The United States is now facing the greatest threat to our free way of life in our history. Even the US Civil War was not the danger that is Donald Trump. In the Civil War, the South wanted to separate from the rest of the Union. Today, Trump does not want to separate from the US, he seeks to destroy the fundamental functions and purpose of the US. He seeks to destroy the Constitution, replacing the Judiciary and Legislative Branches with puppets of the Executive. Plainly stated, Trump seeks to establish himself as a dictator . . . and as of May 2025, he may succeed.
Yes, that’s a picture of Pam Bondi in the trash can. This photo was taken in an anonymous office at Department of Justice the day after Trump fired her. I’ll bet this scene was repeated all over the building because, according to many reports, the people at DOJ did not like this ignorant woman to start with.
We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator. If we see this, we can stop it, overcome the movement that brought us to this point, and make a turn towards something better.
President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth are stuck in the logic of escalation, according to which the feeling of defeat today can be reversed by doing the first thing that comes to mind tomorrow. Trump is surrounded by people who are making money from the war; each day of war strengthens a warmongering lobby with personal access to the president.
As the war lengthens, the chance that it will be exploited for a coup attempt increases.
Trump tells us that he is chiefly concerned with the permanence of his own comfort and power (think about ballroom and bunker), much of which he will lose when his party is defeated decisively in the midterms. He regularly declares his intention to meddle in the elections. His party backed a bill which would have turned elections into a sham. Trump wants to increase the defense budget by nearly 50% without any review of what the money is for; this is strategic nonsense, and has to be understood as a payoff for the men who, as he imagines, will help him install a dictatorship. Hegseth is meanwhile purging the highest officer ranks of people of principle.
It is up to us to put two and two together: Trump will seek to exploit the war (or the next one) to alter the elections. We bear responsibility for what comes next.
The eventuality can seem frightening, but Trump’s position is weak. The trick of turning a foreign war into a domestic dictatorship is complicated and difficult. Its success depends on us. If the possibility of such a coup is not anticipated and the variants of the trick are not called out as they emerge, he can succeed. Trump has attempted one coup — January 2021 — there is no reason to think that he will not try to do so again only this time he has a private army (ICE) and a cowardly Secretary of Defense who will turn the US military against the country’s people.
The biggest, most important story in the world today has several aspects.
We now are experiencing rule by OLIGARCHS – fabulously wealthy people who control everything for their own profit and benefit, not caring who or what they destroy in the process. Joe Biden is a case in point.
The billionaires who owned the media made President Biden always look disoriented and confused. They chose this lie for Americans to believe and to influence the November election to tilt to the republicans.
Now fast forward to today, the current president is showing all the symptoms of a demented mind and NO ONE in the billionaire owned media dares to attack Trump the way they did Biden.
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The United States has a long history of concentration camps, for Native Americans and for Japanese Americans. We now have concentration camps for immigrants. People are dying in our concentration camps.
The March 4, 2026, edition of the Arizona Daily Star put the facts succinctly: “A Haitian asylum seeker held for four months at Florence Correctional Center died Monday at a Scottsdale hospital due to complications from an infected tooth.” It seems the infection spread from his tooth to his lungs, and he developed the pneumonia that killed him.
In other words, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement allowed a prisoner to die of a toothache. His name was Emmanuel Damas. He was 56 years old and the father of two.
And we can only expect medical treatment at ICE centers to deteriorate further. As Judd Legum at Popular Information reported in January 2026:
“ICE … has not paid any third-party providers for medical care for detainees since October 3, 2025. Last week, ICE posted a notice on an obscure government website announcing it will not begin processing such claims until at least April 30, 2026. Until then, medical providers are instructed “to hold all claims submissions.”
Emmanuel Damas’ unnecessary death would be outrageous enough were it the only one of its kind. In fact, 32 people died in ICE custody during 2025, the most in two decades. Another six died in January 2026 alone, among them Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban father, age 55, at the Camp East Montana detention center in El Paso, Texas.
Although ICE initially claimed Lunas Campos had attempted suicide, the American Immigration Council reports that “the El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide arising from asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” Of course, it’s pretty hard to strangle yourself to death. Witnesses, however, described his murder this way: “Mr. Lunas Campos was handcuffed, while at least five guards held him down and one guard squeezed his neck until he was unconscious.” At least one other man has died at the Camp East Montana detention center, where tuberculosis and measles are also spreading.
Damas and Lunas Campos were among the roughly 73,000 people whom ICE currently holds in a tangle of detention camps sprawled across the country. And more centers are under construction. Many of them are former warehouses designed to function, as acting ICE Director Todd Lyons put it last year, “like Amazon Prime for human beings.” (Like many Trump appointees, Lyons has not received Senate confirmation. His actual title, according to ICE, is “Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”)
Now, some people might blanche at the term “concentration camps” since it’s an American hobby to assume everything about Nazi Germany is so unique and so evil that we can’t use anything like the same terms to describe what happens here. And to some extent, there’s truth there. But that doesn’t mean that these aren’t concentration camps. I don’t totally agree with the definition provided in the article, but it’s a good place to start.
Concentration camps have a number of defining features:
- Concentration camps exist outside regular legal structures. The people they hold are not prisoners, but detainees. So, we find people of all ages, from infants to ancients, in concentration camps. In most cases, they have not been tried or convicted of any crime. Rather, they are held because of their status, for example, as noncitizens, or in the case of Japanese American citizens imprisoned during World War II, because of their ethnicity or national origin. This is true for the people held in ICE detention today. Their alleged offenses are against U.S. civil, not criminal, law, and their detention exists outside of any court system, including the immigration courts run by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Immigration judges, who are really administrative employees, can’t order anyone detained. That’s up to ICE and its umbrella agency, the Department of Homeland Security.
- Concentration camp inmates are civilians, not soldiers, which places them conveniently outside the strictures of the Geneva Conventions. That’s why the U.S. has never recognized the men it has held and, in the case of 15 prisoners, continues to hold as prisoners of war in the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In the 1990s, almost a decade before the naval station at Guantánamo was first used to house detainees in the “global war on terror,” the U.S. held immigrants there, including as many as 50,000 Haitians and Cubans. Trump’s Jan. 29, 2025, executive order titled “Expanding Migrant Operations Center At Naval Station Guantánamo Bay To Full Capacity” directed the Defense and Homeland Security departments to prepare to hold as many as 30,000 migrant detainees there. As of July 2025, the camp held detainees from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean.
- Concentration camps are associated with authoritarian regimes. They function both as a direct form of repression and, no less importantly, as a warning to the rest of the population about what could happen to those who resist the regime. In this sense, concentration camps are very much like another tool of repression, institutionalized state torture, about which I wrote in my book “Mainstreaming Torture.” Like state torture, concentration camps perform a kind of national security theater, made all the more entrancing by its quasi-secret nature. In the case of ICE detention camps, the DHS has made a show of not permitting local officials or members of Congress to enter those facilities. But such detention centers can’t fulfill their full repressive function if people don’t know anything about what goes on in them. So, we have the spectacle of a hearing in which a congresswoman asked then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem about a double amputee who “has to crawl through mold and feces and bodily fluids just to take a shower.” Knowing that this is happening to people who have almost no recourse is intended to have a chilling effect on political action.
- Concentration camps are not death camps, but people do die there. Many Americans tend to think that all German concentration camps were sites of direct extermination. In fact, the Nazis constructed six camps specifically designed for the industrialized murder of their inhabitants. But for a decade before the first death camp was even opened, prisoners had already been concentrated in thousands of “labor” camps. In fact, they were not there to be killed directly, but to be removed from society. As the National World War II Museum in New Orleans explains, “Initially, the population of these concentration camps were not usually Jews, but Communists, socialists, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s witnesses, gay men, and ‘asocial’ elements (alcoholics, criminals, people with mental disabilities, the poor).” Notably, like undocumented people in the U.S. today, these were groups who then received little sympathy from the larger German population. The conditions they encountered — lack of food and medical care, crowding, and unsanitary conditions — sickened and killed as many as a third of those who passed through them.
Trump told the man who controls 12% of the world’s oil to kiss his ass. That man just restructured Middle Eastern security with Ukraine, telling Trump, “It’s over”.
On March 27, 2026, Donald Trump stood at a podium in Miami — at a conference bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, in front of 1,500 of the kingdom’s investors and partners — and announced to the room that Mohammed bin Salman was “kissing my ass.”
His exact words: “He didn’t think he would be kissing my ass. He really didn’t. And now he has to be nice to me. You tell him he’d better be nice to me. He’s got to be.”
The President of the United States, on a Saudi-funded stage, publicly declared the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia a subordinate who must perform deference to retain American protection. A dominance display. Performed for investors. Broadcast on C-SPAN. On Saudi money. There was no walk-back. No clarification. No suggestion that Trump misspoke.
On the same day, Zelenskyy was in Jeddah signing a comprehensive 10-year military pact with MBS, which REALLY pissed off the Trump Regime.
UPDATE
The Saudis strike back.
The White House appeared to delete video footage online from an Easter event where President Donald Trump mused about being king, insulted European leaders, encouraged Charlie Kirk’s widow to sue her critics and was compared to Jesus by his spiritual adviser. A video of the event was initially posted on the official White House website and YouTube channel, but it has since been removed from public view. A thumbnail of the video remained on the site as of Thursday.
Paula White‑Cain, a televangelist who has served as Trump’s spiritual adviser across both his presidencies, was blasted for comparing the billionaire president’s life to that of Jesus Christ’s during the Easter lunch event Wednesday at the White House.
“Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life,” Cain said of Trump in her remarks. “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for him, and it didn’t end there for you,” she said.
The lunch was closed to the press, but attendees included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Erika Kirk, the widow of the slain right-wing activist, according to a pool report.
