we’d held frozen for years? Trump went nuts, calling a press conference and saying, “Iran was in big trouble, they had sanctions, they were dying, we took off the sanctions and made this horrible deal and now they’re a power. We paid $400 million for the hostages. Such a bad precedent was set by Obama. … What we’re doing is insane.” Well, it appears that insanity is contagious: multiple sources are reporting that the Trump regime is considering giving the Iranian government as much as $20 billion for the uranium they have. After the deal was reported, Trump claimed it was never serious; did he just get caught? Will it go forward anyway? It’s really impossible to know when Mango Mussolini is so desperate for a way out of his insane, illegal war, so seriously mentally ill, and so deeply unstable…

— Is Cuba next? Trump has already commenced violent hostilities and war-making — without congressional authority and without provocation — against Iran, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nigeria and Somalia and now it appears that Cuba will be next. The guy revels in blood, be it watching gladiators bloody each other in UFC fights, watching the daily “blow them up” reels the Pentagon gives him of people he’s killing in small boats in the Caribbean and in Iran, or cheering on Netanyahu’s slaughters in Gaza and now Lebanon. He apparently gets joy from pain and death, like every other psychopathic leader in history. Now we learn that the Pentagon is laying the groundwork for an invasion of Cuba. Because, of course, why not? If nothing else, ‘Lil Marco thinks it’ll help his ‘28 presidential chances, and every Republican in the House and Senate except a small handful have given him complete authority to ignore the Constitution and Congress. He said on Monday, “We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this,” and last month said he hopes to have “the honor of taking Cuba,” adding that he “can do anything I want with it.” This is Caligula-level hubris. Congress must act to reign this in, and then follow it up by impeaching him.

— Trump Eyes Billions From IRS in Stunning Cash Grab. Looks like billions of your and my tax dollars are going straight into Trump’s money bin. An IRS official leaked some of Trump’s tax information to the press years ago, so now he’s suing the IRS for $10 billion for his pain and suffering. Instead of fighting the lawsuit, the agency — which falls under the Executive Branch and is headed up by Trump’s billionaire New York real estate buddy Scott Bessent, who works for Trump — is now “negotiating” with Trump to decide how many millions or billions they’ll give him to make the lawsuit go away. As he said in a moment of cynical candor: “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself. We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care, because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.” Right. Like the children’s cancer charity he and Eric stole from? Or the phony Trump Foundation that gave a big bribe to Pam Bondi when she began to investigate his phony university back when she was Florida AG, and then was shut down with a court order that all 3 of his children take classes in how to not scam people with nonprofits? Can you imagine the media meltdown if a Democrat had done something like this? They swooned for a week when Obama wore a tan suit…

— Is the Grocery Aisle the New Front Line of Economic Crisis? The recession is real: people are using credit to buy groceries. About a third of Buy Now Pay Later users (29 percent) are using these high-interest short-term credit programs to buy groceries, a big spike up from 14 percent two years ago, with 38 percent of Gen Z’ers saying they’ve done the same. Forty-seven percent of them also report they’ve been late making BNPL payments in the past year since Trump began his “Liberation Day” tariffs and took an axe to our economy. Ten of the last eleven recessions happened during Republican presidencies, almost always following massive tax breaks for billionaires and cuts to benefits for poor and middle-class people. GOP policies are designed to impoverish most Americans while creating an elite upper class; they’re just a reboot of a system that Adam Smith characterized in the 1700s in his book A Theory of Moral Sentiments and have been pushed by billionaires or their equivalent in every generation since. Warren Buffett famously said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” He was right.

— Did a Trump Megadonor Just Prove ‘America First’ Was Always Optional? One of Trump’s biggest donors — over $50 million — is moving a small musical instrument factory to China, killing 150 jobs in Eastlake, Ohio. This is, of course, what billionaires do; squeeze every imaginable penny out of everything they touch. Billionaire John Paulson could have just continued to operate the factory he bought — which has supplied brass instruments to high school marching bands for generations — but, hey, he could make a few extra bucks by using cheap Chinese labor instead. His MAGA workers are feeling betrayed with one telling a reporter, “I’m starting to regret my vote for Trump.” Nonetheless, the cult runs deep; five of six MAGA workers who’ll now be unemployed tell reporters they’ll continue to vote for Republicans. After all, they all hate the same (Black, Hispanic, Queer) people, right? And that’s what counts the most…

— When an 85-Year-Old Gets Detained, What Does It Say About ICE? France is outraged at ICE brutality against an 85-year-old French woman who’d come to America to marry her wartime sweetheart. Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé came here on a tourist visa and forgot to renew it; ICE busted her and threw her into a hellhole concentration camp for weeks. She was released this week after intervention by the French government, which is furious. Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said she was subject to “acts of violence” and the story is all over the French newspapers. She’d married former American GI Bill Ross, who she’d met in the 1950s at a NATO base in France, and the couple reconnected decades later after both were widowed. She’d started the formal immigration process to get a green card, which may be what flagged ICE that she was in the system (some reports suggest her husband’s son, a former cop, turned her in to get more of his dad’s estate). We’re holding at least 70,000 people, including thousands of children, in these brutal camps with no due process. Meanwhile, ICE is hiring people who’ve been fired by police departments and flunked out of police academies in their effort to get as many masked, armed thugs onto the streets as they can before the election this fall. Fourteen months into his chancellorship, Hitler only had 40,000 people in his detention camps; history tells us where this all goes and it ain’t pretty…

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— Sure is starting to smell like Vietnam… If you’re not old enough to remember the early days of the Vietnam war, ask somebody who was; the bravado, the bullshit coming from the SecDef, the president who’s afraid of being criticized as “weak” by “conservatives” if he doesn’t “win the war,” and the skepticism of the American people are all echoing so loudly it’s impossible to miss. Whiskey Pete, the wife-abusing alcoholic Fox “News” B-lister Trump put in charge of our military because he “looked strong” is proving to be every bit as incompetent and disastrous as the guy who appointed him. The most unqualified and frankly disastrous leader of our military in history — openly bragging about committing war crimes while trash-talking the Geneva Convention with his insane riffs about about “no quarter” and “no woke rules of engagement” — just purged the top ranks of our military again. He just canned Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, four-star general David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain. Nobody’s sure exactly why (or if the timing of Bondi’s firing was designed to distract us from this) but speculation largely falls to two explanations. First, these are competent professional military men who most likely told Whiskey Pete and Trump the truth about what a disaster attacking Iran would be, and how it would be illegal to do it without congressional authorization, so they had to be removed. As Senator Chris Murphy noted, “It’s likely that experienced generals are telling Hegseth his Iran war plans are unworkable, disastrous, and deadly.” Only toadies, lickspittles, and sycophants allowed here. The other possibility is that they objected to Petey inserting himself into the promotion process explicitly to stop women and Black men from rising into the most senior ranks. Or both. Whatever it is, following on his gutting the JAG corps (which advises officers about what are and are not war crimes) and his previous attacks on Blacks and women, this is the lowest point for our military in my lifetime, and probably yours, too.

— Who was General George, who Whiskey Pete just fired? General Randy A. George enlisted in the Army in 1982, fought his way into West Point, and then spent a career in the active duty infantry from platoon leader in the 101st Airborne in Desert Storm to multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, commanding battalions, brigades, a division, and I Corps before becoming the 41st Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. Along the way he earned a Bronze Star with three oak leaf clusters, a Purple Heart, a Combat Infantryman Badge, a Ranger tab, and a senior parachutist badge with a combat jump; the résumé of someone who has led from the front and bled with his soldiers. Whiskey Pete, on the other hand, essentially bankrupted two small veterans charities that he was supposed to be running while he was busy getting drunk and cheating on his wife.

— Is the Supreme Court about to become even more bizarre and corrupt than it already is? Speculation is rife in DC that Sam Alito and possibly Clarence Thomas — the two most extreme neo-fascists and on-the-take betrayers of the rule of law — are planning to retire this summer, giving Trump the opportunity to turn the Court into a 5-4 Trump-appointed majority. Alito has apparently penned a book, which some see as a sign he’s paving the way for his departure. Since Mango Mussolini is furious right now with his own appointees because they didn’t appear to roll over for his Birthright Citizenship scam attempt, odds are anybody he puts forward will be even more extreme than anybody currently there. Aileen Cannon, anyone? Or Matthew Kacsmaryk? The former helped Trump avoid prosecution in Florida for stealing and disseminating Top Secret documents essential to national security, and the latter tried to outlaw abortion pills nationwide. And there’s always John Eastman, even though he’s already been disbarred; with Trump, anything is possible. Get ready.

— Gas prices got you down? A new report by Democratic members of the Joint Economic Committee finds that just during the first month of Trump’s criminal war against Iran American drivers paid fully $8.4 billion more at the pump for gas than they would have had the war not driven up the price of oil. While he’s borrowed over $7 trillion in our names and given it to his billionaire buddies as tax cuts and run up our national debt higher and faster than any president in American history, Trump appears determined to drain every last cent he and his greedy buddies in the fossil fuel industry can get from average working people. He took billions from us in tariffs, and now they’re screwing us on the price of gas and diesel, since their costs haven’t gone up a penny but they’re sure happy to use the war as an excuse to jack up prices. This after killing off the VA program that kept over 10,000 veterans in their homes (with another 90,000 facing foreclosure in the coming month or two), gutting food aid, decimating Medicaid, and telling us all this past week that he really doesn’t have the time and America doesn’t have the budget for Medicare. When billionaires first declared war on the American working class with the Reagan Revolution in 1981, most people just thought it was a labor dispute with the air traffic controllers and an “adjustment” to tax rates; now the naked attack the morbidly rich have spearheaded against our middle class is impossible to ignore.

— JD Vance (or whatever his name is this week) is now in charge of Project Screw Blue States. Trump named him the “fraud czar” yesterday and told him to go after Democratic-run states, specifically “California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine, and New York.” In an announcement unconsciously rich with irony and double entendre, Trump began the announcement on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site with this line for the ages: “Vice President JD Vance is now in charge of ‘FRAUD’ in the United States.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

— Is Vance now the Vice President of Hungary? JD Vance flies to Budapest April 7th and 8th, four days before Hungary’s election. His mission is clear: boost Trump ally and fellow neofascist Viktor Orbán, whose Fidesz party is trailing in the polls for the first time in sixteen years. Trump has already endorsed Orbán on social media, calling him a “truly strong and powerful leader.” Secretary of State Rubio visited Budapest in February. Now Vance goes in for the close. Political analysts say the American intervention won’t shift the outcome since Hungarians are focused on kitchen-table issues. But the principle matters. For generations, American presidents stayed out of foreign elections. Orbán has gutted Hungary’s democratic institutions, had his friendly oligarchs take over all of the nation’s media (just like Putin did in Russian), packed the courts with sniveling toadies, and earned repeated EU sanctions for acting like a dictator and throwing in with Putin (he’s currently blocking EU loans to Ukraine). When the United States campaigns for a foreign autocrat, we’re not spreading democracy. We’re exporting its opposite.

— The West is drying up and Republicans who take money from the fossil fuel industry are trying to ignore it. Scientists are sounding a full alarm about a snowpack collapse across the American West unlike anything in the historical record. The Great Basin is at just 16 percent of average snowpack. The lower Colorado River basin, which supplies water to more than 40 million people, is at 10 percent. The Rio Grande is at 8 percent. During a California survey Wednesday, officials found zero measurable snow at a Sierra Nevada site where they’d normally stand knee-deep in snowpack. March 2026 was the warmest March on record, and that heat wiped out snowpack that should have lasted well into summer. Salt Lake City is already urging water conservation. Colorado and Wyoming are moving toward outdoor watering bans. Wildfire season is arriving weeks early. As one climatologist put it, the changes we’ve set in motion are going to be catastrophic. The West is running out of water and time.

— Trump has released his budget and wants $500 billion more for the military to pay for his war against Iran. He proposes to fund it by cutting:

• $510 million - Grants for farmers and agricultural research

• $82 million - Loans for rural small businesses (Fully eliminated)

• $61 million - Support for farmers and food markets (Fully eliminated)

• $240 million - School meals and food education for children abroad (Fully eliminated)

• $659 million - Community building grants

• $47 million - Support for minority-owned businesses (Fully eliminated)

• $449 million - Economic development grants for communities

• $1.6 billion - Weather forecasting, fisheries, and coastal protection (NOAA)

• $993 million - Scientific research and technology standards

• $150 million - Support for American exports and trade

• $2.2 billion - Broadband and internet access programs

• $8.5 billion - Funding for public schools

• $1.5 billion - Vocational training and adult education (Fully eliminated)

• $2.7 billion - College access and higher education support

• $15.2 billion - Roads, bridges, and infrastructure projects

• $1.1 billion - Home energy efficiency and clean energy programs (Fully eliminated)

• $1.1 billion - Scientific research funding

• $386 million - Environmental cleanup programs

• $150 million - Cutting-edge clean energy research

• $4 billion - Help paying home heating and cooling bills for low-income families (Fully eliminated)

• $768 million - Refugee resettlement assistance

• $819 million - Care and shelter for migrant children

• $775 million - Local anti-poverty programs (Fully eliminated)

• $5 billion - Public health programs, mental health services, and disease prevention

• $5 billion - Medical research (NIH)

• $129 million - Healthcare quality and safety research

• $356 million - Emergency preparedness and disaster response

• $1.3 billion - FEMA community disaster preparedness grants

• $707 million - Cybersecurity protection for critical infrastructure

• $52 million - Airport and transportation security

• $40 million - Protection against chemical and biological weapons threats

• $53 million - Funding for homeland security operations

• $3.3 billion - Community development block grants for local neighborhoods (Fully eliminated)

• $1.3 billion - Affordable housing construction grants (Fully eliminated)

• $393 million - Programs to reduce homelessness

• $529 million - Housing assistance for people living with HIV/AIDS (Fully eliminated)

• $489 million - Housing and services for Native American communities

• $50 million - Grants to help communities build more housing (Fully eliminated)

• $60 million - Enforcement of fair housing and anti-discrimination laws

• $58 million - Homebuyer and renter counseling services (Fully eliminated)

• $45 million - Renewable energy development programs (Fully eliminated)

• $1.7 billion - Grants for local law enforcement and public safety

• $20 million - Civil rights mediation and legal access programs (Fully eliminated)

• $1.6 billion - Job training for at-risk youth (Fully eliminated)

• $395 million - Jobs program for low-income seniors (Fully eliminated)

• $234 million - Worker safety and labor protection programs

• $101 million - Enforcement of equal pay and workplace anti-discrimination laws

• $46 million - Programs to combat child labor and forced labor abroad

• $2 billion - International humanitarian aid

• $1.2 billion - Food aid for hungry families abroad (Fully eliminated)

• $4.3 billion - Global health and disease prevention programs

• $2.7 billion - Funding for the United Nations and international partnerships

• $642 million - International economic and treasury programs

• $315 million - Democracy and anti-corruption programs abroad

• $486 million - Grants for public transit projects

• $4.2 billion - Electric vehicle charging infrastructure

• $372 million - Airline service for rural and small communities

• $145 million - Grants for sustainable and equitable infrastructure

• $204 million - Loans and investment for underserved communities

• $1.4 billion - IRS taxpayer services and enforcement

• $100 million - Air pollution monitoring and reduction programs (Fully eliminated)

• $1 billion - EPA grants to states for environmental protection

• $2.5 billion - Clean drinking water and wastewater infrastructure funds

• $90 million - Grants to reduce diesel pollution (Fully eliminated)

• $3.4 billion - NASA space and earth science research

• $297 million - NASA technology innovation programs

• $1.1 billion - International Space Station operations

• $143 million - STEM education programs

• $309 million - Small business development and entrepreneurship programs

• $170 million - Small Business Administration operations

• $158 million - Loans for small businesses

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— Is the Supreme Court preparing to take a knife to mail-in voting just in time for the midterms?. In Watson v. Republican National Committee, a case pushed all the way up to SCOTUS by billionaire Trump buddies, the litigants want the Court’s corrupt Republicans to block states from counting mail ballots arriving after Election Day, even if they’re postmarked on or before the deadline. The ruling could toss out millions of mail-in ballots in the 18 states that currently offer a grace period. If you’re standing in line to vote in person when the polls close, you’re generally allowed to continue forward and vote; counting ballots that were cast/mailed on or before election day but arrived and were counted after is essentially the same thing. But this is just another of the many ways Republicans and Trump are trying to make it harder to vote, and the corrupt, on-the-take rightwingers on the Court appear inclined to go along with the regime’s argument. Why? Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich laid it out during Reagan’s 1980 election when he told a Dallas church basement full of Republican activists: “I don’t want everybody to vote... As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” The GOP took it to heart, and as a result America is now the only developed, functioning democracy in the world where the “right to vote” is so narrowly circumscribed that millions lose out on their opportunity to select their leaders.

— Trump’s war against Iran to help Putin, MBS, Kushner, and Netanyahu rolls on, and the risks to America and world peace get worse every day. When Netanyahu, MBS, and Putin advised billionaires Kushner, Witknoff, and Trump that it’d be a walk in the park to take out the Iranian government, they were able to convince the stupidest president in American history that it’d be quick and would help him recover his poll ratings. Just like Reagan’s “little war” against Grenada helped his 1984 reelection and Bush’s wars against Iraq and Afghanistan got him reelected in 2004. Predictably — at least for every rational diplomat and political/military observer in the world — it’s not working out that way. Trump’s repeatedly said that “nobody could have known” Iran would shoot back, hit nearby US-aligned countries, or shut what he calls the “Straight” of Hormuz, although the record shows that everybody in his senior chain of command and his briefers all told him to expect those results. So now, like LBJ in Vietnam in 1966 and Bush in Iraq in 2005, it appears he’s going to double down. The Wall Street Journal just reported: “The Pentagon is looking at sending up to 10,000 additional ground troops to the Middle East to give President Trump more military options even as he weighs peace talks with Tehran, Defense Department officials with knowledge of the planning said.” This idiocy is exactly why the Framers of the Constitution gave Congress the exclusive power to declare war. And why attacking Iran when they represented absolutely no threat to the US or direct US interests is a war crime under both US and international law. I can hardly wait to see Trump in the cell next to Milosovich and Duterte in the Hague.

— Trump’s war on Iran is the best gift he’s given Putin in years, even better than when he hung Putin’s picture in the White House with the former American presidents. Bloomberg is reporting that “Ukraine risks running out of money by June” because Putin/Trump ally Viktor Orbán is doing his best to repay Putin for help in the upcoming Hungarian election: “Ukraine needs US$52 billion in foreign assistance for 2026 defense spending but could run out of money by April as a €90 billion EU loan remains blocked by Hungary's veto. The shortfall threatens troop salaries, drone production, and air defense purchases critical to the war effort.” Meanwhile, the US is burning through so much high-tech missile and other anti-aircraft and offensive ordinance in the Persian Gulf that observers in south Asia are worried that we’re also on the verge of no longer being able to protect Taiwan from an attack by China. And the spike in oil prices has rescued billionaire Putin’s failing economy, as Politico reports: “Trump administration officials have begun warning countries that U.S. weapons supplies to Ukraine may be interrupted in the coming months as the Pentagon prioritizes their use for the war in Iran.” This morbidly rich idiot man-child in the White House and the lickspittles surrounding him appear to be on the verge of destroying a world order that took millions of deaths in WWII and 80 years of diplomacy to create and sustain. All so he could boost his poll numbers with a “little war,” get the charge of him raping a 13-year-old off the front pages, and give his sons an opportunity to make billions selling drones to the Pentagon. Trump family first, billionaires second, America and democracy last…

— Donald Trump, according to his alcoholic, woman-abusing “Secretary of War,” doesn’t “want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events.” So Hegseth is blocking the promotion of four Black and female officers, while moving up about three dozen white men, according to The New York Times. Their article opens with: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is blocking the promotion of four Army officers to be one-star generals, a highly unusual move that has prompted some senior military officials to question whether the officers are being singled out because of their race or gender.” This follows Hegseth and his apparatchiks previously removing from command or blocking promotions of dozens of other female flag officers, including Cmdr. Sarah M. Quemada, Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, and Cmdr. Angela Gonzales, as well as numerous Black male officers. The blatant misogyny and racism of this regime is astonishing and, frankly, disgusting. Most recently, Trump and Senate Republicans put a former plumber (Markwayne Mullin) without even a college education and no major institution management experience whatsoever (although he was once an MMA fighter) in charge of the Department of Homeland Security. This “white men only” and “big muscles preferred” policy is apparently Trump’s version of DEI…

— In his best imitation of one of Stalin’s or Putin’s toadies, FCC Chairman and Trump brown-noser Brendan Carr bragged about his role, and rightwing billionaire’s help, in censoring major American media. At the CPAC conference in Texas this week, he told the assembled cult members:
“When he ran for office, he ran directly at the fake news media,. He said, ‘You don’t get to decide what we say, what we think, how we’re gonna vote inside the voting booth.’ President Trump took on the fake news media, and President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far. PBS — defunded. NPR — defunded. Joy Reid — gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-eyed Chuck Todd — gone. Jim Acosta — gone. JohnDickerson — gone. [Stephen] Colbert is leaving, CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough, CNN is gonna have new ownership as well. So, we’re not at the point yet where we’re raising the ‘mission accomplished’ flag, but President Trump is taking on the fake news media, and President Trump is winning.”
So, when do Democrats start yelling about “conservative bias” in the “rightwing media”? When will progressive billionaires start buying media outlets? And what are the Democrats’ plans to enforce the nation’s anti-trust laws the next time they’re in power? Inquiring minds want to know.

— Our grifter billionaire president offered “anything you want” to morbidly rich fossil fuel executives if they’d just give him piles of campaign money and backdoor dark funds for his own use, and is now following through by blocking the Endangered Species Act. Ground News reports: “The administration argues that none of the Endangered Species Act’s requirements apply due to national security concerns, as stated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.” At risk is the entire Gulf of Mexico, as Trump opens it up for deepwater drilling that’s even more dangerous and precarious than what led to the Deepwater Horizon blowout. At the same time, he’s killing off wind and solar projects that could help insure America’s energy independence for the rest of the century. Then, as William Shakespeare warned centuries ago, “the fool doth think he is wise,” and nothing proves it more starkly than reopening the depths of the Gulf to the very same reckless drilling that once set it ablaze.

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— A Dangerous Deal Behind Closed Doors: Is Trump Letting Putin Reshape U.S. Foreign Policy? Putin offered to stop sharing intel with Iran if the US just cuts off Ukraine so he can kill as many people there as possible. This is going to be a tough one for Trump, since he’s been Putin’s guy for decades and pretty much always does exactly what Putin tells him to; he’s even hung Putin’s picture in the White House along with the pictures of past American presidents as a gesture of groveling homage. But there’s still strong support for Ukraine in Congress, even among a majority of Republicans, and, as Politico notes: “[T]he sheer existence of such a proposal has sparked concern among European diplomats, who worry Moscow is trying to drive a wedge between Europe and the U.S. at a critical moment for transatlantic relations.” As if Putin hasn’t already succeeded — with his regular secret phone calls with Trump — in driving a wedge between the US and Europe. Trump is now constantly trash-talking the EU, NATO, and Zelenskyy using language that’s almost always nearly identical to Putin’s. Trump thought he was a great war tactician and strategist and could, with his fellow corrupt politician Bibi Netanyahu, try what no American president had before been stupid enough to do and attack Iran. It backfired (as, apparently, General Caine predicted) and now he’s frantic, so get ready for this to get a hell of lot messier as Trump’s now bringing a new warship and thousands of marines into the Gulf while Bibi gleefully escalates into a bloody killing spree against civilians in both Lebanon and Iran, much like he did in Gaza. Only this time, Trump and America will own this war…

— Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0: Will Trump Confront Putin, or Fold? As a favor to his friend/boss/owner Putin, Trump has suspended most worldwide sanctions on the sale of Russian oil, so now two massive tankers filled with Russian oil are steaming their way to Cuba, which Trump has had under siege (a war crime) long enough that power systems are collapsing, people are going hungry, hospitals are shutting down, and the island is in total crisis. (Previously, they’d been getting their oil from Venezuela, but Trump put an end to that when he took out Maduro.) So, to tighten the screws on Cuba, Trump’s Treasury poodle, billionaire Scott Bessent, just had the Treasury Department on Thursday publish a new list of countries that we’ll block from accepting Russian oil, and the only country on the list is Cuba. It appears that the tankers are still steaming toward the island nation, and when they get there it’ll be a whole new crisis for Trump. Does he stand up to Putin and block the tankers or even seize them? Or will he stand down and let Putin “save the day” for the Cubans? And if the former, could this spark a confrontation that rivals the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we were just hours away from nuclear war? And what about refugees? Rightwing Senator Tom Cotton asked the CENTCOM general in charge this past week, “Are we prepared for any kind of humanitarian crisis in Cuba—the possible flow of refugees, other civil disorder that may threaten our interests, especially if the decrepit, corrupt Castro regime finally falls or flees?” General Donovan told him they’re preparing Gitmo to deal with the refugees, which is pretty bizarre given the scale and scope of this crisis. The mind-boggling incompetence and bad faith of the Trump regime is both astonishing and dangerous. Keep an eye on this one.

— Will Colombia be the next country Trump invades or whose leadership he tries to decapitate? Trump has ordered his lickspittles Pam Bondi and Ka$h Patel to open criminal investigations into Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a move similar to what preceded his invasion of Venezuela where he abducted President Maduro and brought him to the US to face charges. The orange man-baby is apparently infuriated that Petro has called out his criminal activities in blowing up small boats in the Caribbean and his snatching Maduro, both clearly illegal under both US and international law. Step by step, country by country, it appears that Trump reading those “Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler” that sat beside his bed for years (per Ivana’s autobiography) have sunk in. He’s the first leader of a western nation to invade two countries and threaten a third within a year since the 1930s in Europe. What’s next? France? Greenland? Oh, yeah, that’s already “on the table…”

— America’s Healthcare Collapse Is Here, and It Was Written Into Law. Just as Democrats predicted when the One Big Beautiful Bill passed with all-Republican votes, millions of Americans are now uninsured. In addition to giving billionaires around $5 trillion in tax cuts, the OBBB also did away with the most recent Obamacare subsidies, jacking people’s healthcare premiums into the stratosphere. The result has been that millions of families — about one in ten previously covered by the Affordable Care Act — are now lacking any sort of medical insurance whatsoever. Republicans are delighted, and Trump’s offering a new “cheap” ACA plan with $31,000 deductibles, a genuinely insane idea in a country where 60% of Americans can end up homeless if they’re hit with an unexpected $1000 expense. But, hey, the billionaires got their tax cut so now they’re paying virtually nothing in taxes, including billionaire Trump, his multimillionaire kids and wife, the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and the hundreds of billionaires who’ve ponied up hundreds of millions to fund his campaigns, ballroom, library, crypto, and every other scam he can dream up. Life’s good when you’re morbidly rich; the rest of us can “just eat cake” — when we can find stale packages of it in the dumpsters behind America’s grocery stores.

— Another death in ICE custody: How many more before anyone is held accountable? The 14th person to die in ICE custody so far this year is a 19-year-old young man named Royer Perez-Jimenez. He was mysteriously declared dead — although ICE refuses to release the medical examiner’s report and cause of death — this past Monday. The facility had been shut down by Biden because of “worms in food, malfunctioning toilets and overflowing sewage” and “a near-fatal carbon monoxide leak last November; and regular exposure to highly dangerous levels of a toxic disinfectant chemical spray linked to severe medical harms” among other outrages; Miller and Trump ordered the concentration camp re-opened when they took over the government. ICE claimed they’d arrested Royer for having committed a crime, but are now refuse to produce an arrest warrant or any details of why he was snatched and detained. But some ICE agent, somewhere, made another $2500 on the “got another brown person” bounty, in addition to the $150,000 annual salary and $60,000 signing bonus. Why the hell can’t we pay teachers like this?

— Meet the new Kyrsten Sinema: John Fetterman. Sinema famously sold out her party and her country in exchange for campaign contributions and other gifts; now, it appears, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senator John Fetterman is doing the same. He’s declared he’ll support former MMA fighter Markwayne Mullin (who’s totally unqualified; he doesn’t have a college degree, no experience in law enforcement, and no management experience whatsoever) to run the 200,000+ employee Department of Homeland Security, replacing Kristi Noem who’s leaving enshrouded in scandal. Even Republican committee Chairman Rand Paul is voting against Mullin. Fetterman’s also supporting Trump’s attacks on Iran, Bibi Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza, and the GOP’s voter suppression SAVE Act. Democrats in Pennsylvania are furious, but Fetterman has another 3 years to go before they can vote him out of office. Every new Congress, Republicans identify one or two Democrats they can seduce, threaten, bribe, or otherwise sway to betray their own party. Last time around it was Sinema and Joe Manchin; this time it’s Fetterman. It’s sick.

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— Trump chuckles as he admits Putin is helping Iran kill American troops. It’s a grim reminder of when Putin was paying bounties to Afghan militants to kill our soldiers and, when Trump was confronted about it, he defended Putin and called it a “hoax.” Even though the source of the information was US intelligence agencies and the briefing had come from his own administration. Now Putin’s at it again, this time helping Iran kill at least a dozen US soldiers so far, and Trump actually laughed when asked about it, saying that Putin was just doing what we’re doing to him in Ukraine, so it’s all okay. Here’s how Raw Story reported Trump’s response to Brian Kilmead asking him to confirm that Putin is helping Iranians kill Americans: “Yeah, we’re helping them also,” Trump agreed, chuckling, “and he says that, and China would say the same thing, you know. It’s like, ‘Hey, they do it, and we do it, in all fairness.’ They do it, and we do it.” And then, as six more US airmen died in a plane crash over Iraq in support of our Iran mission, Trump started dancing. Can you imagine the GOP and media response if Obama had — twice — just shrugged his shoulders when he was told Russia was killing Americans and then went partying? This disgusting husk of a man must be impeached as quickly as possible.

— The lie heard around the world: Trump told our allies Iran was surrendering, but Iran didn’t get the memo. Trump told G7 leaders in a private call this week that Iran was “about to surrender.” Three officials from three countries confirmed it to Axios. He bragged that Operation Epstein Fury got rid of a “cancer threatening us all,” then claimed that “nobody knows” who Iran’s leader is, so there’s “no one left” who can announce a surrender. Hours later, Iran’s actual new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei went on state TV vowing to avenge martyrs (Trump’s and Netanyahu’s strike killed his wife, mother, father, brother, and other relatives), keep the Strait of Hormuz shut, and attack U.S. bases. That same night, two tankers were set ablaze in the Strait. Oil is over a hundred dollars a barrel. On a phone call Thursday, every other G7 leader pushed Trump to end the war, but European officials described him as “ambiguous and noncommittal.” When a president misleads allies during a live war celebrated by Putin, the entire world pays the price, as does America.

— The war comes home, as they always do. An Israeli strike in Lebanon killed two of Ghazli’s (the attacker of of the Michigan synagogue) brothers and two of his brother’s children. The FBI — what’s left of it after Ka$h Patel fired the team responsible for tracking Iranian terror operations in the US — is also investigating the two separate attacks that happened this week. In Michigan, an armed man drove a car into Temple Israel, a synagogue, before exchanging gunfire with security officers. Authorities say the suspect, 41-year-old Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, was killed at the scene. Ghazali was a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Lebanon. According to reporting confirmed by NPR, two of his brothers and two of their children were killed earlier this month during an Israeli strike in Lebanon, and his parents were wounded and remain hospitalized. In Virginia, another attack took place inside a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps classroom at Old Dominion University. Police identified the gunman as 36-year-old Mohamed Bailor Jalloh of Sterling, Virginia. Jalloh opened fire in the classroom, killing one person and wounding two others before members of the ROTC class tackled him. He was ultimately killed during the confrontation. Jalloh had previously served in the Virginia Army National Guard and was honorably discharged in 2015. In the years that followed, authorities say he became radicalized online. In 2017 he pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and was sentenced to 11 years in prison followed by five years of supervised release. He was released in 2024. The FBI is investigating the Old Dominion attack as an act of terrorism.

— Don’t let Stephen Miller turn America into a surveillance state. More than 90 civil rights and civil liberties groups sent a strongly-worded letter Thursday to congressional Democrats warning them not to give Stephen Miller what he wants. Miller is demanding a clean renewal of Section 702 of FISA with zero new privacy protections. That law allows warrantless backdoor searches of Americans’ calls, texts, and emails, and it expires April 15th. It’s been abused to spy on Black Lives Matter protesters, judges, journalists, and lawmakers. Now Trump and Miller want it renewed with no warrant requirements, no reforms, nothing. Advocacy groups are drawing a hard line. As one leader put it, no president should be able to hoover up your private communications without a court order. Congress has one chance to get this right. You can call your member of the House and your two senators at 202-224-3121.

— Is this what the Republican Party’s future looks like? New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg went to a Florida rally for James Fishback, a 31-year-old Republican running for governor. She came back alarmed. The crowds were standing-room-only, packed with young men, some still in high school, cheering antisemitic slurs and wearing the hats of Nick Fuentes, a self-described Nazi sympathizer. Fishback is polling at a shockingly high 32 percent among Republican primary voters aged 18 to 32. Goldberg found kids who said their political awakening came through Kanye West’s antisemitic posts, young people who can’t afford homes, and who are finding answers in conspiracy theories on TikTok (which has banned my radio/TV show ever since the billionaires took the social media site over) and Instagram. Fishback doesn’t represent the Republican mainstream today. But he’s showing us one vision of what tomorrow’s GOP could look like. And we should all be worried.

— Democrats are winning. Everywhere. And nobody’s talking about it. Since Trump took office, Democrats have flipped 28 state legislative seats. Republicans have flipped zero. This week in New Hampshire, Democrat Bobbi Boudman won a district Trump carried by 13 points just 16 months ago. Democrats have now won or overperformed in 254 of 284 key elections since inauguration day. They’ve flipped seats in Texas, Arkansas, Iowa, Georgia, and Mississippi. CNN’s Harry Enten now puts Democrats’ odds of taking back both chambers of Congress at 46 percent and rising. Trump’s response to the bleeding? Demand that Congress ban mail ballots and make it harder for married women to vote. Voters aren’t waiting for permission. They’re already showing up.

— Did AI kill 175 children in an Iranian school? On February 28th, a U.S. Tomahawk missile struck Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran. A hundred and seventy-five people died, most of them girls aged seven to twelve. A Pentagon investigation now points to U.S. forces, possibly acting on outdated intelligence. More than 120 House Democrats sent a letter to Pete Hegseth demanding answers, including whether the military’s AI targeting system called Maven was used to select the school. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called for Hegseth to resign. The head of U.S. Central Command confirmed the military is using AI tools in this war. Hegseth had declared there’d be “no stupid rules of engagement” from day one. When you strip out the guardrails on warfare, children end up dead. That’s not a mistake. That’s the new Trump administration policy, and it’s both immoral and criminal.

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Will Iran surrender or will this war burn the world down? and, “Some people will die”: That’s your president speaking of Americans’ lives. Donald Trump made it crystal clear Friday. There’s no deal, no negotiation, no off-ramp. He wants unconditional surrender from Iran. Full stop. In a post on his Nazi-infested failing social media site, Trump said he won’t end the U.S. attacks against Iran without Iran waving the white flag completely and without conditions. Then, and only then, he promises to help Iran pick what he called “great and acceptable leaders” and rebuild its economy from the ground up, just like we once promised Iraq in Afghanistan. He even coined a brand new slogan for the occasion: “Make Iran Great Again.” MIGA. No, seriously. That’s what the President of the United States wrote on social media while a war he started is actively burning and American soldiers lay dead. But unconditional surrender isn’t a peace plan: it’s a forever war plan. History tells us that countries don’t just roll over and surrender on demand, especially not ones with deep religious and nationalist pride. So what Trump is really saying is that this war doesn’t end until he decides it ends, on his terms, on his timetable. And the rest of us, working people, families, anyone filling a gas tank or paying a heating bill, are the ones who’ll pay the price while Trump cosplays general from his golf course.
Even more disgusting, when Time Magazine sat down with Trump and asked whether Americans should be worried about Iran striking us on U.S. soil, the leader of the free world said, “I guess.” That’s it: “I guess.” And now we learn the Trump regime is suppressing a report warning Americans of Iranian revenge attacks here in the continental United States. Iran had already struck the U.S. embassy in Kuwait earlier this week, and has killed six Americans. And when pressed on whether it could happen here at home, Trump told the interviewer that some people will die. When you go to war, he shrugged, that’s what happens. The reaction to Trump’s tone-deaf comment was swift and brutal. Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger posted “Kewl bro” on X. Democratic strategist Mike Nellis wrote, “I guess. What a leader.” Jon Favreau, who worked in the Obama White House, pointed out that we still don’t even know what the goals of this war are. And Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo News said what a lot of people were thinking: it won’t be Trump or his family who die (Baron, Don Jr and Eric apparently have hereditary bonespurs). It’ll be ordinary Americans who didn’t want this war, didn’t ask for it, and had no say in starting it.

— Trump tells CNN Cuba is soon going to fall: “I’m going to put Marco over there.” Trump has put Cuba under siege, a violation of international law and human decency, and it’s shutting down the island nation’s electric, water, hospitals, and commerce. People are out of food, water, and medicine with no prospect for anything coming in. And now he’s congratulating himself on his brutality, as he told CNN’s Dana Bash: “Cuba is gonna fall pretty soon, by the way, unrelated, but Cuba is gonna fall too. They want to make a deal so badly. They want to make a deal, and so I’m going to put Marco (Rubio) over there and we’ll see how that works out. We’re really focused on this one right now. We’ve got plenty of time, but Cuba’s ready — after 50 years. I’ve been watching it for 50 years, and it’s fallen right into my lap because of me, it’s fallen, but it’s nevertheless fallen right into the lap. And we’re doing very well.” This is dictator’s logic: beat others into submission with massive collateral civilian damage and call it victory. It’s criminal behavior and it’s disgusting.

— DOJ releases the interview with the woman who alleges Trump raped her as a minor. In 2019, this woman reached out to the FBI to allege that, when she was 13–15 years old, she was with a small group of people including Trump and his best friend Epstein. Trump, she told the FBI, asked the others to leave the room before, as the FBI notes, he “mentioned something to the effect of, ‘Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be.’” He then, she told the FBI under oath, forced her to perform oral sex on him and, when she bit his penis, beat her with his fists and threw her out of the room. Was this why Trump invaded Iran? Or was that to distract us from his economy that hasn’t created significant jobs at all since “Liberation Day”? Or was it simply because his two owners/mentors, Putin and Netanyahu, told him to do it? Two juries of his peers have already found that Trump, who once bragged about sexually assaulting women, committed rape against E. Jean Carroll. Now this. Is there no low that will put even a small dent in Trump’s support from the so-called Christians in America?

— ICE has killed another person in one of their concentration camps, the ninth so far this year. Emmanual Damas was illegally detained without a judicial warrant back in September and throw into Trump’s concentration camp in Florence, Arizona. He developed a severely infected tooth and begged for medical attention, but the goons running the for-profit “detention facility” didn’t want to pay for a doctor or medication so they essentially let him die. As Christine Ellis, a city council member in nearby Chandler, Arizona, told the media: “He was complaining for almost two weeks straight, until he collapsed and got septic from the infection.” These crimes are being committed in our names with our tax dollars. There has to be accountability.

— Russia Sharing Intelligence with Iran to Target US Forces? Remember when, in 2019 during Trump’s last term in office, we learned that Putin was offering bounties to local militias in Afghanistan to kill American soldiers and Trump did nothing about it? It appears Russia is up to their old tricks, this time giving the Iranian militias pinpoint-precision targeting information on American ships, planes, and troops from their high-altitude spy satellites. Putin, in fact, appears positioned to be a major beneficiary of our attack on Iran (second, perhaps, to Netanyahu, who gets to stay out of prison longer). We’re draining our anti-aircraft munitions so we can’t send any more to Ukraine, we’re driving up the price of oil which is Putin’s main source of revenue, and we’re forcing India and China to shift their oil purchases from the Gulf states to Russia. It’s almost as if Putin had told Trump to do it…

— Good News Alert! Kristi Noem got fired. Cricket the Dog was unavailable for comment. Kristi Noem is out as Homeland Security Secretary, and let’s be honest about her legacy: she won’t be remembered as a stateswoman or a security expert. She’ll be remembered as the woman who shot her own dog in the face, wrote about it proudly in a book, and genuinely seemed to believe it made her look like leadership material. In reality, it made her look like she had the empathy of a parking ticket. Her entire tenure was a taxpayer-funded vanity project. Mount Rushmore photo shoots. A nearly quarter-billion-dollar federal contract to an ad firm that turned out to be shadier than her spray tan. All while migrant children sat in filthy, overcrowded detention camps that would embarrass a third-world dictatorship. She expended more energy on her Instagram feed than on actually protecting anyone. When Trump finally showed her the door, he handed her the consolation prize title of “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas,” which sounds like something printed on a discount Halloween costume. Cricket the dog just wanted to chase birds and live her best life. Noem wanted fame, power, and a reality show career in public service. One of them had better instincts. And it definitely wasn’t the one holding the gun.

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— Trump has illegally, unconstitutionally attacked Iran in collaboration with his fellow felon Netanyahu. Acting without the congressional authorization the Constitution requires, Trump has attacked Iran and tried to assassinate its senior leadership. Our Arab allies in the region are now under attack from Iranian missiles and are furious, as are several Democratic and Republican elected officials. The chance also now exists that this could spiral into something much larger, which might even include Russia or China believing we’re overstretched and thus taking the opportunity to launch attacks against Eastern Europe or Taiwan. Trump also went on a rant about how Iran helped “steal an election” from him in 2020; this may be preparation for his declaring a state of emergency and locking down our elections this fall. He’s been clearly looking for such an excuse. The situation is fluid and developing.

— Will this finally get Epstein off the front page and give Trump his excuse to declare an emergency to rig the elections? People across the Middle East freaked out yesterday when the Trump regime issued a rare travel advisory telling American citizens in Israel to “consider leaving Israel while commercial flights are available.” Israeli political analyst David Fuchs posted in Hebrew, “Good luck to us all,” reflecting the widespread concern that a sinking economy, revelations that Trump may have raped a 13-year-old girl, and that his people are looking for an “emergency” to seize our elections this November could all be coming together with this strike on Iran.
Trump is increasingly feeling cornered and knows the kind of damage any meaningful, subpoena-based investigation of his corrupt business deals, his exploitation of the presidency, and his history as a proud, bragging rapist can cause. Republicans back in the ’90s squealed that Bill Clinton was “wagging the dog” when he ordered airstrikes to protect civilians in Bosnia, but if you want to make that argument about presidential military action, what Trump’s now pulling off is a much stronger case. And one that could spiral out of control far more easily. This is exactly why the Founders and Framers explicitly took the power to make war away from the president and vested it exclusively with Congress. But don’t try explaining that to cult-obsessed Republicans like John Thune; you’ll just get a blank stare.

— Speaking of panicked Republicans, after they stripped Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) subsidies from millions of Americans, causing insurance bills to double and triple, they’re facing a wave of outrage. So, predictably, the GOP is falling back on their old saw of offering people “more choice” in the marketplace by proposing to lower the price on some ACA plans. The catch, of course, is that they want the deductible — the amount you pay out-of-pocket before insurance starts picking up the bills — to rise to $31,000 for a family of two. Democrats have been proposing a national healthcare plan for America — like literally every other developed democracy in the world has — since the Truman administration in the 1940s, but Republicans have always proclaimed their loyalty to their insurance industry donors over average working people. If it wasn’t for that history, this new proposal would be shocking; instead, it’s just another example of how the GOP always has and always will put wealthy interests above those of average people. As a result, an estimated 50,000 Americans die every year from lack of healthcare, and a half-million families go bankrupt because of healthcare expenses.

— Does the arrest of a Columbia University Student show that we’ve lost our civil society? ICE thugs lied their way into a Columbia University student housing complex, saying they were New York City police looking for a missing 5-year-old girl. Once the building’s superintendent let them in, they grabbed a 29-year-old student and dragged her off to one of their notorious detention centers. New York police are furious; this is exactly the kind of behavior that destroys people’s trust in the cops and, without that trust, policing becomes not just difficult but downright dangerous. But Trump’s secret police thugs don’t care; they’re trying to meet quotas for imprisoned brown-skinned people and don’t give a rat’s ass about the damage they’re doing to civil society in the process. They took away the student, by the way, without an arrest warrant signed by a judge as required by the Fourth Amendment. New York Governor Hochul made an outraged statement, but so far we’ve seen no indication that the state is actually going to do anything about this (other than Mayor Mamdani interceding with Trump to get the woman temporarily released).

— Is CNN the new CBS? Trustfund baby David Ellison looks like he’s used daddy’s money to seal the purchase of Warner Brothers Discovery, handing CNN over to the rightwing billionaire family that already now owns CBS. Panic is spreading through the CNN newsroom after what the Ellisons did to CBS News, putting a rightwing crank with zero TV experience in charge, firing Stephen Colbert, and censoring 60 Minutes. This is exactly what both Putin and Orbán did when they flipped Russia and Hungary from democracy to dictatorship by first having friendly billionaires take over all the major news outlets. Facebook, Twitter/X, Washington Post, LA Times, NY Post, Wall Street Journal, Fox “News,” TikTok, CBS, several minor television networks, or 200 television stations, 1500 radio stations, and now CNN are all under the control of rightwing billionaires more than willing to use their “news” outlets to promote Trump’s fascist regime. What’s next? My prediction is MSNOW, since NBC has spun it off, moved their studios, and essentially prepared the network for sale. Stay tuned.

— Trump’s inflation heats up from tariffs. The Producer Price Index (PPI) for final demand climbed at an annualized rate of 6% last month (0.5% for January) as companies are starting to pass along their tariff costs to their customers. Trump has also overseen a 9% collapse in the value of the dollar since he took office, prompting the massive bank UBS to downgrade their prospects for the American stock market. Meanwhile, the housing market is softening and Trump is again pursuing student loan borrowers with a vengeance. Ten of the last eleven recessions have occurred during Republican presidencies for this very reason: conservative economic policies shift wealth to the very top while screwing average working people, resulting in a loss of the consumer demand that drives economies. Here we go again…

— Bowing to chemical industry donations, Trump officials are killing off the system that protects families and communities from chemical disasters like explosions, spills, and fires at chemical facilities. Saying it’s “too expensive” to protect Americans from the next Bhopal disaster that could kill hundreds and leave thousands with lifelong cancer risks, the Trump EPA is destroying altogether the prevention and remediation program. As The Guardian reports, “The US experienced a chemical accident that harmed humans or the environment every other day on average between 2004-2025. Among recent high-profile incidents are a Clairton, Pennsylvania steel plant explosion that injured 10, and a Roseland, Louisiana oil facility explosion that caused oil to splatter onto homes as far as 20 miles away.” If you live near one of these sites get ready to run, as that may be the only option you’ll have left.

— Crazy Alert! Trump viewed Noem’s shooting her puppy in the face as an asset. A new book by NBC reporter Julia Ainsley explains that Trump thought Noem’s sociopathic delight in killing her puppy named Cricket made her perfect for the job of overseeing his violent secret police force. In the little dog’s memory, here’s Louise’s “Ballad of Cricket”:

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— “I can destroy the country…” says Trump, as he continues destroying the country (and Ukraine, both on behalf of Putin). Six of the justices on the Supreme Court affirmed the Founders’ and Framers’ conviction that power must be distributed among the three branches and that the Constitution says clearly that the power to tax lies exclusively with Congress. (Brett Kavanaugh of “Kavanaugh Stops” fame — who Epstein was sympathizing with in emails about the difficulty of being accused of rape — predictably wrote a passionate defense of Dear Leader Donald.) Trump had been using an emergency provision of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to rationalize the tariffs he’s been using to threaten countries that won’t give him a new hotel, hand billions off to his kids or Steve Witkoff’s son, or lavish him with a free jet airplane, and the justices said, “No, you can’t use that particular law to do this.” In response, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker sent Trump an invoice demanding the feds pay the state around $9 billion — $1,700 for each citizen of the state — as a refund for the illegal tariffs the Treasury had been collecting, saying, “Compensation is owed to the people of Illinois, and if you do not comply we will pursue further action.”
Trump, of course, had one of his classic child-like meltdowns, dropping F-bombs at a governor’s meeting and then going on TV to whine about how the Court is restraining him. He’s now shifting to using another old law to rationalize charging “the entire world” a 10% tariff that must be paid by American importers, although this law gives him only 150 days before congressional approval kicks in: Republicans in the House are already talking about putting forward legislation to backstop Trump, but it’ll be a big lift and face a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. As a result, Trump may try to weasel some other way to collect money from American importers, which will trigger a whole new round of lawsuits. And it’ll take another year for those lawsuits to get it before the Court again. Nobody should be expecting a refund check, or for Trump to change his behavior. There are, after all, still countries to threaten and companies to extort (and gifts to receive like the 24 carat gold bar he got from Apple’s Tim Cook in apparent exchange for cutting tariffs on Apple’s products) to further damage America’s economy and reputation around the world while he and his sons walk off with more billions. This is, after all, the most corrupt administration in the history of America.

— Why won’t the FCC go after Fox “News” or Sinclair for partisan programming? Trump lickspittle Brendan Carr allegedly threatened Stephen Colbert’s network, CBS, with punishment if Colbert had Texas Democratic senate candidate James Talarico on as a guest because his appearance wouldn’t be balanced by a Republican guest. The rationale was that The Late Show wasn’t news but entertainment, and thus could be regulated per the Equal Time Rule. But when Fox “News” was sued by the voting machine company and coughed up over $700 million for lying to its viewers on the air, they tried to get out of the lawsuit by claiming that they aren’t a news operation but are only entertainment and no “reasonable viewer” would take their hosts’ opinions as news. The Equal Time Rule hasn’t been enforced in decades because after Reagan killed off the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, all three big TV networks moved their News divisions under the oversight of their vice presidents for Entertainment and went from losing money on quality news programming to making their news operations new profit centers. (Under the Fairness Doctrine, having real news was required to satisfy the Doctrine’s “programming in the public interest” requirement. When that died, so did the news. It’s time to bring back that aspect of the Fairness Doctrine!

— As the DOJ hails authoritarian Trump with a banner only dick-tators would love, Trump just green-lit removing legal brown-skinned refugees from America. Hitler loved to hang banners with his face on them on buildings across Germany, as did Saddam in Iraq and Stalin in Russia, so, of course, Donald has to have the same treatment. This week the Department of Justice — whose building sports a statue of Lady Justice wearing a blindfold to symbolize impartial justice under the law — hung a massive banner out front with Trump’s face on it. Meanwhile, our wannabe dictator has a new diktat: all brown-skinned refugees who our government has investigated, vetted, and given permission to stay in America as they try for a green card and then citizenship, must be kicked out. This will be a death sentence to many and their families, but Trump and the other white supremacist racists in his regime and his cabinet don’t give a good goddamn; if anything, they’re delighting in the brutality of it all. The cruelty is the point, and MAGA celebrates it.

— Four FBI interviews of an underage girl who said Trump sexually assaulted her and then beat her were removed from the DOJ documents Congress has access to, as Trump claims he is “totally exonerated.” The girl, who was between 13 and 15 at the time, told the FBI under oath that when Trump forced her to perform oral sex on him she bit his penis; in response, he beat her up and threw her out of the limousine they were traveling in. And while there’s a reference to the FBI interviews in the most recent document dump, the interviews themselves have “mysteriously” vanished under Kash Patel’s and Pam Bondi’s supervision. The story even made the top of the Drudge Report, suggesting that conservatives are as sickened by Trump’s depravity as is the rest of America. Meanwhile, following reports in the 3-million-file release that two women were killed during kinky sex at Epstein’s New Mexico Zorro Ranch (now owned by a big Trump donor), that state’s authorities have opened an investigation and are beginning a search for bodies. If dead girls are found there, it’ll catapult this entire scandal into a whole new level of media frenzy. Stay tuned…

— Here comes the Trump Recession. New economic numbers show the nation’s GDP expanded at a pathetic 1.4% in the final quarter of last year, and inflation has shot up to 3% and was still rising in December, well above what Biden left to Trump. Erratic tariffs that cost consumers and American businesses billions, turning the rest of the world against us so they stop visiting and buying our products (both tourism and exports are down significantly), and gutting our soft power by killing off USAID are screwing average Americans and weakening our nation. Just like Putin wanted.

— Bob Kennedy, who won a lawsuit proving Roundup™ causes cancer, now celebrates Trump’s executive order demanding that more of its main chemical be produced in America and then used on our crops. As Common Dreams reported, “Less than a decade ago, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. helped win a landmark $289 million verdict against Monsanto, which was found to have distributed a weedkiller containing the carcinogenic chemical glyphosate.” Rightwing MAHA health enthusiasts are horrified at Kennedy’s about-face; Roundup™ (glyphosate) has, correctly, been one of their big bugbears for decades. Just in time for the midterms, this sub-faction of the MAGA movement is very, very disenchanted as outrage echoes all around the internet. But Bob Kennedy doesn’t seem concerned; he’s probably too busy snorting cocaine off toilet seats…

— Trump is pissed off that Obama scooped him on saying aliens are real. Last week former President Obama was on a podcast and when asked if aliens were real he said that they were; the context was that the universe is so large that it’s mathematically impossible that we’re the only intelligent life to be found. But Trump was outraged that Obama got the headlines, which he probably figured would be a great way to distract us all from his involvement with a child sex ring, and so has ordered the release of whatever UFO files can be found lying around the Pentagon or elsewhere. With Trump, the scams never end…

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— Corrupt adjudicated rapist brags that he’s going to rig the November elections to prevent millions of women and minorities from voting, even if Congress won’t help him. The two SAVE Acts the House has passed — which would prevent tens of millions of low-income people and as many as 80 million married women from voting this fall — are both languishing in the Senate where they’ll be the certain victims of a Democratic filibuster. As a result, Trump just posted to his Nazi-infested social media site: “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel.” Cornered rats are the most dangerous, and Trump knows how to read polls as well as anybody else. He’s getting increasingly frightened and thus increasingly dangerous. Stay alert, and call your Democratic members of Congress (202-224-3121) to encourage them to stand up for our right to vote without challenges or interference.

— Convicted felon brags that he’s willing to destroy our grandchildren’s lives in exchange for a few hundred million dollars from the fossil fuel industry. Seriously. Trump gave a speech to a group of fossil fuel executives where he told them that if they’d help him win the 2024 election with big money, he’d do for them “anything you want.” They paid up and now we and our future generations are going to suffer. It’s hard to imagine anything more disgustingly self-centered, more pathetically transactional, or more fundamentally evil. Thursday, Trump announced that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is doing away with their scientific finding that greenhouse gasses harm human health, so virtually all regulation of those gases will soon be gone. This is a crime against our nation, our planet, and all life.
What’s even more shocking is the seeming lack of outrage coming from the bigwigs in the Democratic Party, who could have used this as a teaching moment that might even break through to Fox viewers. Tell the stories of the people who died in the fires in LA and Hawaii, the floods across the Midwest and South, the amped up hurricanes, etc. Real people are really dying right now from climate change. Add to that the explosion in home insurance prices and the collapse of housing values in high-risk places, and the harms aren’t just measured in human lives but in trillions of dollars annually, as well. Not to mention the hundreds of billions in profits the fossil fuel industry is making and the absurd private-jet-and-luxury-yacht lifestyles of their CEOs and it’s a story tailor-made for savvy politicians.

— Cruel psychopaths in the Trump regime have figured out a new way to waste taxpayer dollars to make the lives of migrants miserable. They’re sending immigrants from America to countries they’ve never visited (often on continents they’ve never visited, particularly Africa) and handing them over to governments that don’t respect human rights and often engage in torture. It’s costing a fortune in your taxpayer dollars and seems to have no value other than delighting the sadists overseeing the program and the racists who make up the MAGA base. Senator Jean Shaheen and Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just released a horrific report detailing the gruesome practice. Every time you think this bunch of dime-store Nazis has hit a moral rock bottom they discover or invent a new low…

— One of Trump’s top allies and private-White-House-dinner guests is now calling for all American women to be imprisoned in the ICE Concentration Camps and only let out when he and his friends personally approve of them. Misogyny has always been at the core of fascism, and proud white supremacist and Trump fanboy Nick Fuentes is embracing it. The 27-year-old incel with over a million followers on Twitter, who brags he’s never had sex with a woman because his Catholicism prevents him from doing so before marriage, shared this sweet little message with the world this week:
“Women get sent to the gulags first, obviously. Which women? All women. Every woman. Every woman and girl is sent to the gulags. We will determine who the good ones are after the fact. Well, what about the good ones? What about the trad ones? First of all, there are no trad ones or good ones. Second of all, we will determine which ones are acceptable after they’re all imprisoned. Then we will let them out.
“You have to do it because those are our political enemies. You want to know our number -- This is unironically just true. The number one political enemy in America is women. Straight up, I’m just telling you. I’m telling it like it is. People might say it’s Jews, it’s Democrats, it’s white liberals, it’s leftists, it’s the Chinese. Our number one political enemy is women because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man, everything. They have to be imprisoned.
“They are the ones that are hurting the fertility rate. They’re the ones making us sympathetic to poor people, which are also brown people. You know, when you -- I want you to understand something. When you’re sympathetic to poor people, you’re sympathetic to brown people because brown people are poor. OK? Not all poor people are brown, but most brown people are poor. So women are making us sympathetic to poor people, aka brown people. Women are making us sympathetic to George Floyd. Women are the reason that their fertility rate is low because they’re getting educated and they attack every man as a rapist and a pedophile and they’re henpecking and controlling all the men.
“So just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, communists, you know, all of his political rivals, we have to do the same thing with women. And we’ll sort it out. We’ll find the good ones. They can prove themselves. Then we’ll let them go.
“So they go to the gulag first. They go to the breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated. The bad ones will toil in the mines forever.”
Sorry to inflict that on you, but it’s important that you know that tens of millions of young white American men agree with the sentiment, which Fuentes blasted to his followers and has since been repeatedly echoed throughout the so-called “manosphere.”

— The Trump Housing Crisis is now officially here. Sales of previously-owned homes tanked 8.4% last month over December, leading the National Association of Realtors chief economist, Lawrence Yun, to proclaim we’re in “a new housing crisis.” Bloomberg, meanwhile, reported: “Delinquency rates on loans ranging from mortgages to credit cards rose to 4.8% of all outstanding US household debt in the fourth quarter, the highest level since 2017, driven by rising defaults among low-income and young borrowers.” Last quarter, Seeking Alpha reports, “Outstanding student loan debt stood at $1.66 trillion, 9.6% of loans were more than 90 days delinquent, and one million borrowers more than 120 days past due had their loans transferred to the Department of Education’s Default Resolution Group.” I’ve been pointing out for several months now that every indicator I have access to — advertising revenue in the radio/TV business and Substack subscriber revenue — are down in an way that’s identical to previous severe recessions. While the Trump Labor Department is insisting things are rosy, they also have an obnoxious habit of presenting happy numbers and then revising them downward months later, after the news cycle has moved on. I smell a rat.

— A Congressman who examined the Trump/Epstein Files (why don’t we all start calling them that? After all, Trump’s name is in them more than a million times according to Congressman Swalwell) says there’s a report of allegations that Trump and Epstein raped and murdered a young girl. And contemporary news confirms that she was found dead. While this is entirely uncorroborated, that’s apparently because the FBI decided not to follow up on the whistleblower lead. Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) tweeted to Trump’s shoeshine girl Pam Bondi: “Dear [Attorney General Bondi]: Since you creepily spied on the unredacted Epstein files I read, you know I read this one. ‘Witness calls FBI’s [National Threat Operations Center] and reports girl, later found dead, told him Trump and Epstein raped her.’ DOJ NEVER INTERVIEWS WITNESS. When will DOJ interview this witness?” After this week’s pathetic performance before Congress, refusal to even look at the victims, and radical redactions to protect wealthy powerful men, nobody’s holding their breath. And what happened to the Republicans who were so outraged about the FBI “spying” on the members of Congress who were apparently conspiring with Trump to make January 6th happen? They were quite literally screaming about the Executive Branch spying on the Legislative Branch, what they claimed was a violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution. Suddenly they’re very, very quiet. I never, in my entire life, thought it would be possible that the majority of elected Republicans in Congress and an entire administration would do everything they can to protect criminals like Epstein and Maxwell while crapping on their victims. But here we are.

— Once again, we have evidence that DHS/ICE has lied about an American citizen they shot five times trying to kill her. Montessori School teaching assistant and US citizen Marimar Martinez was shot five times for honking her car’s horn at a blacked-out SUV filled with loser ICE thugs. The wannabe killer, agent Charles Exum, even posted a text message to his colleagues bragging: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” He was congratulated personally by both Bovino and Trump, according to press reports. The alleged justification was that her car had “bumped” the ICE vehicle, but her lawyer fought hard and finally, after weeks, got the body cam video released and it turns out they bumped her car before trying to shoot her to death. How is this happening in America?

— Crazy Alert! Bob Kennedy boasts that he’s “not scared” of germs because he “Used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.” If Putin directed Trump to kill as many Americans as possible, Trump couldn’t have done better than to put a former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer in charge of the nation’s public health. We’re now seeing mass outbreaks of deadly diseases, he just blocked a new flu vaccine that could save billions of lives in the event of a Bird Flu pandemic, and he’s changed our food recommendations to eat more heart attack- and stroke-causing animal products. This lawyer with no medical or scientific training whatsoever cut the head off a dead whale and tied it to the roof of his car, picked up a dead bear cub for food and dumped it in Central Park, and got a brain worm, presumably from eating road kill. Just the kind of guy you want advising your kids on public health…

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See you this morning at 9 am PT, noon ET, on our “Ask Thom Anything” Zoom meeting!

— These people are monsters. The Trump regime is now trying to deport little five-year-old Liam Ramos, the child they had used as bait in Minneapolis and then deported to Texas before a judge ordered them to take him back to his home in Minnesota. They’re apparently doing because this because his cuteness and innocence embarrassed them. I can think of no other word to describe these people than “monsters.”

— Trump’s racist attack on the Obamas highlights his alleged lifelong racism. Trump retweeted a post from a racist regular over on Elon’s sewer that featured the faces of Barack and Michelle Obama pasted onto the bodies of gorillas, as I wrote about yesterday. After a firestorm that included Tim Scott — the only Black Republican US Senator — demanding it be taken down, the repost has been deleted. But no apology; in fact, now they’re claiming it was a “staffer” who put it up. At midnight. From the bedroom of the White House. Are any of the prediction markets taking bets on the identity of the staffer who was tweeting from Trump’s bedroom in the middle of the night? Some cute, new white female worker bee? Or is it just another lie, and Trump pushed this racist post out with his very own tiny little fingers? Has everybody forgotten that when Trump announced his campaign for the White House in 2015 — because, it’s reported, he wanted GE/NBC to give him a raise — the company fired him from his Apprentice show because his anti-Mexican rhetoric was too racist for the network? Or that Trump and his father were indicted by the Nixon administration for refusing to rent apartments to Black people? This racist repost wasn’t a joke or a mistake, and we should all take it as a warning about how racism, silence, and abuse of power are eating away at our democracy…

— Senator Gallego calls for a national strike when Trump tries to steal this November’s election. Almost daily, Trump is telegraphing to the nation that he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election in many of the same ways he tried to steal the 2020 election. And some new ones, too. Arizona’s US Senator Ruben Gallego is taking it very seriously, saying: “We have to prepare for the outmost scenario, the worst scenario which is they try to either capture the ballot box as ballots are being counted, they try to stop the count, they try to surround polling places, whatever it is. … We need to make sure that we have an ultimate response to that which, I believe, has to be a true national strike, in the sense that, if they do this, if they try to overthrow our democracy, if you are allied with democracy, do not go to work. If you’re a pilot, do not show up. If you drive a train, do not show up. If you’re a teacher, do not show up. We grind the country to a halt … if we have to destroy the stock market to save democracy, we need to accept that.” Gallego is absolutely right when he points out that America’s biggest economic advantage is our democratic system and our embrace of the rule of law, both treasures paid for with the blood of patriots for over 250 years. “The richest and the most powerful people in the world and in this country need to understand that that is a real possibility,” he added. “There is no economic stability without democratic stability. If you take away our democratic stability, we will take away the economic stability.” Stay tuned…

— Non-citizen voting is a GOP scam the NY Times just busted wide open. An Arizona Republican election official just penned an article for the Times pointing out that, in response to Trump’s constant claims of non-citizen voters (he claimed a quarter-million Mexicans voted in that state in 2020), a half-dozen or so GOP-controlled states have done exhaustive searches of their voter rolls looking for non-citizens. What they found is that the entire thing is — and has been since the GOP started this in the 1960s with Rehnquist’s Operation Eagle Eye — a scam. In Utah, they found one non-citizen on the rolls, out of 2.1 million citizen voters. It was 36 people out of over a million in Idaho. For Louisiana, it was 79 out of 2.9 million, and 23 out of just short of a million in Montana. Georgia had 24 out of 8.2 million. In other words, almost nobody who is in this country without legal status has any interest in casting one vote out of millions that may endanger their going to prison. This scam has been used for decades to justify draconian voter ID laws ever since Governor Mike Pence made Indiana the first state to require ID to vote in 2006, producing about a 6% drop-off in minority voters (who didn’t possess the necessary ID), helping the GOP keep that state Red. Noting that it is typically poor people or those living in cities with good public transportation who don’t need to own a car who lack ID, and those people are typically democratic voters, Trump now is demanding Congress pass a law requiring the same ID requirements for every state in the country. Buckle up: this is going to be a wild ride.

— Let’s not forget the Epstein files! Trump is wildly flailing, trying to get Americans and the press to stop talking about the possibility that he was raping children or providing kids to his “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein both from Mar-a-Lago’s spa and his Miss Teen USA pageant and his Trump teen modeling agency. And why did the DOJ redact the names of the predator men but reveal the names and even nude pictures of some of the victims? Sure looks like they’re trying to threaten the victims to keep their mouths shut, while aggressively covering up for wealthy, powerful men.

— Trump killed the Voice of America, our messenger to the world, and is replacing it with US taxpayer money for racist rightwing think tanks in Europe. The Financial Times reports that the Trump regime is going to hand off huge piles of cash to racist, xenophobic, and neofascist groups across Europe: “The US state department is set to fund Maga-aligned think-tanks and charities across Europe…” The US National Security Strategy last year came right out and said what was up, in a widely ignored story, arguing that “mass migration” of brown-skinned people into Europe is leading to “civilizational erasure.” In a “Freedom Speech Tour” that explicitly complains about the censorship of pro-Nazi content on social media, Trump’s emissary Sarah Rogers has already visited “London, Paris, Rome and Milan.” We’re now taking Putin’s and Orbán’s side against pluralistic, democratic republics that have traditionally been our allies. This is simply evil.

— Incompetence Alert! Bob Kennedy claims KETO diets can cure schizophrenia. Wow. While there is some preliminary evidence that people experiencing severe mental illness are more vulnerable to be behavioral changes as a consequence of eating diets super high in sugar and ultraprocessed foods, there is no evidence that a keto diet will “cure“ schizophrenia, a claim that Bob Kennedy made in a speech this week. What kind of idiot would fire the doctors and scientists and put a lawyer in charge of his nation’s public health? Now we know…

— Surprise, Surprise?! TrumpRX is a fake: read the fine print. Most drug companies offer introductory specials on their new drugs, where if you contact them they’ll give you a substantial discount for the first one or two months. Trump’s new TrumpRX website claims to reduce the cost of drugs for Americans, but all it does is link you to the drug companies’s websites where these very limited coupons are available. It’s just another grift, as one should always expect from this professional grifter…

— Crazy Alert! ‘Mortifying’: Fury as Trump demands Dulles and Penn Station renamed after himself. The largest infrastructure project in the country right now is a connecting tunnel between New York and New Jersey that is about 1/3 built. Trump just suspended the cash for this project and is offering to if they will name New York’s Penn Station and Washington DC’s Dulles airport after him. It really doesn’t get more pathetic than this…

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— Is this how a free press dies in America, with Don Lemon in handcuffs? What’s left of American democracy just hit another crisis with the arrest of independent journalist Don Lemon by federal agents yesterday in Los Angeles. This was for reporting on a protest at a Minnesota church, and it isn’t just a legal spat: this is intimidation aimed at the free press itself. As fascism expert Jason Stanley noted on Ali Velshi‘s show this morning, this is the moment of fascism when the fascists begin arresting members of the press. Federal officials are pursuing charges even after a magistrate judge refused to approve a complaint against Lemon, and his lawyer says Lemon was there doing what journalists have done forever — reporting the truth — and that’s exactly what the First Amendment protects. The message being sent is clear: “If you speak truth to power — particularly if you are Black or brown — you could end up in handcuffs.” This cannot stand. Call your elected officials (the number for Congress‘s switchboard is 202-224-3121) to support independent journalism and let them know that we need them to defend the Constitution, the First Amendment, and our tattered republic.

— New Trump act may lead to the takeover of elections. Trump has officially begun his corruption of the 2026 election, raiding the warehouse in Georgia where the 2020 election ballots were being stored by the state. He and his lickspittles know they’re facing an overwhelming defeat this November unless they can figure out multiple ways to rig the elections. Orbán and Putin have both used their equivalents of gerrymandering, destroying the free press, and voter purges to stay in power, and Trump has been following their examples (and even hung Putin’s picture in the White House this week). When conspiracy nut, former cult member, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard showed up in Atlanta to participate in the seizure of these materials, election integrity folks from across the country went on high alert. Something really dark is afoot; keep an eye on this…

— Trump’s New Grift: A $10 Billion Demand for “Reputational Harm” After his Income Tax Avoidance Was Exposed. Seriously. A man is now serving a 5-year prison sentence for leaking Trump’s tax returns to the press in 2018, and he wasn’t even a federal employee; he worked for a contractor. But Trump still thinks his embarrassment when we learned he’s been a tax cheat most of his life is, Trump says, so severe that the American government must give him and his two oldest boys a massive pile of cash. This family never saw a grift it couldn’t embrace…

— Trump building ‘white supremacist army’ inside government that will outlast him. “I’ve said some pretty harsh things in my time,” Ta-Nehisi Coates said on a podcast this week, “but I don’t know that I’ve seen before the President of the United States attempt to build what I can only call a white supremacist army that’ll outlast him. That is new. And I don’t know what else to call it! Given the propaganda and the recruiting.” I documented the white supremacist memes that Republicans and ICE are using for recruitment and general racist incitement, and it’s now so broad and pervasive it’s impossible to ignore. Good on Coates for calling this out.

— Is Minneapolis now a “papers please” city for non-whites? CBS News reports that people of color, including people whose families have been born here for generations, are now carrying their passports or birth certificates with them in Minnesota because ICE continues to defy the Fourth Amendment and federal and state law by randomly stopping people and demanding they show their proof of citizenship. If it’s not readily available, they often end up in ICE detention (which some reports suggest generates a bonus for the agent who nabs them, “undocumented immigrant” or not), something that’s already happened to multiple US citizens. Trump’s reign of terror is just getting underway; Minneapolis is widely regarded as a test case, with other Blue cities in Blue states up next. My congresswoman, Maxine Dexter, just warned Portlanders that we should all get whistles and be prepared for an invasion here, as most observers think Portland will be next (although, apparently they’ve decided to go after Black Somalis in Ohio first). It’s a sentiment echoed by an administration official who spoke with NBC News, saying: “The reality is, you can’t stop what you’re doing. This is the whole point of ICE existing in these cities, and Minnesota is not going to be the last state that ICE goes to. Oregon was next. We were not done. We need to keep going.” Trump is trying to create a situation where people in Red states feel “safe” and people in Blue states go to bed every night feeling like they are under siege. So far, it appears to be generating more backlash than fear, even after he’s murdered two people and inflicted violence and chemical weapons on thousands of others. Will America eventually back down and bow before him? Stay tuned…

— Mark Carney stood up for democracy, and Trump is pissed. Canadian Prime Minister Carney went to Davos and gave a great speech arguing that as Trump moves America closer and closer to Putin-style fascism it’s high time for the remaining democratic nations of the world to band together. That would include economic cooperation, military and defense collaborations, along with new alliances. It’ll be a massive undertaking and will probably produce a short-term hit to the Canadian economy, but Canada is now — perhaps correctly — viewing Trump and the US the way Poland was viewing Hitler and Germany in 1938. The damage our bone-spurs rapist fraudster felon president is inflicting on America and the world is mind-boggling.

— DOJ busted for removing Epstein files accusing Trump of child rape. Minutes after releasing an FBI document detailing reports to our government of Trump raping young girls, they pulled it off their server. Nonetheless, the FBI report is widely circulating on the web now, including text like this: “[Redacted] reported an unidentified female friend who was forced to perform oral sex on President Trump approximately 35 years ago in NJ. The friend told Alexis that she was approximately 13-14 years old when this occurred, and the friend allegedly bit President Trump while performing oral sex. The friend was allegedly hit in the face after she laughed about biting President Trump. The friend said she was also abused by Epstein.” That’s just one of a series of allegations against our president who’s already been found — twice — by a jury of his peers to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. Only the best, right?

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— So much for the “anti-big-government right” in America. Growing up in Michigan, I had a friend whose dad was in the Michigan Militia, a rightwing group that used to go into the forests of northern Michigan to “train” with semiautomatic weapons and survival tactics for the day when the “jackbooted thugs” from the “big government” would try to “end our freedom.” My Republican activist dad told me they were just bigots and “boys who never grew up,” but I always felt like they’d be the shock troops for a fascist takeover, should that ever happen to America. That was sixty years ago, long before they tried to kidnap and kill Michigan’s governor, and long before anybody took Trump seriously. But now, according to a fascinating report in this week’s Washington Post, those same government-skeptical rightwingers are now fully embracing Trump’s racist crackdown on brown people using so-called “Kavanaugh Stops” in which people are now legally racially profiled. The key to their change of attitude appears to hang on the race of the people the government is targeting; so long as it’s going after people of color they’re 100% on board. Apparently these yahoos have never read Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem, “First they came for…” Government that selectively enforces the law to the detriment of one disfavored group will almost always eventually turn on others. These idiots are just too stupid to realize what they’re cheering on…

— It was the third or fourth shot that killed Renee Good. An autopsy commissioned by her family found that the first shot nicked her arm and the second shot hit her breast, but neither would have killed her. It was the third shot, taken from the side of the car into her head and completely unnecessary, that killed her. This sure looks like pure homicide, which is probably why Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem are doing everything they can to cover up this crime.

— Trump’s war on the First Amendment threatens to change America forever. Colby Hall writes for Mediaite.com: “In a functioning democracy, the federal government does not compile dossiers on students for their political views, threaten journalists with prison for covering protests, or seize reporters’ devices as a warning to sources. Yet all three have now come into focus in the United States, supported by newly unsealed court records and recent actions by the Trump administration.” He then proceeds to document in painful detail multiple times the Trump regime has violated the basic tenets of our First Amendment, including arresting and deporting people based on their speech, searching journalists’ phones and computers without legal authority, and the president himself calling for the criminal prosecution of a reporter (Don Lemon). Our largest media outfits are ignoring this (after many of them paid Trump off), hoping to avoid Emperor Trump’s wrath, or openly sucking up to him (CBS/Washington Post/LA Times/etc.). This isn’t about partisan loyalty anymore; it’s about whether we’re willing to live in a country where speech is still technically legal but exercising it gets you threatened with arrest, searched without warrants, or singled out for prosecution by the president himself. This is what Ben Franklin warned about when he said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Without a truly free and open press, the space for dissent quietly shrinks and people learn to stay silent just to stay safe. And our republic dies.

— How did America get to the point where a five-year-old hostage is an acceptable tool of law enforcement? When ICE can detain a five year old and reportedly use that terrified child as bait while armed agents sweep neighborhoods under an explicit promise of immunity from Gauleiter Stephen Miller, it’s fair to ask how America got to the point where a five-year-old hostage is an acceptable tool of law enforcement. This isn’t about enforcing the law, it’s about raw, naked power being used without restraint, and cruelty being inflicted on people without consequence, encouraged from the top and excused after the fact by people who know better. The surge in drawn guns, shootings, and intimidation isn’t a breakdown of discipline, it’s the logical result of telling agents they won’t be held accountable no matter who they harm or how they do it. When most of the people being arrested have no criminal record and children are dragged into the machinery of fear, the lie that this is about public safety collapses completely. A country that tolerates terrorizing kids to score political points doesn’t just brutalize families in the moment, it corrodes the moral core of America and teaches that raw force matters more than law, conscience, or humanity.

— House passes bill funding ICE with help from seven turncoat Democrats: the bill provides more billions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement with no meaningful constraints on its violent tactics in Minnesota or elsewhere. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Jared Golden (D-ME), Laura Gillen (D-NY), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), Don Davis (D-NC), Tom Souzzi (D-NY), and Vincente Gonzalez of Texas all broke ranks with the American people and their constituents to give ICE even more money and absolutely no constraints. No outlawing masks or Klan hoods, no requiring actual judicial warrants before they kick in your front door, no funding investigations of their violence or their concentration camps, nothing. If one of these fools represents you, you may want to call 202-224-3121 and let them know what you think of this traitorous behavior. And don’t forget to let Hakeem Jeffries, who allowed this to happen in a way Nancy Pelosi would never have tolerated, know how disappointed we all are in his failure of leadership. If Chuck Schumer has a similarly difficult time holding his caucus in line when this hits the Senate, it’s past time for Democrats to seriously reconsider our leadership choices. At the very least, supporting fascism like this should result in the loss of committee appointments.

— The Trump administration goes after protesters that stormed a church but they’re entirely fine with the protesters who stormed the capitol, killed and harmed police, and smeared poop on the wall of the capitol. I understand that there’s no First Amendment provision that protects the right to bust into a church and disrupt their services, but the outrage coming from the Trump regime and Fox “News” around this makes a mockery of their deification of the people who attacked our Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election. Republicans have managed to elevate hypocrisy to an art form…

— Trump is using our money to target states that didn’t vote for him. Surprise. Trump is reviewing federal funds to Democratic-led-states. Can anyone stand up to the bully? Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 and now head of the Office of Management and Budget has ordered a “review” of pretty much all federal funds flowing into Blue states. Targets include: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington state, and Washington, DC. “This is authoritarianism, plain and simple,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), whose state is the only one on the list with a Republican governor. “The Trump administration is targeting states that didn’t vote for him—including my home state of Vermont. Using federal power to punish political opponents is anti-democratic and blatantly illegal.” Amen. So, what are Democrats going to do about it? Inquiring minds want to know…

— King of the World bully uses “board of Peace” just like he uses Tariffs. It’s all about bullying and loyalty to Emperor Trump. Trump is now trying to replace the UN with a new “Board of Peace” with him as its unchallengeable leader for life, him alone able to appoint his own successor from his own family, and member states paying a billion dollars that Trump gets to decide how to use. Before all these bizarre details came out and this was just part of the UN’s plan for implementing a peace deal in Gaza, Canada had initially agreed to consider membership. But after that nation’s Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a fire-and-brimstone speech at Davos warning the world about Trump’s dangerous anti-democratic impulses, Trump went to his Nazi-infested social media site to un-invite Canada. Our president has the emotional maturity of a ten-year-old, and our country’s reputation is paying the price…

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Sorry for the delay in sending this out this morning; I was on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNOW...

— While Putin attacks Europe from the outside, Trump dismantles NATO from within. Trump advances Putin’s goal of destroying the Atlantic alliance: ever since the 1980s when Trump, newly married to the Czech daughter of a KGB informant, visited Russia and returned to the US to buy large ads in major newspapers essentially calling for the end of NATO, he’s been singing Russian Intelligence’s song. This week the tune included his tariff theme, as he threatened to jack up tariffs on European and/or NATO countries that don’t support his effort to beg, buy, or steal Greenland from Denmark. NATO, in response, has moved troops and fighter jets to the island nation and is going though a top-to-bottom reevaluation of its relationship with America, now that Trump has taken Putin’s positions on pretty much everything from immigration to gay rights to Ukraine. (When asked this week who’s responsible for holding up peace talks in Ukraine, Trump said, “Zelenskyy.”) It’s delighting Russia’s military and intelligence planners and, of course, Putin, but threatening to destroy the oldest and most successful peacekeeping alliance in modern history. Will Putin finally get his way via Trump completely ruining the alliance? If that happens, will Putin then move on the Baltic states and Poland? Will it thus provoke WWIII? Stay tuned…

— Renee Good’s death sparks MAGA deplorables’ wrath: small Minneapolis charter school under siege. Southside Family Charter School, where Renee Good (murdered by a deranged ICE thug) served on the school board and where her 6-year-old son attends, was shut down this week when Trump-humping MAGA fascists overwhelmed the little facility with threats and harassment. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA), famous for his low intellect and even worse ethics when he was openly pushing opioids from his campaign donor as a pharmacist, tried to stir up the hate by posting on Facebook: “I’m calling for all federal funds to Minnesota’s Southside Family Charter School to be REVOKED. This institution radicalizes students and pushes a left-wing agenda that demonizes ICE agents. The federal government should not subsidize anti-American education.” The school has since taken down their own Facebook page and now gone to online teaching, as the racists and bigots the GOP attracts have made keeping classes open untenable. Haters gonna hate…

— Trump offers a phony “healthcare plan” that does nothing to fix our healthcare system and has virtually no details, but Fox and rightwing media lap it up as if it were real. Congressman Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee that would play a role in healthcare spending, said in a statement Thursday that, “Trump’s half-baked healthcare ‘plan’ is a con that does nothing to help Americans facing soaring costs and would raise healthcare expenses while cutting coverage.” Trump, of course, has been convicted multiple times for fraud and he and his son Eric even stole money from a children’s cancer charity, so it’s no surprise that he’d play petty political games with the healthcare of millions of Americans. “That’s no surprise from a president who is taking healthcare away from 15 million Americans to pay for tax breaks for billionaires,” Boyle added. “The American people deserve real solutions, not gimmicks.” Amen. Time for Medicare For All!

— Trump has suggested multiple times in the past few weeks that we shouldn’t have an election this November, and now it’s becoming clear why. Both Trump and the Republican Party are in the toilet when it comes to polling numbers, with basically nobody except regular viewers of the Australian billionaire family’s Fox “News” propaganda channel still supporting him. A CNN survey found 58 percent of Americans call Trump’s first year of his second term a “failure” and 64 percent said Trump was “focused on the wrong issues.” This helps explain Trump’s flailing efforts to direct attention away from the Epstein Files and his terrible economy by making absurd claims about Greenland, kidnapping the Venezuelan president, and his attacks on Minneapolis. So far it’s working to change the subject in the media, but Americans still know he’s ruining our economy at the same time he’s damaging our democracy and I don’t see any way short of an all-out war with somebody that he can change these numbers. Which may be why he keeps taking actions and making statements that increase the probability of war…

— The Minneapolis battlefield continues: an infant needed CPR after ICE flash-banged and then tear gassed the family van with 6 kids inside. The family was simply trying to drive home, but they had the bad fortune of encountering an ICE “operation” and the low-intellect goons assumed they were up to no good. So, of course, they set off an explosion under the car that literally lifted it up off its springs and then threw a tear gas canister at the vehicle with six children inside. All were panicked, screaming and choking, and the six-month-old stopped breathing and lost consciousness, necessitating CPR; three of the six kids are hospitalized. No ICE thug has been charged or even identified, of course. Welcome to Trump’s Amerikkka.

— Big baby Trump steals a Nobel like a toddler grabbing a trophy. This is what happens when a grown man with a toddler’s ego doesn’t get the trophy he thinks he deserves. Trump has whined about the Nobel Peace Prize for years, so when a real winner got it, he didn’t rise to the moment but instead grabbed at it, clutched it, and strutted around as if it was actually his. He’ll swear he doesn’t care while making sure every camera catches him fondling the medal, because his pathetic hunger for validation never shuts up. The outrage isn’t just the theft, it’s the humiliation ritual of Maria Machado that went with it, the bowing and scraping followed by Trump’s usual insult of her even after she handed it over. Even then, it still isn’t his, no matter how hard he pretends, and the Nobel Committee has had to spell it out like they’re talking to a child. The last time this sort of thing happened was when a Norwegian novelist gifted his Nobel prize to Joseph Goebbels. You can’t steal peace, and you can’t bully your way into honor, but watching Trump try is as ugly as it is revealing.

— Crazy Alert! Man trains crows to steal MAGA hats. If it weren’t so dangerous for the crows, this would be funny. A fellow named Dave has been training crows to come to his place for food for months, and thought it would be funny to add into their training an ability to identify and make off with MAGA red hats. ”I tried to be centrist for a long time,” he wrote on Threads, “but I no longer believe that is a moral option.”

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Indivisible.org is planning anti-ICE actions all across the country today and tomorrow. Check out their website for more information.

— ICE is planning to go door-to-door just like in 1930’s Germany? On a Wednesday interview with Fox “News,” three-named notorious Dark Enlightenment fan and liar James Donald Bowman James David Hamel JD Vance said: “I think we’re going to see those deportation numbers ramp up as we get more and more people online working for ICE, going door to door, making sure if you’re an illegal alien you’ve got to get out of this country and if you want to come back, apply through the proper channels.” (emphasis added) Anne Frank, I’m guessing, would like to have a word.

— How can we stop Trump’s masked, anonymous, secret police thugs from killing us? The federal murder laws are very narrow in scope, covering only murders against federal officials, on federal property, killings committed in the commission of a federal crime like interstate bank robbery, or killings that are civil rights violations. In all other cases, state laws cover murder. So, when ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good on a Minneapolis street, about the only way he could be federally prosecuted would be as a civil rights violation, and that’s pretty unlikely. So, why did the FBI move in and block both Minnesota and Minneapolis police from investigating the crime scene? The only reasonable assumption is that Bondi, Noem, and Patel are planning to cover up the crime and let Ross get away with shooting Good and then calling Good, as her car spun away, a “fuckin’ bitch.” We have a convicted criminal in the White House and it appears that the people around and beneath him are more than enthusiastic about supporting more widespread governmental crimes. Democrats are proposing a bill in the House that would make it easier for victims of ICE violence, theft, rape, and other crimes by ICE officers to both prosecute and get damages; Eric Swalwell calls it legislation to “stop mother-murdering thugs.” Excellent name for the legislation, particularly given the two more people ICE has shot, this time in Portland.

— ICE may be monitoring your phone and those of your neighbors. Particularly if you live in a Democrat-run city whose leadership has pissed off the man-baby president, ICE has gotten around the 4th Amendment’s privacy provisions by purchasing cell phone location data from private companies that buy and sell our whereabouts without our knowledge. They recently signed on with a company that lets them basically nail every phone within a multi-block radius and learn where those phones have been for days, weeks, or even months. On top of that, they’re using so-called Stingray devices that pretend to be cell towers so everybody’s nearby phone hooks up to them allowing them to download the contents of your phone while monitoring all of your inbound and outbound internet traffic and phone calls. This should not be legal, and the ACLU is suing. But don’t hold your breath, Trump’s growing police state promises to fight it all the way to their six loyal on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court.

— Mainstream news is dying but independent journalism is on the rise… This Hartmann Report Substack newsletter is part of a much larger trend, now that rightwing billionaire oligarchs are buying up America’s mainstream and social media operations like CBS, The Washington Post, The LA Times, Fox “News,” The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc. and essentially censoring them or turning them into pro-Trump propaganda operations. More and more reporters and OpEd writers are moving to platforms like Substack, Ghost, and Beehive to publish their investigative reporting and opinion pieces, and it’s leading to a mini-revival in the news and OpEd business. The bottom line appears to be that Americans really don’t want their news and opinions filtered through the interests of morbidly rich oligarchs looking out for their own interests and so are signing up for these new newsletter products, which is a good sign for the continuing vibrancy of democracy in America. Support your favorite independent outlets!

— How Trump has backed himself into a terrible corner in Venezuela. The “West Point History Professor,” Terrence Goggin, writes that Trump may find it much harder to get Venezuela’s oil infrastructure rehabilitated than he thought, as most oil companies are reluctant to pour billions into nations run by unstable regimes. There’s certainly some history that contradicts this, but he also makes a great point overall. I continue to believe that when Trump held his press conference to announce the capture of President Maduro nobody up there on the stage with him was expecting him to say that he was going to “run the country” and “take the oil.” It was, I believe, Trump being the narcissist and pathological liar that he’s been his entire life and he caught them all by surprise, and now they’re peddling as fast as they can to bring his vision into reality. But, as Goggin notes, it’s not going to be easy and represents some real dangers for America, as Republicans in the Senate seemed to realize this week when a handful voted to allow debate on limits on Trump’s war powers. This probably won’t come out for years, when people start writing memoirs, but if I were a gambling man I’d put money on it…

— Is Mexico next? “We are going to start now hitting land with regard to the cartels,” Trump told Fox personality Sean Hannity Thursday night. He seemed dead serious, adding “The cartels are running Mexico.” For some reason that historians or psychologists may be able to explain, history’s most notorious dictators were just as obsessed with stealing other people’s lands as they were with stealing the wealth of their own people while locking down civil rights and throwing dissenters in jail or killing them. Here we go again…

— If you want World War III to begin, just take down the UN. And that appears to be exactly what Trump’s up to, having just pulled the US out of over 60 UN programs and putting America over $4 billion in arrears on our UN dues, representing 80% of all the overdue dues to that body in the world. Is Trump doing this, like so many other things, because Putin recommended it?

— Is the White House’s West Wing the next to be torn down? Trump’s ballroom architect told America this week that he has big plans for the West Wing as well as replacing the now-torn-down East Wing with a gaudy, Russian-style ballroom. Between that, Trump’s picture hanging from 60-foot-tall banners all over Washington DC, and his slapping his name on the Kennedy Center and anything else he can find, it appears that we’re fully in the midst of a Saddam-like new era in America. Tell me again whose house the White House is? Throughout American history, it was often called “the People’s House” but it seems those days are over, too.

— Fascist Alert! Trump apologizes to oil titans for not having a posh ballroom to host them. Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to apologize to the oil oligarchs he met with yesterday that he couldn’t host them in a simulacrum of Putin’s St. Petersburg throne room. The new slogan for post-Trump America: “Of the oligarchs, by the oligarchs, and for the oligarchs.”

— Geeky Science: Most people are still fundamentally good. Watching the crimes, lies, thefts, and violence foisted on us by the Trump administration and their captive GOP it’s easy to think that morality is collapsing here. Check out what’s happening in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, etc., etc. and it seems to be a worldwide problem. But according to new research, dictators and oligarch thieves are the exception, it turns out, not the rule, and most people don’t agree with the kinds of values we see daily displayed with Trump’s gaudy and disgusting displays in the Oval Office. This is actually encouraging…

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— Well, that sure ended discussion of the Epstein files: welcome to the Putin Doctrine. Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife is the latest example of his following the explicit doctrine of his mentor. In this new multipolar world order — what we might call the Putin Doctrine — the great powers no longer pretend to follow a single rules-based international system but instead openly carve out regional spheres of influence, each claiming the right to dominate its own neighborhood.
In this model the United States treats Venezuela as part of its unquestioned backyard, Russia asserts a claimed historic right to absorb Ukraine and the rest of Eastern (and eventually Western) Europe, and China prepares to reclaim Taiwan, all under the logic that geography and power outrank international law, democratic self-determination, or global norms.
Putin has repeatedly called for this “multipolar world” and his assault on Ukraine embodies a return to a 19th-century great-power carve-up where might makes right and each empire polices its own hemisphere. What we’re seeing now is not random chaos but a coordinated erosion of the post-WWII order, replaced by a world where the strong take what they want, the weak endure what they must, and democracy everywhere is left in tatters.
From the CIA-engineered coups in Iran and Iraq in the 1950s, through Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and 70s, the invasions of Grenada and Panama and the covert wars in Central America in the 1980s, the bombings and occupations in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf in the 1990s, to the catastrophes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and across the Horn of Africa since 2001, Americans have watched presidents of both parties lie, rush, and swagger their way into foreign bloodshed only to leave chaos behind while democracy at home gets progressively more and more hollowed out.
Grabbing a foreign head of state after bombing a sovereign capital without Congress’s approval is the behavior of a wannabe emperor drunk on his own power. That Trump’s bragging about Venezuela having the world’s largest stash of oil that he claims was “stolen” from American oil companies who are huge Trump donors adds another dimension that’s impossible to ignore, just like Trump not seeking the approval of Congress or even notifying the so-called Gang of Eight for an act of war.
This isn’t about democracy or drugs or enforcing the law, it’s about America embracing the Putin Doctrine while grabbing trillions of dollars worth of oil for Trump’s fossil fuel industry donors. As he told Fox “News” this morning: “We have the greatest oil companies in the world – the biggest, the greatest – and we’re going to be very much involved.” And now we’re going to “run” Venezuela for our oil companies? What didn’t we learn from all our other efforts at regime change?
Regime change operations rarely turned out as planned, and there’s a good chance this particular train is also being driven by Marco Rubio, who lied for years that his parents were Cuban refugees (they came to the US 2 years before Castro took power) and his goal is to end Venezuelan aid to that country.
This is getting very dangerous, and Trump appears to be reveling in how successfully he’s ignored and violated the Constitution and international norms of behavior as he tries to turn America into Russia, complete with secret police, economic collapse, trafficking children, and now regional war.

— And then there’s Iran: so much for the “peace president.” Is Trump going full “emperor of the world” or is he just trying to help his fellow war criminal and Kushner family friend Netanyahu (with whom Trump met last week) start another Middle East war to insure the Israeli Prime Minister’s political survival? Yesterday Trump issued a threat against the Iranian regime, writing on his Nazi-infested social media site: “If Iran shots (sic) and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” Across the political spectrum and around the world, commentators of all stripes are noticing and pontificating, wondering if it’s a hollow threat or how he’d carry it out, although the one observer whose opinion always carries the largest weight with Trump — Putin, who’s explicitly allied with Iran — has yet to speak on the issue. Stay tuned.

— Surprised? Trump goes shopping for Italian marble as health insurance rises 114% and he freezes all childcare money to all states. Congressional Republicans, who’ve fought against any sort of a national healthcare system ever since FDR and Truman first proposed them in the 1940s, refused to renew the Obamacare/ACA subsidies so insurance prices spiked this week on over 20 million Americans, some by hundreds of percent. This will cause millions of younger, healthier people to drop out of the system and, since their payments underwrite and stabilize our jerry-rigged healthcare system’s ability to pay for sicker people, rate increases will spread across the entire health insurance marketplace. (To the extent it is a marketplace: there’s really no logical reason for primary health insurance to exist. It doesn’t control or reduce costs, cover every American, expedite delivery of healthcare, or serve the nation’s needs; instead, it’s a wealth extraction scheme supported by bought-off politicians whose bribes were authorized by Clarence Thomas and four other on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court.) Meanwhile, in a shockingly tone-deaf moment, Trump decided to take the day Saturday to go to Arc Stone & Tile to shop for Italian marble to refurbish floors in his White House residence and armrests at the newly- and illegally-renamed Trump Kennedy Center. As millions of Americans are cutting pills in half or postponing chemotherapy and struggling to pay the rent, Trump’s going all gold-and-marble. Grifters, after all, gotta grift, sometimes even with gilt and marble…

Speaking of grifters, a racist 20-something MAGA YouTube influencer showed up at a bunch of Somali-run daycare centers in Minneapolis, leading Trump to cut off all childcare funding to all 50 states. You can’t make this stuff up. This kid shows up at daycare centers when they’re closed and says their being closed is a sign of fraud. He shows up at others that are open but refuse to let some random man in off the street to ogle the children and that’s more “proof” of fraud in daycare. Rightwing media amplifies the message because it vilifies their their two most hated groups, immigrants and Black people, provoking Emperor Trump to declare he’s cutting off all congressionally-mandated funds for childcare all across the country. It seems like every six months or so the racists and haters on the right require a new moral panic, and the outcomes always seem to hurt poor people or racial/religious/gender minorities. But they make billions for the billionaire families that own Fox “News” and other rightwing media (now officially including CBS) and crank up the GOP’s base, so it’s all good from the point of view of Congressional Republicans.

— Is “Tax the rich” coming soon…let’s hope so! As any European can tell you, taxing rich people not only generates revenues that improve the standard of living of the entire country but also doesn’t much hurt the rich people themselves. Most would argue, as a German businessman once said on TV, that they pay taxes because, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.” A handful of greedy, OCD/hoarding-syndrome billionaires in America, however, have captured so much of our media and bought off the entire GOP, that whenever “taxing the rich” gets mentioned they all hysterically threaten to leave the state or the country. Massachusetts, for example, put a 4% “millionaires surtax” on incomes over a million bucks two years ago and billionaires and rightwing media freaked out, but nobody appears to have left the state; instead, as Bostson NPR affiliate WBUR reports: “[T]he number of ultra-wealthy residents in Massachusetts — those with at least $50 million or more — has actually grown since 2022, from 1,954 to 2,642 in 2024. The millionaires' tax also greatly surpassed its projections in the first year, generating S2.46 billion for the state in 2023 alone.”
California is now contemplating something similar, only with a tax on wealth rather than income, and already rich sociopaths are squealing, threatening to leave the state. Billionaires in his district are threatening to pay to primary Congressman Ro Khanna, a regular guest on my SiriusXM/Free Speech TV program who represents Silicon Valley. Billionaire Jeff Bezo’s Washington Post editorialized: “Many progressives think of taxation the way teenage boys think about cologne: If some is good, more must be great. California, already reeks of overtaxation, but it’s thinking about trying out its most potent scent yet: a wealth tax. Just a whiff has some of the state’s wealthiest residents fleeing.” How condescending.
But if history is any guide, it’s all bluster. Meanwhile, American billionaires (who generally pay less than 4% income tax already thanks to Republican loophole legislation) are doing great. As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams: “Led by Big Tech billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Elon Musk, the world’s 500 richest people added a record $2.2 trillion to their collective wealth in 2025, Bloomberg reported as the year ended on Wednesday.”

— How’s Project 2025 going? The billionaire-founded and -funded Heritage Foundation famously handed Reagan his “Mandate for Leadership” in 1981, calling for massive tax cuts for the morbidly rich, gutting federal support for colleges to drive up tuition and student debt, cutting social programs, and kneecapping anti-discrimination efforts. They did it again with Trump’s second term with their Project 2025, which recommended gutting programs that supported women, queer people, racial and religious minorities, education, and pretty much anything else that must be paid for with taxes on billionaires.
PBS did a good summary, and it looks like Trump’s about halfway through his neofascist punchlist with more to come. Having oligarchs write policy for governments invariably produces a single predictable outcome: oligarchy for our nation, leading to increased poverty, a gutted middle class, and a spectacular eruption, a virtual geyser, of wealth for the morbidly rich. When Trump was lying to his voters during the election by denying he even knew what Project 2025 was, it nonetheless became remarkably unpopular. Will voters punish Republicans for their fealty to America’s billionaires this fall? Or will Republicans succeed in preventing enough people from voting that it won’t matter?

— Billionaire Trump is destroying Social Security on behalf of his billionaire peers and the 13 billionaires in his Cabinet. First, he laid off around 8,000 employees of the Social Security Administration, throwing wait times for phone calls to be answered or appointments made into hours and sometimes even days. Now they’re shutting down field offices as 12,000 Americans age out and become eligible for benefits every day while the SSA website is browning out with greater frequency. The GOP’s goal in this first-ever serious assault on Social Security is to make so many Americans pissed off with its lousy service (the result of the layoffs and closures) that they’ll accept Republican legislation to transfer Social Security’s trillions in assets and functions to the largest Wall Street banks, who generously slather those same Republican politicians with cash every election. Given that the average age of a Fox “News” viewer is 71, it’s surprising Trump and his billionaire and bankster buddies are getting away with this, but reporters who watch Fox for a living point out the network only rarely reveals uncomfortable truths like this.

— What you need to know about Jack Smith’s deposition. Jack Smith wanted his testimony before Congress to be public, and now much of it has finally been released. He was unequivocal: Donald Trump committed multiple prison-level felonies while trying to overturn the 2020 election and stealing top-secret documents, and Smith still thinks he can be successfully prosecuted, along with multiple criminal co-conspirators. He didn’t back down at all in the face of extremely hostile Republican questioning. If a Democrat is elected president in 2028, he or she damn well better make this guy our next Attorney General.

— Geeky Science: Want to know what a longevity expert eats in a day? A group of researchers who specialize in aging, working at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in Southern California, have been following 1,400 adults between 85 and 105 for years and have discovered, to pretty much everyone’s astonishment, that, as The Washington Post noted, “genetics played almost no role in their exceptionally good health and longevity.” While there are several major variables they’ve found — regular easy exercise like walking a mile or two a day, good sleeping habits, family and friend support networks — the biggest one is diet. And the optimal way to eat, they’ve found, is the Mediterranean Diet with its emphasis on daily fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, nuts, seeds, olive oil, and the occasional fatty fish while avoiding red meat, sugar, salt, processed foods, and chemical additives. Not only do these four simple lifestyle changes produce a longer life, they also dramatically increase the odds that quality of life will extend, too, and chronic diseases like diabetes, cancer, and hypertension are less likely to arise. This is spectacularly good news for anybody interested in a longer, healthier, happier life.

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— Lift a toast to all the new billionaires made in 2025, including 50 of them just in the tech arena. Because of changes made to our tax laws by Reagan and Clinton, they don’t even pay income taxes like you and me; instead, they borrow against their assets, live on the borrowed money, and pay interest (a few percent) instead of the income tax that you and I pay that can add up, with state and local taxes, to as much as almost half of our income. This didn’t “just happen.” It was engineered. And the prime mover was Ronald Reagan and the GOP’s full-throated embrace of neoliberalism when they seized Congress and the White House in the 1990s. Before Reagan, high marginal tax rates (90%) acted as a hard ceiling on greed. You could be rich, but you couldn’t become morbidly rich without giving most of it back to the society that made your wealth possible. Reagan blew that up. He slashed top tax rates, cut capital gains, deregulated finance, and turned borrowing against assets into the preferred way to live tax-free. Never sell. Never take income. Borrow forever. That’s how billionaires are made. And then came the bipartisan betrayal. Bill Clinton didn’t reverse Reaganism; he normalized it. He signed Gingrich’s Tax Reform Act of 1996 that cemented billionaire control over America’s wealth, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996, blowing away media ownership caps, content liability, and opening the door to today’s oligarch-owned information ecosystem. A handful of billionaires now own what we see, hear, and argue about, and they’ve used that power to convince Americans that extreme inequality is freedom. This wasn’t economics: it was class warfare. Reagan fired the opening shot. Clinton waved it through. And democracy has been bleeding ever since on the altar of great wealth.

— Trump threatens Democrats on Christmas day, saying “Enjoy What May Be Your Last Merry Christmas!” It followed this sick and twisted man calling Democrats “scum” in his official Christmas message, preceding the threat noted above. We now have secret police rampaging across our nation wearing masks for the same reason the old Klan used to: so they can’t be identified and held to account when they break the law. We have regulatory agencies being run by people from — or invested in — the industries they’re supposed to regulate. Senior administration officials like Tulsi Gabbard and Marco Rubio openly parrot Russian talking points while Trump trashes our European allies. Prosecutors are appointed specifically to go after Trump’s political enemies like in your generic third world tinpot dictatorship. Members of Congress and the Supreme Court get rich on insider trading and from being showered with “gifts” from billionaires and industries seeking favors.

— Drip, drip, drip come the rape and abuse allegations against Trump, who a jury has already found raped (according to the judge) E. Jean Carroll and more than 20 other women have accused of sexual abuse or rape. Most recently, the Christmas Eve document dump includes a alleged report from a limo driver about an underage girl allegedly raped by both Epstein and Trump, who then committed suicide perhaps with Maxwell’s help. MAGA world, however, after going nuts over phony allegations involving a pizza parlor in DC and Hillary Clinton, are responding with a collective shrug. “He already admitted this stuff,” they seem to be saying, “in the Access Hollywood tape. This is old news and so what?” As long as Trump has his goons attacking Black and Brown people, trash-talks women (particularly female reporters), and aligns himself with foreign dictators and American billionaires, all is good. The party of moral rectitude has been revealed as a fraud; they only pretended to those positions to get the votes of the suckers in the evangelical movement, who appear to be willing to forgive and forget as long as Trump keeps saying America is a Christian nation and gives their megachurches billions in subsidies and payments for schools, daycare, etc.

— Bondi’s Department of Justice now appears to be saying that if you’re taking pictures of masked ICE agents beating up, shooting, or otherwise abusing immigrants (or American citizens) you’re guilty of “domestic terrorism” and can be arrested by those same unaccountable ICE agents and disappeared into their growing collection of concentration camps. Following Tim Cook’s and Apple’s pathetic decision to cave to Trump regime pressure and eliminate the “ICE Block” app that lets people know when the masked secret police are in their communities, Noem, Bondi, Miller, and Bovino appear about to go on a tear based on Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7. If you’re “guilty” of “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” or “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity,” you, too, may be heading to one of those privately-run for-profit camps in the coming year.

— The Trump regime is on the brink of turning routine travel into a permanent surveillance apparatus and most travelers have no idea. What started as a simple entry authorization for visitors from allied countries is being twisted into a data-hoovering monster. Under the new proposal, travelers wouldn’t just answer a couple of questions: they’d have to hand over years of personal communications, social media history, multiple phone numbers and emails, family details, and biometric identifiers like fingerprints and DNA just to step foot in the country. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s real. It’s happening now. And if you don’t raise hell before February 9, 2026, it could quietly become law. This is how surveillance states are built. First the data grab targets foreigners. Then it normalizes. Then it spreads. And history (including the PATRIOT Act) tells us that once surveillance infrastructure exists, it never stays in its box. It expands, it digests more of your life, and you barely notice until it’s too late. This isn’t “modernization.” It’s a privacy apocalypse masked as security. Share your outrage with your elected officials (Congress’ phone: 202-224-3121) before it’s permanent.

— Trump’s racism brings nursing home crisis. Tens of thousands of people working relatively low-wage and often unpleasant jobs in nursing homes around the country are legal immigrants from Haiti, here on work visas. But, because they’re Black and not from “Norway,” Trump’s racist henchmen have already pulled legal work visas from thousands and will be ending work visas for over 100,000 Haitians starting February 3rd. Nursing homes are already experiencing staff shortages because of the pulled visas, and the situation is expected to become a full-blown crisis for the industry in a few weeks. As Raw Story reports: “Rob Liebreich, CEO of Goodwin Living in northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., let go of 14 migrants who had their work permits stripped. Sixty more employees face an uncertain future over their permanent legal status.” Meanwhile, Trump complains that Norwegians don’t want to immigrate to America to take these jobs. Sick and twisted doesn’t begin to describe this situation and the people driving it.

— The official White House Spiritual Advisor, Paula White, says of Epstein’s best friend: “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God, and I won’t do that.” Meanwhile, a “great unchurching” is going on in America, as over 40 million Americans have stopped showing up in houses of worship over recent decades. Could the two things have something to do with each other? Prior to 1980, modern American presidents and their political parties largely stayed away from religion, but that year the Reagan campaign brought in their VP candidate’s son, George W. Bush, to create a bridge between the campaign and the religious right. The merger with the likes of Falwell and Reid was fabulously successful, with “a thousand points of light” representing billions of taxpayer dollars flowing to church-run operations at the same time the Reagan administration stopped enforcing the law that forbids churches from preaching politics from the pulpit if they want to keep their tax exemption. It started with “voter guides” being passed out at services, but has since morphed into open and blatant spitting in the face of Jesus, who famously said to render onto Caesar what was Caesar’s and onto God what was God’s. As the GOP’s wealthy preacher cronies continue to replace faith and spiritual experience with cynical tribalism and White Christian Nationalism, horrified Americans are turning to personal spiritual experience, meditation, and even psychedelics. Houses of worship, which used to be essential hubs of community where all were welcome, have instead become what Christ called “dens of thieves.” It’s a tragedy for religion, the spiritual experience, and our democratic republic that was conceived as staying on the secular side of Jefferson’s and Madison’s “wall of separation” between church and state.

— Recession watch: Ten housing markets are in a crash right now, with more soon to come. So far, nine of the ten are in Texas and Florida (the last is Champaign, Illinois) but the loss of immigrant labor to ICE’s rampage increasingly has the entire housing industry in a bind. Combine that with Trump’s reckless “give me a hotel, golf course, jet, or a billion dollars or else” tariffs, and his radical dialing back on the Inflation Reduction Act’s thousands of construction projects and we’re looking at a serious economic problem in the coming year, according to many observers. Just in time for the midterm elections next November. Hang on; the ride is about to get really rocky.

— Racist MAGA goes nuts over King Charles III’s Christmas message. Louise and I watched his speech on BBC TV and were nearly in tears over the notion of a man who appears to be a genuinely decent national leader calling his people to their highest moral and political standards. The King told the world that through “the great diversity of our communities, we can find the strength to ensure that right triumphs over wrong,” provoking a virtual explosion on Musk’s increasingly-sewer-like social media site. MAGA followers were falling all over themselves to claim that racial diversity is causing the destruction of Great Britain (rather than pulling out of the EU, as Russian social media trolls promoted a few years back). If it wasn’t so disgusting, it’d be pathetic.

— Geeky Science: Eat your chocolate and drink your coffee! New research finds that both foods contain theobromine, which appears to measurably slow aging at the cellular level by activating or suppressing certain genetic activities associated with youthfulness and aging. They both also contain polyphenols, which are known to have powerful protective anti-oxidant properties. Time to start putting powdered dark chocolate into the percolator with your ground coffee? Sounds like a New Year’s treat to me…

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— How do we save journalism and democracy? As Jefferson famously pointed out, democracies can’t survive without a vigorous free press, and a free press can’t thrive without democracy. Both have been horribly damaged by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court, resulting in laws like the Telecommunications Act of 1996 specifically exempting social media giants from liability for the content on their platforms, and Reagan’s stopping enforcement (in 1983) of anti-trust laws that dated back to the 1880s. Between social media super-powering lies, propaganda, and misinformation polluting our public sphere (when more than half of all Americans now get their “news”) and consolidation in the newspaper, radio, and TV realms in ways that would have been blatantly illegal before the Reagan Revolution. If we’re to save both journalism and democracy in America we need to: 1) Reverse Citizens United and its precedents dating back to Santa Clara County in 1886, 2) Repeal Section 240 of the Telecommunications Act so Zuck, Musk, et al, will once again be required to carry responsibility for the content on their platforms and re-hire moderators who do actual moderating, and, 3) require all algorithms used in social media to be open-source and completely visible/transparent to users and the public. If we’re going to be manipulated for political and economic purposes by these richest men in the world, we should at least know how we’re being manipulated.

— Is Our Gun Culture Grooming People to Kill? We make getting guns almost as easy as ordering a hamburger. The shootings at Brown University remind us that America has become the world’s mass-killer groomer, not because people here are uniquely hateful or unstable but because we’ve engineered a system that trains anger into carnage through sheer access. In a country where getting a gun or rifle can be as easy as ordering a hamburger, grudges don’t cool off, they get armed. The alleged shooter, Claudio Neves Valente, didn’t emerge from a vacuum, he emerged from a culture that tells people with a grievance that the fastest path to power is through the trigger. Other nations have rage, resentment, and conflict too, but they don’t groom them into mass murder because they refuse to confuse public safety with profit. So let’s stop letting the gun lobby write our laws and start passing universal background checks, safe storage, and real limits on weapons built for killing, because this fight isn’t just about one shooting, it’s about whether we’re going to keep raising the next headline or finally choose a country that values lives over firepower.

— Does Trump’s Chief of Staff have Russia ties? Bette Dangerous (Heidi Siegmund Cuda) was on my radio/TV program yesterday and laid out the multiple connections between Trump’s Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, and Russian oligarchs. It’s all circumstantial and implicit, but genuinely creepy. She writes about it at her Bette Dangerous Substack newsletter, and it’s really worth a read.

— The Billionaire Protection Program at the Department of Justice rolls on. A small fraction of the files about billionaire Jeffrey Epstein were released yesterday, utterly failing to satisfy the requirements of the law, after a reported 1000 FBI agents worked to strip out any reference to billionaire Donald Trump. Were the Trump Talent Agency and Miss Teen USA Show funneling young girls to Jeffrey Epstein? And will Pam Bondi face prosecution for violating the law? Let’s not forget that Richard Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison for committing crimes while he held that office. It is possible. The release yesterday was a joke, with some documents entirely redacted which is absolutely different from the provisions of the Epstein Transparency Act. Members of Congress are now talking about impeaching Bondi and Todd Blanche, and it’s becoming increasingly evident to everybody in America that Donald Trump himself was up to no good back in the day.

— Jack Smith has the goods on Trump’s criminal activity and Republicans in the House don’t want you to hear the details. Jim Jordan made sure we’ll not hear what Smith had to say, even though Smith explicitly requested a public hearing, by forcing the hearing behind closed doors. What’s leaked out is that Smith said that he’d happily prosecute Trump again, that the evidence is solid, and that Trump not only stole Top Secret documents and kept them where spies visiting Mar-a-Lago could easily access and copy them (Trump even handily put a copy machine in the storage room) but also then obstructed justice by repeatedly lying about them, another felony. We have a convicted criminal in the White House who’s doing everything he can to tear down our democratic institutions and transform America from a democratic republic into an oligarchic strongman state aligned with Russia instead of Europe. If only Merrick Garland had acted two years earlier…

— How strange is it that the GOP has the urge to jump off the health-care cliff? South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds says, “It’s just strange” that Republicans in the House and Senate were unwilling to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies for even one more year when the consequences of that failure will be so destructive to over 20 million Americans and the electoral hopes of the party next November. Rounds is apparently unaware that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized rightwing billionaires buying politicians, and those billionaires don’t think it’s right that they should have to pay income taxes to cover the health insurance of “the little people.” It’s really that simple: if the rightwing billionaires who own the GOP had told their politicians to vote to extend the subsidies, it would have happened in a heartbeat. It’s really all about the Benjamins…

— Bob Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense anti-vax group is circulating disinformation at the height of a measles outbreak, according to reporting in The Guardian. We’re now in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in 30 years, with 1,958 people infected and three dead so far. But Children’s Defense is on the offense, publishing an article that questions whether anybody should be vaccinated against the sometimes-fatal disease and saying it’s “absurd” that the parents of any of the children who’ve died of the disease — or anybody else — should criticize Bob for his years of work against vaccines. Vaccine law expert at UC Law SF, Dorit Reiss, notes, “Nobody wants to believe that they’re hurting children. They will be blamed for this, and they will be rightly blamed for this, because most of the cases are in the unvaccinated and they have been promoting anti-vaccine misinformation for years.” And Amy Pisani, CEO of the group Vaccinate Your Family, added, “Even if he’s not responsible for the actual start of the outbreak, he is most certainly responsible for the spread of the outbreak.” Amen.

— Geeky Science. Feeling awe and wonder actually improves your health, both mental, emotional, and physical. Multiples studies over the years have proven that the more often we can provoke that feeling of awe within ourselves — be it through looking at the stars at night, viewing awesome art, or just simple spiritual exercises like prayer — the more it improves our body and mind. Figure out what triggers your awe-button and turn it into a daily ritual; you’ll see a whole cascade of improvements in your life, according to all this research.

—The Trump Grinch that stole America! The Trump regime has fired the person in charge of government statistics and is trying to hide what’s going on, but every indicator out there seems to point to our having already fallen into a serious recession. Substack newsletters are complaining that they’re not getting new paid sign-ups, two nonprofits that I do fundraising for are falling seriously short for the first time in years, advertising revenue across the media are down, housing prices just went negative for the first time since the pandemic, and The Wall Street Journal nailed it this week with the first paragraph of a major story under the title Big Winner in Trump’s Trade War: The Grinch:
“Donald Trump was right again. ‘Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,’ he said in April about the consequences of his tariffs. ‘And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.’ Sure enough, Christmas is coming, and parents looking for toys face tariff-induced price hikes and shortages.”
His use of tariffs to extort gifts and deals for himself and his family members, the GOP’s renewed $5 trillion tax break for billionaires, his pro-Putin and anti-democracy rhetoric that’s driving away our traditional allies and trading partners, and his ICE and other abominations that have collapsed travel into the United States (thus injuring a major industry) have all added up to our economy going into the toilet, just like Democrats predicted before the election. Buckle up: this is going to be a wild ride. It wouldn’t surprise me to see us slip into a second Republican Great Depression, as the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover policies were so similar to what Trump’s up to.

— MAGA, meet the pothole: Trump floats withholding road money and refusing to pave roads in the Red states of his own base. How is that going to go over? The Heritage Foundation, architect of the second Trump presidency (and the Reagan Revolution back in the 1980s that’s gutted our middle class), put out a threat to Republican legislators in Indiana. They claimed that Trump would cut off federal funds to the state if the legislature didn’t help him/them rig the 2026 midterm elections with a massive new gerrymander that would leave the state with 9 Republican representatives in the House of Representatives and 0 Democrats. 
“Roads will not be paved,” wrote Heritage Action. “Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.”
Will he now follow through with the threat? If he does, he’ll be kneecapping his own base in that state, and if he doesn’t it’ll show every other Republican politician in the country that he’s really no longer the threat that he once was. The simple reality is that Trump’s slipping in virtually every way imaginable. The big question now is whether he’ll allow the slide in his power to continue, or will pull a Putin-style crackdown against the people he considers his political enemies. This may be a very, very dangerous moment for American democracy.

— Grand Theft Retirement: Trump’s GOP war on Social Security and Medicare rolls on. George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress began the privatization of Medicare when they invented the Medicare Advantage scam back in 2005; now more than half the people who think they’re on Medicare are actually on these private usually for-profit scam plans that will dump you once you start getting sick and expensive for them, not to mention how often they simply refuse to pay for tests, procedures, surgeries, etc.
But to add insult to injury, Trump’s Medicare director, the notorious quack-TV-doc and supplement peddler Dr. Oz, is rolling out in a few weeks a new “trial” program in six states where even people on real Medicare will have their doctors’ bills and requests for tests, procedures, etc., subject to “preclearance,” an euphemism for inserting an approval process in between you and your physician just like with the scam Medicare Advantage programs. They call it the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) model (Republicans love to gut successful government programs using the excuses of “waste and fraud”), and it’ll run in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Washington state. If you’re on real Medicare in one of those states, you may want to reach out to both your federal and state elected representatives and raise hell.
Meanwhile, Trump is also trying to get all of us so pissed off at Social Security that we’ll beg for him to hand the trillion-dollar program over to the big New York banks that bankroll the GOP. He’s doing this by having already fired or laid off over 8000 Social Security employees, and now his SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano’s planning to shut down local offices across the country to cut the number of people they can see by more than half.
The excuse they’re using is that the system will be running low on cash in the coming decade, but (as Democrats keep pointing out) if millionaires and billionaires simply paid the same percentage of their income into the system as you do, the system would be solvent for 70 more years and everybody in the country on SSA could get a $2000/year raise. Right now, once a person has made more than $171,000 a year they stop paying SSA taxes on anything above that, which is nuts. If you’re on Social Security, near that age, or just concerned about it being there when you retire, again, raise some hell.

— “Who is Antifa?” FBI Director can’t say because it’s not a membership club. The FBI’s Branch & Operations Director Michael Glasheen told Congressman Bennie Thompson that Antifa — short for anti-fascist — represented the “greatest threat” of domestic terrorism to America. In response, Thompson asked him who is Antifa, where is their headquarters, how many members they have, etc., and Glasheen was completely unable to answer the questions. Of course, he knew — as did the members of Congress questioning him — that there’s no such organization and people who oppose fascism aren’t a threat to our country.
Antifa is, in fact, most all of us. Arguably, my dad joined Antifa when, fresh out of high school at 17 in 1945, he joined the Army to go fight fascists. Ditto for all those members of the Greatest Generation who served our country in that war against the German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese fascists. The simple reality is that the Trump regime is trying to invent a new “threat” they can use as an excuse to spy on those of us who oppose their neofascists policies and, in their dreams, one day imprison all of us. Like so much in Trumpworld, it’s all utter bullshit, albeit one of the most dangerous and anti-American forms of bullshit imaginable.

— Merry Christmas: the EU just kicked Trump and Putin in the nuts. The European Union got around Orbán’s obstruction on behalf of Putin and seriously froze over €200 billion in Russian assets, holding them to cover the costs of Ukrainian reconstruction. The EU is finally over Trump’s and Orbán’s pro-Putin meddling and is taking direct action; weapons for Ukraine are almost certainly next. In response, Russia is suing like crazy over the money and threatening nuclear war if weapons arrive.
Putin’s economy is collapsing, Ukraine is badly damaging their oil infrastructure, and Trump is increasingly looking impotent. He gave Ukraine “until Christmas” to take the deal he and Putin worked out that would give Russia about a quarter of Ukraine and keep them out of NATO forever. It’ll be interesting to see if, when they and the EU call his bluff, Trump will flip-flop and stop supporting Putin, or if the Butcher of Moscow still controls Donald like some kind of bizarre marionette. I’m betting on the latter, although why Trump always rolls over for Putin is still a mystery.

— Detained for “looking Somali”: ICE goon grabs a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis. A US citizen and resident of Minneapolis was sitting in a restaurant having a quiet lunch when he looked up and saw a masked man decked out in camo running across the room at him. The ICE goon tackled the young man to the ground, roughed him up, and put him in a headlock as the citizen kept begging to be allowed to show the agent his passport.
Instead, because he “looked Somali” (in other words, he was Black), he was dragged out to an unmarked vehicle and taken to an ICE facility miles away. When he was finally — hours later — allowed to show them his passport, they simply threw him outside into the snow and told him to walk the miles back to the restaurant where his coat and car were.
The incident horrified local and state officials. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told the 20-year-old man, “I apologize that this happened to you in my city, with people wearing vests that say ‘police.’ That’s embarrassing.” The city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, condemned the young man being “taken into custody for no reason at all, in clear violation of law and the Constitution of the United States for simply walking down the street and looking like he’s Somali,” and began reaching out to other mayors across the nation to coordinate resistance to ICE’s unconstitutional overreaches.
Minnesotta Governor Tim Walz wrote a strongly worded letter to puppy-killer Kristi Noem, saying, “The forcefulness, lack of communication, and unlawful practices displayed by your agents will not be tolerated in Minnesota.” Hopefully, he’ll follow through and find that agent, arrest him, and throw him into the clink for assault, although I doubt anybody’s holding their breath. This is what happens when you offer a cash bounty to officers for an arrest without requiring it to be legal and appropriate.

— What happened to Republican’s love of states’ rights? Republicans used to love “states’ rights” when the phrase was invoked to allow states to prevent Black people from voting or using public facilities. Now, not so much, when it comes to states wanting to regulate AI. This week, Trump signed an executive order forbidding states from regulating the new technology, as his AI czar — a tech-bro billionaire who’s himself heavily invested in AI — pushes to prevent any meaningful regulation of the emerging technology. After all, there’s big money to be made by the billionaires at the top of this particular pyramid, even if it may end up destroying the world.

— Not a Palace: National Trust sues to stop Trump’s “Presidential Ballroom.” The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a congressionally chartered historic preservation group, sued Trump yesterday, saying that no president can legally demolish the East Wing and start construction without the appropriate permits and public input. They claim Trump should have submitted plans to the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts because the two are required to approve any federal construction projects in DC, along with the requisite environmental and other reviews and permits.
They also accused Trump of violating the National Environmental Policy Act by proceeding with the demolition without protecting local residents and businesses from the release of asbestos and other toxics. Their complaint to the DC District Court was clear: “No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever — not President Trump, not [former] President Joe Biden, and not anyone else.” Trump, of course, thinks that he’s above the law because the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have given him such immunity that he can break any law he pleases with impunity. Keep an eye on this one.

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FYI, our “Ask Thom Anything” monthly zoom call for paid subscribers will be next Saturday, as I’m in Seattle today speaking at Town Hall about my new book The Last American President.

— Trump released his new National Security Strategy and it looks like the focus is based on the racist “Great Replacement Theory” that posits “international Jews” are funding immigration of Black and Brown people into “European” (ie white) countries including the United States to replace the white population. It’s what the young Nazis were chanting about in Charlottesville back when Trump first became president when they repeated, over and over again, “Jews will not replace us.”
If Trump is putting “civilisational erasure” and “majority non-European” panic into an official National Security Strategy, that’s racism getting a government letterhead. It takes a white-nationalist story about “replacement” and turns it into policy, which means whole groups of people get treated as a threat by definition, not as Americans with rights.
That’s how democracies slide into authoritarianism, a script we’ve seen most recently followed by Putin in Russia and Orbán in Hungary: first you pick a scapegoat, then you build the machinery to punish them, and pretty soon the target list grows until it includes anybody who challenges Dear Leader.

— When the government can kill without consequences, what’s left of democracy? If this report is accurate — if the U.S. military struck a boat, watched two unarmed men cling to wreckage for an hour, and then hit them again — we’re not talking about a policy dispute; we’re talking about the kind of lawless violence democracies are supposed to prevent.
A democracy doesn’t survive on elections alone; it survives on the rule of law, transparency, and the idea that government power is restrained, especially the power to kill. If the Trump administration can wave a wand, declare a “war” on drugs, and then use that made-up battlefield to execute suspected criminals without trial, without surrender, without due process, and then hide the most damning footage while demanding applause, we’ve crossed a line into something ugly and familiar from history: a state that treats human beings as targets and calls it “security.”
And once that precedent is set, it doesn’t stay on the ocean. It creeps home. It becomes the justification for using the military, for militarized policing against anyone they can label “dangerous,” “terrorist,” or merely inconvenient. That’s the bargain authoritarianism always offers: let us break the rules this once to get the bad guys. But when no one is held accountable, the real message to every agency and every future president is simple: the law is optional if you have power. And that’s how democracies die: not with a coup on a single day, but with a slow normalization of brutality, impunity, and lies told in the name of “law and order.”

— Bob Kennedy delivers a lifetime of disease and death to babies? Kennedy’s hand-picked vaccine council has ended automatic vaccination against Hepatitis B for babies immediately after birth. This is a disease that leads to liver cirrhosis and cancer later in life; a quarter of all people infected as children will die prematurely. And even if mom doesn’t have it, it’s all over the place: like the flu, the virus can be acquired by touching surfaces touched by people actively shedding it (although it’s not airborne). We enacted this at-birth vaccination policy during the Clinton administration and in the years since then millions of lives have been saved as infections have declined by 99 percent. But Kennedy and his fanatic anti-vaxxers seem to have a different agenda than protecting Americans and our children from disease…

— Has Kash Patel ordered his agents to act as Uber drivers and deliver one his girlfriend’s “inebriated” pals home? Back in the day, Bill Clinton fired his FBI Director (William Sessions) because Sessions had required FBI agents to run personal errands for his wife. Now we have Patel using the FBI jet to zoom around to and with his (much younger) girlfriend and, most recently, reportedly ordered agents to drive home one of his girlfriends’ friends. If the allegation is true, the bigger picture is something called “personal-rule corruption”: a powerful public official treating armed federal personnel like private servants. It signals that government power has become a reward for loyalty and a tool for convenience instead of law and public service. That kind of impunity corrodes democracy because it tells agencies that accountability is optional, missions are secondary, and the taxpaying public exists to serve the powerful, not the other way around. If anything demands investigation and impeachment (if Patel doesn’t resign first), this is it.

— Is Trump going to let big corporations loot America via the tax code? Multiple sources are reporting that the Trump administration is considering killing off the 15% alternative minimum tax on corporations that have otherwise been successful in evading paying income taxes on their profits. The bigger picture is simple: this is the tax system being rigged in the shadows so giant corporations can pay less, while everyone else picks up the tab. When government works like a private help desk for corporate lobbyists, it drains money from public services and poisons democracy by teaching people that power, not fairness, is what makes the rules.

— Is Trump’s conspiracy machine turning anger into pipe bombs? This is what happens when a demagogue turns politics into a conspiracy-based religion: a man allegedly plants pipe bombs in Washington, and investigators say he told the FBI he believed the 2020 election was stolen, which is exactly the poisonous Big Lie Trump and his allies have poured into the country for years. When leaders manufacture “enemies” and tell followers democracy is fake, some followers stop voting and start reaching for explosives, and that’s a direct harm to America and democracy because it normalizes political violence and destroys trust in elections and peaceful transfer of power. And now that we know that the young man arrested was a True Believer, don’t expect this story to get any meaningful traction on rightwing media…

— Is Trump’s Christmas greeting “Daddy’s Home” an authoritarian warning? Trump’s “Daddy’s home” White House holiday Instagram Christmas Card isn’t just cringe, it’s a flashing red warning light for a republic. When the official seat of American democracy starts marketing a president as a father figure who’s come back to “set things right,” we’re not in the world of civic equality anymore. We’re in the world of submission and strongman politics, where citizens are cast as children, dissent is treated as disobedience, and accountability gets replaced by worship. And that’s the poison: democracy doesn’t need a “daddy.” Democracies need competent public servants who respect the Constitution, tell the truth, and accept limits on their power. The “joke” works only if you accept the authoritarian premise underneath it, that the country is a household, the leader is the patriarch, and everyone else should pipe down and fall in line. That’s how you train a movement to cheer power for power’s sake, and it’s how nations slide from self-government into cult-of-personality rule.
So no, it’s not harmless. It’s propaganda wearing a Santa hat: an invitation to trade citizenship for fandom, rights for loyalty, and democracy for a boss who demands adoration. America doesn’t need a “daddy” standing in front of the White House with a thumbs-up. America needs leaders who understand that in this country, the people are the bosses, and the president is just an employee.

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