Saturday, February 28, 2026
The Felon Attacks Iran With No Clear Goal
In his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised voters that he would end wars, not start them. Over the past year, he has instead ordered military strikes in seven nations. His appetite for military intervention grows with the eating.
Now he has ordered a new attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran, in cooperation with Israel, and U.S. officials say they expect this attack to be much more extensive than the targeted bombing of nuclear facilities in June. Yet he has offered no credible explanation for why he is risking the lives of our service members and inviting a major reprisal from Iran. Nor has he involved Congress, which the Constitution grants the sole power to declare war. He has issued a series of shifting partial justifications, including his sporadic support for the heroic Iranian people protesting their tyrannical government and his demand that Iran forswear its pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
That Mr. Trump declared the Iranian nuclear program “obliterated” by the strike in June — a claim belied by both U.S. intelligence and this new attack — underscores how little regard Mr. Trump has for his duty to tell the truth when committing American armed forces to battle. It also shows how little faith American citizens should place in his assurances about the goals and results of his growing list of military adventures.
Mr. Trump’s approach to Iran is reckless. His goals are ill-defined. He has failed to line up the international and domestic support that would be necessary to maximize the chances of a successful outcome. He has disregarded both domestic and international law for warfare.
The Iranian regime, to be clear, deserves no sympathy. It has wrought misery since its revolution 47 years ago: on its own people, on its neighbors and around the world. It massacred thousands of protesters this year. It imprisons and executes political dissidents. It oppresses women, L.G.B.T.Q. people and religious minorities. Its leaders have impoverished their own citizens while corruptly enriching themselves.
Iran’s government presents a distinct threat because it combines this murderous ideology with nuclear ambitions. Iran has repeatedly defied international inspectors over the years. Since the June attack, the government has shown signs of restarting its pursuit of nuclear weapons technology. American presidents of both parties have rightly made a commitment to preventing Tehran from getting a bomb.
We recognize that fulfilling this commitment could justify military action at some point. . . . recent history demonstrates that military action, for all its awful costs, can have positive consequences.
A responsible American president could make a plausible argument for further action against Iran. The core of this argument would need to be a clear explanation of the goals — whether they were limited to denying Iran a nuclear weapon or extended to more ambitious aims, like ending its support for terrorist groups — as well as the justification for attacking now. This strategy would involve a promise to seek approval from Congress and to collaborate with international allies.
A responsible approach would also acknowledge the risks that the next conflict with Iran might go less well than the last American attack. Iran remains a heavily militarized country. Its medium-range missiles may have failed to do much damage to Israel last year, but Iran maintains many short-range missiles that could overwhelm any defense system and hit Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other nearby countries. An attack on Iran risks the lives of American troops, diplomats and other people living in the region.
Mr. Trump is not even attempting this approach. He is telling the American people and the world that he expects their blind trust. He has not earned that trust.
He instead treats allies with disdain. He lies constantly, including about the results of the June attack on Iran. He has failed to live up to his own promises for solving other crises in Ukraine, Gaza and Venezuela. He has fired senior military leaders for failing to show fealty to his political whims. . . . Mr. Trump shields them from accountability. His administration appears to have violated international law by, among other things, disguising a military plane as a civilian plane and shooting two defenseless sailors who survived an initial attack.
Recognizing Mr. Trump’s irresponsibility, some members of Congress have taken steps to constrain him on Iran. In the House, Representatives Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, and Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, have proposed a resolution meant to prevent Mr. Trump from starting a war without congressional approval. The resolution makes clear that Congress has not authorized an attack on Iran and demands the withdrawal of American troops within 60 days. Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, are sponsoring a similar measure in their chamber.
Mr. Trump’s failure to articulate either goals or a strategy for a potential military intervention has created shocking levels of uncertainty about this attack. Americans do not know whether the president has ordered an attack in their name mostly to set back Iran’s nuclear program — or to go so far as toppling the government of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
If it is the less ambitious of the two goals, it raises an obvious question. Iran will surely rebuild its nuclear program in the years ahead. So is the United States committing itself to a yearslong cycle of military attacks? If it is the more ambitious goal, Mr. Trump has offered no sense of why the world should expect this effort at regime change to end better than the 21st-century attempts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now that the military operation has begun, we wish above all for the safety of the American troops charged with conducting it and for the well-being of the many innocent Iranians who have long suffered under their brutal government. We lament that Mr. Trump is not treating war as the grave matter that it is.
Friday, February 27, 2026
America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account
Every segment of the Trump-backing right wing—America First nationalists, Trump loyalists and rank-and-file MAGA activists—has unsubscribed from the idea that there is any such thing as right and wrong, much less that wrongdoing should result in consequences. In effect, there is no behavior Trump’s GOP sees as too wrong to vote for. In late July 2025, almost half of Republicans said they would keep voting for Trump even if he were “officially implicated in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities.”
The Felon boasted that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and get away with it. So far, evidence that the Felon may have been involved with the rape - or worse - of minors seems to have drawn nothing but yawns from the self-congratulatory and piety feigning "godly folk." Yet, as a long piece in The Atlantic lays out, the trend of allowing the rich and powerful to get away with crimes that would send the rest of us to prison began long before the Felon first sought political office. It is disturbing that in America where supposedly no one is above the law, the elite are above the law even as some of their foreign counterparts are being held accountable. Here are article highlights:
Around the world, powerful men are facing consequences for their actions. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of trying to overthrow the government in a January 6–style coup, as was his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yuol. Marcin Romanowski, the former deputy justice minister in the right-wing Polish government, is in hiding in Hungary, accused of misusing public funds. The former Prince Andrew—Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor—became the first member of the British royal family in several centuries to be arrested; he’s been accused of crimes related to his relationship with the late sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein. . . . They’re all unfortunate not to be American. Otherwise they probably would have gotten away scot-free.
One way to look at the rise of Donald Trump is as part of a decades-long backlash among the American leadership class to the idea of accountability. Since Richard Nixon was forced to resign, powerful people in both political parties have worked assiduously to ensure that their leaders would escape the consequences of their actions. Trump has evaded punishment for crimes both low (campaign-finance violations, for which he was convicted, though he will serve no time thanks to his 2024 victory) and high (his attempted overthrow of the federal government in the aftermath of his 2020 election loss, for which he was spared by the Supreme Court’s decision to grant him a kingly immunity). This is not just about Trump; his impunity is the product of a society that has worked hard to help the rich and powerful elude punishment for criminal behavior.
Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor in the name of “healing,” but inadvertently set a precedent that executive lawbreaking was no crime. The Reagan administration engaged in blatant violations of federal law during the Iran-Contra scandal, in which it sold weapons to the Iranian regime and used the finances to support anti-communist death squads in Nicaragua. George H. W. Bush, the former head of the CIA, pardoned nearly all of the officials implicated in Iran-Contra—a move that many Americans supported, because they believed that fighting communism justified extreme measures. George W. Bush’s administration broke laws fighting the “War on Terror” but almost no one faced consequences, because many Americans believed that fighting terrorism justified extreme measures.
While Congress and the presidency have been working hard to raise the executive branch above the law, the Supreme Court has done its part to ensure that laws against bribery and corruption are near-unenforceable. With a series of rulings on campaign finance, the Roberts Court has ensured that the rich can try to buy elections without formally breaking the law. As a result, politicians are indebted to a few hundred billionaires who drop unholy amounts of cash every election cycle.
Getting convicted of bribery in America requires some serious effort—take former Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey . . .caught with gold bars in his house. When Trump first took office, he paused enforcement of foreign bribery cases entirely—but there are some signs that he intends to revive such prosecutions as a weapon against his political enemies, in the mold of the Hungarian strongman Victor Orbรกn.
Such erosion of anti-corruption law has often been a bipartisan project. In 2016, the bribery conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell for receiving gifts from donors was overturned unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court. Since then, the Roberts Court has slowly dismantled anti-corruption law. In 2024, it decided in Snyder v. United States that federal law does not bar receiving “gratuities” given after the fact for “official acts.” Convenient not just for politicians, but also for justices who enjoy lavish lifestyles funded by billionaires with interests before the Court!
The logic of the Roberts Court’s quest to legalize white-collar crime led to Trump v. United States, which decided in 2024 that the president is basically entitled to commit whatever crimes he wants in the course of his “official duties,” and which successfully shields Trump and potentially future presidents from federal criminal prosecution for any “official” actions while in office. This was comically framed by the right-wing justices as protecting democracy, rather than undermining it.
Although some of these decisions were more defensible than others, together they suggest a pattern of elite class solidarity: powerful people making sure that powerful people rarely face real consequences.
The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements can be seen as, at least partially, a brief rebellion against this culture of elite impunity. . . . . Those movements didn’t last. The backlash against them nevertheless fed a Trumpian nostalgia for the good old days, when sexual assault and police brutality were easily rationalized or not even discussed. This nostalgia also helps explain the extreme response to the call for accountability—many powerful bystanders behaved as though they had narrowly survived Robespierre and the guillotine and worked to prevent such movements from ever emerging again by trying to censor speech associated with them.
This is not to say that the rich and powerful are never held to account. Menendez is one counterexample, and Epstein himself was a billionaire who died in a jail cell, after all. But his crimes were taken seriously by authorities only after the journalist Julie Brown uncovered the extent of Epstein’s crimes and the lenient response from law enforcement over decades.
Unfortunately, many Americans who might have been outraged at this edifice of impunity have instead directed their resentment toward the poor and weak, supporting a cruel and unforgiving system of criminal justice that harshly punishes those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder while exempting many at the top from any accountability at all. So you did a few death-squad massacres or wedding bombings? Well, that was what America’s leaders had to do to fight communism and terrorism. You can even take a sack of cash from an undercover FBI agent if you’re the Trump immigration czar Tom Homan. But if you overstayed your visa or got an abortion, you deserve to have the book thrown at you.
MAGA also offered an implicit bargain: Not only can you be a bigot toward whatever group makes you mad by existing, but everyone will have to love and respect you anyway. This was an impossible promise to keep—not even Trump has managed to bully comedians mocking him into silence—but politicians make impossible promises all the time. Many Americans are simply content to live vicariously through Trump’s impunity, even if they cannot share it.
The answer to why powerful people in some other parts of the world face consequences, while in America they rarely do, is that elite impunity is now an American national project. We might need to reframe “American exceptionalism.” Instead of a New Deal, we have a Great Society for white-collar crime, a New Frontier of executive lawbreaking, a No Rich Crook Left Behind. Most of us probably don’t even realize it. Nevertheless, this has been the priority for the wealthy and powerful, who have managed to convince a critical mass of Americans that they will be able to enjoy the same privileges. They won’t.
Thursday, February 26, 2026
The Felon's DOJ Epstein Coverup Continues
The vast trove of documents released by the Justice Department from its investigations into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein failed to include some key materials related to a woman who made an accusation against [the Felon]
President Trump, according to a review by The New York Times.The materials are F.B.I. memos summarizing interviews the bureau did in connection to claims made in 2019 by a woman who came forward after Mr. Epstein’s arrest to say she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Trump and the financier decades earlier, when she was a minor.
The existence of the memos was revealed in an index listing the investigative materials related to her account, which was publicly released. According to that index, the F.B.I. conducted four interviews in connection with her claims and wrote summaries about each one. But only one summary of the four interviews, which describes her accusations against Mr. Epstein, was released by the Justice Department. The other three are missing.
The public files also do not include the underlying interview notes, which the index also indicates are part of the file. The Justice Department released similar interview notes in connection to F.B.I. interviews with other potential witnesses and victims. . . . Officials did not directly address why the memos related to the woman’s claim were not released.
The woman’s description of being assaulted by Mr. Trump in the 1980s is among a number of uncorroborated accusations against well-known men, including the [Felon]
president,that are contained in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department.The missing records deepen questions about how the Justice Department has handled the release of the Epstein files, which was mandated by a law signed by Mr. Trump last year after bipartisan congressional pressure.
Under the law, the Justice Department can redact material that could be used to identify Mr. Epstein’s victims, depicted violence or child sexual abuse, or would hurt a continuing federal investigation. But the law expressly prohibited federal officials from withholding or redacting materials “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity” to public figures.
Some lawmakers and survivors of Mr. Epstein’s abuse have strongly condemned the department for how it handled redactions, noting that details identifying some victims were left exposed and nude photographs of young women were included in the public release, while material related to claims of abuse by other men had been heavily redacted.
The woman who made the accusation about Mr. Trump came forward in July 2019, days after federal investigators arrested Mr. Epstein on sex-trafficking charges, according to records in the public files of tips the F.B.I. received during that period. She claimed that she had been repeatedly assaulted by Mr. Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s, according to a summary of an F.B.I. interview with her on July 24, 2019.
The F.B.I. did three subsequent interviews to assess her account in August and October 2019 and made a summary of each interview, according to the index of records compiled in the case. But the memos describing those three interviews were not publicly released.
The public files do contain a 2025 description of her account, as well as other accusations against prominent men contained in the documents. In that 2025 memo, federal officials wrote that the woman had said that Mr. Epstein introduced her to Mr. Trump, and that she claimed Mr. Trump had assaulted her in a violent and lurid encounter. The documents say the alleged incident would have occurred in the mid-1980s when she was 13 to 15 years old, but they do not include any assessment by the F.B.I. about the credibility of her accusation.
The Times’s examination of a set of serial numbers on the individual pages in the public files suggests that more than 50 pages of investigative materials related to her claims are not in the publicly available files.
Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that when he reviewed unredacted versions of the Epstein files at the Justice Department on Monday, interview summaries related to the woman’s claim were also missing from that trove. . . . . Mr. Garcia said. He added that the Justice Department had also not provided them to the Oversight Committee, which issued a subpoena last year for all of the Justice Department’s investigative material regarding Mr. Epstein.
The woman spent most of the interview on July 24, 2019, describing in detail what she said were repeated violent assaults by Mr. Epstein that she had endured, as reported earlier by The Post and Courier. She said that as a teenager in South Carolina, she was asked to babysit at a house on Hilton Head Island. But after she arrived, there were no children to babysit, and only a man she came to know as Jeff who she said plied her with alcohol, marijuana and cocaine. She described him raping her on multiple occasions.
The woman joined a lawsuit later in 2019 against Mr. Epstein’s estate. She subsequently dropped her claim. Court records do not indicate if she received any financial settlement. A court record from 2021 said she was separately deemed ineligible for compensation from a fund set up for Epstein victims, but it did not specify why.
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
The State of the Union Carnival Show
The longest State of the Union in modern history is now over. Donald Trump held court in the House of Representatives and said little of substance, but substance wasn’t the point. This year, he intended to put on a show, with an array of guest stars and special appearances. He was happy, because he was playing the roles he clearly loves: game-show host, ringmaster, MC, beneficent granter of wishes—and, where the Democrats were concerned, a self-righteous inquisitor.
Trump did his usual rote lying about the economy—pity the fact-checkers who tried to keep up even in the first 10 minutes or so of the speech—along with some of his other greatest hits, including the many wars he stopped and the magic of tariffs.
Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, once managed to do the entire State of the Union address in 31 minutes; that’s because he could say important things efficiently and well. Tonight, however, was not about communication, it was about showmanship. Almost every line was a cue for applause from obedient Republicans; they even gave Jared Kushner a standing ovation. Every few minutes, Trump told a story, and reached out into the audience like the host of The Price Is Right, telling people to come on down.
He started, of course, with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team. Just basking along with Team USA wasn’t enough. Trump soon announced that the goalie Connor Hellebuyck would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Normally, this honor is bestowed for a lifetime of achievement . . . .
And so it went, all night. Sometimes, the guests were meant to tug at the heart, such as when Trump recognized Erica Kirk, the wife of the murdered activist Charlie Kirk. Others were presented as ornaments meant to illustrate Trump’s successes: Enrique Marquez, a Venezuelan political prisoner freed after U.S. forces deposed the strongman Nicolas Maduro, was given a round of well-deserved applause. Trump also gave a shoutout to a woman whose IVF medications were now, he claimed, cheaper.
But no group received more attention than the U.S. military. Trump handed out two Purple Hearts (one posthumously), a Legion of Merit, and not one, but two Congressional Medals of Honor. Military awards that should have been treated with dignity and respect were placed on men like prizes, including a moment when Trump’s co-host, the First Lady, put one of the Medals of Honor around the neck of a 100-year-old fighter pilot.
Trump even had designated heels in the audience: the Democrats. He called them crazy, and accused them of impoverishing the nation. He dared them to stand up if they agreed with him that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” This stunt was obviously meant to force Democrats either to stand or boo or otherwise do something that Trump could exploit; instead, it merely resulted in several awkward seconds of a staring contest between the president and the Democrats in the chamber. Trump managed to bait Representative Ilhan Omar into shouting at him, but for the most part, he seemed genuinely irritated that the Democrats sat through his show in stony silence.
The only thing Trump did not do was explain his policies—especially about war and peace—to Congress or the American people.
The largest American armada assembled since the second Gulf War is now encircling Iran. Trump never mentioned the buildup; instead he claimed that his one overriding interest was that Iran would forswear nuclear weapons forever. But the brief case he laid out was not for nonproliferation, but for regime change.
But if some of the address was a game show, much of it was a bloody Grand Guignol theater of horror stories, almost all about immigrants preying on the helpless and the innocent. Trump led into these anecdotes by starting with an accusation that the Somali community of Minnesota was scamming the state. He followed up with stories of murder and mayhem, . . . .
Trump tonight went far beyond what even the most self-indulgent presidents would have envisioned. Beset by scandal, facing multiple defeats in America’s courts, and hitting levels of unpopularity that would make Richard Nixon nod with empathy, he turned the State of the Union into a vulgar, populist carnival.
Trump made a great show of honoring a handful of U.S. military heroes. Meanwhile, thousands of young men and women are a world away, waiting for his orders to go to war. The president of the United States might have taken a moment tonight to tell their families why they’re out there, and what they’re supposed to do. But why bother? The show must go on.
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem
Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.
By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Vice President J. D. Vance shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party.
Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. The Labor Department hung a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich documents.
Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the fรผhrer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man?” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978 book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.
The people pushing such trash are offended by the accusation that they are pantomiming Nazis. . . . But when even Laura Loomer—conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter—says on social media that “the GOP has a Nazi problem,” then perhaps the GOP has a Nazi problem.
As a former Republican, I’m aware that the American conservative movement has spent generations fighting off intrusions from the far right, including the John Birchers and the Ku Klux Klan. But I am still surprised and aggrieved by how quickly 21st-century Nazism has found a home in the party of Lincoln. . . . Today, Trump and his party haven’t bothered to even pretend to be appalled by the degenerates gathering under the GOP aegis.
So how did a major American political party become a safe space for such people? When I first joined the GOP, in 1979, the party around me did not seem hospitable to Nazis. . . . I was, like many people then, a resolute ticket-splitter, voting often for local Democrats but always for Republican presidents, because I believed the national GOP was a moderate institution. Ronald Reagan, for example, disappointed the far right and his evangelical base by reducing nuclear weapons, leaving abortion rights largely untouched, and granting mass amnesty to undocumented immigrants . . . .
I first encountered the fringe elements of the conservative base in 1990, when I went to work in the U.S. Senate for John Heinz of Pennsylvania. I remember fielding an angry phone call from a constituent who grilled me about whether the senator was part of a globalist one-world-government conspiracy.
The country and the GOP were in the hands of Bush, the ultimate moderate, but extremists were making inroads to power. The populist demagogue Pat Buchanan, crusading against modernity and multiculturalism, challenged Bush in 1992 and garnered 23 percent of the Republican-primary vote. Bush, in turn, gave him the stage at the Republican National Convention in Houston. Buchanan’s speech, which envisioned a “religious war” for the country, shocked many Americans.
A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership. For Gingrich, politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.
Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. As they stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.
By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.
In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.
[R]acism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States. . . . years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.
Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.
Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. . . . . Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.
Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.
What can Americans do in the face of moral rot in a major political party? The only short-term answers are shaming, shunning, and mockery—and punishment at the polls. Decent citizens must ostracize those among them who toy with Hitlerism. Americans—especially journalists—should resist becoming inured to fascist rhetoric. No one should rely on euphemisms about “extreme” comments or “fiery” speeches. Call it what it is: Nazi-like behavior.
When a Gen Z Republican focus group has 20-somethings talking about how Hitler “was a great leader,” even if “what he was going for was terrible,” something is amiss not only in the Republican Party but also in America’s homes, schools, and neighborhoods.
Whatever their intentions, some Americans are expressing or abetting ancient hatreds, smirking at the mention of Hitler, and plastering public spaces with images that Allied soldiers once tore from the walls of destroyed German cities. Political leaders who encourage or tolerate such scoundrels should be driven from office.
The Republicans have a Nazi problem, yes. But this means that the United States also has a Nazi problem. The responsibility for defeating it in the 21st century falls, as it did in the 20th, to everyone—of any party or creed—who still believes in the American idea.
Monday, February 23, 2026
Sunday, February 22, 2026
The Supreme Court Delivers the Felon a Humiliating Defeat
The ruling is a major victory for the constitutional separation of powers, rule of law, and millions of American consumers and businesses harmed by these tariffs. . . . This decision spared America from a dangerous, unconstitutional path. Under [the Felon's]
President Trump’sinterpretation of the law, the president would have had nearly unlimited tariff authority, similar to that of an absolute monarch. That undermines basic constitutional principles. The Framers of the Constitution had sought to ensure that the president would not be able to repeat the abuses of English kings, who imposed taxes without legislative authorization.
Here are longer excerpts for the second piece:
In the 1630s, King Charles I tried to tax English people without the consent of their legislature. He lost his head. In the 2020s, Donald Trump tried to tax Americans without the consent of Congress. He just lost his case.
A tariff is a tax. The Trump tariffs imposed in and after April 2025 were projected to raise as much as $2.3 trillion over 10 years. The Constitution assigns authority over taxes, including tariffs, to Congress. It does so for reasons that date back to English constitutional history: An executive who can tax without permission from elected representatives is on his way to becoming a tyrant.
[The Felon]
President Trumphas had lots of ideas for how to spend the money he collected without Congress. He has offered it to farmers. He has mused about direct cash payments to taxpayers. He has speculated about creating a sovereign wealth fund to invest in companies. He has disregarded the fundamental principle that spending, like taxing, is a power the Constitution assigns to Congress, not the president.Now we may be on the verge of a regime-changing war against Iran. War-making is also supposed to be a congressional power—but there’s no sign that Trump will allow Congress to vote on his war. In the past, the ultimate check on the president’s war-making powers was Congress’s power over the purse. . . . . if Trump were allowed to tax without Congress, then he might reasonably conclude that he could fight wars without Congress.
Trump’s tariffs were advertised as a revenue source liberated from the restraints imposed by Article I of the Constitution. Had the Supreme Court upheld the tariffs, it would have wrought a constitutional revolution. Instead, the court quashed Trump’s scheme. Like every president before him, if he wants money—for an Iran war or any other purpose—he will have to ask Congress for it.
Trump’s theory was that an emergency-powers law passed in the 1970s allowed him to impose permanent revenue-raising tariffs on anyone for any reason. This argument was always far-fetched. The law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, was part of the post-Watergate reform to reduce presidential emergency powers. The IEEPA reformed the Trading With the Enemy Act passed during World War I. President Franklin Roosevelt had used that law to ban most private ownership of gold bullion in 1933, which even supporters had to concede was a fantastic legal reach. After Watergate, Congress sought to restrain the president by limiting the IEEPA to “unusual and extraordinary” threats to “the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” The law’s powers can be invoked only after a formal declaration of national emergency, and the word tariff appears nowhere among the powers conferred upon the president by the law.
Trump gets very impatient when he’s asked about “affordability.” You can understand why he squirms. The price increases Americans have felt in 2025 and 2026 can be blamed in no small part on Trump’s tariffs. Power bill up? Trump imposed a tariff on the equipment used to generate and transmit electricity. Six-pack of beer more expensive? Trump taxed the beer cans. Kids need new shoes? Trump’s tariffs raised the cost.
The ironic political question for 2026 is whether the U.S. Supreme Court acted in time to save Trump from himself. Whether or not it was the justices’ intention to help Trump, a generally Trump-friendly Supreme Court has offered the president an exit from one of his most unpopular domestic policies. Will he accept the handout? Acceptance would be smart, but humiliating. Trump holds other legal means to disrupt international trade, some of which he used in his first term. But those powers have tighter legal limits than Trump wants. . . . Until and unless a future Congress acts to protect Americans from Trump protectionism, the outlook for U.S. prosperity and security will remain clouded.
While shadows dim the future, the sun shone today. U.S. stocks surged after Trump’s Supreme Court defeat. American consumers may soon feel the benefit. Liberated from this approach to economic warfare, relations with allies may recover some of their former cordiality. And unlike the case of Charles I, all of this was accomplished while allowing America’s president to lay his unsevered head on his pillow tonight.
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