My dad was home sick from work. When I came home from school, I heard him yelling “bad words” in the living room – at what I didn’t know.

I was ten and his anger frightened me.

I stood in the living room doorway and saw that his anger was not directed at my mom or anyone else, but at our black & white television screen. I didn’t recognize what was on the screen - just a lot of men in suits, in what seemed to be a courtroom, who were angrily questioning a plainly dressed, middle-aged black woman. My dad yelled, “Leave her alone!” before he saw me. A look of sadness crossed his face. He got up from the sofa, turned down the TV, and beckoned me to join him as he sat back down. He took my hands into his and apologized for scaring me. When I asked why he was yelling at a TV program, he explained that it wasn’t a regular TV show, but live coverage of a news event called the McCarthy Hearings.

Over the decades I have often wondered what politicized me. Did I come out of the womb a leftie liberal, now defined as a democratic socialist? Was it because as a minute past toddler age, I would hear discussions my liberal dad had with his leftie immigrant Finnish father? Or was it that time I came home and heard him yelling at the TV?

A bit about my dad: He was an FDR democrat who fought against fascism in WWII under Eisenhower (well, all GIs did, of course). When Ike ran for president, my dad (and my mom) became Eisenhower Democrats, but unlike Reagan Democrats, returned to voting Democrat after that brief flirtation with the Republican Party. My dad was a fun, easygoing man, who adored my mom (they held hands while watching TV), loved kids (organized all us neighborhood kids on summer evenings to play punch ball or hide’n’seek), loved people in general and loved life. He was a white-collar executive (a CPA and comptroller of a Long Island mail-order family owned business - not our family), and an early feminist. He laughed a lot, taught me to dance the “lindy” (jitterbug), had studied acting at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, acted a bit in local NYC theater productions, and played minor league baseball. He was a Sunday school teacher and he and my mom were the co-presidents of the church’s Mr. & Mrs. Club and the co-heads of the youth group.

He never yelled!!!

As I sat next to him, my heart still beating as fast as a runaway train, he went on to explain that the man in charge, Senator Joe McCarthy, was a terrible man who craved the spotlight and who now was promoting hate and fear for gullible followers while he preyed on vulnerable Americans, such as the black woman being interrogated… how the Senator reveled in going after famous artists, writers, Hollywood actors, movie studio bosses, and hard-working government employees with fabricated stories and accusations.

Fear – accusations – guilt by association – public humiliation – institutional punishment were his weapons.

Sound familiar?

He talked about the war, and how he and millions of Americans, Europeans, Russians and soldiers from other countries had just fought a war to save the world from fascism. This Senator was now pushing a new threat (this time by the Soviet Union) to world peace. Communism. But in doing so, he made up fake evidence to condemn people he didn’t like or who were in the “working class” he actually abhorred, or college educated artists and democrats who might have flirted with Marx’s utopian political philosophy in their youth. His goal: to blacklist them from employment in America. And, for a short time corporations, Hollywood, and other institutions did just that for fear that McCarthy would come after them.

I repeat, sound familiar?

There really was a Cold War of course, and the Soviet Union was, at that time, a geopolitical threat, but...

...McCarthy’s genius – or depravity – was turning that legitimate fear into a political weapon to make him a Congressional “star.” Maybe a future president. He didn’t have to prove that someone was a Communist, he simply had to say that he or she “might” be one.

Politically on the ropes in round 12 without a ringside doctor to fix its cuts, or legislation to run on, Republicans, now the MAGA party, have resurrected Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare playbook. I’m sure many “MAGAs” will buy into it since most seem to equate communism with socialism or fascism, not knowing the differences or recognizing the fact that their false Golden Idol is a fascist. Trump, Miller, JD and Donnie’s “mini me” Mie Johnson, are preaching from their fascist altars that democratic socialists like Mayor Mamdani and Michigan’s new progressive democrat candidate (who, incidentally, labels himself a capitalist) for the Senate, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, are in a communist plot, along with other democratic “socialists,” to take over the country and then our voting rights and freedoms.

Communism!? Really?!?! Are you kidding me?!?!

Hell, Putin isn’t even a communist. He’s an authoritarian nationalist who managed to make oligarchy look like a governing philosophy. A philosophy that leans heavily on – fascism. Moscow’s Red Square is now a misnomer (IMO) and should be renamed.

China? Up for debate. Trump’s pal, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea and former Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Hungary, another favorite of Trump’s and Fox News? Communists? You tell me.

MAGAs in government seem to be projecting their sins and crimes on those they hate or fear, yet again, to make you forget how they have betrayed and hurt you. It’s Trump, Johnson, Miller, Vance, et al. who have done nothing in the last two years except take away the vote from many people of color, women, and Democrats in general, whether they be moderate or democratic socialists. They have taken away healthcare and government safety nets for the working class and stopped funding public education – the list is endless. They’ve levied ridiculous tariffs that taxpayers are paying for. Gas and food prices have skyrocketed. The war against brown legal and illegal immigrants continues. We are losing the war Trump started in Iran to one-up Obama, and now our sailors in that war are being abused and our military treated like pawns for a depraved leader. Again, the list for this cruel, incompetent MAGA government is endless.

And Mike Johnson, with his pious, “I believe in Jesus” baby face who worships the fat golden calf is touting “Red Scare” to win the mid-terms. Again - REALLY?!?!

It’s the “don’t look at us - look over there” strategy. Don’t look at the corruption. Ignore the immigration hunt and imprisonment of brown people, don’t look at the rising cost of living, ignore losing our voting rights, and do close a blind eye to the war...

... look at the socialist, the protester, the media, the educators, the democrats... all enemies of the people. And, now to those that MAGA calls “communists.”

I still remember how upset my dad was when McCarthy began his Red Scare hunt and how that became a blight on our country’s history. I didn’t understand it all at the time, but I learned to be wary of politicians when they start telling me that my neighbor is the enemy. I learned that accusations are not evidence, and that when fear becomes policy and hatred a campaign strategy...

WATCH OUT!!!

“Have you no, shame...?” was the question asked of Senator McCarthy in that court room which woke up America and began his downfall. It is now the question of our times. I would say “shame on them” and those who follow them, but they seem to have no shame.

It’s enough to have me seeing red.

Through the tears of horror we shed for the crimes done in our name on the American and world stages by our incompetent and rather evil president and his administration, there is, occasionally, another response...

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!??!?

I’m talking moments when you just have to laugh. Well, I do – otherwise I might scream and never stop.

LET’S START WITH THE WORLD CUP

While much of humanity was riveted to its televisions at home or in a sports bar watching the World Cup, Trump was apparently playing his own version of the game – rules don’t apply to me is his mantra. You know the game. He plays it in golf, in business, in politics, in marriage and now even in international soccer. (An aside: he recently “won” yet another golf tournament at a golf resort he owns the other day, but I digress...)

When a U.S. soccer star was red-flagged, Trump apparently disagreed, called his pal, FIFA President Gianni Infantino (you know, the guy who bestowed upon Trump a FIFA “peace” prize) and asked him to overturn the ref’s decision. FIFA did. Because why should a referee’s decision stand when the president of the United States can make a call to overturn it? I chuckled. Donnie corrupts everything he touches.

But the championship game was even better. Spain won. SPAIN! This was particularly delicious because Trump had recently called Spain a horrible country populated with “bad people” and promised to stop all trade with it. Ah, but what does President Narcissus do? He trotted out his bloated body, leaving his trophy wife behind their bulletproof shielded seat to go down on the field to present Spain with the game’s trophy (not to be confused with a trophy wife). Why? Because in Donnie’s imagination the World Cup came to America because HE brought it here. Never mind that Canada and Mexico also hosted matches, therefore, it was HE who should hand the team their trophy even though they are “bad people.”

Booing – lots of it. Every time Trump’s face appeared on the giant stadium screens, the crowd let him know exactly what they thought. And when he walked onto the field? The boos became deafening. This was especially satisfying because these were not angry protesters who had somehow sneaked past a barricade. These were people who had paid a fortune to be there. Rich people were booing. Now that was bi-partisan entertainment.

Apparently oblivious or deaf as a cinder block (which could explain a lot), our “esteemed” president tried to position himself front and center on the stage so he could insert himself into the championship photographs. Where’s the theatrical “hook” when you need it? Then came the final indignity, when he had to be escorted off the stage.

Of course, the man who desperately wants to be in every picture was removed by the Spaniards from whatever photos he managed to insert himself in. Chuckle.

NEXT UP – THE “BIG REVELATION”

Then there’s Donnie’s BIG speech – the one in which he was finally going to reveal proof – yes PROOF, I tell you – that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. At last!!! Except there wasn’t any. ABC, NBC, CNN declined to air it – and MS Now ran the beginning as its lead into a scathing commentary by various on-air pundits. That was a big slap in the president’s face since only state run networks, Fox News and newly MAGA-ized CBS, naturally, gave him the oxygen he craved.

America heard no evidence, none was shown. Not proof that voting machines had somehow transformed into Democratic slot machines. Not a single smoking ballot. Just the same old whiny grievances, conspiracy theories and allegations that have been examined, litigated and debunked for years. It was particularly amusing to watch him present old news as though he had just discovered the Rosetta Stone.

Former Republican operative Steve Schmidt pointed out the rather inconvenient fact that Trump wasn’t actually claiming that votes had been changed. He had no evidence that a single vote was altered. Then came another delicious bit of Republican apostasy: John Solomon, one of the conspiracy theorists who has helped keep Trump’s election fantasy alive, acknowledged to reporters that JOE BIDEN WON THE 2020 ELECTION – FAIR AND SQUARE.

Imagine my delight. The only foreign leader who actually attempted to interfere in the 2020 election was Vladimir Putin. And we all know that ol’ Vlad wasn’t trying to do it to help Joe Biden.

NOW, LET’S TALK ABOUT “T”

Secretary of “War,” pumped-Up Pete Hegseth has apparently decided that the Pentagon needs to become a combination of a men’s health club, a health clinic and late-night infomercial. His brilliant Mengele-lite idea: test the testosterone levels of military personnel (men only, I presume – though don’t know if that includes men of color) over thirty. Because apparently the existential threat facing the United States is not China, Russia, cyber warfare, nuclear weapons of global instability.

It’s LOW “T”.

I’m assuming Petey will eventually identify the insufficiently testosteroned among the men and prescribe the appropriate regimen of pharmaceutical masculinity. Nothing says national security like a Pentagon-wise hormone screening. One can only imagine the questionnaire:

Do you cry?

Have you ever enjoyed a Broadway musical?

Have you experienced an emotion other than rage?

Congratulations. You’re getting testosterone. Considering the size and diversity of the American military (even just the white men), I can hardly wait to see how this grand scientific medical experiment works out. Perhaps Hegseth can personally inspect the troops. “Drop and give me twenty – and then let’s get your bloodwork.”

TRUMP vs THE WIND

One of my favorite destructive Trump insanities is his war against wind farms. Recently he announced plans to spend $765 million of taxpayer money to destroy and/or dismantle wind-energy projects. Doing so would devastate a growing industry that employs thousands and thousands of people. No biggie, right?

His obsession with the wind is puzzling. What is he afraid of? Did daddy leave little Donnie on a Queens’ street corner during a windstorm (perhaps accounting for demented Don’s hatred of the borough of Queens). Did he have a traumatic childhood encounter with a weather vane? Did a windmill once laugh at his hair?

Is it really his fear that the “windmills” are killing birds? Nah ... we know that anything with a beating heart means nothing to him.

Is it because one wind farm ruined a view from one of his European golf courses? Hmmmm.

THE REFLECTING POOL

And then there’s President Narcissus’s reflecting pool. The latest “are you kidding me” moment deflection from releasing the Epstein files or ending the war in Iran...

After blaming vandals for destroying the lining of “his” new, remodeled pool done by his Miami “gangster” construction friend in a no-bid contract, Trump had arrested an American Olympian for putting his hand in the pool to scoop up a piece of floating lining. The charge: slicing the new lining with box cutters. Exactly how he managed this remains one of those fascinating mysteries that seems to have escaped the attention of both prosecutors and common sense.

Enter Jeanine Pirro, Donnie’s crackerjack US Attorney for the District of Columbia. The case proceeded. And then, this past week, the charges were dropped. Why? Because prosecutors finally acknowledged what perhaps everyone else had suspected:

Trump’s contractor had botched the job. Which brings us to the man who spent decades telling us that he was not merely a brilliant business man who bankrupts and fails at everything, but a great builder.

THE GREAT BUILDER

Donald Trump is not a great builder. In fact, I’m not sure he could identify a construction site unless someone put his name on it. Fact: Trump’s “genius” was never as at construction or business. It’s grifting and “building” a brand. A great many buildings carrying the Trump name weren’t actually built by Donald Trump (and arguably, perhaps none were). Developers paid to license the Trump name and put it on buildings, hotels, resorts. Which, when you think about it, is a great racket.

Find somebody else to build the building. Put your name on it. Take the money. Call yourself a builder. Voila!!! The man who couldn’t tell a hammer from a sickle becomes the greatest builder in American history.

What he does seem to love, however, and what seems to makes him most happy is decorating. And here I must give him credit.

Gold. More gold. Gold on top of gold. Gold so aggressively gold that King Midas might have walked into the Oval Offices and said, “Dude, tone it down.”

Yes, he has truly garish, vulgar taste, but he loves it. Because Donnie’s idea of wealth isn’t simply having more money than anyone would need in a hundred lifetimes. It’s making sure everyone can see that you have money. Subtlety is for losers and for the old-world WASP 400 crowd who rejected him when he first moved to Manhattan and wanted to be embraced by them. They saw he was trash, so he in turn rejected everything they stood for and embraced a garish, vulgar lifestyle, proving they were right. He is trash. Which brings me to my favorite question.

WHAT IF?

Historians have long debated whether Adolf Hitler’s rejection from art school played any role in the path he subsequently took. We’ll never know. But here’s a thought: What if Hitler had been accepted? Would there have been a Holocaust? Impossible to know.

And now, purely as an exercise in alternate history: What if Donald Trump had gone to Parsons School of Design instead of -- or perhaps in addition to - - Wharton, would he have run for president?

Maybe instead of trying to remake America into a fascist country, he would have spent his life turning rooms into his gilded age version of a different MAGA – Make America Gaudy Again.

Actually... Never mind. He already did.

According to him, people like me are driven by envy. We resent happy white families who attend church every Sunday with their beautiful white children (full disclosure, I grew up in a happy white family, went to church on Sunday, sang in the youth choir and taught Sunday school, just saying).

He claims that I attend “violent” protests because I hate America and its values. Translation again: for Stephen, violence is simply singing “We shall overcome” or carrying an anti-ICE or anti-Trump poster.

Consequently, I’m not actually sure what values he is referring to or where these violent leftist, communist, socialist protests are. The violence I see on television differs from the caricature of left-wing America that Miller endlessly conjures up, but rather it comes from his own armed, masked Federal agents who descend, like locusts, on farms, construction sites, restaurants, schools, hospitals, even courthouses where brown people are working or complying with immigration proceedings.

If the government’s mission is to remove “the worst of the worst” undocumented immigrants, why do so many of these arrest images involve unarmed laborers picking crops, dishwashers and cooks, hotel house keepers, janitors, or parents or grandparents dropping children off to school. Perhaps these masked men (and women) are actually too afraid to go after the “worst of the worst.” Why?” Because their dangerous?”

Under Miller’s “guidance” brown people are often chased and dragged out of their cars as their children watch in terror – some are being shot in the head behind the wheel. Others are sent off to detention centers without due process, soon to be deported.

Reports from those detention centers have described overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, delayed medical care, and worm-infested gruel. There’s even a special concentration center just for women and children. CHILDREN!!.

These conditions have drawn criticism, not only from “left-wing” communist protesters, a/k/a caring Americans from all political persuasions, but from judges, physicians, human-rights organizations, even government inspectors. No civilized nation should be comfortable with this. Especially not America.

Oh, and in case you haven’t heard, it has also been reported that there are over 60,000 brown human beings are being terrorized, deported or left to die in these American detention concentration camps.

Miller, along with Trump, are following a familiar Nazi playbook:

Divide the nation into real Americans vs the others.

Portray opponents as enemies, immigrants as invaders, and entire groups of people as less worthy of dignity or compassion.

The extraordinary becomes ordinary.

Masks on ICE SS agents become normal.

Raids become routine.

Cruelty becomes policy.

Miller’s latest speech was merely another installment in his increasingly incendiary rhetoric and immigration orders - a follow-up screed to his straight “out-of-Hitler’s-mouth” speech that he gave at fascist Charlie Kirk’s Bund rally memorial – according to various political pundits, the most disturbing Bund rally since the 1939 Bund rally in Madison Square Garden.

Miller’s greatest “talent” isn’t policy, however. It’s dehumanization. His face is expressionless, but his tongue is relentless – turning fear into ideology and prejudice and hate into applause.

Close your eyes and just listen to his delivery – you’ll swear it’s in German.

It’s The Best of Petes – It’s The Worst of Petes

Charles Dickens probably never imagined America would someday produce two Ivy League-educated combat veterans named Pete who would come to embody two radically different visions of patriotism. Yet here we are.

Once upon a time in America – well, now, today, actually – two Petes roamed the land of democratic politics. One, an Ivy League (Harvard), University Oxford educated Rhodes Scholar, white, gay male, combat-military veteran, who is an avowed peace and love, let’s solve problems liberal – the other is also an Ivy League educated (Princeton), combat-military veteran who espouses white nationalism, might over right, cruelty over empathy, and whose multi-tattooed body reflects his idea of macho manhood and white supremacy. A Pete who prides himself as a strong, straight, warrior of what, we’re not totally sure of yet – but, he does love to blow up shit, though.

“Law & Order” music up:

Here are their stories –

Let’s start with “Dry Drunk” Princeton alum, Pete Hegseth – a television producer’s dream.

A decorated war veteran with a confident grin - a slick, product-haired pretty boy TV “host” on Fox “fair and balanced” News where certainty is rewarded far more than nuance. Trump has always had a weakness for casting where appearance outranks experience and confidence is mistaken for competence. His Cabinet meetings frequently resemble auditions for a political remake of “The Apprentice,” with loyalty valued above expertise and television presence treated as a governing qualification. It was no surprise then that Petey became Donnie’s Central Casting pick for the Secretary of Defense... a casting choice whom we soon realized was straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s classic black comedy movie: “Dr. Strangelove,” which is, sadly, no joke – black or otherwise – in real life.

Pete Buttigieg couldn’t be more different.

This Pete’s public persona, a warm, friendly, calm intelligence, isn’t built on swagger but composure. Where Hegseth projects “certainty,” Buttigieg projects curiosity. He listens before answering. He rarely raises his voice. He treats disagreement as something to engage rather than defeat. Instead of bombing roads, he builds them.

In today’s political climate, that qualifies as revolutionary.

In our country’s uniform, Hegseth served in the Army National Guard, including deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Buttigieg was a Naval Intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve deployed to Afghanistan where he worked to uncover and disrupt terrorist networks, and made dangerous, armed trips searching for mines and IEDs.

Military service shaped both men.

It simply taught them different lessons.

Hegseth preaches conflict as the natural state of mankind and compromise a sign of weakness. His rhetoric embraces the language of warriors such as Attila the Hun, bloody battles and enemies everywhere, whether abroad or at home.

Buttigieg emerged from the military emphasizing something quite different: discipline, restraint, and the sober recognition that war is a terrible instrument, not an attractive one. Like General Dwight David Eisenhower, a WWII war hero and two-term Republican President who spent his life trying to avoid war, Buttigieg believes that war for glory and conquest is wrong.

As Secretary of Defense (perverted to “War” by Princeton Pete), Hegseth established his priorities. Diversity initiatives became targets. Women in combat or in military leadership? DEI efforts. Policies affecting LGBTQ and Trans service members became recurring subjects of criticism and dismissal. White male Christian supporters called it restoring “merit.” Critics saw something else entirely: an effort to redefine military excellence as only a white male achievement.

Whatever one calls it, the debate consumed enormous energy inside the Defense Department (War), a non-political institution the principal purpose of which remains defending the nation.

Meanwhile, Buttigieg approached government from almost the opposite direction.

As Secretary of Transportation for President Biden, Buttigieg talked less about cultural warfare than literal infrastructure. Roads. Bridges. Rail. Ports. Airports. Broadband, Supply chains. The sort of work that rarely trends on social media, but determines whether our nation functions on Monday morning.

Also sensitive to others, Buttigieg addressed racial equity and launched a $1 billion “Reconnecting Communities” pilot program to establish racial equity on our roads and transportation workforce regarding bus lines, walkways and city and town planning studies.

Infrastructure lacks the glamor of a fighter jet, but tends to last a lot longer.

But, if nothing else defines the difference between the two Petes, it’s their personal lives.

Hegseth’s devotion to the sewer dweller, swamp creature who lives in the Oval Office, is mirrored in his treatment of his wives and women, in general.

Like Trump, Hegseth has been married three times. He cheated on his first wife numerous times. With his second wife, he had three children (Donnie had his first 3 kids with his first wife, so there’s that tiny difference in their entitled, white, macho male behavior) but while married to the mother of those 3 children, he impregnated his mistress, now his third wife. Sound familiar, Marla?

And then there are those credible Trump-style accusations against Piston Pete of sexual assault and rape and his payment of $50,000 dollars to one of his “alleged” female victims. (An aside: and what about those financial mismanagement complaints – so, so Trump’s M.O., but I digress.)

In 2011, Buttigieg became the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana and while still in office came out as gay. Three years later he married his husband, Chasten Glezman, a teacher and writer and, though favored to win a third mayoral term, Buttigieg decided not to run so he could devote more time to his new husband as they began their life together. When their twins arrived in 2021, he took parental leave from his Cabinet position, which, of course, twisted the panties of the Trump-MAGA anti-gay crowd. Leaving them clutching their pearls - Buttigieg did not bend (he never does when doing the right thing), nor did he apologize – instead, he firmly stated that he was, “taking care of my pre-mature newborn infant twins. The work we are doing is joyful, fulfilling, wonderful work.”

Since becoming the Secretary of Defense (War), Pete took to his warrior pugilistic “persona” like a duck to the water in Narcissus Don’s algae invested reflecting pool when he declared a drug war against Venezuela, bombing manned boats he claimed were running drugs off Venezuela’s coast to some undetermined country or location. Some photos seemed to show fishing nets and fishing paraphernalia on deck that clearly said “drug” boat to ol’ Petey. Of course, when two men weren’t blown to bits by the drone bombs and were hanging off their demolished boat trying to keep from drowning, Hegseth took a no-survivors stance and struck again so that no one could interrogate them to find out who they actually were, what they were doing and where they were going. But, the ne plus ultra of “OMG boat bombing moments” was Petey’s posts of video game style whack-a-mole posts for Trump and mass consumption showing these drug/fishing boats (will we ever really know which?) blown out of the water. BAM! Tactless, tasteless.

And, who can forget the Entebbe-like Raid on the Venezuela president’s bedroom, where our military arrested the sleeping president and his wife, kidnapping them in their PJs and whisking them off to America.

And now “Praise-God-and-pass-the-ammunition” Pete is leading the charge for Trump in what he refers to as a “Biblical War” against Iran, personally sanctioned by God. What God he actually follows is up for interpretation (sounds more like Devil worship IMO). This latest mid-east misadventure is a Substack unto itself and many others, such as the brilliant historian, Heather Cox Richardson, who have written in-depth pieces about this “war” that has made Iran stronger and Trump look weak and ineffectual to the entire world. But our Secretary of “War” is having a grand time blowing up even bigger targets.

On the flip side of this angry prancing “Pentecostal-style” faux preacher, Attila the Hun, burn-the-house down military “leader,” is Pete Buttigieg.

Two-term, South Bend, Indiana mayor, affectionately called “Mayor Pete,” is the calm, reasoned, intellectual Pete, with a spine of steel and a strong determination to actually work to make America great again by fighting for working men and women to have a better quality of life... to be able to earn a fair wage, have access to healthcare, a good education, clean air to breathe, and affordable housing. Blowing manned boats out of the water or decimating a country isn’t on his “to-do.” Instead he became the first openly gay man in a presidential Cabinet, and, prior to that, the first openly gay man to run for President. Expectations were low, but his campaign surprisingly gained momentum when he began having debates and town hall meetings; and even became a hit for the Fox “fair and balanced” News audiences. He placed second in the New Hampshire primary and when he won Iowa, he became the first openly gay man to win a presidential primary or caucus.

Unlike fire and brimstone Hegseth, who thinks a quote from the movie “Pulp Fiction” is from the Bible, and believes God is a warrior God whose mission is to “smite his enemies” real and imagined, Buttigieg is a quiet Anglican Christian, who has a working knowledge of foreign languages from Norwegian to Maltese to Arabic and Spanish among others. He understands the horror of war and the enormous toll it takes on civilians, especially children. He’s an author and a musician. Though never a TV host.

And, Pentagon Pete? He’s still blowing up shit.

Drastically Dickensian.

The latest exhibit? Trump’s birthday extravaganza – a spectacle of garish, self-congratulatory, would-be emperor’s repellent version of Daniel in the lion’s den “sport” which looked less like patriotism and more like a dictator’s birthday party sponsored by a Vegas casino. A perfect metaphor of the sewer our country’s swimming in – or, more recently, the fungus filled Washington D.C. Trump reflecting pool, a true Narcissus pool reflecting the image of swamp creature Donnie more than anything I could write as a fiction writer.

And, yes, I have Trump Deranged Syndrome and, quite frankly, proud of it. If objecting to vulgarity, corruption, racial insults and the daily demolition of civic norms qualified as derangement, I’ll happily wear that diagnosis.

The evening reached a predictable low when a “performer” (not a real athlete) lobbed a racist insult at Michelle Obama. Thousands of mostly white “Christian” men sat silently. No one objected. No one walked out. America’s former First Lady – a woman of extraordinary beauty, grace, intelligence and accomplishment – was reduced to a punchline uttered by a pre-historic creature masquerading as a man and was rewarded with the crowd’s silent complicity. And, Melania, our unaccomplished current First Lady just sat by her husband like the plastic mannequin she is.

But deranged syndrome or not, enough about that “F” word – I want to write about the original “other ‘F’ word... Feminists.”

More and more women have finally defined themselves as feminists (not white MAGA women, of course). Women who believe they should be treated as equal to men and who have built careers and shepherded families through the decades and are still doing so now. However, Pompous Pete Hegseth and anti-career “childless cat women,” JD Vance aside… ” feminist is still a word that makes some otherwise accomplished women recoil as though they’d just been accused of tax fraud.

As a woman who wore out the soles of her shoes marching during the women’s movement in the 70’s – I get it. The residual male anger still lingers for those who do not want to work for or compete with (and lose to) women.

Most of you don’t know me from Eve, but I am now and always have been a member of the feminist party. That’s not to say I don’t like men, some of my best friends are men, even my husband, and I don’t make this pronouncement to be arrogant or “uppity.” It’s just who I am.

Not long ago, l was on a treadmill (the fitness kind, not the one we’re on every day), off in my own zone, listening to Janis Joplin wail on my earbuds (yes, I’m old), when a woman I knew jumped onto the adjoining treadmill. She’s belonged to that rare species of humans who answers “How are you?” as though you’ve requested a deposition. As she warmed up by walking faster than I run at top speed, I recklessly opened the door for conversation by saying “Hi, how are you?” She instantly picked up her pace and started telling me.

As she ran her own private 10K, she launched into the common female tale of survival in a corporate world of sexual harassment (yes, Me, Too has lessened that, but with Trump getting convicted for sexual assault and lauded for it by his MAGA base, and the cover-up of the Epstein files, it is still a blight all women in the work force continue to face), so, without the slightest strain in her breathing, thank you very much, she declared she had fought her way into a successful career and wasn’t about to surrender it.

A half-hour later she finished and I was awestruck.

In tribute to all she had overcome and all she planned to do, I called her a true “feminist,” naively assuming she would take it as the compliment I meant it to be. Instead, she nearly leaped off the treadmill as she emphatically stated,

“I’M NOT A FEMINIST!”

I was so stunned by her reaction, I started to jog.

“Why not?” I finally gasped.

“I don’t want to alienate anybody.”

For the second time in my life, mere moments apart, I had an overwhelming urge to become a sprinter. I couldn’t believe what she was saying! After all the progress she had made, all the plans she had for the future, she was ready to give it all back! I mean really, who could she possibly be afraid of alienating? The people who didn’t want to hire, promote or pay her equally because she had “X” chromosomes? Not likely.

So what was it about that word that still triggers such a response --- that makes too many women cringe when they’re accused of being one, as if it were the ultimate insult? Why had “feminism” become the other “F” word? The mostly male media’s years of portraying feminists (f/k/a “women’s libbers”) as bossy, man hating mantises? No doubt. The growing backlash against independent women who keep moving up the corporate ranks making insecure men uncomfortable? Probably. But, maybe… just maybe, openly feminist females, like myself, are partially to blame. Maybe, just maybe, in our enthusiasm for equality, we forgot our common sense and lost our sense of humor.

Before I married my amazing (and pro-feminist) husband, I dated a guy I cared about, but he wasn’t willing to make a commitment… or is that redundant? He insisted on the option of dating other women. Saturday nights were mine, but the rest of the week was open to interpretation. I was young and foolish, so I agreed. After dating for about six months, he inquired (I use “inquire” because he did… he was an attorney) why he always paid for our theater tickets, dinners, whatever. As a self-proclaimed “feminist,” didn’t I want to pay my fair share? I told him no (I was a feminist, not foolish), and explained that feminism had nothing to do with who paid for dinner. Why should I pick up a tab for someone who wanted to use the money he saved on me to wine and dine the first bimbo (do people still use “bimbo” to degrade women?) who said yes to Tuesday? Made sense to me. Okay, maybe they weren’t “bimbos,” but you get my point.

I really couldn’t blame him --- we had confused the poor guy, and ultimately alienated ourselves, with all that 50/50 rhetoric. Nothing in life is 50/50.

So maybe it’s time to soften our image --- to put a new spin on things --- to put “feminine” back into feminist. No, I’m not talking crinolines and ruffles (though black lace garters have their uses)… But, if a man wants to open a door for us --- hey, why strain? And, if some swain (don’t you just love that word?) wants to lay his coat over a puddle so your feet stay dry, smile first --- then step on it!

And in reference to the latest “scandal” from the Epstein files, women are not toys for men to “Man-nipple-ate,” we are their equals and never forget it...

...then just wink, bat your eyes, and do your own thing.

“There’s a sucker born every minute,” attributed to Phineas Taylor Barnum

P. T. Barnum is often described as a brilliant successful entrepreneur, a showman, an accomplished elected politician – an author, publisher, and philanthropist... and a legendary huckster.

America now has a huckster living in the White House who believes he’s a showman, grandiosely puffed up (literally and figuratively) by being the front man for a tacky TV show. Well, “The Apprentice” made him famous, at least something to show for it.

P.T. Barnum wrote books – D. J. Trump hires people to write books in his name.

Barnum was a philanthropist - Donnie stole money from his own charity.

Barnum was an entrepreneur – Donnie is a multiple bankrupted, failed businessman.

Barnum loved perpetrating silly hoaxes – Donnie calls truths lies and lies truths because of his hoax affectation.

As a republican politician in the Connecticut legislature Barnum championed the 13^th Amendment to abolish slavery.

Donnie, a republican president, loves to sling racists memes in the middle of the night, to champion the abolishment of DEI. He is erasing prominent and accomplished people of color and women from our history books and has fired them from government while ordering the kidnapping, detaining and deporting of hardworking brown refugees, including children, who are being warehoused in unsanitary concentration centers.

As the mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut Barnum, updated the city’s infrastructure and was responsible for the construction of the Bridgeport hospital.

Donnie ‘s “Big Beautiful Bill” is closing hospitals around the country, withholding money for the infrastructure bill while stealing much needed Federal funding while he lines his pockets with gold.

As a philanthropist, Barnum shared his money.

Donnie steals and hoards shares.

Barnum was also a newspaper publisher, a champion of freedom of the press.

Donnie sues newspapers and television news media in an ongoing effort to silence them.

And, last but not least, Barnum gave us the Big Top – Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Three Ring Circus with cotton candy, star-studded daring feats, and colorful costumes adorned with glitter and sequins which continue to delight children and adults decades later. A magical entertainment.

Donnie however, has given us a vulgarity of a garish, gold-appliqued Oval Office that delight and entertain no one. (Well, maybe Mary Antoinette roaming the spirit world headless and cakeless). He is fighting to build a gilded Versailles-style enormous ballroom emblazoned with his name in gold (of course) as a monument to himself and to show the world that he IS someone of importance. Then there’s his tacky, oversized arch, topped with gold (Donnie can never have too much gold) tchotchkes that desecrates the Arlington Cemetery where our true heroes are buried. And, of course, the reflecting pool that was designed to reflect the lights of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial which Demented Don wants to paint blue, the color of millions of backyard pools that reflect nothing, not even his Narcissus face.

And now Depraved Donnie has planned to celebrate himself on Flag Day with his very own “big top” on the once beautiful rose garden that he’s destroyed. A towering erector set of arches has arisen from the garden’s ashes forming a cage that resembles both a Six Flags amusement park and an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie set (you choose) that will showcase violent gladiator-style “fights” which will probably only delight make-believe macho men like Pulp Fiction Pete Hegseth or Mar-a-Lago lipped women. To make sure he actually has attendees for this truly showy (and not in a good way) “presidential” birthday spectacle, he is, as the Commander-In-Chief of the world’s greatest military, commandeering service men (preferably white) to be in the audience, dressed in their summer uniforms to cheer him, on cue. Ah, but, only if they are the preferred lean, handsome, muscular white men.

Class, honor, dignity, and taste are absent in the White House. We are no longer “America the beautiful” – but “America the Tacky.”

Let’s resurrect Mr. Phineas Taylor Barnum. He could teach Dementia Don a thing or two about being a huckster with class.

The Confederacy collapsed, but the bitterness changed outfits from gray to white. The Ku Klux Klan arrived shortly thereafter, like the worst community theater troupe costumed in white sheets performing “Birth of a Nation” indefinitely. Schools, hotels, restaurants, diners, public bathrooms, even water fountains sprouted signs proclaiming, “No Colored Allowed.”

Decades passed and America, for a glorious minute, appeared to move on. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act became law - both statutes prohibiting discrimination in public places and in the voting booth... both statutes signed by the contradictory, profane, brilliant, southerner President Lyndon Johnson, Texas drawl included. Collectively we decided that black people should, in fact, be allowed to vote and eat lunch indoors.

Progress!

Or so we thought.

Because hate in America never dies - it just waits for a better cable package. Racism remained. Anti-Semitism remained. Misogyny remained. They sat quietly in the attic for decades like bigot Christmas decorations waiting to be unpacked.

Then three things happened:

First - Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell packed the Supreme Court with right wing ideologues, and even refused to let then President Obama nominate a replacement when a vacancy occurred. Why? Apparently “constitutional duty” was now a seasonal employment.

Second - America elected Barack Hussein Obama, a black man for president who had the audacity to move his black family into the “White” House, which caused half the country to react as though someone had replaced Mount Rushmore with a vegan food truck.

And third - Donald Trump injected his racist “birther” conspiracy straight into the Republican bloodstream while his surgically laminated, nude-model wife nodded along with the expressions of a woman trapped inside a Botox escape pod. She does looks good in couture, though. Credit where due.

Bund rallies sprung up like crabgrass – part fascist revival meeting, part NASCAR tailgate, part group therapy for men furious that women and minorities now have LinkedIn accounts.

KKK white sheets were replaced with red trucker hats. Speaking of sheets, those bedsheet Confederate flags sprouted up everywhere - on pickups, porches, boats, probably neonatal units. Why so huge? Scientists should study this. Somewhere in hell, Freud is smoking a cigar whispering, “Called it.”

The Bund rally attendees (and greedy rich white people salivating over promised tax cuts) ushered in the Trump presidency which unleashed the backwater militias who came out of the woods, locked and loaded with enough tactical gear to invade Belgium, but were somehow unable to locate a dentist.

Then came January 6^th.

Egged on by their demented leader, they formed an insurrectionist army and attacked our Nation’s Capitol building, waving Trump flags, Confederate flags and American flags simultaneously – which felt efficient, if nothing else. They beat, tased, gassed, blinded and maimed police officers. They smeared their feces (literally) on the walls inside, erected gallows outside and chanted “Hang Mike Pence” because he refused Donnie’s orders not to certify Biden’s election win. After it was over, hundreds were convicted by juries made up of ordinary Americans. Donnie hailed them as patriots.

Then, upon returning to the Oval Office four years later, Demented Don treated them like hostages in a failed community theater production of “Les Miserables” sponsored by Info Wars. He pardoned all of them – some of whom have gone on to rape and pillage again.

AND... Voting rights are once again under attack. Apparently, parts of America enjoys rebooting terrible sequels nobody asked for.

Trump’s second act, however, has been even more deranged than Act One. His cruel immigration crusades, his obsession with tariffs, his refusal to release the Epstein files after promising to do so, his fixation on building a billion-dollar Marie Antoinette tasteless gilded ballroom with taxpayer money, his war of choice with Iran – all are destroying America’s leadership in the world and tanking our economy.

And, let’s not forget his out in the open war profiteering and grifts of billions for himself and his family which has also helped dwindled his voter coalition. His poll numbers hover at 32% approval – though he delusionally believes he is the most popular president in American history. He confesses openly, however, that if he loses Congress in the mid-terms, he’ll be impeached... maybe even see the inside of a prison cell. So somewhere in his limited gray matter, he knows he’s a loser. Woe is Donnie. What to do? What to do? Suddenly a light bulb flashed above his hair-sprayed, bleached blond coiffed mane... Let’s restrict the voting of brown and black people, maybe even some married women.

Some Republicans appear exhausted which, given their tolerance for chaos, is saying something.

But the South shall rise again! (Oy, do I need to buy rebel gray clothes? Not my best color.)

Donnie failed to get the bill passed that would have made it difficult for married women to vote – BUT with McConnell’s right wing Supreme Court and fascist governors in Texas and other rebel states, partisan unlawful redistricting has been made not so unlawful – allowing those states to virtually eliminate black voting districts, thus cancelling elected black congress folks by distributing their black population into newly formed white districts. I type “not so unlawful” because blue and purple states are being challenged for doing the same thing in reverse, even though those governors actually asked its people to vote yes or no on redistricting. They all voted “yes” – what’s good for the goose ...?

Trump and his MAGA governors seem to believe that by taking away black districts, they will gain many more white nationalist (aka fascist) MAGA seats in the House, keeping Trump from being impeached, but more importantly, controlling the House for decades to come.

But, here’s the rub. Will this really give white racist nationalists more seats in Congress? Or, by putting more black voters in formerly all-white districts dilute their dominance, as more and more reasonable white voters, moderate republicans and independents repulsed by Trump and his leadership have moved away from him. Will their votes, coupled with these districts’ new black constituency actually give back the democrats, progressives and moderates, the House of Representatives? Keep hope alive.

We’ll find out in November.

VOTE!!!

In case you missed this heartbreaking truth article written by Robert Reich – I had to put it on my Substack.

Trump’s even demanding the the DOJ investigate Smith College for civil rights violations because it has allowed enrollment of transgender students.

Trump doesn’t need impeachment, he needs to be committed.

Friends,

When I learned what Samuel Alito and the other Republican appointees to the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act last week, I thought of Mickey.

(Forgive me if I’ve already told you about him, but he was very important to me.)

I met Mickey the summer after third grade. His family had rented one of the summer cabins in the Adirondack Mountains where my grandmother also had a tiny summer cabin. I was eight, and Mickey was a teenager. We were not friends, yet I came to love him.

Mickey was kind and gentle, with a ready smile. I don’t recall asking him to protect me. He wasn’t the kind of hulking kid I usually chose as protector from bullies who’d torment and ridicule me. Mickey was on the short side and thin. He wore a sailor’s cap and seemed forever cheerful. I don’t remember him fighting to defend me or even quieting the kids who made fun of me, but I do remember his warmth and reassuring presence. His calm good nature seemed to cast a positive spell over kids who might otherwise turn to teasing or bullying.

Years went by and I grew into a teenager who no longer needed older boys to protect me from bullies, and I lost track of Mickey.

It wasn’t until September 1964, the start of my freshman year at Dartmouth College, that I heard what had happened to him.

Early that summer, Mickey — whose full name was Michael Schwerner — had traveled to Mississippi. The Civil Rights Movement was gaining strength. Martin Luther King Jr. had given his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the August 1963 March on Washington, where 250,000 people had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear him.

“Freedom Summer” of 1964 had brought college students, both Black and white, Mickey among them, from northern schools together with Black people from Mississippi to educate and register Black voters, under the aegis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Mississippi was chosen because only 7 percent of the state’s eligible Black voters were registered, in a state that was about 40 percent Black. Most had been frozen out of the polls with poll taxes, subjective literacy tests, and brutality. It had been that way since 1877. The system was enforced by white supremacists who could commit crimes with impunity because the entire region had become a one-party state run by white supremacists.

Mickey was among the first wave of volunteers to arrive in Mississippi for Freedom Summer. On the afternoon of June 21, he and two other student volunteers — Andrew Goodman, also white, and James Chaney, a young Black man — were driving near the town of Philadelphia when Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price stopped them for allegedly speeding. Price locked them up in the local jail. That night, after they paid their speeding ticket and left the jail, Price followed them in his police car, stopped them again, ordered them into his car, and took them down a deserted road where he turned them over to a group of his fellow Ku Klux Klan members. They beat Mickey, Goodman, and Chaney with chains. Then they killed them and buried their bodies in an earthen dam under construction.

For weeks, no one knew what had happened to the three volunteers. Lyndon Johnson used concern over their disappearance to pressure the House to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2.

On July 16, a little more than three weeks after Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared, and two weeks after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, Senator Barry Goldwater accepted the Republican nomination for president at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California. Goldwater told Republican delegates that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Mickey’s body and those of Chaney and Goodman were found August 4. They were illustrations of extremism in the defense of what white supremacists defined as liberty.

The state of Mississippi refused to bring murder charges against any of the killers, but eventually Price and Neshoba County Sheriff Laurence Rainey, also a Klan member, and sixteen others, including Samuel Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of Mississippi’s White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, were arraigned for the federal crime of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the murdered young men. An all-white jury found seven of them guilty, including Price and Bowers. After several unsuccessful appeals, each received a sentence of between three and 10 years. None would spend more than six years behind bars.

When the news reached me that Mickey had been beaten and murdered by white supremacists — by adult bullies who would stop at nothing to prevent Black people from exercising their right to vote — something snapped inside me. It was as if I had gotten a new pair of eyes and began to see everything differently. Before then, I understood bullying as a few kids picking on me for being short, making me feel bad about myself. After I learned what happened to Mickey, I began to see bullying on a larger scale, all around me: Black people bullied by whites; workers bullied by employers; girls and women bullied by men; the disabled or gay or poor or sick or immigrant bullied by politicians, insurance companies, landlords, and bigots. I saw the powerful and the powerless, the exploiters and the exploited.

It seemed as if the world had changed, when in fact it was I who had changed. I had a different understanding of the meaning of injustice. It became as personal to me as were the bullies who had called me names and threatened me in the boys’ room and on the playground — but larger, more encompassing, more urgent.

In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, protecting the right of Black people to vote.

After that, the stranglehold of the white supremacists on the one-party South began to loosen. At the center of the law’s success was Section 5, commonly referred to as the “coverage formula,” which determined those states that had to receive clearance from the Justice Department before changing their election rules, based on their histories of race-based voter discrimination.

Another critical part of the law was Section 2, which prohibits states and political subdivisions from imposing voting qualifications, standards, or practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. It forbids any election rule that results in a denial or abridgment of the right to vote, aimed at preventing vote dilution, such as discriminatory redistricting.

In the 20 years following the law’s passage, the disparity in registration rates between white and Black people dropped from nearly 30 percent in the early 1960s to 8 percent. Based on its continuing success, the Voting Rights Act was repeatedly reauthorized by Congress. But the forces of racism and violence did not disappear.

On August 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign with a rally at the Neshoba County Fair, only a few miles from where Cecil Ray Price had stopped Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman on that fateful night 16 years earlier. In defending “states’ rights” that day, Reagan, the cheerful “morning in America” candidate, was sending a dark dog-whistle to racist bullies, telling them he was on their side.

Thirty-three years later, on June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula in the Voting Rights Act, in the case Shelby County v. Holder. The court’s five conservatives decided that the formula was out of date, despite Congress’s repeated reauthorizations, effectively ending pre-clearance. The court’s opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas. Reagan had put Scalia and Kennedy on the court.

“Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote. The Voting Rights Act was “strong medicine,” but in 1965 it was the right response to “entrenched racial discrimination.” When first enacted, he wrote, the rate of voter registration among Black people in Mississippi was 6.4 percent, and the gap between Black and white rates of registration was more than 60 percentage points. But now, Roberts said, pre-clearance was no longer needed.

Yet within 24 hours of the ruling, states of the old Confederacy were already proving Roberts wrong. Texas announced it would implement a strict photo ID law. Mississippi and Alabama began to enforce the same photo ID laws that federal pre-clearance had previously barred. Other Southern states began to purge voters from their rolls, curtail early voting, eliminate same-day registration, and prevent county boards of elections from opening polls for an additional hour.

In 2021 and 2022, in response to record voter turnout in the 2020 election, 19 states passed more than 30 laws making it harder to vote. The United States Senate, although nominally under Democratic control, did not have the votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster and restore Section 5.

Then, last week, the six Republican appointees on the court decided to gut Section 2. In Louisiana v. Callais, Alito — in a remarkably dishonest opinion, even for him — said he was only bringing Section 2 up to date. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country,” Alito wrote, “particularly in the South.” As a result of the Voting Rights Act, he claimed, Black Americans, once barred from the polls, now vote at similar rates as the rest of the electorate.

Rubbish. According to a recent study in which researchers analyzed nearly a billion votes cast in federal general elections between 2008 and 2022, “significant and robust evidence” shows that the racial turnout gap widened in parts of the country that had been covered by the Voting Rights Act after Shelby gutted Section 5.

The Republican appointees on the court have now invited Republican state legislatures to draw new congressional maps that will likely create a solid red south, creating the largest reduction in Black political representation since the death of Reconstruction. It could result in a loss of as many as 19 seats in the U.S. House and nearly 200 state legislative seats nationwide — and dramatically remake the balance of power in favor of Republicans. The Roberts-Alito court has ensured that Dred Scott and the Confederacy are reborn.

Immediately after the ruling, the Florida legislature passed a new congressional map drafted by Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office, aiming to flip up to four Democratic-leaning seats. Louisiana is postponing primaries to allow for a special session to redraw maps. Officials in Alabama are seeking to lift a lower court injunction to change their map. Mississippi is also actively exploring new white Republican districts.

It is hard for me to think back on the deaths of Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, along with that of Martin Luther King Jr. and other martyrs to civil and voting rights, and not fear that — because of the dishonest and regressive opinions of Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and other Republican appointees to the Supreme Court — they died in vain.

Brave Democrats (men and women) have been fighting Trump in Congress all across the land. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that #depravedDonnie likes using pretty women, specifically young pretty women for sex, but he doesn’t really like women for anything else, especially smart, uppity woman. His MAGA Christian white male followers are not any different. They continue to fight to get women out of the workplace and back into the kitchen. Why? Because women have proved over the years to be more adept at leading than these mediocre men. That infuriates their peacock egos. They resent that women are more qualified than they are. Hence their bond with “The Donald” (his Manhattan nickname).

So, when Donnie surprised me and appointed about a half dozen women to very important positions in Trump 2.0, including his Cabinet and his Chief of Staff, I had hoped the denying of women of their rights was taking a hiatus. Oops, wrong!!! In less than a year and a half into 2.0, Trump has begun to fire the women who bent over backwards to please him and whom he is now blaming for his failing presidency - not a peep about inept #drunkenKash or #PulpFictionPete or #deadanimaldeviantRFKJr - all accused of sexual “misconduct.” I find it eye-opening that Trump seems to collect sexual predators like some people collect stamps… Like attracts like, I guess.

What is fascinating about these female Trump cabinet appointments is that I learned that women high in government can be as cruel, as cowardly, as incompetent and even as evil as the men Trump surrounds himself with – yes, I’m talking about you Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi and Lori Chavez-DeRemer.

You would think after wearing out the soles of my shoes marching for women’s equality in the 70s and 80s, I might have guessed that this day would come. Women are, of course, equal to men even on those matters... equally devious, ambitious, lazy, power hungry, and dishonest, though we don’t tend toward violence. Most of us are missing that gene...well, except puppy murderer/ brown people torturer Kristi, but I digress. I should have known better. I’d seen women suck up to men for corporate promotions, for acceptance in their “boys’ club,” even for love, and watched how they undercut other women, afraid of the competition. But I was still an optimistic women’s “libber” (what men called us back in the day) after we got “the pill” then won the right to get credit cards, buy a car, and go to a bar or restaurant without a male escort. I loved eating out or having a drink with girlfriends without being evicted as a probable hooker. I loved shopping on Fifth Avenue in Saks, Bonwit’s and Bergdorf’s with my own credit cards, and I loved being able to rent an apartment in my own name – no male co-signer necessary.

But as we all know, that was just the beginning. Battles were won, but the war raged on as we continued to fight for our rights. We still had many glass ceilings to break, but “the times they are a changing.” Women have become more powerful in every field – in business, in the military, on Wall Street and in banking. In leadership positions in all fields. We’ve even become valued members of fire departments and police stations all over the country. We are now accepted as doctors and mechanics, as forest rangers and movie studio chiefs. The world became our oyster as it opened its shell to include us. However all men were not happy about that – especially evangelical white Christian men.

In struts Donald J. Trump who fed their anger against women, first by telling them how he could grab a woman by her pussy because he was famous. They seemed to love that he could humiliate a woman without consequence. Then further embracing these men, Trump shared their hated Hilliary Clinton by bullying her, lying and dismissing her achievements. She didn’t bend. That infuriated Donnie and his aggrieved, often racists, definitely misogynist followers. They chanted “lock her up” at his Bund rallies and cheered when he called on his friend Putin to release her emails and rig the election. It worked – she may have won the popular vote, but she lost the electoral college. Did she run a good campaign, did she miscalculate and make mistakes? Sadly, yes. But the jig was up once Putin took over behind the scenes and Comey went on television about those emails... but again, I digress.

Women were galvanized and marched en masse after Trump’s narrow victory and knit woolen pink hats came into vogue. Four years later women, led by black women, threw Trump out of office when they elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the first female Vice President, a woman of color. When he had to drop out from his re-election campaign, he appointed her as his successor. She ran an energizing, happy warrior race – she filled stadiums, but alas, she had entered too late - yet still only lost by less than 2%, not the ‘landslide’ our #liarinchief keeps braying to his followers. Were his misogynist insults – the first DEI vice president, low IQ, disparaging her “color,” diminishing her many vast education and legal accomplishments, to blame? Or was it because men, in general, were intimidated by her (as they were by Hillary) and didn’t want a woman, especially one of color, to become president?

Reems of essays have been written about the why - blaming Biden, the Democrats in general, Trump, MAGA, racism, misogyny, all the above. But for white Christian evangelical MAGAs, the election was too close. The SAVE Act was born the minute Trump took office. A bill that would make it very hard for married women who took their husband’s names, to be able to vote. New gerrymandering rules were written to give more MAGA candidates seats in the House.

But this time, Democrats and Independents in Congress and around the country are not sitting quietly... they are marching and organizing and voting in every local and federal special election in huge numbers, winning in red and blue districts and have thwarted most of MAGAs cheating tactics in court, while fighting ICE in the streets and in the halls of justice.

The Democrats are now predicted to win back the House, and have a chance to win back the Senate, and women have been leading the fight.

The brave victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his fellow rapists have opened a Pandora’s box, recruiting husbands, fathers, brothers and lovers all over America in the “Release the Epstein Files” fight, who are appalled over the cover-up to protect pedophiles. Even MAGA is demanding justice for these brave survivors, along with millions of Americans. Americans are also fighting against this Administration of Dunces who are erasing men of color and women’s achievements in the military, in science, education, etc. They are fighting for those who have been fired from the military and elsewhere for being black or female. They are fighting those in Trump’s government who are erasing our history of Native American genocide, slavery, even the history of WWII, the time the world fought fascism and the German’s “Final Solution.”

But we won’t win the war on women or save our democracy if we stop marching, voting, protesting, writing letters, going to town halls meetings. We can no longer be silent. We are in this together. We are the cavalry. We are the resistance. And WE will win this forever war.

... perhaps with ICE’s invasion of American blue states and the kidnapping of brown people off the city, town and village streets who are part of our labor force or who are just living their lives quietly, raising their families, spending there hard earned money in stores, restaurants and various businesses in the country, boosting our economy, or...

... perhaps with the internment of these brown men, women and children – even toddlers, who are housed in unhealthy, crowded detention centers (aka concentration camps) with little food, medical care and sanitary bathrooms, or...

... perhaps with the unnecessary deaths of these kidnapped brown people in these “camps,” including toddlers.

Too depressing? Maybe...

... the bombing of boats in the waters near Venezuela killing all on board, or...

... America’s unauthorized military invasion of Venezuela, and the kidnapping of its president and wife, or...

... Bibi Netanyahu, after trying to get Presidents George W, Obama and Biden to go to war with Iran by lying to each of them, finally succeeding in his con by conning our #coninchief? Hence, we are now in an unnecessary, brutal, deadly Iranian quagmire, murdering school girls and civilians, while further intelligence has determined that Iran did not have nor was close to having any nuclear weapons, or...

... how about #PentecostalPete citing “bible” quotes from the movie “Pulp Fiction” – proving once again how dumb this dry drunk is (though I have to admit, I found this horrifically amusing), or...

... Donnie’s verbal war with Pope Leo, a far more worldly, educated and intelligent human than he will ever be. Have you ever noticed how Trump, with his limited command of the English language, uses the same insults over and over again against his perceived enemies... a favorite being “low IQ”? Another of #dementiaDon’s projections?...

... then there’s Donnie’s insane attacks on our allies and NATO...

... and his ass-kissing Administration and MAGA controlled Congress letting him fiddle like Nero with no checks or balances.

But, I’m in a very bitchy, catty mood so let’s talk about the queen of plastic surgery, boob enhanced, squinty, cat-eyed Melania – our supposed First Lady (meow).

Does anyone know where she actually resides – Mar a Lago with all the fish lipped, pumped up cleavage baring women or secretly in the Liberace-ish decorated Manhattan penthouse? She’s certainly doesn’t seem to be living in the White House, though she does visit from time-to-time.

Who watched her documentary? I confess, I didn’t, but saw enough clips to see what a truly no-depth PR puff piece it is which was directed by yet another sexual predator. Donnie collects these men like trophies or maybe it’s just that like attracts like... birds of a feather.

This brings me to the Epstein files.

We all know the president of the United States is a sexual predator, at the very least. Many women have attested to that fact and a jury found him guilty of sexual assault, but Melania seems oblivious. After the Access Hollywood tape that should have disqualified him as a presidential candidate in 2015/16, our un-esteemed First Lady declared “boys will be boys.” She has never even commented on the fact that shortly after she delivered another Trump male heir, her husband had a fling with a beautiful hooker, then paid her a bundle to keep her mouth shut. It’s also been reported that Donnie’s name is mentioned thousands of times in those Epstein files and he’s done everything he can to subvert a court order to release them all. And recent FBI documents revealed a credible witness who told the agency that realtor “playboy” Donald Trump and future president raped her when she was only 13. Melania’s reaction: silence. Not even an accented peep. She has the money and lifestyle she desired and has that heir apparent. Frankly, she doesn’t need the president anymore. BUT...

... then she held a press conference in the White House behind a podium with the presidential “seal.” Say what???

It seems she had heard that a forthcoming book would give detailed accounts of her close friendship with ol’ Jeffrey and his girlfriend Ghislaine. Though certainly proud of her semi-porn modelling career, this implication was a bridge too far.

But was it? This vapid, plastic woman vehemently denied she was a Jeffrey victim, in fact, she claimed she barely knew him or Ghislaine, yet many photos and personal notes seem to show otherwise.

Then there’s the question of her Einstein visa and the claim that she speaks a zillion languages. True? Who knows? We do know she speaks at least two – her native language and English. Does that qualify her for an Einstein visa? (Most undocumented immigrants speak two languages. Where are their visas?) We’ve since learned that imported European models (many underage) were awarded visas through two “model” agencies. How were these agencies able to do that? What was the quid pro quo?

During Melania’s presser she also claimed that a friend introduced her to her husband (in fact Donnie was Marla’s husband) at a party by a mutual friend (who was a friend of Jeffrey’s – oops) and continued to claim she knew nothing about Epstein’s trafficking ring. If those slanted eyes showed empathy or a soul of some kind, perhaps her plea would be believed by more than those who think she’s a woman of substance (about 15 maybe?), but it was fascinating to watch her almost robotic statement that lacked any real emotion – even when she claimed that Congress should continue its investigation by releasing abusers’ names and have all of Jeffrey’s survivors testify under oath. Interestingly, she did not volunteer to testify even though former First Lady/Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who never met Epstein or Maxwell, was forced to.

Well, done Melania. After the Minneapolis murders of US protestors, U.S. concentration camps, Venezuela, Iran, the verbal war with the Pope and his insulting of our allies distractions, you brought the Epstein files back to the front burner.

Mrs. Trump trumps Trump. Brava!

I don’t remember the first time I understood the term “blood lust” – it may have been while reading Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities” when Madam Defarge uttered “Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule” while she watched the heads of French aristocrats rBLOoll off the guillotine into a wicker basket, one head at a time as she knitted their names into a register in her cold-blooded pursuit of revenge.

“I will be your retribution,” Demented Don told his MAGA followers, but like Madam Defarge who really meant the extermination of the Evremonde family and their relatives, who didn’t really care about “revolution” but personal revenge, Donnie never gave a damn about his followers. Trump never has had a single political ideal or belief in his bones, not even his bone spurs, but uses beliefs for his own gain. “Bone spurs” kept him out of Vietnam and his promise of retribution for his voters was not to help them, but to assume his desire to destroy all those who looked down on him, laughed at him or just didn’t like him or praise him. His Retribution Road began in earnest the minute he returned to the Oval for Trump 2.0. He ordered his newly anointed petulant blonde AG sycophant to indict his perceived enemies, such as Leticia James, James Comey, Adam Schiff et al (the list is seemingly endless) and those who tried to stop his delusions of grandeur and power in an effort to hold him accountable for his many crimes.

His blood/less lust increased when he ordered FBI agents to be fired if they investigated him. He commanded that DOJ lawyers be dismissed who worked as prosecutors on cases against him, and directed dry drunk Hegseth to fireHegH Generals and other military Officers if they were men of color or female whom he considered woke DEI hires (his racism and misogyny rearing their ugly heads). Like Krazy Kash and Pesky Pam, Pompous Pete had a field day embracing and eliminating all of Donnie’s made-up enemies. And, don’t forget there’s Puppy Murderer Kristi whose blood lust led to beatings, kidnappings and murder on American streets – real blood, its scent emboldening Donnie.

But they and what they did to promote hate and violence in Trump’s name were only a prelude to the unleashing of Depraved Don’s real blood lust nature, egged on by Nazi Admirer Steven Miller and Pompous Pete. Concentration camps that are often death camps and bombing boats and its men in the Caribbean (Hegseth’s ode to the Marquis de Sade). The camps are for Brown people (that racism thing, again), the bombings and murders in a fabricated war on drug cartels. Real blood was beginning to flow and Trump was aroused. He wanted more, so he invaded Venezuela. But, alas, no real blood was spilled.

Visions of Caesar riding into a conquered city in a chariot as cheers reverberated off the city walls and flowers were thrown at his feet or the glories of Alexander The Great or Ghenghis Khan who conquered their known worlds at the time seemed to pervade Donnie’s delusions. His eyes shifted to Iran. He always hated Iran - well, to be fair, he seems to hate most Arabs. Full. Stop. - and though he railed against America’s endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a political ploy to win votes, invading and overtaking another country with the greatest military in history now seems to be his focus. Again, Pentagon Pete spurred him on. It became a Biblical calling for Pete – you know, the wrath of God, fire and brimstone and all that atonal jazz. He preaches at his Pentagon prayer meetings, and preaches to the press... America must “smite” its enemies! But for

Delusional Don, it remains the blood lust. The glory.

Bibi, who has wanted to annihilate Iran for years, seemed to have whispered in Deceitful Don’s ear that Iran was close to making a nuclear bomb; that Israel was about to attack to keep that from happening and he wanted the U.S. to help him. The perfect excuse for our Donnie. He jumped into the fray with drones and planes and ships. Pete, perhaps speaking in tongues, was ecstatic. Bombs away!!! Though no one bothered to get Congress’s approval.

In one of our first strikes, America obliterated an elementary school, killing more than 100 little girls. Trump tried to use the “dog ate my homework” excuse and blamed Iran. He lied. As our country relentlessly bombs military targets, leveling Iran’s army, navy and air force, Trump revels in the destruction. His blood lust grows… claiming victory over and over again as our military took on casualties, and lost lives. American blood flowed. But Donnie explained that that was the price we had to pay to save America even when it became apparent that Iran was not close to having a nuclear bomb. The reason we were then told for starting this war was a needed regime change. After that, a variety of other ridiculous reasons were thrown against the wall, including liberating the Iranian people. Nothing stuck. Iran didn’t get the memo that the war was over and attacked American bases in the region and other strategic targets in neighboring countries.

Blood is now flowing all over the middle-east, with no end in sight. Trump claims he’s talking to people in Iran to end the conflict, but Iran’s leaders deny that claim as the bombings continue. Trump’s dream of leading a victory parade in Tehran as a liberator is fading and his attention to Iran is waning. He has now decided he wants to conquer Cuba.

Knit one – purl two. Stay tuned.

Oops – not true.

He promised to lower food prices and save the economy.

Oops – again.

He declared he ended 7 or 9 or who knows how many wars around the globe.

Again - not true.

He crowned himself the President of Peace and demanded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Norway refused.

He promised no more forever wars in the mid-east.

He declared war on Iran.

This is not Afghanistan.

This is not Iraq.

Those wars, however misguided, at least involved Congressional authorization. This one was conceived in secrecy with #WarCriminalBebe Netanyahu.

The justification pitch: Iran was minutes (maybe seconds) away from a nuclear weapon.

The evidence: invisible

The consequences: immediate

The first reported casualties were not Iranian generals or leaders, but children – killed when a strike hit a girls’ elementary school. THAT is the image that will circle the globe, recruit the next generation of enemies and outlive every press release.

#DepravedDonnie has also announced that the strike killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and #PresidentBoneSpurs is reveling in playing a powerful strongman. Sadly, he doesn’t have the intelligence or the discipline to plan and carry out a long term, strategic game plan now that he started this war with his pal, Bebe. In fact, instead of being in the situation room with generals and military experts, he’s posting on his “Truth Social” (irony anyone?) in the wee hours after the strike, still insisting he won the 2020 election, and attending a glitzy million dollar a plate fancy fund raiser. Today is focus is on his “beautiful ballroom.”

All together now:::::: sigh.

Iran has confirmed the death of Ayatollah Khamenei – but does it matter? Iran’s political leaders’ and successors’ bench is deep – and it is not deep with “pro-democracy” players. Trump and Bebe killed a leader, but not the system, not the ideology, and certainly not the capacity to strike back. Authoritarian regimes do not run on one man: they run on institutions, factions, and succession plans.

Iran has now already started its war on terror against America and Israel and has already bombed our military bases in nearby regions and targets in Israel. Four Americans have been killed. More were wounded. And, #despotDonnie has promised more American casualties.

This, of course, counters #delusionalDonnie’s announcement last year, after he bombed Iran with his depth defying missile, that Iran’s entire nuclear program was destroyed.

Apparently, it rebuilt itself overnight.

Either the intelligence was wrong then, or the rhetoric is wrong now. Possibly both. Another possibility - we were fed lies then and now.

And let’s not forget, Iran has terrorist cells all over the world and Americans are now targets – soldiers and civilians alike. Targets such as American military bases, American cities and towns, water supplies, bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers, schools, hospitals, etc. if they choose to do so – and no thinking person believes they won’t choose to do so. Iran is also very patient – it may not deploy too many defensive strikes now and may let their country fall into chaos and give Trump and Bebe a sense of victory. But they will huddle and plan and huddle and plan and huddle and plan (in caves, if necessary) other strikes as they wait for #sadisticDon and still a #WarCriminalBebe to let their guards down – maybe a year from now, two or ten... but Iran will not forget, and they will never forgive.

At precisely this moment of terrorist risk to all Americans, our U.S. intelligence, law-enforcement and military apparatus has been gutted by Trump, #krazyKash, #PetulantPammy, #DryDrunkPete and #CruellaGabbard - experienced personnel have been pushed aside, institutional memory discarded, professed loyalty to Trump valued over expertise. Counter-terror world depends on continuity; you cannot replace it with unqualified sycophants, hashtags and press conferences.

And through it all runs the same political through-line:

When the story turns dangerous, change the subject.

When scrutiny rises, create a crisis.

When accountability looms, manufacture an enemy.

“Operation Forget the Epstein Files” is not a policy.

It is a pattern.

A cycle of promise – reversal – escalation – distraction.

And we are less safe than we’ve been in decades. There is no one competent to stop terrorist attacks because of this President, who continues to find creative, dangerous, immoral ways to desperately shift focus from the – as Jimmy Kimmel now calls them-- the Trump-Epstein Files and, let’s not forget his plans to steal or stop the 2026 mid-terms, now claiming Iran (along with China, et al) has interfered in our elections to help democrats.

He knows if he loses Congress, all the files will be released and he will be impeached, if not arrested for sexually assaulting a minor girl. He needs to stay President (and in his delusions, win a third term) to keep himself out of prison and let the statute of limitations expire.

When #DapperDon first dipped his manicured toes in NYC real estate, he refused to rent apartments in his father’s buildings to Black and Puerto Rican people - their income irrelevant. The DOJ noticed. Daddy and Donnie were sued, lost and fined. Lesson learned? Sure: never get caught again. Donnie’s racist credentials were solidified.

From there, the boy from Queens perfected a uniquely American art form – failing upward one bankruptcy at a time with the help of the real estate “Mob,” Daddy, Manhattan banks, European banks, and the city’s third tier socialites and social climbers who confused vulgarity with confidence. He stiffed contractors, his hotel and casino employees, elderly Trump University students, children’s cancer researchers – you know, the little guys, as he graffitied his name on buildings from Manhattan to Atlantic City and beyond, then watched it all collapse again.

No problem. #DelusionalDon reinvented himself – this time on a “reality” TV show where reality was as fictional as his claim to be a great businessman. His preening would have made Narcissus blush, but it became his “brand.”

#DepravedDon’s racism was never subtle – never coy. He took out full-page ads demanding the execution of the Central Park Five – five black teenagers falsely accused and imprisoned for raping a white girl. Years later when DNA exonerated them, he continued to call for their execution.

To be fair, Trump did seem to like some Black people who “looked” black and were in professions Trump felt appropriate for them. Sports. Music. Hell, he even befriended a few like Don King, Mike Tyson and Kanye West. No threat to his inflated ego. No competition. Just reflected fame.

Meanwhile, #DonTheCon’s personal life was a soap opera sponsored by entitlement and he reveled in it. Cheat, divorce, marry, repeat. Ivana – the skier, Marla – the American, Melania – the “model.” The first and third, immigrants – because xenophobia is flexible when it’s sleeping with you and they are white. Desire mattered. Fidelity didn’t. Respect never entered into it.

For years this worked. Donnie wasn’t invited into the WASP 400 he so desperately wanted to impress, but his delusions of grandeur and a desired lady’s man kept him warm at night.

#DeleteriousDon’s life was full. His delusions of importance mushroomed...

... then, along came Barack Hussein Obama.

An “unknown” community organizer and up and coming politician from Chicago, Barack Obama walked onto the stage to give the key note speech at the 2004 Democratic Presidential Convention. He rocked the rafters. A political star was born. AND, #DementedDon’s seed of resentment and hatred was planted.

When Barack became a US Senator, Trump tried to ignore it. But his ego couldn’t. That seed sprouted. In Obama, Trump recognized everything he wasn’t: Obama was smarter, better educated, dignified, athletic, thin, funny, and honorable. He had ideals, class, and spoke like a true orator. Worse - people loved him. White people loved him!

When Obama became president, Trump’s insecurities and racist core rose to the surface and out crawled the birther movement - his racism and those who began to follow him - racism that had been fermenting underground like mold in a Mar-a-Largo basement, was now in full bloom. Despite it all, Obama won handily; on his inauguration day, the D.C. mall was jammed with more people than anyone could remember. But when Barack’s Black family moved into the “White” House, little could contain Donnie’s hatred. He went after Barack. He went after Michelle. Neither took the bait.

Then came the White House Correspondents’ annual dinner. Trump was there enjoying the roasting of the man he loathed. Then Obama took the microphone – the tables turned. His jokes landed. The room laughed. #TheDonald sat there smirking as he was publicly skewered by a man who embodied everything he resented and could never be.

Something broke.

Trump entered politics not with ideas, but with revenge. He ran for President and won. His presidency was a disaster. It was Obama’s fault. And Hillary’s. And Biden’s. Losing the 2020 election was intolerable - #DeludedDonnie can lose money, marriages and businesses, but never his inflated self-image. So he lied and claimed the election was stolen.

He kept on lying. Loudly. Over and over and over again.

Now, back in the Oval, he wants payback – not just against Democrats, but America itself for his loss in 2020. Against women. Against Black and Brown people. Against immigrants.

It doesn’t matter if he erases female or Black war heroes, artists, scientists, writers et al from the history books.

It doesn’t matter if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue or ICE agents murder U.S. citizens on the streets of Minneapolis.

It doesn’t matter if he has five-year-old or two-year-old Brown children arrested.

It doesn’t matter that he wants to nationalize our elections.

It doesn’t matter if he allows women to bleed out and die having a miscarriage.

It doesn’t matter if he blows up boats and murders those in them.

It doesn’t matter that he threatens Canada, Mexico or NATO and puts our economy and country in danger.

It doesn’t matter that he’s a convicted sexual assaulter.

It doesn’t matter he stole money from his own children’s research cancer charitable foundation.

It doesn’t matter that he’s a convicted felon.

It never matters, because in his mind...

... It’s all Obama’s fault.

We are at war.

Not metaphorically.

Not rhetorically.

We are at war over decency, democracy, and who counts as human in America.

As John Heilemann warned, this war is coming “to a theater near you.” In truth, it’s already here.

In California.

In Illinois.

In Maine.

Most brutally, Minnesota.

And spreading.

Out-of-control ICE agents, overwhelmingly white and male, operate with impunity: terrorizing, harassing, beating, detaining, and killing immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. Their sadism is not accidental. It was unleashed deliberately by Stephen Miller and sanctioned by this Administration of Hate, masked and militarized into brown-shirt street thugs who answer to no one.

Like most wars against evil, this one will be long. Millions of Americans still want a white nation—or, failing that, a country where Black and Brown people are stripped of citizenship, voting rights, economic power, and political voice. Many would gladly resurrect slavery for the billionaire class. The same authoritarian impulse fuels the MAGA obsession with forcing women back into subservience—out of the workforce, into the kitchen, pregnant and barefoot—now openly championed by Vice President J.D. Vance.

This latest assault on democracy began the moment Trump returned to the Oval Office.

He wasted no time.

Law firms silence.

Universities bullied.

Books banned.

The DOJ weaponized

His revenged tour began, starting with James Comey and Tish James, ordered by

his personally chosen Constitution-Challenged Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to indict them. From there, the scope widened. Networks. Journalists. Entertainers. Anyone critical.

Bondi’s opening gambit against the press was lawsuits against television news networks, but recently turned chillingly strategic: arresting and indicting two independent journalists—Don Lemon and Georgia Fort—both Black, both lacking the institutional legal firepower of corporate media. The message was unmistakable: journalists of color who expose this administration will be punished. Others—white or otherwise—will follow if they report protests, corruption, tariff lunacy, or the reality of Trump’s detention camps.

This is not a novel. It is straight from the authoritarian playbook perfected by Russia, Egypt, and China. Arrest the messengers. Criminalize the truth. :::::sigh

But silencing critics is only part of Trump’s fun.

The most visible battlefield now plays out nightly on our screens: America’s streets, especially in blue states Trump despises. ICE has become his personal paramilitary force, expanding into red states as well, tasked with purging not the worst of the worst, but undocumented people of color. More than 3,800 children have been booked and detained—twenty of them infants.

In Minneapolis, the brutality is constant. ICE agents raid homes without a warrant, smash car windows, drag men, women and children out, slam bodies face-down onto the cement pavement, fracture bones, gas peaceful crowds, and aim weapons at adults and children alike. A female ICE observer was threatened with arrest for raising her voice. A handicapped observer was told her disability was “too friggin’ bad.” Only the intervention of a local Minnesota police officer prevented her from further assault.

And then there are the murders.

Jonathan Ross screaming “FUCKING BITCH” at Renee Nicole Good after shooting her in the face three times. Federal agents laughing after killing Alex Pretti—shot ten times in the back.

To distract from these atrocities, the DOJ flooded the public with more Epstein files. Irony is not dead. Trump is no longer distracting from the files with foreign crises he created; he’s using them to distract from ICE’s violence.

Bondi’s cruelty added a final twist: she failed to redact the victims’ names, exposing their addresses and phone numbers—re-victimizing them so wealthy predators and their allies could harass or threaten them with impunity. The men named? Mostly already known. Including, fittingly, Jim Jordan, a pedophile enabler. But the rapists and sex traffickers the victims identified? Still protected.

And when journalists report it?

They’re arrested.

When lawyers fight it?

They’re targeted.

When citizens protest it?

They’re beaten.

This is how democracies fall.

Not all at once.

But piece by piece.

Lie by lie.

Body by body.

And now they come for the vote.

A second front in this war now demands immediate attention: the survival of the 2026 midterm elections.

Marc Elias of Democracy Docket has warned that the GOP’s so-called “Make Elections Great Again Act” may be the most dangerous voting-rights assault in U.S. history. It goes beyond the SAVE Act: strict voter ID mandates, mass purges, mail-in voting bans. Elias’s darkest fear is no longer unthinkable—that Trump will manufacture chaos, declare martial law, and cancel the elections entirely to avoid impeachment or prosecution.

Trump has already lamented not seizing voting machines in 2020. He knows he lost—and admitted it privately—but remains obsessed with the lie. Despite multiple Republican-led investigations in Georgia confirming zero fraud, Trump ordered FBI raids to seize the 2020 voting records, then sent Tulsi Gabbard to “investigate,” signaling even his own agents aren’t trusted to lie convincingly enough.

AND now Trump has ordered the Republicans in Congress to nationalize our free and fair elections. Vlad is dancing in the palace.

BUT, despite all of this—there is light.

Tens of thousands of Minnesotans march in freezing temperatures day after day. Mostly white Americans. In the streets for their Black and Brown neighbors. I cried watching it. I cried again when a judge ordered the release of five-year-old Liam and his father—because only a sadist cages a child with his hardworking parent.

Stephen Miller’s cruelty is not a byproduct; it is the point. Trump’s dementia-fueled delirium embraces it.

And yet, 34,000 Minnesotans have now signed up for ICE-observer training—learning their rights, learning how to intervene, knowing they could be harmed or killed by their own government. That courage is contagious. These trainings are happening nationwide. Learn them. ICE could be in your neighborhood tomorrow. It’s already in mine.

Some days, this feels like a bad Robert Ludlum or Le Carré novel.

But it’s real. And silence is complicit.

I was going to start my first 2026 Substack by wishing everyone a very Happy New Year. I was even considering posting a satirical HuffPost piece I wrote years ago—“The Other F Word”—about the plight of women and our eternal optimism required to believe things might improve even as we slide back to the 1950s.

Then Trump shit hit the fan.

Suddenly, satire felt quaint.

First came #DementedDon’s “not-an-invasion invasion” of Venezuela but a “simple military operation” to arrest the country’s president and his wife. Then came the execution of Renee Nicole Good on a Minneapolis street by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who, after shooting her three times in the face while she sat in her car, yelled, “fucking bitch.”

A mother of three was dead.

And then erased.

The Trump and his Administration’s response that seemed so very quickly after her murder, before her name was even known, was not an investigation for truth and accountability, but fabrication: lies designed to transform this 37-year-old woman who had just dropped her six-year-old son at school into a violent domestic terrorist – even after multiple videos at the scene showed precisely the opposite. This murder, and the grotesque effort to rewrite it to protect Ross and themselves, became my first Substack of 2026. Not because I wanted to – but because I had to.

I’m still enraged. I’m also numb.

And while ICE violence against peaceful protesters and against anyone with brown skin is no longer new, the doubling-down on cruelty – on terror and chaos as its policy since Renee’s murder – demands that we look at the larger pattern. Which brings me back to Venezuela.

We’ve been told, depending on which unqualified MAGA administration official is free-associating in front of a TV camera, that this was not an invasion. This was a “law enforcement action.” “Invasion” apparently, is a word being saved for later – presumably when American oil companies arrive en masse in Venezuela with contracts, flags, and patriotic hard hats to “stabilize” the country’s oil fields and pump black gold straight into billionaire pockets.

The justification? Nicolas Maduro and his wife are drug traffickers.

#DepravedDonnie’s reasoning for his oil-fueled “not-an-invasion invasion” of another country and the kidnapping of its president, (as corrupt and deranged as he was…more so than #DerangedDonnie is debatable at this point) drips with irony.

This, of course, would be more believable if #ForkedTongueDonnie hadn’t recently pardoned the ex-President of Honduras, the largest drug trafficker to ever supply the American people with drugs -- a man convicted of trafficking in an American Court of Law and sentenced to decades in jail. The administration’s ‘spin’ on this insane pardon labels it an “act of mercy.” Others might call it am expensive cash-based get-out-of-jail card.

What makes this operation truly historic isn’t just the audacity – it’s the precedent.

After WWII, the U.S and world leaders, including Dwight Eisenhower, helped craft a global agreement that would help prevent another world war with our allies and members of the United Nations. The agreement prohibits a more powerful nation from simply marching into a weaker one to annex it to expand their power and sphere of influence. Putin, obviously, ignored those rules when he invaded and began a bombing and killing spree in Ukraine more than once over recent years. What Trump just did in Venezuela, while bragging about “taking the oil to keep America safe” – is a retroactive endorsement by America of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and a signal to China that it, too, can consolidate its sphere of influence wherever it sees fit.

The irony? Even the oil companies that #DiminishedDonnie claimed knew about the “not-an-invasion invasion” and were “on board” to spend billions in Venezuela to make billions, seem to be backing away. It’s not cost-effective, they say. Translation - even imperialism has a spreadsheet. OK – now what, #DonTheDon?

Which raises another m question: if this kidnapping of a foreign president/dictator was the goal, why leave the rest of his regime intact? Maduro’s Vice President and his loyalists, including his generals, remain in power, hostile to democracy and are unlikely to greet American oil companies with flowers and a parade. This wasn’t a strategy, it was spectacle.

Ah, but timing matters.

Just as those damn files resurfaced. Just as we learned that #DuplicitousDon was on Jeffrey’s private plane way, way more than he admitted. Just as the reporting re-emerged that he, Donald Trump, trafficked many young Mar-a-Largo “staffers” to his good pal Jeffrey’s home to perform “spa services.” Suddenly, the #AdministrationofLiars’ and #pedophileenablers’ message became: Look over there.

#PeskyKaroline’s latest spin? The “Donald Trump” mentioned in those files isn’t our Donald Trump – just some mysterious Donald Trump who also flew with Epstein. If you believe that, I have several bridges in Brooklyn for sale.

To further flood the zone (it’s not working), #ProfessionalVictimDonnie’s late night Truth Social rants now include threats to invade Cuba and install #MendaciousMarco as president, Greenland (again) and Mexico, one of our largest trading partners. Which raises a chilling question: if ordered to invade Greenland, for example, would American generals obey that illegal order? If so, would American soldiers shoot Danish soldiers? Same questions re: Mexico, even Cuba.

Meanwhile, back at Department of War (chuckle), Secretary Pete Hegseth – sorry #PenislessPete – has apparently found time between cable TV appearances to attack Senator Mark Kelly (at the behest of #PresidentBoneSpurs) for reminding service members (Generals included) that under U.S. military law, they are required to refuse illegal orders - even from the president. Kelly, an actual war hero responded by filing a law suit against #PenisChallengedPete. Good!!!

So, here we are - distraction stacked on distraction, cruelty masking corruption, and foreign forays to protect domestic predators and their enablers (#GymJordan, #LadyLindsey, #VenalVPVance and countless more in Congress and the administration).

To paraphrase the departing Marjorie Taylor Greene:

What happened to America first?

What happened to lowering food prices?

Healthcare? Drug costs. Helping Americans?

Those questions remain unanswered.

And no amount of noise, from #DestructiveDon’s military adventures to street-level executions will make them go away.

Watch the tape. And there are other tapes from different angles.

She was NOT a terrorist, those ICE agents are the terrorists. Stephen Miller is a terrorist, #krazykristi is a terrorist.

Minneapolis law enforcement is investigating this shooting. Though I doubt #crazyeyedKash is happy about that since he can’t control the investigation’s outcome.

But there’s this — Minneapolis Mayor to ICE: “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis. “

The question remains - Has this government no decency? The answer is NO.

For argument’s sake, let’s say our #PutUponPresident and #PetulantPete are right and these low-level drug mules armed with sunburns and bad life choices are cocaine smugglers - how much cocaine could actually fit on those small boats carrying a half dozen drug mules and two sardine tins? An ounce? A Ziploc baggie? Perhaps a kilo? And, how do #ConvictedFelonDonnie and #PrettyBoyPete know that these cocaine canoes, with a piss-poor amount of cocaine, are headed to America and not just up the coast somewhere closer to Venezuela to make a few pesos to buy food for their families? From most news account, in real life actual cocaine smugglers use cargo ships or semi-trailer trucks in cahoots with corrupt officials – it’s not “Gilligan’s Island: Narco Edition.”

And, AND, since the drug fentanyl is the drug that’s actually killing Americans by the thousands, why is our #BoneSpursPresident and #TattooedPete murdering these “maybe or maybe not” drug mules over tiny quantities of cocaine? As most druggies (when sober) will tell you, cocaine is not fentanyl.

So... why isn’t this “stop the cocaine-smuggling boats” (if that’s really what they are) not a Coast Guard mission? The Coast Guard are actually trained, staffed, funded and equipped to stop these small boats, seize any illegal contraband and arrest any smuggling mules for interrogation. But, instead, we get the Pentagon, because nothing screams “tactical mastery” like launching multimillion dollar weapons at something smaller than a Boston Whaler.

It’s almost as if this is a White House video game for the MAGA crowd …#CarnivalBarkerDonnie can hawk this latest Christmas item for sale to go along with his gold sneakers, Trump Bibles and Trump watches.

Hence my first perplexity.

Perplexity #2: If our #BribeTakingPresident and #MachoManPete are so heroically devoted to stopping the drug that is actually killing Americans (you know fentanyl), then why do they keep hyperventilating about the wrong drug in the wrong place supposedly by the wrong people via the wrong method? Fentanyl isn’t arriving on dinghies cruising past Barbados. It’s coming through land ports, hidden in cars and trucks, and trafficked by organized cartels - something even the DEA has explained repeatedly.

If our #DementedDeludedDonnie is truly trying to stop the smuggling of fentanyl into our country, why isn’t he trying to do so where the drugs are actually coming from? Which, as we’ve been told a zillion times, is on land, in large quantities, smuggled across our southern border from Mexico. Yet, fentanyl is still streaming into the United States. Hasn’t #LiarInChiefDonnie claimed he totally closed our southern border – sealed and double-locked it? Hmmmmm. Maybe he just closed the part that keeps brown refugees out.

And my third perplexity? Why then, in the name of logic, if he wants to eliminate drug traffickers, did #DepravedDonnie pardon the ex-Honduran president, one of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers who smuggled over 4 TONS of cocaine into the United States, killing who knows how many Americans, adults and children?

#TryingMyLastNerveTrump claims this poor ex-Honduran president is in jail for #trumpeduppoliticalcharges issued by President Joe Biden. Yeah, right. A phrase #DuplicitousDon apparently believes works like Febreze: spray it on anything and the stench disappears. Or has money been exchanged and paid to #ConManDonnie – a bribe, perhaps? A second hmmmm. Wouldn’t be the first time this #KingOfGriftPresident accepted money for political favor. Even so, why pardon a drug trafficking king while murdering inconsequential, pathetic drug mules, if you’re trying to keep drugs out of America? It’s not a good look.

And why has he (not Congress) declared “war” on Venezuela?

Do you see my problem here?

“I have met some very bad people, none as bad as trump. not one decent cell in his body. so yes- dangerous.”

That’s a typo-ridden, grammatically incorrect email written by the world’s most notorious pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, to disgraced economist Larry Summers in 2017 about his former “closest friend.”

That, coming from the world’s most notorious pedophile and sex trafficker to economist, Larry Summers, about his “closest friend.”

Let’s explore Jeffrey’s “closest” friend, Donald J. Trump:

A convicted felon with 34 counts for falsifying business records to cover hush money to porn star, Stormy Daniels...

Found liable (civilly) for sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll...

Caught on tape bragging that he can grab women “by the pussy” because he’s famous...

Credibly accused by many women of various forms of sexual abuse...

Paid to sleep with a porn star shortly after his 3^rd wife gave birth, because adultery might as well be a hobby by this point.

But, hey, according to Melania Trump, his very same 3^rd wife, “boys will be boys.”

Let’s fast forward to the present:

Does anyone else besides me find Trump’s repetitive ‘seventh grade’ behavior bizarre? Same ridiculous nicknames (“horrible, stupid, enemy of the people, traitor, scum, nasty, crazy left wing radicals” to name a few), same playground taunts, same “hoax label” slapped on anything that upsets or attacks him –traitors, incompetent” (though that was a big word for him), or “haters of Trump” (as he refers to himself in the 3rd person (not to be confused with Graham Greene’s “The Third Man”). Projection? Has it become as boring for you as it has for me?

For years and years, MAGA, led by Donnie, demanded: RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES! QAnon and others believed those files would catch a cabal of Democrats, such as Clinton and Soros, in a web where liberals were drinking baby blood in pizza parlor basements, (which for the record, has the same factual basis as Narnia), and sex trafficking young girls. The release of those files was one of Donnie’s campaign promises.

Trump won - barely. Then, his newly appointed FBI head, #KrazyKash and his soon to be muscle-brained what’shisname henchman second in command, both of whom previously demanded their release on podcasts, read the files. While Donnie’s #PetPuppetPammy who, after she became the AG of America, told the world she had the files listing the all the pedophiles on her brand-new desk, in her brand-new office, and promised to release them.

America and the victims were finally going to know which filthy Democrat rich and powerful men were in this sex trafficking cabal.

Oops. #KrazyKash then told #PetPuppetPammy what was in them... she allegedly told Donnie that he was in the files, then voila, the files were suddenly back in the closet. NO files were released. The cover-up began. Brave victim-survivors came to D.C. to plead with Donnie and to Congress for their release. Not happening. Weeks and much bad press later, Donnie finally caved after Congress voted nearly unanimously, (one holdout), that he had to take those files from the closet and air them out for the American people to read. Ironically, he never needed Congress to release the files, he could have just release them on his own, but I digress... Ah, but will they ever be released? Stay tuned.

But perversion comes in many shades of gray besides a sexual one:

Perversion of the rule of law - as Donnie ignores court rulings, attacks judges, ignores warrants and due process for brown undocumented immigrants, and behaves as if legal accountability is for everyone but him.

Perversion of the Constitution: illegally sending military units into states to terrorize brown immigrants whose only “crime” is a misdemeanor... seizing state National Guards without a governor’s approval against State Rights... threatening arrest and using the DOJ and FBI to go after political opponents, kidnapping and arresting people off the streets by masked and armed Federal agents, illegally deporting brown people to undisclosed 3^rd world prisons - the stuff dictators do before breakfast.

Perversion of humanity: by packing kidnapped immigrants into filthy detention sites, separating families, grabbing elderly and disabled men and women and children in raids and deporting them to horrific 3^rd world prisons --- it’s barbaric.

Perversion of America’s military: using the military to invade cities and to police the American people, to investigate American heroes who speak out against him, to demand the dismissal of female and people of color in the military as DEI hires, and using the military to investigate veterans, even officers and generals who speak out against him.

Perversion of the Justice Department: turning the DOJ into this president’s own personal vengeance machine. Demanding the firing of all DOJ prosecutors that worked on the Mueller investigation or the January 6 investigation. Demanding the investigation of all Democrats who have spoken out against him. Republicans? Absolutely not. Instead, he halts all investigations of any misdeeds committed by a Republican.

Perversion of the First Amendment: Ordering the FBI, the DOJ and now the Defense Department to investigate Americans, including the recent Senators and House representatives for speaking out against the President by asking the military not to obey illegal orders, which is part of the Constitution and all of which is free speech covered by the First Amendment.

Then there’s instructing the military to bomb boats, thereby murdering the passengers in international waters with made up charges, offering no proof supporting those chargers, and no due process, thus continuing his perversion of America’s military, but also of the rule of law, international rules of law, and our Constitution.

All these perversions have obviously perverted the Office of the Presidency, which he continues to do on a daily basis with his Truth Social rantings, most recently branded as traitors those Senators and House Representatives who counseled the military that they do not have to follow an illegal order, and as such should be put to death.

AND, recently, Donnie, in front of the press, called a female Bloomberg reporter a piggy because she dared to ask a legitimate Epstein news question, then what seemed a nano second later, he called a female ABC Nightly News reporter a horrible person and a stupid, bad reporter when she asked a probing question of MBS in the Oval Office.

And, there’s his perversion of the truth: the longest perversion of which is that he won the 2020 election, but not far behind is his ever changing, ridiculous story regarding his break up with his dear friend, Jeffrey Epstein:

He cheated me on a land deal;

He stole my Mar a Lago employees; and finally

I kicked him out because he was a pervert.

Which is it, Donnie? All of the above – none of the above? I vote for the latter and believe there’s a lot more behind their break up.

To wrap up who’s the pervert:

There are few crimes worse than the sexual assault of a minor, or raping and trafficking any human being, at any age, for sex. In that regard, Epstein is the most heinous of perverts.

But, Donnie’s perversions?

He’s perverted our laws, our justice department, our institutions, our military, the Constitution, our values and our basic national dignity.

Donald J. Trump is a disgrace, and the world is embarrassed for us, but when someone knows who’s committing that most heinous crime, takes part in that crime and/or does nothing to stop it and covers it up, then perverts all Federal laws and human civility because of greed and narcissism, who, then is the worse pervert?

I’ll wait.

Sent from my Galaxy

Read more