Who holds the cards now? And it’s not Trump or Vance.
“You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards”
—Donald Trump to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Oval Office, Feb. 2025
“I’m not playing cards. I’m very serious. I’m the president in a war.”
—Zelenskyy’s reply
In that frigid Oval Office exchange earlier this year, President Trump told Ukraine’s wartime president that he had no leverage. No cards. No power — unless the United States would continue to hand it to them.
What Idiot Child Trump didn’t realize was that Zelenskyy had already anticipated this move after the Biden administration left and was replaced by one hostile to Ukraine’s survival as a nation. While Trump saw a desperate leader begging for help, Zelenskyy was preparing to pivot to a redefinition of modern warfare if his largest ally would be abandoning them.
That pivot in silence is what became Operation Spiderweb.
And it wasn’t just a military operation. It was a message — to Russia, to the world, and perhaps most pointedly, to Trump: I don’t need your cards. I’ve built my own deck
The Zelenskyy Doctrine
President Zelenskyy’s doctrine is not just military—it’s cultural. It’s the war of a nation that has had to prove its right to exist over and over again. These are people that will continue to fight and survive whether Trump continues support or not. And now, it’s showing other small or threatened countries — Taiwan, Estonia, Georgia — what survival might look like in the 21st century.
Cards on the Table
President Zelenskyy may not be the leader history or Ukraine expected — but he may be the one they needed.In the span of a few years, Zelenskyy has gone from underestimated to indispensable, from a political novice to a battlefield innovator. Not because he sought power, but because he refused to let go of his country.
And when he was told by Trump that he “had no cards,” Zelenskyy didn’t flinch.
He built a new deck — and played it to perfection.
Trump “administration” coming apart . . . result of hiring alcoholics, liars, potheads, wackjobs, and Nazis
Even as government agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ramp up their arrests and confrontations, the lug nuts on the wheels of the White House bus continue to loosen.
On Wednesday, officers from the Federal Protective Service, which is part of DHS, handcuffed an aide in the Manhattan office of Representative Jerry Nadler (D-NY). Someone sitting in the office captured the confrontation on video.
Federal agents are trying to meet the quotas the administration has set for arrests by detaining individuals outside immigration courtrooms after they show up for their scheduled hearings. According to Christopher Maag of the New York Times, peaceful protestors gathered on Wednesday outside the Manhattan federal building that holds an immigration court and immigration advocates gathered outside the courtroom. As officers detained immigrants outside the courtroom, advocates reminded the immigrants they had a right to remain silent. Officers threatened to arrest the advocates for loitering, and a member of Nadler’s staff invited some of the advocates to Nadler’s office a floor above the court to defuse the situation.
Trump, Musk engineered white supremacist apartheid that is killing hundreds . . . and they love it
It’s one of the greatest preventable mass deaths in modern history: around two people every minute of every day, day and night, week after week, soon to be year after year.
In the time it takes you to read this article, several dozen children will have died because of actions taken — with full knowledge of this consequence — by South African immigrant Elon Musk, Big Balls and his teenage buddies, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio.
Children who wanted to live as desperately as do yours and mine, whose parents grieve them every bit as much as we would grieve the death of our own kids, are dying as you read these words.
Even worse, Musk and Rubio keep lying about the blood on their hands. Nobody knows if Rubio is drinking himself to sleep to deal with the guilt, but according to The New York Times Musk is taking mind-numbing drugs at a level that would make Charles Manson blush.
Stupid people being stupid . . . and supporting Trump
Let’s say it again: It’s 25th Amendment time
When the President of the US posts insane shit like this — which he posted Saturday night — it’s time for the 25th Amendment.
Trump now claims that Joe Biden was “executed in 2020” and was replaced by a robot.
We have seen this before . . . Joe McCarthy and Trump’s lawyer, Roy Cohn
“I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition,” Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine told her colleagues on June 1, 1950. “It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear…. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American.”
“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles, and the ones making those attacks were in her own party.
Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, led a faction that had cowed almost all of the Republican Party into silence by accusing their opponents of “communism.” Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. She had seen the effects of his behavior up close in Maine, where the faction of the Republican Party that supported McCarthy had supported the state’s Ku Klux Klan.
“Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Senator Smith said. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”
Senator Smith wanted a Republican administration, she explained, but to replace President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration—for which she had plenty of harsh words—with a Republican regime “that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation.”
“I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
Trump’s Dept of Justice is coming after free and fair elections . . . 2024 may have been the last one
The Department of Justice no longer represents the best interests of the American people. Under Bondi, it has been transformed into little more than a cog in the authoritarian machine doing Donald Trump’s bidding. It has abandoned independent judgment and fealty to the law and replaced it with unquestioned obedience to the White House.
After only five months in office, Trump has transformed the Department of Justice into an instrument for voter suppression. This should come as no surprise.
When Trump nominated Pam Bondi as Attorney General, Democracy Docket described her as an “election denier” who helped spread “voting conspiracy theories and false allegations of election fraud.” Meanwhile, The Washington Post editorialized that she should be confirmed because she was “qualified” and “serious.”
Sadly, we were right, and much of the corporate legacy media was woefully wrong.
Since taking office, Bondi has appointed Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican lawyer with her own history of supporting anti-voting litigation and election denialism, as head of the Civil Rights Division. The most recent addition to the voter suppression team is Maureen Riordan, who recently helped lead a prominent anti-voting legal group. As Democracy Docket reported, she is now the acting head of the Voting Rights Section.
The first sign of the new regime’s focus came last week in North Carolina. Republicans spent six months trying to steal a state Supreme Court election by throwing out more than 65,000 ballots, claiming the voter registrations were incomplete.
Truth for the day in pictures
Trump wants to drop charges against MS-13 chief to protect the leader of El Salvador
Here’s the short version.
- Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele gave money and territory to the MS-13 gang.
- In return, the gang promised to reduce violence from its side and provide Bukele’s party with electoral support.
- And now Trump’s “Dept of Justice” wants to drop charges against the MS-13 leader and not deport him — because — he has threatened to blow the whistle on the El Salvadoran president, who is taking deportees from the US and who is a big friend of Trump.
According to justice department records, the MS-13 figure in question, Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez, has intimate knowledge of that secretive pact, which – before eventually falling apart – involved Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s government ceding money and territory to the gang, who in return promised to reduce violence from its side and provide Bukele’s party with electoral support.
Attempts by the Trump administration to expel Arevalo-Chavez are part of its own deal with Bukele to allow for the US to incarcerate immigrants in a maximum security Salvadoran prison. CNN reported in April that Bukele’s government had specifically asked for nine top MS-13 leaders to be brought back to El Salvador from the US.
…
Arevalo-Chavez is a member of the “Ranfla Nacional”, which is considered to be a directors’ board of sorts for the MS-13 gang. Federal charges pending against him in New York include racketeering, terrorism and conspiring to commit narco-terrorism.A filing from the US justice department – dated 1 April but not unsealed until Thursday – said federal prosecutors want to dismiss charges against Arevalo-Chavez for “sensitive and important foreign policy considerations”.