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The Felon's and MAGA's Hatred of Minorities and "Liberal" Women

The Felon has a long history of racism - his company settled a federal lawsuit in Norfolk in the 1970's for anti-black discrimination - and his contempt for and objectification of women, especially smart, educated liberal women, has an equally long history. While the Felon's regime is supposedly fighting "wokeness", its real agenda is rolling back civil rights laws which the Felon recently complained that the milestone civil rights laws from the 1960's have caused "white people to be treated badly."  The Felon's war on so-called DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) through executive orders and agency regulations follow the upside down view that whites face discrimination when in reality that so-called discrimination is merely restraints on whites to mistreat others badly, especially racial minorities.  ICE's cruelty is aimed at anyone with brown skin regardless of their citizenship and even Native Americans have been seized. All of this agenda was laid out in Project 2025 and was sadly ignored by far too many voters.  The shooting of Renee Good last week also shows this racist agenda threatens whites who do not buy into the Felon's campaign of cruelty and discrimination.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's push to to undo civil rights protections:

[O]ne of the key Republican talking points of the [2024 election] cycle: that “wokeness” was sweeping the nation and upending established ways of life, and that [the Felon] Donald Trump would fight against it. Trump has since made clear that he wasn’t interested in just reining in what some people saw as excesses. He was interested in a wholesale rollback of bedrock civil-rights protections.

During his recent interview with The New York Times, the [Felon] president harshly criticized the legislation of the 1960s, which included the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which bans employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which bans racial discrimination in voting).

“White people were very badly treated where they did extremely well, and they were not invited to go into a university or a college. So I would say, in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases,” . . . it also hurt a lot of people—people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job.”

[The Felon] Trump went on to say that the laws caused “reverse discrimination.” This idea that white Americans are suffering from widespread bias is a core belief of the revanchist right. In a Pew Research Center poll last year, 62 percent of white Republicans said that white people face some or a lot of discrimination. It’s not a mainstream view, though. Overall, fewer than 40 percent of Americans believe that white people face some or a lot of discrimination; roughly three-quarters say the same about Black and Hispanic people, and two-thirds about Asian people.

The idea that early-2020s “wokeness” went too far is more mainstream. Trump’s anti-woke campaigning appealed not only to the MAGA base but also to independents and even some voters who viewed themselves as left of center but felt that Democrats had overreached. The word woke was a useful tool because it had no clear definition . . . . This meant that people could interpret Trump’s rhetoric however they wanted . . . . observers, including my colleague Adam Serwer, warned that this vagueness was a Trojan horse for attacking more popular equal-rights protections.

After taking office, [the Felon] Trump did move to push back on DEI initiatives (in the federal government and in private universities) and transgender-athlete participation in sports . . . . But [the Felon] Trump has also gone much further than that, working to undermine structures that were in place long before DEI or woke became familiar terms. This broader project is one that keen observers of the plans laid out in Project 2025 would have known to expect—but that many voters may not have intended and may not endorse.

In April, Trump issued an executive order that throws out the theory of disparate impact, an approach that allows policies to be assessed not just on whether their intent is to discriminate but also on whether their effect is discriminatory. Disparate impact has been a core tool for civil-rights enforcement for decades. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been hollowed out . . . Last month, the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission posted on X to solicit complaints: “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.” The administration is even trying to erode the foundational post–Civil War constitutional amendments.

Alongside these policy moves to undermine civil-rights protections, the administration has also resorted to old-fashioned racist rhetoric. The Department of Homeland Security has consistently published winking nods to core racist texts in its advertising materials, including the white-nationalist screed Which Way Western Man? My colleague David Frum reported earlier this week on a DHS post that alludes to a song popular on the far right. Quoting the song, the post read, “We’ll have our home again.”

Trump’s new frankness about the most basic civil-rights laws shows another way in which he hopes to restore MAGA’s sense of home: His administration is going to reclaim the pride of white people who believe that their country has left them behind, no matter who gets treated badly in the process.

As for "liberal" women, a column in the New York Times looks MAGA's the contempt for this demographic:

If you read conservative media, you might have heard about a new danger stalking our besieged country.

This week, Fox News warned about “organized gangs of wine moms” using “antifa tactics” against ICE. According to a column in the right-wing PJ Media, the “greatest threat to our nation” is a “group of ‘unindicted domestic terrorists’ who are just AWFL: Affluent White Liberal Women.” (The acronym is wrong, but never mind.) The Canadian influencer Lauren Chen . . . . wrote that the ideology of women like Renee Good is “almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.”

It’s as if the right is speedrunning the Martin Niemöller poem that begins, “First they came for the Communists.” ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis started with the demonization of Somali immigrants. It took only weeks for conservative demagogues to direct their venom toward the middle-class women of the Resistance. We’re now seeing an outpouring of misogynist rage driven by both political expedience and psychosexual grievance.

One reason Renee Good’s death was such a shock is that we’re not used to seeing law enforcement violence against middle-class white mothers. The citizenry has broadly recoiled; her killing, in addition to being a human tragedy, has been a public relations disaster for the administration. According to an Economist/YouGov poll, most Americans have seen videos of the shooting, and only 30 percent believe it was justified. A plurality of Americans say ICE is making cities less safe, and more people support than oppose abolishing the agency.

In the face of such widespread public revulsion, the administration and its enablers have been trying to invent a terrorist threat to justify their increasingly unpopular siege of Minneapolis. That’s why the Justice Department pushed for a criminal investigation of Good’s partner, Becca, leading six federal prosecutors to quit in protest. For authoritarian leaders, lying itself isn’t enough; they must act as if their lies are true. And the lies go far beyond Renee and Becca Good to smear the entire movement of which they were a part.

Conservatives aren’t wrong to see furious women as an obstacle to their dreams of mass deportation. . . . . . CNN reported that Renee Good served on the board of her son’s charter school, which provided links to guides about opposing ICE. ICE watches are being organized in churches and neighborhood associations. In many ways they are manifestations of local civic health.

They’re also a problem for the right. These activists both document ICE’s brutality and are often subject to it, demonstrating the casual violence that Trump’s paramilitary forces are bringing to American communities. Just this week, a woman named Patty O’Keefe described agents surrounding a car she was in, spraying chemical irritants through the vents, breaking the windows and dragging her out. She was thrown in the back of an ICE vehicle, where she said the driver taunted her: “You guys got to stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” After eight hours in detention, she said, she was released without charges.

To defend such treatment of activists — many of them women — right-wingers need to cast them as enemies of the state. The editor of the conservative National Review, Rich Lowry, wrote a column headlined, “The Anti-ICE insurgency,” describing Good almost as a suicidal militant. . . . . His language seems designed to rationalize ICE agents storming through Midwestern streets kitted out as if they’re headed into battle in Falluja.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump has now threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. . . . . no normal administration would contemplate a military response to such small-scale disorder. Trump doesn’t want to crush just criminal defiance, but the civil defiance that he wishes he could criminalize. . . . . it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy. But it also makes sense, because everyone hates an apostate. In the right-wing imagination, these women are acting like harpies — an epithet often seen online — when they’re supposed to be helpmeets.

For MAGA, ICE’s eagerness to put women in their place might be a feature, not a bug.

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Something Is Rotten in the State of America

If it wasn't clear before - although it should have been perfectly clear - the United States as a dangerous psychopath in the White House who is poised to attack an ally of two centuries for seemingly no real reason other than to perhaps satiate his sick ego, generate yet another distraction from the Epstein files which have not been released as required, or perhaps to follow orders from Vladimir Putin.  The United States is in a crisis that ranges from masked ICE agents attacking American citizens and creating domestic violence to destroying the NATO alliance.  Sadly, one individual who surrounds himself with equally evil and unhinged sycophants is responsible for the crisis. Frighteningly, congressional Republicans who could end the nightmare continue to sit on their hands and do nothing even as the Felon's unfitness for office becomes ever more glaring.  Indeed, Nikita Khrushchev's boast that America would fall from within seems ever more accurate as the Felon destroys the nation from within both with ICE - his secret police force - and threats to invade Greenland - where treaties already allow American bases and troops without any need for conquest - and other allies.   Meanwhile, the latest polls show a majority of Americans disapprove of the Felon's policies. A long column in the New York Times looks at the foreign policy disaster:

I want you to remember the name Mark Peters. In 2009 he was on patrol in Afghanistan when he stepped on an improvised explosive device. The incident was captured on video and can be seen in a 2014 documentary series called “My War.”  The footage is horrifying. You can see the explosion, then you hear shouts of anguish and desperate calls for mine clearance so that medics can reach the wounded soldier.

Mark Peters is Danish. He lost his lower legs fighting in defense of the United States. I learned about him when I read this moving account of Danish deployments by Todd Johnson, writing for War Room, a journal of the Army War College.

Denmark answered the call after the 9/11 attacks. It deployed thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq, and it lost more soldiers, per capita, in Afghanistan than any NATO nation aside from the United States. There is no more profound way to stand in solidarity with an ally.

“America has no permanent friends or enemies,” Henry Kissinger is often quoted as saying, “only interests.” That statement, championed by proponents of realpolitik, is true only if you emphasize the word “permanent.” Over the long sweep of time, allies can certainly become enemies, and enemies can become allies.

Consider France and England. They fought each other in a series of wars sweeping across hundreds of years. But they’ve been friends and allies for more than a century, fighting together most notably in World War I and World War II. Despite tensions, they stood watch together as NATO allies, defending Europe and the free world for the entire duration of the Cold War.

I don’t know if they are permanent friends, but they are friends — to the incalculable benefit of both nations.

The better expression, the one that accurately reflects the national interests of the United States, is that while any given friendship isn’t permanently guaranteed, our country has a permanent interest in maintaining international friendships and alliances. When we lose partners in alliances (much less the alliance itself) we are weaker and more vulnerable — no matter how much we try to bulk up our independent military and economic strength.

I am writing about all this because the Trump administration may be on the verge of the most catastrophic national security mistake of my lifetime. It is attempting to bully Denmark into surrendering Greenland, its semiautonomous territory, to the United States.

On Jan. 9, President Trump said that if America can’t acquire Greenland “the easy way” then it would resort to the “hard way.”  “We are going to do something in Greenland, whether they like it or not,” Trump said, “because if we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland, and we’re not going to have Russia or China as a neighbor.”

One would be tempted to simply make a moral argument against bullying (and possibly even attacking!) Denmark. Danes are such stalwart allies that they long ago granted America sweeping access to Greenland to bolster our own defense.

As The Times explained last week, a 1951 agreement grants the United States the ability to “construct, install, maintain and operate” military bases across Greenland, “house personnel” and “control landings, takeoffs, anchorages, moorings, movements and operation of ships, aircraft and waterborne craft.”

Denmark resisted Nazi occupation in World War II. It’s a founding member of NATO, and it followed through on that commitment, as noted above, fighting by our side in Afghanistan. It even fought in Iraq, a non-NATO military mission. More recently the Danish Navy deployed a frigate to the Red Sea, where it fought alongside the U.S. Navy against Houthi rebels.

In the mercenary calculus of Donald Trump, morality is meaningless — unless it’s his morality, of course, and his morality places no constraints on his will to power and his greed.

And so it’s also necessary to oppose seizing Greenland using the words that MAGA will understand. Bullying Denmark will make the United States weaker and perhaps even poorer. It’s not just wrong to turn on our friends; it’s stupid, and that stupidity is spreading across the length and breadth of American foreign policy.

The best description I’ve read of Trump’s flawed approach comes from Kori Schake, a senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Writing in Foreign Affairs last June, she noted that “since the end of World War II, American power has been rooted mostly in cooperation, not coercion.”

“The Trump team,” she argued, “ignores that history, takes for granted all the benefits that a cooperative approach has yielded, and cannot envision a future in which other countries opt out of the existing U.S.-led international order or construct a new one that would be antagonistic to American interests.”

The history is indeed quite clear. When NATO and the Warsaw Pact faced off against each other during the Cold War, it was a confrontation between an alliance and an empire.

The alliance was a voluntary union of liberal democracies. There was nothing voluntary about the Soviet empire. Soviet troops in Warsaw Pact nations existed not just to confront the West, but also to enforce Soviet control.

But that’s the way it works with empires. They’re almost always weaker than they appear because much of their strength is diverted into domination, into maintaining a hold over people who dislike or actually reject their rule.

Trump favors the failed Soviet approach. The Western Hemisphere is his version of the Warsaw Pact. He wants to transform it into a region that exists under American domination, where nations conduct their foreign and even domestic policies under a watchful American eye, always mindful of the awesome power of American arms.

Our historic allies, meanwhile, are treated like actual or potential enemies. Denmark is facing overt American threats, but the administration’s ominous language extends well beyond Denmark.

In an interview last year with the news outlet UnHerd, Vice President Vance raised the possibility of Britain and France becoming enemies to the United States. “France and the U.K. have nuclear weapons,” he said.

The United States is the most powerful nuclear-armed nation in the world, and it is already being “overwhelmed with very destructive moral ideas” — and one of those ideas is threatening to use that awesome might to extort (or attack) an ally.

What’s more, empires are expensive — more expensive than the United States can afford. Last week, Trump proposed a remarkable surge in military spending, to $1.5 trillion annually, an almost $600 billion increase over 2026. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has calculated that Trump’s proposal could add $5.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

[A] RAND Corporation study found that the United States contributes 39 percent of the total, collective allied defense burden across the globe. If you separate yourself from allies, there is less military force available for defense, and you either have to be comfortable with the additional vulnerability or find the funds to shore up the weakness.

On Tuesday, the prime minister of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, issued a clear and unequivocal statement rejecting the American bid to own his island. “We are now facing a geopolitical crisis,” Nielsen said. “And if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the E.U.”

And what was Trump’s response? “I disagree with him,” he said, “I don’t know who he is. Don’t know anything about him. But that’s going to be a big problem for him.”

Only 17 percent support acquiring Greenland, and a mere 4 percent support taking it by force. But those numbers will be cold comfort if Trump acts anyway.

It is often said that might does not make right; it is less well understood that right can make might, as Abraham Lincoln once said. Voluntary alliances of liberal democracies have proven to be the strongest military and economic forces in the world. This was true in World War I. It was true in World War II. And it was true in the Cold War.

If we break those alliances, we are smaller and weaker. If we break them for pride and power and greed, then we don’t just break an alliance; we break our own character. We diminish ourselves in every way that matters, and no amount of newly sovereign frozen ground can obscure our national shame.

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Trump Is Risking a Global Catastrophe

The Felon campaigned promising to lower consumer prices and to keep the United States out of foreign wars.  To date, prices have continued to rise - in part due to the Felon's insane tariffs - and the Felon appears obsessed with creating armed conflicts in Venezuela, maybe Iran, and in Greenland of all places.   The latter obsession for supposed "national security" reasons ignores the reality that the Untied States and Denmark already have treaties for mutual defense and that the United States had a sizable number of troops and assets in Greenland until the United States unilaterally reduced its own presence in Greenland.  Simply put, there is no need for the United States to own Greenland in order to defend from Chinese or Russian threats. Yet, thanks to the Felon's deranged bellicose claims and threats we now see NATO troops from Denmark, France, Germany and Baltic nations being moved to Greenland to defend against the Felon's threatened invasion. One has to  wonder what is driving the Felon's actions because no one would be more thrilled to see NATO disintegrate more than Vladimir Putin (who I personally suspect has his own copies of Epstein documents or other "kompromat" on the Felon). A very long piece in The Atlantic looks at the disaster the Felon may be about to set in motion that would not only severely damage the United States' global security but also threaten the very lives of every day Americans should the resulting military hostilities spread.  This combined with ICE's terrorizing of American cities underscore that it is time for congressional Republicans to act to remove the Felon from office. Here are article highlights:

[The Felon] Donald Trump has a lot of odd fixations, both as a person and as a president. He tends to focus his tunnel vision on things he wants: the demolishing of the White House’s East Wing, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Many of Trump’s quirks are harmless, if unpleasant. . . . . Some of his ideas, however, are more destructive: His stubborn and ill-informed attachment to tariffs has brought about considerable disorder in the international economy and hurt many of the American industries they were supposed to protect.

But a few of Trump’s obsessions are extraordinarily dangerous, and likely none more so than his determination to seize Greenland from Denmark, a country allied to the United States for more than two centuries. Perhaps because he does not understand how the Mercator projection distorts size on a map, the president thinks that Greenland is “massive” and that it must become part of the United States. If Trump makes good on his recurring threat to use force to gain the island, he would not only blow apart America’s most important alliance; he could set in motion a series of events that could lead to global catastrophe—or even to World War III.

Greenland, of course, is important to the security of the United States—as it is to the entire Atlantic community and to the free world itself. This fact might be new to Trump, but Western strategists have known it for a century or more, which is why the United States has had a military presence in Greenland for decades.

During the Cold War, America and its allies were determined to defend the sea lanes between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom (often referred to at the time as the “GIUK” gap), the North Atlantic passages through which the Soviet Union could have sent submarines from its Arctic bases toward NATO convoys trying to reach Europe. America and Denmark have always worked closely in the Arctic region, and even once had a secret “gentlemen’s agreement” under which Denmark declared Greenland off-limits for the stationing of nuclear weapons, but would look the other way so long as the United States kept the presence of any such weapons quiet and unacknowledged.

The Cold War is over, but Greenland is still an important part of North Atlantic security, which is one of many reasons Denmark and the United States and other North Atlantic nations are part of a thing called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But for the Trump administration, NATO—another of the president’s hostile fixations—is not enough to guarantee America’s safety. Trump, like the mad president in the 1965 novel Night of Camp David, seems to believe that the United States must absorb Canada and Greenland and create some sort of Atlantic co-prosperity sphere stretching from Alaska to Norway, a ring of ice and iron that would stand as a tribute to the imperial ambitions of America’s 47th president.

When voters returned Trump to office in 2024, his electoral affirmation seemed to strengthen his determination to do all the things that the responsible adults in his previous administration told him he couldn’t do the first time around.

At this point, Trump is so consumed with acquiring Greenland that he has implied that he would use force against an old American friend, if that’s what it takes to get the island.

As Trump’s rhetoric has escalated, other administration officials have tried to clean up his remarks, but with little success. Secretary of State Marco Rubio dutifully met with members of Congress to reassure them that Trump intended only to offer to buy the island, but the next day, the White House issued a statement reaffirming that “utilizing” the military “is always an option.” The same week that Rubio was on the Hill, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller on January 5 scoffed at the idea that seizing Greenland would lead to armed conflict, . . . .

The president’s obsession with Greenland is especially dangerous because it has no real constituency: Trump is determined to get the island, it seems, only because Denmark and the rest of the world are telling him that he can’t have it. As is so often the case, telling Trump not to do something makes him more determined to do it.

This morning, Denmark sent an advance military command to Greenland in preparation for sending yet more Danish forces to the island. Danish lawmakers told my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker last week that the timing of this deployment is not a coincidence and represents an attempt to create a “credible deterrent” on the island—presumably to the Americans.

As my colleagues Shane Harris, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Jonathan Lemire reported recently, Danish officials are concerned that Trump will simply issue a late-night proclamation that the United States owns Greenland and then dare anyone to contradict him. . . . .Trump declaring himself Lord Protector of Greenland might not have much impact.

But Trump might then try to enforce his claims. He could start by ordering the U.S. military to treat Greenland as sovereign U.S. territory. And such an order, which would be illegal but would likely be fulfilled by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, could set in motion a disastrous chain of events.

Assume, for example, that Denmark closes Greenland’s airspace to U.S. flights in order to assert its continued sovereignty (and to prevent Trump from sending more troops to the island). Trump might then order the Air Force to ignore any directions from local authorities—because, of course, Greenland would now be American airspace—and to treat all such encounters as potentially hostile. Or imagine that Denmark, following some intemperate claim from Trump, demands that U.S. forces in Greenland remain confined to their bases, and Trump, incensed at the insult to his putatively unlimited power, tries to force the issue and tells American servicepeople to act as the island’s de facto police, including suppressing any demonstrations or resistance from the population.

Either by design or accident, members of the American military might end up confronting Danish forces, men and women with whom they have trained for years and may have served in Afghanistan. Someone might be killed. The death of a Greenlander, a Dane, or a member of any other military there as a show of support for Denmark—Sweden has already sent troops to Greenland and Britain is considering similar moves—would incinerate the NATO alliance. Then the real nightmare begins.

The United States is already overstretched around the world because of Trump’s chaotic threats and impulses. Ships that should be in the Gulf or near Europe or Asia are paddling around in the Caribbean because of Trump’s operation to remove the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from power. The president has threatened to attack Iran, again, if the regime in Tehran continues to kill its own citizens, and U.S. forces would have to dart back across the world to undertake new assignments in the Middle East. Of course, such a move would undermine Trump’s ongoing warnings that he might strike Mexico and Colombia.

As the American military chases Trump’s ever-changing Sharpie lines across the world’s maps, the West’s enemies will be tempted to take advantage of the fact that the United States has obliterated the most powerful alliance in history while scattering American forces around the globe in showpiece operations that have more to do with Trump’s vanity than with sound strategy. They have surely noticed that the U.S. defense and intelligence services are in the hands of unqualified loyalists, and that so far Trump’s plans for improving the battle readiness of the American military are mostly limited to pictures of make-believe battleships that will never be built.

If NATO collapses because of bullets fired in Greenland, Russian President Vladimir Putin might well assume that he could bury the Atlantic Alliance once and for all by attacking NATO’s Baltic members. As the political scientist Ian Bremmer, who founded the analytical firm Eurasia Group, said on social media this week, “Nobody wants the United States to take control of Greenland (and, accordingly, destroy NATO) more than Putin.” . . . . Putin has taken ghastly losses in Ukraine, but he has enough of an army left, backed by drones and other assets, to pummel the Baltic states and grab pieces of territory that may have no strategic value but whose capture would serve to remind the world that the United States—the new masters of Greenland—will not save Europe.

Other nations, however, are unlikely to sit by, especially neighboring NATO countries such as Poland and Finland. Should they come to the aid of their Baltic allies, at least some other European nations would likely support those efforts, and the result would be a broader European conflict involving some of the most militarily capable states in the world. For the first time in almost a century, the continent would be at war, this time one involving multiple nuclear powers. U.S. forces, like it or not, would find themselves in the middle of this bedlam, and with each day of violence the chances would grow of a cataclysmic mistake or miscalculation by any of the combatants.

Meanwhile, a world away from Europe, China might wonder if America has finally tied itself in enough foolish knots to put the conquest of Taiwan within reach, especially with Trump’s “Golden Fleet” nowhere in sight. And although no one should try to predict what North Korea’s bizarre dynasty would do, South Korea and Japan would have to begin planning for the risks that will come during, and after, America’s voluntary strategic immolation, most likely with crash programs to develop nuclear arms.

And all this could happen—for what, exactly? The vainglorious demands of one man who can’t read a map?

Concerned leaders in both parties should explain to the citizens of the United States how much peril Trump is courting. His obsessions could lead not only to the collapse of their standard of living but present a real danger to their lives, no matter where they live. Congress, of course, should have stopped Trump—on this as on so many things—long ago. . . . . Yesterday, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Jeanne Shaheen introduced the NATO Unity Protection Act, which explicitly prohibits using Federal funding “to blockade, occupy, annex or otherwise assert control over the sovereign territory of a NATO member state without that ally’s consent.” This is one case where the MAGA base, which claims to hate foreign adventures, might forgive the GOP for opposing Trump.

Most Americans probably couldn’t care less about Greenland, but they will be forced to care—tragically, too late—if Trump’s gambit engulfs the world in flames.

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 A fellow Virginian.

Banana Republicanism

To date, the Felon's regime is reminiscent of a mixture of early 1930's Germany and Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorships of "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc", where loyalty to the dictator is more important than competency and expertise and where government policies enrich the select few and the dictator himself, and where government forces are used to threaten and intimidate the majority of the populace.  ICE is operating as a form of the Gestapo and the Felon is demanding that heads of government agencies yield to his whims and malicious prosecution of political opponents, real or imagined. The worse of these to date may be the Felon's push for the Department of Justice under Pam Bondi (who should be disbarred for her actions to date) to launch a flimsy, contrived criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell.  Powell's real offense is doing his job rather than follow the demands of the Felon, who wants lower interest rates despite the potentially inflationary impact at a time when even much of the MAGA base is complaining about high prices. The move also may destabilize the Federal Reserve and adversely impact the economy in additional ways. Throughout these outrages, most Republicans remain silent or mumble when not on the record. A piece in The Atlantic looks at this effort to turn the United States into a banana republic:

The Trump administration has opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on grounds so flimsy and transparently hypocritical that it is difficult to know whether anybody is supposed to take the charges at face value. When a respected public servant is being accused of wasting taxpayer dollars and lying to Congress by a president whose extravagant White House renovation has already doubled in cost in just three months, and whose inexhaustible capacity for lies has essentially broken every fact-checking medium, one almost wonders if the criminal allegation was chosen for its absurdity, to demonstrate that Donald Trump can make the law mean whatever he wants it to.

Trump’s gambit is more likely to fail than it is to succeed. Powell’s term ends in four months, a timeline so brief that it wouldn’t be hastened by even a well-founded criminal charge, which this is not. In theory, harassing Powell with trumped-up charges could intimidate him into backing down, but the Fed chair responded with a defiant statement. Republican Senator Thom Tillis vowed not to support any new nominees to the Federal Reserve board “until this legal matter is fully resolved.” And even if Trump were to manage to install sufficiently pliant figureheads at the agency, the Fed’s demonstrable lack of independence would be apt to weaken its influence over monetary policy and make the economy worse, not better.

What’s more, Trump is gambling that his control over the Republican Party is so unshakable that he can extend his banana republicanism to a policy domain that matters deeply to his wealthy partisan allies. Those conservative economic elites who don’t actively cheer on Trump’s authoritarianism and corruption have learned to live with both, because he delivers the goods in the policy realms that matter to them: tax cuts, deregulation, and other conservative economic priorities.

Every affluent Republican, from the tech right to fossil-fuel owners to heirs managing their inherited portfolios, has a direct and visible interest in stable and competent monetary policy. The Republican Party’s respect for the Fed’s independence is already evident in a recent Supreme Court ruling, in which the conservative majority appears to be seeking to create a special exemption for the Federal Reserve from the Court’s general doctrine that presidents are entitled to fire the heads of independent agencies.

The apparent source of this desperate gamble is that Trump seems keenly aware that the public disapproves of his presidency and his economic policy making. But rather than move to the center and try to allay the concerns of his wavering supporters, Trump’s response to adversity has been to try to seize as much economic and political power as he can, as fast as possible.

Thus the invasion of Venezuela, which he hopes will provide him with a windfall source of petro-dollars. (Sunday night, Trump shared on Truth Social a mock biography describing himself as “Acting President of Venezuela.”) After floating a proposal to cap credit-card interest rates that stands little chance of passage in Congress, he told reporters on Air Force One that firms that fail to comply with his target by January 20 . . . . . will be “in violation of the law.”

In normal times, private companies could simply laugh off a president’s threat that they have “violated” a law that does not exist. But since Trump has amply demonstrated his eagerness to redefine the law as synonymous with his own whims, his threats may well contain real power.

Trump’s clumsy legal intimidation of Powell mirrors tactics used by regimes such as those of Argentina, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. This is not a list of the most prosperous economies in the modern world. What these states have in common (with the exception of Argentina, which has rebuilt its economic and political systems from the setbacks they suffered under disastrous Trump-style experiments) is an entrenched elite that hoards wealth and control.

The administration is fond of accusing immigrant communities of importing dysfunctional political cultures from the developing world. . . . . The global South may be cursed with more than its share of regimes in which economic success depends on political access and the rule of law is a bitter joke. However, it is not the desperate refugees fleeing poverty and oppression who are importing their political culture, but Trump himself.

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American Violence Is Becoming Too Much for Families

As often noted, the current nightmare political reality that is gripping the United States is something I could never have envisioned growing up or when I was an active Republican now decades ago.  Gun violence is off the charts with Republicans putting gun sales for the gun industry ahead of the lives and safety of their constituents.  Now, with ICE acting as the Felon's own fascist police force, unfettered by any desire to act humanely and decently - a marked change from ICE under the Bush presidents, Obama and Biden - more and more American's especially younger woman are thinking about leaving the United States for somewhere they deem safer for themselves and their children. Indeed, as noted in a column in the New York Times, 40% of women ages 15-44 are interested in leaving the USA. Yes, each presidential election is seen by those saying they will leave the USA, but as a piece in the New Yorker explores, this time around, more people are actually leaving. I have both blogger friends and former local residents who have now actually made the move out of the country and who, so far are very happy with their decisions.  With grandchildren of my own, I worry about what this country is becoming and what my grandchildren's' futures will be in a nation seemingly spinning towards autocracy with policies that mainly benefit billionaires and oligarchs and where masked  ICE agents can invade one's neighborhood.   Here are highlights from the Times column:  

The one group in the United States most interested in leaving the country and permanently living somewhere else is American women ages 15 to 44. According to Gallup, 40 percent of women polled in my age bracket expressed this desire, double the rate of all U.S. adults. That tells me that the women who are building their lives and the lives of the next generation are looking for the exit.

Women in other, similar nations do not share this desire to relocate. In November, I asked readers who were considering moving what was driving them out.

While the responses were varied (the rollback of rights for women, immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people was mentioned by several), the most common reason cited was gun violence in the United States. Whether at the hands of fellow citizens or militarized law enforcement officers, this particular form of violence and its unremitting nature is just not a significant problem in our peer nations.

In 2025, there were more mass shootings in the United States than days in the year, according to the Gun Violence Archive (which uses a broader definition than The Times). There were 75 school shootings. According to The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit focused on health equity, “The U.S. has among the highest overall firearm mortality rates, as well as among the highest firearm mortality rates for children, adolescents and women, both globally and among high-income countries”; Black Americans and American Indians are particularly likely to die from gun violence.

It feels as though we have hit a particularly horrifying patch of violence in the last month. A shooting at Brown University and the death of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, who was shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis, were beyond disturbing. Some elected officials seem more interested in spreading disinformation about killings like these while gaslighting and smearing victims than doing anything to stop it.

As Adam Serwer pointed out about Good’s death, the administration’s victim-blaming playbook — Vice President JD Vance called her “a deranged leftist” — is shopworn, and has been used to defend police killings for a long time. In 2020, I commissioned a personal essay by the writer Imani Bashir, who purchased a one-way ticket out of the United States in 2015 after the death of Sandra Bland while in police custody, and who felt that living abroad was the only way to keep her Black son safe.  “For my husband and me, the conversation was: Where could we safely raise a family? Where could we feel like we didn’t have a constant threat or target on our backs?” Bashir wrote.

When I spoke to readers who were considering moving abroad, they expressed similar sentiments. For a variety of reasons, they described the feeling that violence was closing in on them, and that they needed to get out of the country. Emma Stamper, who has dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States and lives in the suburbs of Denver, said that multiple high-profile mass shootings in Colorado played into her thoughts of leaving. Stamper, who has a 3-year-old son and a 15-month-old daughter, works for a nonprofit and her husband is a programmer. They both work remotely, so relocation is more possible for them than it is for many families. . . . She also talked about feeling a less tangible shift, a sense that there’s “a cultural aggression that continues to spiral,” in the United States.

I also spoke to a couple — the husband is a veteran who works for the federal government and the wife is a professor — who live outside a major West Coast city. (They asked that I not use their names for fear of retaliation.)The family, which includes a school-age child, spent several months of a sabbatical living in Europe. The wife described the “underlying hum of anxiety” that just went away when they were living outside the United States.

The lack of threat from gun violence was part of that. But it was bigger than just the guns. . . . His wife said it wasn’t just the absence of fear she felt when living abroad; it was also the presence of care. “I realized that I felt held there by the culture, by the society, by people.”

But over the years, as these violent incidents have piled up, it has become harder to soothe myself with cold rationality. The hour after I heard about the shooting at Brown, where I went to college, I was Googling “going to university in Europe” for the first time. For a few days, I considered the idea that the future might be brighter for my daughters elsewhere.

For now, it’s just a passing thought, one that’s already in the rearview. But I can’t predict what is coming next.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

Federal Agents Are Violating the Rights of Americans

This past week included frightening signs that the Felon and his lawless henchmen and henchwomen want to both transform America into a police state and to threaten and seize foreign territories into submission or yielding territory.  The justification is a manufactured "emergency" that depicts undocumented immigrants as hardened criminals and foreign terrorists and that couches territorial demands in terms of "national security" needs.  The killing of a 37 year old white woman who was an American citizen in Minneapolis by ICE agents should be a blaring siren that no one is safe in the Felon's America. In the minds of this dictatorial regime, 4th and 5th Amendment rights have been erased.  Frighteningly, on social media I see Trump voters - some of who I used to think were moral individuals - justifying the ICE outrageous actions and/or trying to deflect the debate.  Perhaps these people are refusing to admit that they made a horrible mistake in casting their vote for a convicted felon and malignant narcissist. The other explanation is perhaps darker and seemingly motivated by racism against non-whites.  These apologists ignore the reality that once rights are erased, they themselves could later become targets. A lengthy piece at The Atlantic by an author who has written about authoritarian regimes looks at the manner in which legal rights of citizens are being trampled upon even as the Felon and his regime seek to intimidate and silence critics  among the citizenry. Here are highlights from the piece that include the seizing and incarceration of an American citizen seemingly solely because he looked Hispanic: 

The transformation of ICE into a type of national police force, backed, in some cases, by soldiers from the National Guard, has been covered as immigration story—but these forces are reshaping democracy for all of us. This shift was evident even before the shootings in Minneapolis and Portland this week. In this episode, George Retes, a U.S. citizen and an Army veteran, recounts how he was detained by ICE and held for three days without explanation.

[The Felon] the president and his entourage are accumulating power in ways that seem familiar to me: this is exactly how elected leaders in other countries have distorted their democracies. . . . an issue you’ve probably heard about: the transformation of America’s immigration and customs officers into a masked and heavily armed paramilitary, and the deployment of the National Guard to American cities, supposedly to defend them. Americans may think of this as a change that mostly affects illegal immigrants, but this new federal police force is also establishing standards of lawlessness, and they are operating with an assumption of impunity that is changing the lives of U.S. citizens as well.

George Retes has already felt the impact.  Retes: I was driving to my workplace, where I work as a contracted security guard. When I pulled up, there’s just cars on that entire road, bumper-to-bumper—people getting out, just cars driving around each other. And I was like, All right, well, I just need to make it to work. So I make my way through, and it’s just this roadblock of ICE agents just standing across the road.

Like, You’re not going to work today. Get back in your car. Leave. So I end up getting back in my car, and they just all start walking in a line towards me, and they just surround my car. I have the agents on the side trying to pull on my door handles, trying to open my car door, yelling at me to get out, and the agents in the front of my car are telling me to reverse, contradicting what these other agents are telling me to do.

They end up throwing tear gas. And I’m in there choking, trying to plead with them, like, I can’t see; my car’s engulfed in smoke, and eventually they hit my window again, and it just shatters. Immediately, the moment it shatters, another agent sticks his arm through and sprays me in the face with pepper spray.

They just dragged me out of the car, threw me on the ground. They just immediately kneeled on my neck and back. There’s maybe four or five other agents just standing around us, just watching as they do this.

I was detained for three nights and three days. That Saturday was my daughter’s third birthday party, and that was probably the worst feeling ever. She’s my princess. It was just terrible.

So Sunday, a guard ends up coming up and is just like, You’re off, like, He’s getting released, and that’s all he says. That was it. They’re like, You’re free to go. All the charges had been dropped; you’re free to go. And I just asked them, “So I basically was locked up and missed my daughter’s birthday for no fucking reason?” And they just were silent. They just stayed silent. I was given no explanation, no apology, just: That’s it. . . . . Someone has to be held accountable. Treating people a certain way without dignity or respect or humanity is so fucking wrong. To not have any fucking rights, especially here in America, when that’s what we’re supposed to be all about—it’s wrong. It goes against everything we stand for. And so I hope that the justice system, even though I don’t believe it works all the time, I hope that in this case it works.

ICE, and the use of the National Guard to protect ICE, has been covered as immigration story, but America’s immigration and customs agents aren’t only being used for that purpose.

The Trump administration is also using ICE and the National Guard to project power, to demonstrate that it can operate without restraint, and in defiance of the law. . . . It seems any American can now be detained or harassed, or even killed. The American National Guard can be used as puppets in a presidential game—is that legal too?

I asked two experts from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU what we should be doing to secure our own safety, and to preserve our democracy. (We spoke before the killing in Minneapolis this week.)

Our first guest, Margy O’Herron, has documented the transformation of ICE. I started by asking her about the George Retes story and what ICE is supposed to do when it picks up a citizen. (And we should add here that ICE did not respond to questions from The Atlantic about the Retes case.)

Margy O’Herron: When ICE discovers that somebody is a citizen, they are supposed to release them right away. I think what you’re seeing, too, is just a bigger phenomenon of unchecked, chaotic deportation and arrest that is dangerous, and it risks all of our rights.

[T]he Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment do still apply to immigrants. They apply to immigrants in the same way that they apply to citizens. There’s no distinction in the law. So without those things, ICE is arresting people and taking people out of the country without any kind of process, without alerting them that they’re going, without allowing them to talk to a lawyer—that is not lawful; it’s unconstitutional. Those rights exist, and they should be protected.

Trump’s big spending bill, which he called the One Big Beautiful [Bill] Act, will allocate over $170 billion to border and immigration enforcement, with a significant amount going to ICE. . . . . And the money going to ICE is triple what they were authorized before. And what it means is that the types of raids that we’ve seen and the scale of detention that we’ve seen are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s going to increase significantly as they start spending all of those funds.

So you see a 400 percent increase in detention and a 14 percent increase for the number of judges. We’ve also seen attacks on the immigration courts and immigration judges. The administration has fired more than 80 immigration judges, mostly for no cause. They’re claiming this is the right of the president to decide who’s an immigration judge. One assumes that they’re being fired because their positions or history or background is something that this current administration does not like. And they’re proposing now to replace those fired immigration judges with military lawyers. And although there are excellent lawyers in the military, they are not trained as immigration judges. And without that training, without that background, it suggests that there’s something else at work. And the fear will be that those judges are there to rubber-stamp the administration’s broader deportation agenda.

Of the folks that are being arrested, 70 percent have absolutely no criminal background, and of the folks that do, there is a very slim number that have any kind of violent criminal background. Most have property crimes or— Parking tickets, I read in one case. . . . And so you’ve taken your FBI agent who’s well trained to go after a drug trafficker or child predator, and instead you have them going after a landscaper or a guy who works at the car wash—to go after civilians.

. . . [T]here is a sense from the top that the agents who are taking these actions are not gonna have any consequences for those actions. For example, there was a video that circulated quite broadly of a woman who was pushed by an ICE agent outside the New York immigration office. She was shoved across a hallway, and she fell. She ended up being hospitalized. Initially, ICE came out with a statement that said that type of action was unacceptable, but a few days later, it was reported that that ICE agent was back on the job.

What we now see is a very heavy, militarized law-enforcement presence with very little oversight. You’ve got ICE agents and their law-enforcement partners using—they’re dressed like military soldiers. They are using military weapons. They are rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters. They’re using flash-bang grenades to clear out buildings.  They’re zip-tying the elderly, children as a way of evacuating a building. These are tools that are used by armed soldiers against enemies—not that we use against civilians.

[T]hey’re trying to convince people that this is a real military operation against real terrorists. They even made a recruiting video out of the raid that deployed Black Hawk helicopters, making it seem something like the Marines in Iraq. But even that raid, it was allegedly meant to target a Venezuelan gang, and yet no one who was detained appears to be a member of a gang, or even a criminal. So it seems that it’s ordinary people.

So what we’re seeing now, not only has Trump deployed the military into American cities three times in just over eight months in office, compared to 30 times in the nation’s entire history before this, but he’s also doing it in circumstances where it just hasn’t been done this way before. . . . He’s claiming he’s claiming emergency powers. There’s a very bad tradition of leaders using emergencies to do things that are illegal. I mean, it goes back to the 1930s and earlier. . . . it’s a hallmark of authoritarian regimes around the world, because emergency powers free leaders from legal constraints that they would otherwise face. And so there’s obviously a temptation to either exploit real crises or to manufacture crises in order to act without these legal limits.

When soldiers are dragged into what is widely perceived to be a domestic political fight, that this—first of all, it’s really bad for the morale of the soldiers. That’s not why they enlisted. They don’t like being dragged into politics. But also, it undermines public trust in the military. When you do that, that really weakens our military, when it cannot appeal to and draw from all sectors of the U.S. population, when it loses the public confidence.

And you have to worry about the long-term effects on the military in terms of who is going to join up and who’s going to stay in the military. . . . And that would very fundamentally and dangerously change what our military is.

[T]here’s certainly a risk that the president would attempt to deploy troops around the time of an election on the theory that people are less likely to come out and vote if they think that the streets are gonna be full of, you know, heavily armed, federal law enforcement or military troops. That’s going to dissuade some people from getting out and exercising the right to vote.

[M]y concern is that we’re moving towards a status quo in which the cities of this country really feel like police states. And to me, a police state is a place where the presence of—whether it’s the federal military or law enforcement—is so heavy and the chill on people’s exercise of their rights is so acute that people are really kind of living in fear, and they’re changing the way they behave. . . . To me that kind of chill and that kind of change in behavior is what really marks life in a police state.