Saturday, December 06, 2025
The Felon Is Seeking to Destroy America's Soul
When Trump administration officials post snuff films of alleged drug boats blowing up, of a weeping migrant handcuffed by immigration officers or of themselves in front of inmates at a brutal El Salvadoran prison, I often think of a story St. Augustine told in his “Confessions.”
In the fourth century A.D., a young man named Alypius arrived in Rome to study law. He was a decent sort. He knew the people at the center of the empire delighted in cruel gladiatorial games, and he promised himself he would not go. Eventually, though, his fellow students dragged him to a match. At first, the crowd appalled Alypius. . . . . Riveted, “he imbibed madness.” Soon, Augustine said, he became “a fit companion for those who had brought him.”
There are many reasons to object to the policies that the Trump administration’s videos and memes showcase. Yet the images themselves also inflict wounds, of the kind that Alypius suffered when he raised his eyelids. The president inhabits a position of moral leadership. When the president and his officials sell their policies, they’re selling a version of what it means to be an American — what should evoke our love and our hate, our disgust and our delight. If all governments rest on opinion, as James Madison thought, then it is this moral shaping of the electorate that gives the president his freedom of action, and that we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.
Amid the swirl of horrors, scandals and accusations, then, it’s worth considering what [the Felon] President Trump and his administration are doing to the soul of the nation — what sort of “fit companions” they’d like to make us. Their behavior during the controversy around a Sept. 2 U.S. military strike on a boat off the coast of Trinidad offers some clarity.
The Washington Post reported last week that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued an order to kill everyone on that boat, which the administration says was ferrying drugs. When an initial missile disabled the vehicle but left two survivors clinging to it, the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, ordered another strike that killed the helpless men. The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said, “This entire narrative was false,” then Mr. Trump said he “wouldn’t have wanted” a second strike but “Pete said that didn’t happen.” The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed that actually, yes, there was a second strike ordered by Admiral Bradley, but it was fine because the admiral was “well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”
A legal discussion ensued. Was the “double tap” strike a war crime? The Geneva Conventions say shipwrecked persons must be “respected and protected.” The Department of Defense Law of War Manual states that helpless, shipwrecked survivors are not lawful targets, while The Hague regulations forbid orders declaring that no quarter will be given.
Or was the strike simply a crime? Under the War Powers Resolution, the president must give Congress notice within 48 hours of U.S. forces entering hostilities, and hostilities that last more than 60 days are impermissible without congressional authorization. Since the president’s boat strike campaign has continued well past 60 days, the strikes support no war, and the entire campaign is unauthorized. Adil Haque, an executive editor at Just Security and an international law professor at Rutgers University, put it on X: “There is no armed conflict, so there are no legitimate targets. Not the people. Not the boats. Not the drugs.
This discussion misses the bigger effort the Trump administration seems to be engaged in. In lieu of careful analysis of the campaign’s legality, detailed rationales for the boat strikes and explanations of why they couldn’t be done with more traditional methods, we get Mr. Hegseth posting an image of himself with laser eyes and video after video of alleged drug traffickers being killed. The cartoon turtle is just one example in an avalanche of juvenile public messaging about those we kill. I suspect the question the administration cares about is not “is this legal,” “is this a war crime,” “is this murder” or even “is this good for America,” but rather, “isn’t this violence delightful?”
The [Felon's]
president’ssupporters seem to grasp this. Fox News’s Jesse Watters responded with utter incredulity that the United States would offer quarter to an enemy. “We’re blowing up terrorists in the Caribbean,” he said on Monday, “but we’re supposed to rescue them from drowning if they survive?” Others went further. . . . Megyn Kelly, the conservative podcaster, said . . . I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”An Associated Press investigation suggests that the men Ms. Kelly would like to watch slowly die are often poor laborers: a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver, a bus driver, living in cinder-block homes with spotty water and power service, making at least $500 per trip ferrying cocaine, a crime Americans normally judge worthy of a prison sentence rather than a torturous death.
The Trump administration’s celebration of death brings us far from discussions of the law of armed conflict, the constitutionality of the strikes or even the Christian morality that would eventually push Augustine to formulate an early version of just-war theory. We’re in the Colosseum, one brought to us digitally so that we need not leave our homes to hear the cheers of the crowd, to watch the killing done for our entertainment . . . .
This wounding of the national soul is hard for me to watch. Twenty years ago, I joined the Marine Corps because I thought military service would be an honorable profession. Its honor derives from fighting prowess and adherence to a code of conduct. Military training is about character formation, with virtues taught alongside tactics. But barbaric behavior tarnishes all who wear, or once wore, the uniform, and lust for cruelty turns a noble vocation into mere thuggery. “The real evils in war,” Augustine said, “are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power.”
In “The City of God,” Augustine distinguishes between a people bound by common loves and those ruled by a lust for domination. A president who wants to lead a nation bound by common loves might offer up something like Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address . . . For a nation devoted to the lust for domination, a president needs to foster a citizenry that thrills in displays of dominance and cruelty. Hence this administration’s braggadocio about death, its officials’ memes about suffering, their promises to inflict pain on America’s enemies followed by scant rationales for their own policies.
We are far from the Christian nation Lincoln thought he was addressing, and tried to shape, when he gave his Second Inaugural Address. But we must still ask ourselves a fundamental, private question that, at scale, has broad political implications: Given that we are all, every day, imbibing madness, how do we guard our souls?
Friday, December 05, 2025
The Felon Should Pay a Political Price for His Racism
During a White House meeting on Tuesday, surrounded by his Cabinet, [the Felon]
President Donald Trumpreferred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” and said, “We don’t want them in our country.” No one in Trump’s Cabinet stood up to this expression of gutter racism, although Vice President J. D. Vance enthusiastically banged on the table. The president’s remarks were ostensibly in response to real events—in Minnesota, dozens of members of the Somali diaspora have been implicated in fraud related to social services—but the community does not bear responsibility for the actions of those individuals.Similarly, white Americans as a whole are not responsible for Trump largely dismantling the federal government’s capacity to fight white-collar crime and corruption, his doling out of pardons for people who donate money or commit crimes on his behalf, or his scandalous profiteering. I don’t believe that there is something inherent in white culture that causes Trump to act this way; he is simply a particularly reprehensible human being.
The next day, at an Oval Office event, Trump again disparaged Somalis, claiming that Somali immigrants have “destroyed our country” and that the Somali American congresswoman Ilhan Omar “should be thrown the hell out of our country.” None of the people around him had the courage to ask whom “our” referred to. Given the president’s plunging approval ratings, one wonders whether these slurs are yet another attempt to shore up his support through appeals to racism.
Watching Trump’s repeated attacks on Somalians—the latest group of Black immigrants to be targeted by the president—I can’t avoid the conclusion that the government of the United States of America is in the hands of people who believe that they can apply a genetic hierarchy to humanity, and that American laws and customs should recognize and serve that hierarchy.
This commitment is most visible in the Constitution-shredding program of mass deportation being carried out across the country by federal agents, who, in order to meet their quotas, are arresting and deporting immigrants who have been following the rules and showing up for their court dates, rather than those committing crimes. Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol commander, told a reporter outright that agents were arresting people based in part on “how they look.” This is racial profiling—a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection—and yet it has been condoned by the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court. In September, an emergency-docket decision effectively legalized racial profiling by lifting an order preventing it. Although “apparent ethnicity alone” isn’t enough to detain someone, it can be “a “relevant factor,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a lone concurring opinion, calling that only “common sense.”
Trump declared on Thanksgiving Day his intention to halt immigration from “Third World” countries, a neuron-thin euphemism for nonwhite immigrants. His remarks about Somalis being “garbage” are consistent with his referring to African nations and Haiti as “shithole” countries in his first term. Trump also announced an intention to strip U.S. citizenship from “migrants who undermine domestic tranquility,” and to “deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization”—arbitrary, subjective criteria that could serve as pretext for denaturalizing anyone for any reason.
The Trump adviser Stephen Miller, a fervent supporter of the racist and anti-Semitic immigration restrictions of the 1920s, declared on X that “migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Miller’s contention that one’s supposed inferiority to and incompatibility with Americans are inherited and unalterable is consistent with Trump’s past remarks about how immigrants with “bad genes” are “poisoning the blood” of the nation.
The logic of this racism is relatively simple—the individual bears the guilt of the whole, and the whole bears the imprint of some alleged crime that deserves collective punishment. Blaming the egregious behavior of men such as Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on their German or Norwegian backgrounds would sound comical to the same people who treat the president vomiting out similar generalizations about Somalis as sound observation.
That a crime by an Afghan former CIA recruit or Somali fraudsters can be laid at the feet of all “Third World” immigrants shows how arbitrarily such lines are drawn. What matters is not what individuals do, but who they are, and whether or not they fit Trump and Miller’s narrow, racially defined view of who Americans can be.
Among the original English settlers, of course, were not only religious refugees and indentured servants but criminals Britain did not want. Many German immigrants to the United States came after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. Irish immigration was spurred by famine and British imperialism; Italian immigration was driven by the bloody post-unification chaos and, especially in the south and Sicily, by lawlessness, brigandage, and Piedmontese repression. Let us not forget the Eastern Europeans, among them Jewish families—including Miller’s own—who fled the autocratic regimes and ethnic violence of their homelands.
Most Americans of European descent are the children of such “broken” societies, by one standard or another, and America would not have become wealthy and powerful without them. No reason beyond bigotry exists to apply different standards to immigrants because they came from Nigeria or Mexico instead of Ireland.
There is a difference between inheritance and action. I cannot help who my ancestors are, but I can make my own choices. That so many Americans chose to place in power a man who holds people in contempt on the basis of race, religion, and national origin; that so much of the mainstream media conveys this bigotry through tired, obfuscating euphemisms; that there is so low a political price for the president’s racism that he and those around him see little risk in its expression—well, that does say something about America, and Americans. Immigration isn’t breaking our society. That’s a job Americans can do on their own.
Thursday, December 04, 2025
Trump 2.0: A Sick Moral Slum
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.
In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II novel, “An Operational Necessity,” that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war, survivors of a sunken ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain, after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew, lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating. In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German commander’s moral calculus.
No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. His order was reported by The Post from two sources (“The order was to kill everybody,” one said) and has not been explicitly denied by Hegseth. . . . the commander of the boat-destroying operation said he ordered the attack on the survivors to comply with Hegseth’s order.
Forty-four days after the survivors were killed, the four-star admiral who headed the U.S. Southern Command announced he would be leaving that position just a year into what is usually a three-year stint. He did not say why. Inferences are, however, permitted.
The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.
Marco Rubio, who is secretary of state and Trump’s national security adviser, seemed to be neither when the president released his 28-point plan for Ukraine’s dismemberment. The plan was cobbled together by Trump administration and Russian officials, with no Ukrainians participating. It reads like a wish-list letter from Vladimir Putin to Santa Claus . . .
Rubio, whose well-known versatility of convictions is perhaps not infinite, told some of his alarmed former Senate colleagues that the plan was just an opening gambit from Russia — although Trump demanded that Ukraine accept it within days. South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, a precise and measured speaker, reported that, in a conference call with a bipartisan group of senators, Rubio said the plan was a Russian proposal: “He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.” Hours later, however, Rubio reversed himself, saying on social media that the United States “authored” the plan.
The administration’s floundering might reflect more than its characteristic incompetence. In a darkening world, systemic weaknesses of prosperous democracies are becoming clearer.
Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell’s 1976 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” argued that capitalism’s success undermines capitalism’s moral and behavioral prerequisites. Affluence produces a culture of present-mindedness and laxity; this undermines thrift, industriousness, discipline and the deferral of gratification.
Two weeks ago, the chief of staff of the French army said: “We have the know-how, and we have the economic and demographic strength to dissuade the regime in Moscow. What we are lacking … is the spirit which accepts that we will have to suffer if we are to protect what we are. If our country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children … or to suffer economically because the priority has to be military production, then we are indeed at risk.”
Putin has surely savored the French recoil from these words. And he has noticed that, concerning Ukraine and the attacks on boats near Venezuela, the Trump administration cannot keep its stories straight. This probably is for reasons Sir Walter Scott understood: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/ when first we practise to deceive!”
Wednesday, December 03, 2025
Trump is Remaking America — as Russia
It’s strange: So many years later, here in the United States of America, I feel like I’m living in a country threatening to become like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which I spent years experiencing earlier in this century. Let me tell you a little something about that.
For decades as a young adult, I lived and traveled in Russia. I was an anthropology doctoral student and human rights worker, studying the effects of Putin’s centralizing policies and of the country’s Christian nationalist media on the everyday lives of Russians. In one of my last projects, I investigated the government’s practice of separating kids with disabilities — and poorer kids generally — from their parents and detaining them in closed institutions. My report detailed how much changes in society when the government excludes swaths of the population from basic services like health care, education and even just access to city streets. The answer? Everything.
That marginalization was part of a governing process aimed at further enriching the wealthiest few and those in power. It reflected the leadership of figures lacking a basic understanding of what all people need and deserve. I consider that a hallmark of a fascist regime.
One of my last evenings in Russia was a chilly November night in 2014 in the northern city of St. Petersburg. Mothers, children, grandparents and teenagers alike stepped with care to avoid slipping on black ice and bumping into — and possibly falling thanks to — large plastic advertisements for fast food, clothing, cosmetic dentistry, plastic surgery and even IVF treatments sticking up like weeds on the cobblestoned sidewalks of the city’s center.
Sometimes, when traffic grew too congested for their liking, Russia’s newly rich — aptly dubbed “New Russians” in the country’s popular press — drove their luxury Mercedes and BMWs onto the sidewalks, forcing pedestrians like me, along with mothers pushing strollers and a few wind-worn men and women hurrying to work, to scatter in panic. Despite the chaos and a significant amount of deprivation, for many I met then, much seemed possible, including working for ever larger companies, migration and new luxuries. Electronic remixes of Western songs like Gwen Stefani’s “If I Were a Rich Girl” and Cher’s “Believe” blasted from vendors’ tinny-sounding boom boxes on repeat.
By the time of my last trip to Russia in 2014, however, shiny buildings had been built and older ones renovated. Developers with close ties to Russia’s political elite were even richer, thanks to the country’s growing oil wealth. Roma families were no longer anywhere to be seen, as St. Petersburg’s government had conducted “purges” of the city’s informal Roma settlements. Nor were old women selling their wares on the streets, while Central Asian migrants from poorer countries to Russia’s south seemed ever fewer and less visible during the busiest times. Indeed, local authorities were rounding them up and detaining them without warrants, based on appearance and language alone. Sound familiar?
Having spent years interviewing families who could no longer access this new cityscape with their kids who used wheelchairs or were blind or deaf, all I could think was: “I’m lucky to be able to go home to the United States.”
My friend understood. Before she gave birth to her healthy son in the 1990s, when Russia’s newly privatized health care system included few viable options for working-class women, it took exhausted, overworked doctors weeks after she started feeling sick during her first pregnancy to determine the baby inside her had actually died. She had an abortion without anesthesia and returned to her teaching job right away to make ends meet. And stories like hers were anything but unique then.
By 2014, urgent care clinics and hospitals were plentiful enough in large cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow, but many were exorbitantly expensive, even for young Americans like me. Worse yet, the attitudes of medical workers toward women who couldn’t or wouldn’t have babies had not exactly softened under a president — Putin, of course — known for describing women as “guardians of the hearth and linchpins of large families with many children.”
In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet empire, the International Monetary Fund and other global lenders pushed Russia to slash public spending and rapidly privatize state functions as part of the deal for their crucial loans to a society then in trouble. In the end, such changes dismantled the Soviet Union’s social safety net, including universal health care.
Well-connected elites carved up many of the remaining state assets and used them for their own private gain. Included in Russia’s newly privatized health care system were private clinics for the ultra-wealthy offering hotel-like amenities, including private rooms, tea and soft background music. Ordinary Russians who couldn’t afford such ritzy private services used the remaining state clinics, though they were often overcrowded, undersupplied and understaffed in the austere new world so many Russians had no choice but to navigate, especially outside the big cities. What’s more, as anthropologist Michele Rivkin-Fish has pointed out, private health care facilities didn’t mean better quality care, as medical workers and all kinds of public figures tended to encourage married, racially white (Slavic) Russian women to have more children, no matter the dignity and long-term health of women in Russia more broadly.
It would be an understatement to say that, by the time I left Russia in 2014, politics infused every aspect of the country’s life. I’ll never forget, for instance, that a colleague of mine, who researched military abuses against ethnic minorities in Russia’s southernmost republics, had to leave the country to give birth after she received threatening anonymous text messages claiming that she and her unborn child were linked to Islamic insurgents in that part of the country.
I wish I could say that my family — and yours — live in a reality that’s different from the one I left in Russia when I took my pregnant self home in 2014. I look around at what’s happening in our country and I worry that we may already be on a superhighway to the sort of class- and race-stratified autocracy that it took Russia so many years to become after the Soviet Union collapsed.
In particular, in the years since the Supreme Court overturned the right of American women to have abortions in 2022, 41 states have put abortion restrictions into effect, including 14 with outright bans. Some 40% of women now live in states with such bans or significant restrictions. In a handful of states like Idaho and Texas, women and expectant parents have had to cross state lines to get routine miscarriage- or pregnancy-related health care because doctors can face criminal or civil liabilities for providing it.
(It may not be coincidental that in states with severe abortion restrictions, infant mortality has gone up significantly, particularly among people of color.) I could go on about the ways this administration and its allies on the Supreme Court and elsewhere are denying poor and middle-class women basic health care, but I’m sure you already get the picture.
Maybe since most Americans haven’t lived under an actual dictatorship the way many Russians have, state capture here is faster and easier, especially in a country with a resurgent evangelical right. (After all, didn’t Jesus say, “Suffer the little children …”?)
These days, many people in my community and in my day job as a psychotherapist have lost hope that Donald Trump’s government can change things for the better. Many tell me that they might not even vote in an upcoming election because government can’t be trusted to tell the truth and act on behalf of ordinary people. I’ve heard folks say that they can rely only on themselves — and maybe loved ones — to help them in crises like driving across state lines for health care. Among some of the highly educated parents I know in my DOGE-stricken Washington, D.C., suburb, I see not mass outrage or the urge to mobilize as much as a desire to homestead and foster a post-apocalyptic self-reliance, much in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road.”
Well, good luck, and thanks for helping Trump consolidate power.
But for now, the one thing I think we still do have that Russia doesn’t is mass demonstrations like the most recent “No Kings” Day, where a record seven million Americans turned out nationally. We also continue to have a (relatively) free press, which is not to be taken for granted or let go easily. To show up in public as fully human and speak out for others is itself a sign of hope and possibility. Rage-filled political leaders and their followers would not invest so much time in intimidating those who speak out if free speech didn’t matter so much.
The reason we should show up at demonstrations, write op-eds and protest in any way we can imagine is to stand in solidarity with one another, even if we don’t change the minds of the people watching us. (We might, though!) In other words, collective action is its own form of social transformation. It is a way to forge, if not a new America, then new Americans who will not let democracy die without a struggle. Without it, I fear we’re likely to end up with Donald Trump’s version of Vladimir Putin’s Russia — at least, the one I left in 2014.
That’s why what we all do next matters so much. Remember that in a democracy, we the people are the government. Whether we’re finding a service for someone who needs it, offering a friend in need a ride, warning of federal police or National Guard in the neighborhood, speaking out against abuse or just meeting friends for dinner, the exercise of our civil rights is a thread from which our democracy hangs.
Simply put, as long as there are more people than military in the streets, the message to those who are scared is simple: This might feel like a foreign land, but you’re not alone.
Tuesday, December 02, 2025
Hegseth Needs to Go—Now
Presidents have always sent people to lead the Pentagon who respect the institutions and personnel of the armed forces, not least because Americans tend to bristle at any sign that an administration does not unreservedly support the men and women of the U.S. military. . . . in his first term, Donald Trump sent General James Mattis, a veteran of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, when Mattis quit, he appointed a long-serving defense professional, Mark Esper.
But this time, the president found a perfect instrument of destruction to send across the Potomac: Pete Hegseth, a Trump sycophant who served in the military, topped out at the mid-level rank of major, and left full of bitterness and resentment toward a military establishment that clearly didn’t value his brilliance and fortitude.
The halls of the Pentagon are apparently strewn with rakes these days, and Hegseth has managed to step on almost all of them, including security blunders, needless fights with the press, and envious, unmanly whining about the medals on the uniform of Senator Mark Kelly, a veteran of higher rank and far greater achievement than Hegseth himself. Like Trump, Hegseth thinks his job is to get even with people he views as enemies: When Hegseth pulled more than 800 senior officers into an auditorium to give them a long and pointless harangue, it was not only disrespectful; it was cringe-inducing, like watching the angriest kid in your high school come back 20 years later as the principal and unload his adolescent gripes on all the teachers in the staff lounge.
Now, however, Hegseth is in new and far more dangerous territory. The Washington Post reported last Friday that, back in September, Hegseth ordered the killing of the survivors of the first strike against what the administration says are terrorist-controlled drug boats. If this report is accurate, it means that Hegseth issued what is called a “no quarter” order, a crime in both American and international law.
So far, the president and the secretary have not disputed the facts, instead fumbling about with classic Beltway-style “non-denial denials.” Today, the White House admitted that the second strike did in fact take place, but on the orders of the Special Operations Command chief, Admiral Frank Bradley, which seems to be setting Bradley up as a scapegoat.
This [Bradley giving the order] seems implausible. Bradley is an experienced officer who by virtue of his rank and position would be intimately familiar with the laws of armed conflict. He would have to know that such an order is likely a war crime, and any senior officer would want civilian leadership to sign off on an order with such potentially immense consequences, especially on the first such operation.
If either Hegseth or Bradley gave such an order—or if Hegseth issued the order and Bradley carried it out—both could be guilty of murder and war crimes. The United States, after World War II, prosecuted German and Japanese officers for similar offenses. (Yesterday, in fact, was the 80th anniversary of the execution by firing squad of Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, a Nazi U-Boat commander who sank a civilian steamer and then killed the survivors.)
Hegseth has since responded to these grave accusations with the crass juvenility characteristic of the toddlers who run this administration. Yesterday, the secretary of defense of the United States of America posted a meme on X depicting Franklin, the cartoon turtle who is a beloved children’s-book character, as a Special Forces operator killing people on boats. He added a comment: “For your Christmas wish list…” Just to make the point, the secretary tagged the X account of SOUTHCOM, the Southern Forces Command, which has had to carry out the strikes, as if blowing up boats and killing the survivors was a joke to be shared with a chuckle and a backslap.
Perhaps Hegseth thinks that sinking boats on the high seas is funny. Maybe he just wanted to own the libs and all that. Or maybe he thought he could disrupt the gathering war-crimes narrative, like the school delinquent pulling a fire alarm during an exam. Or maybe he just has poor judgment and even worse impulse control . . . No matter the reason, his choice to trivialize the use of American military force reveals both the shallowness of the man’s character and the depth of his contempt for the military as an institution.
Posting stupid memes after being accused of murder is not the response of a patriot who must answer to the public about the security of the United States and its people in uniform. . . . . It is not the response of a human being who comprehends the risks—and the costs—of ordering other people to kill helpless men clinging to the wreck of a boat.
It is, instead, the response of a sneering, spoiled punk who has been caught doing wrong and is now daring the local fuzz to take him in and risk the anger of his rich dad—a role fulfilled by Donald Trump, in this case.
Institutions, for a time, can cope with buffoonish leaders. While the secretary has been festooning the Pentagon with new Department of War signs, adults in the building have tried to conduct some of the nation’s geopolitical business.
But Hegseth is still the secretary of defense. He can be kept out of important meetings and excluded from rooms where policies are being debated, but his authority to order the military into action means he can still risk American lives and get people killed. In a remarkable paradox, Hegseth’s formal power and personal incompetence—to say nothing of his apparently nonexistent moral compass—mean he remains dangerous even if he is otherwise insignificant.
He [the Felon] again showed how little he regards military lives this weekend when he was asked if he would attend the funeral of Sarah Beckstrom, the young West Virginia National Guardsman killed in Washington, D.C., last week. He said he would think about it, and then immediately made her death about him by adding that he won big in West Virginia in the last election, as if that were relevant to whether he owed her his presence at her funeral.
Pete Hegseth, however, was elected by no one. He is an unprofessional—and sometimes unstable—appointee who does not seem to comprehend the seriousness of the office he occupies, does not respect the senior officers who serve this country, and does not seem to care at all about the people of the U.S. military, except that he’s worried that too many of them are fat—or women. Hegseth is unqualified and incompetent, and he should have been fired months ago.
Trump has a record of throwing people under the bus when they are no longer of use to him, and Republicans should increase the pressure on him to fire the most unqualified secretary of defense in U.S. history. Let them and all Americans say to Hegseth what the British politician Leo Amery said to Neville Chamberlain as Europe began to crumble under the Nazi offensive in 1940: “Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.” Channeling Oliver Cromwell from centuries earlier, Amery added: “In the name of God, go.” In the name of God, Pete Hegseth, go.
Monday, December 01, 2025
The Felon's Growing Isolation and Detachment
For a decade, Donald Trump’s rallies were intertwined with his political identity. His big crowds were how he first got the media and the Republican Party to take him seriously, and they provided real-time feedback. Those who followed him closely could watch his positions take shape from one rally to the next—an offhand comment that got a strong reaction would become a talking point at the next rally, and then a core part of his pitch. And he took notice when the crowd got bored, pivoting to the lines that would fire them back up.
Before and after rallies, he would meet with local officials, law-enforcement officers, and activists, as well as supporters who’d paid to get a photo with the candidate. Sometimes he visited local businesses or ordered takeout. The people Trump met clued him in to the issues his supporters cared about, and in a few cases, they became part of new stories he told . . . .
But it has been many months since Trump hosted a full-on campaign-style rally. He has opted instead to travel abroad, golf at his private clubs, and dine with wealthy friends, business leaders, and major donors. Beyond the rallies, Trump has dramatically scaled back speeches, public events, and domestic travel compared with the first year of his initial term. And that lack of regular voter contact has contributed to a growing fear among Republicans and White House allies: that Trump is too isolated, and has become out of touch with what the public wants from its president.
[I]n his return to the presidency this year, Trump has seldom ventured across the country to anywhere other than his own clubs. He also inhabits something of a news silo, watching far-right cable channels such as One America News and Newsmax along with Fox News. Even his social-media consumption has become narrower: Instead of being on the app formerly known as Twitter, where he’d occasionally encounter contrary views, he now posts solely on Truth Social, which he owns and where he is surrounded by sycophants. And his own White House staff, this time largely populated by true believers and yes-men (and a few yes-women), only adds to the echo chamber.
Everyone around Trump, and everything he is seeing on TV and on his phone, is telling him that he’s right. But poll after poll suggests that Americans believe Trump is now getting it wrong and has lost focus on what got him elected.
“People voted for him to lower prices, to bring manufacturing back, to stand up to those taking advantage of them,” a close Trump ally told me on the condition of anonymity so as not to antagonize the president. “They didn’t vote for him to build a damn gilded ballroom. He’s not hearing them.”
[T]his year, he barely traveled at all. This fall, he’s ventured beyond the Washington, D.C., metro area; his New Jersey golf club; and Florida, the home of Mar-a-Lago, only five times. Four of those domestic trips were to New York, including three to hang out with rich friends in luxury boxes at sporting events. . . . . Some of his most loyal MAGA supporters, such as Laura Loomer and Steven Bannon, urged him to curb the globe-trotting and instead focus on issues at home.
There had been tentative plans this summer to get Trump back out on the road. Republicans had just passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but polls showed that a majority of Americans didn’t like how it favored the ultrarich. White House aides hoped to have Trump tour the country to emphasize that the bill’s tax cuts and deregulation would benefit his supporters. But it never happened, because Trump got distracted. . . . . And, just weeks after Trump presided over the tax legislation’s July 4 signing ceremony, his White House was consumed by the return of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. The last thing Trump wanted was to face members of his base who might have questions about his ties to the disgraced pedophile.
As summer turned to fall, Republicans wondered if Trump would show up in New Jersey or Virginia to campaign for candidates for governor, and tell his supporters to vote in the year’s most closely watched bellwether races. Instead the president attended only a pair of virtual rallies for the candidates—the exact sort of low-energy move for which Trump used to mock Joe Biden . . . .
After both Republican candidates lost, a number of GOP leaders urged the president publicly and privately to reconnect with his supporters. . . . .in the past two months, Trump has squared his attention on a (faltering) retribution campaign against political foes; a potential war with Venezuela; masked ICE raids that have terrorized immigrant communities; and the demolishing of the White House’s East Wing to construct an opulent ballroom to better entertain wealthy donors. None of those issues, Republicans said, was high on voters’ minds.
But the weeks since have brought little sign that Trump has changed his focus. Although his administration has hosted a couple of White House events meant to demonstrate that Trump is intent on lowering prices, the president himself has shown little willingness to acknowledge the problem, instead calling the affordability crisis a “hoax” and a “con job.” That worries Republicans, who are well aware that Democrats feel that the issue could be their path back to power in next year’s midterm elections.
The Republicans want Trump, even with low poll numbers, back on the road in 2026 to persuade the voters who tend to turn out only for him to support other Republicans. . . . But the bombastic rallies he is known for have come to a halt.
It’s not the only way he has isolated himself. This term, there are very few voices inside the White House to tell him no or get him back on track. And that’s by design. At the start of his first term, Trump filled his team with a mix of veterans of past Republican administrations and figures from the GOP establishment, who moderated some of his more extreme impulses. But Trump chafed at those roadblocks. . . . His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, has made clear that she doesn’t see her role as constraining the president. Moreover, there isn’t a Republican leader on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue to play the role of Mitch McConnell and check Trump’s power.
[H]is focus has been on the business titans and billionaires with whom he has frequently dined at the White House and at Mar-a-Lago, who want something from him and tell him what he wants to hear.
Trump remains in the MAGA echo chamber even when he’s alone in the White House residence or the private dining room off the Oval Office. Yes, he occasionally checks MSNOW or CNN, but his TVs are almost always tuned to Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax, which practically never run negative stories about the president.
Not even two weeks ago, Trump amplified a post that read “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!” as he pushed for sedition charges to be filed against six Democratic lawmakers who’d created a video urging members of the military to ignore unlawful orders. A few moments later, Trump posted his own call for the lawmakers’ execution. Once more, Republicans’ hopes that Trump would focus on the issues voters care about went unheeded.
Let's hope the Felon remains unfocused on voter concerns and that he drags the GOP down with him across the board.
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Halloween Great Gatsby: The Felon's Growing Obliviousness to Reality
Scantily clad young women dancing in tall revolving martini glasses greeted the guests as they entered Mar-a-Lago. Models dressed as flappers with huge white feathers pretended spontaneous gaiety. On Halloween, nine months, 40 weeks, and three days into Donald Trump’s second administration, he celebrated the apex of his image as an almighty ruler by staging a dress-up Great Gatsby party for select club members, Cabinet officials, friends, and family, in a conspicuous display of his omnipotence and invulnerability.
Trump serenely presided as the godhead at his party in homage to the roaring twenties of the twentieth century, as though he had revived its heyday. He certainly had not read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel and comprehended its tragic plot or understood how those ’20s ended in the Great Crash. Historians of the future will mark October 31, 2025, the date of the Great Gatsby party, where Trump basked in glowing adulation, as his peak moment of obliviousness before the deluge.
The federal government was in the thirtieth day of a shutdown that would last until November 13. Trump and the Republicans refused to extend subsidies for premiums under the Affordable Care Act, which would lead to astronomical increases, at least doubling for 22 million people, with millions struggling to pay and 4.2 million losing coverage entirely, according to the Congressional Budget Office. More than a million federal workers were missing their paychecks. With air traffic controllers working without pay, flights to 40 major airports were reduced by 10 percent. Perhaps most alarmingly, especially against the backdrop of a party celebrating 1920s excess, food benefits for 42 million people, including 16 million children, under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, would be cut on November 1.
Trump sat poolside like a sultan at Mar-a-Lago, idolized by his guests, exuding complacency. Seated at his table with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. attorney from the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News talk-show host, wearing a gold headdress, Trump grinned approvingly at a guest dressed in an orange jumpsuit with the words “STATE PRISON” stenciled on the back, perhaps costumed as a migrant about to be deported.
Trump believed there could be no consequences for whatever he wished to do—whether it was to send the military into American cities, impose tariffs on any country without regard to the Congress, grant pardons to political allies and those with the resources to buy into his family’s crypto business, indict his designated enemies, slash food stamps, increase health insurance premiums, enrich himself to the tune of an estimated $3.4 billion, according to a New Yorker investigation—or order his Department of Justice to suppress the Epstein files.
The more Trump is praised, the greater he believes is his popularity. He trusts in his accolades as a science of alchemy. “I have the best Polling Numbers that I have ever received,” Trump tweeted on October 27. “I have the best numbers for any president in many years—any president.”
Four days after the Gatsby party, under a cloud of economic pessimism, chiefly darkened by the betrayal of his pledge to lower inflation on day one, the Democrats swept elections, on November 4, in a wholesale repudiation of Trump and his policies. Trump was more unpopular than he had ever been . . . . Before Trump had departed Washington for his Gatsby party, he had left behind a White House transformed into a kitsch Byzantine palace, its makeover a symbol of his uninhibited power and his self-proclaimed “Golden Age.” He treated the White House as another of his properties that he redesigned as he wished, his Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac.
With Trump, style follows dysfunction. Gold trim appliqués have been pasted everywhere, the Rose Garden paved over, renamed the Rose Garden Club with colored umbrellas covering tables for lobbyists and wealthy supplicants, an exact replication of Mar-a-Lago, and the East Wing torn down for his monstrous ballroom, to be paid for by corporations seeking his favor for government contracts and to avoid retribution. The symmetrical Federalist design of the White House’s two wings, originally intended to stand as a monument against monarchical pomposity and to reflect the balance of power required to sustain a republic, was being daily defiled.
If there is a Gatsby in Trump’s story, it is the self-invented swindler and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, though Gatsby seems like an innocent compared to Epstein. Epstein is now six years dead, but he used to be at the Mar-a-Lago festivities frequently. “I was Donald’s closest friend for ten years,” Epstein said. He and Donald lived just about a mile apart in Palm Beach, cavorting together in a blur of debauched scenes.
While lines began forming at food pantries around the country, Trump’s Great Gatsby party was a cavalcade of the mummified hangers-on of 2025, not the bright young things of 1925. The thrill of the hunt, with Epstein chasing a lineup of models, was replaced with the procession of the nouveau MAGA royalty kissing the king’s ring. Washington plastic surgeons, who have worked on Trump-orbit clients, have dubbed their look “that Mar-a-Lago face.” One D.C. doctor told Axios that constant Botox and cosmetic alterations create a syndrome of “filler blindness,” where in a world of similarly over-treated changelings, “you lose sight of anatomic normalcy.”
Trump’s guests sat in tables around the pool. Instead of Jay Gatsby’s lifeless body, two large metallic balls bobbed in the water. Trump could not have imagined that they were abstract representations of himself and Epstein, the remembrance of things past.
For months now, more than 1,000 FBI agents have been working at the FBI’s Central Records Complex, instructed by Director Kash Patel to flag and redact Trump’s name from the voluminous Epstein files. “Trump” is being “blacked out,” according to Bloomberg News. The FBI refused to comment.
Flying back from Palm Beach to Washington on November 14, aboard Air Force One, Catherine Lucey, a Bloomberg reporter, asked Trump, “If there’s nothing incriminating in the files, sir, why not …” Trump pointed his finger at her and said angrily, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.” The party was over.
The man and his hangers on are despicable.
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