"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Mary Lou and I have recently had a number of conversations with folks who are struggling with anxiety over what Trump is doing. Their fears center around what he plans for the future of America. I would not go as far as FDR to say that these fears are nameless, unreasoning, or unjustified. They do have a name and that name is Trump. And we see every day how he and his spineless sycophants are tearing at the fragile fabric of our democracy.

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Yet, we must not, we cannot, concede in advance. But the fear that Trump will somehow suspend democracy, either within the next 100 days ahead of the mid-terms or on into some unknowable future date is, in FDR’s terms, an unjustified terror. He cannot cancel or delay the elections. As per Protect Democracy:

The U.S. Constitution explicitly gives states the authority to determine the “Times, Places and Manner” to run federal elections and carefully limits federal involvement in election administration. Because each state has its own set of laws and policies, our federalized, decentralized system of election administration means there is not really anything to “nationalize.” That doesn’t mean that there is no role for the federal government — the Founders gave Congress the power to make and change election laws — primarily for federal elections. At certain times in American history, the federal government has had to step in to protect voters and make the process more fair and efficient (see: the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act, among others).

But the intentional effect, as he drops scary hints and the media echoes his bullshit as if it were determinant of the future, is exactly what Trump intends. His aim is to paralyze.

There is no doubt that we are in for a fight. It is not a fight that begins or ends with the next election or even the one after that. We need to rise to the occasion and stay in the fight for the duration. We are not without weapons in this fight. We do, when we seize it, hold the power to stop Trump. We can “convert retreat into advance” but only if we refuse to back down, as Trump hopes, and use his abominations to energize us to action.

Robert Hubbell, unlike those in the mainstream media who are fanning the flames of defeatism, says this:

As political commentators casually spread the narrative that Trump will seize ballots by armed force, the people are living in a different reality, one in which the pain caused by Trump is so bad that the margins of victory will make intervention by Trump pointless. Again, per Politico, “49 percent of MAGA Republicans and 57 percent of non-MAGA Republicans are considering “voting for a different party” because of gas prices.” And that’s just pain at the pump—it doesn’t take into account the other Trump policies that are inflicting hardship on the lived experiences of most Americans.

Stay strong, everyone. We are winning, even though it may not always feel like it. Whatever we do, we cannot quit; we cannot surrender to anxiety or exhaustion. You are not alone, and together, there is nothing we cannot do.

There will be elections this fall. In his vain efforts to stop democracy, there will most certainly be acts of state sponsored terror in places. Trump will use ICE to make illegal raids and possibly worse. But these will be isolated and although they will dominate the news, they will not, when we do our part, stop the blue wave.

We have the ability, in the coming elections, to take back Congress. When we hold the majority, we will control House and Senate committees. We will have authority over the nation’s purse strings and will put a stranglehold on Trump’s misadventures. Critically, we will have authority in the Senate Judiciary Committee to put barriers in the paths of his nominations. There will likely be two vacancies on the Supreme Court before the end of Trump’s second term. We will be in a position to assure that his nominations face the same kind of treatment as President Obama’s did with Mitch McConnell as majority leader.

I am not suggesting anyone should not despair. Indeed, we should all recoil from the spectacle of authoritarianism unfolding before us. We should all be angered by the failure of Congress to step up to their moral and Constitutional duty to check and balance the other two branches of government.

It’s up to us to use the anger and outrage we feel to energize ourselves and our friends and families. We must pick up and wield the torch in defense of democracy. When we are voters in staggering numbers, no threats or actions on the part of Trump and his minions will ultimately win.

This battle will be long and played out at the ballot box, in the halls of government, in the courts, on street corners, and with signs on highway overpasses. We cannot allow it to be lost before it is fully engaged.

Do not disengage and concede in advance.

Donald Trump’s insertion of himself into the decision about Folarin Balogun’s World Cup red card reveals at least three important things:

1 - Trump knows nothing about soccer (of course knowledge and understanding of things - think economics, trade, and international relations - has never stopped him from doing stupid things before).

2 - Trump’s relationship with Gianni Infantino, the FIFA President, is emblematic of the kind of power and control Trump’s narcissism hungers for. Infantino, to the detriment of the organization he leads, and to world football in general, is shamelessly only too happy to hand it to him.

3 - Trump believes that his touch is golden when, in fact, everything he touches turns to shit. This whole thing backfired bigly.

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Balogun, the USA Men’s National Team’s leading scorer, was given a red card in their game against Bosnia and Herzegovina. A video review determined that he stepped on an opponent’s ankle while both were chasing a ball. A red card is a strong disciplinary penalty used by officials to control a very physical game in which players with only minimal protection are vulnerable to injury. A red card is issued for a severe rules violation, such as violent conduct, dangerous play, or receiving two yellow cards (less severe cautions) in a single match. It results in immediate ejection from the game. The team cannot replace the ejected player and must play shorthanded for the rest of the game. The player is also suspended from the next match.

1- Trump knows nothing about soccer. In his self-aggrandizing statement about his intervention, Trump said, “I saw the play, and I’m a person that loves sports and was a good athlete ... that wasn’t a foul. That wasn’t even an infraction. That was two guys running full speed that happened to crash into each other ... So yes, I asked for a review by FIFA. It’s one thing to penalize somebody for the game, but how do you penalize them for a game that hasn’t been played yet? It’s very unfair, you can’t do that.” He went on to call the referee who made the call “a little bit suspect.”

This is such classic Trump. If he doesn’t like an outcome, he invents a way to de-legitimize it. It’s an integral part of fandom to voice displeasure with official’s calls that go against your team. But Trump went way beyond that and ventured into his alternate “victim world” and questioned the red card next game suspension, calling it “very unfair,” and disparaging the official who made the call. We all know of multiple examples of this go-low and ad hominem attack behavior in Trump’s personal, legal, business, and political history.

He said he didn’t think the original call was even a foul. Balogun himself, while expressing that he didn’t think it should have been a red card, did not dispute that there was a foul and went on to accept the call and red card decision at the time.

2 - Trump’s relationship with Gianni Infantino. Corruption is a core element of Trump’s existence. It is also a hallmark of Infantino’s presidency of FIFA amid growing calls for his job after the controversy of Balogun’s overturned ban. Infantino’s presidency has been littered with controversies and allegations of corruption throughout his term. His relationships with political leaders have been called into question, as were his involvement in the decisions to stage World Cups played in Qatar and set to be played in Saudi Arabia.

His relationship with Trump has been most scrutinized, especially with the bizarre and unprecedented “FIFA Peace Prize” Infantino presented to him, that disregards Trump’s role in upsetting the world order, abandoning Ukraine, disrupting and weakening our NATO alliance and, of course beginning a war on Iran which rages on to this day.

As noted in the Financial Review’s coverage of the debacle:

And while eye-rolling fans tolerate low-level corruption in the beautiful game, Trump’s brazen and pathetic intervention has led to an immense backlash.

It resembled an entitled and overbearing sideline parent hollering at volunteer junior sport referees, except this time it was the leader of a global superpower throwing a tantrum about an event well below his station.

3 - Trump believes that his touch is golden when, in fact, everything he touches turns to shit. Trump is notorious for losing. His failed ventures and bankruptcies are well known. The one thing he’s a winner at, to the detriment of us all, is monetizing and profiting, personally and for his family, from his presidency. He’s not done yet, so we’ll see how he manages to foul that up too.

In the case of the Balogun red card, Trump prematurely claimed personal victory for the reversal of the suspension which, he obviously assumed, would assure a victory in the USNMT’s match against Belgium. In fact, the opposite happened. The US came into the match flat and played through its entirety totally out-matched by an inspired and energized Belgium side.

Arguably, as many have asserted, Trump’s ill-considered intervention was a factor for both squads. Because of Trump and Infantino, the US took a lot of heat, if not from US fans, happy to see Balogun back, but from most of the rest of the soccer world. While it would be a stretch to consider it the only factor, it was most certainly an unneeded hindrance and de-motivator for the US players.

On the other side of the pitch, the controversy fueled the emotion and energy of the Belgians. Their social media post following their domination of the US by a 4-1 score said it all - “Overturn this!”

It remains up to us to overturn the damage Trump has done to us and the world.

Tomorrow, July 4, 2026, marks 250 years since the formal adoption of the Declaration of Independence. While tensions between Great Britain and the American Colonies had been escalating for decades, and hostilities commenced in April, 1775, at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, July 4 is universally acknowledged as the date the United States was born.

It’s worth remembering that the birth was actually a long and complicated process that did not begin nor end with end of the War for Independence, which came 2,617 days later, September 3, 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The new nation’s government did not lack controversy. There was a false start in the Articles of Confederation that established a weak central government with most power held by the states. It was in place from 1781, while war was still raging, to 1789 at which point it was replaced by the stronger U.S. Constitution.

The Declaration marked a critical moment in our history and deservedly stands as one of the most important documents in history. Yet it was not, nor was it meant to be, a governing instrument. It contains important articulation of the philosophical foundations of American democracy: human equality (although those were limited to white male landowners) and unalienable rights; government deriving legitimacy from the people they govern; and the right of the people to alter or abolish a tyrannical government.

But the Declaration did not put any mechanisms or details about how the new government would establish or enforce the protection of these rights. That was left to the Constitution and ensuing Amendments. It has taken two and a half centuries to work on this and the job is not nearly done.

The Declaration can more accurately be described as a transactional document. It’s most important role, to its writers, was the list of 27 Grievances Against The King, who in their view, had opposed the very purpose of governance by opposing laws deemed necessary for the public good. It was here that the writers laid out, “Facts submitted to a candid world,” the core justifications for the American colonies breaking away from British rule.

The King’s transgressions included, among other things, abuses of law and government, interfering with the governance of the Colonies, blocking local laws, interfering with colonists’ representation rights, interfering with elections, restricting immigration, military adventurism, including expanding tyranny in neighboring Canada, corrupting justice and obstructing the creation of local courts, placing military power above civilian government, cutting off trade with the rest of the world, imposing taxes without colonial consent, and more.

I’m sure the parallels with Donald Trump’s transgressions are not lost on you. The Declaration lists 27 grievances against the King. The list of transgressions by our current wannabe king surpasses that number by magnitudes.

A small sample includes The National Partnership For Women And Families lists 53 ways the Trump administration is harming women and families. Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tenn) tracks the Trump Administration’s harmful executive actions. The Hill, just yesterday denounced how Trump and his family are illegally profiteering from the presidency.

Grievances against Donald Trump include political targeting including attempts to jail political opponents—such as Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin. He is condemned for his foreign policy, sabotaging NATO, turniing away from Ukraine, his handling of the war in Iran and his handling of Middle Eastern negotiations, alienating our allies and aligning with despotic leaders. Senator Chris Van Hollen notably called the administration’s foreign policy approach a “dumpster fire,” citing dangerous escalations and unauthorized military actions in Venezuela and across the Caribbean. Grievances against Trump include constitutional overreach, and efforts to denaturalize citizens based on political ideology. His attempts to take control and otherwise interfere with the right to vote present an existential threat to democracy.

His abuses of power as he carries out an unlawful and unwarranted war against immigrants – violating the Constitution by trying to eliminate birthright citizenship, weaponizing immigration enforcement, illegally abducting and deporting immigrants, many here legally – are a prime example of his disregard for the rule of law and a blatant display of his racism.

As we stand on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we find ourselves in need of a new declaration. At least we need a re-dedication of our commitment to our never-ending work, in the words of the Preamble to the Constitution, “We the People in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

It’s up to us to find the national strength and courage to halt Donald Trump’s efforts to destroy the work of 250 years to build the institutions and norms that protect our ability to realize that more perfect union.

Let’s use this Fourth of July to take the steps we need.

Blake Gendebien, a dairy farmer from Lisbon, NY, is running to replace Elise Stefanik as the Member of Congress representing NY-21, my district. Since his initial run last year to replace Stefanik when Trump tapped her to become U.N. Ambassador, we have gotten to know each other and have become friends.

As is well-known, Trump pulled that nomination in order to keep Stefanik in the House and maintain his razor-thin majority backing. Stefanik had already completed a farewell tour of the district. I’m guessing for many, this was also the first time they’d met her since she’d rarely been here throughout her tenure as our Representative.

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In fact, when Trump un-nominated her, Stefanik tossed an insult at her constituents when she said she would “take one for the team” and stay in the House. For a decade, she opened virtually every comment with how deeply honored she was to serve as the Representative from NY-21. Quite a change to say she’d take one for the team to continue in that “honored” capacity.

Before Trump called upon Stefanik to publicly acknowledge what everyone already knew about her priorities - that she placed fealty to Trump above any concerns about her constituents - there was a special election underway to replace her. Blake emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee to replace her. Once she “took one for the team” (am I saying that too much? …. nah) that ended and attention shifted to the November mid-term election to determine who would represent NY-21.

Blake stayed in.

There are many fundamental “kitchen table” issues at stake in this election. Blake, as a farmer and at the forefront of the growing crisis in food affordability, is focusing on how the Trump administration’s policies are hurting people, not just in this Congressional district but across the country. The importance of this issue is underscored by a piece in the British news outlet, The Guardian, that featured Blake as one of three farmers in the US profiled as directly dealing with the fallout from Trump’s war with Iran and rising fuel costs.

“These rising costs are hitting us at the wrong time here in the north country in New York,” said Blake Gendebien, who owns a 1,200-acre dairy farm with 500 cows in Lisbon, New York. “I use 20,000 gallons of fuel to get my crops in the ground and harvested.”

Last April, he paid about $2.65 a gallon for off-road diesel. Off-road diesel is for vehicles used off public roads and is therefore exempt from federal and state excise taxes. Depending on the state, it can be anywhere between $0.20 and $0.80 cheaper a gallon than on-road diesel.

This year, it’s pushing $5 a gallon. According to the most recent statistics, 86% of farmers in America run small family farms, defined as having a gross income of $350,000 a year or less. And the majority of those farms have high-risk profit margins of 10% or less. So rising diesel costs pose a serious threat to their ability to stay in business.

“It’s a massive cost for farmers that are already barely, barely getting by,” Gendebien said.

Family farming, always a difficult business dependent on so many things beyond farmers’ control, has become an even more economically perilous proposition in the Trump era. Fuel to run equipment must be purchased regardless of cost. To weather increased fuel costs, they must limit other spending. But they end up passing along some of the costs to consumers, feeding rising food costs for everyone.

And it’s harder for small Black-owned farms. As noted in the Guardian:

According to the 2022 Census of Agriculture, 55% of Black-operated farms earned less than $5,000 a year, compared with 41% of all farms. Only 12% made $100,000 or more. From 2017 to 2022, the number of all farmers fell by 4% to fewer than 47,000 producers. Black-operated farms declined even more, falling by 8%. Of the 1.9m farms, only 32,600 were Black-operated. (Critics suggest that the census overcounts Black farmers by a significant amount, placing the actual number of Black-operated farms anywhere between 5,000 to 18,000.)

Black farmers also have greater credit issues, so relying on credit to buy fuel isn’t an option.

Even under the Biden administration, the USDA only provided direct loans to 36% of Black farmers who applied as against 72% of white farmers. The Trump administration, in its vocal push to eliminate federal programs that attempt to address gaps in equity, has gone even further, most recently canceling a $300m program designed to help Black farmers and other underrepresented groups increase capital and prevent land loss. Letters informing grantees of the cancelation cited “discriminatory preferences based on diversity, equity and inclusion”.

The Guardian notes Blake’s belief that there’s a large disconnect between rural America and Washington.

“We don’t have enough farmers in Congress,” he said. “We don’t even have a farm bill.” (The House passed its version of a farm bill on 30 April, and the Senate is expected to introduce its own version in the coming weeks.)

That’s why he is running for Congress against Elise Stefanik, he said. “It would be so nice to have a congressman from the north country here that understands the beginning of food production at the farm gate all the way to the dinner plate.”

An end to the war with Iran will eventually help reduce the escalating cost of fuel. Beyond that, farmers have limited options to mitigate the costs of farming in America.

“One thing that we could do really quickly is end the tariff war,” Gendebien said. “We would rather make money on our own through fair trade, rather than have our friends and neighbors and their tax dollars have to help us.”

Mid-term elections are fast approaching. It’s up to us to seize this critical moment to send farmers like Blake, and other candidates who truly represent working American families, to Washington.

We must not fail.

An article by Nora Mishanec, staff writer for the Albany Times Union, focused on a debate among Rhinebeck, NY, Village Trustees about how to spend village funds on a celebration marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. At issue was whether to spend $2350 on a Revolutionary War reenactment as part of the event. What ensued was a debate over patriotism, history and what, exactly, should be celebrated when the nation turns 250.

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At a time when Trump and his MAGAverse are working to sanitize American history and expunge from it all mention of our inequities, flaws, and failings, this is the kind of pointed dialogue we are sure to see more of in our semiquincentennial and beyond. As Mishanec says:

Across a deeply divided country, the approaching anniversary has become a kind of civic Rorschach test, with various factions using it to project competing visions of the American story: one that emphasizes founding ideals and shared heritage, another that interrogates who those ideals originally served and who they left out. In Rhinebeck, that divide played out in miniature, as a small-town board weighed whether a family-friendly reenactment was a tribute to history or a misreading of it.

Two of the Rhinebeck Trustees, Lydia Slaby and Eleanor Pupko, argued focusing on battle and soldiers rather than the ideals and aspirations in the Declaration of Independence risked missing the point of the day the document is celebrated. We should, Slaby said in the interview, “… make sure people understand what it is we are celebrating.” Slaby said the proposed battle reenactment felt especially ill-timed given recent U.S. military action in Iran.

Trustee Pupko noted the reenactment would not adequately address the Declaration of Independence’s exclusionary language. The Declaration’s promise of “inalienable rights,” she noted, did not extend to women, enslaved people or those without property at the time.

I think Slaby and Pupko are right on this. It’s alarming, and to our detriment, that the revisionist Right has made so much progress in whitewashing our history. In the interest of securing their fantasy of “American Exceptionalism,” they rely on a compendium of myths and oversimplifications. They attack as “unpatriotic” any histories that include recognition of the flaws that are just as much part of our history as the strengths.

This is not just wrong, it’s foolhardy. It leaves important civic, historic, and cultural questions unexamined. Trustee Slaby worries that Americans don’t spend enough time learning their country’s history, and that the real meaning of the semiquincentennial will be lost amid “too much tailgating and fireworks in a moment in history where our basic values are under threat.”

If we leave the hard questions unexamined, how can we hope to seek solutions? If we leave the hard questions unexamined, how can we ever hope to build the more perfect union promised in the Constitution? The Founders knew from the start that what they were establishing was not, and might never be, “perfect.” Democracy must always be a work in progress.

It’s one of our greatest strengths that, as the semiquincentennial approaches, we have examined questions and corrected one of the flaws in the Declaration to now agree that ALL, not just men, are created equal. We agree that ALL, not just white land owners, are endowed with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It’s up to us to remember that our government derives its power from OUR consent and that the foundation of government is to assure the people’s safety and happiness.

No one needs reminding that Trump has failed us.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a critical benchmark in the battle for civil rights. While it clearly did not end racial discrimination in America, it effectively marked the end of the Jim Crow era in deep south states. Now Trump is on the verge of unleashing a new era of injustice.

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Carol Anderson, writing in today’s Guardian, discusses the critical case now at the Supreme Court, Louisiana v Callais, that “… could be the latest brick in a wall under construction for more than a decade, as Jim Crow is rebuilt in modern form. She writes:

After the civil war, Reconstruction cracked open the door to a multiracial democracy. Black Americans registered. Black Americans voted. Black Americans held office. For a brief moment, the promise of the 15th amendment felt real. That progress was met with terror and violence – and then Jim Crow laws that choked off political power for nearly a century.

Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Legal schemes wrapped in bureaucratic language. When the Confederacy lost the war, it rebuilt its power through state law.

Jim Crow laws generalized segregation and enabled treatment of Black Americans as second-class citizens. They were forced to attend separate schools, drink at separate fountains, sit at the back of the bus, accept lower pay, and defer to white people in everything from making way on the sidewalk to making direct eye contact. Those optics, perhaps hard for many to envision today, established social hierarchies and a pervasive sense of “us vs. them.” Southerners created white nationalist state governments that they controlled, and limited economic opportunities available to African Americans.

The Civil Rights Movement was the fulcrum that tipped the scales of justice toward equal representation. Again from Carol Anderson’s piece:

The modern civil rights movement forced this country to confront that history [of Jim Crow laws]. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 became the most powerful civil rights law ever enacted. It stopped discriminatory laws before they could take effect. It protected communities that had already paid too high a price for access to the ballot.

And it delivered results. Black voter registration soared. Representation expanded. The south changed.

Trump is determined to undo that change and gut every legal protection and advancement achieved by the Civil Rights Movement. Trump’s Supreme Court, over the last decade, has been weakening those protections. In Shelby v Holder, a decision written by John Roberts, SCOTUS ruled that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act – the section dealing with racial gerrymandering - is unconstitutional. It held that the Act imposes burdens that are no longer responsive to the current conditions in America. The constraints placed on states made sense in the 1960s and 1970s and they are no longer needed.

Of course this only served to unleash the flurry of racially motivated gerrymandering we are seeing in state after state, proving that the Voting Rights Act protections were and still ARE needed.

Today, the Voting Rights Act stands on the brink of total collapse. SCOTUS is deliberating in Louisiana v. Callais a gerrymandering case, and appears poised to gut Section 2 of the of the Act. Section 2 is the central provision that has protected minority voters from discriminatory maps and election systems for 60 years. In practical terms, it would remove the last major federal barrier preventing Southern states from engineering political structures that dilute Black votes.

Mississippi Today, a Pulitzer Prize winning news service, looks with trepidation at how Black representation at every level of government could be gutted if the SCOTUS indeed strikes down that key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

In one fell swoop, conservative justices could open wide the door for the wholly legal return of Jim Crow-style systems and laws to Mississippi intended to keep Black voters from having a fair shake. This impending ruling would deal a devastating blow to the generations-long fight for racial and class equality in a state that arguably has never achieved it.

If the U.S. Supreme Court hands down this ruling, Mississippi’s power structure would have the permission to . . . transform the state’s political makeup and harken back to pre-civil rights movement days.

We are poised at a critical moment when the ideals of our democracy – equal representation under the law and government at the consent of the people – are threatened. It’s frightening that the Supreme Court has abandoned its role as protector of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and traded it to serve the interests of an imperial presidency and a rising oligarchy in the image of Jim Crow.

My hope is that the upcoming midterms will usher in an era of defense of democracy. We must have a Congress and a Supreme Court that will pass laws and issue rulings that protect our freedoms and our rights.

It’s up to us to assure that happens.

There is so much to address in these days of escalating outrage at the damage Trump is doing, as well as the inspiring responses to his recklessness here and abroad, that each time I sit down to write, I am nearly overwhelmed. Part of my dilemma is that Trump’s mercurial nature that has earned him the sobriquet TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), that one risks writing today about something that will be off the radar or completely different tomorrow. So I am writing today about something that among the current chaos may have flown beneath the radar.

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The Trump administration has announced plans to use a rarely invoked power given presidents in the Endangered Species Act to convene an Endangered Species Committee, or so-called “God Squad,” to override, in a “national emergency,” established environmental protections. He is permanently exempting oil and gas operations from the ESA requirements in the Gulf of Mexico. (I expect a visit from Trump’s word police for using that descriptor). These exemptions will put federally listed species at risk of irreversible harm. According to Andrew Wetzler, Senior Vice President of the Natural Resources Defense Council:

“This convening of the God Squad for the first time in 30 years is about giving oil and gas companies a free pass to drive incredible wildlife to extinction in the name of billionaire profits. Big Oil CEOs should not be able to determine a species’ existence on this planet simply because they could make more money if they didn’t have to comply with the law as it stands. There are fewer than 100 Rice’s whales left. The Kemp’s ridley sea turtle has clawed back from the brink for decades. The administration is now asking a committee to say none of that matters.”

Tom Perkins of the Guardian agrees:

If successful, the administration may kill off dozens of protected species – from Rice’s whales and whooping cranes to sea turtles.

. . .

The Trump administration is attempting to justify the ESA exemption for “reasons of national security”, marking the first time a security claim has been made. However, oil and gas companies have not asked for the exemption, raising questions about why it is being requested, said Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center For Biological Diversity, which has sued to stop the committee from convening.

The move is presumably aimed at bringing down gas prices that are soaring amid the US-Israel war on Iran, opponents say. Trump wants to make it appear as if the administration is taking action over the growing crisis, but the claim that there is a national security threat is “nonsense” for a multitude of reasons, Hartl said.

“What is the threat here? Or is the main threat Donald Trump’s abysmal polling numbers?” Hartl asked. “This is performative and it’s red meat being thrown to the far-right and industry.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has identified several species that will be adversely affected by oil and gas operations. They include Rice’s whales with an estimated population of just 51 animals. Sperm whales are listed as endangered, exposed to vessel strikes, entanglement, seismic surveys, and oil spill risk across Gulf waters. Five species of sea turtles: hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, leatherback, loggerhead, and green sea turtle, all listed as threatened or endangered, are exposed to vessel strikes, seismic surveys, entanglement, and oil spills throughout the Gulf. The Gulf sturgeon are a threatened species because they use the Gulf’s nearshore coastal waters, where oil spill exposure poses a documented risk.

Trump’s “God Squad” is composed of Cabinet-level officials and is chaired by Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who has called a meeting for tomorrow, March 31. If five of the seven votes are in favor of a project proceeding, it moves forward, which could drive species to extinction. If these sycophants are willing to wear outsized shoes for Trump, what do you think of the chances they will vote against what he wants to protect the trivial existence of irreplaceable species?

NRDC has said “see you in court” and has active litigation challenging the federal government’s management of Gulf oil and gas activities under the Endangered Species Act.

It’s up to us to keep our attention on this as it plays out in the courts. Hard as it is, while Trump continues his distractions in the service of big oil, we must keep this in the public’s eye.

Just spreading the word - from the No Kings website:

In America, we have No Kings.

Masked secret police terrorizing our communities. An illegal, catastrophic war putting us in danger and driving up our costs. Attacks on our freedom of speech, our civil rights, our freedom to vote. Costs pushing families to the brink. Trump wants to rule over us as a tyrant. But this is America, and power belongs to the people - not to wannabe kings or their billionaire cronies.

On March 28th, we show up together, and we say, loud and clear: No Kings.

It’s up to us to defend democracy. Attend a No Kings Rally, find a weekly vigil near you, be a voter, make your voice heard as part of the movement to stop the Trump-led descent into hate and authoritarianism.

“And it flows from there.” - Robert Mueller

Or, why I go to a vigil every week, and especially for No Kings Day on March 28.

After reading Robert Hubbell’s Substack this week, I was inspired to share my thoughts about why I will be attending not only the No Kings vigil this Saturday, but why Alan and I try to attend each weekly vigil, Greenwich for us.

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I will not list the bottomless pit of grievances, missteps, and outright lawless actions taken by the current administration. I don’t want to dwell on the negatives. You already know them.

I do want to share with you the many positives that we are experiencing at our weekly vigils. Nearly everyone there talks about the feeling of community and solidarity. We are cementing old relationships as well as forging new ones. Petitions are signed. Dinner dates are made. Red hats are being knitted at a furious pace, and then the hats are gifted to those of us not adept at the knitting arts. The messages of others’ posters are admired and commented on. Photos are taken and shared on Face Book and other social media. We have a communal laugh when someone from a passing vehicle yells out something at us, nearly always unoriginal and/or unintelligible. We are inspired by the friendly beeps and thumbs-up, which vastly outnumber the negative honks and gestures by at least a 20 to 1 ratio.

We feel energized and hopeful.

I began with a quote from Robert Mueller. So, what does all of this have to do with him? It’s about doing the right thing. His life was an example of attempting to do the right thing, every day. In his own words:

“I have been very lucky. I always felt I should spend some time paying it back. One of the reasons I went into the Marine Corps was because we lost a very good friend, a Marine in Vietnam, who was a year ahead of me at Princeton. There were a number of us who felt we should follow his example and at least go into the service. And it flows from there.”

I try to do the right thing at least every Saturday by attending our local pro-democracy vigil. The messages matter. The frequency of showing up matters. The numbers who attend matter. Building community matters.

Please join me for No Kings this Saturday (March 28) in Greenwich at 11:30, or attend any vigil that matters to you (https://www.nokings.org/). Do the right thing. If enough of us show up for No Kings 3.0 we can hope that “it flows from there.”

Onward.

I’m betting that, like me, you’ve been involved in countless conversations over the past 10 years or so - the time of Trump’s first term; his interregnum filled with all those years of stolen election lies; and the disaster of the first year of his second term - in which someone, maybe you, wonders why so many people don’t seem to see what’s going on.

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How, we wonder, can so many people who voted for him, sometimes twice, continue their support while he does so many things that hurt them? His tariffs are making everything they depend on - food, gas, clothing, and childcare - more expensive. His diplomatic blundering, including the aforementioned tariffs and trade disasters, have alienated long-term allies. His cozying up to dictators like Putin has abandoned America’s leadership role among modern democracies. His territorial adventurism in Venezuela, Brazil, Greenland, Canada, and Cuba has pivoted America from being a defender of the Western Hemisphere to being an imperialist dominator of this part of the globe.

None of these, and more, could ever end well. Trump has set America on the path of ultimate decline and fall.

Back to the question that so many are asking and posed in the title of this piece - how in the face of so much evidence, is it that they can’t see what’s happening? Can’t those who voted for, and still stand with Trump and the MAGAverse, see how wrong they are?

In 2011, Katherine Schultz, staff writer at The New Yorker and Pulitzer Prize and Lambda Literary Award winner, delivered a mind-opening TED talk called On Being Wrong that goes a long way toward answering my question. I highly recommend that you take some 18 minutes to watch it because I’m sure I can’t do it justice.

Schultz asks her audience what it feels like, on an emotional level, to be wrong. Responses are as you’d expect - dreadful, embarrassed, foolish. Great answers says Schultz, but they are really answers to a different question. That question is what does it feel like to realize you are wrong.

She introduces a great metaphor - the coyote chasing the road runner. The coyote chases the road runner off the edge of a cliff. The road runner is a bird so he can fly. But the coyote runs off the cliff too and runs for some way before he finally looks down and realizes he is no longer on solid ground. It’s not until that moment that he falls.

Schultz comes to the key point that until the moment you realize you are wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right! This is one reason we all get stuck in a feeling of rightness, what Schultz calls “error blindness.” We lack any internal clue to let us know we are wrong until it’s too late.

So we are stuck in feeling we are right, and those who disagree with us are also stuck in that place. When we confront one another, we fall into what Schultz describes as a series of unfortunate assumptions.

1. The Ignorance Assumption - we just assume they are ignorant and don’t know the facts. All we need to do is give them the facts and they’ll come onto our team.

2. The Idiocy Assumption - when 1 doesn’t work, they have the same facts we do and all the pieces of the puzzle, but don’t know how to put them together, we assume they are just dumb.

3. The Evil Assumption - when neither of those work, we assume they are just evil.

The big take away for me in this is the understanding that these are the ways we humans operate. The feeling of rightness is important in helping us avoid errors but it is also a problem in that it can prevent us from seeing opportunities for change.

Change is hard and the combination of rightness and error blindness are not helpful. Schultz does not offer a way to change the thinking of those with whom we disagree. But understanding this dynamic can help us to deal with them in a way that is more constructive than following the path of the unfortunate assumptions.

A big step is accepting that, in spite of feeling right, we are all wrong as well. Schultz ends with a profound contrast between Descartes’s I think therefore I am and St. Augustine’s fallor ergo sum - I err therefore I am.

We must also accept that there are minds that no amount of persuading will change. I am encouraged by the huge numbers of people, including mainstream and former Republicans who have seemingly realized that they had not been on solid ground for a long time and have turned away from Trump.

It’s up to us to focus, not on trying to change the minds of hard-core MAGAs, but on dialogue with voters of all persuasion to turn out the impending Blue Wave.

Trump famously and disturbingly dissed the United States in his first inaugural address in 2017. His speech, amazingly for him, ran only 15 minutes. In that moment, he painted a dismal picture of our nation. He used his inauguration to characterize our nation amidst a time of “American Carnage” where, in his words:

“Politicians prospered — but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. ... The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”

As with his lies about the size of his inauguration crowd, this statement bore little resemblance to the truth. According to the Pew Research Center, when Trump took office, the U.S. was experiencing a stable economic recovery with unemployment marking a 10-year low. The economy was healthy, in its 76th consecutive month of job growth. Corporate profits were high and we were in the midst of a strong hiring streak.

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Once his first term commenced, Trump immediately embarked upon practices and policies designed, not to serve “forgotten men and women,” but the super rich. His Cabinet and close advisors, then as now, was packed with billionaires. And, of course he pushed his sweeping tax overhaul to benefit large corporations and the wealthiest households.

Where Trump was not completely far off, this was a time of significant political polarization. Of course, it was Trump himself who contributed mightily to this, fanning the flames of discord. According to the Miller Center:

Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and “America First” campaign slogans translated into harsh restrictions on immigration during his presidency. Immediately after taking office, he issued an executive order blocking entry visas for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen), as well as temporarily suspending all refugees from entering the United States for four months. Trump’s travel ban sparked large protests and legal challenges. As a result of legal challenges, the Trump administration revised the executive order.

Add to this Trump’s demonizing of Mexico and building his border wall which, he said, Mexico would pay for. When it settled that Mexico would not pay, Trump’s battle with Congress over funding the wall resulted in a government shutdown which became, at the time, the longest government shutdown before a deal was finally struck.

Trump’s “family separation” policy at the southern border was a horror show of ham-fisted policy to dissuade migrants and asylum-seeking refugees from entering the United States. At least 2300 children were separated from their parents, many of whom were housed in chain-link cages within detention centers.

At the end of his first term, Trump unleashed his MAGA loyalists upon the physical and psychological symbol of our democracy, the Capitol, in an attempt to defy the electoral voice of the people and maintain control of the government. This was a violent insurrection, wreaking real carnage upon America.

This dystopian authoritarianism has grown and gotten worse in Trump’s second term.

He has escalated ICE’s widespread deportation raids, including targeting citizens and legal residents and those with protected status. He has ignored the due process rights of those attacked. Family separations continue and warehousing of detainees is common. He uses immigration enforcement to target protestors and observers of ICE’s illegal activities. He seeks to unilaterally end birthright citizenship – a Constitutional right - for children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants.

He has imposed sweeping tariffs on imports from over 50 countries, including our close allies, which act as a tax on U.S. consumers. These trigger retaliatory measures that lead to higher prices for families and businesses. He claims that we don’t pay for these, the other countries do. Remember what he said about Mexico paying for his wall?

His policies stoke inflation and undermine economic stability. They benefit the wealthy at the same time he’s cutting social safety nets like SNAP. This widens the gap between the wealthy and those “forgotten men and women” he is condemning to a generation of struggle.

He has brutally attacked democratic institutions and rule of law and weaponized the DOJ to target political opponents, including local prosecutors, judges, and government officials. He openly defies federal court orders, particularly those blocking deportation actions.

He unleashed DOGE to butcher federal agencies and economic aid programs. It wasn’t just DOGE that produced this disaster. Note that Pete Hegseth, as part of his fever dream to focus on lethality, killed a Defense Department program intended to prevent exactly the kind of error that resulted in the deaths of more than 160 children in the recent school bombing in Iran.

Trump has shaken our economic and military alliances around the world and his reckless and misguided war against Iran puts the Middle East at risk of wider war and represents the most dangerous military adventure the US has been involved in in decades. He asks us to believe that US military might assures that this will be ended in a matter of weeks. Isn’t that what George W. Bush said when proclaiming “mission accomplished” while plunging us into nine years of war?

We could talk about more - how he continues to act in ways he wants to distract us from the Epstein files; how his climate denial and pulling us out of the Paris Accords; his land ambitions in Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, and Cuba; fomenting regime change in these places as well as in Iran - but suffice it to say that Trump is responsible for an American Carnage that is unprecedented in our history.

It’s up to us to continue to stand up and prevent further damage and descent into authoritarianism.

The International Olympic Committee’s disqualification of Ukrainian skeleton slider Vladyslav Heraskevych from the Winter Olympics for “refusing to adhere” to the IOC’s athlete expression guidelines is a disgrace. It makes sense for the IOC to seek to minimize political discourse but let’s recognize that the Olympics has always carried with it a political context. Consider Hitler’s 1936 showcase in Berlin and the proxy political battles in the medal counts during the Cold War.

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One could consider Heraskevych’s insistence on wearing his helmet featuring images of athletes killed during the war in Ukraine a political statement but even if you do, it is a mild one in comparison. I see it as an appropriate memorial to his fellow athletes and countrymen, marking their tragic deaths and a statement expressing the true spirit of the Olympic Games - seeking peace through competition in sport.

It’s a shame the IOC chose otherwise. By their ham-handed dealing with this, they have not silenced Heraskevych. They have amplified his message. There is a phenomenon called the Streisand effect that states that attempts to suppress or censor information backfire. The unintended consequence of such efforts draws significantly more public attention than there would have been if left alone. Ultimately the act of suppression makes the information more sensational or newsworthy, causing it to spread rapidly.

Heraskevych is now a much larger presence than just another Olympic athlete who, like the thousands of his fellow competitors, would have had his brief moment on the world stage. The IOC has assured he will be remembered along with American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos who famously raised their fists in a Black Power salute during the 200-meter medal ceremony at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

You may have been sharper of eye and ear than I, but I totally missed it when JD Vance spoke to the Munich Security Conference almost exactly one year ago and introduced a phrase that should serve as a warning to us all. His speech, which I do recall, was a shock to European leaders for the criticisms he laid on them. He chastised them for many things that I won’t go into here because I want to focus on one small, specific detail that flew below my radar. Vance excoriated European leaders saying that it is mass migration that risks "civilizational erasure" in Europe.

Civilizational erasure?

I had to look it up. Here’s what Google told me:

In a widely reported speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, U.S. Vice President JD Vance criticized European leaders, arguing that mass migration, the suppression of free speech, and the marginalization of populist political voices were risking “civilizational erasure” in Europe.

Vance argued that the primary threat to Europe was internal, rather than external threats from Russia or China, accusing European officials of “running in fear of their own voters” and undermining democratic norms.

With that understanding, two things immediately come to mind. First, this is a case of right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation’s (authors of Project 2025) propaganda. “Civilizational erasure” is nothing more than the old wine of The Great Replacement Theory in a new bottle. In fact, Vance’s speech was very much a plagiarism of a piece written by Nile Gardiner, Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom in which he wrote:

Increasingly, the EU stands for despotism, socialism, mass migration, the suppression of free speech and the destruction of national sovereignty. Many senior U.S. officials and Members of Congress rightly view the European Union as fundamentally undemocratic, run by power-hungry unelected bureaucrats with practically zero accountability.

That brings me to the second thing that comes immediately to mind. We’ve seen how Project 2024’s blueprint to reshape America is being implemented by the Trump presidency. Not enough voters took that manifesto seriously enough to keep him out of the White House so that he would not be in the position to put its dark promises into action.

Here’s another example of how the Heritage Foundation is shaping the US’s cultural and policy direction. Just two months ago, in December 2025, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy (NSS). The NSS, by law, lists the US’s official concerns and how the administration plans to deal with them.

Trump’s NSS heavily features the concept of “civilizational erasure” in Europe, which was promoted by Elon Musk’s disastrous appearance at a campaign event for Germany's far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD). The now official position of the US government is that Europe is on the brink of becoming “unrecognizable” due to mass migration, demographic shifts, and the policies of the European Union, which it claims are undermining national identities.

On page 25 of the new NSS, the Trump administration asserts:

Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP—down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today—partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.

But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure (emphasis mine). The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.

Other key aspects of the NSS narrative include that Europe is moving away from its traditional Western, Christian roots. It blames EU multiculturalism and liberal ideology for causing an economic and cultural decline. Through it, the US officially praises “patriotic European parties” such as Germany’s AfD as the solution to this supposed erasure.

Forgive me if I hear echoes in these words of a “final solution.”

It is alarming that this policy moves the US away from NATO and aligns us with nationalist viewpoints and Putin’s narratives regarding European weakness and fear of NATO expansion.

Project 2025

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laid out the roadmap Trump is using to reshape the US. The NSS lays out the roadmap he plans to use to reshape the world order. We can not afford to turn a blind eye to the present danger Trump represents.

It’s up to us to stand up and continue to note that the real threat of "civilizational erasure" is to be found in Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and the erosion of democratic norms within the US and Europe.

I’ve been quiet for a while. Maybe it’s Trump Drama Fatigue. Maybe it’s his Gish galloping (see my piece from Oct 2024 where I mis-labeled it as Gish guzzling). Maybe it’s that so many other writers are talking about the gut-wrenching things going on. It’s probably all of the above that have made it hard for me to get a handle on what’s happening. You’re likely experiencing the same.

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Mary Lou has a very centering approach to dealing with all this. The chief driver of Trump’s constant abhorrence, she asserts, is distraction. She stays focused. Since September, she has carried her sign at weekly vigils reminding everyone that the Epstein files have yet to be released in their entirety and his victims continue to be deprived of justice and satisfaction. Everything Trump does deflects attention from this issue that could be his undoing.

Protecting himself and his billionaire loyalists is likely not the only thing Trump wishes to distract us from, but it’s certainly high on his list of priorities. Here’s a list of some of other things Trump does not want us talking about:

• Pardoning the Jan. 6 criminals

• Pardoning political allies, business associates, his crypto exchange co-founders, donors, and fraudsters (including George Santos)

• Abandoning Ukraine and berating Zelensky in the Oval Office

• The whole tariff thing, hurting Americans, causing rising prices and inflation, and attacking our European partners

• Grabbing for Greenland

• Stealing Venezuela’s oil, extrajudicial killing of people in boats, sending our Navy to the Caribbean and kidnapping the President of Venezuela

• Defying court orders on deporting immigrants

• Dismantling the federal government, thanks Elon

• Erasing the achievements of women and minorities

• Medicaid cuts in the Big Ugly Bill

• Cozying up to the likes of Putin, Erdoğan, and Orbán

• Using our government to enrich himself and his family in violation of the Emoluments Clause

• Opening our borders to white “refugees” from South Africa

• Troops in our cities

It’s up to us to keep our eyes on these and other things, hold him accountable, and ultimately restore democracy.

The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual (DSM5) does not formally define “sociopath.” It does describe its traits under Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), including a pervasive disregard for others’ rights, with at least three of these symptoms: failing to conform to laws, deceitfulness, impulsivity, irritability/aggression, reckless disregard for safety, and consistent irresponsibility.

The Mayo Clinic refines the symptoms of antisocial personality disorder to include: repeatedly ignoring right and wrong; telling lies to take advantage of others; lack of sensitivity or respect for others; using charm or wit to manipulate others for personal gain or pleasure; having a sense of superiority and being extremely opinionated; having problems with the law, including criminal behavior; being hostile, aggressive, violent or threatening to others; feeling no guilt about harming others; doing dangerous things with no regard for the safety of self or others; being irresponsible, and failing to fulfill work or financial responsibilities.

Part of the definition of ASPD in both the DSM5 and the MAYO Clinic, is how long-standing the symptoms have been. History shows that Trump has exhibited them for a long, long time. I have absolutely no training or expertise in psychology or psychiatry, but it seems to me that Trump has pretty much a lifelong public record of displaying all of these symptoms. I’m sure you can recall examples without my going into them.

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In his interview published yesterday with the New York Times, he showed us, once again, his sociopathic personality. The Times noted in the subtitle to its article, “On topic after topic, President Trump made clear that he would be the arbiter of any limits to his authorities, not international law or treaties.”

President Trump declared on Wednesday evening that his power as commander in chief is constrained only by his “own morality,” brushing aside international law and other checks on his ability to use military might to strike, invade or coerce nations around the world.

Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

“I don’t need international law,” he added. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”

When pressed further about whether his administration needed to abide by international law, Mr. Trump said, “I do.” But he made clear he would be the arbiter when such constraints applied to the United States.

This is but the latest example of Trump’s ongoing displays of ASPD. Note that “when pressed” Trump acknowledged that he needed to abide by international law. I suggest that this admission was nothing more than telling a lie to take advantage of others. More accurately, it was a lie to his own advantage. Recall that he also told us he knew nothing about Project 2025. For years he has lied, claiming to not know those once close to him who spoke publicly about one or another of his transgressions.

We would have little trouble citing examples of how Trump has exhibited every one of the Mayo Clinic’s description of symptoms of ASPD - sociopathy if you will. The answer to my presenting question is thus an unqualified - YES! It's good to see the legacy press finally turning away from sanewashing him and is now reporting on his sociopathy deteriorated mental health.

It’s up to us to speak out and work to save our democracy so the madman who would be king never succeeds.

There is little I can add to all that’s been written this morning about yesterday’s killing by ICE of Renee Nicole Good. There is no place in our society for this kind of extra-legal, gestapo thuggery.

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Outrageously, Trump and Noem have added devastating insult to injury by contradicting video documentation of the incident and branding Good, the victim of ICE’s murderous violence, as the perpetrator. The source of the quote that comes to mind may seem inappropriate, but Chico Marx’s line is nonetheless right on the mark. “Who you ‘gonna believe, me or your own eyes'?”

This must not stand. Indivisible has called a nationwide call for tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern / 5 p.m. Pacific. See Indivisible’s description of the call below:

Violence is nothing new for Trump’s secret police force. But this killing is a tragic escalation in the racist campaign of terror being carried out against communities across our nation. It’s proof of what happens when armed thugs are unleashed into our neighborhoods without oversight or accountability.

And it needs to be a galvanizing moment for every American to join the activists who’ve been fighting this brutality day in and day out for years in saying: ENOUGH.

[Tonight](Thursday) at 8pm ET / 7pm CT / 5pm PT, Indivisible and partners are hosting an emergency call to talk through a nationwide response to this killing and ongoing ICE terror in Minneapolis and across the country. Please join us.

Our call will feature concrete actions you can take to address abuses by ICE and demand accountability.

Our response needs to be loud. It needs to be nationwide. It needs to be peaceful. And it needs to address the full rottenness of Trump’s fascist police force and the system that’s allowed it to rampage our country with the budget of a national army.

Join our emergency call to learn how you can get involved.

Here is the link to sign up for the call.

It’s up to us to draw the line and resist Trump’s violent trajectory.

Happy New Year

A few months ago, Mary Lou and I visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA. So I was intrigued yesterday when I saw a piece by Catherine Rampell in The Bulwark - The MAGAfication of Norman Rockwell - about how the right has (illegally) appropriated Rockwell’s work in its propaganda. If you do nothing else, watch the video of Rampell’s interview with Daisy Rockwell, his granddaughter.

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Much of Rockwell’s work was indeed propaganda. Some of his most famous images were produced during the years of World War II and served to support resistance to fascism. He not only proclaimed what we were fighting against, but what we were fighting for.

You’d recognize these masterpieces anywhere, even if you don’t know them by name. The “Four Freedoms” paintings depict the fundamental freedoms that President Franklin Roosevelt once declared all people entitled to: Freedom of Speech (a lone man who resembles young Abe Lincoln rises in dissent at a town hall meeting), Freedom From Want (a happy family awaiting a roast turkey), Freedom of Worship (multiethnic group praying), and Freedom From Fear (parents tucking in their peacefully sleeping children).

Rockwell’s images continued to message what America stands for well beyond the end of the War. In 1958, a compilation poster hung on the wall in my fourth grade classroom.

Once he left the Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell became even more outspoken about his support for freedom and civil rights. Rampell’s interview with Daisy makes it clear that Rockwell was “woke” and quite literally antifa. The Rockwell family is indignant that Trump and MAGA have hijacked her grandfather’s legacy to promote their brand of fascism.

It’s disturbing that Trump and MAGA, particularly the Department of Homeland Security, are appropriating and completely misrepresenting the messages Rockwell intended. For example, DHS posted his 1971 painting of Americans saluting a billowing American flag with the anti-immigrant message, “Protect our American way of life.”

In September, the government posted Rockwell’s 1946 painting of workers cleaning the Statue of Liberty. DHS accompanied the painting with directives to “PROTECT YOUR HOMELAND” and “DEFEND YOUR CULTURE.” “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the Statue, was written by Emma Lazarus as a beacon of hope for immigrants, famously calling to give us “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. ” Echoing the great replacement theory, MAGA desecrates Lazarus’s sonnet.

Getting back to Freedom of Speech. The iconic visual expression of this fundamental right in a democracy has been appropriated, as have so many other thoughts and symbols, by a movement actively working to abolish them. Rampell points out that authoritarian regimes co-opt cherished cultural expressions for their own purposes and, like Trump, simultaneously crack down on contemporaneous artists whom they deem disloyal or degenerate.

Rockwell’s earlier work, before he freed himself from the Post’s requirement that he not include minorities in his paintings (which he ignored, sneaking images in where he could), is a quintessential expression of an idyllic white Christian world that never really existed. Is it any wonder, Rampell ponders, that Rockwell appeals to an administration that pledges to turn back the clock to some imagined golden age?

Rockwell’s scenes look like a happy, wholesome past that many Americans wish they could return to. But this bucolic past was imagined; Daisy notes that her grandfather created and staged it, using models he cast from his local communities in Vermont and Massachusetts. The artist himself grew up in a boarding house, in a cramped urban environment.

“He loved this idea of this, like, sort of small town idealistic thing,” said Daisy, who is an artist and writer too. “But he made it up himself.”

It’s distressing to watch MAGA’s attempts to re-write our cultural, political, and social history. One part of resisting their attempts is to hold on to the original ideals expressed. MAGA has demonized “woke.” In 1938 when Lead Belly’s song “Scottsboro Boys” introduced the term, he advised Black people traveling through Alabama to “Stay woke, keep their eyes open.” His meaning was to stay alert to danger and racial injustice. Today, it remains a resonant and important call to all of us.

DEI, before MAGA demonized and twisted it to equate it with “politically correct” practices in workplaces and educational institutions, promoted fair treatment, equal opportunity, and respect for people of all backgrounds. It continues to represent those things critical to a democratic society and MAGA cannot be allowed to take them away from us.

I think Rockwell was expressing his belief in the importance of diversity and inclusion in his The Problem We All Live With. In it, six-year-old Ruby Bridges is shown desegregating a white school in New Orleans, escorted by U.S. Marshals, made anonymous by their heads out of the frame. On the wall, the word NIGGER has been scrawled and the detritus of a tomato hurled at the little girl is seen. Only Ruby’s face is seen. A reminder that she, like us viewing the picture, is a living, real person.

Rampell concludes her piece with this comment:

If Rockwell’s early illustrations of pink-cheeked lovebirds and rough-housing kids were meant to comfort audiences, those latter works were meant to challenge them. His tool for achieving both ends, though, was the same: compassion. His works ooze it, whatever the subject and whichever the characters, and regardless of how subsequent opportunists might try to exploit those works.

Compassion of that sort is a virtue obviously absent from Trump’s mass deportation campaign—and arguably from MAGA overall. Which makes the use of Rockwell’s art an especially egregious misappropriation.

I wish I knew what Rockwell might have said about Trump’s theft of his life’s work in service of state-sponsored terror. But even more than that, I wonder what he would have painted.

It’s up to us to think on that as well.

I like hockey. I remember the “Miracle on Ice” very well as a great moment in the sport. I take no issue with those who say, as Elise Stefanik did in her comments at the White House ceremony where Trump bestowed Congressional Gold Medals to the members of the 1980 US Men’s Hockey Team, that this was a proud moment that served to boost morale during the tense days of the Cold War. Many celebrities, athletes, musicians, and artists have received similar formal accolades over the years and this award is no less deserved.

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Fewer people recall that the victory over the Soviet team was not for the gold medal. That game was against Finland. Mary Lou, who is not a hockey fan, remembers the Soviet game and even remembers the name of Mike Eruzione (she even pronounces it correctly), the team captain. It was than impactful.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the major rivalry in the world of hockey has been between the USA and Canada. This has actually been the dominant rivalry since the early days of international hockey, when the teams faced each other for the gold medal at the first Olympic hockey tournament in 1920. On the women’s side, Canada and the US have faced each other in the championship game of nearly every Olympics and World Championships since the beginning of international play.

As an aside, at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Japan, the US and Canada men’s teams faced off in the semi-final match for the right to go to the gold medal game, which Canada won. I happened to be in Vancouver conducting a management workshop for a Canadian water treatment company. The participants took some good-natured shots at me, the American in the room, over the US loss and on the next day I started the program with a video, cleverly inserted into a section on dealing with setbacks, of the final seconds of the match.

It is not without precedent that championship teams - NCAA football and basketball champions as well as professional baseball, football and basketball teams have been honored at the White House. The 1980 Men’s Hockey team received congratulations from President Carter, even though they did not win the gold.

I am cynical that, 45 years after the fact, last week’s honor was bestowed on the 1980 hockey team for anything beyond self-aggrandizement. We are in an election cycle that includes Stefanick’s run for NY Governor. The honor is for an accomplishment that took place in Lake Placid, a location in NY’s 21st Congressional District, which is competitive this cycle.

I cannot avoid the conclusion that Stefanik’s bill, the Miracle on Ice Congressional Gold Medal Act, that drove the event, amounted to more than setting up an exploitative photo opp for Trump and Stefanik.

The team deserved the honor. Shame on Trump and Stefanik for, once again, making it all about themselves.

In an important piece for the National Constitution Center, Rosemarie Zagarri, Distinguished University Professor, George Mason University, discusses an often overlooked part of the Declaration of Independence, a list of 27 grievances against King George. The grievances laid out the core of the colonists’ case against Great Britain. She notes that “… this section is at once the most overlooked part of the Declaration and the least well-understood. Yet at the time it was written in 1776, the list was arguably the most critical section of the document.”

The list was drafted by a Committee of Five, composed of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman. In it, the Committee established that the relationship between king and colonists was a reciprocal one. Subjects owed their rulers duty, service, and allegiance. Rulers had specific obligations to the people, including a duty to protect their “unalienable rights.”

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These rights, as the Preamble states, include the self-evident truths that all people are created equal and their unalienable rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s important to recognize that “happiness” in this context did not then, and does not now, refer to the individual emotion of joy or pleasure. Instead, when Jefferson used the phrase, he considered the “pursuit of happiness” to describe a collective status produced by a government that protects, and provides for the people’s safety, security, and general welfare.

The List of Grievances was documentation of the ways in which King George had violated his compact with the colonists to protect their rights and thus was unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Once a ruler had become a tyrant, the people not only had the “right” but also had the “duty” to overthrow their government.

The simultaneously simple and profound words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” not only stated the principles on which the Revolution was fought, they have stood as the central pillar of our democracy. One of my favorite quotes from Mark Twain asserts, , “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it,”

OK, getting to the point of all this. We are clearly in a time when our government has abandoned our founding principles. We have never, from the start, fully lived up to them, and we have frequently strayed afar. Never, until now, have we gotten as close as we are to losing what the Revolution was fought for.

Not all of the grievances the Committee of Five laid out against the 18th Century’s actual King have direct parallels with those we hold against the 21st Century’s wannabe pretend “king’s", but several do.

The first twelve grievances in the Declaration identified Britain’s particular actions and policies that threatened various aspects of the colonists’ collective “happiness.” In Jefferson’s terms this means people’s safety, security, and general welfare. Donald Trump’s stock-in-trade is to keep people confused, insecure, uncertain, afraid, and unhappy. As with any bully, it’s how he asserts his dominance and power. He uses his power to keep his allies and followers in line, to cow foreign governments, and to intimidate opponents.

Grievance # 7 in the Declaration charged that the King had obstructed the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners and refused to encourage migrations to the colonies. There had been a large influx of German immigrants to America, and the King wanted to discourage such immigration. Trump’s selective denigration of immigrants from countries he does not like is no different.

Grievance #10 charged that the King had “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” After the passage of the Stamp Act, the Crown appointed stamp distributors in towns across the Colonies. These created “swarms of officers”, all of whom received high salaries. The high salaries and extensive perquisites of all of these were paid with the people’s money, and thus “swarms of officers, ate out their substance.” DOGE ate out the substance of our government.

Grievance #11 charged the Crown with keeping “among us, in times of Peace” a standing army without the consent of our legislatures.” While the National Guard is not a “standing army,” the parallel is clear. King George sent 40,000 British troops as well as mercenaries from Germany with the intent of quelling protest among the colonists. Trump is sending “his” army to cities for the same reason.

Grievance #12 charged the King had “rendered the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.” Trump has bypassed Congressional authority and declared his own war on Venezuela.

Grievance # 19 charged the Crown with “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses.” In 1744, a law in Massachusetts , known as the Administration of Justice Act, provided that in particular cases, including an indictment for riot, the resistance of the magistrate, or impeding the revenue laws in the smallest degree, he might be taken to another colony, or transported from the colonies, for trial. Trump’s extralegal arrest and deportation of persons, including citizens, for incarceration in other countries is no different.

These are serious grievances, and there are more parallels not included here, laid at the feet of Donald Trump. He continues to commit egregious acts that defy and defile the rights of people and, in the extreme, extend to crimes against humanity.

These were wrong in 1776 and they are wrong today.

It’s up to us to continue to call him out for the tyrant he is.