• 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.

Nothing could be more obvious than that Donald Trump now wants to bail from his impulsively moronic decision to Completely Destroy the Iranian Regime and Replace It With Something Much, Much Better, So Much Better People Won’t Even Believe It.

His “plan” for this is . . . wait for it . . . for other countries to take over and do it for him:

We are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the Terrorist Regime of Iran: (1) Completely degrading Iranian Missile Capability, Launchers, and everything else pertaining to them. (2) Destroying Iran’s Defense Industrial Base. (3) Eliminating their Navy and Air Force, including Anti Aircraft Weaponry. (4) Never allowing Iran to get even close to Nuclear Capability, and always being in a position where the U.S.A. can quickly and powerfully react to such a situation, should it take place. (5) Protecting, at the highest level, our Middle Eastern Allies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and others. The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it — The United States does not! If asked, we will help these Countries in their Hormuz efforts, but it shouldn’t be necessary once Iran’s threat is eradicated. Importantly, it will be an easy Military Operation for them. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

My favorite line is, “Importantly, it will be an easy Military Operation for them.”

Yes that’s a very important point, if true. Another very important point is that the world’s most powerful military is being commanded by a demented narcissistic imbecile. It only someone in a position of responsibility was paying attention to that matter.

Donald Trump lied us into a war with Iran that now threatens to ignite the globe. He’s known to have raped 13-year-old girls. He made a shocking joke in the White House yesterday, speaking with the Prime Minister of Japan, about Pearl Harbor, provoking an international incident. He attacked Venezuela and is now threatening Cuba. And whatever Vladimir Putin wants, Trump gives him.

The man is poison. But it sure as hell didn’t begin with him.

Our country has been poisoned for decades now, and if we don’t remove the poison and start using the antidote, America may soon be completely unrecognizable as a “free” nation. It’s taken around 50 years, but we’re now at the point of maximum crisis.

First came the poison of big money corrupting politics.

Back in 1971, Lewis Powell thought he saw a communist threat in Ralph Nader. Literally: he named him in his infamous manifesto, the Powell Memo, arguing that calls to regulate auto safety with seat belts and soft dash boards (Nader’s book Unsafe At Any Speed) were simply the first steps toward a socialist takeover of America.

“Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business,” Powell wrote, “is Ralph Nader, who — thanks largely to the media — has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.”

Nader (who wrote the Foreword to my book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream) and people like Rachel Carson, with the environmental movement her book Silent Spring had inspired, threatened, Powell believed, the core of America’s free enterprise system.

Regulation, Powell (a tobacco lawyer) asserted, was just step one to a total Stalinist takeover of America.

“The overriding first need,” Powell wrote, “is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival — survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.”

The following year Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, where he personally authored the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision that claimed billionaire and corporate money in politics wasn’t bribery or corruption (as it had been under the law since the founding of the republic) but merely an exercise of First Amendment-protected free speech. Money wasn’t money: it was speech.

That decision greased the path for the later doubling down with Citizens United, and produced a tsunami of corporate money that flooded into the GOP in 1980 (at the time the Democrats were largely funded by labor unions; their embrace of corporate money would come in 1992 with Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats”), floating Ronald Reagan and his neoliberal Reagan Revolution into power.

Since then, big business and billionaires have discovered that the investment of a few million dollars into buying politicians can produce billions or even trillions in returns. When morbidly rich hedge fund guys poured a million or so dollars into Kirsten Sinema’s coffers, for example, she demanded changes to the Inflation Reduction Act that saved them fourteen billion.

That’s one hell of a return on investment, and similar deals are made every day now: the entire GOP and the “corporate problem solver” Democrats are all in on the scam.

Whether it’s money from fossil fuel, big pharma, big chemical, big banking, big airlines, big telcom, big tech, or any other billion-dollar industry in America, the entire GOP and a handful of those “problem solver” Democrats in the House and Senate have their hands out. Literally, no other developed country in the world allows this democracy-killing corruption that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized.

Next came poisonous memes designed to turn working people against each other.

The morbidly rich, and the corporations that made them that way, hate labor unions, aka “democracy in the workplace.” Unions reduce their profits and inhibit their ability to maximally exploit their workers; unionized workers also demand accountability, a word anathema to corporations.

Reagan promoted the idea that “union bosses” were exploiting union members for their own advantage and, even though the argument made no sense (unions don’t have stock or bonus systems like corporations, so “union bosses” get a salary just like everybody else), it was picked up by the media that was, itself, run by corporations unhappy about being unionized.

TV shows in the 1980s and 1990s routinely featured corrupt or mobbed-up “union bosses” as parts of their plots, while state after state adopted “Right To Work For Less” legislation, authorized by a Republican Congress over Harry Truman’s veto in 1947, that makes it difficult for unions to survive.

Right-wing radio and Fox “News” echoed the message, and, since Reagan’s election, we’ve seen union representation go from about a third of all Americans to around 10 percent in the private workplace today.

Along with the poisoning death of our unions came the destruction of the American middle class. When Reagan came into office some estimates put the middle class — a single family’s wage-earner being able to buy a home, a car, take a vacation, put kids through school, and save for retirement or have a pension — at around 60 to 65 percent of American families. Today it’s under 45 percent.

Conservatives then set about poisoning American race relations.

This is not to say everything was hunky dory, but in the 1960s and 1970s we were making real progress. Politicians from both parties — with the broad support of the American people — passed Voting- and Civil Rights laws, we made good faith efforts to integrate schools and workplaces, and even television shows in the 1990s, led by Norman Lear’s genius, brought positive portrayals of non-white and queer people to straight white people’s TV screens in a big way for the first time.

First came Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” openly welcoming southern white racists into the GOP. Next, tragically, in 1988 George HW Bush proved that appealing to white racism could still win elections with his notorious Willie Horton ads, setting the stage for two generations of race-baiting Republican politics that reached its zenith with Donald Trump’s racist declaration about “Mexican rapists” when he announced his candidacy in 2015.

The GOP continues this strategy today, promoting racial and religious fear and hate with Muslim bans and ICE raids, generating hysteria about Brown refugees and fighting to block any true portrayals of American racial history in our schools.

Hustlers, with help from the GOP, poisoned Christianity next.

Reagan’s campaign hired born-again alcoholic George W. Bush to work out a deal to integrate the evangelical movement — which prior to 1980 was non-political and even supported abortion rights — into the GOP.  Jerry Falwell became the face of this church-and-state merger, spewing his own brand of poison.

The week after 9/11, Falwell and Pat Robertson solemnly agreed on TV that the attack on the Twin Towers was merely their god’s punishment for America tolerating “sin.”

“What we saw on Tuesday,” Falwell said on Pat Robertson’s TV show, “as terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”

Robertson replied:

“Jerry, that’s my feeling. I think we’ve just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven’t even begun to see what they can do to the major population.”

Falwell then doubled-down:

“The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad.

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

Robertson, nodding vigorously, added:

“I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government.”

And now we have evangelists like the newly reinvented Mike Flynn — a convicted and pardoned secret foreign agent who spied on us from within the White House — traveling the country today calling, essentially, for replacing our democracy with an authoritarian “Christian” government like in Russia and Hungary (and Germany and Italy in the past).

“If we are going to have one nation under God,” Flynn tells audiences repeatedly, “which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God, right?”

Forget about the teachings of Jesus in The Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Goats and Sheep in Matthew 25; get yourself an AR-15 like Flynn recently strutted with on-stage. And let’s do something about all those Jews and Muslims, like Nick Fuentes recommends!

The NRA and weapons manufacturers then poured the poison of guns across our land.

Using the money Republicans on the Supreme Court authorized with the Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, combined with Scalia’s twisted Heller decision, the Supreme Court and the NRA have unleashed an epidemic of gun violence in America.

The average of all countries in the world is 9.86 guns per 100 civilians.  The United States is highest in the world at 120.5 guns per 100 people. Yemen, which is in the middle of a war with Saudi Arabia and dealing with an internal insurgency, comes in second at 52.8.

No other nation is even close; even Afghanistan and Iraq average around 20 deadly weapons in the hands of every hundred people. European and Asian countries range from 10 to as low as 1 gun per hundred people.

Over on Fox “News,” one brilliant idea to deal with the slaughter of our children in our schools was to issue “Ballistic Blankets” to every school. This is how sick and twisted the Republicans taking money from the gun industry and their allies have become.

Twenty years ago, car accidents were the leading killer of children and youth: today it’s guns. This year, almost 11 out of every 100,000 children died from guns while only 8 per 100K died from car crashes. Nothing in America kills more of our children than the 400,000,000+ guns in which our country is awash (and that have made billions for the weapons industry).

White Supremacists are doing their best to poison our police and military.

There’s an active movement among white supremacist groups to spread the poison of fascism, racism, and hate to the government employees who carry the authority to legally kill people. As ABC News reported last March:

“Based on investigations between 2016 and 2020, agents and analysts with the FBI’s division in San Antonio concluded that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists would ‘very likely seek affiliation with military and law enforcement entities in furtherance of’ their ideologies, according to a confidential intelligence assessment issued late last month.’”

And the epicenter for this appears to be Stephen Miller’s ICE.

“Semi-Fascist” MAGA Republicans are poisoning our system of governance.  

Former President Biden rightly called out the MAGA faction of the Republican Party; they are actively working to undermine our republic and replace it with their beloved autocratic strongman models of Orbán’s Hungary, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Putin’s Russia. They’re even promoting Hungary and Orbán on Fox “News,” doing fawning specials live from Budapest featuring the Big Man himself.

In multiple Republican-controlled states, legislators have made it harder to vote — particularly for low-income people, minorities, and college students — while openly working to terrorize Black voters. Ron DeSantis paraded a group of mostly Black “illegal voters” in Florida, while Texas politicians have promoted far and wide their arrests of Black “felon voters.”

It’s all about trying to terrify Black people away from the polls, if less severe efforts like outlawing “Souls to the Polls” by ending Sunday voting aren’t enough to swing elections to the GOP.

The Brennan Center documents how:

“As of Janu­ary 14, legis­lat­ors in at least 27 states have intro­duced, pre-filed, or carried over 250 bills with restrict­ive [voting] provi­sions.”

Dozens are now law, and next is their SAVE America Act, which they don’t expect will pass but they will point to when Democrats win this coming November, claiming those victories were the result of fraud.

Meanwhile, Republican appointees on the Supreme Court let Republican secretaries of state cancel the voter registrations of over 20 million Americans in the last dozen years with their Ohio decision.

The Supreme Court has also allowed Republican secretaries of state to reduce the number of voting machines and voting locations, particularly in Black, Hispanic and college town neighborhoods, to force people wanting to vote into long, discouraging lines.

And they’re poisoning our social and news media.

In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”

Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.”

As if he had a time machine and could see the “conservative” media landscape today, Wallace continued:

“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money and more power.”

Today CNN is about to be taken over by a hard-right nepo-baby billionaire just like CBS and TikTok. There’s a network of “nearly 1300” websites purporting to be those of local newspapers but that are really rightwing propaganda operations, and dozens of actual rightwing “local” newspapers that are often stuck for free in people’s mailboxes.

Putin, Trump, Orbán, Xi, and other autocrats and rightwing billionaires are trying to poison democracies worldwide.

Donald Trump famously embraced autocrats, dictators, sheiks, and killers while snubbing leaders of democracies and working to destroy NATO and the United Nations. His family has taken in billions from the Middle East as he pursues a war against Iran that Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have lobbied American presidents to undertake for over a generation.

Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese intelligence services run disinformation campaigns that fill social media with lies and information designed to tear democracies apart; they’re having considerable success in their efforts, including putting Trump in the White House in 2016 and 2024, and pushing through Brexit.

Republicans in Congress are even openly opposing Ukraine in that nation’s valiant battle against Russia’s terror campaign: most recently it was 11 Republican Senators and 57 Republican members of the House who proudly voted with Putin over America and Ukraine.

Rand Paul, who secretly carried a stash of documents (from Mar-a-Lago’s bathroom?) to Russia on behalf of Donald Trump to hand-deliver to Putin’s intelligence service, even argued that we should end the Espionage Act, while his Republican colleagues were demanding Congress defund the FBI.

This November we can deliver the antidote to all this GOP poison.

This isn’t the first time “conservative” racists and fascists have poisoned America.

The oligarchs of the Confederacy did it in the first half of the 19th century, and progressive President Abraham Lincoln defeated them in the Civil War.

And the first third of the 20th century was haunted by the rise of the Klan and the Republican Great Depression, until progressive President Franklin Roosevelt declared political war on them, saying, “[T]hey hate me, and I welcome their hatred!”

As FDR and his Vice President Henry Wallace showed us, the most effective way to reverse the effects of fascist poison in the bloodstream of our body politic is for progressives to take power and put both the nation and the middle class back together.

FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower — two Democrats and a Republican — renewed the faith of the American people in the government our Founders created and many died to give us.

They taught us that civic engagement — voting and participating in our political system — is the best antidote to fascist poison.

Forty-plus years of Reaganism, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, is best remedied by purging right-wing poisoners from political power and then taking active steps to rebuild our nation.

Steps that Republicans and a handful of sellout Democrats have fought tooth-and-nail in their service to spreading the fascist poison of giant monopolies and the morbidly rich. They profit from keeping working peoples’ wages and benefits low, exploiting student debt, and forcing our public schools into crisis with bizarre anti-DEI laws and book bans.

This year will feature, more than any time since the Civil War, an unprecedented referendum on democracy. Fully sixty percent of Americans will have an “election denier” Trump-humping Republican on the ballot this November.

Time is short and both the danger of fascism and the opportunity to renew America are at our doorsteps.

Double-check your voter registrations (they can be challenged by Republicans even in Blue states) and do everything you can to wake up friends and neighbors to this very real danger to our republic. And get out on the streets on the 28th for No Kings Day!

Trump knew how to get out of Vietnam; he can’t get out of Iran.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/u-attacked-iran-show-power-151200758.html

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is already lost for the United States. Even if Iran is militarily defeated, it is unlikely the United States’ political objectives will be achieved. And, on balance, the United States will come out weakened from this war.

President Trump’s biggest problem lies in his attempt to square an impossible circle: imposing regime change in Iran without committing ground troops. Trump understands that neither his MAGA base nor the U.S. public has any appetite for another prolonged ground war in the Middle East. But regime change from the air does not work for a 90 million-strong country that is four times the size of Iraq and has been preparing for this eventuality for decades. The United States is beleaguered by the paradox of a leadership wanting to reimpose its global might through coercion and hard power and a population fundamentally opposed to any war that entails a significant expenditure of U.S. lives.

Why Iran Is Harder to Break Than It Looks

 Despite all the talk of a downgraded Iran in the last two years, recent events have demonstrated the country’s capacity to resist. Iran’s resilience relies on a military and security architecture that is highly decentralized, with overlapping command structures between the regular armed forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Recent days have shown how thoroughly Iran has developed extensive contingency planning designed to ensure continuity even under sustained attack. Airstrikes on Iran’s leadership have been ineffective — possibly even counterproductive, given their radicalizing effect on pro-government sectors of the population and their triggering of predetermined war protocols.

Equally important, Iran’s strategy is built around asymmetric warfare and escalation management. Its arsenal of weapons and proxy networks allow it to reap chaos across the region while imposing high costs on its adversaries. Iranian drones and missiles are relatively cheap to produce, but shooting them down requires interceptors that cost as much as 200 times more — and are limited in supply.

This leaves Trump facing a strategic trap. He must choose between the political cost of failing to achieve his regime change objectives and the political cost of walking back on his domestic promise of no more forever wars. The only viable exit strategy is to manufacture the appearance of victory: declaring that the objectives have been met even when they clearly have not.

The Peace Deal That Was Sabotaged the Day Before the Attack

 Even if Trump manages to save face domestically, the war has already been lost at the international level — and the most damning evidence of that may be what happened the day before the bombs fell.

The first source of resentment is that the United States entered this war at Israel’s behest. Israel has been pushing for a decisive confrontation with Iran for years, against the repeated warnings of Washington’s other traditional partners in the Persian Gulf. Gulf states, organized in the Gulf Cooperation Council, opposed this war from the start — they understood that a major conflict with Iran would destabilize the entire region. They were not given prior notice of an attack meticulously planned with Israel. Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, was reflecting broadly felt regional sentiment when he told CNN: “This is Netanyahu’s war.”

This opposition led several states to support diplomatic efforts that were actively underway when the attack began. The day before the attack, Oman announced a breakthrough: Iran had agreed not to stockpile fissile material — a concession that went beyond anything Iran had agreed to in the 2015 JCPOA, which Trump had previously scuttled. “A peace deal is within our reach,” the Omani foreign minister said — before declaring the following day, once the strikes had begun: “I am dismayed. Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined.”

That agreement died on the runway. It is worth sitting with that fact.

How the War Is Fracturing U.S. Alliances in the Gulf

 The Gulf states’ second grievance is that this war has seriously jeopardized their own security. As a result of the U.S.-Israeli attack, Iran retaliated against installations in Gulf states hosting U.S. military bases. In the Gulf, Iranian drones and missiles have struck targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. There is rising anger in these countries that whereas the United States has done little to shield them from these strikes, it has done a great deal to protect Israel. This dynamic creates precisely the strategic outcome Iran has long sought: to erode the foundations of the U.S. security architecture in the Gulf. If trust between Washington and its Gulf partners weakens — potentially leading some states to eventually downgrade their security cooperation — that alone represents a significant strategic victory for Iran.

Bahrain did successfully lead a UN Security Council resolution condemning Iran for these strikes. But Gulf states’ hostility toward Iran is not the new development here. The new development is the regional resentment toward the United States — given that all parties knew Iran would likely attack its neighbors if Washington struck first.

The situation could deteriorate further if Washington, encouraged by Israel, chooses to double down on the total destruction of Iran rather than seek an exit strategy. Nobody in the region — except Israel — wants a prolonged war or the total collapse of the Iranian state. The specter of Libya’s failed state and Syria’s civil war still haunts the region. As a result, Iran’s neighbors mostly distrust the CIA’s renewed support for Kurdish militants, as well as growing talk of stoking Azeri, Baloch, and Arab nationalist movements.

Yet many of Trump’s domestic allies remain oblivious to these concerns. A good if baffling example of this deep-seated ignorance was Sen. Lindsey Graham’s recent threat to GCC states. “Get more involved as this fight is in their backyard… if not, consequences will follow” — captures the depth of that disconnect.

The Global Economic Fallout

 Beyond the Middle East, this war now threatens the entire global economy. Oil prices have surged as a result of the selective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In the United States, gas prices have risen sharply, fueling fear among Republicans that a continued energy crisis could hurt them in the midterm elections. In parts of Asia, the impact is being felt not only in rising fuel and liquefied gas prices but in supply constraints — several countries in South and Southeast Asia are already experiencing energy rationing, resulting in shortened work weeks, business closures, and partial school shutdowns.

 Europe faces its own vulnerabilities. With the end of winter providing some relief, gas reserves nevertheless remain low. Russia has been quick to offer Europe an energy lifeline — which Europeans have so far rejected, determined to uphold their sanctions. Meanwhile, Washington first gave permission to India to purchase limited quantities of Russian oil, then removed sanctions on Russian oil altogether, albeit temporarily. Russia looks set to be among the war’s clearest beneficiaries.

China, highly dependent on Gulf oil imports, will also be forced to seek alternative energy sources — likely accelerating its reliance on Russian oil. But in the longer run, the war tilts the strategic balance decisively in Beijing’s favor. A protracted conflict consumes U.S. military resources globally, including in East Asia — the removal of the THAAD missile defense system from South Korea is an early example of that overreach.

The war will further erode Washington’s global prestige and deepen doubts among key allies about the reliability of U.S. leadership. China has spent years carefully nurturing its relations with Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia — and a net result of this war will be the consolidation of those ties. Some analysts have also argued that the energy shock could further accelerate a global transition toward renewables, raising global demand for Chinese solar panels, electric vehicles, and batteries. Against the backdrop of U.S. military adventurism, China’s reputation for diplomacy and economic stability will continue to gain global appeal.

The Nuclear Paradox

 One of the great ironies of this war is that it marks the end of any significant deterrence of Iran — including on its nuclear program. If Iran survives the devastating destruction brought upon it, its appetite for a nuclear deterrent will have significantly increased. A likely consequence of this war, therefore, will be to accelerate the very threat it professed to avert.

Operation Epic Fury is increasingly looking like an epic fail. What began as an attempt to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of unrivaled U.S. military power is fast becoming one of the most consequential strategic miscalculations of this century — a pivotal moment in the steady erosion of U.S. hegemony.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard pointedly refused to say whether Iran presented an “imminent” nuclear threat to America before the U.S. launched its war, angering Democratic senators during an intelligence hearing on Wednesday.

“The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president,” Gabbard said during questioning from Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia.

The committee continued to press Gabbard over what the intelligence community concluded about Iran’s nuclear program before the war, given that a written version of her statement said Iran’s nuclear capabilities had been “obliterated” with “no efforts since” to rebuild after U.S. strikes last year.

“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” Gabbard said. “That is up to the president, based on the volume of information that he receives.”

Gabbard’s statements inspired a sharp response from Ossoff, who cut in and said, “It is precisely your responsibility to determine what consists of a threat to the United States.” He accused Gabbard of “evading a question because to provide a candid response to the committee would contradict a statement from the White House.”

In a White House statement announcing the beginning of the Iran campaign, the Trump administration said the attack was necessary to “eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime.”

Since then, however, officials have offered shifting explanations for the war, including comments from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the U.S. attacked Iran because Israel was planning an attack on the country, a strike that was sure to provoke Iranian attacks in response on U.S. interests.

The back-and-forth in Congress comes amid larger scrutiny of the Iran war.

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced this week he was resigning, writing in an open letter that he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran” because Iran posed “no imminent threat to our nation.”

During the Senate hearing, CIA Director John Ratcliffe challenged Kent’s conclusion.

“The intelligence reflects the contrary,” Ratcliffe said.

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced this week he was resigning, writing in an open letter that he could not keep supporting the war because Iran posed ‘no imminent threat to our nation’

He added that “any fair-minded assessment” would show Iran posed a threat to the U.S. and called the intelligence leading up to the war “flawless.”

Lawmakers also questioned Gabbard about what President Trump had been briefed about the potential of the war to trigger a shutdown of the vital Strait of Hormuz, which has since taken place.

Gabbard told the panel there had “long been an assessment of the IC [intelligence community] that Iran would likely hold the Strait of Hormuz as leverage,” but declined to discuss specific conversations with Trump.

Now that the war is ongoing, the Iranian regime appears to be “intact but largely degraded,” Gabbard said.

Outside of the Capitol, the administration was also on the defensive, with Vice President JD Vance telling an audience in Michigan the war-driven spike in gas prices will only be “temporary.”

Leading members of NATO have dismissed the Trump administration’s demands for assistance in reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

“It is not NATO’s war,” said a spokesperson for German chancellor Friedrich Merz this week. “NATO is an alliance to defend the alliance area. The United States did not consult us before this war, and so we believe this is not a matter for NATO or the German government.”