Here are two photos.

One of is ICE agents arresting a person in Minnesota early this year.

The other is an Iranian policeman after shooting a demonstrator in Tehran.

Can you tell any difference?

Don’t know who Peter Thiel is?  He’s the owner of PayPal.  He also is the multi-billionaire who took JDVance (not his real name) under his wing and who is supporting Vance’s run for President in 2028.

What if Greta Thunberg is actually the Antichrist? OK maybe just a legionnaire of the Antichrist. What if peace is bad and war is good? What if the Woke Mind Virus is stopping the technological progress that is heading toward the Transhuman Singularity? We’re just asking questions here!

Most people would hesitate to teach theology in Rome if they lacked the requisite qualifications and degrees. That hasn’t stopped Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and Republican mega-donor, whose lectures on the antichrist have been the hottest heretical ticket in the city for months, held at the Palazzo Taverna in Rome, just a stone’s throw from the Vatican.

I don’t think lack of professional credentials is the real problem here. It’s more . . .

His sold-out lectures are not only about garnering attention to his ideas, but also drawing others outside of the technocratic and political worlds into embracing his philosophy. These lectures have been reported on widely by many international publications, and were even lampooned on an episode of “South Park” last October.

And according to multiple reports, that includes the belief that the people who strive for peace, work for justice and want to embrace diversity are to blame for western civilization’s supposed ongoing collapse.

Thiel’s religious beliefs are a mishmash of his political and personal beliefs about technology, civilization, race and democracy. And his views on the antichrist range from the disturbing to the nonsensical.

For example, he has said that he believes the antichrist will push the world toward peace using the fear of war. He also thinks the antichrist would use peace to slow down or even stop technological advances. He’s said it’s possible that climate change activist Greta Thunberg and other critics could be “legionnaires of the Antichrist.”  . . The man who made his fortune with PayPal and is building an even greater fortune by bringing artificial intelligence to government surveillance with Palantir isn’t obsessed with the antichrist in the “Exorcist” sense. His interests are instead an esoteric mashup of teachings from the late French academic Rene Girard’s mimetic theory and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who argued that modern thought is a secular belief rather than a religious complex.

Thiel’s obsession with Thunberg in particular has rocketed past “idiosyncratic” and is now in the extremely creepy stalker category.

Society has a serious billionaire problem and this guy, who among other things gave us his equally twisted messenger boy J.D. Vance, is Exhibit A. Or maybe B, given the continuing existence of Elon Musk.

• 50-inch waistlines
• carrying automatic rifles inside an airport?
• sunglasses inside?
• too cowardly to be soldiers, too dumb to be police officers — just right for Trump’s private army

Trump now has engaged the US in three Vietnam war – all of them quagmires that Trump has stumbled into because he is ignorant, he believes he can do no wrong, and he thinks we, the American people, will swallow anything he says.

Trump’s three Vietnam quagmires are:

• The War in the Middle East
• Tariffs, higher prices, slower economy, and now exploding gas prices
• ICE murders and mass deportations

As a newly crowned Emperor (he crowned himself in his January NYT interview), we have been slow to realize that he can do wrong.

• Trump wants us to believe that whatever he is does is RIGHT, and JUST, and WISE, and STRONG.
• He wants us to believe he can only win, because, when he decides something, it is the responsibility of the people and countries of the world to YIELD and SUBMIT, as those people in Venezuela did in January.
• When he wishes something it must become and be.

And here we are. Another day, another incredibly dangerous, ridiculous Mad King shitshow.

This morning Trump announced that due to progress in talks with Iran — talks that the Iranian government denied are taking place — he has backed off his threat to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure – for five days at least.

We will get the facts about this Trump lie in the coming days but we should note that Iran released a list of Gulf and Israeli targets they would hit if Trump attacked Iranian electrical power plants.   Trump’s allies in the region, along with any level-headed people who can break through to him, probably warned him about what would happen to oil and commodity prices, stock markets, gas prices here in the US if he escalated, and that he would also be committing clear and unequivocal war crimes.

As I am writing we are getting clips from a presser Trump just did.  It was the usual rambling, disconnected, phony Trump bullshit:

• War ending in a few days,
• Strait of Hormuz opening soon,
• bombing them forever,
• Iranians making concessions in talks that are not actually happening
• all just extraordinary incoherence and make believe.

As he so often does when things are not going as he imagined Trump has now begun inventing a false world where he is winning, where he is strong, and mighty, and wise, and not losing  IN FACT, he is stupid, and pathetic, and weak, and idiotic.

After falling this morning on what appeared to be promising news the Brent Crude price is rising again and the Dow has begun to drop – for nothing has changed on the ground, other than Trump looks more ridiculous, scared, and weaker.

For the only way out of this war now is if Trump just leaves and takes the loss – something that we know he cannot do. Vietnam #1.

Vietnam #2 is his ICE private army with its murders and mass deportations.

He wants these masked men roaming our cities, terrorizing all of us. It’s clear it makes him feel powerful and strong. Like his war in Iran, Trump’s ICE has grown wildly unpopular, and the White House and Congressional Republicans have spent the last few weeks screaming COURSE CORRECTION/NEW DAY/KINDER, GENTLER ICE.

Just as the Iranians have outplayed Trump, Schumer and Jeffries outplayed Trump on DHS/ICE funding. They successfully isolated DHS/ICE funding from the rest of appropriations; got the White House to enter into negotiations to rein in ICE, and got some early, meaningful concessions; Noem was sacked and Bovino retired; Democrats have kept forcing the Republicans to vote down dedicated TSA funding as airport lines grow across the country; and yesterday Thune went to Trump with a bi-partisan deal – fund the rest of DHS, put TSA back to work, and Rs will try to pass the ICE portion of DHS funding through a party-line reconciliation vote, with no Democratic votes. It was a way out. But instead Trump, as he does, when threatened and feels like he is losing, escalated.

This morning:

Thune told Trump that Senate Republicans would support funding all of DHS except ICE, the agency at the center of the bitter partisan dispute over Trump’s immigration crackdown, according to senators and aides.

ICE funding could be handled later in a party-line reconciliation bill. Democrats would accept the offer, the South Dakota Republican informed the president.

Democrats wouldn’t get some of their chief demands — banning masks for federal agents or requiring judicial warrants — if reconciliation were used. Plus, TSA agents would get their paychecks and the security-line madness at airports would end.

But Trump said no, according to multiple sources. The president wants Republicans to stay in D.C. and keep fighting with Democrats over DHS funding and the SAVE America Act, the GOP’s voter ID and proof-of-citizenship bill.

Not only that, Trump warned that he’d publicly slam Senate Republicans if they left town for the upcoming recess. Trump also said he’d invite all the GOP senators and their families for Easter dinner at the White House. Some Republicans took that as a threat, not a reward.

In a Sunday night Truth Social post Trump made clear his position: “I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.’”

Trump added: “Kill the Filibuster, and stay in D.C. for Easter, if necessary. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

The Mad King did not take the deal because, of course, he believes he is WINNING. FOR HE IS ALWAYS WINNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The real key here is that Trump believes he and Republicans are winning the DHS battle, while a lot of GOP lawmakers aren’t sure that’s the case.

So not only does our Very Mad King not take the deal, he blows up the GOP’s runaway-as-fast-as-we-can-from-ICE “course correction” by sending ICE agents into our airports today, and demanding that SAVE be passed as part of any deal to re-open DHS and end the airport lines.

Finally, Vietnam #3. The economy is headed into a tailspin because of his policies, policies he cannot admit were wrong and so he cannot course correct.

Pre-war all the data was tracking in the wrong direction – GDP growth slowed, jobs were being lost not grown, inflation was rising not falling. It’s clear from the data that our economy was weakening and prices were rising due to his economic agenda, his mass deportations, and more. But like with so many things with Trump we don’t really know if he understands how much harm he was doing to the country. At the State of the Union he talked about the big economic boom under way, as he does most days. He says prices were falling when they are rising. So we don’t know that when he made the decision to attack Iran that he understood; (1) how bad the US economy was at the moment,  making it far more vulnerable to shocks, and (2) that the war would likely bring debilitating economic shocks, including exploding gas prices.

And so he launched a war that is doing extraordinary harm to an American economy that was already headed towards recession and the dreaded “stagflation.”

Trump has really fucked up here.

• His tariffs were a huge, catastrophic mistake. When struck down by the Supreme Court, he doubled down and reinstated ruinous, global tariffs.
• The ICE terror force and mass deportations were a huge, catastrophic mistake. While Republicans and White House staff had forced him to begin to course correct today he once again doubled down.
• The war was a huge, catastrophic mistake. And in the last few days he has doubled down, threatening huge escalation, sending more marine, ships, and troops to the region.
• And then whatever it is that happened today – walk back, TACO, cowardly retreat, facesaving bullshit – we stumble forward with an enormous armada in the Middle East, war raging, a $200 billion supplemental and preperations for the attempted seizure of another country, Cuba, well underway.

For the good of the country we need Trump to walk away from his three Vietnams, to cut his losses, and end the war, end the tariffs, and end mass deportations/ICE as terror force. Thune tried this weekend to get Trump to agree to a small piece of cutting his losses – reopen DHS, work to fund ICE. Trump, of course, refused, and then did he what he does when threatened – he escalated. He can no longer do “deals.” He can only accept 100% surrender.

That is the pattern. And that is where we are.

Trump has stumbled into three “escalation traps,” three Vietnams, and our leaders – and those across the world – are going to spend the next several years working to extricate us, and them, from all of them.

The central project of our Founders was to build a country where none of this could be possible. They understood the wildly destructive psychology of Mad Kings and escalation traps. As we work to remove the Trump enablers from power, and undo the harms of this terrible Trump era, we also need a grand project to talk to the American people about the vision of the Founders and why democracy must prevail here and everywhere. This terrible Trump era must become a lesson and must never happen again.  And those responsible for these huge errors must go to jail, starting with Trump.

Donald Trump is not normal.  In fact, he is extremely abnormal.  He is twisted, without any moral compass.  Trump is a sick man forged by a brutal, loveless father who raised his children with contempt instead of care. And a mother who was never there.

Trump was mentored by his father’s and later, his, attorney, Roy Cohn — the most psychopathically ruthlessly and amoral mob-affiliated political fixer of the twentieth century.  Cohn taught Trump that reality is whatever you assert it to be if you say it loud enough and repeat it often enough; , that you should never admit fault, never apologize, and always attack.

A wealthy man who never made a penny of his wealth.  Trump has moved through seventy-nine years of life without ever once having to genuinely live with the consequences of his decisions, because there was always more inherited money to paper over the wreckage, more creditors to stiff with an army of lawyers, more gullible Republican marks to con, more toady sycophants to exploit, more people so simply in awe of his wealth or afraid of his bullying that all they can do is tell him what he wants to hear.

As detailed in Thom Hartmann’s excellent book The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink, Fred Trump didn’t raise a president. He raised a wounded child who never grew up emotionally, but learned as an adult to use naked brutality to weaponize his own psychiatric sickness. Trump  delights in the deaths and killings of others, Trump loves to watch people’s homes and cities blow up as if he were a ten-year-old playing a video game.

And now that man has control of the most powerful military in the history of human civilization and gleefully running roughshod over the guardrails against such power abuses that our Founders and Framers wrote into the Constitution.

Consider what this man has done to America and the world in just the past year:

He launched the largest U.S. tariff regime since 1932 (which provoked the Republican Great Depression), a chaotic, impulsive, constantly-shifting wall of taxes on our own imports that Harvard economists say have raised retail prices on clothing by more than 17 percent, building materials by more than 10 percent, and on household goods across the board.

The Tax Foundation calculates it as an average tax increase of $1,500 per American household this year (it was more last year). Walmart — not even remotely a progressive institution — reported that inflation on the general merchandise they sell has shot up more than three percent last quarter and said explicitly that Trump’s tariffs drove it. Goldman Sachs economists found that tariffs pushed inflation up by half a percentage point in 2025, and JPMorgan warned that what businesses have been absorbing is now getting passed to you, the consumer, rapidly.

Your grocery bill isn’t going up because of supply chains or some imaginary “global force.” It’s going up because a lifelong grifter who’s never read an economics textbook or the Constitution decided that tariffs were a display of strength, and strength is the only currency the wounded man raised by Fred Trump — a man once arrested at a Klan rally — has ever trusted.

He’s also used tariffs and threats of tariffs to intimidate countries into giving him gifts, bribes, and help for his boys to make billions in crypto and to build foreign hotels and golf courses in the most blatant corruption of the White House since the Republican Teapot Dome scandal (and Albert Fall was a piker compared to Trump and his family).

Then there’s the illegal war he conspired with Kushner, Netanyahu (and perhaps Witkoff’s buddy Putin) to wage against Iran. On February 28th, without a declaration from Congress, without a single NATO ally willing to join us, without any nation on Earth signing on, without going to the United Nations, and without any provocation or attack on America or American interests, Donald Trump lied our military into launching an assault on Iran falsely claiming they were about to attack the US.

This was not a targeted strike like the earlier effort to knock out their nuclear enrichment facilities: this is an actual war. A war that’s now killed at least 13 American service members and seriously wounded more than 200 (and those are the official numbers, which former military officials are already calling deeply under-reported). And thousands of innocent civilians.

A war that has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s daily oil supply flows, sending Brent crude to $112 a barrel — up more than 80 percent since January — and pushing retail gas prices up nearly a dollar a gallon, with United Airlines cutting 5% of their flights because they’re already planning for oil to hit $175 a barrel (the result of the destruction of oil facilities by Iranian retaliation) and stay there through at least 2027.

He’s the first Western leader since Adolf Hitler to launch military attacks against multiple countries in rapid succession, without legislative authorization, without genuine self-defense justification, and without a single meaningful ally. That’s not hyperbole or hysteria on my part: that’s the actual series of events compared with very real history.

And the Republican Party — the party that once claimed to stand for constitutional government and congressional authority over declarations of war — has largely fallen silent or, in the case of bloodthirsty fools like Lindsay Graham, cheered on what may well become World War III.

To deal with the oil price explosion his illegal war created, the billionaire who runs Trump’s Treasury Department has now lifted sanctions on Iranian oil currently at sea, freeing up roughly 140 million barrels worth over $14 billion to the government of Iran: the government whose forces are killing American troops right now.

At the same time, Trump’s also quietly lifted sanctions on Russian oil, handing Vladimir Putin — whose drones have been raining down on Ukrainian civilians for years and whose intelligence is helping Iran kill American troops — a financial windfall that European allies called a “betrayal” and that the Kremlin greeted not with thanks but with a demand for more.

An Israeli policy analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies said it plainly to NBC News: “The U.S. is funding a war against itself.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal called it “sickeningly, shamefully stupid.” Former NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor called it “the biggest, dumbest concession ever given to Iran by the US.” Even Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace posted: “Bombing Iran with one hand and buying Iran oil with the other.”

It’s like the old definition of insanity: we’re paying Russia and Iran — simultaneously — while Americans in uniform bleed and die at their hands in the theater of war that Donald Trump created without permission, without allies, and without a plan.

The families of those 13 dead Americans know that. The 200-plus wounded know that. The families of thousands of dead Middle Eastern families know that. And every American paying five dollars a gallon or more is quickly figuring it out.

This is what a lifelong grifter does when he’s never experienced real consequences for his actions in his entire life.

Not when he bullied people at prep school, not when he used a phony bonespurs X-ray to get out of serving in Vietnam, not when he cheated on every one of his three wives, not when he was accused of raping underage girls with Jeffrey Epstein, not when he ripped off his customers and refused to pay his vendors, not when he bankrupted dozens of companies including two casinos where he was busted for money laundering (who does that??), not when he lied his way into office, not when he solicited Russia’s help to win the 2016 election, not even when he tried to overthrow our democracy on January 6th 2021.

He acts. He declares victory. And when reality pushes back he always finds someone else to blame and then figures out a scheme to monetize the mess.

When Trump kept insisting throughout the first weeks of the war that we’d “won,” even as U.S. bases burned in Baghdad, he wasn’t lying strategically; he was doing the only thing his psychology has ever equipped him to do: bullshit his way through a crisis and wait for the sycophants around him to pick up the pieces.

There have always been people so in awe of his wealth and power that they’re willing to do what he wants no matter how bizarre or destructive: that’s the lesson his mentor Roy Cohn taught him that’s never left him. He’s left a trail of them — people broken by their association with him — behind him; just look at the folks who served in his first administration who’re now looking at financial ruin and even prison.

Meanwhile, here at home, the TSA has been going without pay since February 14th. Over five weeks. These are the men and women who show up every single day to keep weapons off our planes, and they’re sleeping in airport parking lots because they can’t afford the gas to drive home.

A food bank opened at Pittsburgh International Airport to feed federal employees who’re not getting paid. At major hubs like Boston Logan, Newark, Chicago O’Hare, Seattle-Tacoma, and Atlanta the lines are brutal, the sick-call rates are skyrocketing, and at least one senior TSA official warned this week that some airports may have to shut down entirely if the impasse doesn’t break.

Senate Democrats have put clean, standalone bills on the Senate floor to pay TSA officers — and only TSA officers, nothing else — six separate times. No tricks. No riders. No conditions beyond “pay the people keeping our airports safe.”

Six times, Republican senators — by name, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Eric Schmitt of Missouri — walked to the floor and blocked them. Every single time.

The Republican argument is that Democrats won’t vote to fund the entire DHS, including ICE. What they aren’t saying is why Democrats won’t do that: because ICE agents have been operating without visible identification, hiding their faces behind masks, busting into American homes without warrants, and murdering American citizens in the streets with absolutely no accountability.

Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and others dead at the hands of masked goons who refuse to identify themselves and then flee the scene.

Democrats aren’t blocking TSA funding because they’re playing politics: they’re refusing to write a blank check for an agency that a federal judge — a Bush appointee who clerked for Antonin Scalia — found had violated court orders in 96 cases in 74 different situations in January alone.

Republicans are choosing to let TSA officers go without pay rather than agree to require ICE agents to wear a name badge or take off their masks. That’s the actual choice these ghouls have made in service to the madman in the White House.

That’s what’s happening in the United States Senate right now, in plain sight, while a psychopathic man hits little balls around at his shabby golf motel and posts to his failing, Nazi-infested social media site about his imaginary 100 percent approval rating.

This is what the death knell of a republic sounds and looks like when it’s torn to shreds from the inside. Complete with the upcoming gold coin bearing his face, like he thinks he’s Julius Caesar.

Armed, masked, anonymous stormtroopers (Stephen Miller says, “We are the Storm!”) and massive military vehicles with chemical weapons in the streets of American cities, and the steady, deliberate dismantling of every norm and institution and guardrail that stood between a wounded, entitled, pathologically dishonest man and unchecked power handed him by six Republicans on a corrupted Supreme Court.

The tariffs gutting working families. The illegal war with no consultation of Congress or the American people or our closest allies. The sanctions lifted on Iran and Russia to cover for the oil-price chaos the war created. The federal workers going without pay while Republicans block the bills that would help them.

All of it driven by the compulsions of one pathetic man who was broken in childhood, finished off by Roy Cohn, and handed the keys to American democracy by a political party that decided racism and raw power mattered more than our country.

Democracy doesn’t survive with mere passive observation: it requires enough people showing up in the streets, on social media, in the media, and at the ballot box to refuse to let it die.

The No Kings Day march is March 28th. Find your nearest event at indivisible.org and get out there. The general strike is May 1st: go to generalstrikeus.com, pledge now, and then call someone you know and ask them to do the same.

MEANWHILE:  The entire US House of Representatives and one-third of the US Senate is up for re-election in November 2026.  If your Congressional representative or Senator is a Republican, ask yourself:

• Has my Republican Senator or Representative ever stood up against Trump?
• Of course s/he has not.
• Why not?
• Because s/he is exactly like Trump — twisted, evil, amoral.
• Do not re-elect them.  Elect a Democrat instead.

Who is this person and what does he claim to do for a living?

For decades, Trump has been obsessed with how other nations – including ones run by extraordinarily repressive regimes – honor their leaders with lavish, expensive public celebrations. In private conversations, per sources who’ve been in the room with him, he can go on and on about how much (in Trump’s words) “respect” and “love” these countries shower on their rulers, and how supposedly great it is for the people’s national morale. He does not seem to understand or care that many of these societies he cites – whether in North Korea or in certain Arab monarchies – do those things under the constant threat of arrest, torture, or execution.

Since the start of his new presidency, Trump has privately asked multiple times about how to get his face up there on Mt. Rushmore, crowing to close allies how he is a more accomplished president than some of those faces on the memorial, according to people familiar with the matter. Sources close to the president have told Zeteo that on separate occasions over the past year, Trump has talked to longtime advisers about what it would take to officially make his birthday a national, federal holiday. Similarly, he has already repeatedly inquired about getting a Donald Trump-shaped monument built in our nation’s capital, and mentioned that he wants final approval on the size, look, location, content, and design of the statue and memorial.

It’s tax season – so if you want to know where your hard-earned money is going, here’s one thing to keep in mind:  During his first few months back in office, the Trump administration and the Republican Party marshaled upwards of $1 billion in public funds towards projects and initiatives specifically designed to make Donald Trump feel good about himself. That’s right: that’s a Billion with a “B” – in US tax dollars.

Sources inside and close to the Trump-Vance administration tell reporters that the president repeatedly asks about myriad different things in and outside of DC that his allies could work to get his name or face on. Buildings, parks, airports, military bases, US battleships, highways, and city streets and squares – you name it, President Trump has likely schemed to slap his face and name all over it. He does this often enough that in some corners of the federal government, it has become a running “joke” in private conversations to just start adding his name to, well, everything: The Donald J. Trump National Portrait Gallery. The Donald Trump Washington Union Station. The Donald Trump Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. I’m headed down to the Donald J. Trump Whole Foods Market, they’d quip.

Here are some photos that illustrate what Trump is doing.

You are missing the point:

When Trump and his minions talk about going after the “worst of the worst“, they are not referring to the same group of individuals that perhaps you and I are.

When Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and now Markwayne Mullin say they are “going after the worst of the worst,” they mean they are going after:

• brown people;
• black people;
• anyone who speaks in a foreign accent;
• people who voted for a Democrat;
• anyone who doubts Trump’s righteousness;
• people whose religious beliefs are not the same as theirs;
• legitimate medical professionals;
• lawyers who represent any of the above;
• any woman who has had a pregnancy terminated for any reason at all whatsoever;
• anyone at any time  who they dislike for any reason at all whatsoever. 

It’s pure Nazism.