Just west of Knoxville, the Tennessee Trump Superstore is closing up, and not because the owner is retiring. It’s because people in MAGAWorld have bought all the Trump stuff they’re going to buy — and because most of America can’t wait for this tragedy to end. Journalist Jessica Pishko snapped August’s Photo of the Month, and filed this story for Slate to go with it. She writes: “Trump gear just isn’t selling like it used to. Indeed, the store’s employees seem to have lost faith not just in the venture but also in the president himself.” Other Trump Superstores have closed elsewhere in the country. It’s a good sign that Trump Estrangement Syndrome is spreading across the land.

Personal Favorite of August: I took this photo at sunset while visiting a Maryland horse farm on August 25.

My friend Kurt Kolaja is vacationing in Canada — Nova Scotia, Atlantic Canada, to be precise — and promises to file reports about what he’s hearing from Canadians about Trump. You can imagine. … Well, actually you don’t have to imagine because Kurt has been taking notes.

• Off the top, Kurt says, Trump is getting laughed at everywhere. Everywhere they think the current president of the United States is a joke.

• But Canadians are angry, too. Aboard a boat on a whale watching trip, Kurt spoke with a gentleman from Toronto. “If I was the head of the Canadian government,” he said, “I’d shut down electricity to the U.S.”

• Billboards for Purple Cow internet service say: “Prices more stable than some world leaders.”

  

• Said a skinny, bearded fellow at a Halifax tavern said: “Trump’s a goof. And, mind you, in a Canadian school yard those are fighting words. Someone calls you a goof, it’s a fight.”

• Down the rail of the bar another guy noted that Trump has been good for tourism. “He’s actually given the economy in Nova Scotia a boost,” he said. “It’s a military location, but now spending is up.” (Nova Scotia has a major Canadian military presence. In fact, it’s known as the country’s capital of defense.)

• A bookstore owner in Halifax said: “I’ve visited countries under the heel of a dictator so I kinda see what’s going on. This entire thing has nothing to do with you. People from the U.S. are great.” (One might beg to differ: 77 million Americans voted for Trump less than two years ago.)

• Two guys were overheard as they walked along the Halifax harbor. “I’m feeling very patriotic,” one of them said. “I’m going to have a Canadian burger or something.” The second guy wondered aloud if there’s such a thing as a Canadian burger. “I don’t know,” answered the first, “but I’m going to find out.”

• There was one other fellow at the tavern, an American. He was from Tampa on a work assignment for an electrical company. When he landed at the Halifax airport, his phone lit up. It was a text from his wife: “Our daughter’s school is under lockdown.”

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Ocean City, Maryland sits at the tip of a barrier island, a long spit of sand between the Atlantic and a bay. So it’s always vulnerable to damage from the extreme storms that come with climate change.

But the people of Ocean City don’t seem to be worried about it.

In fact, Ocean City has been fighting an offshore wind farm for years, taking the NIMBY approach to a project intended to slow sea-level rise and harness energy for hundreds of thousands of homes without further damage to Earth’s atmosphere. The Trump regime has joined the fight, vowing to vacate the Biden administration’s approval of a wind project some 10 miles off the Maryland coast.

Ocean City officials, who preside over a municipality one would hardly call quaint, claim the wind turbines will spoil the view from the beach and hurt property values. They have one of the worst MAGA congressmen, Andy Harris, as an ally; he’s claimed that the turbines will kill whales and threaten national security.

Never mind what the climate science says — that, unless we stop burning fossil fuels and develop more solar and wind energy, we will see rising temperatures and more extreme weather, including the kind of storms that threaten to erode the beach at Ocean City.

But why should anyone in Ocean City worry about that when the federal government — the same government they fight in court — is willing to keep investing taxpayer dollars to keep the resort from collapsing into the Atlantic?

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat and harsh critic of the Trump regime, recently presented Ocean City officials with one of those comically huge checks from the U.S. Treasury — this one for $20 million to replenish the eroded beach. As it has in the past, the Army Corps of Engineers will make all the arrangements.

“Ocean City’s beach is a destination for Marylanders and out-of-state visitors alike, making it an important economic driver for the region,” Van Hollen said. “It’s critical that we not only protect the beach from erosion, but that we also restore the shoreline to protect local communities from flooding and extreme weather.”

Let’s be real: This is nothing more than a cyclical rebuilding project to keep the rising sea as far away as possible from all the high-rise properties and businesses behind the beach, and to keep the tourists coming. Just four years ago, Ocean City got $11.1 million from the Treasury to replenish the beach.

Taxpayers who have never been to Ocean City have contributed to its continued existence for years.

And most of us would be OK with that if not for OC’s ridiculous opposition to a wind farm. Just as officials argue that beach replenishment benefits many — property owners and visitors — we argue that wind turbines benefit an even greater number. There should be a quid pro quo here, a conditional grant of future federal funds for sand: If Ocean City wants our help, then Ocean City should show some concern for the common good.

Given his impulsive nature, his ridiculously hostile attitude toward Canada, his America Firstiness and his use of the Justice Department against perceived enemies, this seems like a perfect issue for Trump: Curtailing the industrial harvest of menhaden in the Chesapeake Bay and coastal Atlantic.

I know: Expecting Trump to defend a natural resource — in this case, the most important fish in the ocean — seems ridiculous.

But, given the four givens I listed above, you can see why the issue might appeal to him. They’re all the wrong reasons to take action, but that’s exactly how Trump rolls.

A year ago on Truth Social, Trump posted a video that claimed a foreign company with an industrial fishing operation in Virginia needed to be stopped from harvesting menhaden for the Omega-3 market. The company, based in New Brunswick, was taking too much menhaden out of the bay and ocean, conservationists in the video argued, and that left an insufficient amount of forage for the fish, whales, dolphins and birds that need it to survive.

Menhaden, also known as pogie or bunker, is a small, oily fish that swims in massive schools. It has been called the most important fish in the Atlantic because tuna, rockfish (or striped bass), whales and dolphins feed on it. Eagles and ospreys do as well.

One company, operating out of Reedville, Va., takes menhaden by the ton for the “reduction market,” where it’s reduced to over-the-counter fish oil supplements, pet food, livestock feed and feed for farmed fish. It’s big business, with Omega Protein the largest operation left.

Conservationists and recreational anglers argue that menhaden harvesting by Omega Protein, owned by Canada-based Cooke Inc., is in part responsible for declining numbers of rockfish and osprey.

Rockfish numbers have been in a prolonged slump, forcing Maryland to further reduce the recreational fishing season and make off limits the Chesapeake’s prime spawning areas in spring. Meanwhile, osprey chicks are starving at unprecedented levels, according to a recent study cited by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, raising more concerns that the industrial harvests of menhaden in Virginia have deprived the birds of a primary food source.

Though regulated by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the menhaden harvest has been the source of debate and controversy for years. The company that does the harvesting says, in following the commission’s limits, it is not harming the fishery. Conservationists say conditions in the Chesapeake and Atlantic suggest otherwise.

Whit Fosburgh, of the Forage Fish Campaign, notes that the ASMFC “botched the science” five years ago, setting limits way too high and causing an overharvest that resulted in a 37% drop in the stock since the last assessment in 2022. That, says Fosburgh, requires a stronger correction than the one the commission ordered last fall. (The current coastwide menhaden catch limit is 412 million pounds annually, down from 515 million pounds.)

The commission did not go far enough, Fosburgh says, negating any real reduction in the harvest.

Also in that camp is Allison Colden, Maryland executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation: “Just as we were confident in increasing the total allowable catch when the science says we should, we need to be as willing to take reductions when the science indicates that that’s warranted.”

The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, also advocating for limits on menhaden, says the harvest should be cut by 50% to stop the collapse of the rockfish population on the East Coast: “While anglers in northern Atlantic coastal waters, especially off of New York, observed a robust rise in menhaden and their predators such as striped bass, bluefin tuna and humpback whales for several years, numbers diminished starting in 2024. The previous rise in nearshore fish populations was partly due to coastal protections for these essential forage fish – now implemented by every Atlantic state except Virginia.”

Last year, Virginia sportsmen called on Trump to protect menhaden, and Trump appeared sympathetic. He posted a video in which anglers claimed that Canadians were responsible for the declining populations of menhaden.

As to the Canadian connection to this operation, there was a lawsuit filed in New York over that issue a few years ago, with plaintiffs claiming the companies engaged in the East Coast menhaden industry had not been truthful about the citizenship of their owners. But Ocean Harvesters, the outfit that sells its catch to Omega Protein, argued that it is owned and operated by Americans, and based in Virginia. A judge tossed the lawsuit.

“The court never made a ruling on the merits of the question [of] whether Ocean Harvesters was improperly controlled by a foreign entity,” says Brendon DeMay, the attorney who brought the case. “That issue remains to be resolved.”

Maybe Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Justice Department could resolve it. And then there’s the Cooke connection to Omega Protein. If Trump wants to take his fight with Canada into international waters, there seems to be room for it.

But, who am I kidding?

Whatever instinct Trump had to take executive action on behalf of the menhaden fishery, it has either flown or been talked out of him.

Besides, Trump has bigger fish to fry — his ballroom, his arch, the White House lawn, getting his name undeservedly on an aircraft carrier.

So it will be just as well if conservationists and scientists prevail and reduce the menhaden harvest until we see more rockfish in the Chesapeake, and fewer osprey chicks starving.

Follow the links in this column for more information about the Forage Fish Campaign and the efforts of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. The public is invited to comment on a possible reduction of the menhaden harvest by as much as 50%. The ASMFC expects to make a final decision at its annual meeting in November in Rhode Island.

I am sure the good people of Westernport, in Maryland’s Allegany County, need no reminding, but here it is, once more for emphasis: The Trump regime denied federal disaster relief after the May 2025 flood that blew through your town.

Trump got about 70% of the vote in Allegany County in 2024, and seven months later, FEMA rejected requests for help. Maryland is a blue state with a Black governor, and Trump wasn’t about to send any money here, even after a devastating flood.

I bring it up today as a reminder — to my fellow Marylanders and Americans everywhere — that Trump and his regime engage in the worst kind of spiteful partisan politics, dishing out even disaster relief based on election results.

While Trump approved aid for disasters in West Virginia (right across the river from Westernport) as well as Alaska, Nebraska and North Dakota — states that supported his reelection — he denied requests from Vermont and Illinois, states that, like Maryland, went for Kamala Harris.

This just in: Maryland’s senior senator, Chris Van Hollen, and Rep. April McClain Delaney, both Democrats, were scheduled to visit Westernport today to deliver a check for $675,000 to Potomac Fire Company No. 2.

Van Hollen, Delaney and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks secured that money in Congress to replace the fire company’s 33-year-old engine. The fire company also was flooded in the spring 2025 disaster.

People of Westernport: Trump abandoned you, but the Democrats in Congress are giving you money for a new fire engine. Is that a convincer, or what?

My parents lived through the Great Depression and it was a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress that saved them and saved the country. And my parents never forgot that: Voted for Democrats the rest of their lives.

Democrats came up with all of the programs that help ordinary people, from Head Start to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare and Obamacare. The record of Republicans on the social safety net is atrocious; they’ve done nothing but try to kill those programs.

Disaster relief is supposed to be bipartisan — that is, when your town gets flooded or your village burns, the federal government is supposed to help with the cleanup, no matter what the results of the last election show.

Trump has rejected that principle.

So maybe it’s time to rethink how you’ve been voting out there, in beautiful western Maryland — and everywhere in red America.

While Allegany gave Trump 70% of its 2024 vote, the county next door, Garrett, gave him 75%. What’s that getting you?

Meanwhile, Van Hollen and Delaney are also scheduled to make other stops out west, listed here just for emphasis:

— Frostburg State University, Allegany County, to highlight $2.8 million in direct federal funding for new equipment for the university’s planetarium and more STEM education opportunities for students.

— Garrett Regional Medical Center, in Oakland, to highlight a $1 million federal investment to help design new on-site radiation treatment services for cancer patients.

— Oakland Town Hall, to highlight $1 million in direct federal funding to replace the town’s aging water infrastructure. “This project will correct critical distribution failures, including low pressure and volume issues, and ensure compliance with the International Fire Code,” says a press release from Van Hollen’s staff. “This investment is in addition to $364,632 in federal funding from the Appalachian Regional Commission that the lawmakers helped secure last year to support upgrades to the town’s water system.”

So look, folks, I know you need no reminding, but here’s what the long record shows, once more for emphasis: Democrats mostly help, Republicans mostly don’t.

I don’t want to be seen as giving Trump any advice for improving outcomes, but he’d be a lot more effective as an evil president if he kept his mouth shut. Too often he says the quiet part out loud, making his stupid or sinister intentions completely transparent, and actionable.

Consider what’s happened in the matter of the new FBI Headquarters. Congress approved a Biden administration plan to build it in Maryland — specifically, just outside of the federal district in Prince Georges County, the most populous majority-Black county in the country.

But the Trump regime rejected that plan and chose, instead, to move the FBI to an existing federal building in the District, claiming that such a plan would be more cost efficient. (As if anything about Trump and federal buildings has a record of cost efficiency.)

Given Trump’s desire to harm political opponents in any way possible — the record on that is crystal clear by now — the decision on the FBI HQ was obviously motivated by a desire for payback. Joe Biden beat Trump in blue Maryland by a million votes in 2020, and Kamala Harris took the state in 2024 by nearly the same amount. So Trump was in no mood to reward a Maryland county with a large Black population.

He could have quietly had a Project 2025 team of budget slashers convince the Republican-majority Congress that moving the FBI into the Reagan Building made a lot more fiscal sense. That actually would have been a normal thing to do.

Instead, Trump said the quiet part out loud.

“They were going to build an F.B.I. headquarters three hours away in Maryland, a liberal state,” he said, exaggerating the commute time by about two and a half hours. “We’re going to stop it.”

Well, that didn’t work out.

On Monday, a federal judge ruled that the Trump regime acted unlawfully; the federal government can’t simply scrap a plan approved by Congress and substitute a new plan that has not had congressional approval.

Said Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown: “This victory is about more than a building. It is about ensuring that when Congress makes a decision, the federal government cannot simply ignore it because they do not like the outcome. Congress made a promise. The Trump Administration tried to break it. Now, the jobs, investment, and opportunity Marylanders deserve are within reach.”

Will Maryland’s victory survive a Supreme Court test, assuming the case gets that far before Trump is gone? It should, but who knows?

In the meantime, however, this is another defeat for the Trump regime that should be savored. The basis for the ruling seems solid; it’s all about upholding rules and process, the constitutional power of Congress over that of the executive.

But Trump, with his big mouth, added a layer of petty partisan politics that planted a big red flag in an otherwise ordinary story about the location of a federal building.

Obviously, this was the regime’s attempt to deprive a blue state (and Biden) of a win. Would it still have looked that way had Trump never opened his mouth? Probably. But it would not have been so obvious, inviting scrutiny and perhaps judicial sympathy.

We’re all still getting used to Trump’s open corruption and blatant attempts at political retribution. We’ve never seen anything like it. But such galling transparency is a good thing; it makes clear what’s afoot from the start and feeds momentum for the Big Beautiful Backlash that’s coming.

We started the day with a good laugh: The Guardian pointing out that Trump took big credit for something Joe Biden did: “The White House flooded social media on Saturday with an image of Donald Trump showing off the recent Washington Post headline: ‘Prescription drug prices record sharpest drop in more than 60 years,’ but failed to mention that experts cited in the article actually attributed the price drop to Joe Biden, not Trump.”

Trump held up a printout of the Post story for reporters, pointed to the headline and said, “Prescription drug prices down more than at any time over 60 years,” he said. “What else do I have to say?”

He might have mentioned that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 required Medicare to negotiate the prices it pays Big Pharma for a bunch of popular and expensive prescription drugs. The first price reductions from that measure took effect this year. Trump had nothing to do with it. Not a single Republican in Congress voted for the Inflation Reduction Act.

Similarly, many Republican senators and representatives took credit for infrastructure projects in their home districts though most of them voted against Biden’s big infrastructure funding bill in 2021. Nancy Pelosi referred to the hypocrisy as “Vote No and Take The Dough.”

Also last week: Trump tried to take credit for a downward national trend in crime that commenced well before he took office.

The confederacy of Trump sycophants in the cabinet and Congress usually play a different form of this game. They usually blame Biden for problems that Trump has either created or for problems that Trump inherited and made worse.

Just last weekend, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, blamed Biden policies during the pandemic for an erosion in trust in public health officials. Of course, Trump, not Biden, was president during the outbreak of the deadly virus, and it was RFK Jr., the anti-vaccine crackpot Trump put in charge of the nation’s health, who called the life-saving Covid vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”

It appears that everyone in the Trump cult, from cabinet secretaries to media reps to Republican members of Congress, are trained to either engage in Biden Blame or lie about what Biden did while in office.

The former president’s name is frequently invoked by officials of the regime during TV interviews and hearings of congressional committees.

And it’s sickening.

Inflation and consumer prices were bad at some points during the Biden presidency, and the southern border was a mess for too long. But, by the time Trump came into office, things were improving. You can look it up. All things considered, Trump’s inheritance was good, but he’s clearly made conditions worse, not better.

On the immigration front: It’s a fact that illegal border crossings surged into the millions under Biden in 2022 and 2023, but his better-late-than-never efforts to curb it resulted in a 107% increase in apprehensions during his last year in office. Trump inherited a relatively quiet border, and many Americans initially gave him credit for it.

Since then, however, Trump’s approval rating on immigration has dropped significantly, due to the aggressive and highly visible ICE operations. Millions of Americans are outraged that Trump unleashed masked brutes to hunt down, detain and deport workaday immigrants and not just the “worst of the worst,” as promised during the 2024 campaign. Based on polling, even a considerable number of Trump supporters apparently now believe that ICE has gone too far, and yet the patrols of masked officers continue under the banner of mass deportation.

But the border is not the main focus of those who engage in Biden Blame. The economy is.

So let’s go over the key points, as examined by FactCheck.org, a research project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Inflation hit hard during Biden’s time after a decade when it was very low. The world emerged from the pandemic in 2021 and Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Both were major factors in a significant rise in consumer prices and in the price of gasoline. Home prices rose 37.4%. The price inflation during Biden’s time meant the weekly earnings for most American workers shrank by 4%. Inflation cooled slowly in the last year of Biden’s term. It was reported at 3% when Trump took office. It was 3.4% in July, if you can believe the government under Trump.

• On the upside, the economy under Biden regained all the jobs lost during the pandemic and about six million more, for a total of about 16 million. Unemployment was at 6.6% when Biden took office after Trump’s first term, but fell to an annual rate of 4.1%, well below the historical average. It is still 4.1%, if you can believe the government under Trump.

• Two more facts about jobs: Since Trump took office in January 2025, average monthly job creation has fallen from 122,000 per month in 2024 to 33,000 per month in 2025-26. Specifically, in manufacturing, Biden added 625,000 jobs. In Trump’s second term, some 75,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost.

• Under Biden, the economy grew by at least 2.5% each year, with real gross domestic product growth of 2.8% in 2024. Meanwhile, GDP was 1.5% in the second quarter of 2026, if you can believe the government under Trump.

• More people — about 1.2 million more — gained health insurance during Biden’s time. Meanwhile, between 15 and 17 million Americans are expected to lose health insurance by 2034 under the One Big Beautiful Bill passed by Republicans and signed by Trump.

• The nationwide violent crime and property crime rates dropped during Biden’s time.

• All three major U.S. stock indexes set new records. The S&P 500 climbed 57.8%.

• The median household income, when factoring in inflation, went up by $2,150. The official poverty rate declined.

Biden’s term had serious problems — border crossings, an inflation spike that many Americans had never before experienced. But, on the whole, and considering the circumstances — pandemic recovery, the Russian invasion of Ukraine — America generally benefited from Biden’s leadership and that of congressional Democrats who managed to pass major legislation.

So when you hear Republicans make a negative reference to Joe Biden, it’s because they’ve been trained to do so — and because they can offer nothing positive about Trump that would survive a fact check. Polls show majorities of Americans see that; they do not blame Biden for the current mess we’re in.

The Trump regime and its collaborators at FOX like nothing more than an opportunity to exploit a tragedy involving immigrants — undocumented immigrants, in particular. When, for instance, an undocumented immigrant is found at the wheel of a truck in a deadly accident, the right-wing media goes crazy and Trump calls for a crackdown.

As with violent crime and the housing shortage, the Trump regime wants Americans to believe that immigrants are disproportionately the cause of our problems when, in fact, they are far from it.

Federal records show that non-citizen truck drivers cause a very small percentage of fatal commercial truck accidents — less than 1% of the annual total.

But such facts do not keep the Trump regime from escalating its racist fear mongering.

Trump pledged to rid the nation’s roads of outlaw immigrant truckers and make Americans safe.

With his ethically-challenged transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, leading the righteous charge, some 200,000 immigrant truckers began losing their commercial drivers’ licenses this year, though most had met their state requirements, clocking hundreds of hours of training.

Duffy has threatened to withhold millions in federal funds from states that did not comply with his demands to revoke thousands of CDLs from immigrants who do not speak enough English. And he’s taken his crusade against evil immigrant truckers to his old employer, FOX. They love that story over there.

“Too many American lives have been lost in completely avoidable accidents because illegal aliens have been granted commercial driver’s licenses to drive trucks and 18-wheelers on America’s roadways,” said Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary.

You see what they’re doing here — blaming accidents on someone’s immigration status, thereby serving Trump’s feverish desire to marginalize and deport as many foreign-born people as possible.

Duffy brags about the thousands of CDLs he has forced states to revoke, and he keeps demanding more. This week, a coalition of 21 states (listed below) and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits against Duffy’s DOT for demanding records containing personal information, including Social Security numbers, of millions of drivers.

There seems to be no limit to the regime’s obsession with immigrants.

Which leads me back, as always, to the question that many of my fellow citizens have asked: How is this making America great?

The fixation on deporting immigrants — documented, undocumented, refugee, asylum seeker — does not serve the national interest. It certainly does not serve commerce and our ailing economy. Duffy’s staff at DOT appears to have made sidelining thousands of truck drivers a priority — and at a time when trucking companies are looking for more help.

It’s the same with scientists. According to the Partnership for Public Service, some 95,000 people — 10,000 of them with doctorates in various fields — have left government scientific agencies during Trump’s second term so far. How is losing so many scientists making America great? How can it not damage the country’s intellectual infrastructure, our ability to solve problems, cure illnesses, make technological advances, tackle climate change and prevent tragedies?

I’m sorry to have brought you down this lane again — where we survey the extensive damage caused by Trump and the saboteurs, racists and lying lackeys he recruited to run and ruin the government. But I’m still shocked by the scope of it. All these actions, motivated by either racism or resentment, result in a country less diverse, less equal and less powerful.

While Trump can do a lot more damage in the time remaining in his second term, a Big Beautiful Blue Backlash in November’s elections will at least slow him down and start us on the long road back to sanity.

Bringing the lawsuits against DOT are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, as well as the state of Pennsylvania.

A few months ago in Nashville, a man who illegally demolished a historic building was ordered to rebuild it as close to the original as possible — and he agreed to do it.

“You can expect my full cooperation,” a contrite Ross Condit told the Metro Historic Zoning Commissioners, the body that ordered him to restore the former home of The Groove record store, in East Nashville, to its historic best.

According to Nashville Banner, Condit apologized for his action. He said he did not realize that the historic nature of the 1921 building, in the Lockeland Springs-East End Neighborhood, required proof of the need for demolition and special permission to knock it down.

Imagine Trump saying what Ross Condit told the Nashville commissioners: “I’ve embarrassed myself, I’ve embarrassed my family, and I’m very humbled by this experience. You can expect my full cooperation.”

Of course, the never-humbled Trump would say no such thing, not ever, with regard to his destruction of the East Wing of the White House, a similarly illegal action.

This American taxpayer believes — and, based on what I’ve seen in national polls, I’m not alone — that Trump’s illegal action should be completely reversed. Not only should construction of Trump’s ballroom cease, but he should be forced personally to fund the reconstruction of the East Wing.

Never happen?

We need to stop thinking that way, accepting all of Trump’s actions as within his authority and irreversible. They’re not.

Who thought the unilateral demolition of the East Wing would ever happen? And yet, it did — in the full sight of the world.

So, given the federal appeals court ruling of August 7, we should organize a lawsuit to force Trump to spend some of his grifted gains on restoring the East Wing.

In a 2-1 decision, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a lower court’s ruling that Trump had no legal authority to raze and replace sections of the White House without congressional approval.

“Each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence,” the judges ruled. “The President has no — and claims no — constitutionally assigned authority over that property, which is designed and maintained for the use of all Presidents, current and future, and for the American people.”

A couple more sentences from the ruling: “Congress specifically appropriated the funds that were used to build the original East and West Wings of the White House. We are aware of no instance in American history in which a President unilaterally and using privately collected funds demolished substantial portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and American taxpayers paid for. Until now.”

Of course, Trump will go crying to the Supreme Court that he should have the power to do what he likes to the White House, claiming it as a matter of national security. That’s been the BS argument all along. It would be a shame if the Roberts court let Trump get away with this obscenity.

But, even if it did, there would be room for a Democratic Congress to assert its authority — firmly and clearly — over what happens to the historic buildings in Washington.

As a Nashville resident, Melanee Bandy, told the zoning board in the Groove case: “This moment is critical. If you let this outrageous disregard go unpunished, every future owner will know they can also do the same without accountability. Your guidelines will mean literally nothing.”

Will it surprise anyone to learn that Pete Hegseth’s missile attacks on boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea likely resulted in the deaths of innocent men? And will any American citizen capable of critical thinking be shocked to learn that Trump’s claims about the effectiveness of the strikes are exaggerations and probably lies?

No, and of course no: When it comes to the Trump regime, no allegation of lawlessness strains credulity.

As of July 1, there had been 66 boat strikes with an estimated death toll of 221, according to the Pentagon. But Secretary Hegseth and the defense establishment has not provided the justification for the attacks, claiming the legal opinion it received is classified.

So, we don’t know what criteria is used to determine if the Trump regime has good, verifiable reasons to target the boats. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights have gone to court to make public the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that the Trump administration is using to justify its campaign of lethal strikes on civilian boats.

The president can’t use the military to target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. But the Trump regime claims we’re at war with narcoterrorists, and anything goes to keep cocaine from being smuggled into the country — even if that means summary execution from the sky.

Last September, when the military was first used to blow up the boats, the whole operation looked performative — an attempt to to demonstrate some macho, authoritarian concept of presidential power.

The Trump regime decided that using the Coast Guard to stop marine drug trafficking — boarding boats, seizing contraband — was too old-fashioned, too slow; better to fire Hellfire missiles first and ask questions later. Hegseth, who came to the defense secretariat from television, probably thought the optics — videos of long boats exploding — would carry the day.

But the Trumpian belief that Americans are stupid — or that we’re easily distracted by things that blow up — doesn’t hold here. Polls showed wide opposition to the boat strikes almost from the start. There are two reasons for that:

1. A majority does not believe anything Trump or his cabinet members say about anything, from the “peace negotiations” with Iran to the cause of the Reflecting Pool problems.

2. Most Americans understand that the outright killing of citizens, even those suspected of criminality, is a crime.

Now there’s growing evidence that Hegseth has had the U.S. military engaged in an illegal operation with zero effect on the problem it was intended to solve.

Based on what he learned as a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Tim Kaine, the Virginia Democrat, recently concluded that Trump and Hegseth have the U.S. military engaged in murder.

“A careful review of the available evidence suggests that the United States has killed individuals who are not involved in narcotrafficking,” Kaine wrote in a letter to Trump. “They are murder victims.”

Kaine’s review found that Trump’s directive for the operation, the OLC legal opinion and other documents “makes clear that the United States is engaged in violent and fatal attacks against people far beyond those whom the OLC opinion claimed could be lawfully targeted.”

In addition, Kaine wrote, even the Drug Enforcement Administration reports that Hegseth’s boat attacks “had no effect on the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.” The Washington Post did some good reporting on this, undercutting Trump’s brag that “drugs coming in by ocean, sea, by water was cut 97%.”

Of course, another problem is the type of drug supposedly being stopped from entering the country by boat. Cocaine might be in general use, but it’s not the cause of most overdose deaths. That would be fentanyl, according to the CDC. That synthetic opioid has been the leading cause of ODs for years now, and most of the illegal fentanyl enters the country over land from Mexico, not by sea from South America.

Additionally, overdose deaths have finally been in decline these last few years, before Trump took office again.

Of course, drug addiction remains a problem, but working against it with Hellfire missiles makes little sense. Those who actually have life-destroying addictions create the demand for drugs. They need help, and public funds are better spent on them than on drone attacks in the Caribbean.

“People across the country, politicians across the aisle, and the families of victims have been demanding answers as to how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of civilians,” said Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “The Trump administration has murdered over 210 civilians with no sound legal or moral basis. At a minimum, the administration must disclose to the American people why it thinks this killing spree is lawful.”

A killing spree funded by American taxpayers.

Did you ever think a president and defense secretary would be accused of using our country’s military this way — as a police force that makes no arrests, gathers no evidence for trial and, instead, kills suspects outright?

No. I didn’t either. But, when it comes to the Trump regime, no allegation of lawlessness strains credulity.

In a wide-ranging conversation this week, Rep. Kweisi Mfume spoke with me about what he expects from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform — he’s a member — should Democrats regain a majority in the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.

But this Q&A with the Baltimore Democrat starts with some important perspective on the ascent of Democratic Socialists in congressional primaries this year. The media and right-wing narratives of a radical shift and struggle within the Democratic Party are wrong, Mfume says. Does anyone remember what happened in 2010?

DR: We’re three months away from the midterms. I sense — and I’ve been careful to avoid wishful thinking — that there’s a blue backlash coming. I sense that people are really fed up. I look at the polling on Trump and see erosion among Republicans to some extent, and certainly among independents. But some people tell me they don’t think the populace is outraged enough. I say, “You can march in the street, but I don’t think there’s much more you can do until November, to really exert your power.” What is your sense of it? Is that wishful thinking, or do you think it’s coming?

KM: I think it’s coming. I try to talk to a lot of [members of Congress] in the Midwest, just to kind of remove myself from my Baltimore thing . . .

DR: Your Baltimore bubble?

KM: Yeah, because the rest of the country is different in a lot of respects — particularly in terms of values or issues or priorities — and I get a sense that people are just quietly outraged. Who was it that talked about the “silent majority,” Nixon?

DR: Yes, President Nixon, a term he used in a speech about public sentiment and the Vietnam War.

KM: I think there’s a silent majority out there that’s Democrats who don’t jump up and down, Independents who stand back and watch what’s going on and measure it, and Republicans who are afraid that they are losing, or have lost, their party. I think that’s the silent majority, and I really believe that it’s going to evidence itself on Election Day.

DR: That would form a real backlash to Trump.

KM: One of the things I find interesting has been the way the national press, for a large part, has continued to talk about the [electoral success of] Democratic progressives or Democratic socialists and how the party is falling apart because of that. And I find it amazing that that’s the narrative I hear over and over again.

DR: I don’t think the rise of socialist Democrats is bad. They mostly reflect what’s going on in the country: People are fed up. Why don’t we have Medicare for all at this point? Why are we still cutting health benefits for people?

KM: I turned on the TV [Tuesday] night to look at some election results in Michigan and Virginia and elsewhere, and the recurring theme was: “What do the Democrats do now? Is this the end of the party? Is this group [socialists] taking over the party?” To that, I would say just remember, you’ve got about nine persons who identify as Democratic socialists who’ve won primaries [for Congress]. Maybe it’s eight, now that I think about it. And I remind people that in the 2010 midterms, the conservative Tea Party swept through with 60 seats. So 60 versus eight is a big difference. Sixty is taking over your party.

(Note: The Tea Party movement, a reaction to the Obama presidency, helped Republicans gain 63 seats in the House in 2010. They later formed the House Freedom Caucus to push Republican leaders to the right.)

DR: I hadn’t thought of that comparison.

KM: I just believe that the Democratic Party has always been a party — and I hate to use the “big tent” theme — that wrestled with itself, and in a good way. And it has welcomed every aspect of Democrats. I don’t see that as something new or different.

DR: If Democrats regain the House in January, what should the priorities be?

KM: Well, I think the first thing is to put the brakes on a number of things that have spawned as a result of Trump executive orders. I mean, when you look at the number of people in Maryland alone that have lost positions with the federal government, or when you look at the small amount of money that has been coming into the state — and I’m speaking now parochially as a member of the state delegation — those things are important. But what I find from speaking with my colleagues around the country, it’s important to a lot of us because of the devastation that has occurred and the amount of money taken out of the economy that heretofore would have gone to families to take care of themselves. I think we have to find a way to pump the brakes on those executive orders. We have to do that right away and stop the hemorrhaging. It’s been going on for the last year and a half. It’s unbelievable the way things have turned out in this society as a result of this president, who I think is the worst president ever, at least in my memory and lifetime. … There’s got to be an effort also to, I think, simultaneously go after the corruption. We need only to look at the reflecting pool and the fact that that was a $14 million, no-bid contract that went to someone the president likes, and it turned out to be a boondoggle. That kind of corruption is just a small thing. Congress has to have oversight. As a member of the oversight committee, that’s one of the first things that we want to do — whether it’s cryptocurrency and Bitcoin or the way his sons have profited, or the arrangements overseas with the Saudis. All of the money that this administration’s family has taken in has got to be looked at very, very closely.

DR: The committee can make referrals for prosecution, correct?

KM: Absolutely, and the committee retains subpoena power. It’s one of the few committees that has that, and we’ve got a good group of people on that committee. … Where there are illegalities, they’ve got to be prosecuted. And I can tell you that the oversight committee has been waiting now for the last 18 months to be able to do its job. Because Republicans control the committee, you can’t get anything started. All you can do is kind of fight back, push back, throw a punch and bring attention publicly to what’s going on. And, even then, good luck with that because Fox News and so many other [right-wing media] just choose not to to look at things.

DR: The scope of Trump corruption is formidable. It will take up a lot of the committee’s time.

KM: I don’t want to say we all think alike, but we are all alike in wanting to root out corruption and stop it because it’s hurting Americans. … Massive oversight is going to occur both in the House and in the Senate. I’m absolutely certain of that.

DR: Over the weekend, did you see the Times story about the purchase of icebreaker ships?

KM: No.

DR: Trump wants 11 ships that break through Arctic ice, but even the Coast Guard says we don’t need them. And apparently Trump made some deal with Finland for $7 billion no-bid contracts to build these ships.

KM: And you know you can’t make this stuff up. Honestly, every week there’s something new that you just can’t make up.

DR: Regarding the cuts made in the Republicans’ so-called Big Beautiful Bill: Is your office hearing from constituents about Medicaid cuts? Has that hurt the folks you represent?

KM: Well, we were hearing initial fears before anything took effect because people were looking at the probable impact on their lives, and we have been flooded since they have started, and they’re calling left and right. And they know that I’m an original co-sponsor of Medicare For All, so they look, I think, to me and others who are on that bill to find a way to turn things around. Unfortunately, we are just handicapped because numerically it’s very difficult to pass something that will stop those things.

DR: More like impossible.

KM: So we continue to speak out. I mean, every day there are dozens of us around the country who are in the House who believe in the right to health care, speaking out over and over again. It’s way at the top of the list of people’s fears because they recognize that, without the ability to pay for their health care, they and their loved ones are in a very very vulnerable position.

DR: This is a good place to ask this question: I frequently hear people say, “Well, the Democrats aren’t doing anything. Why don’t they do something?” And I’m sure you’ve heard this . . .

KM: Every day.

DR: I hear Democrats speaking out all the time. I follow the Maryland delegation and members of Congress from other states. But what do you say when people tell you that?

KM: Well, the first thing I ask is: What would you like for us specifically to do?

DR: I’m sure the response is, “Get rid of Trump,” right?

KM: Right. “Get rid of Trump” and, “How come there’s no impeachment resolution?” So you explain that there was an impeachment resolution some years ago, but it didn’t work, and it didn’t work because the numbers just didn’t come together. But people assume that, if you’re in the opposition party, you can get rid of the president, and you really can’t. But that’s what they say: “Get rid of Donald Trump.” I tell people I’m all for that. But there’s a process to do it, starting at the ballot box. While Maryland is a nice blue state, there are other places around the country that don’t look like us, don’t think like us. They have a different set of priorities than Maryland, and those are the ones that continue to prop the president up. He’s not there just because he wants to be there. There are people who feel strongly about him and continue to give him the power.

DR: There’s also widespread fear of Trump within his party.

KM: They are scared to death. Just look at the two senators who caved over the weekend.

Note: Republican Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina demanded assurances from Todd Blanche in return for their support of Blanche’s nomination to be the next Attorney General. Both senators are leaving in January and could have bucked Trump’s nominee — Cornyn lost his bid for re-election and Tillis decided not to seek another term — but chose to confirm Blanche.

DR: You’re talking about Cornyn and Tillis.

KM: After saying that they were demanding assurances from Blanche, they issued some weak statement and a letter, which is not binding by law and doesn’t bind the acting attorney general to anything . . .

DR: They caved. If those two guys can’t stand up to Trump, no one will.

KM: Yes, they’re on their way out.

DR: On another matter: You’ve taken an interest in what’s been going on with Republican attacks on the Smithsonian Institution, and specifically the African American history museum. I wanted to talk about that because they’re not just trying to rewrite history. It’s more like washing away history, erasing it.

KM: Rep. Jonathan Jackson [Democrat of Illinois] and I and several national ministers led a march and demonstration and press conference about a month ago, right at the Smithsonian, when the [White House] released a voluminous report about why the Smithsonian is promoting woke culture. We knew it was just a matter of time before the president would start some foolishness. So we did that protest there, and in my committee on oversight, there was a hearing on the Smithsonian. I got a little emotional at the hearing, to say the least, because I’ve seen this story before. It’s an old playbook, and it starts with lies and it ends with lies. The president, right after that hearing, ordered signs put up all around the Smithsonian, telling visitors to “beware [because] the facts and the information, the artifacts and the history that you are about to see upon entering are not accurate.” That’s a paraphrase, but he put those signs up around the Smithsonian. And we believe that he’s going after two of the directors — in particular, Lonnie Bunch, [secretary of the Smithsonian and former director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture] and Dr. Anthea Hartig [director of the National Museum of American History].

DR: I saw some of Hartig’s testimony. She was badgered with questions about exhibits that address things that Republicans hate. It made for soundbites that play to the MAGA base, culture war stuff because they don’t have anything else to offer.

KM: It’s a vicious, deliberate and really devilish kind of approach because all these things divide the country. I mean, every little thing I see Trump doing is divisive. It’s division and it’s more division, and it angers people. I mean, to remove Jackie Robinson out of archives at the Army, even though he served in the Army long before he became who he was — that’s crazy. It’s division, more division, and still more division.

DR: It’s white men offended by a public history that reflects poorly on white patriarchy. Trump is upset that the Smithsonian shows “how bad slavery was.”

KM: Donald Trump makes no bones about it. He does this right out in the open, so everybody can see. It’s a damn shame the way this guy has rewritten the presidency. Which always raises the larger question: Aren’t Republicans, to some extent, outraged, if not totally outraged, by a number of things that continue to happen? Their silence is deafening. My [Republican] colleagues, if I can use that word, in the House and in the Senate, ought to be ashamed of themselves.

The renewed attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci by Republican senators were disgusting — and, in the case of car salesman Bernie Moreno of Ohio, profane and disgusting — but they were not only about Fauci’s leadership during the pandemic.

Those attacks emanated from the “starve the beast” doctrine that goes back to Ronald Reagan — the cynical view that government does more harm than good, and every Republican must take a cudgel to the federal budget (except for defense spending) and oppose further taxing the rich, regulating business and protecting the environment.

And they must denigrate the government enough that it discourages Americans from serving in it.

It was Grover Norquist, a conservative consultant who, at Reagan’s behest, came up with the GOP’s anti-tax pledge.

“I don’t want to abolish government,” Norquist famously said. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

You can draw a direct line from Norquist to Russell Vought, the Christian Nationalist and architect of Project 2025 who today serves as Trump’s budget director. It was Vought who said: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.”

More than 300,000 federal workers have left or been forced out of their jobs since Trump took office again and unleashed Vought and Elon Musk. Their cuts appeared to be random, but were actually directed at government programs conservatives hate — those that address climate change, protect national lands, regulate a wide array of businesses, serve marginalized communities and address racism.

And the brain-drains caused by these cuts — at the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice and the FBI, the Environmental Protection Agency — have already been substantial.

So that’s why I see last week’s attacks on Fauci as part of the five-decade scheme to not only trim the size of government but reduce the desire of Americans to seek careers in it.

What’s the message from the Senate majority? If you’re smart and skilled, take your professional ambitions elsewhere, maybe even to another country; we have no need for you in the federal government.

It’s hard to measure just yet, but the Trump regime has likely delivered a hard blow to the spirit of public service — the desire of patriotic Americans to take careers in making their fellow citizens healthier, safer, better educated, better housed and better prepared for the effects of climate change.

Trump has broken the trust that such patriots could have rewarding careers in government service without fear of political interference or retribution.

Denigrating the federal workforce, as Republicans have done, will make the future employment of dedicated, competent government workers — from federal prosecutors to Medicare managers to NIH scientists — difficult.

It will take a renewed effort to recruit competent Americans to fill the depleted ranks.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, elected chairman of the National Governors Association over the weekend, has for years pushed paid public service as a way of getting young people employed and engaged in their communities. Scaled up, his ideas could also be a way of rebuilding the spirit of public service.

Moore campaigned on it in 2022 and came into office with a plan for a first-in-the-nation service year program, paying Maryland high school graduates ($15 an hour with a $6,000 award at completion) to work in public service posts before moving on to jobs or college.

The state’s Service Year Option became law in 2023.

One of the goals, Moore said, was to “strengthen civic bonds, restore a spirit of community and call on our fellow citizens to get to know each other, create new friendships and new partnerships and not simply retreat to our corners of political ideology or partisan talking points.”

In Oklahoma City this weekend, Moore launched “Service United,” his signature initiative as NGA chairman, with $10 million from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation and the Schultz Family Foundation to create and expand paid service programs across the country.

Service United is modeled after Maryland’s program.

“This initiative,” Moore said, “reminds us that service can bring people together to solve problems, bridge divides and build a stronger future.”

It’s refreshing to hear a political leader speak of public service and the common good, essentially presenting a counteroffensive to the persistent Republican attacks.

“At a time of deep division, I firmly believe that service will save us,” Moore said.

It will be interesting to see if Republican governors have any enthusiasm for Moore’s plan.

Even if not, the 47-year-old Moore has a good theme to preach as his national profile rises. Young people need to hear the call, an important first step in rebuilding the spirit of public service that for five decades Republicans have been trying to crush.

This photo from Reuters went viral on Fourth of July weekend: A DC Metro car full of masked members of the white nationalist Patriot Front, and seated alone among them, appearing poised, 33-year-old Bernita Bowlding — a disturbing tableau of the USA on its 250th anniversary.

Bowlding’s brother gave the Grio an interview about his sister’s experience two days later.

Also on the train that day: Roswell Encina, someone familiar to Baltimoreans from his years working with Dr. Carla Hayden at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. After working for Dr. Hayden when she was Librarian of Congress — until Trump fired her for no reason — Encina is now president and CEO of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. He spoke to the Guardian about his experience on the Fourth.

Cheney Orr and Nathan Howard were the photographers for Reuters, and Getty Images photographer Finn Gomez captured the photo of Encina during that ride.

Here’s my column about the white nationalists’ July 4th March through Washington: Fortunately, most young patriots march without masks

Now more than ever, it’s hard to understand how anyone endowed with rationality, integrity and decency — anyone who embraces democracy, respects science, values competent government and despises greed and corruption — could support Trump.

Fortunately, most of us don’t.

Just as it was depressing (an American tragedy) to contemplate the 77 million votes he received in November 2024, it’s reassuring to see Trump’s abysmal approval ratings after the first 18 months of his second term.

The latest Quinnipiac University poll, conducted July 23-27, found that only 32 percent of registered voters approve of Trump’s performance in office. Fifty-eight percent disapproved, and 10 percent of people in the survey did not offer an opinion.

Regarding the latter: How does any voter not have an opinion of Trump by now?

I suspect the “no opinion” group is composed of Trumpers too ashamed to admit they voted for this guy but no longer support him. So I’m going to take half of them — 5 percent — and move them to the “disapprove” group.

That means Trump’s approval rating could actually be below 30%.

That would put Trump where he deserves to be — in the historic company of Richard Nixon just before his Watergate resignation, George W. Bush during the war in Iraq and the 2008 financial crisis, and Jimmy Carter amid the 1979 energy crisis and high inflation, when he scolded us for that mess (“the malaise”).

Add it up — a stupid and costly war with Iran, blatant corruption at a scale never seen before, a demented focus on political revenge, an overly aggressive purge of immigrants, an obnoxious obsession with monuments to himself and callous indifference to the cost of living — and there’s no way Trump’s approval should be above 30 percent.

Some of our fellow Americans just can’t let go, even as they face the consequences of Trump’s actions at the gas pump and in the supermarket.

Older Americans, the millions who enjoy the benefits of Medicare, just heard that Trump is eliminating a Part D (pharmaceutical) subsidy that is sure to raise rates early next year. Making this announcement a few months before the mid-term elections — doing anything to upset seniors — further demonstrates the Trump regime’s obliviousness. It’s almost as if they’re intentionally trying to sink the ship.

And that’s another thing, perhaps hard to measure: The extent to which Americans have come to believe that Trump, by executive action, has damaged the country and poses a further threat to the quality of life here — from his dismissal of climate change as wildfires rage to the outbreak of diseases that had been under control.

Aggregation of polls show that a majority of Americans are pessimistic about the future under Trump. But about 35 percent think we’re on the right track, a percentage that roughly matches his job approval rating over time.

So, just spit-ballin’ here, I’d say there’s a stubborn 25 to 30 percent that stick with Trump no matter what.

Allow me to suggest that they might be suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome, when hostages become emotionally attached to their captors and show fear, mistrust and anger toward authorities; hostages will even defend the hostage-taker.

That might explain why, in the latest Quinnipiac Poll, 76% of Republican voters said they approved of Trump’s job performance.

Hey, it’s just an hypothesis, a little pop psychology.

Please follow along as I test my hypothesis against the conditions, described in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, necessary for Stockholm Syndrome to occur.

1. “The hostage is isolated from other people and is exposed only to the captor’s perspective of the situation.” That would be true for Republicans who still believe everything Trump says and/or the millions who just watch FOX News all day. The right-wing propaganda machine runs 24-7.

2. “The hostage-taker threatens to kill the hostage, and the hostage takes the threat seriously.” Trump certainly continues to wield power and “kill” political ambitions. Certain Republican candidates have lost primary elections because they dared to cross Trump in some way. However, that would mostly explain his hold on GOP politicians, not voters.

3. “A hostage cannot escape and depends on the hostage-taker for life.” That’s not the case with Trump and Republicans. Some of them might feel they are under the MAGA spell and trapped in a cult, but most know they can just walk away from this guy whenever they like. He’s half-asleep most of the time.

4. “The hostage views the hostage-taker as kind so long as the hostage-taker is not abusive to the hostage.” Hard to imagine that any American would attach the word “kind” to Trump. In fact, those in the MAGA cult like to think of Trump as tough and nasty, and extremely unkind to immigrants. The MAGA probably cannot recognize when he abuses them; indeed, many have voted for Trump against their own interests.

So, no, doesn’t appear to be Stockholm Syndrome.

I guess it’s simply Trump Syndrome.

No matter how corrupt or incompetent he gets, Trump still can’t shake the hardcore MAGA. And that tracks with another poll just released: Significant majorities of MAGA voters say they would still support candidates accused of corruption, sexual abuse or domestic violence.

That’s disturbing as hell.

But cheer up, keep the math in mind and all things in perspective: The vast majority of Americans — possibly 70% of us — are rejecting Trump and Trumpism, and even more could follow. The big, beautiful backlash has started.

We get reports overnight on certain court rulings against the Trump regime — and there have been many — and wonder why there was such a legal battle in the first place.

Why, for instance, would the White House want to harm efforts to help children who faced or feared trauma at school?

And then you discover, as you might have suspected, that the Trump regime’s obsession with exorcising any reference to DEI in American life even includes cutting off mental health grants for public schools and the kids who attend them.

It’s sabotage of government for the common good.

Background: In 2018 and again in 2020, in the wake of deadly school shootings, Congress made a bipartisan decision to fund more mental health services for children with $1 billion in grants for schools most in need, especially in low-income and rural communities.

“The programs have been an incredible success,” says Anthony Brown, the Maryland Attorney General and one of 15 state attorneys general who had to sue the U.S. Department of Education to keep it from cutting off the grants. “In their first year, the programs provided mental and behavioral health services to nearly 775,000 elementary and secondary students nationwide. Sampled projects showed real results: a 50% reduction in suicide risk at high-need schools, decreases in absenteeism and behavioral issues, and increases in positive student-staff engagement.”

But along came Trump and his DEI exorcists, led by budget chief and Christian nationalist Russell Vought. Trump signed executive orders directing federal agencies to eliminate DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and equity action plans in grants.

In April 2025, federal officials notified schools that their grants would be discontinued for their perceived support of DEI.

A court battle ensued, and the Trump regime went to great lengths to withhold funds for the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program and the School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program.

But, in Seattle on Tuesday, a federal judge blocked the Department of Education from another in its repeated attempts to cancel the grants. Essentially, U.S. District Judge Kymberly Evanson found that, under existing law, the Trump regime can’t impose its political priorities on grants approved before the DEI exorcism began.

From the judge’s 15-page opinion: “Because the department’s termination plan likely reflects an unexplained change in department policy, and the department’s plan likely fails to comply with its own regulations or the statutes identified in this section, and bases terminations on factors Congress did not intend the department to consider, the department’s termination plan is likely arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law and thus violates the [Administrative Procedure Act].”

According to Attorney General Brown’s office, Tuesday’s was the sixth ruling in the case against the Trump regime.

You can read a report from Courthouse News Service at this link.

In addition to Brown, attorneys general from these states fought the battle: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin.

Dan Rodricks is the former longtime columnist of The Baltimore Sun. He is now independent and reader-supported. To receive new posts, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Either way, we thank you. Please feel free to share Dan’s columns with friends.

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It’s not just lack of rainfall that causes drought that causes horrific wildfires. It’s AED — that is, atmospheric evaporative demand, or what climate scientists call “atmospheric thirst,” the rate at which ground moisture evaporates.

It was an American climatologist, C. W. Thornthwaite, and a British meteorologist, Howard Penman, who published early research on evaporation rates and established formulas to predict their effects on agriculture and natural resources. Those scientists of the 20th Century — Thornthwait died in 1963, Penman in 1984 — might be shocked by the acceleration of AED in the 21st Century.

AED has accelerated with global warming caused by climate change caused by human activity.

Research published last year in the British journal Nature found that drought severity has increased steadily worldwide since the start of the 20th Century. “Our findings suggest that AED has increased drought severity by an average of 40% globally,” researchers reported. “Not only are typically dry regions becoming drier but also wet areas are experiencing drying trends.”

Warm air is a primary factor in AED, sucking moisture from farm fields, forests, rivers, reservoirs and lakes. Winds bring dry air that absorbs more moisture. The sun plays a big part, too.

Because of the increase in temperatures globally, we are seeing longer droughts and more wildfires, like those in Spain and France, Canada and the U.S.

In five recent years (2018-2022), said the Nature article, areas in drought were 74% greater than those recorded from 1981 to 2017. And AED was the major factor in that increase.

“The year 2022 was record-breaking, with 30% of the global land area affected by moderate and extreme droughts, 42% of which was attributed to increased AED,” researchers said. “Our findings indicate that AED has an increasingly important role in driving severe droughts and that this tendency will likely continue under future warming scenarios.”

Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor, notes that western Europe’s most recent winter was a wet one. High temperature, and not precipitation, is now the key factor in drought there. What’s happening in western Europe, with extreme heat waves and drought, would have had only a moderate effect on life before the climate crisis.

AED is happening at a higher rate in the U.S. as well; droughts are lasting longer here than they did 20 years ago. If government websites can still be believed under the Trump regime, more than 38% of the nation is experiencing drought at this writing; that includes 205 million acres of croplands.

Given our continued burning of fossil fuels, the Trump regime’s war on science and its shutdown of the nation’s climate response, things will not be getting better here any time soon.

“Climate change and a ‘thirsty atmosphere’ will bring more extreme wildfire danger and multi-year droughts to Nevada and California,” according to research from Nevada’s Desert Research Institute (DRI) and the University of California. “Climate change projections show consistent future increases in AED over California and Nevada. These changes were largely driven by warmer temperatures, and would likely lead to significant on-the-ground environmental impacts.”

Foundational climate research, going back to Thornthwaite and Penman, provided ways for humanity to better see particular atmospheric conditions and even predict their effects on lands where we live and grow food and on the waterways necessary to sustain life. Since then, the overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists have concluded that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have heated the Earth and caused extreme weather — storms, droughts, heat waves and wildfires.

In the midst of this, we have Trump and his neanderthal allies, dismissing science and all that earnest research, denying climate change and promoting 20th Century solutions to our 21st Century energy needs. The U.S. stands among the world’s top consumers of fossil fuels and materials per capita, and yet the national government’s response to global warming has stopped.

Meanwhile, the climate clock keeps ticking.

Some people describe the next two elections as matters of life and death for democracy. We should amend that statement to add the words “ . . . and for the planet.”

Do you still listen to Trump? I can’t anymore. I believe his ignorant ravings, slurs and slurred words are killing brain cells. So I hit the mute button a lot.

Trump’s utterances at the unfortunately rescheduled White House Correspondents Dinner actually diminished the SAT scores of everyone in the room. What was it I saw on Threads the other day? Something like this: “Trump has made America a torture chamber for smart people.”

Actually, that goes for anyone but members of the Trump cult, though even some of them have started to leave the torture chamber. Recent polls suggest that a majority of non-college-educated whites now disapprove of Trump. (There may be hope yet.)

We have had presidential scandals before — Watergate, of course, then Iran-Contra and Clinton-Lewinsky — but nothing as spiritually and intellectually debilitating as these Trump years.

And a hard truth hit me again on the Fourth of July when Trump’s energy secretary bragged of having killed off federal support for renewable energy:

What a profound waste of time Trump’s two terms have been.

The clock has been rolling backwards.

In public health and in science generally, in the development of wind and solar systems to slow climate change, in the support of higher education and academic freedom, in the fostering of public service and a dedicated federal workforce, Russell Vought and the other architects of Project 2025 could not be happier.

Trump has been their useful idiot, giving them time and power to damage almost every sector of American life touched by the federal government.

With the use of Trump’s executive orders, with Musk and DOGE’s chainsaw and with Vought’s ideologically-driven program cutting, the sabotage has been fierce. It has also been deeply politicized. Court records show that, despite claims of simply rooting out waste, the regime rewarded states that supported Trump and withheld grants from those that didn’t.

And so, driven by Trump pettiness and right-wing ideology, there have been setbacks and delays in the nation’s efforts to counter the effects of climate change, to develop cures for cancer, to maintain or foster public trust in vaccinations, to expand health insurance and food security for low-income families, to protect national parks and monuments. The damage has been extensive.

Meanwhile, Trump launched an expensive and futile war that has only made life tougher for millions of people who elected him. And while wasting billions on that war and on more tax cuts for the super-rich, Trump has been obsessed with nonsense — the ballroom, the arch, faux-gilding the Oval Office, building a phony legacy.

When we get our country back, we will need an array of commissions to assess the damage and suggest ways for Congress to make repairs.

That doesn’t mean putting everything back as it was.

Pete Buttigieg says: “You’ve got an administration that is burning down so many of the most important institutions that we have in this country, which is wrong. It is also wrong to imagine that we should have just kept everything going along the way it was.”

I am glad he said that, even if it sounds like he’s throwing a bone to centrists and some Trump supporters. But I doubt Buttigieg knows any better than the rest of us what the extent of the damage really is. The cuts made by the Trump gang have been random, harsh and motivated by a desire to “own the libs.” It will take something the Trump regime never had — objective assessment of government infrastructure and devotion to the common good — to come up with a list of programs Congress should restore or even expand in the wake of this mess.

Unfortunately, that will take time, something profoundly wasted during these horrible Trump years.

Pardon the personal nature of today’s column. Ever since Trump, his trusted adviser Stephen Miller and House Speaker Mike Johnson started ranting about Democratic socialism — warning that socialist evil is at the gate! — I have been thinking about my father and his 20th Century life. Reflection on Joe Rodricks’ timeline affirms a conclusion reached long ago — Democratic socialism made life better.

Or certainly better for his children and grandchildren.

Joe was born Jose Rodrigues in 1914 in Portugal — specifically, Madeira (the birthplace, 70 years later, of Cristiano Ronaldo). He came to America from that beautiful island with his parents sometime in the 1920s. His father died of pneumonia when Joe was 11, leaving him in poverty with his mother, Justina, in a small Massachusetts town.

“Neither were U.S. citizens yet,” my brother Eddie reported, based on conversations with our father. “They received food vouchers from the town – coupons of some sort specifically for flour, salt, butter, milk, eggs and bacon. When Joe turned 14 in 1928 he was removed from public school by a state official and sent to work full-time in a piggery. The food vouchers ended. Joe had a vivid memory of a man and a woman coming to the school and pulling him out, driving him straight to the piggery in a black Ford. And when he got home, his mother’s angry reaction was that he had worked all day at the piggery in his school clothes.”

Had this happened today, under the Trump regime, both Joe and his widowed mother would have been deported for having taken the coupons.

But, at the time, the country had a welcoming attitude toward immigrants, even as they faced bigotry and ridicule from established elites.

My father never got past 8th grade. Progressive laws governing the labor of children were not in effect in 1928. It was another decade before Congress passed — and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed — the Fair Labor Standards Act. It forbade the employment of children under 14 in non-farm jobs and set limits for the employment of children under 16. The idea was to keep kids in school and prohibit them from hazardous jobs.

Was that a socialist idea?

In that everything good about the Progressive Era and the New Deal was dismissed as socialist by stingy conservatives, yes.

A Democratic senator from Missouri (and future president) named Harry Truman put it this way: “Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made. Socialism is what they called Social Security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.”

It was Roosevelt and the Democrats’ huge majorities in the 75th Congress that got the child labor law on the books — too late for my father, but not for his children and those after them.

The Fair Labor Standards Act also established the federal minimum wage and, in 1940, phased in the 40-hour work week and mandated time-and-a-half pay for overtime.

Back in 1925, when her husband died, Justina received no widow’s benefits from the government. There was no such thing until, during the Great Depression, the Democratic Congress first passed the Social Security Act for retirees and, a few years later, added monthly payments for the widows and minor children of deceased workers.

It was the New Deal under Roosevelt and progressive Democrats that made this happen as the nation recovered from the Depression. They also brought about unemployment insurance and public welfare programs for the elderly, blind and dependent children.

The New Deal made my parents and many of their peers Democrats for life. Were they socialists? Were they communists? Far from it. They just saw how, during the Depression and World War II, Roosevelt’s government was a force for good. They and their peers lived and worked and built middle class lives in the 20th Century with government’s help — the G.I. Bill, federal deposit insurance, mortgage regulations, worker compensation, consumer protection, public health measures, vaccination programs, food safety, automobile and highway safety standards, pollution control measures, and a national school lunch program for their kids.

It was another Democrat, President John F. Kennedy, who established the Peace Corps and the U.S. Agency for International Development to extend a powerful and rich nation’s generous reach to those in need abroad.

Was JFK a socialist? A communist? Far from it.

It was progressive ideology and courageous activism that brought about the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights in the 1960s. That happened, along with the nation’s anti-poverty efforts, during the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Democrat. We have Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start and supplemental food benefits because of Johnson’s Great Society efforts. We have — or had — environmental protection because of progressive thinkers, both Democratic and Republican, who supported the Clear Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

Joe Rodricks lived long enough to enjoy cleaner air and an all-too-brief retirement with Social Security benefits and Medicare. His wife, the late Rose Popolo Rodricks, received those benefits as well. She lived to see the nation’s first Black president, another Democrat named Barack Obama, lead the effort to provide health insurance for millions of Americans who had not been able to afford it.

So, yeah, my family — and most likely, the families of all who read this essay — benefited from Democratic socialism; we just didn’t call it that.

Trump, Miller and Johnson think they’re scaring Americans with their warnings about socialism. It won’t work. More and more Americans understand, even if they don’t want to admit it: Socialism or progressivism — whatever you call it — has improved life for millions. We inherited hard-earned benefits and they are mostly still with us, thanks to Democrats. Republicans just want to tear them away.

From the Associated Press: Iranian authorities on Sunday said at least 50 people have been killed and 517 wounded in the latest rounds of U.S. strikes. Since the war began, 17 U.S. service members have been killed.

In April 1971, Vietnam veteran John Kerry delivered powerful and graphic testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, making an impassioned plea for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Southeast Asian country where more than 45,000 U.S. troops had died. Eventually, another 13,000 would die under President Nixon’s long exit strategy, and Vietnamese military and civilian deaths would reach estimates of more than 3 million. The last U.S. troops did not leave Saigon until 1975.

The most quoted lines from Kerry’s speech were these: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

As Trump conducts, with dubious purpose, his misguided and wasteful war with Iran, I hear loud echoes of Kerry’s remarks about Vietnam — and not just those two famous lines, but many more.

In fact, leading up to the most-quoted part of Kerry’s testimony was this: And now we’re told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost each day to facilitate the process by which the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say that we’ve made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, “the first President to lose a war.” … And we are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we’re trying to do that, and we’re doing it with thousands of rationalizations…”

There’s a lot more to it, including this: “There is nothing in South Vietnam that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy.”

Kerry’s speech is worth reading today. Trump’s war needs opposition from the American people. We can learn (and relearn) much from the echoes of 1971. Kerry’s full remarks are available at this link, courtesy of the Voices of Democracy project at the University of Maryland.

___

In the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, in each instance, ICE officers targeted the wrong man.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted that Salgado Araujo was not the target of ICE’s aggressive enforcement operation in Houston. ICE officers stopped his white van because, DHS says, someone inside supposedly resembled the man they were looking to arrest.

In Biddeford, Guerrero had been authorized to work in the United States and had a Social Security number. He was not the man ICE was looking for.

Both immigrants were targeted because of how they looked. So, while we’re casting blame for these senseless killings by Trump’s thugs, it’s no stretch to lay blood on the hands of the conservative majority of the Supreme Court.

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Last September, the Roberts Court made what the American Civil Liberties Union called “one of the most dangerous immigration rulings in decades.” In a 6-3 vote, the court gave ICE permission to engage in racial profiling on a mass scale. Trump’s thugs were allowed to target people who look Hispanic, speak Spanish or with a Spanish accent, and hang out in Home Depot parking lots looking for work.

The decision, listed on the court’s “shadow docket,” lifted a ban imposed by lower courts — the Los Angeles federal court and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — on ICE’s roving, profiling patrols.

It was a license for ICE to stop anyone simply based on “apparent race or ethnicity,” language, accent or workplace.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s strong dissent called the ruling a betrayal of constitutional values — Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, guarantees of equal protection — and a dangerous normalization of discrimination.

“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” Sotomayor wrote. “Rather than stand by idly while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

Over the years, numerous courts throughout the country have looked at data and held against racial profiling by police on Fourth Amendment grounds — that is, the disproportionate targeting of people of color for traffic stops, questioning or searches without specific suspicions of criminal activity. There are state laws against racial profiling.

But, in its ongoing support of Trump and executive power, the highest court in the land has opened the door to all kinds of profiling by a masked paramilitary force conducting an immigrant purge for a racist president.

And that makes possible tragic circumstances like those in Houston and Biddeford.

So, no … we should have no problem at all in seeing blood on the hands of Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett.