clearandpresentdanger.blog

Donald Trump and his MAGA followers are obsessed with Somali-Americans. The president frequently rants about immigrants from the easternmost African country and their children, using racist rhetoric that would not be out of place at a Ku Klux Klan rally. At a campaign event Monday in Ohio, ostensibly to boost Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign against Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown, Trump fixated at length on Somali-Americans. They “don’t have pants to wear,” he claimed, but then he also expressed anger that they drive “Mercedes Benz and BMWs.” He accused them of being “low IQ” and alleged that they “plundered, ransacked and destroyed” Minnesota, a state with a large Somali immigrant population.

So it wasn’t too big a surprise when Homeland Security officials raided the home of perhaps the most famous Somali-American in the country, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., on Monday. The action is part of an all-hands-on-deck effort to prove a conspiracy theory that has been percolating on the right for years now, accusing Omar and her family of falsifying her documents to become a U.S. citizen when she was 17. The administration hopes it can denaturalize and deport the progressive lawmaker, whom Trump has deemed “deranged and sick,” repeatedly calling for her to be ejected from the country.

Odds are that the Trump administration has no case at all against Omar — as is true of thousands of other cases it has lost against immigrants so far. Instead, the raid on the Minnesota congresswoman’s home must be understood more as a campaign stunt by a president desperate to distract from his economic failures and the disastrous war in Iran. Omar herself called the raid “pointless” and “the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.” This isn’t even the first time Trump’s goons have gone hunting for evidence that Omar’s citizenship is illegitimate. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that, during his first term, Trump made the same demand of immigration officials, but they found “insufficient evidence of wrongdoing” and “eventually abandoned” the search.

But that all underscores the greater truth about the administration’s attacks on Omar and her fellow Somali-Americans. The success of the congresswoman and her fellow immigrants handily disproves the claim that non-white people are inferior, and instead proves that progressives are right — that the U.S. is better off for allowing people from around the world to live here. For MAGA, the fear of immigration is not about feeling contaminated, but being shown up and exposed as mediocrities in comparison to industrious newcomers.

Fundamentally, Trump and his administration are white supremacists who would be right at home in a 1950’s Mississippi Ku Klux Klan rally.  Remember his attacks on Obama, claiming that Obama was not a citizen?  Remember the stupid Tea Party claims that Michelle Obama is a man and their daughters adopted from Morocco?   At Trump’s Atlantic city casino, Black employees were not allowed in public areas where they would be seen by guests.  Trump and his father were fined by DOJ for discriminating against Blacks in sales and rentals.  Remember Trump’s comment that he wanted his money “counted by guys in yarmulkes” – continuing the nonsense about Jews being experts at handling money.

There is an old saying about rats and sinking ships. There’s also an old saying about how a democratic system taken over by a single party quickly becomes corrupt because the ruling party lacks oversight. Then, as corruption becomes the party’s driving force, the only people willing to work for it are either corrupt themselves or so unqualified they support the corrupt leadership to gain power, knowing that in a merit-based system it would be entirely out of their reach.

OK, that second old saying is shared mostly among political scientists, but it’s accurate, and it’s right up there with the rats and the ships to describe what’s happening in Trump’s orbit now.

The saga of Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was recently forced to resign from her post as U.S. Ambassador to Greece, continues to expand. Guilfoyle left her post after news broke that she had tried to get a donor, Eric Deters, to pay down her credit card debt. She and her lawyers countered the story by claiming Deters was withholding money she had earned, and said the text messages he shared with news outlets were false.

Guilfoyle dated Don Jr. from 2018 to 2024 and was engaged to him the last four years of that time. Now there are rumors that during her time inside the family as a trusted loyalist, she kept a “burn book” about the family.

While that may or may not be true, the fact that there’s such a threat out there reflects the cracking loyalties of Trump insiders. More to the point might be the video released today by Deters himself, saying that he had launched a lawsuit against Guilfoyle for defamation and that he would depose her and Don Jr. and demand subpoenas to clear his name. He also vowed to play a 16-minute phone conversation tomorrow that he claims has information which “might just bring down the entire Trump administration, an administration which I have supported from Day One.”

Note that the story of Guilfoyle’s alleged shakedown is breaking now, although it happened more than a year ago.

Also in the category of old stories coming to the surface is one reported yesterday by Marc Caputo of Axios. He wrote that Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba is saying that another one of Trump’s advisors, Ric Grenell, did not deposit her billionaire husband’s $5.6 million donation to the Kennedy Center. According to Habba, Grenell asked that the donation be routed through a $17.6 million payment for a business deal, an accusation Grenell called “absurd.”

Trump appointed Grenell to be U.S. ambassador to Germany and then acting director of national intelligence during his first term. After retaking office, he named Grenell as a special envoy to Venezuela before putting him in charge of the Kennedy Center.

A fight that has been going on for more than a year in the administration broke into the open this morning in a Politico story by Daniel Lippman. He explained that Trump named Italian Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who introduced Trump to First Lady Melania Trump at a party in New York City, as a special envoy at the State Department with a portfolio of cultural diplomacy. But Zampolli apparently ignored that assignment and struck out on his own on a wide range of issues, infuriating Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau.

“My number-one boss is the president of America,” Zampolli told James Fontanella-Khan of the Financial Times in April. “I get my instructions from the White House, Commerce and the Department of War…anything to advance the America First agenda.” More than 16 administration officials have been included in the angry email chains Zampolli and Landau have exchanged, which at one point led to communications about the fight with a top-level foreign official.

At one point Zampolli accused Landau of leaking to reporters what appeared to be the story that Zampolli had tried to get custody of his son by asking Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to deport Amanda Ungaro, the boy’s mother. That story created its own scandal when Ungaro, a former model, threatened to expose information about the president and first lady. Landau responded to Zampolli’s accusation, which he sent to more than a dozen other officials, saying: “Your threats and accusations are getting more and more bizarre, defamatory, and inappropriate for broad dissemination on email.”

An administration official told Lippman that the State Department was “generally squeaky clean and professional and above it all.” In contrast, these exchanges were “cartoonish and embarrassing.”

By this afternoon, Lippman had a follow-up story: Zampolli had been fired.

It is not just the current associates of the president who are problematic. Today, news broke that two women have named former Republican representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), along with his friend former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg and others, in a civil lawsuit, alleging that from 2017 through January 2019, “Gaetz and Greenberg coordinated recruitment, payments, drugs, and travel to obtain commercial sexual acts….”

In 2024, the House Ethics Committee reported that Gaetz “regularly” paid women, as well as a 17-year-old girl, for sex, and bought and used illicit drugs while a member of Congress. Those accusations helped to sink Trump’s nomination of Gaetz for U.S. attorney general in 2025.

Gaetz’s response was hardly a denial: “I look forward to taking the plaintiffs’ depositions because much of the conduct alleged against me is false,” he wrote. “The lawsuit relies almost exclusively on a Congressional Committee Report that didn’t allow me to confront my accusers. Now I will finally have that chance.”

One has to wonder why anyone would want to be part of such a mess, but Trump’s new White House press secretary provides an answer: in a normal administration she would never make it through the door. Trump has described Katie Zacharia as an “attorney,” and she has identified herself as a “general counsel” and seemed to claim she worked as an attorney in China.

But after Judd Legum of Popular Information noted there was no sign she had ever passed the bar exam or been admitted to a state bar, Philip Wegmann and Alexandra Bruell of the Wall Street Journal reported today that, in fact, she failed the California bar exam when she took it. That, itself, is not unusual—the California bar exam is notoriously difficult—but it does mean she is not qualified to call herself an attorney.

Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonpartisan team defending democracy led by attorney Norm Eisen, has asked the State Bar of California and California Attorney General Rob Bonta to investigate whether Zacharia practiced law without a license in California, where doing so is a crime.

Tonight, on his show, Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity seemed to undercut Zacharia, asking her why she had chosen to describe herself as an attorney when she could just have said she “went to Pepperdine Law School and then took a different career path.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that Hannity’s stance likely reflected that Trump is turning on her.

Rhein Amacher, the man who started a right-wing media frenzy when he claimed to have proof that Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico had sought mental health treatment in Ohio, backed away from that claim today…sort of. Amid suggestions that he might well have run afoul of HIPAA penalties for trying to obtain health information duplicitously, he posted that “this entire situation has been blown completely out of proportion,” and wrote, “As far as I’m concerned, this matter is closed.” Later, in response to a post saying he had lied, he added: “Never lied, I just doubled down on wrong information.”

A blockbuster story by Jonathan O’Connell, Sarah Blaskey, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post today explained that the administration has been able to keep donations for Trump’s ballroom largely secret by using a nonprofit to collect the donations and then channeling that money “into a White House account the president directly controls.”

The reporters gained access to a list of the 57 donors who have committed to giving $100,000 or more to the project. They found that “the vast majority of the funds raised came from companies and wealthy individuals with interests before the federal government.” Large technology companies Nvidia and Apple committed $25 million each. Microsoft, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin pledged $10 million each.

Individuals on the list who are associated with Trump include Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s son Brandon, chair of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, who contributed stock worth more than $2.5 million, and the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, Republican donor Joseph Popolo Jr., and his wife, who gave $1 million. Missing from the list is Trump himself, who claimed he would be helping to pay for the project.

Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark was right when she called the ballroom being constructed where the East Wing of the White House used to be “a monument to corruption” built by “a corrupt American president.”

On Tuesday, Charles Gorrivan, Lydia Beyoud, and Nicola M. White of Bloomberg reported that on March 23, a few traders placed billions of dollars of contracts predicting that the price of oil would fall just 15 minutes before Trump posted on his social media platform that he had changed his mind about striking Iranian power plants. The deals were worth billions, and analysts from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) flagged the traders and the deals and sent a referral to the Division of Enforcement to decide whether to open an investigation into insider trading. But in a virtually unheard-of move, the administration asked the CFTC to withdraw the referral.

The journalists note both that there have been many trades apparently tied to Trump’s announcements and that between a 20% cut to CFTC staff during Trump’s second term and the agency chair’s vow to curb “over-zealous regulation,” enforcement actions have dropped dramatically from the numbers during the Biden administration.

Steven Portnoy and Katherine Faulders of ABC News reported today that the White House is claiming that all Trump’s conversations about plans to renovate the Kennedy Center are covered by executive privilege and therefore can be kept secret. This is a dramatic expansion of the concept of executive privilege, which enables the president to shield conversations with key advisors from public scrutiny, extending it to consider virtually all conversations private.

Apparently in anticipation of Democratic investigations, Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a memo as soon as he took office, claiming presidents can shield “presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking.”

A new Fox News poll released today showed that voters’ top concern is “corruption in government,” with 88% worried about it compared to 12% who are not. Corruption tops even “inflation and high prices,” which comes in at 85%, and “gas prices,” which concern 83% of voters.

In a conversation with Rob Finnerty of Newsmax, aired tonight, Trump suggested he would pardon everyone in the administration, including himself, to make sure none of the people around him have to “go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing.”

It is no wonder that Republicans eager to stop Trump are backing Democratic candidates for the midterms. Today 58 Republicans and Independents in New Hampshire declared their support for the Democratic Senate candidate, Representative Chris Pappas, over Republican candidate John Sununu. Those supporters include Don Bolduc, who was Trump’s pick for the Senate in 2022 but who lost to Democrat Maggie Hassan by 9 points after he embraced Trump’s claim to have won the 2020 election.

One of the Republicans supporting Pappas told Kevin Landrigan of the New Hampshire Union Leader: “Donald Trump has turned the Republican Party into something I no longer recognize.”

I’m fascinated by this particular topic, so sue me if I blog too long.

Donald Trump continues to make claims, in public speeches that are recorded by contemporary information technology and therefore viewable after the fact, that schoolchildren are being subjected to surgical procedures to alter their genders, without parental permission or knowledge. He has been making these claims at least since the fall of 2024, when he did so while campaigning for re-election to the presidency of the United States, and he made them again yesterday at a midterm elections rally in Arizona. Here is my verbatim transcript:

Mutilate your children, they want to cut your children.  It’s unbelievable, what they do.  Six states, they can do whatever they want, and they do.  Your son leaves as Jimmy, and comes back home in three days as Janet. [Some people in crowd laugh in what sounds more like a polite than a sincere way].  And they don’t even ask you.  Most people don’t believe that, you know, they think it’s like an exaggeration – it’s not.  They can take your child out of school and do whatever the hell they want.  These people are sick.  Minnesota is one of those states that can do that.

I had to make my own transcript after viewing a video clip of the rally posted by Aaron Rupar, because I can find no news stories reporting on these specific remarks. These remarks, made yesterday by the president of the United States, are not considered in any way newsworthy by any major media outlets.

What’s going on here? Some speculations:

I don’t believe this is an example of media bias in the crude “the New York Times supports Donald Trump and therefore covers up bad stories for him” narrative.  What’s happening here is subtler than that I think. If, for example, Mike Johnson were to come out and say he can’t negotiate with Hakeem Jefferies and Chuck Schumer because they are possessed by demons, and that therefore negotiations must wait until a successful exorcism, this would be a massive news story, there would be lots of calls for Johnson’s immediate resignation from the speakership, etc. Johnson’s hypothesized claim is actually less crazy, for certain values of crazy at least, than Trump’s actual claim yesterday, since demonic possession is not empirically verifiable or disconfirmable, while the existence of unauthorized transgender surgeries at American elementary and/or secondary schools is. So why are the Trump remarks a complete non-story, given that they are totally insane on their face, and the president of the United States making totally insane on their face statements seems like real news by definition?

The answer, it would seem, is that Donald Trump, president of the United States, makes totally insane on their face statements all the time, so such statements aren’t news, because they fail to clear the dog bites man as opposed to man bites dog definition of news.

Relatedly, the media, consciously, semi-consciously, or unconsciously, rationalize all this as some sort of joke or schtick. Trump isn’t serious, you see, because if he were serious that would be totally insane, and the president of the United States is not totally insane, because if he were that would be extremely alarming, plus we have institutional guardrails ™ to deal with insane presidents, that aren’t being employed, or indeed even referenced, so obviously he has not gone insane. [Extreme Captain Willard voice]. Obviously.

Also relatedly, this whole thing implicates a pet little idea of mine, which is that right wing politics and ideology in contemporary America can be described as Apocalyptic Calvinism on Meth which works something like this. As I’m sure you all remember, a core principle of Calvinist theology is the total depravity of the human moral condition, which is an assumption that actually makes a certain amount of twisted sense, for certain values of twisted sense, if your metaphysics assume not a can opener but an omniscient omnipresent eternal definitionally good down to the last drop deity. Think of it this way. I’m sure there are a lot of different ability levels in the LGM readership in regard to playing basketball, but how would the differences in all those levels stack up in comparison to Nikola Jokic’s basketball abilities? The answer of course is that the differences would be trivial, because Jokic is almost infinitely better at basketball than anyone at LGM. Well in Calvintown, God is not almost infinitely better than you or me or Pope Leo or Ted Bundy or Donald Trump: he is literally infinitely better. Which means . . . stick with me for a second here . . . that sure Donald Trump lies, but all politicians lie, because all people lie, unlike God, who literally never does, because he can’t by definition (This would seem to contradict the omnipotence feature of our featured deity, but whatever as the kids say).

So yes, Donald Trump is totally depraved, as illustrated by his totally depraved statements about transgender surgeries, but everybody is totally depraved compared to God, so none can be justified by works, which is why you need Unconditional Election via the Irresistible Grace of Jesus Christ (are you with me so far?).

From this perspective, saying “Social Security is going broke” and saying “Jimmy goes to school and comes home three days later as Janet” [side point: does Donald Trump not realize that not everyone goes to boarding schools or how is this part supposed to work?] are the same, because they’re both lies, and God hates all liars with equal fervor, which again is why we all need all that irresistible grace. That the first lie is a kind of subtle spinning of the facts while the second is a deranged claim totally orthogonal to reality itself is a trivial detail in the eyes of the Big Guy, so it should be in ours, as well. Or something.

Let us turn now to Chapter 33, verses seven through eleven, of the Good Book:

Take for example Trump’s claim that elementary schools are carrying out secret gender reassignment surgeries on children, so that one day Johnny goes to school and comes back as Jane.   How does he get away with making this utterly insane and above all epically stupid claim, at the height of a presidential campaign, with no apparent ill effects on his re-election chances? 

First, because of epistemic bubbles, a huge number of Trump voters will never hear about this claim, as Fox News and the internet algorithms won’t feed it to them.  The fact that in theory it’s very easy to find this information runs into the practical reality that people who don’t want to hear it will very often successfully avoid doing so. 

Second, many supporters who do hear it are stupid enough to believe it, as Trump himself probably does in his increasingly degenerate decrepitude. 

Third, Trumpian intellectuals – and they do exist, despite the reflexive denial of so many liberals – will interpret this claim in symbolic terms.  Yes, it’s not literally true, but it’s true in a higher, metaphorical sense, given that elementary schools, controlled by cadres of woke cultural Marxists, are trying to make transgender identity a normal and acceptable thing.  One can perform a similar re-interpretation of just about every item on the list below.  And that is the essence of this nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

And that is why there are no news stories about Donald Trump’s deranged claims about transgender surgeries yesterday. Because the fact — and it is very much an undeniable fact to any rational observer — that Donald Trump himself is a deranged delusional liar, who is losing touch with reality and is almost out of blow, is NOT NEWS. It’s just how he is, and the way things are now, and we had better get used to ie, because there’s nothing to be done about it for twenty-seven more months (minimum unless Captain Willard gets a real choice mission), because that’s the way God planned it, that’s the way God wants it to be.

President Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary has an apparent shortfall in her resume.

The 80-year-old president introduced Katie Zacharia as “an attorney,” and she has described herself the same way on national TV over and over, but a new investigation by Popular Information’s Judd Legum found no evidence that she has ever been admitted to practice law in any state.

The journalist searched bar records in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and turned up no sign that Zacharia holds a law license. She isn’t listed with the State Bar of California, where she lives, or with the bars in Texas and D.C., where she has also worked.

But that hasn’t kept her from using the title.

“I’m a lawyer,” she said on the Greg Kelly Show earlier this month. In August she told a podcast, “a lawyer, I went to Pepperdine, Pepperdine Law.” In a February appearance on CNN, she said, “[A]s a lawyer, there’s a big difference between answering something under oath and answering something to the media.” Fox News has also labeled her a lawyer.

Zacharia does have a law degree, but a Juris Doctor alone doesn’t authorize someone to practice law. That requires admission to a state bar, which means passing a bar exam.

In California, presenting yourself as entitled to practice law without an active license is a misdemeanor under state law. Zacharia’s LinkedIn says she worked full-time from January 2024 to March 2025 as “General Counsel” for Fix California, a conservative nonprofit founded by Trump ally Ric Grenell. A general counsel is usually an organization’s top lawyer. According to archived versions of her X profile, she kept listing that title, along with “Lawyer,” as recently as July 2026.

However, there is this exchange — her answer to a reporter’s question when Trump introduced her.

Q: You said Zacharia is an attorney. Where did she pass the bar exam? What state?

ZACHARIA: When I moved to China.

The Chinese bar exam is in Chinese and is available only to Chinese citizens.

Popular Info’s Judd Legum found that, after analyzing state bar association databases from all 50 states and Washington, Zacharia never actually passed the qualifying legal exam anywhere in the country. But she couldn’t have passed the Chinese equivalent of the bar exam, either, as it’s actually forbidden for foreigners to do so.

Zacharia’s LinkedIn work history places her at Zhong Lun, an elite Chinese multinational law firm, between 2011 and 2013. She worked at the Beijing-based firm as an associate on the international practice team, months after she obtained her J.D. from Pepperdine Caruso Law. Zacharia’s LinkedIn also notes that she spoke Chinese at an “elementary proficiency.”

Oct 13, 2026, 3:00 PM EDST

This is a photo of the crowd at a JD Vance scheduled event 10 minutes before start time.  In TEXAS.

Botox lips, high cheekbones, other work done lower down.

In mid-2017, Guilfoyle signed a long-term contract extension with Fox. In July 2018, she abruptly left Fox News and began working for a pro–Donald Trump super PAC.  HuffPost reported that, at the time of her departure, the network had been in the midst of a year-long investigation of a sexual harassment accusation against Guilfoyle. Network officials had given Guilfoyle an ultimatum: resign by the end of July or be fired.  Later, turned out that she had been hopping into bed with several male Fox fellow employees and officers.  Her favorite pastime was to take photos of her companions’ genitals and post the pics on her Instagram account.

After leaving Fox, she hooked up with Donald Trump, Jr., who did exactly what Donald Trump, Sr., would have done: Ditched his wife and five kids for Guilfoyle.

They announced their engagement after which she dumped him; he wound up marrying the daughter of Epstein’s accountant in a multi-millionaire wedding paid for by a close friend of the ruling prince of Saudi Arabia.

Trump appointed her as ambassador to Greece where she proceeded to endear herself to her hosts by saying “We could overthrow you if we wanted to. ”

In October 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported that while preparing for her Senate confirmation hearings in 2025, Guilfoyle asked businessman and Trump-allied donor Eric Deters to send a wire transfer for $100,000 to pay down her American Express account “in a way that wouldn’t leave a paper trail.”  He claims to have refused but somehow the bill was paid.  She was afraid if this debt became public in her confirmation hearings, she would not be confirmed.  There’s no record as to who paid the AMEX bill.

And now — Oct 13, 2026 — she is resigning as ambassador because she embarrassed Trump.  Her problem now is that she is 57 years old — Botox and surgery can only help so far, then, nature takes over.  And if you can’t pay off your $100K AMEX bill, you sure as hell can’t afford to have any more work done.  Oh, well.  There’s always a place somewhere for another Trump camp follower.

UJPDATE!!  UPDATE!! Oct 13, 2026; 12:38 PM EDST

BREAKING: LOL! The big MAGA donor who Kimberly Guilfoyle tried to squeeze $100,000 out of for political favors announces that he’s suing her.

And it gets even better…

“I’m going to be suing those lawyers, that law firm, and Kimberly Guilfoyle. It’s going to be fun,” Eric Deters told CNN.

Guilfoyle, who it was revealed today is being forced out as U.S. Ambassador to Greece, demanded that Deters pay off $100,000 of American Express debt in return for access to senior Trump administration officials. It’s the most blatant form of corruption imaginable, the kind of thing that we once expected only from Third World dictatorships. But under President Trump’s criminal rule, all of these crooks are exploiting their positions for financial gain. Guilfoyle’s great sin was not being more subtle about it and leaving text message evidence.

Deters claims that Guilfoyle’s legal team lied about him after the bombshell story broke.

“They first said that the text messages were fake. Defamation,” said Deters. “Then they said I was a known blackmailer. I’ve never blackmailed anybody in my life.”

Desperate to construct a narrative to shield her from possible prison time, Guilfoyle’s team is insisting that she was innocently trying to collect on $150,000 that Deters owed her for speaking events and consulting. Deters, in turn, says that he paid Guilfoyle the full $300,000 that he owed her for speaking at an anti-COVID mandates event.

“Now, they’re claiming that there are invoices when she knows that’s not true. In all the text messages, she doesn’t mention anything about me owing money,” Deters said. “She knows that is phony, and I’m going to be suing them all for defamation.”

“I think she’s gone. I think he has to fire her,” he added. “It’s grifting on the highest level, and it’s just an awful look for the administration.”

As it turns out, Deters was correct and Trump has asked Guilfoyle to leave. But again, it’s not because she tried to enrich herself through corruption. It’s because she got caught.

Introducing Kate Zacharaia, the new White House Press Secretary, shown here displaying her qualifications for the job.

The woman who spread her filth calling Democrats and Hollywood celebrities “sick pedo cannibals”, who wanted to suspend the habeas corpus for migrants, who spread Covid-19 vaccine lies, who called for a federal takeover of California, and who called for Trump to serve a third term . . . is holding her first press conference as Trump’s Press Secretary, Tuesday, Oct 13.

Is Natalie Harp in trouble?

While Zacharia has routinely presented herself to the public as a lawyer, Popular Information’s Judd Legum could find no evidence that she had ever been licensed to practice law, and when offered an opportunity to prove otherwise, the White House referred to a Trump social media item in which the president asserted that she was an attorney.

Before the mid-19th century, executions in America were presumptively public. Most prisoners were hanged on a gallows, following an hours-long affair that began with the condemned person’s exit from jail accompanied by ministers, the sheriff and his deputies, and sometimes a military escort. Spectators joined the humiliating procession, gathering by the thousands to watch the noose lowered over the prisoner’s neck. The sheriff would mount the scaffold to read aloud the death warrant, sometimes adding commentary, and at least one minister (often several) would issue sermons. The condemned was offered the chance to give a speech, with spectators standing so close that they could ask the prisoner questions and join him in prayer, or bid him goodbye, if he was a family member or friend.

All of that seemed safely confined to a past that the Trump administration now hopes to revive. President Trump, a consummate showman, has authorized the country’s first public execution in 90 years. The condemned prisoner is Nidal Hasan, a military psychiatrist who murdered 13 people and injured many more during a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, in Texas. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that the killing, scheduled for December 3, will be conducted by the military and publicly livestreamed. During his trial, Hasan alarmed his standby attorneys when he chose to defend himself, and mounted an argument that the lawyers considered tantamount to seeking his own death. He could still conceivably file civilian appeals, which could delay his execution substantially. If it goes forward, the administration surely hopes to make an example of Hasan to all who might be tempted by his worldview. But this strategy could just as likely result in unintended consequences, and pushback by the public.

Elizabeth Bruenig: The way of the gun

Public executions ceased not because those who clamored to witness them found the displays uniformly outrageous, but because politicians in the 19th century associated them with proletarian barbarity. Though these executions were theoretically meant to deter crime and exhort onlookers to practice proper Christian values, they were mostly entertainment, and did not always provoke the desired reactions. Some onlookers cheered and celebrated the killings; others sympathized with the condemned. Public executions of Black prisoners in the South, for instance, became opportunities for community, song, and displays of Black religious authority. Ministers preached sermons of salvation and sometimes protested that the prisoners were innocent.

In that sense, the public nature of executions backfired, and critics took note. Because the attendant crowds were so volatile, vulgar, and unruly, by 1860 all northern states had begun carrying out the killings in jail yards, which were much smaller areas, subject to tight government control. Decades later, the South followed suit. The large crowds soon vanished. Military executions, traditionally carried out by firing squad, were long conducted in small, controlled settings, often witnessed only by military personnel and chaplains. The last military execution in the United States was carried out in 1961.

Trump and Hegseth aim to have it both ways: a small, secure setting and massive crowds. This time, viewers will be watching a livestream on their screens, close enough to see the event but too far to smell the gunpowder. Both Hegseth and Trump seem intent on flexing America’s political power and military might as a message not just to foreign enemies but to the American people, as if to say: This could be you. This method of ruling by fear is central to authoritarian governance, and Trump and Hegseth seem drawn to executions partly for that reason.

But if Trump and Hegseth are hoping for a deterrent effect, they’re unlikely to get it. The idea that executions could deter other killers with political motives seems sorely mistaken; those who carry out such murders already know that they could face grave consequences and have deemed that outcome acceptable. Nor do executions deter murderers without political motives, because deterrence is generated not by the severity of the punishment, but by the certainty of getting caught. And there is little certainty in American homicide investigations: In 2023, the nationwide case-clearance rate for murder was only 58 percent, meaning that murderers have decent odds of evading justice. Even if they are caught, they have good odds of avoiding the death penalty—only 23 new death sentences were handed down in 2025. Trump’s Department of Justice hopes to boost those numbers, but even if they tripled, they would add up to 69 death sentences spread across some 14,000 murders.

Adding a livestreamed element is perhaps an attempt to intensify the intended deterrent effect, but it might have opposite consequences. Plenty of Americans would surely enjoy the spectacle of a public execution, just as people have historically. One can envision groups of people crowded around their phones, sharing chips and drinks, admiring the military pageantry. But it’s easy to imagine a different effect, too: Other crowds of people, other phones, entirely different impressions—that the death penalty is a disgusting violation of human rights that puts America in league with nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China. Or that Nidal Hasan is a martyr, and the United States is a savage country not worth defending—which is the narrative presented by Hasan himself. Before the shooting, he told family that he’d turned against the country he served upon hearing horrific stories of war from his psychiatric patients and grew troubled by the fact that America was killing Muslims abroad. Carrying out his public execution would only credit the notion that this country is barbarous.