Residing close to the border, I spend a lot of time in Canada. Always have since I was a toddler. I learned French there, though I had to take a course years later at the U.S. State Department, my former employer, to retool to a more universally comprehensible le français métropolitain. My wife and I just returned from our place in Ontario. In his latest asinine act of gratuitous offensiveness, Donald Trump “renamed” Lake Ontario “Lake America” while we were there, on top of waging what the Wall Street Journal calls “the dumbest trade war in history.” I’ve never seen Canadians so incensed. Fortunately, they aren’t directing their anger at individual Yanks — yet. Most are fully aware that the vast majority of Americans do not support Trump’s irrational attacks against them and their highly capable prime minister.

Walk into any provincial liquor store or supermarket and you will search in vain for American alcoholic beverage products. One sees red maple leaf-embossed signs in shops reading “BUY CANADIAN.” Canadians are boycotting travel to the U.S. by the millions, delivering an economic body blow to formerly popular destinations like New York City, Las Vegas and Florida. Border states are particularly hard hit. In Upstate New York, where I live, businesses which traditionally have relied heavily on Canadian patronage are suffering, including the state’s biggest shopping mall, Destiny, in Syracuse, which has seen a nearly third drop in shoppers — Canadians, many of whom normally do their school shopping there. The Finger Lakes wine country has also seen a sharp fall-off in Canadian tourism, as has the Adirondack Mountains region.

Canadian news media are saturated with coverage of the Trump-triggered strain in U.S.-Canadian relations. Citizens are engaged in both words and actions. Typical is Toronto-based entrepreneur Valerie Crisp, who started a company, Common Goods, to sell Canadian products to Canadians. “Within a week, I had 10,000 customers on a wait list,” she told the CBC. Her business tripled after twelve months.

The Globe & Mail’s headlines have shifted from “How Can Canada Get a Deal?” to “What is Canada Willing to Sacrifice to Resist Trump?” and “A Free Canada is Worth the Sacrifice.”

With Trump’s recent bewildering tirades against Canada, it’s useful to look into some early history between the two neighbors and take stock. Americans forget that Canadians are not pushovers (the following is updated from a piece I published early last year).

Upon entering Canada by car, an American visitor very well might encounter a historical plaque reading:

THE UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS Who, after the Declaration of Independence, came into British North America from the seceded American colonies and who, with faith and fortitude, and under great pioneering difficulties, largely laid the foundations of this Canadian nation as an integral part of the British Empire. Neither confiscation of their property, the pitiless persecution of their kinsmen in revolt, nor the galling chains of imprisonment could break their spirits or divorce them from a loyalty almost without parallel.

The markers honor the estimated 40,000 Loyalists of the British Crown who fled to what is now Canada to escape what one described as the “Chaos, Taxes and Anarchy” of the new American republic. Benjamin Franklin’s son William was a Loyalist who escaped to England and remained estranged from his father. Americans, indoctrinated since grade school in the heroic lore of the revolutionary Patriots fighting for freedom from British “tyranny,” might experience cognitive dissonance when encountering such monuments, which proliferate throughout Canada.

Canadians have a different take. The Loyalists are held in the highest esteem. Many landmarks are named after them: Loyalist Township, Loyalist Parkway, Loyalist College, etc. The United Empire Loyalists Association of Canada is a kind of inverse counterpart to the Sons/Daughters of the American Revolution. Its chapters can be found in many Canadian cities and towns. They sponsor annual parades and other events, including battle re-enactments, and offer scholarships. The UELAC estimates that one in ten Canadians can trace their ancestry to an American Loyalist, who, by the way, included Jews, First Peoples/Native Americans and thousands of Blacks escaping slavery.

The influence of the Loyalists on the Canadian psyche is strong, centering on Canada being an independent and distinct North American nation — and also a dollop of reflexive anti-Americanism among some. The mottoes of two provinces reflect Loyalist pride: Ontario’s Ut incepit fidelis sic permanet (“Loyal she began, loyal she remains”) and New Brunswick’s Spem Reduxit (“Hope restored”). A couple of Canadian MP’s once sponsored a tongue-in-cheek bill which would have entitled Loyalist descendants to reclaim ancestral property in the United States.

Whenever Americans have taken on Canada in conflict, they haven’t fared well. The Continental Army’s attempt to seize Quebec in 1775 ended in disaster and heavy losses for Washington’s troops.

Former President Thomas Jefferson’s boast to a reporter that the capture of Canada during the War of 1812 would be “a mere matter of marching” proved to be delusional. The dozen, or so, American incursions into Canada all failed. The fathers and grandfathers of four-fifths of the residents of Upper Canada (Ontario) were Loyalists, many of whom had fought for the British during the War of Independence and were in no mood to cede to Americans. They seized Detroit. When the Americans tried to retake it, they lost an entire army, and then another at Queenston Heights after their militia refused to cross into Canada. After more heavy losses at Frenchtown, the Americans gave up. Following that battle, the only Americans in Canada were prisoners of war. It is not true that troops from Canada burned down the White House, Capitol and Library of Congress, though the British general who did so is buried in Nova Scotia.

British-Canadian victories in the northern theater of that conflict resulted in a cementing of Canadian identity. A 2012 poll found that Canadian identity forged from the War of 1812 places second (25 percent) — behind Canadian universal health care (53 percent). Canadian schools devote considerably more attention to that conflict than their American counterparts.

Since Canada became an independent nation in 1867 Americans and Canadians have been best friends and fought together in two world wars, Korea, Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. I had the pleasure of working with Canadian military personnel in peacekeeping and mine-clearing operations in Cambodia. Where I reside in Upstate New York, the Maple Leaf and Old Glory fly side-by-side in parks and atop many buildings, public and private. Our currencies used to be interchangeable. Cross-border tourism was strong until Trump. Canadians flocked to U.S. malls to shop at cheaper prices. Cross-border family connections are many. I had relatives in Toronto and my sister married a Quebecois-American man.

The U.S. and Canada are often likened to siblings: similar, yet different. Canadians place greater emphasis on tolerance, inclusivity and cooperation. Americans gained their independence from Britain through violence. Canadians won theirs through patience and peaceful means. In addition to the Loyalists, Canada also gave refuge to escaped American slaves and men fleeing the Vietnam War draft.

The takeaway is this: Canadians don’t want to be Americans and never will.

So, why then is Trump trash-talking and waging a senseless trade war with Canada, calling it “One of the nastiest countries to deal with,” repeatedly belittling its prime minister as “governor of Canada,” and referring to the country as “the 51st state”? His mini-me MAGA-moron ambassador to Ottawa, Pete Hoekstra, has so offended Canadians that there is move in parliament to declare him persona non grata and send him packing.

Chrystia Freeland, a former deputy prime minister, minister of foreign affairs and minister of finance of Canada, nails it in analyzing Trump’s actions in a New York Times op-ed:

Mr. Trump has made his view plain. His Washington doesn’t have allies. It has only satraps, enemies and equals — the latter a singular group that includes just China and on some days, perhaps, Russia.

In other words, this isn’t about wine sales or how Canada manages its forests or reviving U.S. manufacturing. It’s about whether Canada is prepared to accept a profound change in its relationship with the United States. It’s about whether Canada is willing to go from being an ally and a partner, in a relationship governed by treaties and rules, to being a vassal, subject to Washington fiat — like the Venezuela of Delcy Rodríguez, only with snowdrifts and hockey.

And I’ll add the following — mental illness and Putin envy.

Serious mental health experts have been warning the nation for years about Trump’s compounding psychological conditions, centering on clinically defined personality disorders and dementia.

Just before the November 2024 presidential election, 233 psychiatrists and mental health professionals stated in an open letter their conviction that “Trump exhibits behavior that tracks with the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s (DSM V) diagnostic criteria for ‘narcissistic personality disorder,’ ‘antisocial personality disorder,’ and ‘paranoid personality disorder,’ all made worse by his intense sadism, which is a symptom of malignant narcissism.”

More than 3,000 licensed medical and mental health professionals, moreover, signed an open letter attesting that Trump shows clear signs of “probable dementia.” And in the 2017 bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health experts described the “clear and present danger” that Donald Trump’s mental health poses to the “nation and individual well-being.”

Who else but a delusional madman would pick an unprovoked conflict with his country’s closest ally and, with Mexico, biggest trading partner?

Vladimir Putin, acting as a latter-day tsar, embraces the concept of Greater Russia, a reconstitution of the Soviet Empire. He pursues the expansionist nationalism of the tsars and the aggressive geopolitics of Stalin. He has a 19th century worldview in which the globe is divided into spheres of influence dominated by great powers.

Trump has made no secret of his admiration of Putin and he seeks to emulate him, first by imposing autocratic rule on the American people, followed by ditching alliances, dividing the world into spheres of influence and pursuing territorial expansion. Hence, his threats to invade Panama, Greenland and annex Canada. This mixing of psychosis with power-mongering is exceedingly dangerous for the country and the world.

Therefore, take his threats seriously. He isn’t bluffing. And what happens when he makes a move against Canada, pursuing military aggression on top of economic warfare?

Congressional Republicans had best brush up on Canadian-United States history and learn its lessons. And finally mobilize for action with Democrats to check Trump before it’s too late.

The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.

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In case anyone had any doubts, the U.S. today is a mafia state run by a mob boss.

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) describes in “Trump’s Corrupt Transactions: How the 47th President Has Brazenly Traded Official Benefits for Personal and Political Gain” an unprecedented scale of presidential corruption by Donald Trump:

Since his return to the White House in January 2025, President Donald Trump has continued the same “transactional” approach to governing that characterized his first term, albeit now with an even greater, unprecedented level of unabashed political corruption. Trump has made clear that favorable treatment from his administration is available for a price — and wealthy individuals, companies and special interest groups have lined up to pay. A defining feature of the Trump administration is that those who pay get to play: Multimillion-dollar political donors have been rewarded with prominent government positions and the power to financially benefit their own bottom lines; seven-figure corporate donations have translated to executive branch support for legislative and policy positions; major media companies seeking to stay in the administration’s good graces have paid Trump millions of dollars to settle meritless lawsuits; federal investigations and enforcement actions have dissolved for the right price.

In an interview on MS Now today, former CIA director John Brennan referred to ex-FBI director James Comey’s observation after his initial meeting with Trump shortly after assuming the presidency in his first term: “His leadership style reminded me of that of a mafia boss, of a Cosa Nostra boss... it was like Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony, with Trump in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man’.”

I recognized this from the get-go when he first ran for president. Why? Because I covered mob trials in New York as a junior reporter long ago. I wrote about my experiences in a piece earlier this year. Given the attention and growing outrage over Trump’s brazen lawlessness, corruption and self-aggrandizement, I repeat it, updated and modified, here:

When I was a cub reporter for UPI during my student days, one beat I was assigned to cover was trials of petty mafiosi. It was fascinating, but also frightening. I’d watch as smirking mobsters sat silently in courtrooms as their sleazy attorneys spun arguments in their defense that rivaled the best crime fiction. The late Bruce Cutler was primus inter pares among this ilk. In their book, Mob Star, Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci write that Cutler could “take the prosecution’s evidence, spin it, scuff it, twist it and pound it to a pulp, until it was nothing more than a lumpy pile of reasonable doubt.”

With this background, I’m always taken aback when mainstream media overlook Trump’s innate criminality, instead focusing on the merits, or lack thereof, of his policies. When I watch and listen to Trump, I see a career gangster taking on the system, like the wise guys I covered — characters like Genovese family hitman John “Johnny Dee” DiGiglio, Gambino family underboss Aniello “Neil” Dellacroce and Giovanni “Johnny Dio” Dioguardi. The latter particularly stands out in my memory for having blinded a reporter with acid because he didn’t like the man’s stories; I made sure to keep a considerable distance from the ruthless Johnny Dio.

I’ve always viewed Trump as a mob boss. His ploy to extort Volodymyr Zelensky, leading to his first impeachment, and his schemes to steal the 2020 election — “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” His extorting top flight law firms, news networks and elite universities. His masked ICE agents are merely muscled Trump Crime Family enforcers. His open grifting and the unstinting protection by corrupt judges in Florida and on the Supreme Court. His threatening to “bomb the shit out of them” (Oman) and his sending his consiglieri Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to do “deals” with foreign leaders and, if necessary, make them “offers they can’t refuse.” Add to this his obsession with vendettas. Trump thinks, acts and talks like a crime boss. He can’t help himself. It runs in the family, from his children, Kushner felon-in-laws, his shady father and his draft dodging, brothel-owning immigrant grandfather.

After making an offer to Venezuela that they couldn’t refuse backed by a naval armada amassed off the nation’s shore and its president taken in a snatch-and-grab Tony Soprano would be proud of, Trump stated that he was sure “they’ll do the right thing” — recalling the scene in The Godfather I when Michael Corleone said, “Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.” The extortion started with 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil to be forked over to Trump, not the U.S. government, and an undisclosed amount of oil proceeds going into a secret bank account in Qatar. And, sticking to standard mobster operating procedure, the Maduro Crime Family stays in place to keep the racket going, only under new tutelage.

The Trump administration most closely resembles in my mind the characters in the 1990 movie, Goodfellas. Trump is mob boss Paulie Cicero. Tom Homan is hitman Jimmy “The Gent” Conway. Todd Blanche is his top consigliere, essentially a Bruce Cutler hologram. Kash Patel is an uglier and much dumber version of hitman Tommy DeVito. And Venezuela is hapless restaurant owner Sonny Bunz, whose joint is bled dry and burned to the ground for the insurance money by Paulie’s thugs. Next on the menu: Greenland, Cuba and Panama. The sky’s the limit. His threats to annex Canada sound as if Trump is channeling Gambino Crime Family boss John Gotti:

The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear.

Got it, Canada?!

Here’s how it works, according to Goodfellas mobster Henry Hill:

Now the guy’s got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with a bill, he can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy, he can call Paulie. But now the guy’s gotta come up with Paulie’s money every week, no matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.

This is the classic Faustian bargain one makes with the mob (United States). Paulie (Trump) couldn’t care less about the Bamboo Lounge’s (Venezuela’s) success as a legitimate business (country) — all he sees is a big, fat pocket to pick. The mercenary “Fuck you, pay me” is the sole operating principle. Watch for the same template applied to Cuba.

And this ethos, if you will, conforms to Trump’s congenital outlook on life, again as laid out by Henry Hill:

For us, to live any other way was nuts. To us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, worried about their bills, were dead. I mean, they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again.

This is the “might makes right” stance enunciated by Trump underboss Stephen Miller: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

His and Trump’s world is identical to that of the wise guys in Goodfellas: you’re entitled to take what you want by force, and success on anyone’s terms but your own is failure. They can’t imagine being law-abiding citizens just as the rest of us can’t imagine flouting the law at every turn. Trump’s worldview aligns with that of mob boss Carlo Gambino: “Judges, lawyers, and politicians have a license to steal. We don't need one.”

Like it or not, we are now a Mafia State. Our government is the plaything of a recidivist career criminal and his enforcers. Lawlessness reigns in the dismantlement of the federal government, anything-goes corruption, bribery, threats against opponents, physical assaults by masked men, a collaborationist Supreme Court and bought-off Congress, and hostile takeovers of whole nations for their resources. Crime is the name of the game. Our choice is to provide either our signature or our brains on the new social contract.

NB: “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli” - from “The Godfather” - told by hitman Peter Clemenza to his driver, Rocco, right after they whack the traitor Paulie Gatto in a car.

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Weekly Mind Dump: 8/2-8/8, 2026:

Having been raised properly by upwardly mobile peasants of good taste and served my country in saner times as an officer and gentleman, I am not normally one to remark on a person’s looks, especially of women. But the popularity of two of my essays on the puzzling and enduring craze of millions who opt to tattoo themselves in a mindboggling quest to make themselves crew member replicants of Black Beard’s ship Queen Anne’s Revenge (see “Trump’s Bread & Circuses Have Taken America to New Lows of Vulgarity” and “Tattoo Nation”), I’ve decided to take on the even more perplexing self-destructive phenomenon known as “Mar-a-Lago Face.”

Trigger Warning to those of you who have undergone this B-horror movie transmogrification: stop reading now and return to your favorite West Palm Beach watering hole where you chum it up with fellow vacuous moneybag phonies over obscenely priced “dirty martinis” and wallow in MAGA apocrypha and QAnon bullshit.

What got me onto this topic is a thoughtful essay recently by The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino: “Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare.” She describes the transformation many wealthy MAGA women go through:

They began to look like cyborgs, their faces contoured by the algorithm, perpetually glinting in the light of digital approval.

This violence produces an outcome that is almost supernatural. Lindsay Lohan, a totemic millennial celebrity, reappeared in 2025 out of relative obscurity with the skin of a toddler, the brow of a person who had never felt worried — a face just like her old one, if it had been assembled by blushing angels at sunrise that very day.

After a decade of the Trump Era, we all know the look: piscean lips, Betty Boop eyebrows, death mask facial rigidity, fright-night eyes, stuccoed makeup from a do-it-yourself embalming kit. Add inflated porn-actress breasts and a sartorial style mimicking that of a psychedelically rendered Fox News anchorwoman. Examples abound: Kristi Noem, who transformed her High Plains natural beauty into Wes Craven’s Ellie Myers in his horror film, “Cursed”; Kimberly Guilfoyle, who metamorphosed from GenX working girl cutie to Medusa’s plutonium radiated netherworld spawn; the inimitable Laura “Looney” Loomer, whose scalpel-botox-altered visage could send rats scampering out of Dracula’s crypt. And then there’s Trump’s once favorite “judge” Jeanine Pirro whose icemaker’s charm and cement-mixer voice are exceeded only by her Hang ‘Em High demeanor.

Satirists liken the look to “luxury meat-masks meant to signal wealth and in-group belonging,” “Fellini-esque exaggeration” of beauty and “a fun-house mirror feminism of the GOP.” Tolentino also makes the apt comparison that the Mar-a-Lago face is essentially “the Trump ballroom” in human-face form — an extravagant, artificial construction whose relationship to reality is beside the point. “Like the Administration,” she adds, “Mar-a-Lago Face locates power in the spectacle of dismissing reality altogether.” It’s the price of admission for many to join the MAGA-a-Lago crowd.

Brittany Wong writes in HuffPost, “It’s been said that when you get plastic surgery, you don’t look older or younger, but a secret third thing: weird,” a caricature of femininity. But, she adds, it’s a sign that you’re part of an exclusive members-only MAGA club. Finally, Mar-a-Lago-face isn’t so much “look how young I look,” but “look how expensive I look.” These vanity disfigurement procedures go from $90,000 up to double that amount, depending on the surgery and the reputation of the surgeon.

I turn to one of my favorite horror writers, H.P. Lovecraft, who aptly captures the look of these MAGA-era fembots: “It was a terrible, indescribable…a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as a pustule of greenish light... I saw the thing that was to become my nightmare.”

The problem is, unlike tattoos, these alterations of one’s face cannot be reversed and the result can not only be unnatural, but surreal. “Once all the necessary ligaments have been cut, the features on top move freely and in one piece, like a Halloween mask,” wrote one writer who actually observed one of these surgeries in the operating room. But, like tattoos, vanity plastic surgery has become something of a fad. There’s a generational cascading effect. Young people, including teens, are opting to alter their beautiful faces with elective surgery or injections. According to data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, neurotoxin injections (including Botox) rose by 75 percent among individuals aged 19 and younger, and by 71 percent among those aged 20 to 29, between 2019 and 2022.

In “Your Face: The Brutal Aesthetics of MAGA,” Innae Oh writes in Mother Jones about her visits to her parents’ birthplace, South Korea, “the plastic surgery capital of the world” where “the faces of manipulated uniformity — double eyelid surgery, face-whitening injections, breast implants on laser-toned thin bodies — are jolting to witness.” After a while, she senses that she is the “odd one, even ugly… perhaps a quick visit to one of Seoul’s 600 plastic surgery clinics would fix things.”

Which gets me to another of my favorite horror/surreal fiction resources, the old cult TV series, “The Twilight Zone.”

In “Eye of the Beholder,” a young woman named Janet Tyler, whose face is entirely wrapped in gauze bandages, is lying in a shadowy hospital bed, undergoing her eleventh and final permissible surgical procedure. The state-mandated operations are a desperate attempt to correct her “grotesque” facial deformity so that she can look “normal” and fit into a strictly uniform society. If this final surgery fails, she will be permanently banished into a ghetto colony alongside other disfigured “misfits” like her. Throughout the episode, the camera deliberately keeps the faces of the doctors and nurses hidden in deep shadows or obscured by medical masks, focusing instead on Janet’s despair and desire to be accepted. Their comments make Janet’s appearance sound horrifying.

Eventually, the bandages are removed. And then comes the twist: Janet is beautiful. The people around her are the ones who look grotesque to us — piglike, distorted faces that the episode has been concealing. The doctor announces that the operation has failed and that Janet must be sent away to a community where people have faces like hers.

“Eye of the Beholder” is a dramatic commentary on conformity, societal standards of beauty and authoritarianism.

And it offers a warning for all of us: should a new Dark Age of MAGA oppression be ushered in, those of us who do not or cannot adapt, if we don’t take on Mar-a-Lago Face and join the freak show, will be banished to some ICE colony for “ugly misfits” just like us.

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Weekly Mind Dump: 7/26-8/1, 2026;

He “was led by officers of the law to Campo de’ Fiori, and there, stripped naked and tied to the stake, he was burned alive, always accompanied by our company singing the litanies, and the comforters, up to the last, urging him to abandon his obstinacy, with which he ended his miserable and unhappy life.” So goes the official church record on the burning at the stake on the morning of February 17, 1600 of Giordano Bruno in Rome.

Among his transgressions, his Inquisitors wrote that Bruno believes “that there are many worlds, and all the stars are worlds, and believing that this is the only world is extreme ignorance.” To this day, Bruno’s case is still considered a landmark in the history of free thought and the emerging sciences. He was a brilliant philosopher, priest, poet, astronomer and cosmological theorist who posited that the universe was infinite and comprised millions of planets circling millions of suns. He also expounded an atomic theory maintaining that everything is made up of identical invisible particles. Bruno’s prescient concepts of nature and the universe come closer to our modern understanding of the cosmos than those of any other thinker of the 16th or 17th centuries. He published 30 works which are held up today as pillars of knowledge. Reason, not orthodoxy, was his guiding light.

For this, as well as his novel theological thinking, Bruno was condemned for heresy and burned at the stake.

We witnessed a replay of Bruno’s Inquisition (short of burning at the stake) this past week with the disgraceful staged spectacle congressional Republicans put on of publicly scourging Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose science-grounded lead in combating the COVID pandemic saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. And it wasn’t the first time he helped save countless lives, having 30 years earlier spearheaded the science-based effort to combat AIDS. He developed therapies for formerly fatal diseases and developed drugs that turned a 98 percent mortality rate of the disorder vasculitis into a 93 percent remission rate. And his achievements in saving lives don’t stop there. Dr. Fauci is a true American hero who, like Dr. Jonas Salk, deserves to be lauded.

But a penumbra of Dark Ages superstition and rejection of science and facts has settled over the land, ushered in by the reactionary, modernity-defying MAGA movement and meretricious, soul-selling politicians for whom the pursuit of power trumps integrity. As with their 16th century ideological antecedents, they require sacrificial scapegoats to satisfy their lust for ignorance and worship of their ancient shibboleths. And they found theirs in Dr. Anthony Fauci just as the hidebound Roman Catholic church zeroed in on Giordano Bruno more than four centuries earlier.

A toxic form of right-wing populism has taken hold in this country which rejects science, knowledge and experts and roils in a cauldron of proud ignorance, paranoia and rage. The late science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

Republicans have taken to heart the Cheshire Cat’s observation, “Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality” and have adopted this as their de facto mantra. Indeed, warring with reality is what too many Americans and their political leaders seem to be engaged in these days.

Fauci’s tormentors hold their own with those who persecuted Bruno. Senator Bernie Moreno demanded, “Who the f--- do you think you were?”, accusing him of arrogance and of wielding excessive authority during the pandemic. He also sarcastically suggested Fauci must be “in deep s--t” for hiring prominent legal counsel and called on him to apologize for pandemic-era policies.

Senator Rand Paul spat, “Anthony Fauci is a single bureaucrat who believed his opinions were so infallible that he could strip you of your liberties.” He had Fauci’s attorney evicted from the hearing room and vowed to have him cited for contempt of Congress. Paul had previously stated that Fauci should be imprisoned.

If anything, their threats and insults well exceeded the invective hurled against Bruno by his persecutors: “We...declare you, the aforementioned Fra Giordano Bruno, to be an impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic.... We now expel you from our ecclesiastical bar and from our holy and immaculate Church, of whose mercy you have now rendered yourself unworthy.” Undaunted, Bruno replied calmly, “Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”

Fauci would have been justified in responding that the opprobrium the senators leveled against him were made with greater fear than he received it. But he prudently opted to cite his fifth amendment rights instead.

Years after burning Bruno at the stake, the same Inquisitors went after another obstinate genius “heretic” — Galileo Galilei.

Giordano Bruno had a knack throughout his 53 years for getting into “good” trouble. I know, you’re wondering if we are related. I have no idea. Bruno is a fairly common name in Western and Northern Europe. But I do recognize some common traits between us: outspokenness, challenging authority, a prodigious memory and a firm commitment to facts and reason over orthodoxy. As for my part, I hope to avoid being burned at the MAGA stake.

When America finally moves past the era of retrogression, bigotry, anti-science and irrationality in which it currently languishes is anybody’s guess. But history will place it in the same category as the pre-Enlightenment era that crushed the lives of Giordano Bruno and so many other progressive thinkers, condemn today’s Inquisitors and hold Dr. Fauci in the same exalted category as his Italian predecessor.

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The Trump administration is moving hard and fast to transform the U.S. Department of State into Ribbentrop foreign office 2.0. Long regarded by the far-right as a bastion of liberal elitist cosmopolitans, the department has been a target for purges and persecution by demagogues from senators Joe McCarthy and Jesse Helms to, now, Donald Trump. The transformation is part of a concerted effort to subordinate all government departments and agencies to the will of a president with ambitions to become America’s first dictator. The longer-term consequences bode ill for U.S. national security.

“We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States,” Trump promised in 2022. “The deep state must and will be brought to heel.”

The MAGA tool to bring this about is Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint coordinated by the Heritage Foundation, to dismantle the traditional, nonpartisan U.S. civil service and replace it with political loyalists. It entails mass firings, stripping civil servants of labor protections, loyalty screening and targeting disfavored departments like State for ideological cleansing. It furthermore builds a massive database of thousands of pre-vetted conservative loyalists to be hired and establishes a training framework to prepare these personnel to unflinchingly implement the president’s policies. To be an effective demagogue, you must command iron-clad loyalty from hand-picked henchmen who will exert firm control over all levels of government on your behalf.

Bloomberg News reports, “The push comes as Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered an overhaul of the notoriously daunting entrance exam, removing questions related to diversity and inclusion and emphasizing history. A rigorous on-boarding process is also being modified to refocus training on what the administration calls ‘America First’ foreign policy.”

To get the ball rolling, State has hired MilitaryHire, a three-year old firm run by high school dropout Andrew Crapuchettes. The million-dollar contract aims to recruit 600 to 1,000 candidates to take the Foreign Service Officer Test. Donald Trump Jr. has a financial stake in it. It started out as a website aimed at connecting “workers opposed to vaccine mandates and progressive workplace policies with like-minded employers” and normally works with companies with fewer than 300 employees. The State Department had roughly 27,000 employees before the reductions in force. The goal is to shed 10,000 altogether, bringing the work force down to 17,000.

“We’re focused on merit, hard work, patriotism, and not the latest political correctness,” Crapuchettes told Bloomberg, noting that there is “the delta between how State Department employees and the broader population voted in the last presidential election.” MilitaryHire zeroes in on recruiting military veterans, a demographic that leans conservative.

The Project 2025 purges started in earnest a year ago when 1353 State Department employees, 246 of them Foreign Service officers, were summarily fired. This was on top of more than 1,500 other State Department employees who took voluntary departures last year. They took with them, collectively, hundreds of years of specialized knowledge, from foreign languages to arms control to international development to conflict stabilization and much more.

The purges were marked by ham-handedness, contempt and cruelty. One dismissed FSO, with 14 years of service, told me, “I have been struck by the responses from those questioning the patriotism and skill of my colleagues and me and suggesting the country is better off without us.” Maryum Saifee, with 17 years, posted, “Cruelty was always the point. And it’s working. We’ve seen mass waves of early resignations, and for those still on the inside, a mad scramble to prove fidelity in a performance evaluation system that is more hunger games than meritocracy.”

After the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran earlier this year, many of the laid off employees volunteered to return to help manage the evacuation of thousands of Americans stranded in the Middle East and to work on a task force the department had set up. The department turned them down. And Trump’s Iran war continues to be botched.

Meanwhile, the department is on a hiring binge, having brought in a new class of 170 Foreign Service officers earlier this month, with more in the pipeline. What is going on here is something akin to Leninist-Stalinist-driven class warfare. Those fired are ideologically suspect, similar to the kulak and bourgeois classes persecuted under Soviet leaders. Every communist country has pursued this policy. Those purged are being replaced by younger recruits vetted under new rules, including “fidelity” to this president’s agenda. Recruiters are reaching out to conservative universities and colleges as well as military veterans to encourage MAGA-friendly individuals to take the Foreign Service Officer Test, which is also being revamped. A pro-Trump collaborationist grouping of conservative diplomats calling itself the Ben Franklin Fellowship has formed with funding and support from the Heritage Foundation. As staff are purged and standards lowered, the morally eviscerated Marco Rubio has proven himself to be Trump’s Joachim von Ribbentrop, a sad mediocrity who lives to please his boss.

What happened to Germany’s Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) in the 1930s and 1940s is instructive for us today. Traditionally a bastion of conservative but principled aristocrats, the ministry underwent a radical transformation after the Nazis came to power. Soon after becoming foreign minister in early 1938, Joachim von Ribbentrop nearly tripled the ministry’s staff to 6,458 by 1943. Senior officials were appointed largely based on ideological grounds. Career diplomats complained about Ribbentrop and his policies and resented the influx of outsiders, many lacking requisite qualifications. Only a handful resigned, most notably Friedrich Wilhelm von Prittwitz und Gaffron, Berlin’s ambassador to the United States. Less than 10 percent of career diplomats participated in resistance activities. Those caught paid a heavy price; about a dozen were hanged. By the late 1930s, diplomats who were Jewish or had Jewish wives, or who were suspected of democratic or leftist leanings, had been forced out of the ministry. By 1941, around three-quarters of the ministry’s entire staff were Nazi party members or candidates. Nazi purges, recruitment and intimidation paid off. Thenceforth, the ministry loyally defended and carried out Reich policies, including those related to genocide.

The State Department is in crisis. And, by extension, so is the nation’s security. As with their earlier German counterparts, those remaining in the diplomatic trenches are now being confronted with instructions to pursue policies that are legally or morally questionable. Will they merely follow orders, or act on their consciences? Would they defend the annexation of Canada, seizure of Greenland, or of the Panama Canal? How about an alliance with Putin’s Russia? The abandonment of NATO? The mass expulsion of Gazans to other countries to enable the development of a “Trump Riviera” in the Middle East? More wars of choice by President Trump, himself a convicted felon?

The 1950s McCarthy communist witch hunt era severely damaged the State Department, the late senator’s prime government target. So-called loyalty boards screened employees. The purging of the department’s China experts cowed the work force and contributed to Washington’s slide into the Vietnam quagmire. The magnitude of damage done by the Trump administration not only to the Department of State, but to all of the national security agencies, is many magnitudes worse. And the damage plays out for decades, certain to plunge us into misguided conflicts, hurt commerce and trade, tarnish America’s global image and lose the “soft power” that diplomacy delivers.

The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.

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Weekly Mind Dump: 7/12/-7/18, 2026:

America today faces an existential threat.

COMMUNISM!

How do we know?

Because President Trump is telling us so —

There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land... These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. America will never be a communist country. We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms if we are foolish, stupid and unwise.

And so is House Speaker Mike Johnson:

Ronald Reagan used to warn about communism, he talked about it, but it was a distant threat across the world. And now the barbarians are inside the gate… This is not your father’s Democratic Party. That party’s long gone.

And House majority leader Steve Scalise:

Look, we live in dangerous times. We’re fighting communism on our own shores… And communism is on the ballot this. November against freedom. Make no mistake about that. Bolsheviks in the year 2026.

Could Senator Joe McCarthy have been right?

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time.

And he claimed to have a list:

I have here in my hand a list of 205…a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

I wasn’t on that list because, well, I wasn’t born yet. But I might as well have been, having served over two decades as a covert operative in the Deep State, which I guess also makes me a commie — per Trump, Johnson, Scalise, et al. You see, I have the distinction of occupying the top two categories of Trump’s Enemies of the State: 1) a Deep State operative; and 2) a member of the Fake News media. I schemed against six sitting presidents in my years as a deep cover Deep State operative. I connived with scores of other conspirators in government and the fake news in a long sorry career to undermine the U.S. of A. I fully expect to find myself face down in the cold mud of a Stephen Miller-mandated freshly dug gulag ditch once Project 2025 is completed.

We’ve been warned. The 1949 movie The Red Menace is one of those overlooked and now forgotten cinematic masterpieces that is both prescient and relevant nearly eight decades after it was produced. I encourage all patriotic Americans to watch and pay close attention. Its opening:

America. Land of the free, home of the brave. Here, in the heart of our prosperous suburbs, the American family thrives. But look closer.

Is peace truly what it seems? Or is a silent, creeping shadow plotting to dismantle the very foundation of our Republic?

The Red Menace does not always march with tanks or drop bombs. It operates in the shadows. It whispers through neighborhood gossip, plants seeds of doubt in our universities, and preys upon the innocent minds of our youth.

They do not value God, family, or the freedoms we hold dear. Their weapon is conformity. Their goal is the destruction of the American way of life.

Do not be fooled, citizens. Stay vigilant. Report suspicious activity to your local Civil Defense office. Protect your home, protect your community, and guard your freedoms!

Protagonist Bill Jones says, “I’ve been thinking, Nina. This is the United States, not a police state!”

Of course not, Bill. But we’re taking the bull by the horns when it comes to Communism. Today there are 456 ICE concentration camps holding over 73,000 people and we have mass deportations with no due process, the Justice Department is prosecuting the president’s enemies, Fake News journalists are being intimidated, and the question of whether we ever have free and fair elections again is an open question.

Bill says, “You’ve got to break down the mind of the individual. Make him forget his family, his God, his past. Only then is he ready to serve the party!” Well Bill, that’s being taken care of too. Today we have Fox “News” and a constellation of other “patriotic” media telling us what to think.

“Stir up the front organizations... have them howling about witch hunts, violations of democratic rights, and about forgeries.” Bill, behold the Heritage Foundation, America First Policy Institute, Turning Point USA, CPAC, Club for Growth, etc. They’re the vanguard in fomenting constructive hysteria.

It’s time to bring back the House Un-American Affairs Committee and if the Iran Forever War really gets out of hand, school bomb drills and bomb shelters for every home.

Because —

There’s a commie under every bed,

And it’s better to be dead than Red.

MAGA tells us to live in fear and dread,

And Republicans turn logic on its head.

Joe McCarthy will save us all as he rises from the dead.

Happy 250th, America! You earned it.

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“The unseen is all around us,” says Billy Kwan in the 1982 movie, The Year of Living Dangerously. Kwan is a complex, fiercely moral Chinese-Australian photojournalist with dwarfism who acts as the guide and moral compass for the protagonist, reporter Guy Hamilton, in 1965 Jakarta, a pressure cooker of political intrigue that is about to explode. Political tensions between communists, nationalists, and the military are bubbling beneath the surface in the final hours of strongman Sukarno’s rule. Kwan believes a true journalist must look past official government press releases to find the dangerous, hidden truths that are about to burst into violence.

A slow-burn tension builds. The viewer can almost sweat along with the protagonists, actors Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, amid the sweltering tropical heat and raw suspense. Something’s about to break and it’s not good. Neither foreign journalists nor diplomats have a firm grasp on what’s happening, which makes the suspense that much more taut.

This is where we are today in the United States. Our Sukarno, Donald Trump, justifiably feels embattled, his power, his ill-gotten wealth, even his freedom, threatened as his misrule and galloping derangement, accentuated by tumescent paranoia, turn more Americans against him.

The reflexive fingerspitzengefühl for an approaching political storm that I developed as a diplomat has kicked in again with this president. The Indicators & Warnings (I&W) signals are now blinking bright red. I’ve been through two coups d’état up close and personal, replete with gunfire, assassinations and rocket attacks, and observed others from my safe perch in the State Department. What we must worry about in the U.S. today is the steadily building tension that, with no brakes, will lead to a political crackdown which then sparks widespread civil violence, followed by an even greater crackdown.

Trump’s speech on Thursday alleging election rigging by the Democrats and foreign actors was a masterclass in mendacity, a bijou of bombasity and a dissembling of desperation.

He claimed that China illicitly obtained 220 million (sic) U.S. voter files starting in the 2020 cycle; alleged “rogue bureaucrats,” the CIA and the “deep state” suppressed intelligence showing Beijing wanted to help Joe Biden win, and uffishly chortled some nonsense about Venezuela manipulating voting machines. Trump furthermore baselessly asserted that “278,000 noncitizens” are registered to vote in federal elections. He pushed for passage of unpopular legislation aimed at suppressing the votes of targeted constituencies.

Major networks — ABC, NBC, CBS, MS NOW and CNN — refused to carry the 25-minute rant live in full. Only Fox did. Critics and election security experts quickly pointed out that the claims recycled previously debunked theories and lacked context. Rather than China trying to steer the 2020 election toward Biden, Trump’s declassified documents reveal that Russia tried to manipulate it in Trump’s favor. Analysts noted a contradiction in Trump’s warnings: while sounding the alarm on cyber threats, he has gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and several counter-foreign influence task forces.

To add insult to injury, a member of Trump’s election task force, John Solomon, told MS NOW that the intelligence community has “zero evidence” that any foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 2022, or 2024.

All of this said, make no mistake: Trump’s ludicrous claims do not constitute political tomfoolery. They have a deadly serious purpose.

Ty Cobb, a White House attorney in the first Trump administration, told NPR that Trump’s speech is laying the groundwork to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections. According to Cobb,

Steve Bannon and Todd Blanche have suggested that there will be ICE agents at the polls. I think that that’s a virtual certainty. Whether that will include the National Guard or not, we don’t know, but anything to intimidate minority voters, particularly immigrant voters, and also I think anything that allows them to try to seize voting machines, as Trump wanted to do in 2020…

I think you will see him doing everything he can to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, the election of Democrats, and do whatever he can to remain in power and to keep his cronies in power, so that he can continue doing what he thinks he’s allowed to do as president, which is anything he wants.

One key I&W pointing to oncoming danger is an increase in extreme rhetoric and outlandish claims. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before diplomats from sixty-five countries this week at the State Department and said,

More than 80 percent of radical violence is now driven by far-left anarchist actors. These are not abstract statistics. Americans have seen what those numbers mean: An all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes, a transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, ‘Where is your God now?’

Trump advisor Stephen Miller told the group,

Here in the United States, we have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and survival of our republican form of government.

We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization. If the left is allowed to use the real or actual threat of violence to destabilize our institutions, then those institutions cannot and will not succeed.

Trump-influencer Steve Bannon told a podcaster:

We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.

Late last year, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) targeting “anti-fascist” groups which display, “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The Brennan Center for Justice denounced the presidential decision as “ungrounded in fact and law.” Former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor described it as “Orwellian beyond belief.” I find it to be a key brick in the Trump administration’s framework to crack down on dissenters.

Professor of history Timothy Snyder argues that autocrats use violent rhetoric as a deliberate, strategic tool to systematically erode democratic norms, terrify citizens into compliance, and lay the structural groundwork for physical political violence. In her book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat echoes this view that autocrats use violent language as a deliberate tool to normalize political violence, dehumanize targets, and condition the public to view brutality as morally righteous.

They and other scholars will also tell you that, once in power, authoritarian leaders will not leave of their own accord. Trump, who engineered the January 6, 2021 failed putsch, muses about serving for a third term and has stated openly that “In four years, You don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good. You’re not going to have to vote.”

As we close in on the November midterms, the rhetoric from the White House and Trump administration officials is heating up at an accelerating pace. The “unseen all around us” that Billy Kwan described is now coming into full light. Trump is feverishly working to put in place measures to rig the election so that he can escape justice, keep his corrupt winnings and continue to be able to indulge in his megalomaniacal fantasies. But the polls show him at near-record low approval ratings and the courts keep ruling against his power ploys.

I have no doubt that Trump will exercise every measure he can to retain power, including sending ICE and J6 thugs to intimidate voters, seizing ballot boxes, declaring Democratic victories null and void and ordering federal agents and National Guard troops to assault protesters. We are on the road to violence, the outcome of which is uncertain. I envision two scenarios: 1) GOP defections and non-compliant election officials and workers, federal agents and troops refuse to follow unlawful orders and Trump’s coup 2.0 fizzles out; or 2) coup 2.0 succeeds and we find ourselves under the jackboot of an American fascist tyranny.

There is, however, a way to defeat the MAGA putschists, as lawyer Ty Cobb reminds us: “I think the only real guardrail is for people to get to the polls, to vote against the level of corruption and insanity and frivolity that we have seen.”

And in BIG numbers. This succeeded recently in Hungary where the voter turnout and demonstrations were so overwhelming that Trump BFF Viktor Orban, who spent 16 years consolidating authoritarian power in a corrupt system with Russian backing, realized the overpowering tide of people power yearning for democracy was simply irresistible and stepped down. (I experienced the full force of Hungarians’ zeal during a visit to the country months before the election when I was swept up in a mass demonstration that shut down the capital.) Orban’s successor, Peter Magyar, and his administration are now dismantling the corrupt, anti-democratic structures and policies the disgraced leader had built.

Americans, too, have it in their power to reverse the slide toward autocracy under Donald Trump. Billy Kwan told us how to do it: “Don’t think about the major issues. You do what you can about the misery in front of you. You add your light to the sum of all light.”

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Week of 6/5-6/11, 2026:

Senator Lindsey Graham’s sudden passing at 71 reminds us all that we are on this earth for a short period of time no matter how long we live, and how people will remember us depends on how we lived our lives. Late senators J. William Fulbright, Everett Dirksen, Charles Sumner, Arthur H. Vandenberg and Henry Clay are considered by historians to have been among the greatest U.S. senators. Lindsey Graham will not be. Nor Mitch McConnell, the subject lately of speculation as to whether he’s even alive.

Graham falls into the category of honorable public servant/citizen-turned-amoral-sell-out, a topic of many of my essays over the years. A question that has always fascinated me is how individuals who stem largely from good families, are well educated and have pursued solid careers and respectable lives suddenly decide to make a Faustian pact with evil for riches and fame, but mostly for power. In modern times, think Albert Speer, Alexey Vyshinsky, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Today, in the Trump Era, there are almost too many such opportunists to name. But recently we have J.D. Vance, Todd Blanche, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Elise Stefanik, Megyn Kelly and Lindsey Graham, to name a few. These are amoral people who would, with relish and gusto, publicly eviscerate their grandmother to get more media attention and boost their numbers.

Graham is the guy who, faster than you can say “relevant,” went from calling Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” and “jackass” to “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God” and “we can’t grow without him.” Graham made multiple phone calls to Georgia’s secretary of state to try to get him to throw out all absentee ballots from certain counties in order to swing the 2020 election in Trump’s favor.

And, of course, Vance once called Trump “America’s Hitler” and “cultural heroin.” The hypocrisy of these fools and fellow sell-outs is nothing short of shameless and jaw-dropping.

Mitch McConnell went from excoriating Trump for being “practically and morally responsible” for the January 6, 2021 mob assault on the Capitol to voting to acquit him in the follow-on impeachment. He’s the true patriot who said his central purpose as Senate leader was to deny Barack Obama a second term, and unconstitutionally blocked Obama from having a Senate confirmation hearing for his Supreme Court nominee, yet rammed through a conservative appointment to the court lickety-split under Trump. Moscow Mitch engaged in cynical and corrupt maneuvering to attract Russian investment in an aluminum plant in his home state of Kentucky, a deal that ultimately fell through.

So, here we are with Lindsey Graham being most definitely dead. The jury is still out on 84-year old McConnell, who has been hospitalized now for a month with his office divulging little about his condition. Skeptics speculate that Republicans want to pretend he’s alive until the deadline for filing senate candidacy passes to prevent GOP gadfly Tom Massie from running. A recent photo of McConnell with his wife in the hospital is speculated by some to have been AI-generated. Alive? Not alive? We might as well categorize Senator McConnell as Undead until proven otherwise. Unless there’s a Second Coming of Jesus, don’t count on him ever returning to work. As for his legacy— whether he’s alive, dead or undead — for McConnell party always prevailed over country.

Which gets us to Donald Trump. He just went through yet another physical — two months after his last — including yet another cognitive test (you know — “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV”). His previous physical exam required 22 specialists. Why? Trump these days looks like eight miles of bad road during a shit storm on Halloween, bless his heart! It comes from a life of no exercise, consuming burgers and fries choked down with Diet Coke, and, oh yes! — galloping dementia, which runs in his felonious family all the way back to Kallstadt. Did I neglect to point out that he just turned 80? Here’s another interesting factoid: the average lifespan of a White male in America today is 73.7 years — unless you have an army of the best doctors keeping you going daily with extraordinary elixirs and the wonders of modern alchemy shot through your forehands, neck and extra-large diaper.

We are increasingly governed by geezers. With a median member age of 64 years old in the Senate and 58 in the House, the 119th Congress is the third oldest since 1789, according to an NBC News analysis.

To this writer, old age and ambition seem incongruous, even sinful, like s’mores prepared by a Michelin chef. What’s the point? What I don’t get is what drives a man in his ninth decade of life, whose only turn at public office was a failed and chaotic single term as president, one that saddled him with two impeachments, 91 felony counts, 34 felony convictions and potentially jail time — not to mention a legacy of treason. To escape legal punishment, for sure. But I believe it is more than that.

As we age, the youthful drive to succeed and achieve gives way to resting on one’s laurels, enjoying the fruits of one’s life and family. There is a point in the aging process when reflection begins to eclipse ego.

Sure, there are plenty of people who retain ambition into old age, though seldom does it take the form of raging megalomania and overreach much less uncontrolled avarice and ardently seeking vengeance and retribution on one’s enemies. Such people invariably possess disordered personalities. Donald Trump is a prime example. Shakespeare’s Macbeth dramatizes the damaging physical and psychological costs of political ambition on those who crave power, especially in old men. Trump can be seen as a latter-day Macbeth, just as self-destructive, but dumber.

Trump, hobbled by bottomless stupidity, lack of conscience and inherited evil, can almost be forgiven for not caring about being remembered negatively by future generations. He can’t help it. His delusional mind believes that slapping his image and name on everything will lend him immortality. Oblivious of history due to his semi-literateness, the reputational fates of Hitler, Stalin, Mobutu and other egomaniacal historic failures as leaders don’t enter his mind. As with them, his name and scowling image will be assiduously erased by the American people and the very mention of his name will eclipse the infamy of Benedict Arnold.

As for Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and their ilk, they will go down in history as asterisks pointing out their hypocrisy and amorality during the second Gilded Age. Returning to Shakespeare, their legacy will hang loose about each of them, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief.

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Four years ago, more than a month before Putin invaded Ukraine (which btw I predicted) I published an essay titled, “Pax Americana: Why the U.S. Must Continue to Be the World’s “Last Best Hope.” I wrote that “it scares me to my soul to contemplate the world order without a strong, democratic and cohesive United States as the leading force in defending freedom and opposing aggression. Should a hegemonic transition be made from Pax Americana to, say, Pax Sinica, I fear the oncoming of a new Dark Age marked by wars, oppression and strangling of free thought and expression,” adding that “were I still in the Foreign Service, I’d be at a loss as to how to explain my country and what it stands for to foreign audiences. I’d likely lose myself in a tray of hors d’oeuvres.”

Our allies, I said, are losing faith in us as leader of the free world. French President Emmanuel Macron has pushed for a “European pillar” of security. Canadian writer Stephen Marche recommended that “every political and corporate leader should prepare for American chaos — at the border, in the markets, in international institutions, in the spillover of their toxic political discourse.” Another advocated for a parliamentary committee to be established to provide Canada’s prime minister with guidance on how to prepare for U.S. “democratic failure.”

I made the case in my piece that while we had fairly lost the moral high ground in lecturing the rest of the world on freedom, human rights, rule of law and democracy, we still were, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “the last best hope of earth.”

I was wrong.

Americans returned Donald Trump to the White House to finish the job of wrecking the United States. I chuckle at a recent political cartoon featuring a mock newspaper headline, “REPUBLICANS CONCERNED TRUMP MAY DIE BEFORE HE FINISHES DESTROYING AMERICA.” You’ve got to hand it to him. A failure at most things, he’s proven wildly successful at this mission, from demolishing the East Wing to weakening NATO to shattering the economy. But actions have consequences.

Marche, whose writing I greatly admire, just published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “The Zombification of America.” He makes the point that,

As a geopolitical actor, the United States has become a kind of lumbering zombie — a beast that can be startled into reflexive actions but lacks higher functions. Much of the world understands that another round of elections in the midterms or in 2028 won’t solve anything. The American people are so divided that the future will be chaotic whoever wins.

As for the entity known as the United States of America, there’s no there there. There’s no America to deal with. An increasingly isolationist America is no longer the leader of the free world. How can it be, when it’s no longer the leader of itself?

Everybody who believes in freedom and democracy and the dignity of the person and the right of nations to self-determination should be working toward the destruction of the United States’ capacity to project power — to end the strange hold it has over the world so we can all move on. So far, no one is helping more than the United States itself.

Marche points out that NATO allies are reacting by quietly moving away from the United States. Canada’s Mark Carney is steering his country’s trade increasingly away from the U.S. and has launched a multi-year program to bulk up Canada’s military. European governments are following suit. The Canadians and Europeans are also moving defense procurement away from the U.S. and investing more in their own defense industries. EU countries are shifting away from American tech systems and developing their own as well.

Can we blame them? The Europeans were preparing to defend Greenland militarily against the U.S. a few months ago when Trump was threatening to seize that land mass. Canadians are boycotting the U.S. after his threats to annex their country.

And he hasn’t stopped. At the NATO summit in Ankara days ago, Trump reiterated his deranged Greenland blathering, scourged European energy and immigration policies, insulted Spain, and drove up the allies’ angst by declaring that the fighting between Kyiv and Moscow “doesn’t affect us.”

Polling by the European Council on Foreign Relations finds that only 11 percent of Europeans now view the U.S. as an ally. Only 35 percent of Canadians said the U.S. is a reliable partner, compared to 83 per cent in 2022, according to a recent Pew Research poll.

In its 2026 report on the state of democracy worldwide, Sweden’s respected V-Dem Institute reports that “the speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history,” and downgraded the U.S. from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations.

Winston Churchill reputedly quipped, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.”

I’m not sanguine that this applies to self-destruction. This year’s mid-term elections and the 2028 presidential election will reveal whether we Americans have it in us to save a slow-sinking ship of state. If Stephen Marche is proven right — that they won’t solve anything and that the future will be chaotic no matter who wins; that a sane president of either party would not be able to restore stable American policy or the even vaguest principles of sound foreign policy, then we will know that we have reached an historical inflection point marked by the inexorable decline of a great nation and the rise of others to fill the vacuum. The latter would be China and perhaps Europe. Such wrenching change takes decades to play out and inevitably entails instability and conflict. And another great power will replace the United States as “the last best hope of earth” — or one hopes.

The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.

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Raised a Christian, I was taught to have compassion even for sinners and to forgive them. The Bible tells us, “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles, lest the Lord see it and be displeased.” The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer admonished, “To feel envy is human, to savor schadenfreude is diabolic.” And then there’s Janis Joplin: “You’re out on the streets looking good, And baby, deep down in your heart, I guess you know that it ain’t right.” To assuage any guilt feelings over schadenfreude, I turn to another ponderous German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote, “To see others suffer does one good.” At least some others anyway.

And that’s how I’m feeling about Donald Trump lately as he suffers one setback after another:

• Supreme Court rejects his ploy to end birthright citizenship.

• Supreme Court upholds mail-in ballots.

• Supreme Court blocks Trump from firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook on a “manufactured pretext.”

• Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s global tariffs.

• Supreme Court rejects his final plea to review the E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse case.

• Courts repeatedly rule against his efforts at voter suppression.

• A federal judge orders his name removed from the Kennedy Center and blocks his plans to temporarily close and remodel it.

• Republicans balk at and a judge blocks the creation of Trump’s so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund aimed at paying off J-6 insurrectionists.

• Republicans refuse to fund Trump’s billion-dollar Ballroom.

• Trump halts a bipartisan housing bill, further hurting GOP election prospects in the fall.

• Iran negotiations go nowhere while the House votes to block further unauthorized military strikes against that country.

• The Reflecting Pool fiasco.

• Trump’s “Great American State Fair” is a bust.

• The U.S. team loses to Belgium in the World Cup after Trump meddles.

Yes, I pound my chest like some triumphal barbarian warlord and breathe in deeply the sweet invigorating air of shame and humiliation America’s greatest malignant narcissist is experiencing right now.

Ah, but it doesn’t stop there!

My robust schadenfreude extends as well to MAGA and others who voted for Trump, some of them my friends and kinfolk.

You see, I’m okay with those who, for the sake of healing national wounds when the Trump nightmare is finally over, will grant forgiveness to and seek reconciliation with the misguided millions who elected him to the presidency not once, but twice. I, however, will not be among them. Instead, I plan to rub into their faces the guilt and embarrassment they richly deserve. Somebody must, otherwise this dalliance with tyranny will simply be on historical rinse and repeat. After all, those who cannot remember the past indeed are condemned to repeat it. Americans, like the Germans, will forever have to contend with the moral collapse and evil they themselves wrought on their nation.

Trump supporters deserve neither mercy nor pity, only contempt for bringing America to its knees and making it the laughing stock of the world. I, for one, have a draft essay in my head titled, “We Told You So” which I will publish when the U.S. implodes and the inevitable reckoning comes.

A writer in the Daily Kos put it succinctly:

You have voted for a racist Neo-Nazi Confederate to take over this nation. You voted for a convicted criminal, you voted for someone who staged an insurrection to void an election he lost. You voted for someone found liable for sexual assault, found liable for racial discrimination, found liable for fraud, and found liable for corruption. You voted for someone who stole from a children’s cancer charity. You voted for someone who took $98 million from the Russian Mafia. You voted for a Liar.

Progressive pundit Thom Hartmann adds:

When the MAGA friend or relative in your life asks why you’ve gone quiet, you don’t owe them a fight and you don’t owe them an apology. You owe them, if you choose to give it at all, the truth: that you saw what they helped build, and you’ve decided you’d rather associate with someone else.

They voted for him again in 2024 knowing exactly who he was, knowing what he’d promised to do, knowing that Stephen Miller had spent two years describing on podcast after podcast a deportation operation that would, in Miller’s own words, require building “very large staging facilities” and deploying the military against the civilian population.

They knew.

We increasingly hear these days disaffected MAGA supporters saying disingenuously, “I didn’t vote for this.” The rest of us must quickly respond: “Oh yes you did!” You own the inflation, the war, the destruction of the East Wing and the evil circus that was the nation’s 250th birthday. You own the corruption, the treason and the dead babies at ICE concentration camps. You own Epstein. And if Ebola arrives at these shores and wipes out hundreds of thousands, you’ll own that too. You own it all, but all of us must suffer the consequences of your decisions.

I have two cousins who are surgeons — and Trump supporters. I have a friend and former colleague who has three university degrees and lived and worked abroad — and voted for Trump each time. My wife and I have been close friends for many years with a couple who don’t particularly like Trump — yet voted for him three times — “we saw him as the lesser of two evils,” they explained. Huh?! They now regret their vote now that prices for groceries and gas have gone through the roof.

Sorry, but democracy doesn’t have a price tag. A year and a half ago, in my essay, “The Moral Collapse of the American People,” I actually researched the price of eggs, adjusted for inflation, going back to FDR’s inauguration and up to the present day. Lo and behold! The cost of a dozen eggs has barely budged. I attribute Americans voting in one of history’s greatest scoundrels to their moral indifference and intellectual laziness and cite Plato, who said, “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

But Janis Joplin said it best: “Don’t compromise yourself. You’re all you’ve got.”

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Because the British Crown viewed those in the United Colonies as British subjects, the Founders’ act of signing the Declaration of Independence was deemed “high treason,” punishable by death. George III railed against the “arbitrary tyranny of chiefs” who desired “dominion and power.”

Twice in modern times some Americans, presented with the principles of the Declaration, but not being told their origin, have sided with King George by denouncing them as subversive and unacceptable. Each occasion took place during periods of fraught politics with tyranny clawing at freedom’s door.

For over three decades, National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” has broadcast a reading of the Declaration of Independence annually on July 4. It also tweets the Declaration in 113 consecutive posts, in 140-characters, from its lofty preamble, to its lacerating indictments of King George III’s “absolute tyranny,” to its final signature. Who in these times could protest such a patriotic exercise on the occasion of the nation’s birthday?

It is “a document from a deeply divided time,” NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly noted in the 2017 reading. “It was a time when Americans turned against each other.” Contrary to the common myth of a universally supported uprising, historians estimate that around 20 percent of American colonists sided with the British, nearly half sat on the fence, while only a third or more actively supported the Patriots. Around 40,000 embittered and often persecuted Loyalists fled to Canada after the Revolution. As Ken Burns’s documentary, The American Revolution, reminds us, “It was also a savage civil war that pitted brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, American against American, killing tens of thousands of them.”

NPR’s July 4, 2017 posting of the Declaration sparked a backlash from Twitter users who mistook the historic anti-tyranny quotes as an attack on Donald Trump and even an incitement to violence. Examples:

“A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

• Reaction: Multiple Trump supporters interpreted this historical grievance against King George III as a direct insult to Donald Trump.

“It is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

• Reaction: Angry commenters accused NPR of pushing “propaganda,” inciting violence, and actively calling for an anti-government revolution.

“And totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”

• Reaction: Critics viewed this as an unpatriotic political attack on the Trump administration.

“He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.”

• Reaction: Again, readers took this as an attack on Trump.

The blowback increased when the tweets addressed the portion of the Declaration that spelled out, in unsparing detail, the ways the Crown had wronged the then-colonies. A sampling:

Seriously, this is the dumbest idea I have ever seen on twitter. Literally no one is going to read 5000 tweets about this trash.

Propaganda is that all you know how? Try supporting a man who wants to do something about the Injustice in this country #drainingtheswamp.

Please stop. This is not the right place.

So, NPR is calling for revolution. Interesting way to condone the violence while trying to sound ‘patriotic.’ Your implications are clear.

DEFUND #NPR let the Hollywood Elites pay for your biased propaganda.

Horsechit

trash

A similar episode of paranoid hair-trigger reactions occurred during the height of Senator Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare in 1951.

John Patrick Hunter, a reporter with The Capital Times in Madison WI, typed up the preamble to the Declaration, included six of the ten Bill of Rights amendments plus the 15th Amendment barring the government from denying citizens the right to vote based on background. He put the text in the form of a petition, mimeographed it, then hit the streets.

Of the 112 people he talked to that day at Madison’s Fourth of July celebration in Vilas Park, only one, a Madison insurance agent, agreed to sign the “petition.” He also happened to be a Mayflower descendant,

No one else would sign it. Twenty accused Hunter of being a communist. “I can see you are using an old commie trick, putting God’s name on a radical petition,” one elderly man said.

When Hunter pointed out to one woman that the opening passage of the petition was from the Declaration of Independence, she was in disbelief. “That might be from the Russian Declaration of Independence, but you can’t tell me that it is ours!” she shot back.

Another said, “You can’t get me to sign that — I’m trying to get a loyalty clearance for a government job.”

Fifty years later, The Capital Times editorialized,

Perhaps the most distressing part of Hunter’s story was that a majority of those who refused to sign the petition said they feared repercussions if they signed any petitions at all. This on a day when they were supposed to be celebrating their nation’s freedoms.

The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in his 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:

The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

[I]n a populistic culture like ours...a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.

Hence, America’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, is perceived by many Americans in polarized times as a subversive, treasonous screed. King George would be proud.

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Week of 6/21-6/27, 2026:

As so frequently happens in the Trump Era, a story that in normal times would capture headlines and chyrons for a week has gotten swept away in the rushing swirl of fetid bilge that inundates us daily from the White House. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Swaine has written a meticulously researched exposé on recently departed Director of National Intelligence and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard revealing that she has been controlled for many years by an obscure cult leader.

Gabbard has also come under repeated fire over the years for serving Russia’s interests and spouting Putin talking points, leading some to conclude she’s an asset of Russian intelligence.

The question therefore arises: Who owns Tulsi Gabbard? Another is: Has our intelligence community been so compromised that our national security is wide open to attacks by hostile foreign actors? Trump’s inserting MAGA political hitmen/women in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in a brazen effort to make it his attack dog to steal the mid-term elections certainly renders the country more vulnerable to foreign interference.

I’ve been intrigued by Tulsi Gabbard ever since she became elevated to national prominence by being elected as a congresswoman from Hawaii in 2012, and serving four terms; her later abrupt party switch, and her being tapped by Trump for the ODNI job, for which she possessed zero qualifications. With her flowing black hair, white forelock and mysterious background, she struck me as a classic B-horror film beauty. But the combination of her odd policy stances and impenetrable poker face led me to believe she was concealing much about herself.

The Post’s Jonathan Swaine wondered whether “the improbable arc traced by one of the most unconventional shape-shifters in modern American politics” might be explained by her being secretly controlled by a cult leader. Gabbard was raised in a Honolulu-based Hare Krishna subsect which her parents had joined in the 1970s and subsequently rose to senior positions therein. Titled the “Science of Identity Foundation” (SIF) by its founder, Chris Butler, it is secretive, and described by former members as a cult, its leader Butler as “akin to a god” who will not be questioned.

Swaine writes,

Former devotees had been telling me for weeks that Butler controlled his followers’ major life decisions and demanded total obedience and secrecy. They said he spent years working to extend his reach into politics — and they suspected Gabbard’s rise in Washington was the culmination of that effort.

Through an SIF defector, Swaine gained access to 25,000 pages of emails and memos, dozens of which were directives and guidance for Gabbard during her time in Congress. They included instructions on what legislation she should propose, which policies she should support and how she should conduct herself with the media. “They had an air of authority,” according to Swaine, who found unmistakable parallels to her actions and statements in the House. His sleuthing led him to unequivocally believe that these directives came from the media-averse Butler.

The memos, covering “a dizzying range of matters,” included guidance for Gabbard on dozens of topics and imperatives with language such as “Start introducing bills,” and “Need to get on it and hit hard. Stop being weak.” In harsher language, she is called “chickenshit” and “intellectually lazy.”

The messages also included guidance for dealing with the news media. For example, Swaine cites an Oct. 12, 2015, memo labeled “CNN Wolf Blitzer Talking points (Final)” instructing her to say, in reference to a presidential debate which she should not attend, “It’s not a ‘boohoo, I don’t get to go to the party’ situation, Wolf.” In her interview with Blitzer later that day, Gabbard said, “The issue here is not about me saying boo-hoo, I’m going to miss the party.”

Butler appears, through staff, to have sent her instructions on U.S. policy toward Syria: “The CIA is the one that started this thing,” the directive said. She subsequently repeated it verbatim and responded to the staffer, “Sent tweet.” Gabbard was the sole supporter in Congress of the brutal Syrian dictator (now in exile) Bashar al-Assad, having traveled to Damascus twice to meet with him.

Swaine compared Gabbard’s remarks in 32 televised interviews between 2014 and 2016 with the talking-points memos passed on to her from SIF. On 24 occasions, Gabbard used nearly verbatim language. In the eight other cases, Gabbard promoted the same ideas, but with modified wording. He also discovered in the files given to him that Butler had the SIF staff set up sock puppet social media accounts which were used to sing Gabbard’s praises in order to boost her public image.

Swaine has no access to messages passed to Gabbard while she served as DNI since his SIF defector source had left the movement well before then. One can only speculate to what extent her performance in that position was steered by cult leader Chris Butler.

Which gets us to Russia’s sway over her.

Gabbard’s slavishly parroting Putin’s propaganda is such that her loyalty is widely questioned. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has come right out and said it: “There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.” Hillary Clinton alluded that Gabbard was “a favorite of the Russians” who were “grooming” her.

Gabbard has blamed the Russia-Ukraine conflict on the victim rather than the invader, propagated the Russian intel lie that the U.S. has set up multiple chemical weapons labs in Ukraine and heaped praise on now deposed Russian client Bashar al-Assad, who had fatally gassed thousands of his own subjects.

The day before Trump nudged her out of the DNI position on June 19, Gabbard made sure to do one more service to Moscow in her swansong last act, releasing the following Big Lie, one spread repeatedly over the years by Russian intelligence agencies in disinformation ops regarding COVID:

After years of lies, censorship, and cover ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability. The tactics used to hide the truth are straight from the deep state playbook: politicized self-serving leaders like Dr. [Anthony] Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress, and undermined a duly elected President by restricting his access to vital facts needed to keep the country safe. It’s time the American people learn the real story.

In doing so, she again repeats virtually verbatim Russian disinformation talking points alleging the U.S. has funded “120” biochemical weapons labs around the world. Total b.s. Per Snopes fact checker: “There is no credible evidence to support the claim that the U.S. funded the construction of 120 biolabs in other countries.”

My brain hurts contemplating all of this. Jonathan Swaine’s impressive investigation clearly shows Gabbard being under the influence, if not control, of a cult leader. Without a smoking gun, her being under the thumb of Moscow is pure speculation. Can she be the tool of both? What really bothers me is that she would never have been granted a security clearance had she been a mere citizen-applicant for a national security job in the government. The other thing that gives me a headache is that, at 45, Gabbard, like a bad kopek, might turn up again in government roles in the future.

It gets worse. By illegally weaponizing the ODNI to do his dirty domestic political work, Trump has installed as acting DNI a favorite MAGA hitman of his, Bill Pulte, a house-building magnate, also with zero qualifications for the job. Pulte, in turn, has recruited as his deputy a MAGA party girl and election denier attack dog, Christina Norton, whose utter lack of national security credentials matches her boss’s. SpyTalk speculates that “Pulte’s real agenda as intelligence chief is to use his post to create enough doubts about the 2026 election to justify intervention at the polls by the Trump administration.” This likely would be accomplished by falsely claiming overwhelming foreign intrusions into the elections, thus warranting emergency measures such as ICE goons intimidating voters and seizing ballots or even more extreme actions.

Russian interference in the 2016 elections has been established in the Mueller Report, congressional investigations and by investigative journalism. Donald Trump’s evisceration of the national security agencies — not least those involved in cyber-defense — and his placing sycophantic cranks to run them have left the United States highly vulnerable to not only foreign machinations, but his own.

Assuming we eventually overcome the MAGA madness and return to normal governance, a multi-year/multi-agency intelligence damage assessment will be needed to be carried out in order to ascertain just how much harm has been inflicted on our national security by Tulsi Gabbard and fellow travelers during eight years of Trump misrule. The results won’t be pretty.

The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.

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In the latest twist of stampeding incompetence from the Oval Office, ducks are turning up dead in the capital’s Reflecting Pool, victims apparently of the green slime that has flourished there like so many MAGA lies since Trump’s hand-picked no-bid contractor, Mar-a-Lago crony and co-felon, botched the job to the tune of almost $15 million — about eight times the originally set cost.

The sweetheart no-compete deal, the refusal to use experts, the corruption, the overruns, the sheer clown-assery, and now the deflection of blame leave us not knowing whether to laugh or cry — most likely the latter considering it’s our tax money being squandered.

Please refrain from going to your post office or police station to peruse the wanted posters for pool slashers — you know, the Antifa vandals and “Dumocrat” saboteurs — Trump has fingered as the real culprits. You see, you’ll find them along with the “205 communists” Red-baiter Joe McCarthy claimed to have identified in the State Department 76 years ago (hint: they were never found). And he will make public the evidence of vandals cutting a 350-foot gash in the Reflecting Pool lining at the same time he releases the Epstein files, proof that the 2020 election was stolen, and the ICE agents who killed two Americans acted in self-defense. In other words, don’t hold your breath.

The New York Times’s Michelle Cottle writes,

Getting bested by an algae bloom then throwing a finger-pointing tantrum about it doesn’t make Mr. Trump seem scary or threatening so much as petulant and inept. People are laughing at him, and that laughter undermines his image as a take-charge master of the universe.

Malignant narcissists have the most brittle egos in the galaxy. Constitutionally incapable of accepting blame or being humiliated, they find scapegoats and then fabricate legends to justify their lies. So, to back up his myth of “vandals” having damaged and sabotaged the pool, he has ordered park police to arrest anyone who even dips a finger in the pool’s revolting water, detain them for hours and issue them a citation. Trump’s favorite inquisitor/hangin’ judge, U.S. attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro, has vowed to prosecute his spectral marauders “to the fullest extent” of the law. I suggest she recruit Ghost Busters.

The administration has also deployed National Guard troops and set up surveillance cameras to “protect” the pool, more measures to back up Trump’s latest Big Lie. As he searches for villains, he might want to consult DC Comics and Marvel Comics. They can certainly offer up evildoers fit for the president’s runaway imagination. Personally, I see Lex Luthor and Dr. Bizarro on a moonless night wielding atomic box cutters to slash the pool linings and tossing effulgent kryptonite into the water.

Trump’s Gestapo fever dreams of simply sweeping innocent citizens off the street on his whim bespeaks a nation gone off the rails. During my service in Cuba, the communist regime arrested those it didn’t like under such fluid charges as “disrespect,” “spreading enemy propaganda,” “illegal association” and “dangerousness.” Make no mistake. All those ICE camps they’re constructing throughout the nation — overseen by Trump’s very own Reinhard Heydrich: Stephen Miller, and Adolf Eichmann: Tom Homan — are gearing up to incarcerate anti-MAGA troublemakers like me, and maybe you.

The bad news: expect more abominations from the White House as Trump’s mental and physical health further deteriorate and his support wanes.

The good news: MAGA is falling apart — finally.

Trump’s overall approval hovers in the mid-to-high 30s; a recently released Fox News analysis shows Trump’s net job approval among rural voters (a key MAGA constituency) fell from +20 in early 2025 to -14 in May 2026, with only 25 percent of these voters strongly approving of his job performance, compared to 41 percent who strongly disapprove. His support among non-college-educated white voters (another core of the MAGA base) dropped from 64 percent last year down to 46 percent. Independent voters are even more negative, with a 25 percent approval versus 69 percent disapproval split.

MAGA influencers are breaking from Trump. And erstwhile Trump boosters Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene have not only turned against him, but this week announced they’re “done supporting the Republican Party” and its “America Last” agenda.

A meeting at the White House Tuesday between Trump and Senate GOP leaders turned into a “shouting match,” with the president calling Senator Cassidy “a lunatic.”

Trump furthermore has lost all nine court cases on his latest efforts to suppress voting. To add insult to injury, both congressional houses passed a war powers bill against the Iran war over his objections. Finally, Trump nixed a bipartisan much-needed housing bill in a snit this week.

If this challenging trend continues, we will witness the unraveling of the crime spree-cum-clustersuck that is the Trump presidency.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for Trump. In their bestselling book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, the NYT’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan contend that Donald Trump ran for the presidency in 2024 for one reason above all: “This was about staying out of prison.” This accounts for his increasingly frantic efforts to rig the mid-term elections and bully Republican members of Congress to pull off impossible goals. The pressure has to be unbearably intense.

Which gets us to Trump’s health. Those who follow the news know of his skin blotches, swollen ankles, wayward gait, chronic narcolepsy and slurred speech. A record 22 specialists participated in his recent medical checkup, with the White House providing no explanation as to why. And Trump just looks awful — bloated, pale without his spray tan and exhausted. He reportedly gets little sleep as he tweets maniacally throughout the wee hours.

And then there’s dementia. Medical expert after medical expert attest that they see visible signs of creeping dementia in Trump — key signs being his degrading speech, confusing names and not keeping a train of thought. Others suspect he has suffered from a stroke, noting a drooping right side of his mouth, weakness in his right side and, again, his frequent nodding off in public.

Bettors are currently placing the odds that Donald Trump will leave office before his term ends in January 2029 at roughly 31 percent to 40 percent across major prediction markets. These figures factor death, resignation and impeachment.

President Biden’s staff was able to conceal the toll advanced age was taking on him for a while, until the presidential debate exposed it in full.

Ronald Reagan’s staff shielded him as his dementia progressed in his second term, something to which I had personal exposure working on Afghanistan at the State Department at the time.

Woodrow Wilson’s staff also kept secret their boss’s incapacitation due to a stroke. First Lady Edith Wilson effectively ran the presidency during the last 18 months of her husband’s second term, the American people none the wiser.

In this age of tech-driven saturation coverage and travel demands, Melania, if she even wanted to, would not be able to replicate Edith Wilson’s legerdemain. Trump’s people, moreover, would be no more successful than Biden’s, particularly given 47’s already ample display of increasing incoherence and erratic behavior.

In sum, the tide may at long last be turning in democracy’s favor. And Trump’s lame duck presidency may soon become deader than the poor waterfowl succumbing to MAGA slime in the Reflecting Pool. And not soon enough.

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In its twilight years as a great civilization, the Roman Empire increasingly relied upon “bread and circuses” — chills and thrills — to distract an increasingly restless population. Fifth century theologian and chronicler of the empire’s crumbling, Salvian of Marseille, condemned the blood sport put on by the authorities to amuse the masses:

There is almost no crime or vice that does not accompany the games. In these the greatest pleasure is to have men die, or, what is worse and more cruel than death, to have them torn in pieces, to have the bellies of wild beasts gorged with human flesh; to have men eaten, to the great joy of the bystanders and the delight of onlookers, so that the victims seem devoured almost as much by the eyes of the audience as by the teeth of beasts. That such things may take place the whole world is ransacked.

Were he alive today, Salvian would be similarly lashing out against the cavalcade of coarseness and spectacle Emperor Donald Trump is delivering to Americans on the 250th anniversary of the nation’s independence.

On June 14 — coincidentally Trump’s 80th birthday — Trump held a “cage fight” on the White House South Lawn involving modern-day mixed martial arts gladiators bashing and gouging each other under a colossal lighting monstrosity dubbed “The Claw.” The late Senator John McCain tried to make this kind of no-holds-barred fighting illegal, dismissing it as “human cockfighting.”

A line-up of testosteroned tattooed brawlers weighed in under the brooding gaze of our 16th president inside the solemn Lincoln Memorial, over the decades a venue honoring civil rights and racial justice. Then followed an evening of body slamming, kneeing to the groin, buffoonish japing and triumphal prancing by the brawlers to cheers, jeers and yelping by the masses under The Claw on the South Lawn, which traditionally hosts honor ceremonies for visiting heads of state and elegant dinners showcasing refined American hospitality. The lowlight of the evening was one intellectually challenged Marcus Attilus-reincarnate bellowing that the First Lady of the 44th president was not a woman.

The Trump family profited off the spectacle by selling gold coins at $12,000 a pop.

“On July 4th, at The Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, in beautiful and safe Washington D.C., we are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA,’” Trump posted on Truth Social. This Trump-centric event apparently will present martial music by military bands.

Finally, in August, “Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C.” — specifically ordered up by Trump — will be a car race in the middle of the capital, involving roaring turbocharged machines that will start at the Supreme Court and continue along a nearly two-mile lap around the National Mall, including the Lincoln Memorial.

H.L. Mencken called the United States “the Eden of clowns… incomparably the greatest show on earth… [featuring] the ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues… We have clowns in constant practice among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state.”

I watched as precious pundits on MS NOW and other liberal media twisted themselves into pretzels to posture that they are not elitists, mealy-mouthing that UFC brawling “is fine for many people…blah, blah.” I’m going to call out what Trump is forcing down our national gullet on our semiquincentennial for what it is: trash entertainment pandering to what Shakespeare called “stinkards and groundlings,” the uncultured, déclassé fellow citizens who hold culture in contempt simply because they’re incapable of understanding it and, mainlining Fox News propaganda bilge, resent those who do, and enjoy it. The good news is that this cohort was a small minority. Only 16 percent of Americans believed it was appropriate to host a UFC fight night event on the White House South Lawn, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

John and Jacqueline Kennedy hosted Leonard Bernstein, Pablo Casals, Igor Stravinsky, and Isaac Stern. The Nixons’ hosted Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, Duke Ellington and Pearl Bailey. The Obamas’ had James Taylor, Aretha Franklin and Speranza Spaulding. Trump? Kidd Rock and…uh… The line-up of entertainers for Cage Fight Night all backed out after they learned it was to be a solipsistic extravaganza for none other than Donald Trump rather than an event for all Americans.

The degrading of a people’s culture is nothing new. The Old Testament Book Of Hosea records, “There is no faithfulness or kindness….There is swearing, lying, killing, stealing, and committing adultery."

As a fish rots from the head down, so does a national culture. Trump’s whole persona is one of nastiness and crudeness. “Your countries are going to hell,” he lectured delegates to the United Nations. “I hate my opponents,” he said at the memorial service for murdered rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.

But, to be fair, Trump isn’t the catalyst of cultural decline; he is the accelerant. In these toxic times of increasing political polarization, Trump provides a permission structure for rude and uncivil behavior. Three times today alone, I was called a “libtard” on Facebook. Months ago, I received my first death threat on Substack. I wish I had a dollar for every profanity-spouting miscreant I’ve blocked on social media — at least a dozen this past week.

But cultural degradation takes many forms, from jerks who feel it’s their first amendment right to blast music at 10,000 decibels, their neighbors be damned, to slovenly or salacious fashion, to misbehavior on plane flights to, my particular pet peeve — tattoos.

Walking the street or standing in a supermarket parking lot, my view of humanity drives home to me that I’m a member of a dying minority: the tattooless one. I see all manner of “body art” on display on jiggly cellulite, sunken hairy chests, stout calves, flabby upper arms and sagging breastlines.

There’s a social truism: when edgy gets adopted by the hoi-polloi the edge is gone. Johnny Depp, Pamela Anderson, David Beckham and Angelina Jolie popularized “body ink.” The lumpenproletariat soon followed. Next thing you know, your aunt Rosie and uncle Fred now sport graphics on their dermis depicting a crucifix, cupid and his bow, or cryptic messages comprehensible only to those fluent in written Mandarin. Americans share with Russians the distinction of being proactively the ugliest people on earth. Passengers disembarking a U.S.-originated Boeing 777 at a foreign city resemble nothing less than Blackbeard’s crew lumbering off the Queen Anne’s Revenge.

That fetching 19-year old female cashier with “Jezebel Loves Jazz” emblazoned across her alabaster upper chest in bold blue Harlow font will one day be a plump Janie Paycheck balancing two little snot spewers on each hip while trying to organize dentist appointments in her iPhone and standing in a Walmart line to pay for Great Value frozen dinners and Faded Glory school clothes. Will she look at herself in the mirror when home and think, “Was I out of my mind?”

Sorry, but I digress.

Cultural descent accelerant-in-chief Donald Trump is fast taking us to our cultural nadir. Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman recently wrote,

The vulgarity of the Trumpian elite isn’t in itself that important. But it’s a symptom of a collapse in values and norms that, unless confronted and reversed, may herald the end of the American experiment.

Which gets us back to the Roman Empire’s demise. Roman culture relied on mos maiorum (“ancestral custom”), an unwritten code emphasizing duty, frugality, honor, and service to the greater good, to hold society together. Toward the end of the empire, collective loyalty to the state fractured and shifted toward individual survival, local powerholders, or personal wealth accumulation. The lower classes increasingly relied on state-sponsored handouts and violent gladiatorial games (panem et circenses, or “bread and circuses”) to escape a harsh economic reality of inflation and heavy taxes.

Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chronicled five characteristics of Rome’s decline: a mounting love of show and luxury; a widening gap between the very rich and the poor; an obsession with sex; freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality; and an increased desire to live off the state.

Arnold Toynbee, who studied the rise and fall of 26 civilizations, wrote about the “schism of the soul” — the deep internal division between the moral/spiritual life of a society (its “soul”) and its social/political structures (“body social”) which, if not addressed through radical renewal, could lead to societal collapse — politically as well as culturally.

And that’s what America faces today (with or without tattoos). Radical renewal starts with removing the leader who is dividing the soul of the nation and pulling it toward self-destruction. After that healing and rebuilding can commence and “bread and circuses” be consigned to where they belong: at the cultural fringe.

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Week of 6/7-13, 2026:

When he ran for the presidency the first time, Trump was fond of declaring, “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning.” Yet another campaign promise not delivered.

In my last essay, I stated that Americans are finally waking up to the consequences of incompetent and corrupt governance by an 80-year old convict-president whose mental and physical health appear to be in fast decline. And I listed a broad range of economic statistics and other indicators which show that if we are not in free fall as a nation, we’re getting to that point fast.

This past week added yet further proof of our decline with the Iran “deal.” In his first term, Trump tore up the intricate agreement that the Obama administration had painstakingly reached with Iran basically because he hates Barack Obama. Now, in his second term, Trump blundered into a needless war with Iran that knocked the world economy out of whack, further destabilized the Middle East and frames the United States as a flailing aggressor as well as provides yet further proof that Trump is a world class incompetent.

Compare Obama’s and Trump’s results in negotiating with Tehran:

OBAMA’S IRAN DEAL:

• $1.7 billion in unfrozen Iranian assets

• In exchange for a 98 percent reduction in Iran’s uranium stockpile

• Strict limits capping enrichment at 3.7 percent — monitored by on-the-ground inspectors

TRUMP’S IRAN DEAL:

• $24 billion in unfrozen assets and cash

• A $300 billion reconstruction fund

• Lifted sanctions

• In exchange for an “opened Strait” with “fees” attached

• Deferred discussion on Iran’s nuclear program to — maybe never

In sum, Trump lost — “bigly.” W.C. Fields said, “Some people are born losers; others acquire the knack gradually.” Trump falls into the former category and has excelled at every turn: Six bankruptcies. Failed casinos. Failed air shuttle. Failed “university.” Failed charity. Two failed marriages (number three could be on the way — stay tuned). Failed 2020 bid for the presidency.

And it gets better. A no-bid $14 million contract to change the color of the Reflecting Pool has yielded a giant embarrassing petri dish of algae slime. His name came off the Kennedy Center by court order. His beloved ballroom project is nothing more than a glaring crater next to the White House and is likely to stay that way. He is losing court case after court case on his plot to undermine this year’s elections and on other issues.

In sum, Donald Trump is a loser — except when it comes to corruption, at which he excels magnificently.

“I hate to lose, and if anybody gets used to losing they are going to be a loser,” he has said. Well, he’d better get used to it now. And if his ill-concealed plot to steal the November congressional elections fails, all the more so.

But a losing president has dire consequences. He turns the nation into a losing enterprise. I stated in my previous essay that what we are witnessing today is the slow-motion fraying of American civilization. Declining civilizations all follow a pattern.

Among the catalysts leading to the decline of the Roman Empire, for example, were economic inequality resulting in social unrest and political instability; unchecked corruption; a decline in civic engagement along with a focus on personal gain causing the erosion of traditional Roman values; overspending on the military; inequitable taxation; inflation; trade imbalance; pandemics and bad leadership — with Caligula, Nero and Domitian being among the worst. Sound familiar?

We are governed today by a menagerie of nattering maniacs and rank opportunists who spew myths about a “deep state” and anti-science nostrums ripped straight out of the coldest depths of the Dark Ages. Their delusional anti-gravity, flat-earth notions extend to economics, health, diplomacy, defense and, well, just about anything that’s fact-based and empirical. And a solid base of Republicans continues to solidly back this black magic buffoonery presided over by the felon-in-chief. We are in a decivilizational phase of our history.

Hastening this slide backwards are Trump’s appointees — all competing with him to win the Nobel Prize for Fecklessness. Here’s where Trump has ignored his own counsel: “If you hang around with losers you become a loser.” But in this case, it’s like the chicken or the egg — which came first?

America is losing under a loser-in-chief who, if allowed to go the distance of his term, will complete the job that centuries of our historical enemies, from Britain to the Confederacy to the Axis powers and the Soviet Union, have attempted but failed: destroy the United States.

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Trumpapocalypse Now: the Road to Ruin

Democratic elections lawyer and persistent bane of Donald Trump and MAGA, Marc Elias, is given to repeating, lest we lose sight, that “It’s only going to get worse.” His point is to expect conditions in the country to worsen much further before we reach a breaking point when a potent counterrevolution can be launched to at least check Trump’s power, if not remove him from office. History shows us that it often takes a national cataclysm or collapse before a critical mass of citizens mobilize or elites take action to turn things around — viz. France 1789, Austria-Hungary and Russia 1917-1918, Italy 1943, Argentina 1955, Soviet Union 1991. The United States is no exception.

And it is now on a fast track to a catastrophic denouement under the misrule of Donald Trump. To wit:

The consumer price index hit 4.2 percent in May, up from 3.8 percent in April. Many economists project that U.S. grocery inflation will reach between 4 percent and 4.5 percent by the end of the year. Ground beef has increased 12.1 percent year-over-year, now averaging $6.70 per pound. The price of gasoline has risen by 40 percent this year to over $4.50/gal.

Meanwhile, wage growth falls below inflation at a current 3.6 percent. An increasing number of lower income families are skipping some meals and foregoing health care.

Home shortages are leading to 3.6 percent to 4.9 percent increase in housing costs in parts of the country with industry experts forecasting the 2026 average to finish between 5.90 percent and 6.40 percent higher. New car prices now average $49,500.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Trump’s policies are:

• diminishing access to vital public services by pushing out federal workers who operate critical programs and by illegally withholding federal funds.

• taking away health coverage from roughly 15 million people and hitting many millions more with higher health care costs.

• slashing SNAP (food support for low income earners) with the deepest cut in history, terminating or substantially cutting food assistance for about 4 million people, including 1 million children, after suspending benefits.

• providing huge tax breaks for the wealthy while low- and moderate-income households see tax cuts that average less than a dollar a day.

• taking away critical health, food, and tax benefits from people with lawful immigration status and their families.

• reducing access to housing, including for formerly homeless people, and allowing discriminatory housing practices.

The Economic Research Service reports that 13.7 percent of U.S. households — roughly 18.3 million households — are food insecure, with one out of five kids facing hunger daily.

Trump blundered into a quagmire war in the Middle East, costing approximately $2 billion per day and threatening looming fuel shortages; there is no clear exit strategy. Corruption by him and his family is brazen and unchecked. His assault on democratic institutions is alienating more and more Americans. U.S. foreign policy now aligns more with Moscow and other autocracies, while alienating our traditional allies. Political partisanship is at an all-time high and getting worse, potentially leading to widespread civil violence.

What we are witnessing today is the slow-motion fraying of American civilization. If it collapses, the end may not be apocalyptic, but would be self-inflicted over time, uneven and under the weight of its internal contradictions. The degradation permeates not only our politics and economics, but our collective psychology; call it cultural rot. Americans feel increasingly unanchored, adrift in a system whose foundations are crumbling and a time in which hope in the future for themselves and their children is evaporating. They have lost faith in the institutions that constituted the bedrock of American democracy for two-and-a-half centuries.

Having examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations, British historian Arnold Toynbee concluded that they rise by successfully meeting daunting challenges under the stewardship of dynamic, creative leaders, e.g., George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, etc. And they fall under the misrule of self-serving tyrants and mediocrities, e.g., Donald Trump and his coterie of unqualified cabinet misfits. “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder,” Toynbee concluded.

The Great Awakening & How to Take Down Il Duce 2.0

Yet our national demise is not preordained. Americans are finally waking up to the consequences of incompetent and corrupt governance by an 80-year old convict-president whose mental and physical health appear to be in fast decline.

The latest polls show that support for Trump is falling rapidly. Across major tracking data, his average approval rating sits in the mid-to-high 30 percent range, while his disapproval rating has climbed to around 60 percent. His favorability among non-MAGA Republicans has dropped into the mid-30 percent range. Support among independents generally has plummeted 21 percentage points, while that among non-college-educated independents has cratered from 48 percent before Trump’s second term down to around 25 percent today.

According to political strategists, trying to fracture Trump’s core MAGA base would be futile due to its unshakeable voter loyalty. Instead, Trump’s primary political vulnerability lies in the fragmentation of GOP support among the remaining 60 percent of the electorate.

Marc Elias warns that the key threats emanating from Trump center on voter suppression and gerrymandering, election certification challenges and dismantling voting rights. Democrats need to oppose these machinations by refusing to normalize authoritarianism and countering Republicans by employing their tactics, for example: aggressive Blue state redistricting, vigorous legal and political counterpunching and stronger messaging. He counsels the need to prepare for a multi-year struggle, stating that the battleground won’t be confined to presidential cycles.

Breaking or halting the political momentum of Trump and his administration requires a combination of strong legal resistance, unified political opposition, and significant shifts in broad public and economic sentiment. Political scientists, legal experts and strategists point to a number of distinct mechanisms that could disrupt his agenda, including:

Legal Resistance and the Courts: filing hundreds of targeted lawsuits that tie up controversial executive orders in court, e.g., lower federal courts regularly block policies that clearly bypass statutory authority or congressional funding powers.

Uniting the Political Opposition: by expanding coalition building and grassroots mobilization à la No Kings Day and ancillary protest demonstrations. Political scientist Erica Chenowith has found that when 3.5 percent of the population of a country protest nonviolently against an authoritarian government, that government is likely to fall from power. We just witnessed this happening in Hungary.

Exploiting Economic Pressures: popular economic dissatisfaction is historically the fastest way to erode a president’s support base. Democrats need to have a steady drumbeat calling out Trump on inflation, rising unemployment and the harm that tariffs bring.

State-Level Pushback: our federal system gives much power to the states; governors and state attorneys general need to use state sovereignty laws to refuse cooperation with federal directives on immigration, environmental law and election administration.

Midterm Elections: a Blue wave would shift control of Congress and impose strict legislative oversight and accountability over Trump.

We’ve Been Through Worse

We’ve been through worse times over the past half century, or so. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed race riots resulting in cities, including Washington, DC, set ablaze; a forever war in Vietnam costing over 58,000 American lives; mass student demonstrations and a “generation gap” that tore families apart; and the Watergate scandal leading to Richard Nixon’s resignation. John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were assassinated within a mere five-year span, and a governor (George Wallace) was disabled by a shooter. In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted 2,500 bombings nationwide, almost five a day, almost all by radical leftist groups.

Stagflation in the 1970s saw unprecedented spikes in both inflation and joblessness, with inflation climbing from 3.2 percent in 1972 to over 11 percent by 1974 and peaking at 13.5 percent. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate nearly doubled from roughly 4.9 percent in 1973 to 9.0 percent by mid-1975, compounding sluggish economic output. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate peaked at an all-time record of 18.63 percent by 1981. The U.S. stock market in the 1970s was characterized by a prolonged “lost decade” of flat or negative real returns with the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeting by 45 percent and the S&P 500 falling nearly 50 percent in 1973-1974.

Americans feared the country was coming apart — before its 200th birthday.

U.S. News & World Report described the era as one “of extremes, of transformational change and bizarre contrasts: flower children and assassins, idealism and alienation, rebellion and backlash. For many in the massive post-World War II baby boom generation, it was both the best of times and the worst of times.”

After the Nadir, the Dawn?

Yet we survived and overcame our differences as well as the seemingly intractable political and economic woes back then. We haven’t reached rock bottom yet under Trump in terms of national degradation, but rest assured we will. Marc Elias is spot on in warning, “It’s only going to get worse.” Finally hitting bottom will constitute the inflection point that will determine whether we have it in us as a people to save the nation. But we still have a distance to go. Fasten your seat belts.

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Week of 5/31-6/6, 2026:

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the “rabbit hole” that is the gateway to Wonderland is also a metaphor for entering a bizarre, surreal alternate reality. As each week passes, as we descend further down the MAGA rabbit hole, we are confronted with acts of madness on the part of Donald Trump that are more egregiously bizarre and surreal than the previous week. We’ve journeyed from baseless declarations of election rigging and suggestions that rectal light bulbs may cure COVID to a proposed $250 bill with his sneering puss on it as well as gladiatorial blood sport on the South Lawn of the White House under a structure that resembles the space travel contraption of a race of evil space aliens. Meanwhile, Trump wants to back a truck up to the U.S. Treasury and loot it of billions as he demands another billion to construct an LSD-inspired Versailles ballroom where the staid East Wing has been summarily ripped out.

Donald Trump’s psychosis, dementia and visible physical decline have turned the nation into the world’s largest insane asylum, destroying the country in the process. Our national security and foreign policy serve our erstwhile enemies; economic policy feeds the oligarchs at the expense of everyone else; public health is now steered by quacks, cranks and witch doctors; social services are regressing to the 19th century; energy policy is aimed at killing the planet; education is being dismantled by those who “love the poorly educated”; endless forever wars drain the economy, and the rule of law is being transformed into the rule of the rich and powerful.

A decade of Trumpism is driving us all mad. My antidote is to spend part of each month in Canada to recalibrate and sooth my grey matter. I’ll take a stiff banker prime minister over a blowhard conman president any day. The cliché, “The inmates have taken over the asylum” aptly describes the United States today.

Which gets me to one of my pet hobby horses: madness as depicted in art and culture. Two movies and a book come immediately to mind.

Le Roi de Coeur (King of Hearts) is a quirky 1966 French-Italian comedic war film that eventually acquired a cult following (including yours truly) in the United States. Scottish soldier Charles Plumpick (Alan Bates) is ordered to disarm a bomb placed by the retreating German army in a French village during WWI. The residents have fled, leaving behind the inmates of the local mental asylum who then playfully take over the town, exaggeratedly assuming the roles of its former residents. While Plumpick is enchanted by the antics of the escaped inmates, he has limited time to find the bomb before it detonates. As hours pass, he comes to view the asylees as saner than the world outside their lock-up, as borne out when British and German soldiers massacre each other to the last man in a face-off in the village square. Foot soldier Plumpick, as sole survivor while ensconced among the mental patients, is left as the link between the worlds of sanity and madness, whichever is which.

Film viewers are left pondering the “sanity of the insane versus the insanity of the sane” in a zeitgeist of oppressive patriotism and a society gone mad — in other words where we Americans find ourselves today. The ticking time bomb can be seen as a metaphor for the imminent destruction of the nation. Disarm MAGA before everything is blown to hell.

Along the same lines, Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece movie, Apocalypse Now, derived from Conrad’s book, pose the question, “Is there such thing as insanity in a world that has already gone mad?”

They focus on a character (Marlow in Heart of Darkness; Capt. Willard in Apocalypse Now) sent to track down and bring back a man (Kurz in the book/Colonel Kurtz in the movie) who has detached himself from reality and “civilization” deep in the jungle, gone native and utterly insane. Marlow/Willard each eventually finds his deranged Kurtz presiding as a brutal deity over a remote tribe. Each Kurtz dies in dramatic fashion, and before perishing, enigmatically utters, “The horror! The horror!”

“The horror” might signify man’s capacity for cruelty and his ability to normalize it to the point that it becomes business as usual among the population. It might also mean that inside we are all “hollow men” (and women), to quote Conrad, who deep down lack a moral compass. Once that is removed we are all monsters succumbing to our basest urges. “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means,” says Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz.

Which gets us to MAGA and Trump.

Donald Trump has been compared to the infamous cult leader Jim Jones and others of his ilk. To this writer, he resembles Kurtz, a darkly charismatic madman run amok with no constraints as he lords over his tribe of deluded and crazed hero worshippers — in doing so, leading them ultimately to apocalypse. Conrad refers to one character as a “papier-mâché Mephistopheles” who has “nothing inside but a little loose dirt.” All hat, no cattle, as Texans describe such people. In the book and the movie, Kurtz is all gibberish talk, lacks reason and is morally bankrupt. As he blurts nonsense, his physical body wastes away, rendering him a “hollow sham,” or imitation, of his former self. Again, like Trump.

Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, author of the book, Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul, sheds light on this cultish relationship between demagogue and followers:

“Shared psychosis”— which is also called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”] when occurring at the national level or “induced delusions”— refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence — even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

Kurtz both in the novella and the film is eventually removed by the protagonist, ending the madman’s life and thereby abruptly terminating the danger he radiates. In a modern society with a functioning justice system still in place and democratic norms, though eroded, still basically intact, the preferred outcome is removal through process, followed by accountability — at which point our own Kurtz can utter, “The horror! The horror!”

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Week of 5/24-5/30, 2026:

P. T. Barnum said, “Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.” Donald Trump evidently had this in mind when he decided to celebrate America’s 250th birthday with a cavalcade of coarseness so low that the original Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights on exhibit at the National Archives might as well be used as kindling for the national cultural dumpster fire that is unfolding.

Pandering to his “base” of MAGA stinkards and groundlings (to borrow a Shakespeare term) Trump, pursuing his own vulgarian tastes, has decided on his own that what Americans should have for the country’s semiquincentennial is a spectacle of trash entertainment that, rather than cultural events exalting America’s founding values of freedom, opportunity and hope, and bringing all Americans together, instead wallows in cheap thrills and atavistic chest thumping.

On June 14 — coincidentally Trump’s 80th birthday — the White House South Lawn will host a “cage fight” involving mixed martial arts gladiators bashing and gouging each other under a colossal lighting monstrosity dubbed “The Claw.” The White House has called on the military to cough up hundreds of young enlistees and junior officers who meet German SS physical requirements to attend — at their own expense.

After viewing a tape of such anything-goes combat, the late Senator John McCain declared it “barbaric,” adding it was “not a sport.” He then sent letters to all 50 state governors urging them to ban what he termed “human cockfighting.” That was a time when Republicans still clung onto civilization and high-mindedness.

Ah. But there’s more. “Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C.” — specifically ordered up by Trump — will be a race car event smack in the middle of the capital, involving roaring turbocharged machines that will start at the Supreme Court and continue along a nearly two-mile lap around the National Mall, including the Lincoln Memorial. If only these things existed when the Founders were alive. Imagine Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison chugging tankards of Mr. Hare’s Porter as 650 hp NextGen and Xfinity Chevies and Fords tear up the dirt streets of what is now Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, fist pumping and bellowing “Go bro’! Go!”

But things aren’t going according plan. The fight night musical line-up of has-been’s and never-were’s have largely backed out after learning that the June 14 blood sport lollapalooza will be an extravaganza to celebrate Emperor Donald rather than a non-partisan all-America fest honoring the country’s independence. Predictably, in a mega-snit, Trump announced that he would replace the musical entertainment with “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP.” In other words, another Trump bloviatory grievance rally.

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel quipped, “Instead of music, the entertainment will be an 80-year-old man yelling about windmills.”

Contrast Trump’s carnival of blood, sweat and vomit with the nation’s bicentennial celebration in 1976. In the wake of years of civil strife over the Vietnam War, civil rights protests and Watergate, the Ford administration highlighted the themes of renewal and rebirth rooted in a restoration of traditional values. The Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife, which took place over a span of twelve weeks on the National Mall, brought together thousands of national and international scholars, folk artisans and performers. A majestic fleet parade of tall-masted ships sailed around New York City and Boston. Americans joined together in a wave of patriotism and nostalgia that finally drew the curtain down on an era of social and political turmoil.

“Trump has always been drawn to combat sports favored by mobsters and head-trauma victims. But apparently he can’t even fill the seats for the event in celebration of himself,” observes writer David Rothkopf. “Together, they tap into every source of shame, ignominy, and indignity imaginable… Call it the semicringecentennial,” he adds.

The only things missing are a monster truck mash-up, mud wrestling contests and a Miss Hot Semiquincentennial Pageant. But don’t give up hope yet.

Ever since voters opened the gates of the republic to Trump and his barbarian MAGA hordes, the latter have gone on a tear of institutional and physical destruction that would be the envy of Rome-sackers Visigoth king Alaric and Vandal chief Gaiseric. Just look at the landscape along Pennsylvania Avenue and surrounding areas these days. A gaping crater marks what used to be the White House’s East Wing, ripped out by Trump on his own initiative. And there’s “The Claw” on the South Lawn. Lafayette Park is torn up by an overpaid no-bid contractor who doesn’t know what he’s doing. The same goes for the Reflecting Pool, which Trump, again having consulted with no one, is turning into a Six Flags kiddies splash pad.

If he has his way, Trump will inflict on the American people at exorbitant expense a psychedelic version of a Versailles ballroom, a brobdingnagian Albert Speer-inspired victory arch to himself and such masturbatory trinkets as commemorative coins, a $250-dollar bill and oversized posters on government buildings featuring his sneering mug shot face. And, lest we forget, Kennedy Center is now transformed from one of the nation’s premier cultural landmarks into a hulking and haunted palace of the dead after Trump took it over and slapped his criminal family name on it. After all, everything Trump touches dies.

The wreckage that Donald Trump has wrought in the nation’s capital is aptly emblematic of the destruction he has wreaked, and continues to inflict, on the nation as a whole. A master of hyperbole, P. T. Barnum labeled his circus “The Greatest Show on Earth.” While it is debatable he ever said, “A sucker is born every minute,” those voters, politicians and corporate leaders who have enabled Trump’s Greatest Sh*tshow on Earth have themselves to blame. And the rest of us bear the cost.

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Bari Weiss, the hatchetwoman put in charge of gutting and neutering the award-winning “60 Minutes” news magazine by CBS’s new billionaire owner and Trump crony, David Ellison, has just fired two correspondents and three senior producers. Star journalist Anderson Cooper quit “60 Minutes” shortly after Weiss came on board. She has plans, moreover, to drastically change the format of the most popular news program in the U.S., one whose viewership has only been increasing. “60 Minutes” is the crown jewel of American news broadcasting, on the air since 1968. Since Weiss was installed as CBS’s news head, the network has been hemorrhaging viewers. She and her boss violate one of the fundamental rules of business management: “If ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.”

Fired correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi: “The wall between editorial independence and corporate interest at CBS is being methodically torn down. Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not.”

Fired correspondent Cecilia Vega: “In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories.”

Former correspondent Steve Kroft: “Since I retired, I often wondered what would happen to ‘60 Minutes.’ But I never expected it would be executed by the president of the United States. There is no smoking gun. But [Trump’s] fingerprints and DNA are all over this. He’s been making threats against ‘60 Minutes’ and how he wanted it gone. And he finally got his wish.”

Trump has pressured a number of major news organizations to be more “Trump-friendly” or at least more self-censoring, including the Washington Post, ABC News, NPR, PBS, White House Correspondents’ Association and now CBS. Next up is CNN, which the Ellison father/son billionaires also are in line to take over. Since Trump ally Elon Musk bought Twitter, that platform has become a devils’ playground for white nationalists and other rightwing agitators.

Research by the Center for American Progress (CAP) reveals that 91 percent of all weekday political talk radio programming on major stations is conservative. Of the top 15 most-listened-to political talk shows in the country, 12 feature conservative or libertarian hosts. Fox News, with 2.282 million total viewers, dwarfs the combined audience — 1.564 million — of CNN and MS NOW. Conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group owns or operates nearly 200 television stations across 100 markets, reaching approximately 40 percent of American households.

Trump’s hitman for intimidating news media to align with MAGA is Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr, who uses his regulatory position to investigate and threaten media networks with the loss of their broadcast licenses over political coverage, programming, and network diversity policies. His tactics famously backfired when he pressured ABC to fire popular TV host/comedian Jimmy Kimmel because of his humor eviscerating Trump.

One of the first targets of attack by aspiring and incumbent dictators is the news media. Why? Because they, and academia, lead in pursuing the truth in the public space. Strongmen, be they aspiring dictators or mob bosses – or both in Donald Trump’s case – loathe the truth, which exposes their lies and undercuts their power over people.

CBS has been consumed by the MAGA shark. Legendary CBS journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite are hurling celestial lightning bolts of outrage from newsroom heaven. And it hits me personally. I started out in journalism at CBS headquarters at 51 West 52nd Street in Midtown Manhattan. As a student intern, I researched for reporting done by Cronkite and other correspondents and also on occasion for “60 Minutes.” I was one of those anonymous figures in the background during Uncle Walter’s evening broadcasts. And it was the thrill of a lifetime to meet Morley Safer and observe Cronkite, Mike Wallace and others prepare for their next reporting as well as to deal with “60 Minutes” producers. I learned a lot, including the unshakeable adherence to the highest standards of ethics and integrity in journalism, now sadly leaving us in this unprecedented era of corruption and amorality. I fear CBS-News will be competing with Pyongyang’s KCTV for audience share. I have to wonder how long veteran “60 Minutes” correspondents Scott Pelley, Leslie Stahl and others will stick it out at CBS-turned-Fox News 2.0.

As the juggernaut of MAGA fascism continues to consume our freedoms, we risk losing our first amendment right, freedom of expression, to reactionary oligarchs out to curry favor with a deranged, megalomaniacal president. New Yorker essayist A. J. Liebling warned us about this danger six and a half decades ago: “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”

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On April 14, 2001, I participated in a solemn ceremony in Hanoi, Vietnam to repatriate the remains of seven military colleagues who had died a week earlier in a helicopter crash while searching for the remains of Vietnam War-era missing-in-action. The Russian-built Mi-17 helicopter crashed into a fog-shrouded mountain in central Quang Binh province, some 250 miles south of Hanoi. Nine Vietnamese military members assisting our team also perished. The combined U.S.–Vietnamese unit was scouting six potential MIA crash sites for planned excavations.

Our military colleagues saluted and we embassy civilians placed our hands over our hearts as each flag-draped coffin was slowly carried up the ramp to be secured in a U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo aircraft bound for the U.S. It was one of the most emotionally chilling experiences of my 25 years serving the United States. I had flown on those choppers myself many times to visit POW/MIA excavation sites. Most of my friends in the POW/MIA search office with whom I’d exchanged banter just days previous were now gone. Their wives now widows, their children fatherless. The bitter irony, of course, was that these seven men sacrificed their lives in search of the remains of American counterparts who had given up theirs in a futile war a generation earlier.

I had attended similar ceremonies over the years for fallen colleagues. The 17-gun salute burial ceremony with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery for Ambassador Arnie Raphel, killed in a still unsolved plane crash in Pakistan in 1988, still echoes in my mind and tugs at my heart. He was 45.

On Memorial Day we honor American military members who sacrificed their lives in service to their country. In the rural village of 4000 in which I grew up, 48 KIA are listed on the war memorial monument, at least four killed in Vietnam. It behooves us to also honor those who were killed in the line of duty serving in civilian agencies: 321 U.S. diplomats, 141 CIA officials and 99 USAID employees. During my 23-years in the Foreign Service, 78 of my colleagues died in the line of duty, most the victims of terrorist attacks. It is often said that our embassies and other diplomatic posts are on the front lines in defense of our national security.

But we now live in nation ruled by self-serving, thieving scoundrels for whom the concept of “sacrifice” is incomprehensible as they rob the American people blind and capriciously commit American troops to senseless wars.

President Trump, himself a five-time draft dodger, referred to the 1800 U.S. Marines who died in the World War I battle of Belleau Wood and buried in France as “suckers and losers.”

During a Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery in 2017, Trump stood by the grave of retired Marine General John Kelly’s son, 1st Lt. Robert Kelly — who was killed in Afghanistan in 2010 — and asked the general, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

In a recent commentary, I wrote about how the American Foreign Service Association, the Foreign Service’s union, was denied permission by State Department management to hold the annual memorial service for diplomats killed while serving their country. No reason was given. Just a de facto “F— you.” Undeterred, AFSA held the ceremony at its nearby headquarters.

The Mafia state misanthropes currently in control of our government have made no bones regarding their contempt for public servants:

DONALD TRUMP: “I will shatter the Deep State, and restore government that is controlled by the People.”

RUSSELL VOUGHT, OMB director: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma.”

KASH PATEL, FBI director: “The Deep State is really just a collection of unaccountable bad actors at the highest levels of the federal bureaucracy, the media, elected office, corporations, and cultural institutions, who abuse the power they have been given and the institutions they were hired to serve in order to protect themselves and manipulate politics in their favor.”

As I wrote in a previous essay, what Trump and his merry band of fellow nihilists seem incapable of comprehending is that the soldiers and public servants they savage are, unlike them, not driven by revenge or greed. They are there out of a devotion to American principles and the rule of law. As such, they deliver essential services for the public good, defend us all from enemies foreign and domestic, and, yes, provide an added check and balance on executive power because they will not follow illegal orders. And it’s this that drives the megalomaniacal MAGA mob into a frenzy. Our military serve the Constitution; and, rather than some secret anti-Trump fifth column inside the career bureaucracy, civilian government employees function, at times, as part of the constitutional autoimmune system at work. Only an amoral power-hungry bombast like Trump and his slavish minions who wallow in a dark fantasy world of conspiracy theories fail to grasp that.

As a reminder that we have been governed in the past by selfless, outstanding presidents, I quote two whose views on public service and sacrifice must guide us in the post-Trump era:

From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. ~ Abraham Lincoln

The president is merely the most important among a large number of public servants… The minute that we make men’s bread and butter depend upon their political action, that action ceases to be influenced by considerations of the public weal, and is taken from considerations of private benefit. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

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