Trump was dangerous in his first term, however, the republic, the rule of law, our standing among other nations all survived.  BECAUSE he was for the most part surrounded by people with good sense.

Now — as of August 2025 — he is surrounded and by and is advised by a gaggle of former third-rate Fox personalities (Pirro, Hegseth); unhinged, crazed racists (Miller); incompetent glory seekers (Bondi, Patel); and an immature, ignorant nutcase (Loomer).

In his first term, the Supreme Court had a different composition — he changed that with his appointment of three incompetent justices.

TODAY THERE IS NO ONE TO STOP HIM.

Add to this his health — both his mental and physical health are deteriorating rapidly in plain view.

His rambling speeches in which his fixations take over his thoughts — windmills, Obama, flushing toilets, fake gold — just listen to him.

His swollen lower legs and admissions of venous insufficiency mean that his heart has a much heavier load. He is headed for cardiac arrest or heart attack.  We know that in his first term he suffered at least three incidents that were not publicized and that likely were TIA — transient ischemic attack — better known as “mini stroke.”

The recent scarring on the outside of his right hand are clear evidence of repetitive IV emplacement.

In his novel “Night,” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel recalls a horrifying memory: “Around eleven o’clock, the train began to move again. We pressed against the windows. The convoy was rolling slowly. A quarter of an hour later, it began to slow down even more. Through the windows, we saw barbed wire; we understood that this was the camp.”

In the dark shadow of the Holocaust, trains tell many different stories. For some, it was a ticket to freedom. For others, it was a journey from life to death.

When Elie Wiesel boarded a train destined for Poland, he didn’t understand what awaited him. People boarded trains none the wiser. They had already survived the ghettos. What could possibly be worse? Who could have imagined the horrors at the end of the journey?

In Nazi Germany, trains were weaponized to transport Jewish people out of the country and to their deaths. But they were also a way out. Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who escaped the Holocaust, recounted taking the train across the United States on his way to safety. He later coined the term genocide.

Today, dictatorial governments use trains to keep people in.

At the beginning of the invasion in Ukraine, the Russian military tried and failed to secure the railway network. Now, it’s deliberately targeting Ukraine’s passenger trains with missile strikes.

In North Korea, the trains are undeveloped, undermaintained and horribly slow. Trains to China are frequently monitored with numerous checkpoints. Travel is controlled, limited and escape is nearly impossible.

In the wrong hands, trains are the perfect tool for governments to weaponize. They can easily be utilized to keep people in or kick them out. That’s why, on Tuesday, when Trump announced his takeover of Washington, D.C., Union Station, I was immediately concerned.

Union Station was once described as “the gateway to the capital city.” As you step outside the grand, Beaux-Arts style train station, you stare directly into the eyes of the Capitol Building, with the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress only a few blocks away.

The iconic station has stood the test of time. It witnessed both world wars, welcomed generations of presidents to the White House and survived the auto-industry boom that brought the original New York Penn Station to its tragic end.

The station is more than just a place to come and go; it’s part of the anatomy of the city, and it’s an important building for residents and visitors alike.

The Trump administration knows this.

While the Department of Transportation has owned Union Station since the 1980s, the nonprofit Union Station Redevelopment Corporation ran its daily management until Amtrak assumed those responsibilities last summer.

Union Station, for all its architectural glory, has long needed repairs. However, if you listen to the Trump administration, you would assume the station’s state was borderline apocalyptic.

“You have vagrants, you have drug addicts, you have the chronically homeless, you have the mentally ill who harass, who threaten violence, who attack families, and they’ve done it for far too long,” Vice President JD Vance said, singing the familiar tune of Trump’s capital takeover.

To be clear on the facts, crime in D.C. is on a decline, and in 2022, homeless encampments were removed from Union Station. Yet, the Trump administration is legitimizing its takeover of the train station based on crime and degradation.

Most major cities — in the United States and around the world — experience homelessness and petty crime near train stations. Most train stations need repairs.

That’s why the Trump administration’s takeover of Union Station is so alarming. Trump won’t stop at Union Station. This is just the beginning. 

On Wednesday, an event in Boston to unveil new Acela trains took a dark turn. Deputy Director of Transportation, Steven Bradbury, took Trump’s Washington, D.C., plan to New England.

“Here in South Boston, we need to address the cleanliness, the crime, the safety, and security of the station for the rail workers, for the passengers, because the people of Boston deserve that,” Bradbury said. Then, he left the audience with this: “All the people up and down the Northeast corridor and Americans who travel on these trains, they need and deserve beautiful rail facilities.”

Ignore the positive spin. This is a warning. 

Even worse, at a stop in New York City, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy spoke about “transforming” Penn Station “under the speed of Trump” — whatever that means. He even joked about renaming the iconic gateway “Trump Station.”

The Department of Transportation’s sudden special interest in municipal train stations has received varying reactions from city and state leaders. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, said, “If it’s about what Union Station needs for its total transformation, that would be an amazing initiative for the federal government to take on.”

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey took a stronger stance.

“We’re not going to let the guy who went bankrupt six times take over our train stations,” Healey said. However, she also dismissed Trump’s claims as “political theater.”

For our sake, I hope she’s right. But I wouldn’t be so sure. As Bradbury notably pointed out, the Northeast corridor connects blue cities from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia to New York to Boston. It’s a critical route for tourism, business and connecting friends and family who live up and down the East Coast.

But it’s also critical for a quick departure. The first thing anyone would do to escape Washington, D.C., during a federal takeover is book a ticket on Amtrak from Union Station to Penn Station. If someone needed to flee New York City, they would likely head up the corridor to Boston.

Trains are both mentally and in reality the easiest escape route. The major stations are in city centers. There’s no security. If you live close enough and time it right, you can be on a train heading out within 30 minutes. Unless Trump wants to keep us.

Or maybe, Trump is trying to control the trains to take us somewhere else.

Hillary Clinton warned us about this dystopian reality last year in her book “Something Lost, Something Gained.” She wrote, “Welcome to Trump’s America. If you live in a major city, the first thing you’ll probably notice are the soldiers patrolling your streets outside your window. Are we at war? Have we been invaded by an adversary? The answer is no.”

We are already living this reality. The soldiers are outside our windows. They are already patrolling Union Station, and they’re coming for your city next.

So, don’t dismiss this as a conspiracy theory. Don’t laugh it off as Trump wanting to see his name on another building. Don’t ignore the reality they’re shoving in our faces.

The Trump administration is using crime and degradation as an excuse to control important transportation hubs. The government controlled the trains in Nazi Germany. They control them in North Korea. And now, they’re wrestling for control of the trains in the United States of America.

Open your eyes, and if you’re not ready to fight back, consider booking a flight.  Or, you could do as I have done – I’ve been stockpiling ammo:  .45 and .40 caliber for my pistols; .308 and .243 for my rifles; and 5.56 for my AR-15.

 

 

Call yesterday Black Wednesday for American health.

RFK, Jr., heroin addict, sex addict, anti-vaccination lunatic and aspiring architect of millions of deaths purged the CDC last night. He gutted the world’s premiere public-health agency in his endless quest to destroy vaccine science and plunge this nation into the Middle Ages.

It is widely reported that Kennedy has ordered a clampdown on reporting of COVID and human cases of H5N1 bird flu, and that he plans to entirely ban COVID-19 vaccines in the coming months. He has already cut access to COVID-19 vaccines, restricting it to adults 65+ and in high risk categories.

RFK is purging the CDC so he can replace professional doctors, scientists, epidemiologists, virologists, and public-health experts with antivax cranks, horse-dewormer morons, radical eugenicists, and inhumane conspiracy screamers. A month after a mad gunman (an antivax activist) charged the CDC on a killing spree, Bobby Brainworm fired Dr. Susan Monarez, the CDC’s director. More firings and resignations followed.

Yesterday there was another highly publicized school shooting. Republicans, as usual, are offering thoughts and prayers.

 

But why?

Why have Republicans — who, before Reagan, were the party in favor of gun control — decided that it’s just fine for America to be the only country in the world where the leading cause of childhood deaths and injury is bullets?

Why have Republicans — who, during the Eisenhower administration, pushed for massive public works programs like the interstate freeways and new schools coast-to-coast — decided instead to kill off as many of those sorts of programs as possible to pay for tax gifts to billionaires?

Why are they defending insider trading in Congress, supporting monopolies that rip off consumers and small businesses, and refusing to do anything about uninsured people or student debt?

The question is answered most easily with another set of questions, these ones rhetorical:

Would you trust your doctor if she told you the only reason she went into medicine was to get rich and doesn’t much care for people? Would you take your kids to such a physician?

Similarly, would you trust your child’s teacher if he said he hated kids but needed the paycheck and though teaching might be a great way to meet attractive single mothers of young kids? Or a pilot who hates flying but loves the paychecks and the flight attendants?

Yet this is exactly what Republicans have done with government. They stand up at campaign rallies and proudly proclaim that government doesn’t work and never will, and then voters hand them the keys.

Once in office, they make sure their wealthy friends and donors get the perks while they steer the rest of us straight into turbulence. It’s sabotage disguised as leadership, and the only way they get away with it is because they’ve convinced enough people that wrecking the plane is the same thing as piloting it.

Republicans — in the years since Reagan told us that, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” — have been like that doctor, teacher, and pilot. They run for public office because it can make them rich, introduce them to people who’ll help them get richer, and might even improve their sex life. Look, for example, how Tiffany Trump’s new husband suddenly got rich once Donald was back in the White House.

But making life better for average Americans? Hah, they’ll tell you: that’s for Democrats and suckers.

JD Vance has taken seven very expensive taxpayer-funded vacations in the 8 months since he became VP; Trump plays golf about every third day and has made an estimated $3.5 billion off his having occupied the White House so far; every Republican in the House and Senate knows that if they treat the right industry the right way they’ll have a very-well-paid job waiting for them when they retire.

They don’t care about governing; they’re just in it for themselves.

This is a far cry from the idealistic notions of public service that animated the Founders and generations of Americans who’ve fought and died for this country in the years since. It’s a twisted embrace of Ayn Rand Libertarianism, a philosophy that says greed is good and whoever’s the most efficient predator deserves whatever they can steal or con people out of.

Once you understand that simple reality, everything else the GOP is up to makes sense.

It explains why they’d saturate our country with guns while taking billions from the gun industry, why they’d deregulate polluters while Americans are dying from pollution and climate change, why they’d sanction a healthcare system that has caused millions of unnecessary deaths but has meanwhile made insurance, hospital, and healthcare executives into billionaires.

Here’s a test for you:  Can anybody who name even one single piece of legislation from the past 40+ years (since Reagan) that was:
— authored by Republicans,
— principally co-sponsored by Republicans,
— passed Congress with a Republican majority,
— signed by a Republican president,
— and benefited average working people or the poor more than it did the GOP’s donor class.

Outside of a feeble-attempt bill to regulate spam callers during the first Bush administration and legislation reversing the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, nobody has ever won the autographed book prize.

Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system, and free or subsidized higher education.

In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis; nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick; and jobs pay well enough and have union pensions so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

But not in America. Republican politicians have fought tooth-and-nail for generations to prevent any of those things from happening here.

Which again raises the question: “Why?”

Why do Republican politicians promote hateful messages and cruel policies? Why are Republican-run Red states the real “shithole” parts of the US with the highest rates of poverty, violence, early death, disease, and illiteracy?

What motivates these Republican politicians to say they’re for the “little guy” when the only policies they pursue are to cut taxes on the morbidly rich, gut unions, destroy public schools, and ship jobs overseas?

It’s not about ideology.

Republicans don’t hate Social Security and Medicare, for example, because they’re afraid that those programs are going to somehow turn America into a “socialist” country. They hate those programs because they’re paid for with tax dollars, and greedy Republicans hate to pay their fair share of taxes.

It’s not just about racism, although it often appears that way.

The reason Republicans work so hard to keep Black and brown people down is because they subscribe to a weird economic theory that “requires” an underclass who do most of the hard work for very little money. Thus, morbidly rich Republican “donors” — being part of the overclass — can reap the benefits of increased corporate profits while keeping their taxes low so they can stuff the extra cash into their money bins.

If their use of racist language and Confederate iconography brings in a few more low-IQ white voters, that’s just icing on the cake. They can use the racist yahoos to get themselves reelected so giant corporations will continue to stuff their SuperPACs with lobbyist cash they can use for their own retirement.

It’s not about charity.

Republicans say that the housing, healthcare, and other needs of poor people should be taken care of through “private philanthropy” instead of government. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes to maintain a healthy society.

It’s not about Christianity, although they’re constantly invoking Jesus for everything from pushing the death penalty on women who got an abortion to giving bigots the legal right to discriminate against gay, lesbian, and trans people.

Jesus never once mentioned abortion and decried bigotry, but they regularly ignore and even flout His teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and His warnings in Matthew 25. They protect multimillionaire evangelists’ tax-free status, and the preachers repay them by preaching politics from the pulpit.

It’s not about saving Americans from the pandemic or concern for public health.

Last time he was president, Trump used the Defense Production Act to force mostly brown and Black meatpackers back to work, not to keep Americans safe. As long as the factories were humming and the stock market was rising, a few hundred thousand dead Americans were just collateral damage with the 2020 election looming.

It’s not about conservatism.

They’re not interested in slowly or “cautiously” improving society, or “conserving” anything other than the balances in their own checking accounts. They like to use the word “conservative,” but they’ve rendered it meaningless at best and code for “racist” or “obsessively selfish” at worst.

It’s not about making the world a better place.

Republican politicians deny climate change, deregulate industries that poison our air and water, and do everything they can to screw working people out of unions, good wages, and decent benefits. They’re totally down with pesticides that are killing our pollinators while they poison our atmosphere with their carbon emissions, all just to make a buck.

It’s not about having a better-educated electorate or populace.

They’ve spent decades trying to destroy our public education system that was, in the 1960s, the envy of the world. When they did away with free and low-cost college education during the Reagan years they kicked off almost $2 trillion worth of student debt which is preventing young people from starting families, opening small businesses, or even buying their first house. But it sure is profitable for Republican-donor banksters!

It isn’t about “culture.”

They do a good-old-boy NASCAR/Duck Dynasty routine to bring in the rubes, but there’s no way Donald Trump would ever invite the average Republican voter with a giant flag and a pickup truck to any of his golf clubs, nor would Ted Cruz want to vacation with one of them or their families in Cancun. And if any of their daughters were raped, they’d be getting an abortion in a New York minute.

It’s not about “gun violence.”

As long as their investments in weapons manufacturers are profitable and the problem of gun violence is limited to poor- and working-class Americans, Republican politicians don’t give a rat’s ass about “gun safety.” Although they’re happy to use guns as a wedge issue to bring in male voters who are insecure about their own masculinity. As California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote yesterday:

“We cannot even make it through the first week of school without mass shootings. And the @GOP will continue to do absolutely nothing while our kids are being gunned down. This is sick.”

It’s not about “protecting our children.”

The main through-story of the GOP attacks on queer people is that “they’re coming for your kids.” If Republican politicians actually cared about our kids, they’d do something about America being the only country in the world where gun violence is the leading cause of childhood death.

Republican politicians know that most pedophiles are straight men, but attacking defenseless minorities has been the cheap trick of craven demagogues from the eras of crusades, pogroms, and witch burnings to this day. And don’t get me started on the damage Bob Kennedy is inflicting on our public health system and programs to vaccinate our children and grandchildren.

It’s not about immigrants taking jobs from working-class Americans.

After “reforming” our immigration laws in 1986, Ronald Reagan stopped enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring people who are here without documentation (even though those employers were — and are — committing a crime by hiring undocumented workers). This was part-and-parcel of the GOP’s war on unions.

As a result, entire industries like construction and meatpacking that once provided good union jobs have been de-unionized, their former American-citizen union employees replaced by low-wage workers without documentation.

And when the spotlight gets shined on those industries, Republicans are more than happy to put poor, hard-working brown people in jail, but there’s no way they’re ever going to go after wealthy white employers. Not a single wealthy white employer ever goes to jail, although they’re the ones who initiated the “crime.”

Republican politicians don’t give a damn about your job, particularly when they can find somebody else to do it cheaper, although they do have to put on a little show from time to time to keep the racists happy.

It’s not about putting America or Americans “first.”

Reagan and Bush the Elder negotiated NAFTA and revived the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) so businesses could offshore entire factories. Since the Reagan administration instituted neoliberalism in 1981, over 60,000 factories have left America, taking along with them at least 15 million jobs.

Donald Trump’s rewrite of NAFTA even gave American companies a huge new tax break if they’d move their factories from America to Mexico.

At the end of the day, all Republican politicians care about is money. Greed is their principle animating force, and is what binds them to their morbidly rich donors.

The greed embraced by Republican politicians — and the billionaires and CEOs who fund them — is why average Americans can’t have nice things. It’s why we and our children must walk the tightrope of life without the same safety net other countries — from Canada to Costa Rica, France to Taiwan — offer their citizens. It’s why children are dead today in Minneapolis as Republican politicians happily pocket NRA cash.

It doesn’t matter to Republican politicians how many Americans die unnecessarily, how many of our fellow citizens struggle in misery and poverty, how many children’s growth is stunted or bodies and brains are poisoned by industrial and mining waste being poured into our air and rivers, or terrified by active shooter drills in our schools.

As long as the money keeps rolling in and the GOP’s billionaire patrons keep paying less than 3 percent in income taxes, then, the only thing Republicans are willing to fight for are greed and their own wealth and power.

Pass it along…

Monday night, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker came right out and said it. Trump sending troops into American cities has nothing whatsoever to do with crime or policing but, instead, is all about stealing the 2026 election:

“Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans,” Pritzker said bluntly. “None of those states is Illinois.”

In fact, the cities with the highest crime and homicide rates are Memphis, Tennessee and St. Louis, Missouri respectively, both in Red States.  Jackson, Mississippi, has a much higher murder rate than Washington, DC, yet, Mississippi National Guard troops have been ordered to DC.

So, if this isn’t about crime, why is Trump working so hard to get Americans used to heavily armed troops — who aren’t trained in policing but can be very effective at crowd control — in our Blue cities?

The simple answer is that he and his cronies are terrified of suffering Richard Nixon’s fate (40 of his senior officials were indicted; many went to prison including his Attorney General and White House Counsel). That’s why they’re planning to steal the 2026 and 2028 elections by any means necessary, and the troops are part of their plan.

Because they know that one of the most common causes of people pouring out into the streets — including in ways that brought down authoritarian governments — was the regime in power stealing an election.

Governor Pritzker said it clearly and emphatically:

“This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections.”

Let that roll around in your head: “Militarize our cities, and end elections.”

Pritzker is no wild-eyed leftie or crazed conspiracy theorist. He’s the billionaire heir to the Hyatt fortune so he knows the billionaire circles Trump travels in well. He’s the governor of America’s 6th largest state, with a population larger than 170 nations or 87% of all UN member states.

He’s an attorney who knows the law, and a successful businessman who’s founded multiple companies, including backstopping tech companies, starting a venture capital operation, and building a private equity firm from scratch. He was elected in 2022 with the highest vote share of any Democratic governor anywhere in the nation in over 60 years.

And he’s watching what Trump is doing, far better, apparently, than our national mainstream press. He’s tracking Trump’s executive order giving the president the power to direct the military to seize voting machines (and thus nullify their votes) in Blue cities that may swing states away from the GOP. And Trump’s Executive Order to end mail-in voting.

Trump’s statement this week that Americans “want a dictator,” was almost certainly cribbed from his mentor, Vladimir Putin. His new order for the National Guard to work with ICE (eventually, presumably, to work for ICE, Trump’s personal secret masked police force) to create a “Rapid Reaction Force” to deal with civil disturbances reveals his end game.

Its mandate is to assist “local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law.”

It appears to be modeled almost exactly after the Rosgvardiya National Guard rapid reaction force Putin created in 2016 to put down anti-Putin and pro-Navalny protests; today the Rosgvardiya numbers over 600,000 men under arms. Putin probably told him about it in the car in Alaska, as this EO came right after that meeting.

Additionally, Trump‘s executive order essentially invites Proud Boys and other white supremacist militia into the tent to help with election intimidation efforts. It creates “an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience” who National Guard leaders “shall each deputize the members of this unit to enforce federal law.”

As Alec Karakatsanis of the Civil Rights Corps, wrote on X, this will “permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers.” It’s a 21st century echo of the GOP’s Operation Eagle Eye, which enlisted white men to threaten people of color at voting polls in the 1960s and 1970s, or Hitler’s SA, the Sturmabteilung.

So, what sort of civil disturbance is it that Trump’s anticipating putting down with his Rapid Reaction Force?

Here’s a partial list of countries where a recent stolen or apparently stolen election caused citizens to pour out into the streets to challenge the regime in power:

Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Serbia, Ukraine, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Panama, Philippines, Georgia, Mozambique, Serbia, Malawi, Hong Kong, Comoros, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mauritania, Tunisia, Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, and Peru.

Stolen elections and the protests they provoke are one of the most common features of countries that are in the process of sliding from democracy into authoritarian fascism and strongman rule.

And if you think Trump doesn’t believe people will turn out in the streets — sometimes violently — to demand the overturn of a stolen election, just remember January 6th. If you truly believed that an election had been stolen in broad daylight, might you have been among those protestors, too? Given that example, you can add the United States to the list above.

And Trump definitely doesn’t want Americans — particularly Democrats — out in the streets protesting a stolen election again (unless Republicans lose so decisively he can’t steal the election, in which case he’ll try to repeat January 6th).

Make no mistake: this is what Trump’s militarization of Blue cities is all about. If he can confiscate enough voting machines, refuse to count enough votes, intimidate enough voters, and disqualify enough mail-in ballots to invalidate Democratic majorities in a few dozen big cities, he can flip as many Blue states to Red as he wants. And keep the GOP in power forever.

And he has to; in his mind he has no choice.

After Merrick Garland finally got off his ass following two years of worried thumb-sucking, just the smallest and most tentative efforts to hold Trump to account for a tiny percentage of the many crimes he committed both in and after his first term would have sent him to prison for the rest of his life.

Trump knows this well. He was arrested and mug-shot photographed in Georgia, convicted of fraud and what a judge called “rape” in New York, and was looking at dozens of other lawsuits and potential criminal and civil charges that are all on suspension since his election as president last year.

He can’t go back. His life and his fortune literally depend on his holding power and never allowing Democrats to have subpoena ability in the House or Senate again, at least as long as he’s alive.

It might explain why he just appointed 2020 election denier/activist and Cleta Mitchell protégé Heather Honey to a senior position in the DHS where she’s charged with “overseeing” the 2026 and 2028 elections, particularly, as Miles Taylor points out, the overseas mail-in votes that tend to trend Democratic. As ProPublica noted:

“Honey has led at least three organizations devoted to transforming election systems in ways championed by conservatives, such as tightening eligibility requirements for people to be on voter rolls. Members of Honey’s Pennsylvania Fair Elections, a state chapter of Mitchell’s nationwide Election Integrity Network, have challenged the eligibility of thousands of residents to be on voter rolls.

“Honey has also been involved in numerous other efforts to transform elections around the country, including a successful push to get many states with Republican leadership to pull out of a bipartisan interstate partnership to share data to make voting more secure.”

He’s getting ready.

After all, Trump is the man who cheered as his followers killed three police officers and smeared feces on the walls of America’s Capitol while trying to overturn the 2020 election. He’s the guy who routinely lies to the American people while threatening and castigating reporters who dare call him out on it. He’s the one who openly admires Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, Kim, Xi, and pretty much every other tinpot and major dictator in the world.

And the people who work for him — looking at the fates of John Mitchell, John Dean, G. Gordon Liddy and others who were busted for following the illegal and unconstitutional orders of a corrupt president — are equally emphatic that they’re never going to spend a day in a federal prison, either.

So, get ready because Trump’s already well more than halfway down the road toward fascism and, in his mind, there’s no stopping until America’s democracy is buried under the old Rose Garden and our dissenters are as quiet and terrified as are those few still remaining in Russia, Hungary, and Turkey.

If Democratic governors and mayors are going to stop Trump from having his armed forces pre-positioned to help Republicans steal the 2026 elections, they need to get an infusion of Pritzker’s and Newsom’s courage and begin to seriously fight.

A coalition or interstate compact — formal or informal — will be absolutely necessary to resist Trump’s armed forces. Perhaps even a sort of soft succession, openly defying Trump’s illegal orders and threatened violence.

Governors are not without resources, as both Pritzker and Newsom have pointed out; they just need to use them. Let your state’s governor know!

Trump held a “cabinet meeting” today that went well over three hours in his garish Washington D.C. bordello, which consisted of escalating rituals of abject ass-kissing with the occasional conspiracy theory thrown in.

This was one of Trump’s usual cult-of-personality Cabinet meetings  Tuesday, most of which was spent, of course, with his minions licking his ass while spouting obsequious praise.

As the hours ticked by, Mr. Trump’s cabinet members highlighted the cost — in hours, in money, perhaps in karma — of keeping a seat at his table. And many did so while testing the apparently imaginary boundaries of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities on the job.

The updates ranged from enthusiastic — Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the labor secretary, implored the president to come to her agency to look at his own “big, beautiful” face on a banner — to servile, and they went on for hours.

Occasionally, policy peeked in, but only in a way that allowed Mr. Trump to tack on his own thoughts or to take a hard right turn. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the onetime presidential challenger and current health and human services secretary, issued an update about shrimp contaminated with radioactive material, accusing South Asian nations of “dumping shrimp” that was then packaged and sold at Walmart.

“You are going to save the whales,” Mr. Kennedy, who once sawed the head off a whale and drove it home, said while railing against the dangers of wind farms and wind energy, a long-held peeve of the president’s.

Mr. Kennedy then engaged Mr. Trump in a back and forth about rates of autism in young boys, allowing the president to wonder aloud if there was “something artificially causing this, meaning a drug or something,” repeating a widely debunked theory that vaccines cause autism and opening it up to an even vaguer interpretation.

In other moments, some of the truth behind all of that radical transparency revealed itself, like when Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that this year’s Labor Day held a special place in his heart.

“Personally, this is the most meaningful Labor Day of my life, as someone who has four jobs,” said Mr. Rubio, who in his spare time is Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“That’s true,” the president replied.

And then there was Steve Witkoff, a billionaire whose praise was so slavish that even the president seemed to pick up on the overkill. During his turn, Mr. Witkoff, the president’s peace envoy, complimented Mr. Trump’s leadership in the Israel-Gaza conflict, a war that continued this week with Israeli strikes killing 20, including journalists, at a Gazan hospital. He suggested again that Mr. Trump should receive the Nobel Peace Prize he has long coveted.

“There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about,” Mr. Witkoff said.

When he was finished, the billionaire received a round of applause from his colleagues. During a later question-and-answer session with reporters and far-right news personalities, Mr. Trump circled back to his envoy and frequent golf buddy. Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Trump said, had reassured him that he was the only person who could solve the Russia-Ukraine war.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said, “you’ve told me that a few times.”

The old reality television pro then broke the fourth wall. “Unless he was saying it just to build up my ego. But it’s not really. I have no ego when it comes to this stuff,” Mr. Trump said.

He added: “It’s a massive tax cut for the middle class.”

Like much of what was said on Tuesday, this was transparent but not truthful: The legislation overwhelmingly benefits top earners, and has adverse effects for low-income households.

Attorney General Pam Bondi promised to crack down on drunk voters over the Labor Day holiday.  She clearly has never seen a Trump Boat Parade.

He has moved well beyond mere extreme narcissism now. Trump is rapidly moving toward a Louie XIV state of mind, where he starts to equate himself with “The State” and vice versa. He has gotten away with virtually everything for all of his life, and now that he has been reelected to the most powerful position in the world, he has started to believe that his will is unstoppable, that all will eventually bend to his dictates when he fully asserts himself. It has been his life experience. European leaders who once laughed behind his back are no longer laughing, as they struggle to find approaches that might shield them from the consequences of his capricious rages.

The legal system that once threatened to imprison Trump is now increasingly under his thumb. The Department of Justice that once prosecuted him has become his lapdog. The Intelligence services that once exposed his treachery are now all subservient to him. Small wonder that Trump believes that no one is capable of stopping him. Those inside the Federal Government, and those active in Republican politics, who played any role in opposing Trump have systematically been marginalized and are increasingly under direct attack.

As Trump moves to impose his will on widening circles of American society, he senses no force is capable of effectively opposing him, so he presses on with less and less lip service played to constitutional constraints or the norms that once defined our political system for well over a century.

Congress is mere window dressing on his rule as the Republican Party bends to service all of his mandates, with no regard given to whether they fly in the face of everything that political party professed to believe in less than ten years ago. The vestiges of time honored checks and balances are crumbling fast. Trump orders Republican Governors to convene special legislative sessions, and they do. He orders corporations to change their policies, and they do. He orders museums to alter history, and they do.

Nothing is too small to be of direct concern to him. He takes over the Kennedy Center, plasters the oval office with gold, paves over the rose garden, and plans major structural changes to the White House so that he can have a grand ballroom. He openly demands tributes from those who seek anything from our government, and punishes those who refuse to fall in line with his views. Disaster aid to citizens living in blue states is held hostage as leverage to force capitulation to his mandates.

It is the rate of the collapse of all political norms that is both so staggering and alarming. Individually, Trump’s actions raise grave concerns. Collectively they represent a menacing consolidation of power in his hands. Trump has already invaded two cities run by Democratic mayors with his federalized forces, with plans now to occupy more. He asserts non existent “emergencies” as a pretense for unconstitutional assertions of raw power, from imposing arbitrary tariffs on trading partners, to deporting residents legally here in America to nations where they have zero ties.

In Trump’s mind, Executive Orders are the equivalent of Royal Decrees, giving him the right and authority to change virtually everything about the way government functions. While the leaders of our military are continually being shuffled as Trump seeks those with unquestioned loyalty to him personally. Meanwhile Trump is amping up his assault on media outlets that anger him, most recently calling for ABC and NBC TV stations to lose their broadcasting licenses.

Trump literally believes that he alone knows what is best for America. That is delusional. Increasingly Trump seems to take seriously the Far Right fever dream that God blessed and elevated him to leadership as part of some greater purpose. Kim Jong Un, it seems, has a fellow traveler seeking worship from the masses.

We are only seven months into Trump’s four year presidential term. The mid term elections that Democrats pin so much hope on are still over fourteen months away, twice as long to endure as the siege our democracy has already been subjected to. Politics as usual will not save us this time. A true opposition party has to be at the forefront of the resistance. The time is rapidly approaching when elected Democratic leaders must take to the streets themselves at the front of massive marches opposing federal occupation of our cities, or forfeit their leadership in the fight to save America

“It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” President Donald Trump wrote yesterday afternoon on social media. He took the stake in the company after calling on August 7 for its chief executive officer, Lip-Bu Tan, to step down. When Tan met with Trump on August 11, the president says, he told Tan the U.S. “should be given 10% of Intel.” Tan agreed. Announcing the deal, Trump referred to Tan as “the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company.”

It is wild to see Republicans cheering on a president who publicly threatened a CEO and stated openly that he shook the man down for a major share in his company.

It is even wilder to see Republicans, who since 1980 have held so fervently to the idea of free markets that they have denounced even the most basic regulations as socialism, celebrate the government takeover of a private company.

The story of that shift is a larger story about how the Republicans came to put party over country and, now, how they have put power over everything.

It was not always this way.

After World War II, leaders of both major political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and shore up a rules-based international order to try to prevent another world war. Republicans and Democrats contended, sometimes bitterly, over policies, but members of both parties recognized that they shared with the other a loyalty to the country and a general set of beliefs about what was best for it that encouraged them to seek common ground.

As recently as 1974, Republican senators went to the White House to tell a member of their own party that the House of Representatives would vote to impeach him for covering up a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party and that they would vote to convict him. After their visit, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.

But 1980 saw the takeover of the Republican Party by an extremist faction known as the “Movement Conservatives.” Their roots lay in 1937, when men who hated the New Deal legislation being put in place by the Democrats came together to destroy it. Businessmen who hated business regulations and taxes joined with southern racists who hated Black rights and with religious traditionalists who hated women’s rights and wanted the churches to control welfare programs so they could police behavior.

Calling themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to dismantle the laws and recreate the 1920s, the Movement Conservatives produced a list of demands. They called for deregulation, tax cuts, an end to social welfare spending, and an end to government support for workers, maintaining that those principles would protect the bedrock of the economy: private enterprise. They also called for states’ rights, home rule, and local self-government, by which they meant that southern states could maintain discriminatory laws against their citizens, no matter what the Fourteenth Amendment said.

Their goal was not to compromise with Democrats or Republicans who believed in an active government; their goal was to destroy that government. They insisted that government regulations and taxes were creeping socialism; they said that social welfare sapped American individualism; they said that civil rights laws destroyed democracy by overruling state voters. Most Americans wanted little to do with this faction until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that protected Black and Brown voting enabled the businessmen who hated regulation and taxes to mobilize racists.

Ronald Reagan tapped into the Movement Conservatives in 1964, when he backed Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency. When he ran for the presidency in 1980, his promises focused on economic freedom, but the racism and sexism in the radical faction was always present; he deliberately appealed to racists with a promise to defend states’ rights and to the sexists trying to combat the women’s liberation movement with an appeal to religious traditionalists. Reagan promised to put businessmen in the driver’s seat, but he depended on the votes of racists and sexists to win the White House.

Reagan’s tax cuts tripled the federal debt and left his successor, George H.W. Bush, facing a $171 billion deficit in 1990, along with the threat of automatic cuts of 40% across the board if the deficit wasn’t reduced. Bush reneged on his promise not to raise taxes. Movement Conservatives signed on in private, but in public they attacked the deal as a betrayal of Reaganism and common people. Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich used the opportunity to purge the Republican Party of its traditional base: those who believed in an active government. He accused anyone who stood against him of being a “Republican In Name Only,” or “RINO.”

In 1994, Gingrich managed to flip the House of Representatives to the Republicans for the first time since 1954, and he set out to reshape the Republican Party into an instrument for destroying the modern government. That effort would require destroying the Democratic Party by referring to its members as “corrupt,” “intolerant,” “sick,” “traitors”; by launching investigations of what he insisted—without evidence—was “voter fraud,” and by investigating and then impeaching Democratic president Bill Clinton.

By the end of the 1990s, leading Republicans no longer saw party differences as differences of policy. Party trumped country because they believed they were in a fight for the soul of America, and they were on the side of the angels.

If keeping Democrats out of power meant it was necessary to skew the system, surely that was justified. Republicans began to talk of purifying the voter rolls in the 1990s, and in 1998 the Florida legislature passed a law that purged from the system as many as 100,000 Black voters presumed to be Democrats. This purge paid off in 2000, when Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College. The contest came down to Florida, where a confusing ballot had siphoned about 10,000 votes intended for Gore off to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan.

A hand recount had reduced Republican candidate George W. Bush’s lead from 1,784 to 537 when Republican operatives attacked the recount venue in Miami-Dade County to stop the recount, claiming there was “voter fraud.” The Supreme Court—led by five Republican-appointed justices—stepped in to give the victory to Bush.

When voters elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans declared war. On the night of Obama’s inauguration, Republican senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and other Republican leaders agreed over dinner to oppose anything that the new president proposed, regardless of whether they agreed with it. “For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,” Republican senators told incoming vice president Joe Biden.

They also worked to make it easier for Republicans to win. In 2010 the Supreme Court overturned a century of campaign finance laws to permit unlimited corporate and other outside money to flow into elections.

At the same time, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project, to take over statehouses before the redistricting after the 2010 census. They won the statehouses of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. And yet Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

Three years later, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by ending the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination in voting preclear changes to their voting rules with the Department of Justice. Republican-dominated state legislatures immediately began to restrict voting rights.

But the Republican economic program of slashing regulations and taxes was never popular, and the Republicans stayed in power by doubling down on the racism and sexism of their voting base. After 1987, talk radio fed the rhetoric that racial minorities and women were ushering socialism into the United States, and after 1994 the Fox News Channel amplified it.

In 2016, Donald Trump rode to the White House by playing directly to that racism and sexism and asserting that white men should dominate women and people of color. Establishment leaders backed him for the tax cuts he promised, but they no longer called the shots. The racist and sexist MAGA base did. Trump and his loyalists took the idea that they had a right to rule to its logical extreme. When voters elected Democrat Joe Biden to the presidency, they tried to overturn that election with violence.

Now, back in office, Trump is dismantling the government as Movement Conservatives have wanted for decades. But he has abandoned the small-government principles Movement Conservatives claimed to champion and is using state power to terrorize citizens. He has abandoned the due process of the law and states’ rights and is working to rig the system permanently in his favor. And now he has abandoned the free-market principles around which the Movement Conservatives organized in the first place.

From the beginning, “Movement Conservatism” was anything but conservative. Its supporters embraced the radical goal of dismantling a practical system that stabilized the country after the Great Depression and a devastating world war, a system that was based in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But now they are embracing something altogether different.

Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo explained yesterday on social media that “a new conservatism has emerged. We are leading a rebellion against the establishment and dismantling the elements of the left-wing ideological regime—not for the purpose of nihilism, but for the purpose of rebirth, or restoration, of our republic.”

Rufo’s statement is, as one commenter noted, “just textbook 1930s fascism.”

Ghislane Maxwell is a convicted pedophile, convicted by a jury of trafficking girls as young as 13 for sexual purposes and for assisting her boss Geoffrey Epstein in sexually abusing these girls.

She knows that Donald Trump participated in Epstein’s abuse of girls.

Now, Trump’s defense attorney — who is also the Deputy Attorney General of the United States has interviewed Maxwell and has released the transcript of the interview.

In that interview, the Deputy AG tossed some softball questions to Maxwell who replied:

• “Donald Trump? Never saw him around little girls.  Epstein barely knew him.”
• “Sexual abuse of girls?  Don’t know what you are talking about.”

And then, she was moved from a regular federal prison to a very minimum security federal prison.

Coincidence?  Bullshit.

Trump will pardon her during his last few days in office in exchange for her not saying a word about Trump’s abuse of young girls.