But it has kinda been one of those years, so why should I be surprised.

As I sat down to one of those typical early morning feasts that even modest European hotels do so well, and which never cease to amaze me, I opened my phone and began to scroll the infinite tributes to Dolly Parton the morning after her passing from this mortal plane - to what is most certainly a prominent place in the heavens.

If there’s a line to get through the pearly gates, Dolly most definitely earned herself a priority pass. We all know she won’t use it anyway and will probably make sure all the others angels get to meet their maker first. She was just built like that and everybody knew it.

More importantly, everybody felt it. I believe in such things as graceful love that goes beyond our familial circles and personal auras and reaches out to touch us all.

The sheer diversity of the remembrances pouring in for Dolly shine a light on what rare gifts she possessed as a performer; her prodigious talents as a guitar player and singer. Dolly Parton could fingerpick standing next to Doc Watson and share a microphone with Linda Ronstadt - she was one of those rare artists that everyone could agree on, and anyone who was asked jumped at the chance to share a spotlight with her.

When she walked into a room full of celebrities she was the star; the one others turned to see. Inevitably they always had the same reaction, they smiled. Dolly had a way of bringing out the awe in others.

Dolly Parton pulled smiles out of people in a way I had never seen before, and I was lucky enough to be a witness to this particular magic more than once. When she walked down a crowded backstage hallway, a whoosh of joy followed in her wake. That may sound cheesy but it was true. Among the jaded she was jade, a rare gem that never lost its ability to shine and inspire a sort of homespun opulence that made everyone’s eyes go wide.

There’s a nonchalance that often comes with being part of a production crew in the entertainment business - any well-seasoned vet has already seen it all. That all went out the window with Dolly. Folks would stop what they were doing and pay respectful attention in her presence in a way I never observed before.

You never met anyone who didn’t know somebody who loved Dolly Parton - and they looked at her and smiled for them. On more than one occasion I saw grizzled roadies pull out their cell phones and say, ‘Hey Mom, guess who I just saw!’

A spontaneous ripple of love, Dolly had a presence that was joyfully contagious and not in the usual way of celebrity spectacle. She seemed to know that about herself, and respected and shared what she meant to others with an open generous heart.

Our very American blonde beauty was royalty for the rough hewn and for the regal. She transcended place to become as large as this land itself - by never losing sight of what truly matters and everyone’s right to share in its bounty.

A superstar who looked out for those who may otherwise get left behind; on Dolly’s watch nobody ever did if she could help it. And help she did, in ways large and small, from funding early covid vaccination research at Vanderbilt University Medical Center at the height of the pandemic (to the tune of one million dollars) to her Imagination Library which has given out over 300 million(!) books to children and fostered literacy worldwide. A gift that will bear fruit beyond her lifetime, but in ways that the sparkle in her light blue eyes seemed to foreshadow.

A visionary, she was laying the groundwork for the next generation of Dollys. Though we will only be graced with her specific charms once, a fire like that has a way of giving off sparks that continue to rise toward the skies and burn bright.

Dolly was a bedazzled beacon of a better world. Self-effacing and sunny with an ever cheerful disposition, she used her time on this earth to get down to the serious business of applying her gifts and good fortune to help others.

Fundamentally what she shared was love, charity, compassion. The attributes that make us feel most human.

Dolly was a comfort in a dark age and that is what made her loss so personal, for so many.

You didn’t have to know Dolly, to know Dolly. We all did because she belonged to all of us, and she always will. ‘9 to 5’, the song and the movie, was a massive hit in my elementary school years; she made us children, of every shape, size and color, all laugh and think.

In a world that seemed to have barriers, social strata and at its worst, the lingering shadows of segregation, Dolly reached across the barricades of the mind and taught us in the end, we are all one family.

An Appalachian angel, she turned her allyship into righteous action in the real world. It is incumbent upon us all to learn from her example in this fraught and fearful moment.

I believe we would honor her best by taking her lessons to heart.

Those same hearts in which she will live forever.

There is so much we can offer each other in this life: the deep well from which Dolly seemed to draw her inspiration and generosity is available to us all.

Giving is not only a material action but a state of mind.

An abundance of the heart is where true riches lie, and Dolly seemed to learn that lesson at an early age. Such profound insight clearly echoed across a lifetime and from it we can all draw guidance. We can take up the mantle in large and small ways -it all matters.

There is no greater gift than the ability to be inspired, and to learn.

What is life other than personal growth - and what heals the heart and soul more effectively than progress?

It is a balm in toxic times, we need to lean into whatever becomes the opposite of isolation in our individual lives, and stretch toward community.

Our motto as world citizens should be to embrace the wonder and mystery of this remarkable planet. Everything we need is already here; we can find the antidote to troubled times within each other.

And perhaps more importantly, within ourselves.

The essence of the wondrous ability to imagine is to become acquainted with our true reality. The space between our thoughts, and the breath between our words is where love lives.

There are a thousand ways to get to that place but the only time to truly find it is always gonna be right now. The present moment needs us all.

As has been said before, ‘you don’t have a life, you are a life’, it is all of our responsibility to find out what that really means and then share it with each other.

The most beautiful thing you could say about life, and love, is that it went on.

The most fitting tribute we could give to a person such as Dolly Parton would to be heed her well-lived example of love in action and pay it forward.

Be well.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

-Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Perhaps no image is more evocative of the American West, or of the unbridled freedom this vast and wild country came to represent in the modern world, than a band of horses galloping unrestrained across a dusty and desolate landscape. Free from the fences and fevered misfortunes of man - a spirit unbroken and unbound.

A land where mustangs can live as they were meant to be is a place that still holds dreams and promise for the human soul. It points to something elemental in our nature that we should always preserve and protect. We honor ourselves when let the wild horses have their way.

A man who can’t see that, or worse, feel it, has no business running this country.

Even Richard Nixon, who signed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act in 1971 spoke of wild horses as having an “indomitable spirit and sheer energy” that enriches the American spirit while invoking the wisdom of Henry David Thoreau, “we need the tonic of wildness.”

At present, under the Trump administration, the Bureau of Land Management is rounding up wild horses by the thousands, at a substantial cost to the American taxpayer, and selling them for a paltry twenty-five dollars a head to unscrupulous horse traders who are using a loophole in our federal laws (by reselling them to middle men brokers and in doing so changing the animals’ status from that of a protected species to livestock).

The mustangs are then shipped off to Canadian slaughter houses at a substantial profit (as much as $750 per horse); their meat is then sent to China. Last year over 3,700 wild horses met this fate - and this irredeemably awful activity is only increasing.

Our government is spending almost $3,000 per horse to capture and transport these magnificent creatures because of a directive in Project 2025 that wants to open up federal lands to further development by industry and in doing so sees the eradication of the free roaming herds as a necessary budget saving item for the BLM.

The care and feeding of these horses before they are sent off for sale, then slaughter, costs $142 million yearly and is what they hope to eventually eliminate. The U.S. government is essentially subsidizing the destruction of these animals to save money in the long run; undoubtably the Trump administration sees it as more money for billionaire tax breaks down the road.

Also, the cruelty is part of Trump’s desire to dominate all the land and creatures of this nation. Donald has always had it in for horses, once purchasing a thoroughbred from a casino customer with Triple Crown potential, renaming it ‘D.J. Trump’ and forcing it to train and race against professional advice, sickening and permanently injuring the animal.

When our obituary as a nation is written save a paragraph for what this insane cruelty symbolizes for us all. Russell Vought and the MAGA mini-autocrats care more about profit and capitulation to their corporate donors than the very essence of what makes our country truly great.

And of course it is also a giant act of sadistic domination of the natural world which is at the core of the broken psyches behind the men and women of ‘America First’.

I still feel like most folks don’t fully realize what is being done in their name and how rapidly it is all occurring. National forests are being opened to logging, national parks to mining and this administration is rolling back many decades of ecological conservation efforts in the name of profit and pilfering of our natural resources.

Our very identity is being atomized, and an anguished allegory is emerging in its place.

Scholars may someday study this period in our collective story to learn what not to do as a nation. The smoke and bombast and John Philip Sousa marches of a once prideful people has watched our military become reduced to beleaguered troops being abused by their oily leadership and deprived of basic necessities, not to mention the armaments that made us so mighty.

The U.S. Navy is floundering under the weight of Trump’s insane requests, from retrofitting aircraft carriers with the outdated technology of steam catapults to his wishlist for a ‘Golden Class’ of new battleships at a cost of untold billions for the American taxpayer. Navy leadership is even discussing renaming an aircraft carrier after Donald Trump - and stripping the name of Pearl Harbor hero, Doris Miller, who was the nation’s first Black service member to receive the Navy Cross.

On Friday, Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon fired the editor and publisher of the independent military publication Stars and Stripes for their refusal to bow to an increasingly alarming climate of state-sponsored censorship in the Trump era.

Our nation is being bent and broken to appease a madman who only thinks of himself.

Who lumbers around in a Benzoed haze with a mentally obsessed aide, Natalie Harp, nicknamed the ‘human printer’, who seems to be leading the current footrace of most psychologically unwell Trump-sycophants. Her story will not end well - it never does for folks so unhealthily drawn into his orbit.

Trump’s White House ballroom is being built over twenty hour work days, seven days a week, with direct supervision from the dilapidated, undignified dignitary.

POTUS gives almost zero effort towards his illegal war in Iran which we are now almost universally believed to have lost - and the quagmire he has created will outlive his presidency for perhaps a lifetime or more. Trump is breaking things he does not even begin to know how to fix and folks all over the world are paying the price.

It is both maddening and absolutely horrifying.

When he showed up for his second meeting with Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam in 2019 he was ill-prepared and the summit was a failure. Any hopes of a denuclearized North Korea were squandered, and Donald settled for what he now refers to as a “loving relationship” with the diminutive dictator.

DJT failed stupendously, as he always does in any endeavor, and spun it as a personal victory- people of the world be damned. Now North Korea has nuclear warheads with a probable capability of reaching the West Coast of the United States and he is leaving our allies in South Korea in the lurch and imperiled.

Militarily speaking he is throwing them under the bus. It is not only an insult to our long-standing alliance, it is spitting on the graves of all those American soldiers who suffered and died fighting in the Korean War.

A brutal conflict that is often overshadowed by the wars that came before and after for the United States, but makes it no less hellish or worthy of allowing its hard fought lessons to seep into our consciousness. The uneasy truce that came in its wake is being dismantled by an ignorant POTUS who not only doesn’t grasp geopolitical history, he hails from a family that has never served our nation in any armed conflict.

That matters more than you might think - and this moment is a perfect example.

45-47’s recent talks broke down with Canada - and now we are in a tariff war with our closest ally. If you cannot get along with Canadians, you will not get along with anyone. I was in Toronto a couple of weeks ago and it was embarrassing to walk around as an American.

I’m never not impressed with our good neighbors to the North; it says a lot about Trump’s ignorance and ego that he seeks to punish them. He resents intelligence, civility and cheery competence because he hates himself - and deep down knows he will never measure up.

I think Prime Minister Mark Carney makes him feel vastly inferior and Trump is reflexively reacting out his own defects of character. Never forget that above all else, DJT is a drug addict with low self-esteem and basically zero education.

Everything you witness from him comes from a deeply damaged, criminal mentality.

When all is said and done, he will be viewed as perhaps the worst human being this nation has ever produced - that is why surrounds himself with like-minded fools. He needs dysfunction in order to feel functional. Competence makes him recoil so he reaches for the charlatans and the churlish co-conspirators.

When first asked about the emerging scandal concerning Rep. Max Miller’s physical abuse of his ex-wife and two year old daughter earlier this month, Trump said “he was just learning about it”, which was of course, a lie - like every other stunted consonant and strangled vowel that has ever slipped from his thin, crooked lips.

POTUS then spent the rest of his remarks saying he felt sorry for the young man and hoped it would work out for him - that he wasn’t gonna get involved (when has Donald not poked his jowly visage into the internal politics of the party he has refashioned into a reflection of his own distorted and grotesque image).

DJT ended up calling Mr. Miller Genuine Draft and advising him that his reelection chances weren’t looking good, but the defiant young congressman is staying in the race, claiming he has drawn inspiration from Trump himself after his Access Hollywood moment in 2016.

It has now become a loyalty test of sorts to Trump for fellow GOP candidates to refuse returning donations Miller has made to many of his Republican colleagues’ congressional campaigns; obstinance and obsequiousness in the most recent generation of MAGA candidate.

Trump always sides with the male abuser and offers support. Most especially when they are handpicked proteges who served in his own White House, as the young Mr. Miller did during Trump’s first term. Miller was physically abusive as a White House aide, having pushed former Trump White House Press Secretary, Stephanie Grisham, up against a wall and slapped her in the face when they were dating.

In 2022, Miller was anointed by DJT to run in Ohio’s 7th District, replacing retiring GOP Rep. Bob Gibbs. At that point, Miller’s demons were already widely known to MAGA insiders.

Only in Trump’s world would such an abusive incident earn a promotion.

His foray into politics began with a stint on Marco Rubio’s ill-fated 2016 primary campaign (which doesn’t say much for Marco’s due diligence either). It was most likely during this primary campaign that his cocky and abusive attitude attracted MAGAworld attention and marked him as having the “right stuff” to serve on Donald Trump’s campaign and later in his White House. That kid is gonna go places.

Miller was not the only abuser working in the White House in Trump’s first term, which also included aide de camp and Staff Secretary, Rob Porter, and former campaign manager/second term DHS shadow Director/Kristi Noem sidepiece, Corey Lewandowski.

Donald has a way of sniffing out the deviant and disturbed ones.

That is why POTUS is so reluctant to see Miller leave now. Men like that are malleable and he knows it. Trump has always sought those with abusive tendencies and addiction issues because he not only shares those core attributes and defects of character, he knows they will engender loyalty.

It is also why he welcomes those back into the fold that he knows lack the character traits and basic decency to resist his criminal aura, i.e. his recent reunion with Michael Cohen, a man who was always been as greasy as they come. Michael was close friends with Felix Sater since his teens, an associate who served as a conduit between Trump’s family and Russian mobsters for many years.

The fact that he was seen as some sort of progressive influencer by some will never not be nauseating to me (he once asked me to appear on his podcast to please our mutual “fans”. I didn't respond because it was always clear to me a guy who was still living in Trump Park Avenue was simply playing the only card he had at the moment after coming out of prison (for lying on Trump’s behalf); grifting progressives through a gullible online-influencer operation. He is not alone in his endeavors, unfortunately.

Had Cohen not been cast out during Trump’s first term he would have become one of his biggest henchmen, and I am sure he will soon find himself serving “the boss” once again.

POTUS doesn’t want the best in people, he wants the broken parts in the worst people to further his own aims. The faulty wiring serves his own dysfunctions.

DJT loves noxious personalities and men with something to hide - and this began long before he entered political life.

Secrets and sin are as central to his business operation as spreadsheets and savings are to most others.

Misery loves company as they say - so do misogynists and stunted, abusive males who think it’s ok to put their hands on a woman, or a child.

Trump abused his own wives and children, which is hardly a secret in certain circles. (It is also no secret that he escaped any substantive scrutiny for this repulsive behavior, along with his decades of sexual predation, when he ran for POTUS in 2016).

We are all now in abusive relationship with our Commander-in-Chief. His misguided wars and profane threats against sovereign nations have a destructive effect on the entire world.

The trust we are losing in the eyes of so many allies will not be easily restored. We have reached a critical moment in our collective history and it is incumbent upon us all to act as quickly as we can to staunch any further erosion of our national character.

We owe it to ourselves and to the world. And also to all those wild horses hoping to run free.

Be well.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

This follows a Trump-appointed regulator preliminarily approving a federally chartered trust bank for his family’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency firm, which is run by Zach Witkoff, son of Steve, Trump’s erstwhile Special Envoy.

An apex moment of self-dealing, marrying the powers of the presidency to personal financial interests. The last man in the world who should have his own bank is Donald Trump. The last people on earth you would want to trust your money with are the execrable Trump clan.

Never before has such a pustular cabal of treasonous, glutinous venality metastasized so swiftly and eaten away at the undergirding of a system of government that may not just be temporarily broken - it may be heading towards a place well beyond repair.

To say the fox is guarding the hen house is too weak an analogy at this point. What we are witnessing is larceny on a scale we have not witnessed before in this nation. What occurred in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union may pale in comparison to the thievery and corruption now taking place in the U.S.A.

Part of the KGB’s plan was to let America’s own greed and decadence do us in - and they may have finally gotten their wish. This is not by accident of course, but through decades of cultivation of Donald Trump and his associates. ‘Active measures’ were certainly taken - and they paid off grotesquely.

Everything DJT is now doing is designed to undermine our democracy and install him as an authoritarian ruler. Using district attorneys’ offices to go after his political opponents’ fundraising apparatus is designed to hobble the ability of the opposition party to hold him accountable and provide checks and balances on his unitarian powers.

The recent revelation that Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over Trump’s NY State Supreme Court conviction on 34 felony counts for attempting to silence a porn star with whom he had sexual relations, has had his family targeted for over a year by the DOJ is chilling.

Merchan’s daughter, and the Democratic fundraising firm she was a co-owner of, was investigated by the U.S. Attorney in Chicago; the latest in an onslaught of weaponization of government powers against POTUS’ perceived enemies.

To Trump and his oligarchic administration, money is the reward for holding elected office - and they are attempting to amass so much of it in such a short period of time, that it may allow them to never again be ousted by the will of the people.

To never be dislodged from their privileged perch of insatiable profiteering, and naked, blatant corruption is the ultimate goal the MAGA movement.

The ultimate act of white supremacy is to place themselves firmly and forever above the law.

Men like Russell Vought were brought in to make sure our institutions fail so they can never again find footing sure enough to hold the criminals accountable. This administration gutted institutional knowledge for a nefarious and strategic reason. Project 2025 in the end may prove to have been a greater threat to our republic than any enemy we fought on a battlefield.

The lesson Trump took from his loss in 2020 is that democracy is for suckers; he will do his best to make sure it is not employed to unseat him or his MAGA movement ever again.

They are stealing far too much treasure to stop the looting now.

POTUS has made 2.2 billion dollars so far in his second term, as the most corrupt president in our nation’s history by a country mile. Trump’s Treasury Department’s dismembering of FinCEN this week will only add to his illegal haul and allow untold amounts of foreign dark money into the U.S. in the form of campaign contributions.

The international organized crime outfits that Trump participated in for decades before becoming president have now been consolidated in such a way that any financial crime or money laundering anywhere on earth could potentially benefit Trump and his family.

We are not just up against the MAGA movement, and the immorality of the billionaire backers of his xenophobic regime, but a well-oiled crime machine that just broke through the last remaining guardrails against corruption.

Trump had vetoed the reporting rules regarding ‘shell companies’ late in his first term. The bipartisan Corporate Transparency Act passed anyway - and it was a gigantic step towards rooting out money laundering and illicit funds from being moved and hidden anonymously within the United States by forcing shell companies to reveal their ownership.

Now, not only are those regulations abandoned, the databases themselves have been destroyed - and Republicans in Congress are working to make sure this evisceration of the rule of law cannot be reversed by any future administration.

A little known Trumpworld fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, is making sure the race to save democracy may in fact be lost ahead of the starting gun.

Shaking down everyone in Trump’s purview, not merely willing donors but also the corporate cowards who wish to compete in this rigged and corrupt, insider-favored economy.

Many perhaps know deep down it is wrong to pour their millions into his grift machine, yet they do it anyway to receive preferential treatment in the most crooked administration in American history.

The real folks getting fleeced by this unbridled greed are the American taxpayers - and anyone looking for an even playing field, equal opportunity and representation in our government. We are handing future generations a rotten husk of a country if this malfeasance continues.

The ‘Princess of Darkness’, a sobriquet given by Trump himself, checks in with ‘the boss’ (as she refers to him on donors calls, ‘the boss wants this money’) nightly to compile a list of who has paid up and who hasn’t.

So far they have raised a staggering 800 million dollars for his MAGA, Inc. super PAC, his Presidential Library and ballroom funds. Unheard of in modern times, and thanks to SCOTUS’ Citizens United ruling, perfectly legal.

The candlelight dinners POTUS hosts at the White House and his Trump properties are not just opportunities for shakedowns and insider trading on the public dime, they seem to be the only thing POTUS puts any effort into beyond his continual destruction of our National Monuments and the White House grounds.

Meredith O’Rourke has no official role in the government, beyond a seat on the board of the National Parks Foundation. The destruction of Big Bend National Park in recent weeks to build a steel barrier wall is in many ways a flex of Trump’s power (no one crosses the border there and the desecration of our public lands is another exercise in grifting taxpayers), as was the tearing down of the East Wing earlier this year.

It is no accident his primary fundraiser, whom he refers to as a ‘killer’, is involved in both of these projects.

The destruction of national monuments and parks is to show potential donors that POTUS can in fact, do whatever the hell he wants and nobody is gonna stop him (so you better f’n pay up, capiche?).

It is the equivalent of mobster walking into a store that hasn’t paid up for protection and taking a baseball bat to the shelves. It is violence in service of profit - and to inspire acquiescence and fear through sheer brutality.

Donald’s actions on the world stage always reflect this same mobster mentality; much of the geopolitical chaos we are witnessing stems from his avarice and immorality.

We must not allow this administration to keep punishing us all and tearing at the fabric of our nation.

We must stand up to this criminality, which has now become official with the confirmation of Todd Blanche as Attorney General.

The courts alone will not save us despite the recent judgment against Trump in the construction of the ballroom - SCOTUS will once again come to his aid.

We the people must not accept this madness and do all we can to stop him while we still can. This summer of smoke and suffering may one day seem like our last chance, we do not want to look back and wish we had done more.

If it feels like there has been an avalanche of chaos and corruption over these last couple of steamy months, you are correct, and that is by design.

While POTUS is golfing, his shadow government is working overtime to steal our republic from right under our sun-blocked noses. There are no vacations for the villainous; every outrage du jour distracts us from seeing the big picture and how rapidly they are advancing in their goals.

Trump and his ilk will always aspire to the awful and the morally bankrupt: if the last decade of American life has taught us anything, it should be that he is far from alone in his pursuits and predilections.

POTUS is an immensely criminal human being, make no mistake about that but he has always served as a Trojan horse of sorts for those in his immediate and extended orbit looking to capitalize on their proximity by doing very bad things in the darkness of his immense shadow.

The CIA covert operation in the waters off of Ecuador is a prime example of something larger brewing than just meets the eye. It is well funded and essentially untraceable; in our name uniformed mercenaries are abducting and interrogating foreign nationals with zero accountability.

I alluded to this last week and it was confirmed by The Washington Post in recent days that at least two fishing vessels have been attacked - its occupants zipped and hooded and brought to a facility in El Salvador, before being deported back to Ecuador.

This is a separate operation from the very public killing of fisherman falsely accused of being narco traffickers that Pete Hegseth so proudly posts snuff videos of on the Pentagon website.

The clandestine paramilitary actions include a top of the line Cessna surveillance equipped aircraft, with no tail markings, flying out of a shadowy airport outside of San Salvador that was last used by the U.S. at the height of the Iran Contra affair. It is registered to a P.O. Box in Virginia.

My guess is that in addition to Trump’s obvious financial scams and looting of the United States, he is working on a plan to consolidate South American drug traffickers under one shadowy organization willing to work with his interests, i.e. he wants a piece of the action and will use the powers of the American government to insure he gets it.

We have a long history of interfering in the politics of Central and South America and profiting from the drug trade to serve U.S. interests.

These recent events are not unrelated to the recent FinCEN deregulation. Trump and his cabal are positioning themselves to be at the top of the pyramid when it comes to global criminal enterprises.

They are not trying to stop drug trafficking or those who would launder the proceeds. They are making sure no illicit business gets done in this hemisphere without his approval.

These patterns have been prevalent throughout DJT’s entire career but now he has unlimited funds and the U.S. Military at his command.

As was the case with the Watergate scandal, the best thing to do is follow the money.

If the task ahead of us seems daunting or insurmountable, we must remember that there are more of us than there are those willing to go along with living in a dictatorship.

Most folks still don’t have a clear picture of what his happening and that is understandable for a myriad of reasons. Our task is to enlighten them.

We must wake our fellow citizens up fast before it is too late because they amassing a vast arsenal to use against us in the upcoming midterm elections and Trump and his cronies know that if it gets past a certain point - say he does something completely undemocratic like seize ballots when it looks like GOP is going to lose or declare the election was rigged - any protests that occur after that point he may crush in the interest of ‘national security’.

He is already broadcasting his intentions, as he has always done and we would do well to heed the warnings. The enormous ICE budget exists for a reason and it’s not just to prosecute and deport migrants. The Trump administration’s response to the horrific murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti this past winter was to investigate progressive groups and unions in Minneapolis.

They have shown their hand, we need to show them ours, rising up in our collective power before it is too late. We are a vast, creative and compassionate nation.

These dark days will pass but not without righteous effort and non-violent, urgent action. We need to call up a thundercloud and let ‘em hear from us. All of us.

The wicked do not rest and we shouldn’t either.

Be well.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

A man so thin-skinned and small he cannot admit when he’s wrong, and hates others for being right. He hates them even more if they are kind - kindness was seen as a weakness in the stunted household he grew up in

POTUS was reared like a fungus, he wasn’t so much raised as he was allowed to fester. A forgotten peach that rolled under the Cadillac seat, turned bruised and moldy - not that he ever would have been sweet, some folks are just born bitter.

His particular antisocial traits have been allowed to smolder, coddled by unending privilege and the all-encompassing racism of his pedigree. If being an asshole was an endurance sport Trump would be world champion. The core of his dysfunction is a bottomless need for attention.

Self-assured people do not need attention in a such a pathological fashion. While we have always endured powerful men who sought the limelight, none have ever done so with as much immoral baggage and lack of qualifications to hold office.

DJT became an icon for idiocy - and now it is spread like the uncontrollable wildfires that are ravaging our planet.

Trump hasn’t mentioned the fires that incinerated almost a thousand structures in Spokane or Oregon and are far from contained (49 fires still burn and are worsening air quality and threatening lives and property) but he made a big show this past week of offering aide to red states that had climate-related damage from flooding and tornados (without of course, acknowledging global warming as the culprit).

We have never had a more un-American president, one who has no concern for the states and citizens that he doesn’t view as on his team. His VP and Cabinet members behave in a similar way: we saw the results of that during his first term when Kushner and others held back PPE equipment to blue states during the Covid pandemic.

Trump’s brutal tenure in those awful days cost over a million American lives and robbed us all of something we might never get back - a country that stands united in the face of adversity. Trump chose to attack science and reward ignorance because he felt it was a more expedient way to please and manipulate his base.

It may have worked for him politically, but the damage it has done to our nation is incalculable.

POTUS’ rejection of science was a cynical ploy, a further attempt to dumb down his base to blind them to his own incompetence and dereliction of duty. Trump himself (of course) took the vaccine and received state-of-the-art medical care thanks to military doctors at Walter Reed, but pretended like the rest of America would be better off with hydroxychloroquine and bleach.

Now 45-47— is attempting to rewrite the history all together by using his surrogates in the GOP Senate to attack Dr. Fauci and hold the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in contempt of Congress for asserting his Fifth Amendment rights.

An 85 year-old man who spent his life attempting to save the lives of children and adults is being attacked mercilessly by an 80 year-old man who spent much of his life attacking children.

Including but not limited to, the teenage girls he sexually abused and trafficked with his friend and business partner, Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s personal lawyer and newly confirmed Attorney General, Todd Blanche, knows as much and went out of his way to obfuscate for Trump and cover up his role in decades of sex-trafficking.

I am quite sure Trump’s former Attorney General, Bill Barr, was aware of all of these allegations as well and having had his own father so deeply intertwined with Epstein thought the best course of action was to silence the well-connected sex trafficker forever. Trump was not the only associate to benefit from this permanent solution.

The DOJ has done more to protect Donald Trump than it has to seek justice on behalf of women and girls abused by powerful men.

Bill Barr’s own law firm actually defended Jeffrey Epstein between his stints as Attorney General.

Barr essentially spent his life covering up crimes, not protecting the innocent from them or seeking retribution for its victims. He’s been no friend to justice or democracy going back to his role in whitewashing the Iran Contra affair in 1992 at the end of President H.W. Bush’s term. Facilitating the pardons of the six main perpetrators and essentially closing the independent criminal investigation; his justification was that he felt the Reagan era officials had been treated unfairly for political actions. Sound familiar?

Trump’s criminally abusive behavior and compulsive sexual predation was no secret to his family or his business partners; it certaInly was never a secret to his lawyers, Blanche included. Neither was his money-laundering - the Trump Organization was a money-laundering outfit. It still is essentially an organized crime operation, but now they have branched out into crypto currency scams and looting the U.S. Treasury through graft and corruption.

Never have such dangerous men and women gotten away with so much with so little accountability. Trump’s mob ties trace back his entire career in real estate, extending to his father’s developments in Brooklyn and Queens.

The fact that I see zero pushback on Trump using the words ‘military terror’ in his most recent bellicose threats to Iran shows how far he has degraded both our society as a whole and what GOP/USA has come to expect of our armed forces under Pete Hegseth’s leadership.

Pocket Square Pete reportedly blamed his own deputy, Stephen Feinberg, for munitions stock piles being depleted during his disastrous prosecuting of the illegal Iran war when called on the carpet by Trump at Camp David.

Pathetic leadership and the last kind of coward you want in charge of the Pentagon. A man who cannot take responsibility is a man who should not have the power to put our military into harm’s way. Navy sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln are reportedly enduring poor morale, food rationing and moldy showers while they endure a historically long, twice-extended deployment under dubious and dangerous circumstances.

They work incredibly long hours, most without a day off let alone shore leave, and concern has been growing that they may be overworked to the point of mishaps becoming increasingly likely. Troops are going without essential toiletries like toothpaste and their contact with the outside world is limited.

My guess is the military is attempting to cover-up just how bad things have gotten for those deployed in Trump’s impulsive quagmire, much like they have tried to downplay and hide the number of casualties. It does not take military expert to smell disaster looming on the winds of war.

‘Pauli Girl’ Pete has not visited the aircraft carrier operating in the Arabian Sea but seems to have plenty of time to prance around in front of the camera with Trump. He denounced the reports regarding shortages and crew morale as ‘fake news’.

Trump spent the weekend playing golf, again (last weekend he awarded himself his 43rd tournament trophy while claiming to have shot a 70, a ridiculous lie like everything else in his own little land of make believe) at his private club in Bedminster, NJ while the 5,000 sailors on the USS Lincoln passed 260 days deployed.

That’s a long time to be at sea, sailing on the whims of a madman.

My fear is Trump & Hegseth, despite all the patriotic machismo talk about ‘supporting our brave warfighters’, are forgetting about our service members and keeping their abysmal treatment and over-extended tours of duty out of the headlines.

It is beginning to take on a rather Putinesque feel. We need a more pugilistic press, not a bunch of pedantic scribes looking to build followings and compete with news aggregators on social media.

We need folks who can stand up to a Pentagon and President Trump hellbent on turning acts of war into opportunities to profit personally, while turning a blind eye to European allies under nightly siege by a Russian army with North Korean ballistic missiles.

You would think that would be a bigger story - perhaps it will be when it turns into World War III. Just this week a U.S. intelligence assessment warned that Putin is planning to launch a limited incursion, or perhaps a missile strike or hybrid attack on a NATO member state on the alliance’s eastern flank - just to show he can and that Trump won’t stop him.

Trump launched his illegal and ill-fated war with the idea it would make him some sort of virile imperialist (he has reportedly indulged comparisons to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan). Plundering the world for its oil, he too stupid to understand Iran was not Venezuela. Now Iran will control the Strait of Hormuz as a result of any deal he can cut at this point.

Trump handing a brutal theocratic regime the ability to drive up global oil markets at their whim: to say they are in a stronger position geopolitically than when the war began is an understatement. This is why you don’t need idiots and cowards running our military and country. Trump and Hegseth are obviously both, Rubio may be worse because he most likely knows better but doesn’t care. Marco is looking to take over the whole franchise and expand our predatory operating into Cuba.

The damage they have done is not temporary, most of us will pay higher prices, and not just at the pump, for the rest of our lives. Not to mention the human cost and disgrace they have brought upon our nation with war crimes and punitive tariffs on our allies.

POTUS was elected under dubious circumstances on both occasions; I believe he cheated like he has on everything his entire life (accepting foreign interference or the dark money of oligarchs is a form of cheating). We need to recognize this fact and the threat he poses to upcoming elections.

He and his allies will do all they can to stay in power. Our assignment is to make sure that does not happen. As dire as it may seem now we still have plenty of opportunities to push back on this autocratic regime - and we must continue to do exactly that.

Resistance is not a part time job but a necessity in the face of such horror.

Stay cool and keep the faith.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Yawing back-and-forth the whole time, while the old man spoke only of how the world had always done him wrong.

He blamed the sextant, he blamed the sailors.

Anybody but himself and his own inability to read the charts and respect the weather.

The typhoon had now found him - a tempest in every way of his own making.

A storm that would soon sink their ship, yet he continued to spit empty words into the spray.

He threatened the very rocks on which he would soon run aground. As if his own arrogance could overcome the ocean. The waves laughed in his face.

Born into privilege this one, inherited it all.

Had never known the chalky taste of hardtack or curled his flimsy lips to taste the last drops of water in a musty keg, like the greenhands who were lucky to even have it.

It was all beef and burgundy for this spoiled princeling. He would never lie awake with an empty belly in a borrowed bed.

A life of entitlement that only led to more taking. Never once gave back or said thanks. His only mantra was ‘More’.

‘Me’ was his epitaph and his undoing.

His body now bloated by wind and sagging like the mainsail, the sea was saving him for last.

It would eat through the hull first before it came for the captain’s quarters.

The crew damn well knew it, like they knew they would miss their mothers when this ship went down, so they hurriedly devised a plan before it was too late for all.

The rudder stock was cleaved, its pintels and gudgeons splintered and soaked. The main mast and boom would surely be next.

The forestay had already said ‘So long,’ yet there he stood, this coward of a captain, refusing to release the lifeboats and order ‘Abandon ship!’

Yellowed hair matted and soaked, falling down the sides of his ruddy cheeks, sticking to it like a saddle to a haunch. Dead eyes reached into the distance, empty of both memory and mirth.

He could not feel the terror of the men under his command as he had no taste for the stars, the bracing tickle of snowflakes or the green fields of spring.

The wonder of seasons that would not come again for these poor souls.

There would be no songs sung to mourn his passing. No new wife left widowed or child born lonely, nothing to miss unlike so many of the new world sons soon to be lost to a nautical disaster not of their making.

They shipped out under a flag that had once held promise, their phantom fortunes had now been surfeited by a tyrannical toddler of a man.

A funk rose off of him that repelled both flies and rats. Funny that.

For him there was no heart to break, just an empty hole that no amount of treasure would fill.

The wind seemed to sing one last command in its howling symphony of fury. It came more as whisper than a roar.

‘Save yourselves, he does not matter now,’ but would they hear its command?

Perhaps a useful way to understand where we are as a nation is to study shipwrecks. The ocean floor is filled with treasure that cost lives.

The general laws of maritime customs always stated that the crew must obey the ship captain’s orders during a voyage, but in the instance of a shipwreck the captain no longer had absolute authority if he is deemed unfit for duty.

The old rules did not always apply in perilous times.

In the era of whale ships and merchant vessels, this became an important distinction. And many a young deckhand had sought to save themselves and abandon ship, rather than continue to listen to the ‘old man’ (as captains were often called).

The captain’s allegiance was often to the owners of the ship and the lucrative industry under which they sailed; perilous circumstances had a way of becoming obscured and ignored in a quest for profit. Freezing in fear at the prospect of lost fortune.

Gold will do that to a man, sometimes it is hard to let it go. Even in the face of certain death. There are no shortcuts at sea, the ocean always gets the last say.

‘Every man for himself’ is about survival. When it becomes so painfully obvious that the ship is taking on water, often the best thing you can do is get in a life boat, point it towards land as best you can - and row.

Being led into certain destruction is the right time to change a deadly course, and to bravely ignore the orders of those already shown to be unfit for duty; the maritime version of ‘good trouble’.

Our republic is being run like a pirate ship, sailing in turbulent waters with one objective - to pillage and plunder.

There’s thirteen billion dollars missing from the Venezuelan economy. It was generated from the proceeds of the Venezuelan nationalized oil sector - after Trump took unilateral military action without the approval of the U.S. Congress or the American people, and started selling the oil on the global market.

DJT essentially performed a smash and grab in the middle of the night with only one objective: to steal the shiny black jewel that is the nation’s oil industry. He did not change their dictatorial government, or offer democracy, or economic and humanitarian aid. He again on Saturday posted a meme depicting Venezuela as the 51st state. Meaning, of course, in his mind it belongs to him; actions that are no different than a mob boss claiming his territory.

POTUS is a thief and has always been one - and he has now turned the United States’ geopolitical agendas into a gigantic grifting operation.

Marco Rubio was appointed to oversee the sale of the country’s oil, and the thirteen billion dollars has disappeared on his watch. Only a paltry 300 million has made its way back to the long suffering Venezuelan people according to their own official ledgers.

Over half of the country lives in extreme poverty. This is cruelty and larceny on a massive scale and it is mostly flying under the radar: we cannot get a straight answer out of the Trump administration as to where that money has gone.

I’m sure Trump himself knows exactly where the purloined oil revenue has gone - and like everything else he sees as under his purview, his answer is basically, ‘None of your f’n business’. This is a POTUS spent twenty years claiming the U.S. were suckers for not ‘taking the oil’ in Iraq.

Donald ran a fraudulent Trump Organization (along with his co-conspirator children) for over four decades before he became president. Cooking the books and keeping all of the profits for himself, while cheating on his taxes and reneging on his contractors, is standard operation procedure.

Then he would send his businesses into bankruptcy to escape whatever debt he had accrued on what essentially amounted to money laundering operations for organized crime, and for which he profited handsomely all along.

Capital One on Friday pushed back on a Trump Organization lawsuit that claims the company was a victim of ‘woke debanking’, by releasing documents showing the bank closed 300 Trump Organization accounts in 2021 only after review by their anti-money laundering experts.

This occurred after DJT was POTUS the first time. Imagine what he was getting away with before 2016.

Trump’s children were raised in an environment of perpetual criminality which is why they are serving so steadily as the legs to his banquet table of graft right now.

Don Jr., Eric and Jarvanka, (and even Barron with his Polymarket bets and upstairs-in- the-White-House insider trading), are helping themselves to a feast which may, in the end, send much of the world into a famine.

Trump essentially hijacked the armored car and his kids are unloading it.

That corrupt methodology has now seemingly been adopted by our State Department under the greasy guidance of Marco Rubio, a man who seems hellbent on becoming the dictator on deck.

A scary proposition because a more disciplined man with the same immoral attributes as POTUS could do remarkable damage in the world, perhaps even extending out from the calamity Trump has already caused.

All signs point to Rubio’s involvement in the Ceuta migrant situation this past week, which looks like it was a stunt engineered by our own State Department.

In April, under Rubio’s direction, the U.S. sent 20 million dollars to Morocco specifically earmarked for ‘diplomatic engagement’ between Morocco and Spain concerning the ‘future status’ of Ceuta (an autonomous Spanish city on the northern coast of Africa). This week’s stunt was engineered with the seeming complicity of the Moroccan government as a sort of payback to Spain for not opening their airspace to the U.S. military during Trump’s illegal war with Iran.

Most of the shirtless (another tell) young men who were victims of online disinformation campaigns (falsely stating European immigration policy had suddenly changed, creating a “pull factor” for the mass migration event) returned immediately to Morocco. Participants said they had been driven to the maritime and land border (that Moroccan security forces themselves control) in trucks and buses, and pointed towards Ceuta. Where cameras happened to waiting to document their arrival.

Nothing about the situation looked spontaneous; it was political theater and most likely an act of retribution against Spain for standing up to the United States-an opportunity to reinforce Trump’s immigrant rhetoric which he immediately seized upon and said it should be used as an issue to benefit the GOP in the midterms.

A tailor made distraction from the calamity caused by both the United States and Israel in the disastrous war in Iran.

Ceuta provided the sort of ‘migrant invader’ social media agitprop content that is so popular with POTUS and MAGA influencers. It feed the fears of the psychologically stunted men and women to whom the ‘America First’ movement has become a balm.

Too burdened by their own xenophobic dysfunction to understand they are being preyed upon by billionaires who are stoking a sociological disease to strip them of their rights and their economic futures.

Our current mad captain has struck his own metaphorical reef in the Strait of Hormuz.

He didn’t listen to his own military advisors that warned him it was there, he did not take heed of the caution displayed by his predecessors when it came to military engagement with Iran. His hubris and historical ignorance, not to mention his malleability when others seek to manipulate him and exploit his venality for their own aims - as Netanyahu did so deftly at the beginning of this incendiary imbroglio, guided him into a quagmire.

Nor did DJT honor the diplomatic achievements of the past, namely the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which, besides the years worth of diplomatic manpower that went into the drafting and signing of the JCPOA, there were millions of U.S. tax dollars spent on achieving that viable and effective diplomatic solution.

Trump flushed it all down the toilet on a whim, and now he finds himself the one circling the drain.

We are also spending billions bombing a country and destroying it’s civilian infrastructure while doing nothing to help the people who have lived under a theocratic rule for almost fifty years, and who bravely stood up to tyranny in recent months, who are now being punished twice for it.

A country of over 90 million people is being made to suffer by the actions of a few.

We are creating more enemies, not vanquishing them.

The Iranian economy has been so damaged over the last year (for Iran the turmoil began with the U.S./Israeli strikes in June 2025) that most folks are only buying rice one cup at a time and fresh vegetables are a luxury.

There is no sign of a solution in sight, either diplomatically or militarily, for either side.

The self-proclaimed ‘Peace President’ is causing more calamity, human suffering and unbridled warfare than I have seen in my lifetime. Once again pivoting back to Saturday night social media posts claiming ‘perimeters of a deal’ are in place with Iran, preceded by his usual bellicose threats of ‘military terror’ - just in time for Monday’s market manipulations.

POTUS is essentially shipwrecked and not admitting it.

Reality eludes him when it comes to how stuck we are as nation right now - and the old man is incapable of saving the vessel without sacrificing much of the crew, having very nearly run out of dry gunpowder, so to speak, after being so loose and uneven in the firing of their cannons early on. They were being led by clowns and now cannot get out of this battle by cutlass and courage alone.

So the captain and his officers continue to bray and boast, ignoring all the damage they have done and the hell and hardship that may be yet to come.

Even going so far as to blame their own people for cyber attacks that their own reckless actions have engendered.

Trump allowed DOGE to dismantle the U.S. Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the early days of his second term because Elon Musk helped get him elected - and now Iranian hackers are attacking our nation’s water supply and Trump blames it on Minnesota, instead of acknowledging the threat and protecting the American people.

POTUS did this while sitting next to Minnesota native son, Pete Hegseth, who did nothing to defend his home state or correct the Commander-in-Chief when his own government officials and F.B.I. had already admitted it was the work of Iranian-backed hackers.

Pilsner Pete sat there and smugly let him lie, another awful act in an ignoble tenure as Defense Secretary, making it painfully obvious to all why we are losing this war: he’s all hair gel, no heroics.

The kind of coward who would rather do bicep curls in the mirror of an air-conditioned gym than stand up to a real threat that is right in front of him.

Or protect the troops he was appointed to serve. The flag is merely a pocket square to men like Hegseth; a symbol, not something sacred. His patriotism is performative and designed to polish an allegiance with Trump, and cover for his own demons and inadequacies by being a caricature of the modern MAGA military man.

He has abused the military and led them to commit multiple war crimes, including the ongoing murder of the poor souls who find themselves on fishing vessels off the coast of South America, leading to the executions of at least 221 innocent people.

An Ecuadorean prosecutor, Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeño, who was actively investigating the U.S. military drone and boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, was also killed by a hitman on a motorcycle in June.

I have no doubt that there is a shadow paramilitary force backing up much of the actions of our nation’s new ‘warfighter’ imperialistic stance.

This would be nothing new for us, especially when it comes to Latin America.

What do you think the reaction of those who wish to do us harm is when they see such immature and feckless leadership from the President of the United States? The self-dealing and surreptitious side hustles? The sadism mixed with a sanctimonious Christofascist agenda?

Trump blamed vandals for his botched Reflecting Pool renovation instead of his own subpar contractors and his moronic multi-vehicle motorcade excursion of the newly installed surface that wasn’t designed for heavy vehicles.

DJT then enlisted his own DOJ and the odious and ever-inebriated former Fox News legal screecher turned U.S. Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, into arresting innocent civilians until ultimately admitting it was all just another lie designed to protect Trump’s ego and coddle his obsessions.

We are in a codependent dance with disaster.

If our capsized ship of state is ever to become righted again we must make all bad actors stand trial and answer for their crimes and audacious ineptitudes.

But for now we are forced to watch them tread water in roiling seas, knowing there is not a strong swimmer in the bunch.

The good news is still the same: they only keep getting away with all of this if we let them.

This country still belongs to us, not the corrupt and craven few.

We either sink or swim.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but your generous support makes it possible. Many thanks for reading and sharing.

Anyone in that room that calls themselves a real reporter and sat there smiling, or even with a bemused look of shock at his antics should be ashamed.

Much of the DC political press corps helped whitewash predation and the most anti-democratic, corrupt president in the history of the United States in the interest of self-congratulatory pageantry.

Trump knows he owns the mainstream media now - his mean-spirited and abusive performance proved that much. The WHCA gave him the platform he craves and a national primetime audience on a Friday night.

45-47-48? used it as an opportunity to attack the very people who had feted him, smear a transgender woman who is a private citizen and go after a CNN journalist, Kaitlin Collins, who does not demure to his brutish behavior.

It was a disgraceful evening in every way.

It was not only embarrassing and hard to watch, it was counterproductive to saving our republic. The self-congratulatory AI shlock at the beginning, enlisting digitized Founding Fathers to crow about the importance of the Fourth Estate only served to punctuate what we have lost.

POTUS’ appearance followed a full day of ‘Executive Time’ and a late afternoon Oval Office press event that showed how unmoored and unmanageable he has become; we are enabling and indulging active addiction at the highest level of government.

Trump sat behind his desk like some sort of primordial lizard king as his supplicants fanned out behind him, all dressed in identical matching blue suits and too long ties.

DJT’s bloated face looked like someone had stuck sunflower seed shells sideways on a rotting pumpkin and then slathered it in bacon grease. He slithered as much as he spoke, a pale serpentine tongue darting back and forth over his thin crooked lips.

The sideways mouth that has only spewed lies in a lifetime of unworthy words.

Each answer was crazier than the last until it built to a cacophonous crescendo and his twin blonde assistants, who look like they were genetically engineered in a backroom lab at an Ole Miss sorority and should be named Kayla One and Kayla Two, hurriedly ushered the gobsmacked press out of the Oval Office.

Trump has always been a mess, especially behind the scenes, but he is now disintegrating before our eyes - not in a shrivel up and disappear kind of way, but more like a distended farm animal cooking in the midday sun half-eaten by piranha, ribboned and rancid, floating down a river poisoning all the other fish.

DJT’s particular kind of rot is dangerous: we must disinfect and protect our country from it.

Trump began his week beclowning himself on a stage filled with Spanish soccer players who openly mocked him, as his greasy consigliere, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, attempted to steer him off the stage.

Donald walked up there fully expecting to be in the middle of the picture when the players hoisted the trophy. It was not to be the case, but not before embarrassing himself in front of 80,000 people and providing endless clips for social media ridicule.

Not to mention his appearance belied his ridiculous claims that he needs a White House ballroom with drone ports on top and blast proof windows to keep him safe at events but somehow has no problem standing in an open field surrounded by people from all over the world (many from countries targeted by his tariffs and his immigration crackdowns) in a stadium with multiple entrances and an army of hourly event workers.

My former colleagues were the production staff that brought you the World Cup Halftime show and post game celebrations. I have worked on shows with them in event spaces all over the country and we all know that no matter how many security sweeps the Secret Service does, there is no way to make such a situation 100% safe.

Especially a stadium built on the Mob owned swamp land of North Jersey.

I have personally seen caterers unknowingly slip into side doors in convention halls with carts of food after the Secret Service has locked down the building; it happened once, innocently enough, at President Obama’s second inauguration and I was the one who alerted the officers to the potential breach.

Trump was not concerned, as he too knows that no public building can ever be completely secure and his request for a ballroom is more about his own future grifting and hold on power than Executive Branch safety or his personal fear. That is not to say he is brave but to point out his stated reasons for a ballroom are not his true motivation.

Even if he was afraid for his own life, his desire for constant attention would override it.

His narcissism and need for adulation will always win out. Trump craves attention like most people need oxygen. He wants to get high, hit on women and have music play when he walks into a room. Those three elements form his Holy Trinity - at least in public life.

In private, it turns much darker and more nefarious - and much of that is to keep the public image he has always profited from afloat. His demons work in concert with his defects.

Never before has one man been so thirsty, so desperate to watch the world revolve around him. If it means he must burn it down to get his wish than so be it.

His mind has no care beyond himself, and the human suffering this will cause will be hard to quantify. It already is, but we must not stop trying.

We cannot become numb to the insanity or the heart-wrenching tragedy he is foisting upon the world. We are watching wildfires consume forests in southern Europe, filling the skies with fiery terror and ash, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes; the largest peacetime evacuations since World War Two.

From France, Italy and Spain to Canada, it feels like the Northern Hemisphere is burning up all at once, and in many ways it is. The U.S.A.’s official response is to deny climate change even exists and push for more consumption of fossil fuels. Trump has appointed lackeys at the EPA and dismantled effective climate science programs within our own government. As our risk increases, our ability to mitigate and respond to threats is not only hampered, it is being hamstrung; in the interests of appeasing the oil and gas industry that is causing all of the calamity.

Even as his own actions in the Middle East cause oil prices to skyrocket and the world economy to endure endless tremors, POTUS stokes all this chaos with his nonsensical, punitive tariffs which harm the American consumer and alienate our trading partners.

Donald Trump is the biggest threat to the global economy in this century. We are all paying more because of him. He is also shrinking the stability needed for economic growth, and replacing industry and job creation with data centers and crypto scams.

We often hear that Trump governs by instinct. While this may be partially true (he has no real interest in the mechanics of governance, it’s all just an opportunity to profit personally and exact retribution on his perceived enemies), we must understand that is the same instinct that allowed him to hit on a 12 year-old girls in the lobby of Trump Tower.

Or cheat on every wife and business partner he’s ever had.

Donald’s so-called instincts told him it was within his purview to walk into the dressing rooms of teenage girls participating in his beauty pageants, and spend decades assaulting women and girls in New York City and Palm Beach.

He even attacked his own wife (and mother of three of his five children) violently because he didn’t like the scar the plastic surgeon she recommended left on his forehead (after scalp reduction surgery to help mask his baldness).

DJT spent his entire adult life laundering money for various mob figures and bankrupting his Trump-branded businesses, while cheating those who had the misfortune of subcontracting with him out of their livelihoods by refusing to pay invoices and then hiring lawyers to defend his actions in court.

He ripped people off for sport. That has been a family tradition dating back to his father, Fred Trump Sr., who was a tax cheat and a racist - and who ultimately had to get his lawyer to defend against Donald’s attempt to rewrite his father’s will and make himself the sole beneficiary of his fortune and real estate empire.

Sr.’s impulsive and incompetent son did not succeed but after the patriarch passed away Donald coerced his siblings into selling the company they now co-owned, ultimately squandering much of his portion of the $700 million payout on various businesses, including his failing casinos.

Had he put the $400 million he had received from his father in an index fund he would have made much more money than he ever did in his own ventures, and most certainly had he and his siblings held on to the properties Fred Sr. had spent a lifetime building they all would have been much wealthier in the long run.

Of course, Donald has never made more money in his life than he has in the first year and a half of his second term in office - now that all the guardrails of propriety have fallen and he is using the government to enrich himself and his children.

Were it not for a coterie of hand-picked corrupt DOJ and FBI officials, Trump’s criminality would be on full display for the world to see and act accordingly; instead we got the slow drip of the heavily redacted ‘Epstein files’, and an avalanche of distractions designed to lessen their impact and the public’s ability to comprehend the full scope of the horror.

Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General and Trump’s ‘former’ personal lawyer, helped make a lot of this coverup happen - and was so audacious in his attempts to help Trump hide from his own criminal past, he interviewed and then transferred Ghislaine Maxwell to a cushy prison, giving her special perks to buy her continued silence and complicity.

A commutation of her sentence may be around the corner as well.

Our acting AG was all smiles at the WHCA dinner as well Friday night, as a mentalist enlisted him in the art of psychological illusion, though Blanche is seemingly already an expert in this field.

Trump likes to call his rhetorical style ‘the weave’ but it is actually the result of jumbled synapses fed a steady diet of several stimulants including Adderall, Benzodiazepines, and Diet Coke chasers for the better part of four decades.

POTUS is an addict - and our inability to fully recognize that fact is to the detriment of both our nation and the world at large. Innocent people are dying because of his defects of character. There will be many more to come because of his defunding of Medicaid alone, not to mention the Iran war he started with no idea how to finish.

Donald’s destructive cuts to our nation’s healthcare system, which will disproportionally effect many of his own rural red state voters, were enacted to extend and deepen tax cuts for the billionaires who put him in office; mostly men who are happy to watch the world burn in exchange for record profits, deregulation and consuming natural resources with impunity, while facing no consequences for pollution and over consumption.

Proximity to power and the ability to leverage that influence for your own financial gain has become the coin of our twisted realm. The intoxicating thrill of all this access is seen clearly in the Botoxed cheeks and Chiclet smiles of the agro-odious tech titans as they stood behind Trump at his second inauguration.

We should’ve done a better job of saying ‘what the hell are they even doing there?’, instead it was almost accepted that they had purchased the POTUS and now we were we are all paying the price.

In many ways that was the moment in which the sanctity of our representational democracy was lost and its vertiginous effects continue to hamper a proper response, as if the outrage got stuck in our throats and the scream turned into a muffled cough.

It is now up to us whether or not this is a temporary or permanent condition.

We must raise our voices in collective outrage and use every means of peaceful protest and non-violent action to demand accountability, and stop the purloining of our government.

The GOP is actively stripping voters of their rights and gerrymandering congressional districts, most especially in the Deep South, to further disenfranchise Black voters and allow Trump’s preferred flavor of white Evangelical MAGA candidates to be the only item on the menu.

A chicken-fried Christofascist meat and three for mediocrity.

We must not play along, but take to the streets and demand change before it is too late.

The surest sign of an unevolved man is the constant blaming of others for his own problems. The President is always playing the perpetual victim.

Few instances so fully illustrate how unfit Donald Trump is to serve as POTUS than his awkward participation in this week’s dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base.

He audaciously slurred out to the assembled press when speaking of the fallen soldiers, ‘All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon’.’

Putting words into the mouths of those who can no longer speak for themselves seems to almost hold a place beyond sin. It is not only disingenuous and disgusting, it compounds grief. I can think of nothing crueler for the families of the brave deceased U.S. service members than to have their sacrifice turned into spurious talking points by an addled and incompetent leader, who merely saw the ceremony itself as a pit stop on his way to a MAGA campaign rally in Georgia.

Can you imagine having recently lost a loved one in the Iran war and have Trump diminish both their sacrifice and your own family’s personal tragedy by comparing his illegal Iran war death toll to those in Vietnam or Afghanistan, as he did both online and in front of the White House press, referring to soldiers killed in action as ‘only 18 in two wars’.

A number that he immediately ordered the Pentagon to revise down to 14 by claiming the four soldiers who were killed in Jordan last week by an Iranian missile barrage died after his (now broken) MOU cease-fire was announced in June.

Easily one of the most despicable moments a presidency that has plenty of them.

Especially when it comes to our service members who have made the ultimate sacrifice, and who he referred to as ‘suckers and losers’ during his first term when he refused to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery to honor the Marines who died at Belleau Wood in the First World War.

Trump wants to lower number of deaths in his Iran war because the loss of life to him holds no more value than a golf handicap - to him it is just about keeping score.

It reminds me of his refusal to let the Grand Princess cruise ship with Covid infected passengers dock in San Francisco during the early days of the global pandemic because he didn’t want the twenty-one infected passengers to ‘double the numbers’ and make him look bad.

The global pandemic went on to claim over a million American lives, in no small part because of Trump’s ego and incompetence, and his desire in March of 2020 to deny reality (because he thought it would hurt his reelection chances) and the threat we were facing as a nation.

We must not allow his war in Iran spin out of control in a similar fashion.

POTUS is in over his head; any escalation at this point will only lead to more death and destruction, and will not make the region or the world any safer. It will in fact make it far more dangerous.

As will allowing Saudi Arabia to have access to enriched uranium, as Trump had his Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, sign off on a deal to provide KSA this week. (Trump later walked back his initial approval by stipulating that KSA must recognize Israel and join the Abraham Accords.)

As it stands Trump, his sons, and son-in-law Jared, have deep ties to Saudi Arabia (and MBS) financially, at the same time this deal is on the table with the U.S. government.

Most notably, a 63 billion dollar development deal with Dar Global to build Trump branded hotels, golf courses and condo towers in Diriyah; the Saudi government-owned real estate project is not only a conflict of interest, it is essentially a bribe that may set off a nuclear arms race in the region.

Not to mention that Westinghouse Electric, who would be directed to receive the Saudi contracts for building light water reactors, which gives KSA a path to uranium enrichment, is majority owned by Brookfield Asset Management.

That is the same private equity fund that bailed out Jared Kushner when his 666 Fifth Avenue Manhattan building’s mortgage was due, taking out a 99 year lease covering Kushner’s 1.1 billion dollar building debt.

The Qatari government was a major investor in Brookfield - and were on the receiving end of a naval blockade shakedown enacted by Kushner when he served in the White House during Trump’s first term.

The Qataris had initially refused to bail out Trump’s son-in-law, who bought the Manhattan skyscraper at the height of the market in early 2007 and found himself underwater with the property after the cataclysmic real estate crash of 2008.

The prissy princeling had majorly overpaid but when his father-in-law became POTUS he deftly used the levers of geopolitical skullduggery to bail himself out.

Now the First Family are all cashing in - and the world will be a worst place for it.

If this all feels too complicated, allow me to simplify - Trump and his family are cutting deals with the country that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers hailed from, and where some of the folks who organized and funded the largest terrorist attack in U.S. history still walk free two months before the 25th anniversary.

Imagine if those hijackers had a dirty bomb in their possession when they piloted hijacked jets into the World Trade Center Towers or the Pentagon.

That’s the sort of thing you want your government to make sure never happens, not to make it even potentially likely because POTUS stands to personally profit from providing the possibility of a nuclear Saudi Arabia.

Corruption is always corrosive, but sometimes it has the potential to be catastrophic.

This is one of those times.

*If you enjoy reading ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Cheap and tacky and full of hot air.

The simple act of reading is an endurance sport for Donald Trump. A lifelong defect that has calcified in his old age.

There was no equilibrium or grounding - in body or mind.

Just an avalanche of indecency and slurred election conspiracies rushing forth from a mottled visage with the ruddy pallor of a dollar store ham.

A gelatinous hunk of salt and fat that is better left on the shelf but somehow ended up in our homes. The funk and rot extends beyond the tin and makes it way to our kitchen tables, sickening us with incompetence (much like the parasitic lettuce that carries Cyclosporiasis and escapes any honest recall from Taylor Farms thanks to an allegiance with MAGA).

Spinning in the wind like a rusty weathervane, as he heaved and jerked and rotated via his own internal propulsion and an able assist from pharmaceuticals, Donald didn’t so much stand - he convulsed.

As if his own body was rebelling against the insanity of it all.

Grabbing the sides of his lectern like a ship’s captain steaming headlong into a nor’easter; lashing himself to the wheel, allowing no spasm or seizing up of gnarled appendages to keep him from sailing the phantom seas of resentment.

An octogenarian Ahab set course for a destination that he alone believes to exist and every one else knows to be farce. His very own fantasy island where Trump always wins and suffers no bruises from facts or truth. The leviathan swims in his mind alone.

You could actually see the moment in the speech when the initial Adderall rush wore off and he began to float back to earth, like some deflated party balloon, ready to wash up among the flotsam and crab carcasses on the Jersey shore. More detritus for the green flies and sand fleas of an injurious, overheated July.

I am angry at how toxic my country has become. We are drenched in dirty rain and choking in smoke. This is not the fault of our good neighbors to the North, despite an inglorious POTUS attempting to cast blame and levy further tariffs on them.

Kicking a friend and ally who is down instead of offering help is not the American way -but it damn sure is Donald’s.

This is a man who just last week reneged on a deal for the Gordie Howe Bridge on the Canadian border with Detroit, shaking down our trusted allies for 50 percent of the tolls - after they paid the entire cost of construction and we benefitted immensely from the project, not just from the bridge itself but also from the jobs it created and the U.S. materials used to build it.

It was a fair deal and Trump turned it into a travesty and a shameful shakedown.

A mob boss move that illuminates both the criminal mindset and lack of morality he has forced upon us. He makes it hard to look the rest of the world in the eye. My hope is that as nation, when he is finally gone, we will take on the task of making amends and paying restitution for all the harms he has caused in our name.

A man too ignorant and venal to recognize the threat of Climate Change, and to think a nation with the second largest wilderness area on the planet, much of it so thick with majestic pine trees one can barely walk between them, could somehow be guilty of ‘willful negligence’ by not ‘sweeping or raking them out’.

POTUS is not capable of understanding the priceless beauty we are all losing with this catastrophic combustion and the integral part the Canadian Boreal Forest plays in our shared continent’s ecosystem. Not to mention the heart wrenching destruction many First Nations are experiencing because of these wildfires.

We have a lunatic in charge of the United States, who is too uneducated and intellectually lazy to understand basic atmospheric science, let alone the natural wonder of one of the world’s great countries - or have any empathy for the lives affected and beauty lost.

Those trees are burning because of us and the planet we are rapidly overheating due to our continued consumption of fossil fuels. The U.S.A. has all but abandoned renewable energies and removed itself from existing climate treaties at the behest of the oil and gas industry which donated nearly half a billion dollars to Donald Trump and MAGA candidates in the last election cycle; a drop in the bucket of their record profits.

On Sunday morning, Trump celebrated incoming UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s statement that he wanted to fast track existing oil and gas projects in the North Sea, with DJT erroneously stating the ‘people were dancing in the streets of Aberdeen’ while attacking windmills and Britain’s current fossil fuel importation with Norway. POTUS is a cheerleader for our demise. To him everything is about power and profit; he cares nothing for the health of this planet or the life it supports.

It is ironic that in the same week Trump eliminated over 90 percent of two of our greatest and most majestic national monuments, Big Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante (handing over 3 million acres of public lands to private oil drilling and mining interests), he attempts to blame catastrophic Canadian wildfires on lack of forest management.

Trump’s actions in Utah on behalf of a lobbying effort by private industry was the largest rollback of public land protections in American history. Corruption which will come with an incalculable cost.

It may not be fully evident to most folks what we are losing in such rapid fire succession: I’m not sure the United States has faced a greater emergency than what we are enduring in this second Trump term.

POTUS has singlehandedly made the climate disasters we are facing worse and doomed protected species and sacred indigenous places to extinction. He is selling things that don’t belong to him and essentially pocketing the money. It is the greed and malfeasance of men like him that is mostly to blame for this planet’s worsening ecological crisis.

Trump is the greatest threat to the environment this world has known. His ignorance and venality will cause untold suffering for generations to come. Wisdom will be lost, and millions will go without, so one man and his corporate cronies can continue to profit from the plundering and destruction of our planet.

Winston Churchill said, ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going’ - it certainly feels like we are all marching through Perdition at the moment.

Do not be tempted to look away or grow hardened to the horror, as that is understandably quite easy to do. We must remain steadfast in our ability to wake up our fellow Americans to the madness our country is causing in much of the world.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Stephen Miller spoke at this week’s so-called ‘Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism’ as a sort of precursor to DJT’s speech, and to kick off a full court press to usurp democracy and steal the midterms by promoting lies and fear.

Their alarming rhetoric, branding the entirety of the Democratic Party as ‘far left radical terrorists’, and communists, is the sort of fear mongering that has deep roots in red state USA.

This was backed up by the cartoonish Markwayne Mullin threatening state election officials with prison time if they don’t hand over voter rolls. Part of the Trump administration’s attempts to manipulate the midterm elections in their favor through voter intimidation, interference and stripping citizens of their right to vote.

Add into this toxic scenario POTUS giving a primetime address at the White House as a backdrop to sow even more lies regarding the 2020 election - and you have an environment and a threat to our civic well-being and physical safety unlike anything we have faced before.

The first ever GOP midterm convention in early September in Dallas, Texas (of course), will only add to this cavalcade of disinformation, and provide a sort of carnival backdrop to their attempts to mislead the American people in order to separate them from their democratic rights.

DJT will attempt to seize the ballots on election day if he feels like he is going to lose by accusing Democrats of cheating. All of his recent antics are leading to this and he has folks in place who are both stupid and corrupt enough to try it.

We are so deep in the danger here at times it seems we have run out of alarms. The time to act is now, yet because so many here in the U.S.A. live in relative privilege - and even modest privilege can prevent you from properly diagnosing and reacting to the threats we face.

There is a tendency to think people are overacting to the danger he poses: I would say to you that is always a mistake. Trump is capable of anything. Most especially when he knows that the other side of a free and fair election and a Democratic victory in the House and perhaps the Senate, means both impeachment and more exposure of his role in the Epstein files and his decades of sexual predation and sex-trafficking.

The resentment and entitlement that Trump so clumsily exploits in his MAGA base pale in comparison with the poverty and life threatening dangers he is forcing on the Global South through his Project 2025 policies and nationalist goals of ‘America First’.

In other words, we need to somehow convert the message, ‘You think you got it bad?’ to, ‘You should see what the guy you voted for is doing to everybody else in your name.’

This is not to say Trump’s policies are not punishing American citizens, both economically and in terms of our civil rights, they most certainly are, but his base is still largely unaware of his most egregious misdeeds and the full extent of his corruption.

POTUS is indeed hurting almost everyone but the wealthiest among us. Some just can’t see it yet. Our mission is to change that - and speaking truth to power is the way.

We think of our institutions as failing us in this moment, and indeed they are in a catastrophic way, but perhaps the real failure began decades ago. Ronald Reagan and the advent of the Heritage Foundation cut the brake lines on our vehicle of state, and that has allowed us to veer off the cliff in this moment.

They did this through marrying modern conservative ideology, with a precursor in the John Birch Society, to evangelical Christianity and a preponderance of reactionary and racist NRA dogma infiltrating red state, mostly Bible Belt American culture.

It spread from the there like the wildfires now filling our skies with smoke.

How else can you explain a generation of men and women, so casually accepting of horror? I speak of my own, Generation X, and the fellows I grew up with that voted for a monster in their adulthood, not once, but as many as three times. Fox News rotted their brains.

MAGA turns a blind eye to Climate Change when danger and disaster is all around us. They were raised in a way that was all that has allowed them to abandon empathy in their adulthood, and I find it both shocking and repugnant. One must always assume they know better, but do they really?

At this point members of this hard right movement may be so brainwashed and deadened into their own humanity, that the effort required to change and learn is lost to them.

I offer these thoughts, not as an excuse, but as a way to understand - so we can fix the problem. We must find some way forward, and it would help to know who we are traveling with. Otherwise, we are going to keep going in circles - and that spiral only goes one way - down.

Most damaged people don’t know what to do about it. Sometimes it feels like we are born broken, a product of the kicks and stings this life gives us and gave those that came before. Trump is a master at exploiting the generational resentment of working and middle class white folks, and offering them the illusion of redemption.

The opposite of his cynical predatory maneuvers is a clear-eyed understanding of the psychological forces at work in both DJT and the targets of his manipulations.

Everyone is sick and suffering in someway (I say this not in judgment but in the interest of awareness), and we would all do better to deepen our compassion for each other and ourselves. Hard as that may be in this moment, the answer to our current predicament is always going to be love. We need to transcend this hour of crisis.

Non-violence and righteous, moral action is the best way to wake up those around us to the truth. Of course that may feel impractical, and a lofty pursuit in the face of such calamity, but when you get down to the heart of the matter, what choice do we really have?

The suffering we are seeing in the world right now, is a direct result of the egos of a few deeply disturbed and troubled men, and their inability to see the basic humanity of others. Wars are not waged by wisemen. They are the folly of fools. They consume brave souls and the innocent on the whims of madmen.

‘America First’ is spreading their toxic manifesto like poison - and the stunted, machismo and abusive tendencies of those who would hear such a brutal call to arms, and regressive, nationalistic dogma, and smile instead of shudder, must be addressed. MAGA flourishes because it separates people from the spirit of unity and our natural desire to live in an egalitarian society.

It is a bastardization of American ideals and a pornographic patriotism.

We are a nation that has come to celebrate killing at a governmental level. ICE is murdering innocent family men in the streets on a weekly basis and any attempts to even reign them in are stopped by Donald Trump - who enjoys the brutality.

His Homeland Security Director, Markwayne Mullin, said they were, ‘turning up the heat on the streets,’ in response to the latest extrajudicial killing, and ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan (a man who looks and sounds like when he sweats, butter comes out) in response to Democrats outrage over the recent murders said, ‘there’s going to be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted’.

Once again this week, a hard working immigrant, twenty five year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero, a man who was described by those who knew him as a doting father and husband who relentlessly pursued a better life for his family (and who was in the United States working legally) was murdered.

He died pursuing and attaining a better life - and did absolutely nothing wrong and everything right. By all accounts, was the kind of person we need more of in this country.

Sebastian was killed in cold blood in front of his three year-old daughter by a homegrown monster, a mutant from Maine who should have been in jail, not a uniform.

Guerrero’s killer has a lifetime of abusive behavior, racist red flags and severe mental health issues - and was still given a gun and a badge and allowed to hunt immigrants on American streets. I’m sure got a signing bonus too.

What we are witnessing is not law enforcement, it is organized terrorism against innocent people and it has to stop. The outrage we feel and collective actions we take should reflect the severity of these heinous crimes. This is a moment to stand up and speak out.

Never in my lifetime have I witnessed something so threatening, and in opposition to the values we should cherish in the U.S.A., as what is occurring in the ICE crackdown.

We must stop them before it’s too late for other innocent souls whose only crime is pursuing the American dream.

Pete Hegseth thinks war is a game, and there’s tens of millions of MAGA that see no problem with it as well. My fear is these men have children and not all of them will reject the broken beliefs of their fathers, some will take up the mantle.

Seeing themselves as soldiers in a crusade of the clueless. Raised on a diet of resentment and false pride, and the adolescent stunts of our current Secretary of Defense (his response to the Blue Angels beach flyover this week in Pensacola was abhorrent).

Hegseth has created a climate in which such things can occur and is attempting to bifurcate our military from their own professionalism and safety standards. I last worked with the Blue Angels in 2016, and is hard to imagine any of the pilots I have met in over a decade of helping coordinate flyovers at the Super Bowl committing such a stunt. I am glad their team leader overrode Hegseth and grounded the pilot.

The Christofascism and sophomoric machismo we are experiencing, and Pilsner Pete typifies, is every bit as dangerous as the terrorism we have railed against and fought for decades.

In fact, it may be much more dangerous as it seems to be occurring not in the shadows, but in the sunlight. We are losing soldiers once again in Iran, and if the situation escalates further those tragedies will increase.

So will the war crimes committed by the United States, which is now attacking civilian infrastructure in violation of the Geneva Convention.

Trump and Hegseth see no problem in the suffering of innocents, such as the killing of school children in the early hours of the war, or our current attacks on desalination plants on the Iranian coast. Separating families from water in 100 degree deserts does not make you any friends; the effects of such atrocities linger for decades.

Trump refuses to even admit the ‘double-tap’ missile attack on school girls and their grieving parents and rescuers was carried out by U.S. missiles.

The world knows it was, so do the Iranians. He is the last man who should be Commander-in-Chief.

We must hold this administration accountable.

And remember this country belongs to all of us, not just the corrupt few.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but your generous support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

A one dimensional illusion of what existed before yet will never be the same again, as he refashions the very architecture and bureaucratic infrastructure of our government in his own image; like some sort of meatloaf Mussolini seeking to claim his place among the emperors.

The ‘People’s House’ belongs to Grandpa Adderall now - and he wants to make sure everyone knows it. Donald Trump should be walking around some cookie cutter cul-de-sac in Paramus bragging to his neighbors about his new paving stones and that he’s springing for the ‘good mulch’ for his flower beds; instead he is sitting in a gold embossed Oval Office, destroying the global economy and starting geopolitical fires he will never be able to extinguish.

The wars POTUS is starting will not be solved in his lifetime.

He must be stopped.

I still believe we can but we better do it soon. This is not the time to wait around: it’s time to take to the streets in steely resolve and righteous urgency.

A nation whose brave soldiers stormed beaches in a bloody summer almost a century ago to protect the free world from fascism now (mostly) sits idly by while a tyrant attempts to snatch our beloved republic right before our very eyes.

We do not have to accept this larceny and criminality, but we must also realize no one is coming to save us - we must save ourselves.

The most dangerous thing about Donald Trump in this perilous moment with Iran is that he may no longer hesitate to send in ground troops. Kharg Island could perhaps be the beginning of a conflagration that will last well beyond his presidency and drag much of the globe along with it.

This is how world wars start, and we must not for a second underestimate both the incompetence and venality of Trump and his minions - and their inability to see the trouble they are both courting and causing.

There was never any real, meaningful peace process. It was a show for the cameras, and much of the mainstream media played along. The cronies in his regime and his own family were making far too much money off of market manipulation and the infrastructure of modern warfare to stop it anytime soon.

If there’s a buck to be made off of this fight, you can bet Trump will happily send someone else’s sons or daughters to fight it, while his own sons make billions off of drone contracts and tungsten mines. It makes the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about look like child’s play.

Don Jr. sits on the board of a Texas company, GrabAGun, that seeks to become the ‘Amazon of firearms’. The new ATF rules proposed by the Trump administration would allow Trump Jr. to profit from weapons being shipped directly to the purchaser’s home - circumventing the current rules which at least make the customer pick up the gun at a federally licensed gun store and submit to an on-site background check.

Think of the ways terrorists organizations could exploit this new insanity.

Not to mention what it will do to our already horrific epidemic of gun violence and firearm-related suicides. Overnight shipping of guns to people’s doors is a death sentence for many Americans.

Having known both Don Jr. and Eric, I am not at all surprised by the enthusiasm with which they have embraced weapons as their latest business venture. They were raised to be as cruel and callous as their father; in Don Jr.’s case in particular, he may surpass his old man someday with his taste for canned trophy hunts and pseudo military machismo.

We are in dangerous times, and we must keep our focus and resolve on speaking truth to power - most especially in the case of this illegal war and the actions of the men who are both promoting and profiting from it.

Trump this week fired the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, effectively shuttering the government agency charged with ensuring free and fair elections, monitoring our voting machines and registration processes.

POTUS did this with the full blessing of the conservative Supreme Court thanks to the recent Trump v. Slaughter ruling. They have handed the world’s most infamous election denier the power not just to disenfranchise millions of voters but to tip the scales in his party’s favor in the upcoming midterms.

On Friday, the President refused to sign the bipartisan Housing Bill in a petulant protest against the one piece of legislation his party has passed this year, with a defiant demand for his GOP to end the filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act.

Donald’s fever dream of disenfranchising our citizens from participating in a representative democracy is receiving the full court press. He has no other way to win unless he cheats. This has always been his modus operandi - going back to when his family paid other students to take his tests and he cooked the books in his casinos and real estate properties.

DJT is actively attempting to steal an election in broad daylight, and my fear is by the time the full scale of their treasonous malfeasance is apparent - it may be too late.

Nothing could be more undemocratic than what he is doing along with his coterie of goons and scoundrels, and sadly far too many of our fellow citizens are probably still not aware of the full scope and gravity of the situation. It is our job to change that in every way we can: a conversation with a Trump-leaning voter about his attempts to interfere in our midterm elections may be among the most important you will have this year.

Of course you will be going up against six years of lies concerning the 2020 election and this is no accident. Trump’s projection from the beginning was meant to prepare his audience for his own evil escapades.

It is always projection with Trump; accusing others of the crimes he himself is committing has been a lifelong habit. His insane, novel-length post on Saturday attacking The New York Times’ reporters for not giving him enough kudos for winning the last election ended with the all caps boast that he ‘was the best political athlete of all time!’ - and therein lies the rub.

DJT sees politics as a game, an opportunity for self-aggrandizement and personal enrichment - not an opportunity to serve a nation and protect its citizens.

The renaming of a sun coast airport this week after an octogenarian conman, who used it for decades to fly sex-trafficked teenage girls, with his longtime friend and fellow Palm Beach resident Jeffrey Epstein, is about as ‘Florida’ as it gets - and reflects the split screen reality of American life in this moment.

The wealthiest among us are more than happy to let Trump and his caustic clan continue to pilfer our republic as long as they get a percentage of the proceeds.

They sit idly by as the hardworking immigrants who build their mega mansions and care for their beachfront properties are prosecuted by an ‘America First’ movement that has more in common with Nazi Germany than it does with the values and morals this nation as always prided itself on.

ICE agents are not apprehending illegal immigrants - they are hunting our fellow humans. What is happening now will go down as one of the darkest chapters in the American story.

ICE agents and their assault on our freedoms should have ended after the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, instead they escaped any consequence and have quietly ramped up their efforts; detaining over 10,000 people in the same week this prideful nation, once known throughout the world as a land of hope and dreams, celebrated its own birthday.

DHS assaults on our liberty may have disappeared from the headlines but the injustice lingers on. They are targeting upstanding, tax-paying contributors to our society for doing nothing other than providing for their families and seeking to build a better life.

If you spend 35 years building homes in Houston, and raising three proud and upstanding sons, all U.S. citizens, you are a hero. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was such a man and he will never get the chance to see them flourish; they in turn were robbed of a father, his wife was robbed of a partner and the man she deserved to grow old with - it is an unbelievable tragedy and a grave injustice. Entirely preventable and utterly unforgivable; the 52 year-old man got up in the morning and went to work and never came home.

Labeling people undocumented immigrants or worse, illegals, is the language of a government which seeks to dehumanize minorities. It is, in and of itself, an act of violence meant to cauterize the natural empathy even Republican leaning voters must feel when confronted with the brutality of this administration.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo paid with his life this week for successfully participating in the American dream.

The men who murdered him, and then sought to cover it up, did more damage to our country than 1,000 Lorenzos ever would. Going so far as strip him of his identification so the morgue had to process him as a John Doe, adding to the horrific trauma his family was already facing.

Texans in particular should be deeply ashamed - and would do themselves a favor to get out from under the grip of a GOP that has been lethally incompetent. Their myopic vision hardly reflects the changing demographic of the Lone Star State and certainly doesn’t reflect the multiculturalism of a fine city such as Houston.

Any rational citizen already knows - immigrants make this country run.

We are punishing, prosecuting and killing the hard-working souls who not only put food on our table, they build the tables themselves; they put roofs over our heads and repair them in 100° heat with skill and precision.

The U.S.A is quite literally biting the hand that feeds it - and it has to stop.

Trump’s brazen, reverse-Robin Hood tax cuts and crypto deregulations are all the bribes the oligarchs need to look the other way and use their own outsized riches in service of autocracy.

MAGA would not have a leg to stand on without its wealthiest supporters and their borderline monopoly of media companies; this part of the equation is often hidden in Trump’s false pitch of economic populism. The hillbilly still can’t see over the hedgerow but when he finally does it may be all over for the current ruling class.

We need to boycott accordingly, and that means giving up consumer comforts that many have come to rely on. Economic actions raise awareness and get people talking - dialogue is the answer to darkness.

This is a David versus Goliath battle and we must utilize all the rocks in our sling. No pebble is too small in service of slaying an economic ogre.

I implore my fellow Americans to utilize our righteous indignation and mischievous imagination to stir up a storm. They can’t continue with business as usual without your money.

Good trouble only, going forward.

We also need more real grassroots movements over grifting and parasocial engagement farming.

People mistaking large online followings for political experience is dangerous at the candidate level and downright catastrophic at the consultancy level. We saw this play out in the Graham Platner debacle that was all but inevitable to anyone with even a mildly seasoned eye.

The first rule, before rushing in as a party, is to fully vet those you chose to represent you. Platner’s red flags began in high school and only got worse in what could only be called a troubled and rather privileged lifetime.

To fashion him into a working man populist hero was both a mistake and an illusion. His myth grew out of the seat of privilege, not the rugged outsider ethos it was meant to portray. Charisma is no substitute for caution or emotional sobriety and humility.

The ‘oysterman’s’ graceless exit video poisoned the pearls of promise he once carried for the progressive movement.

The same well-paid, but inexperienced political consultants and podcast pundits that overplayed their hands and delivered a disaster at the polls after Biden was pushed out contributed to this current imbroglio.

Playing on genuine feelings and a desire for change to juice an algorithm and making misguided and adolescent choices, over seeking out adult attributes, is always a mistake. We need smart, sane leadership that employs both empathy and vision.

As they say in recovery, ‘righteous anger is the dubious luxury of normal men’; nothing about these times are normal, and anger will only get you so far if not mixed with a pragmatic, even-tempered approach to the political. If you haven’t yet fully faced down your own demons it is hard to slay dragons on another’s behalf. The people of Maine deserved better and I hope they find it soon. My fear is the national hype surrounding Platner may have diluted Democrats’ chances of defeating Susan Collins.

There are plenty of highly qualified minority and women candidates in midterm races right now across this country that are not receiving the attention they deserve from the mainstream media.

Key words are not meant to be cornerstones of a platform. Platner’s resentful reaction to an onslaught of accusations showed his true character - and illuminated how unqualified a candidate he was from the start. His origin story of hardscrabble roots was essentially a hoax (he attended Hotchkiss and after expulsion, another prep school in Bangor, Maine. His father is a wealthy lawyer and his grandfather a famous architect, his mother’s restaurant purchased most of his oysters), and the folks who ate it up are now discovering they were dining on empty calories.

The sauce mignonette was sus AF.

I understood the desire for him to be the real deal, but if wishes were horses then beggars would ride. We need to be much more discerning going forward and cannot afford false hope and fraudulent narratives in such dangerous times. A man who claimed to be unaware of the meaning of a Nazi tattoo he carried on his chest for nearly twenty years does not need to be a U.S. Senator as his first job in public office.

Believe women and make the so-called progressive beard bros prove it, make them walk the walk and give us more than talk before we just hand it to ‘em on a platt(n)er. This episode was a lesson we should not soon forget.

We have to cultivate inner peace before we can truly bring about peace in the world. This feels like a paradox, because so many situations in our current political climate seem to demand our righteous anger and outrage but we need to learn to channel and temper our rage into alchemy and altruism.

This is not about looking away or ignoring the evil and atrocity we are all witnessing; it is about becoming as efficient as possible in our mission to heal and transcend our current calamity.

We are doing work now that will stretch well beyond our own lifetimes. Right here and right now.

These are not normal days we are living through.

They are tumultuous and exhausting - and require endurance, resilience, the sort of strength that needs replenishment and an undergirding of deep faith in our own goodness.

The counterweight to acrimony is joy. We can dance. We can sing. And we damn sure can laugh. These are things they can never take away from us. We can only take them from ourselves and we must never do that, especially now.

If we are to save the world, we must save ourselves from its effects first.

So much seems beyond our control, but the awareness of our own inner being, our own serenity, is well within our grasp.

Become mindful of the present moment. Sometimes it is simply just remembering to breathe.

What we are up against is the absence of peace; the intolerance and violent actions of so many who see ignorance and retribution as a way to consolidate their own power, and achieve their self-serving goals.

We refute this by being of service to others, and sometimes that begins by being kinder to ourselves.

Respond to calamity with compassion and you can’t ever go wrong.

Lock arms with your loved ones in this battle for our nation’s soul and realize you are not alone; no action is in vain when it is performed in service of love.

The hero you seek may be in your own mirror.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

POTUS is both an abomination and an embarrassment, a creature who came to power preying on our weaknesses and exploiting our blindspots as a people. He reflects back to us our defects and moral derelictions.

A man who stands underneath Mount Rushmore and spuriously calls his Democratic opponents ‘Communists’ while knowing full well he has taken a percentage of government deals involving private businesses, such as Intel, and recently ripped-off over a million investors in his meme coin scam which he shamelessly promoted as as President.

Only the latest fraud - in a lifetime of larceny, deceit and depravity.

Trump would make our founding fathers ill, as he encompasses all they feared and - tried to avoid - in crafting our Constitution. I doubt even those men of vision would have a imagined a leader so craven and arrogant he would sell self-branded sneakers and put his face on passports and coins, not to mention his myriad treasonous actions as president.

DJT embodies the antithesis of the values that have guided this nation for two and a half centuries - we must continue to rise up in this moment and reclaim our dominion and destiny.

To counter his many bad deeds with righteous ‘good trouble’ and an enthusiastic embrace of our fellow citizens standing up for democracy and decency. We should mark this moment as one in which we reclaim our power as a people to stand up to tyranny, remembering that bravery is our birthright.

MAGA will use their new ‘Socialist Democrats are all Communists’ talking points as a cudgel to bludgeon the uninformed with tired tropes, which admittedly have a Pavlovian dynamic in the American psyche; so we mustn’t take this new rhetorical strategy lightly but be cautiously aware of its past efficacy and historical horror. The weak always look for witches to burn.

We need to counter this misinformation with truth and illumination. To share how our nation is being run by a corrupt few taking orders from oligarchs and industries that feed on our apathy and fear.

The Trump administration recently rolled back dozens of gun regulations designed to protect us from a firearms industry that values profit over human life. Federal agencies are abandoning discrimination cases and leaving our fellow citizens vulnerable and marginalized - those are not the moves of a regime that cares for this country but one that wants to hold on to power no matter the human cost.

Trump inserts the word ‘rule’ into his public comments instead of ‘govern’ because his aim is not to help or protect the people of this land, he only wants to be a king; artlessly launching an excessive amount of fireworks into an overheated Washington, DC sky, as his ever-dwindling crowds stand stupefied and smiling for the camera, mindlessly cheering for a democracy that is fading as fast as the multicolored bursts falling back to earth.

The illusion of gunpowder and smoke, a forced frivolity that is drifting ever further from freedom. Too many MAGA folks still think they are attending a birthday party instead of a funeral.

On the Fourth of July the Trump administration ended all subsidies for new solar and wind projects in the U.S.A., this heinous and regressive move will cause untold suffering and economic hardship for millions of Americans. One has to only step outside this broiling holiday weekend to see how the fossil fuel industry is destroying our planet.

To turn our back on sustainable energy projects in the midst of an existential climate crisis is akin to throwing your parachute out first before you leap from a plane.

The astronomical profits the fossil fuel companies, such as Exxon (who helped bury climate science and research for decades), are making are enough to bribe Trump and his ideological henchmen like Energy Secretary Chris Wright, to cancel all sensible environmental initiatives in favor of graft and servitude to the oil and gas industry.

It also allows us to fall far behind China in building a national infrastructure for renewable energy. It should be viewed as a national security issue but instead Trump frames environmental sanity as some sort of ‘woke ideology’ and covers up common sense conservation efforts with pablum like ‘unleash American energy’ - which draws cheers from the mindless hordes still laboring under ignorance and denial.

To say this planet is warming is no longer up for debate, to ignore it in this moment is absolute insanity and feeds into the same moronic mindset MAGA has been exploiting for over a decade.

The U.S. Coast Guard removed the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater from the Sail4th 250 Parade on Saturday because it flew banners that read ‘Save the Clean Water Act’ and ‘Indigenous Rights, Racial Justice, Climate Solutions’: the Trump regime is censoring free speech in service of anti-environmentalism and reactionary dogma.

I have personally sailed on that historic sloop several times, often in the company of Pete Seeger himself, who founded the Clearwater Environmental Organization; which is responsible for cleaning up the Hudson and removing much of the industrial pollution put there by companies like General Electric.

Over the course of my lifetime, which has roughly coincided with Pete Seeger’s Hudson River advocacy, the magnificent waterway, which had an outsized role in this country’s initial prosperity and cultural wealth (the Hudson River School of painters such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Church beautifully documented this country’s majestic natural grandeur and inspired transcendentalist thinkers such as Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller) has gone from near death to quite miraculously healthy.

Pete was a true hero (and a better American than Donald ever will be), and we must continue to honor his legacy and speak out on environmental and social justice issues. Eerily, Seeger and Woody Guthrie all but predicted and tried to prepare us for this moment.

Trump will do to this land what he has always done in his life: destroy things. The ideals of living in harmony with nature and the belief in the spiritual essence of untouched and protected natural beauty and wildlife is completely absent from the MAGA philosophy of unchecked industry and unbridled greed.

In many ways, we are the inheritors of what thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson warned us about with the rapid industrialization and westward expansion of 19th century American life.

A monochromatic aspect of our history that Trump celebrated in his speech last night by name-checking a first grader’s list of cultural figures and leaving out the complicated reality and deleterious effects of our national story and its impact on both indigenous populations and our ecology.

Donald is feeding his base a cartoon version of America - where only the dubious achievements of a pre-approved list of heroes is lauded and our true reality is ignored and suppressed. His efforts to remake our cultural institutions, such as the Smithsonian, bear this out: we must recognize how dangerous this is for the health and wellbeing of our nation. His dogma is a weapon - and his rambling speech on the National Mall was an assault on our ethics, not an invocation of greatness; more blasphemy than benediction.

DJT is a man who likes to break stuff, whether its the lives of teenage girls who resemble his favorite daughter, or the folks who stood up to his unethical business practices, POTUS has even turned against members of his own party, who helped him ascend to his golden throne before falling out of favor and becoming victims of his wrath.

Has such a ridiculous and unsubstantial man ever inspired so much obsequiousness in American life? The Republican Party has been hollowed out of any courage or morality over many decades. John McCain was perhaps the last decent member, but it has mostly been made up of the sort of feckless followers who want to manipulate their base and line their own pockets.

The current GOP will use any measure of Christofascist dogma and plastic patriotism to appeal to the kind of folks who can’t turn down a t-shirt with a flag on it and a pickup truck that makes a lot of noise. Our job is to change this narrative and undermine their false culture with real facts.

We have to save our fellow Americans from themselves, guide them back to reality. In recovery parlance this is called a moment of clarity - many of our fellow citizens are in desperate need of one.

We have become a caricature of what a real country looks like, an oligarchy masquerading as a bastion of freedom. Of course this is not all of us, but it is enough of us to have poisoned the well and allowed a spiritual dis-ease to fester.

Trump appeals to the broken bits in the American personality; he offers a sort of Disneyland for the disinformed.

POTUS is a man without boundaries, morals or any sense of ethical decorum. Whether in politics or his personal life, the same instincts that allowed him to walk into the dressing rooms of teenage beauty pageant contestants on ‘Miss Teen USA’ are the same defects of character driving his assault on our Constitution and his prodigious grifting.

He has made over 2.2 billion dollars in the first year and a half of his second term.

This staggering number extends to well beyond 6 billion when you add in the haul that his children and extended family are raking in by trading in on their proximity to power.

A nation that has never been a stranger to folks helping themselves to more than their fair share still has no idea what they are really up against when it comes to the Trump clan. Their avarice and corruption will be a plague upon our country for decades. They will make this land poorer in every way while they enrich themselves. The Trumps are a people bred for grifting - they take to greed like a duck takes to water.

Trump is using all of the levers of his political power and governmental institutions to enrich himself - and SCOTUS just gave him a green light to fire anyone who stands in his way or seeks to reign in the unethical behavior of his Cabinet.

To say the conservative justices on the Supreme Court have acted shamefully would be an understatement. Their own greed and corruption is in plain view. It is quite obvious they are extremely compromised with just a mild understanding of the conflicts of interest and outright bribery involved in the personal finances of Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch.

And lest we not forget the execrable, Samuel Alito, who right now, is most likely shopping his seat to the highest bidder.

If you don’t think billionaires are buying up their robes through the banality and immorality of Donald Trump, you are not paying close enough attention.

This is a time for soul-searching not celebration. This is a gut check moment for our country if there ever has been one. The hardworking immigrants who built this nation and are making it run are not the ones who get to hang red, white and blue bunting over the bannisters of their palatial summer homes.

This week’s heat dome didn’t extend out to Nantucket Island. As always, the wealthiest Americans are able to escape consequence and inconvenience and hide behind the hedge rows in the Hamptons. They have pools and air-conditioned mega mansions ready for relaxation; Land Rovers and lobster lunches.

The dusty, parched lives of landscapers and laborers may not fare so well in the stifling heat and stultifying, sinister strategy of Big Oil-backed MAGA mega-millionaires, the homegrown oligarchs who are selling this republic for their own gain and couldn’t care less about who they hurt in the process.

We are leaving a world for our children that will have problems beyond a scale that most can imagine and it will be a direct result of the two presidencies of Donald Trump and the damage he has done to the United States.

POTUS spent the lead up to the 4th of July attacking NATO at a time when his idol, Vladimir Putin, is committing war crimes against Ukraine and his two ersatz diplomats, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, have all but abandoned the peace process and an unprovoked Russian war that Trump promised he would stop in 24 hours.

It would be a joke if it wasn’t so deadly. The catastrophic conflicts POTUS is making worse are piling up - and I fear that we are just getting started if we don’t stop him soon.

Trump has no idea how to extricate our nation from his unwarranted attack on Iran and which has left the Middle East region in further turmoil and chaos. And in Iran’s case, seeking revenge, as we heard in the chants of the tens of thousands of mourners who gathered in Tehran this week to remember Ayatollah Khamenei.

This geopolitical churn is happening at the same time an unqualified 38 year-old construction scion, Bill Pulte, is serving as acting head of the Office of Director of National Intelligence and firing our career intelligence agents as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to dismantle our counter-terrorism capabilities.

Not to mention the venal plumber from Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, who now runs the Department of Homeland Security. This is vulnerability by design because Trump is, in my belief, looking for an opportunity to declare martial law in the face of a domestic terrorist attack.

In essence, DJT is leaving the door unlocked for the burglars because he is more interested in filing the insurance claim than stopping the theft itself - an inside job if ever there was one. We are being set up by a man with decades of mob affiliations and criminal behavior.

Trump should be tried on war crimes for his incompetence and his self-dealing, but many still view him as their honorable Commander-in-Chief. No man has ever been more unworthy of the title or done more damage to our nation’s military though his corrupt surrogate, Pete Hegseth.

Numb to the machinations of madness, a nation celebrates its birthday at the precise moment it has drifted farther from its founding principles than at any point in its history.

A Supreme Court that sides with Monsanto over immigrant farm workers who put the food on our tables says so much about the state of the U.S.A under Donald Trump and his coterie of oligarchs. A poisoned proletariat has no intrinsic value to the corporate overlords who value money over life.

The political party that recently spent days hosting the ‘Faith and Freedom Caucus’ is the same party celebrating SCOTUS decision to roll back Temporary Protected Status status for Haitians and Syrians.

We are punishing refugees and hardworking immigrants who followed the rules, in favor of racist rulers and corporations who follow none.

The folks who cheered on Donald Trump engorged themselves on hot dogs and Hemi-trucks; hooting and hollering as fireworks exploded overhead while they sweated under a merciless sun, still unable to recognize the true threat they face.

They will become further drunk on the delusion that Trump is selling them as our republic begins its 250th year. Blind to the notion that we are in a moment which calls not so much for celebration, but a reckoning of who we are and who we want to be going forward.

It is our job to sober them up - wake them from their fever dream and bring them back to reality.

As the old Don McLean song goes:

‘Bye bye, Miss American Pie

Drove my Chevy to the levee

But the levee was dry

And good old boys were drinking whisky and rye

Singing this’ll be the day that I die

This’ll be the day that I die’

Keep the faith, America.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

We (mostly) don’t allow individuals to stockpile military grade weapons in their homes because of the threat and potential danger that poses to society as a whole.

That may sound radical but so are UFC fights on the White House lawn attended by Mark Zuckerberg, who, along with Elon Musk, helped the biggest bad actor this republic has ever known accrue power and purchase over the democratic mechanisms of our country.

They are not only not paying their fair share of taxes, they are consuming what belongs to all of us. The common thread running through all of these perpetually adolescent men is a lack of emotional maturity - and a voracious greed mixed with a complete lack of moral duty or civic responsibility.

Their cluelessness is a clue to the threat they pose.

Multi-billionaires cannot and should not be trusted with the power they wield. We should view the enormous accumulation of wealth under the same lens as we would any other weapon - for it is now being wielded with ever greater destructive consequence by men like Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Not to mention increasingly repellant folks like Jeff Bezos and Larry and David Ellison, who have played an outsized role in turning much of our media into partisan propaganda aiding the oligarchy.

Amazon causes enormous damage to the environment while simultaneously reaping the benefits of massive tax subsidies, reducing their obligation to almost nothing; all so its billionaire owner can play ‘I have a rocket too’ and prance around with puffy-lipped poseurs pretending to have taste and culture.

Wealth should not be used to court celebrity and false perch on some sort of social stratum. I want to live in a country that celebrates teachers, not tech titans; where those that have been given the most strive to care for those with the least.

We are approaching a tipping point on this planet - one which is cooking and buckling under the strain of global warming, and the endless carnage of conflict caused by dictators and despots.

One must only look at the heat wave in Europe this week, and the continued chaos around the globe, to see we are in deep trouble and in desperate need of solutions that value human rights and ecological sanity.

The war against democracy is becoming a war of attrition, and it is ironically being fueled by the very forces that are attempting to stop it. The opposition is becoming increasingly centered around the same technological infrastructure that is accelerating our demise.

Social media-driven algorithms, AI, and the data center boom all have the same consortia of scoundrels at the top of their pyramid scheme: conspiracy theories, alternative facts and cringe.

A cabal of influencers and online grifters have all contributed to the acrid smokescreen that has allowed bad actors to climb our castle walls and reach our battlements with impunity. Now they are turning our own weapons against us and in the confusion and chaos many are succumbing to the threat of inertia and malaise; it is enervation by design.

The United States is now a country fully geared towards greed. This is not a good thing.

Elon Musk has now become the world’s first trillionaire, a year and a half after sentencing many of the globe’s poorest to certain death or abject suffering by his ketamine-fueled dismantling of USAID.

I write about this often because it is so devastating to me personally. I know many good hearted folks who dedicated their lives to serving the Global South through our country’s aid organizations and their partnerships abroad, who rather selflessly served (when compared with what equivalent skillsets would earn in the private sector) the mission of soft diplomacy by implementing our nation’s institutional wealth and scientific advancement for the betterment of humanity.

The folks I know who lost their jobs believed in the mission and believed in America, they were forced out for no other reason than human rights and the dignity of the world’s poorest fell out of favor with the current administration. What they had dedicated their lives to over many decades was essentially destroyed in a weekend by an overgrown adolescent who is now wealthier than anyone in human history.

The fact that Elon Musk would be seen to be out of his mind by any true measure of sanity is almost beside the point; after his destructive reign playing politician and riding shotgun with Donald Trump at the beginning of his second term, Elon has now set his sights on fomenting discord in Great Britain and much of Western Europe.

We saw the results of his racism and xenophobic flame throwing at the anti-immigration riots in Belfast a couple of weeks ago, which were stoked by well-funded online agitprop.

We must increase our awareness of the growing emergency that democracy faces around the globe. Wall Street, and the loosening of rules to allow SpaceX an IPO on NASDAQ, essentially handed Musk an economic nuclear bomb. And he will use it to punish us all, not to mention defraud investors (such as the index funds that are now basically forced to buy into his company).

Mark my words, or just read the recent The New York Times article on his ‘Space Town’ in Brownsville, Texas, to get a preview of what may be in store. The fact that much of the horror that is occurring from the dismantling of USAID by the DOGE bros is taking place in Africa is not by accident.

Musk grew up in Apartheid South Africa, with a famously racist father who was so enamored of the human rights violations of the Black citizens, he moved his family from Canada to join the cruelest cause on the planet at the time.

Musk’s father also had a child with his own, much younger step daughter, which goes a long way towards explaining Elon’s own proclivities and myriad children with many different women. He has fourteen children with four women, several of which he is estranged from, but who can forget the charm of his toddler son ‘Little X’ picking his nose in the Oval Office and telling POTUS to shut up.

Elon also seemingly used his favorite son as human shield in public places by carrying him on his shoulders to protect his hair-plug carpeted skull from potential snipers; even doing so in the halls of the U.S. Congress.

Not to mention his association with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who hosted Musk and his then wife, British model Tallulah Riley, at Epstein’s townhouse in 2012.

Maxwell was in the procurement business and Elon isn’t exactly smooth with the ladies; he once offered to buy a Space X flight attendant on his private jet a horse if she would give him a massage and perform a sex act on him mid-flight. She demurred but reports of sexual harassment and racial discrimination at his non-union Tesla factories abound - and are the least shocking thing ever.

I believe that Musk targeted much of Central and Sub-Saharan Africa intentionally by dismantling USAID with an eye towards colonizing much of the land for SpaceX operations and data centers - once he wipes out most of the population through famine and disease.

And it goes without saying how attractive and necessary the rare earth minerals and other elements are to his manufacturing. If you don’t think Tesla batteries would take precedent over the indigenous populations of those countries in the mind of Elon Musk, you haven’t been paying attention to how racist and crazy his rhetoric is online on a daily basis.

Musk is a full blown white supremacist who gave a literal Nazi salute at Trump’s last inauguration celebration. The world has never seen anyone this racist and this wealthy before; given our collective track record in the West we should be quite alarmed at how much political power he wields in the United States. The tech titan had a very specific hand in both helping Trump get elected to a second term and shaping his Cabinet once he was installed.

The seeming incompetence of folks like RFK Jr., Dr. Oz and Doug Burgum are not by accident but by design. Do you think Elon would hire similarly inexperienced folks for SpaceX? Of course not - he poaches NASA employees, former astronauts and top of their class tech wizards.

Musk wanted to break the U.S.A.’s ability to respond to global health crises, where we provide aid and stability to vulnerable governments - so he could go in, commandeer the wreckage and set up shop for himself. He moved much of his operations from California to Texas because he knew how amenable the Texas GOP was to manipulation and outright bribery; Governor Abbot has essentially allowed Musk to write his own rule book, ignoring the needs of the citizens and the law.

One must only look at what he has done around the once environmentally-protected area of Boca Chica to see this in effect. Musk has a private, heavily armed force in tactical gear patrolling his gated town which is essentially a private town on public streets. Non-employees are not allowed to use the retail businesses or the infrastructure; trespassers are subject to prosecution.

The non-SpaceX residents are offered no compensation for the fallout from his rocket launches which often coat the town in toxic dust and debris.

MAGA, and the entirety of the GOP, now know that Musk’s vast wealth will be a force to contend with in political life for decades to come. What he is doing now on our planet, and in our atmosphere however, may reverberate for centuries.

On the same Friday Elon bragged about the successful launch of the SpaceX IPO, he also boasted about putting another twenty-six satellites in orbit from a SpaceX rocket in Florida.

If you look up at the night sky these days, you are likely to mistake one of his SpaceX satellites for a star; Musk has now launched into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) more satellites than entire nations, including China.

The Starlink network now encompasses over 8,000 LEO satellites, which is the vast majority of active satellites and poses not only a hindrance to the science of astronomy, it is obviously a major national security risk having one man responsible for much of the communication networks on this planet. We have already seen him shut off wifi communications on the battlefield in Ukraine at the behest of Vladimir Putin - imagine what he would be capable of in the future were his needs not met.

Elon Musk may have the ability to blackmail, or worse, influence American military operations abroad. For the moment he is working in concert with the Trump administration and Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, and that is obviously not a good thing, but a far worse thing may be what happens in subsequent administrations.

If a Democrat was elected president would Musk not declare him an enemy of his ambition? Or would he use his unprecedented riches, and wield his technology, to serve the party out of power? One perhaps aligned with his xenophobic and racist dogma, and villainous designs on accumulating even more wealth and influence. Everything about his track record is self, not society, centered - and this should alarm us all.

The pursuit of extreme wealth should be seen as an abomination of the spirit. We are glorifying the wrong instincts. We have gone beyond the desire to provide for our own families into the realm of greed as the goal itself.

When I look at the mansions and megayachts that line the wealthy enclaves on the oceanfronts of the USA, I do not see something aspirational but something that is deeply broken.

How can one live in luxury when so many others live without? This is of course, an age old question, but one that has never before been so pressing as it is in this perilous moment. We have approached the precipice as a people, and if we do not learn to pull back, we will all suffer.

There is a better way, and that that does not mean living in austerity. It means reaching for equanimity before opulence - and realizing that true luxury is living in a world where no child goes hungry and not one person goes without.

It means sharing the abundance that isn’t necessarily man-made, but universally given. We must move from hoarding to harmony to protect our very existence.

This truth applies to all of us in the United States and the world beyond.

I gazed up up at the heavens last summer while on Nantucket Island for the Fourth of July. It’s my favorite place to see shooting stars when I am lucky enough to visit.

I have been doing this for enough summers to realize the Starlink satellites are not only becoming quite visible, they are too numerous to count now. It seems strange to ponder how one man can literally make an imprint on the night sky.

As my eyes settled back towards the horizon line, I saw the twinkling lights of the many megayachts that had taken over the harbor.

As the fireworks exploded overhead, it seemed the land of the free and the home of the brave was for sale in a way it has never quite been before.

As the saying goes - if you have to ask how much, you probably can’t afford it.

That’s not liberty, it’s larceny and servitude, disguised as capitalism and freedom.

We must wake up before it is too late.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Another beautiful national cultural resource that has been ruined by his reckless taste and groaning incompetence.

I have no doubt it will one day be repaired and restored, but it now appears as a liquid love letter to the swampy grift and fetid ignorance of this bellicose and brutal administration.

Trump’s false claims of vandalism, and now outrageous arrests to cover for the incompetence of his overpaid contractors, will only add to the legend of this monumental (pun intended) screw up. The administration’s many mistakes are well documented by both press and citizenry alike; we’ve all witnessed their incompetent attempts at ‘fixing’ the Reflecting Pool.

Trump foundered on the world stage this week at the G7 summit in France. Insulting our allies by showing up to a working meeting an hour late, then announcing ‘I’m the boss,’ as he lumbered past the serious leaders who were already seated and working without him.

Looking as disheveled and disinterested as one would expect from an octogenarian drug addict who had his UFC birthday party cut short to take a work trip, POTUS clearly still wanted to be back in Washington, DC on the sweaty South Lawn as addled and idiotic gladiators sung his praises and insulted his perceived enemies.

‘Enemies’ including former First Lady Michelle Obama, who possesses more intelligence, grace and sensitivity than Trump will ever know (and also happens to be married to a Nobel Peace Prize winner, as she incisively pointed out in her brilliant speech this week).

Upon returning from the G7 Summit, Donald Trump promptly insulted the Prime Minister of Italy, Georgia Meloni, by insisting she was begging to take a selfie with him, the most sophomoric and unbelievable of boasts, and in keeping with his pattern of attacking strong women who don’t stroke his broken ego.

A beautiful woman who doesn’t immediately make herself subservient to Donald always becomes a target of his anger and his predatory demented nature; which is why Vanky would change her speaking voice in his presence to a sotto voce whisper, POTUS needs to feel that he dominates the women in his orbit.

Some play along and some stand up - and the latter always drives him crazy. Kaitlin Collins, and his unending attacks on her while imploring her to smile, is a good example of this dynamic.

DJT is one of those deeply insecure men who needs the women around him to bolster his fragile ego and stunted adolescent mindset. His daughters and wives happily accepted this role but they did so at a disservice to the world at large. Most especially Vanky, who bore witness to his abuse of her fellow teenagers in his beauty pageant days and chose to keep her duplicitous mouth shut to live a life of luxury and lies.

In many ways this entire week is a metaphor for our global standing, having slipped from our perch as the world’s democratic superpower to our current status as an untrustworthy economic empire being led by a demented, misogynistic oaf. One who bizarrely complains at the G7 that his chair is lower than the rest (a dirty trick he himself used for years in his Trump Tower office) when he finally shows up in his Benzoed stupor.

Trump then retreats to Camp David for the weekend to hide from his shame, while the world wonders why the United States essentially surrendered to Iran and left the region and the global economy in a more perilous place than before his unwarranted attack.

That is not to say the regime in Tehran is not worthy of being overthrown and replaced, but Trump has only strengthened them, fueled their hatred of the U.S.A., and sent any internal rebellion back decades; a shameful and tragic turn of events.

POTUS promised ‘help on the way’ on nine separate occasions when the brave people of Iran took to the streets in protest earlier this year, only to allow them to be slaughtered by the tens of thousands on the orders of their brutal theocratic leaders.

Now Trump is audaciously putting $300 billion into the bloody hands of those who fired bullets on their own people - affording them more economic firepower and literal bombs to use against the innocent, and buttress their deadly reign of terror.

As of Saturday morning, the Strait of Hormuz was once again closed by Iran due to ongoing conflict in Lebanon, resulting from Trump’s inability to curtail Netanyahu and force the Israeli government into accepting a cease fire.

Not to mention Iran’s mercenary proxy, Hezbollah, and their continued deadly attacks against Israeli forces; any sort of peace agreement that doesn’t take into account the vast complexity, competing forces and ideologies of the region, is obviously doomed to failure. Which makes the mainstream media’s embrace of the ‘peace deal’ narrative this week all the more inscrutable.

We all have seen this dog and pony show before - it seems mostly to exist to allow Trump insiders to manipulate markets before falling apart once again over bellicose posts and actual bloodshed. Wars do not end easily, all the more reason they should not be started on a whim.

Anyone who thinks peace is on the horizon is a fool. This deal will allow Iran to replenish its stockpile of ballistic missiles and keep their uranium stockpiles, while putting our allies in the region in greater danger for decades to come.

A complex and fraught situation was made exponentially worse than it was after the signing of the JCPOA, which was the result of years of diplomatic effort and careful negotiation, during President Obama’s presidency. Abandoning it to assuage the racist inclinations (Trump hated that Obama made it happen) and fragile ego of the current POTUS was diplomatic vandalism - and the entire world has paid a price.

Trump’s actions are criminal and immoral - and it feels as if other G7 leaders just shrug their shoulders at his malicious incompetence and do their best to just get along.

This is not the correct approach and will not be looked back on favorably in the decades to come. It will be seen for the foolhardy appeasement that it is, a dangerous capitulation to a deranged and drug-addled leader.

POTUS’s withdrawal from climate change accords and complete and utter fealty to the oil and gas industry alone should cause our European allies to mistrust the ‘Drill Baby, Drill’ guy and view him as the villain he is, most especially as they bake in unbearable temperatures while American leadership promotes fossil fuel consumption and and outlaws any alternative energy projects.

Many of which were partnerships with major Scandinavian companies who will now suffer both economically and environmentally, as will the American citizens who will lose their jobs as we retreat from green energy projects and regress as a nation.

The man who unseated Biden for being too old literally could not clasp a Medal of Honor on a war hero the other day, and instead turned one of our military’s highest honors into a clumsily tied choker - when after minutes of embarrassing fumbling, Donald just gave up and tied the ribbon into a knot.

These events get pushed aside and laughed away but they should not; they are in fact evidence of a very serious mental and physical decline in a man who has never been honest or forthcoming about his health and addictions.

I am sure that is why they are keeping him out of the public eye this weekend - he is always a mess after a big trip, even more so than his normal state of unmanageability.

Trump fumbled through his speech accepting a gifted Qatari jet as the new Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews on Friday before departing to Camp David; a plane that he brags about being a ‘palace in the sky’, and which he will keep for his personal use when he leaves office. If ever there was a symbol of how brazen he has been in his corruption and how this nation has come to normalize it, the new Air Force One may be it.

Or perhaps the best symbol was a few days earlier when he signed his surrender Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) document at Versailles in his signature EKG Sharpie scrawl, looking up from the table like some elderly python with hooded eyes who had just slipped out of a moonshine still in the backwoods of Florida before slithering back to his swamp, drunk on being where it never belonged.

Trump surrendered to Iran out of self-interest. In a way, that broadcast to the world at large how in over his head he was from the beginning.

Future generations will look back and shudder at the incompetence and venality of American leadership in this murky moment. Where human life takes a back seat to business interests and foreign policy is negotiated by scoundrels and fools. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have no business representing the United States in matters of war.

Kushkoff are both vacuous sleaze bags. The generational mediocrity they represent will haunt this hour of ignominy and hang over the negotiations with Iran like a mushroom cloud of malicious greed and baleful, Botoxed belligerence.

While Trump was waving a white flag in the Iran war and slurring his way through the G7 Summit, JD Vance was on a book tour in New York City. Spending the week promoting a product that will put money into his personal bank account while incurring all the expense and security of traveling as a Vice President.

American taxpayers footed the bill for Vance’s P.R. sojourn.

It used to be that the Executive Branch waited until they left office to cash in - not so anymore, and I find it absolutely appalling. Not to mention the way much of the mainstream media embraced his promotional blitz, which would put even more money into Murdoch’s pockets as Vance’s publisher, Harper Collins, is owned by News Corp.

All of the media ecosystem grift is interrelated and much of our political apparatus now seems designed to reward corporate greed.

It was interesting to me that in JD’s podcast sit down with The New York Times he revealed the sort of anti-intellectualism on offer to the MAGA base and the naked contempt they have for working class Americans.

When pressed on the Trump administration’s clearly unchristian attitudes towards economic and humanitarian aid for developing nations (while ironically, Vance promotes a book on faith titled ‘Communion’), and their uncharitable (to put it mildly) attitudes towards immigrants, and the hostile, often violent rhetoric of Donald Trump and his ‘America First’ henchmen, JD’s response was to basically say civility was an attribute of the elite establishment that the working class had no appetite for in the body politic.

In essence, that the blunt and juvenile tone they adopt when speaking to their base is necessary pandering to the rural white folks who make up their base. Essentially the hoi polloi have no time for anything but the derogatory monosyllabic hate speech of Donald Trump and his goofy compatriots.

Of course, JD Vance is a Yale grad who passed himself off as some sort rube whisperer from Appalachia when he released the fictitious memoir ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ and got his first taste of the big money afforded BS artists; the con man Vice POTUS has since morphed into the ultimate cosplay Christian and bearded ‘Bro Country’ Eddie Haskell. Never mind that he is the very definition of an elitist.

A man so obviously insincere that the only consolation in watching his money grab is that he will most likely never be his party’s nominee for POTUS, let alone ever hold that office. Now JD is being dispatched to Switzerland to participate in the negotiations after being asked twice this week why he wasn’t already involved - and responding that he didn’t really understand diplomatic protocols.

Vance was unqualified to be a Senator - and was only elected to office thanks to Peter Thiel funding his Ohio campaign and essentially purchasing his seat on behalf of venture capitalists - he has no business being involved in geopolitical affairs. Our Veep’s involvement in the negotiations sadly makes the outcome a forgone conclusion.

We have seen the future of the Democratic Party - and the solution to the darkness purveyed by these merchants of militarized incompetence and racist rhetoric. We have within our grasp the antidote to the division and rancor that has pulverized our standing in the world and our relations to one another, in this fiery chapter of fealty to a fraudulent king.

A culture that spoon fed ignorance to the hordes of people weaned on lies and caustic patriotism is scraping the bottom of the jar and almost out of apple sauce.

The baby is colicky and weary of the counterfeit twang sung in broken lullabies. The emperor is indeed naked in their eyes now, or at least stripped down to his girdle and adult undergarment. His verbal incontinence has lost both its bark and its bite - it may still be acrid, but is no longer nearly as effective.

Contrast this with the eloquence on display at the opening of President Obama’s Library and the warm reminders of what grace and inclusion felt like - and the comfort of having leaders that were actually fit for office, that one could take pride in supporting.

Or the youthful enthusiasm of Mayor Mamdani’s speech at the Knicks parade, where he embraced not just the vibrant and joyful celebration but seemed to intuitively grasp what it meant in a city that perhaps more than any other has come to exemplify the melting pot of American culture.

A culture that is at its best when it embraces the contributions of all who care to participate. Who see being in service to a nation and its people as not the only the birthright of the few, but the sacred promise of the many.

The Statue of Liberty smiled down on my city, on our city, this week - as in every way New York has always belonged to the world more than any one nation.

It represents a spirit of inclusion - and possibility of accomplishment reached through gritty determination, a bit of luck and an unwavering commitment to the promise of dreams coming true if you are willing to work hard enough for them.

Obviously, it doesn’t happen all of the time but it has happened enough of the time to make it something worth believing in. Humanity needs hope. It is as essential as sunlight.

We need to start believing again. To hitch our wagons to possibility and promise and to learn anew to see our fellow passengers as co-creators of a dream instead of apparitions in a nightmare. To view our fellow travelers as teammates.

There are no dreams in MAGA, just the empty intonement of one man’s bitter grievance and entitled mediocrity.

His moment is already fading and he damn well knows it, sooner than most. I can see it in his beady bloodshot eyes and you can bet he sees it too. The foul may soon be forgotten but its lessons will linger.

Let us not forget who we are again or let anyone pull us off course so widely.

His blunders will take time to heal and correct, there is much hard work ahead. But the future is now - and is right in front of us.

As we look back and celebrate this nation’s birth, let us remember where we are heading and where we never want to go again.

And be certain and steadfast in our collective destiny.

We owe that to the past as much as we do the future.

There is only one way to walk this road - together.

Happy Solstice.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

In stark contrast to the well-earned, inclusive and historic joy that erupted in NYC in the wake of the Knicks becoming NBA Champions for the first time in over half a century.

The UFC cage match at the White House on Sunday evening represents the apex of a culture that Donald Trump has long sought to co-opt. A carnival for the carnivorous and the careless. Pyrotechnics and steel where roses once grew. Closed fists in lieu of open hearts and optimism. The bacchanal of the bellicose and the brutal.

The toxic masculinity we see on display now, in all forms of MAGA iconography and the creatine-spiked machismo of inebriated clowns like Pete Hegseth, were always catnip to the manicured old man who turns 80 today.

Trump used to hang out with mobsters and goons in his NYC days. He would post motorcycle gang members at the entrance of his ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ afterparties and employed a personal security team that could best be described as Cro-Magnon. It was always an act, of course; performative tough guys encircling the softest man on the planet. Donald is physically lazy, intellectual incurious and possesses all the bravery of a tadpole. Feathers make him flinch.

This is why I knew the version of events we witnessed in Butler, PA, were a stunt - and not the natural reactions of the man whose family I worked closely with in reality TV. Even Tucker Carlson revealed recently that Dan Bongino told him Trump personally shut down the FBI investigation into his ‘assassination attempt’ when he came back into office.

Which makes total sense seeing how effective the ‘Fight, Fight, Fight’ branding operation had become for him - and how there is no way the events of that day would hold up to further scrutiny. Including the actions of the Secret Service, who seemingly went against all previous training and protocol to allow POTUS the opportunity for a photo op during an attempt on his life.

To put it simply, it doesn’t pass the smell test - and, as I have said many times before, Donald Trump should never be given the benefit of the doubt. Most especially when it comes to choreographed optics that serve the fraudulent image he has spent a lifetime crafting.

DJT’s entire career has been an illusion designed to mask both the criminal underbelly of his eponymous organization and his own crimes.

We have seen further evidence of this ongoing strategy this week in the revelations of how senior Trump administration officials, including his under-qualified Vice President, JD Vance, gathered in the Situation Room to discuss options for keeping Donald’s decades-long involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, and his prominent role the Epstein files, from being revealed to the American people any more than they already had been.

The administration was in damage control over the soon to be released Wall Street Journal article further illuminating DJT’s close relationship with the notorious sex trafficker, including his infamous birthday card. ‘Public servants’ were colluding to protect the President of the United States from his criminal sexual predation, the abuse of sex-trafficked women and girls - even going so far as discussing the graphic nature of his proclivities (which align completely with what my friend who spent time in Epstein’s East 71st Street mansion with both men described to me).

That’s the thing with Trump - the multiple allegations against him always have the same set of details and circumstances, describing the same sort of behavior over and over again.

Behavior that was no secret in certain circles in New York City and Palm Beach, and certainly not to his immediate family, including his children and former and current wives.

Do you think anyone present in the Situation Room believed Trump was innocent of the evidence against him in the Epstein files? Of course they didn’t, but put their own self-interest and protecting his hold on power above the interests of the nation and justice itself.

Participating in such a shameful action in a facility designated for the most sensitive of military operations belies any attempt to put forth the notion they believed Trump wasn’t guilty. They knew he had committed the heinous acts described by multiple survivors and witnesses and conspired to cover it up anyway - and while this is not surprising, what it says about the character of the folks running this nation, in that way, should not go unremarked upon as we celebrate this country’s founding.

In convening to obscure such perilous and impactful truth from the citizens they are supposed to serve, those present functioned as saboteurs of democracy.

Given these recent revelations, what do you suppose they are currently covering up regarding Trump’s physical and mental deterioration? That Situation Room meeting occurred last summer - and we have all seen POTUS’s disinhibition and erratic behavior increase over the last year.

Trump no longer has a work schedule beyond staged photo ops and press sprays in the Oval Office; where he sits behind the Resolute Desk like some sort of obese emperor with bruised hands, excoriating the press as ‘fake news’ and lying with impunity. He spent four days last weekend at his private golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, only returning to the White House late Tuesday afternoon - after falling asleep at Madison Square Garden on Monday night.

He barely mentioned the Knicks since then, choosing not to celebrate the most miraculous comeback in playoff history until a brief post celebrating their championship - which ended with ‘Make America Great Again!’, ignoring the ironic fact that the America he imagines has no place for the men who made New York proud.

I worked on NBA Allstar Game weekend for over a decade and never once did Trump attend - including when it was held in New York City.

He attended game three to try and steal some of the attention, so when the awe inspiring last second victory on Thursday night became headline news coast-to-coast, he chose to ignore it completely because it wasn’t about him.

POTUS is spending his birthday weekend with nothing on his schedule but a MAGA, Inc. fundraiser at his Virginia golf club and the $60 million dollar cost to taxpayers- fight on the South Lawn, which benefits a private company that he has a financial stake in. It is grifting on steroids, quite literally; even the White House press corps is being restricted, as the Trump administration turned over press credentialing to the UFC itself.

The Fourth Estate is being jettisoned in favor of a private company that is also selling corporate advertising. It is in many ways the perfect encapsulation of the ‘For Sale’ attitude of Trump’s entire regime.

POTUS was never interested in governing, only in lining his own pockets - and, as always, violence is the most effective way for him to achieve his aims. The sort of folks who would find such a brutal contest representative of our democracy are the same folks who in the end will be fleeced the most from his staggering corruption and dereliction of duty.

DJT was in very poor health, both mentally and physically, years ago - when I worked around him in his reality TV show days. His deterioration in recent months is still shocking.

I promise he has not spent most of his recent weekends in DC - in lieu of traveling to Palm Beach, or even his eldest son’s second wedding in the Bahamas - because he wants to be close to the Situation Room, monitoring the progress of an Iran peace deal.

He launched the Iran war while flying aboard Air Force One on his way to Mar-a-Lago, he doesn’t need to end it by being in the White House.

Trump is staying in DC because he is obviously dealing with some sort of medical condition, most likely exacerbated by his mid-May trip to Beijing.

He leaves for France after attending the fight tonight- and once again we may watch him physical falter under the strain of travel, which he never liked doing even before he was POTUS.

The White House medical staff are not being forthcoming about both his overall health and his late May trip to Walter Reed; DJT was in Bethesda much longer than a routine physical should take, and it was his fourth trip this term.

That should raise red flags to anyone who understands Trump’s long history of outright lying and general obfuscation about his health. Like most addicts, the leader of the free world lives in a perpetual state of denial and covering up for the consequences of his actions.

Trump has built a structure around him that enables his bad behavior and allows him to continue to wreak havoc in the lives of those who have a stake in his mental and physical health, which in a macro sense is now this entire country.

We are not only being misled, we are being abused.

This point should be emphasized over and over - instead we have a media that seems to largely disregard the obvious in favor of access. Bear in mind, this is a media that mostly ignored Trump’s decades of sexual predation and his ties to Jeffrey Epstein in the lead up to his first presidential election in 2016.

Not to mention his deep ties with organized crime.

They also gave those closest to him a pass, including Ivanka and Jared Kushner, who by then were already knee deep in sketchy deals with foreign investors, Russian oligarchs and mobsters.

Felix Sater carried Trump Organization business cards when I worked around the family on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ and spent much his time making introductions to various Russian mobsters and the Trump kids at the afterparties. Mark Burnett was in the room for much of this as well.

Trump and his kids used very public events to do very shady deals, essentially in plain sight, which has always been Trump’s modus operandi in a way. What better way to keep your juggernaut of crime and scandal out of further scrutiny than to seemingly have the blessings of NBC and a handful of B-list celebrities.

This speaks to what I wrote earlier about how Trump uses spectacle to distract from his behind the scenes thievery and predation. This same strategy was of course employed in his beauty pageant days and his attendance at big events like the U.S. Open, which was a long time hunting ground of sorts for Trump who assaulted two women in his private suite on separate occasions.

I worked on the U.S. Open opening and closing ceremonies for fifteen years (during the same period I worked on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ finales) handling wrangling duties for celebrity talent that performed anthems and Trump’s box was often next to ours. He would fill his suite with models and ‘Miss Universe’ pageant contestants, so I have no doubt about the veracity of the women’s claims, though the alleged attacks took place in the late 90s before my time on the U.S. Open.

Unlike the NBA Allstar games and Super Bowls I worked on, Trump was always around at the U.S. Open for obvious reasons. He is not interested in sport, he is interested in flexing his dubious wealth and power around women and using the veneer of his celebrity to prey upon the innocent.

Donald used his pageants to scout potential victims and would invite them to events, where they were vulnerable. (The layout of these suites is such that there is a private bathroom near the back, so while most guests were on a balcony watching the tennis, he would prey on his victims who got up to use the restroom). ‘47’ has done similar things to People magazine reporters visiting Mar-a-Lago and visitors to his office in Trump Tower.

It is also why the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, and subsequent conviction and legal judgement for defamation against Donald Trump are so credible.

The further targeting of the well-known journalist by Todd Blanche’s DOJ is an obvious outgrowth of the strategies laid out in last summer’s Situation Room meetings. Not to mention Blanche’s service as Donald Trump’s personal attorney during the appellate court trials in which DJT sought to overturn his civil court judgements. To have the same man who would protect a predator serve as U.S. Attorney General is an offense not only to survivors and victims of such heinous crimes, but to morality itself.

Carroll’s description of his actions are exactly how Trump behaves - he is most definitely the sort of arrogant sexual predator to assault a famous woman, that he knew, in a public dressing room in Bergdorf Goodman, and then go back to his eponymous tower and family shielded by his burly security guards, with his smug, self-satisfied, make up-caked face beaming proudly.

POTUS had undoubtably gotten away with the same sort of crime many times before; Carroll’s bravery in standing up to him and seeking justice, even decades later, is why he is so determined to use the DOJ to seek retribution.

When Trump had a teenaged Ivanka give him lap dances in front of the production crew on ‘Miss Teen USA’ pageants and in front of guests at Mar-a-Lago during a Beach Boys concert, he wore the same audacious, predatory smile.

Trump gets off on doing the unthinkable in plain sight. Now he is doing that on the world stage. His predator instincts are being melded with a new American Imperialism under the surreal ‘Donroe Doctrine’ his administration is carrying out.

I have no doubt Cuba is next on the list. It worries me deeply as I believe Trump will view that long suffering island and its people as a place for his plundering and proclivities to reach a pinnacle in our hemisphere.

Can you imagine the abuses and self-dealing of a Trump Hotel and Casino project in Havana? One perhaps overseen by his execrable sons and their South Florida gangster pals?

It will make the worst outrages of the Batista regime and the Mob playground of Havana’s ‘heyday’ seem like child’s play: we must be cognizant of the danger at hand if an invasion is launched in the coming days and weeks.

Any claims of a peace deal with Iran should be viewed with a wide angle taking this into account. Trump may not so much be ending that war as he is gearing up to start another one. The recent revelations regarding his administration’s Epstein files coverup and his outsized role in the sex-trafficker’s crimes will only fuel this insane trajectory.

We must not allow him to keep plundering and pillaging everything he perceives as in his rightful purview. One look at the man tells you he is a monster. Where there is smoke, there is fire - around DJT, an inferno is blazing.

We counter his crimes by bringing them to light and not succumbing to the distractions. He will do all he can to subvert the will of the people and to claim election fraud in the midterms, as he recently has done in California and with Democratic primary victories in Virginia.

POTUS has gotten away with far too much, for far too long.

It is time to change that. The only way we can fully do so is to remind our fellow citizens of the true cost of his crimes.

Be well and make room for joy. In spite of all the darkness there is always cause for hope. The illusion many of his supporters have been laboring under is dissipating in the summer sun.

Our job is to bring more light through those cracks in the clouds. To radiate peace in the face of acrimony and exclusion.

I believe we can.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

It is no accident that as soon as Republicans began to mildly pushback on Trump, his first response was to immediately lash out at women. (In this week’s case it was again White House reporter and CNN anchor Kaitlin Collins). It’s a deranged form of self-soothing for the deeply flawed, misogynistic, sexual predator/president.

And once he got into office, how was it not plain for all to see that he was not merely a belligerent buffoon, but he was in fact using his power to enrich himself and his family while destroying the very fabric of our society and breaking through the moral barricades of our institutions to allow his criminal scrum of scoundrels to pillage and plunder?

To steal from the neediest among us to further line the greasy pockets of Palm Beach dilettantes and deadbeat debutantes. The sort of people a saner nation would mock mercilessly, or at the very least, invent new forms of sitcoms and comedy to satire.

Instead, these bejeweled weasels inveigle themselves further into the foundation of our society. Buying their way into our media, fashion and attention spans. Trump himself is like a rabid muskrat chewing on the dining room table’s legs while a dysfunctional family sits down to a Thanksgiving dinner of cold duck and crow.

We have gone from counting our blessings to airing our grievances and bickering with each other to the point of calamity. The folks who would divide us think they can still function without those they seek to exile and shun; denying the modest and deserving a place in a functioning society. Bifurcating us to the extent we distrust our our one-time friends and neighbors. Fomenting discord to encourage the aggression that has seeped into our national character is both dysfunctional and dangerous.

To deny benefits and protections to anyone, regardless of their backgrounds, is to deny all of us the very spirit that allows this country to function and move forward.

Marginalizing and punishing a sector of society that doesn’t adhere to the dogma and bigotry of a reactionary movement, designed to enrich its leader by exploiting grievance and racism, is as lethal to our land as any plague or pestilence.

That sort of vitriol and anger hurts the host as well as the intended targets of the resentments and retributions. The pervasive defilement of our our principles in service of one man’s ego run amok is exacerbating our current existential predicament.

If you view a nation at its core as aligned in common cause under a power greater than ourselves (to borrow a phrase from recovery), then we must surrender a bit of self-will to flourish in a functioning society. Not in some dictatorial sense of course, but in the interest of equanimity and balance.

This concept should be, and often is, written into the charter of any functioning civilization, a trade-off we all make to have our hard-earned tax dollars go towards providing for a military and an infrastructure that works for the protection and prosperity of us all. It is a downpayment on securing our very way of life. A bedrock of common decency upon which true exceptionalism can be built.

MAGA loves to quote ‘One Nation Under God’ but they refuse to behave with the humility required to surrender to a power greater than ourselves, which is in many ways a foundational prerequisite of citizenship.

Of course we have to trust that political power is being wielded by a duly elected and co-equal branch representing the interests of the many and not just the oligarchy. The few who curry favor with a tyrant to amass wealth and turn a blind eye to the persecution and suffering of the many are never true patriots. They instead seek to undermine our checks and balances for personal gain, rewarding avarice and eschewing the attributes of altruism.

After Elon Musk helped Trump win Pennsylvania using his vast wealth to usurp democracy in the interest of his own ambition, he gutted and destroyed U.S.A.’s global soft diplomacy by ‘feeding USAID into the wood chipper’, basically creating the Ebola outbreak we are now witnessing ravage the Democratic Republic of Congo. Just a fraction of the millions who will suffer and perish as a result of the actions of just a few terrible men, and in DOGE’s case, outright teenagers.

That all of us are afforded an equal say in the ‘beautiful argument’ of our democracy (to quote a Springsteen line) that moves forward the ideals and the patriotic quest of opportunity and freedom for all.

The ‘American Dream’ should always extend across its borders and for much of the last century it did just that - in the form of international aid. Despite the echoes of imperialism so central to our song, we did a lot of good in the world as well. Turning our back on that will only bring the nightmares closer to home.

The founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, when writing about the need to overcome self-will run riot, in the interest of placing our trust in a power greater than ourselves said it best, ‘The philosophy of self-sufficiency is not paying off. Plainly enough, it is a bone-crushing juggernaut whose final achievement is ruin.’ (This was a lesson our country seemed to understand after World War II when the Marshall Plan helped rebuild a devastated Europe and shared the bounty of our industrial might and booming economy with much of the world that only recently had been at war with itself. It was a good investment and the right thing to do because it (mostly) helped foster the peace and stability required to remain a superpower.

One can easily apply these prophetic words from AA literature to MAGAism itself and extend them to the concept of isolationism. They have placed their faith in one man over the many, believing we can trade in global order for a multipolar world run by a handful of despots and ‘strongmen’. There is nothing strong about refusing to care for your neighbors, it is both miserly and weak. And always leads to ruin.

The ‘America First’ movement are turning their backs on the ideals and institutions they pay lip service to while their so-called leaders are stripping it for parts and sneaking out the back door with our nation’s precious jewels and priceless artifacts. Both literally and figuratively.

We learned this week that Trump is making all federal grants align with ‘MAGA’ ideals or they face termination. This is as anti-American and as arrogant as it gets and will affect all aspects of our lives for generations.

As will the fast tracking of immigration cases by the Trump administration intended to overwhelm courts with burdensome case loads and denying due process to migrants seeking asylum and citizenship. They are deliberating manipulating the system not in the interest of expediency but to increase deportations.

Overwhelmed judges are more likely to push cases through rather than give them the time and scrutiny they deserve. Long lines are forming outside of immigration courts; lives hang in the balance while overloaded dockets decide their perilous fates.

Folks looking for a better life are not only being punished, they are being harshly and negligently processed through a system that has become a caricature of what was in place before Trump took over. Immigration was always a difficult issue - and other administrations have been overwhelmed in dealing with it, but none before this one sought out chaos as an ideological strategy.

Individuals subjected to such treatment will have their lives forever changed by yet another callous effort to go against the very grain of this nation by the architects of ‘America First’, namely the spiteful runt of a White nationalist, Stephen Miller.

Senate Republicans just this week approved another $70 billion to fund this unethical immigration machine through the end of Trump’s second term (and of course he is gearing up to steal a third term if we don’t stop him). Most of this money will be spent on ICE and the for-profit detention centers that have become the apex of the authoritarian design and kleptocratic rule of this ever burdensome mad king.

Trump gets a piece of every venture that comes under his purview - and the overpriced warehouses that are being purchased for the purposes of illegally housing immigrants are a major source of his graft.

There is no doubt in my mind that the overinflated sale prices of these buildings and the contracts being handed out to private prison companies like Geo Group and CoreCivic are resulting in massive kickbacks to Trump.

They certainly aren’t spending the money on healthcare and adequate food for their detainees. Men, women and children are denied due process so MAGA consiglieri, (such as the obviously unintelligent but overtly corrupt Markwayne Mullin, who comes across as some sort of Temu Chuck Norris engineered to appeal to the kind of stunted men who would want to become ICE Officers in the first place), can make a profit.

A wholly shameful occupation in this dark moment. The GOP are perpetrating and purveying what will go down in history as one of the shameful eras in American history; they represent a party that is completely adrift not just from the values that we should adhere to as a society but have placed greed and reactionary violence above humanity.

I know Donald Trump and I know how deeply pleased he must be with all the suffering his causing. He comes from a family that is generationally racist, and he has raised children that will carry on his ignorance and venality.

We are letting the worst among us dictate our fate as a nation and this should outrage us all to the point we no longer tolerate it. POTUS has reshaped this country in ways we may come to regret for centuries. We can already see its effects in our everyday lives - and as hard as it is to not look away that is exactly what we must continue to do.

To document and bear witness to this administration’s crimes so we can not only begin to hold them accountable when we take back the House and Senate in November, we can also use their cruelty in this moment to educate future generations about the evil that can transpire under the guise of patriotism and normalcy.

Nothing is normal about this moment. You don’t have to go far in the U.S.A these days to see examples of people behaving poorly. We need to counter that with acts of love and tolerance, of acceptance and courage.

Humility is one of those attributes we don’t speak enough about in public life, especially in politics. The idea of serving others has been jettisoned in favor of a sort of judgmental, personality-driven politics. The notion of domination has supplanted a more sober approach to governance which fully takes in takes into account how the actions of the individual affects the lives of the many.

We have seen this dynamic at play most explicitly on the issue of gun control where a nation ruled by Republicans are unable to admit and accept that we have a crisis with firearms in this country. They are too beholden to the NRA and the regressive views of many gun owners, allowing children to suffer tragic fates the adults in charge could have stopped.

Our loftiest goals as a nation, the idea that ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ should be enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, came from English Enlightenment thinkers; specifically John Locke, who was known as the ‘father of liberalism’.

His influence on Thomas Jefferson was apparent in our founding document which set out to define those unalienable rights (at the time those rights obviously were not extended to women, indigenous peoples or enslaved persons of which Thomas Jefferson himself was an owner and abuser), but that does not make their inclusion any less significant in the trajectory of our nation.

The genesis of our transformation from such opaque origins was indeed there in this founding philosophy, a kernel of hope existed amongst the moral blindspots - and that was ironically the concept that this new government was created to protect - the rights of the people, not just monarchs, tyrants or wealthy landowners.

At least in language, if not fully in deed, there was an expansive view on what a country could be, and the Jeffersonian insertion of the word ‘happiness’ introduced the concept of virtue and personal betterment rather than just the pursuit of wealth.

Our founding fathers, despite their foibles (to ascribe a polite term to obvious moral defects) saw back on July 4, 1776 that for a nation to truly be great, it had to live by certain frameworks; those core values were the undergirding of the ‘American Dream’ for two-and-half centuries.

In this hour of their dismantling, we must rise to protect our own underpinnings; speaking out and taking action in every creative way imaginable.

Happiness is not simply material comfort, though access to basic necessities should be a right to all no matter where they are born.

It is extending the protections and promises of this once bountiful land of hope and dreams to all. We strengthen and buttress our identity as a nation by being brave enough and big enough to include all who seek to join us with a seat at the table. Fulfillment comes from doing the next right thing; this works for both individuals and countries.

That is what Woody Guthrie meant when he sang, ‘this land belongs to you and me’, the legendary folk singer who also penned ‘Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)’ about another regrettable chapter in our nation’s shameful treatment of immigrants.

Woody was no pollyanna when it came to injustice but a true messenger of hope, bearing a reminder to the people, all the people, that our genesis as a nation includes them too - and not to let any cynical, greedy, in-it-for-themselves corrupt politician tell them otherwise. Ever.

Stand up. Speak out. Share truth.

Guthrie was also no fan of Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump Sr. and wrote two songs about his wretched landlord’s discriminatory practices in the early 1950s when he lived in a Trump building - Beach Haven, in Coney Island. But I digress.

I’ll write about my years on the folk festival circuit as a road manager and my associations with the Guthrie family another time. But whether it was Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie or John Sebastian, my ears always perked up when the Woody songs and stories came out.

One of my favorite memories from those days was a tribute concert to Woody Guthrie at the Kennedy Center to celebrate what would have been his 100th birthday. Jackson Browne performed along with Rosanne Cash, John Mellencamp, Lucinda Williams, Tom Morello and many others.

Back at the Foggy Bottom boutique hotel after the show with friend and folk singer Joel Rafael, who performed as well and is great ambassador of Guthrie’s legacy, we were in the tiny little elevator when none other than Ramblin’ Jack Elliot stepped in with us and started chatting.

Ramblin’ Jack was one of Woody’s closest friends and traveling companions, falling under Woody’s spell when he was 19 years-old. He learned to play guitar and sing from Woody himself, spending nearly two decades under his tutelage, and also mentored a young Bob Dylan.

Elliott was still going strong and carrying the torch back on this night in the fall of 2011. It reminded me of the resilience of what some might think of as a modest tradition. There’s a strength in an American music that very much belongs to the people who make and consume it.

Much like jazz and blues, in folk there are elements of all sorts of cultures that get mixed up in a truly unique gumbo of graciousness and earthy illumination because, elementally, that is what speaking truth to power through the arts is: an act of gratitude in the face of enormous challenges and outright evil.

A beacon in darkness.

A nutritious meal for the soul so to speak. A coat of many colors in a chilly wind.

There is grace in both creatively sharing the news in a form that sparks joy and pointing out that a better day is coming.

The Trump regime is systemically denying basic human needs to people innocent of crimes and undeserving of the demonization an entire party has built its brand upon. It is not only shameful, it is anti-American.

Nothing could be in further opposition to who we have always aspired to be as a nation and a people. They are an artless administration and we must stop them now.

We will counter this reactionary darkness with spirit - with truthful, uncompromising messaging and hope. They will be singing songs about these times in a hundred years.

Let’s give ‘em more to sing than ‘Deportees’. Let’s change this trajectory we are on now and extend our open arms to all who want to work hard and build their own American Dream.

Before it becomes even more of a nightmare. Be well.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

He did this, of course, in lieu of brokering any sort of peace deal with Iran - and his meltdown was surely noticed by those he wages unprovoked and illegal war against; as well as our allies, who are having to cope with an unhinged POTUS seemingly grounded at the White House while undergoing whatever medical treatments are being shielded from the public view.

To say it is uncharacteristic for him to not be on a golf course for the last two weekends in May would be an understatement. Not surprisingly, he covered over his unacknowledged infirmity by going on a xenophobic hate spree.

The central pitch of the MAGA movement is that immigrants are taking away money and resources from real Americans and destroying communities that are the backbone of patriotic, wholesome, red, white and blue life. The images POTUS posted buttressed this despicable and false narrative.

Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to their reactionary theme: Trump’s war on immigration, spearheaded by Stephen Miller (as odious as a wood grub without the charm and social skills), is a national disgrace.

Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, is a tiny, rancid man who is causing huge problems for a nation that prided itself as being a beacon of freedom.

An unfavorite son of Santa Monica, California, who infamously began his nativist hatred of minorities in his high school days, Miller grew up in a state that once belonged to Mexico - and whose proud, innovative and talented people he would come to vilify and proselytize against, and ultimately to prosecute.

The Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda is the largest government sanctioned movement against an ethnic population since Hitler’s Third Reich wove its demonic tapestry of genocide; its Aryan army arrogantly marching across Western Europe before walking into the cold hard fist of American exceptionalism and industry.

But here’s the rub - what made us exceptional is that Adolf and his evil ilk weren’t just going up against some blue-eyed kids from the heartland but the ethnic cornucopia of diversity that we had become.

The United States was a melting pot and the wildly diverse skill set of so many backgrounds is what made our war machine so effective and resourceful.

Hitler was drawing on the strength of eugenic hogwash and the false premise of his pseudoscientific fever dream of a master race. Admittedly, he was basing much of the organizational ideology of his movement on the poisonous ideas of men like Henry Ford and the discriminatory logistics of post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow era treatment of African Americans in the South.

Nazi Germany obviously took it to an insanely sinister and destructive next level by poisoning their followers against Jewish people and anyone else described as ‘others’. Art, and culture itself, came under attack - eerily much like today.

None of this would have been possible without the support of so many in Germany and abroad who looked the other way, or worse, enabled its rise: isolationism and appeasement never work when facing down fascism.

But America and what it stood for was still able to harbor hope and transcendence from our darker historical defects - and rise to the occasion when history called on us to both progress and pay it forward.

We were drawing on the power of myriad cultures and historical strengths passed down through generations, and allied under a common cause. It was as if a symphony was going up against a single drum.

It was in fact immigration itself that saved the free world - and now the country that performed that miracle, along with our courageous and loyal allies, is actively turning its back on those very ideals in favor of a carnival of toxically xenophobic culture and racist rhetoric designed to appeal to the myopic and the stunted.

The men and women who do not understand their own history, and the politicians to whom they pledge their loyalty, would prefer to keep it that way.

Our government has been waging war on immigrants in a way we have not seen before; it makes even the first Trump term with its innumerable horrors seem mild in comparison to the transgressions of this moment.

We are punishing hardworking people who have received Temporary Protective Status (TPS) to come and live and work in the United States in a way that should outrage us all. We are denying them the right to perform the labor that makes our country run; not to mention the aspiration and assimilation that is so foundational to what we consider the ‘American Dream’.

Without their hard work all of our lifestyle standards will be diminished.

‘America First’ ideology is denying immigrants with TPS status healthcare and daycare for their children; going out of its way to torture people who only wanted to suit up and show up - and provide for their families.

Just like the twelve million folks who passed through New York Harbor’s Ellis Island, ‘The Island of Hope’, and applied their ingenuity and determination towards building both a better life and a stronger country.

We are a better nation for it.

They achieved miracles of assimilation and it was far from easy for any of them. Now sadly, many of their own descendants are falling for a man who is actively seeking to destroy their hard-won way of life, and place this country in the sole service of oligarchs and tax-dodging corporations by appealing to MAGA’s base instincts and irrational fears.

So much of the poison that has been pumped into the minds of those most susceptible to the cynical manipulations of men like Donald Trump is reinforced by the iconography, entertainment and MAGA ethos purveyed by men like Mark Burnett, Dana White and certainly Rupert Murdoch - and of course the monetized, online world of ‘bro culture’.

It all feeds the same ignorant beast - and that monster is now perched on the South Lawn of the White House for Trump’s UFC fight extravaganza, designed to appeal to the toxically masculine morons who think an almost eighty year-old man in an adult diaper, who has never had a callous on his hands in his long, miserable life, is somehow a tough guy.

Nothing is more central to the ruse of Trumpism than making his followers believe he is somehow virile, and in command, on the world stage. He is not.

He is a bumbling, almost-octogenarian drug addict who was so unmanageable in his reality TV show days (in which I worked with his family) that his call times were always late afternoon - and even then, he cancelled much of the time.

Trump simply was not functional - or all that interested in working; a trait he shares with his children. They showed up on the ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ finale tapings as if they were some sort of royal family descending from their penthouse perches to mingle with the commoners for a few hours.

Don Jr. was a notoriously bad drunk who was semi-dry for a while, before slipping in to the obviously coked-out years of his father’s two presidential terms. Working has never really entered his mind. Junior has fleeced the MAGA faithful for years, along with his old man - before now focusing his greedy, beady eyes on the American taxpayer and no-bid Pentagon contracts.

We learned this week that the White House, courtesy of Peter Navarro, intervened on behalf of a $620 million Pentagon loan to a mining company, Vulcan Elements, that Don Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, took a stake in just three months earlier.

Besides the fast-tracked loan, the company also received $50 million in Commerce Department incentives. Don Jr.’s firm’s assets under management has grown from $200 million to $3.5 billion in a year. He refers to this success as ‘Patriotic Capitalism’, but most folks would call it what it is, corruption and graft in plain sight.

The staggering AUM adds to the long list of handouts and kickbacks he and his brother Eric have amassed in recent months by helping themselves to U.S. Defense Department contracts, and trading on their father’s presidency for private, for-profit Trump Organization development deals across the world.

Lest we forget, much of their old man’s last campaign was based around Hunter Biden’s laptop and the fact he had sold a few oil paintings.

Basically, the difference between panhandling outside on the sidewalk or walking in and robbing the bank. The MAGA faithful bought the ‘Biden Crime Family’ BS lock, stock and barrel because they were told to - by the culture that reinforces the Trump clan’s grifting and by the sleight-of-hand Donald employs with his constant demonization of Democrats and his endless dancing in front of flags.

The burp and gurgle of his increasingly erratic appearances only adds to their admiration of the man because he keeps telling them it is ok to hate who he hates.

Donald values spectacle over substance - and MAGA has been dining on the empty calories of his particular brand of french-fried fascism for so long they have come to crave the taste of the salt and the grease. The muddled masses only want more, and seldom notice how thirsty they are becoming.

Despite POTUS’s falling poll numbers and the pain at the pump, he may be able to continue to make enough of them look away with his endless opportunism. Trump will use his name being taken off of the Kennedy Center to further stoke the culture wars and brandish himself the victim once again. His constant state of aggrievement seems to be contagious.

This plays well in Peoria so to speak, whether or not the strategists want to admit it.

The musical artist cancellations for the ‘Great American State Fair’ National Mall concert series have allowed POTUS to take center stage and give a speech which will of course be endlessly re-posted by influencers, looking to build their own followings with pithy comments while inadvertently expanding Trump’s toxic reach.

The same strategy employed almost daily by a White House that full well knows his schedule is made up of ‘Executive Time’ and ‘Policy Meetings’ (code names for ‘Watch TV’ and ‘Post Online’), but slips in enough appearances of him dozing behind the Resolute Desk to feed the online clamor for content.

A raging dumpster fire of noxious flames cannot be tamed by giving it the oxygen it craves.

We would do better to focus on the human cost of POTUS’s policies - and the immoral incompetence and craven self-dealing of his Cabinet.

Our compassion is our strength: we must emphasize the opposite of the regressive ideology of ‘America First’.

Creativity, a thirst for justice and the joyful resistance of a people who will not bend in the face of such darkness is our birthright. An agenda of love and service always outweighs a selfish, immoral mindset.

True faith requires humility - in these dangerous and dispiriting times we must remind ourselves there is something greater at play than one man’s avarice and malicious incompetence.

I believe we can find that presence in each other and draw on the strength and resilience of our fellow citizens of every shape, creed and color. Our variety is a blessing; so is our desire to accept and understand each other.

It is what allows us to hold space for healing. We can find these attributes in abundance if we open our hearts to awareness.

America can only truly become a shining city on a hill when we recognize that it is, in fact, a city of immigrants. And that is never a bad thing.

Be well.

*If you enjoy reading ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

POTUS trolled both Greenland and Cuba this week, along with issuing his usual bellicose threats to further destroy Iran’s infrastructure (while disseminating a meme of an American flag superimposed over a map of Iran, labelling it ‘The United States of the Middle East’), which have become so commonplace that one almost forgets the threats themselves constitute war crimes.

Threatening to terrorize a civilian population is itself a prohibited act under the law of armed conflict.

I feel like that is worth noting on the this Memorial Day weekend; when those who are sober and serious enough to remember the sacrifice of so many, to protect the very democracy that we can all see being eroded on a daily basis by a demented bully whose only concern is enriching himself and staying in power.

We have in many ways become what we have stood against - and which the bravest among us fought so fiercely to protect.

We must honor their sacrifice by redoubling our efforts to stand up to the menace and malicious nature of the most corrupt man to ever lead our nation by a country mile.

I think of my relatives who served, as I am sure most of you do as well, this somber weekend. The gloomy rain and unseasonable cold of the East Coast provides poetic punctuation for the serious task at hand - for those of us who want to save this democracy.

In an age when we are bombarded by the silly, from Trump’s idiotic A.I. videos throwing Stephen Colbert in a trash can or his social media posts with his corpulent orange face glowering over Greenland, to the endless drivel of a thousand online pundits looking to make a buck off of this calamity - using misfortune to bilk followers without offering any particular insight or empathy - we must remember what so many stood up honorably to protect.

My paternal grandfather Harry spent much of WWII in a bomber over Germany, before dedicating his life to the U.S.A.’s intelligence and foreign service agencies.

My great uncle Paul dropped out of high school to join the Marines. He stormed Omaha Beach on D-Day, survived, and eventually went home to raise a hardworking, caring family in suburban Maryland. Never said a word about the war but let his cheerful embrace of the prosaic, middle class life do all the talking for him. He knew so many of his fellow soldiers never got that chance, so he savored it.

Paul honored their lives by living his own with humility, respect and deep appreciation of the freedoms this nation stands for, even in this ignoble hour: we would do well to remember the ideals and the stoic service of the everyday men and women who stood up when the hour of history demanded it.

As a nation, they and we were there when the world needed them - and the United States of America, sadly, can no longer make this claim. We are shifting from protector to predator under the morally corrupt leadership of Donald Trump.

Let us pray this is only a temporary catastrophe because both our aggressions and our retreats, such as the illegal war in Iran and the dismantling of USAID, have consequences that none of us can be proud of as we barrel towards more calamity led by a mendacious monster posing as a man.

Trump did not offer a single comment regarding the attacks by his pal Putin on Kyiv over the weekend. Russian missiles and drones attacked civilians in apartment buildings hospitals and schools, seemingly with the silent blessing of POTUS who has too much personal business before Vladimir’s oligarchs to offer even empty admonitions for their heinous war crimes.

Trump is a coward first and foremost - and has long been compromised by the reams of kompromat Putin holds over him, not to mention his decades of laundering Russian Mob money through his real estate holdings. Donald is a man absent of valor.

On Memorial Day I also think of a long lost great uncle I never met, my maternal grandmother’s brother, Rodger. He joined the Merchant Marines during World War II and on D-Day his assignment, along with his fellow mariners, was to sink the older ships called ‘corncobs’ that were sailing in the waters off of Normandy.

A 1,000 yards from shore they would sink ships to provide a secret breakwater for Allied amphibious landing craft; creating an artificial temporary bulwark against the waves (codename Gooseberry).

After scuttling their own vessels, they were then instructed to tread water until a fellow Merchant Marine ship rescued them. As the horrors of the D-Day invasion unfolded before his youthful, wide open eyes, my great uncle spent many hours treading water, unarmed, but that ship never came.

I cannot imagine the death and destruction he witnessed; the sights and sounds of abject horror as he struggled to stay afloat in the salty water, and the helpless nature of his circumstance. Watching so many fellow countrymen cut down as soon as they hit the beach, along with our Allied partners who fought as mightily and sacrificed just as profoundly.

All he could do was to keep from drowning - and bear witness to the infernal operation, the largest amphibious invasion in world history. He also unwittingly saw the frightful beginning of the end of the Nazi takeover of Western Europe.

Hard fought hope, springing and sprinting forth from hell itself.

The brave young men who kept storming those beaches that infamous day, and who served in the skies above, in wave after wave of lethal determination, did so knowing most of them would not come home. All it takes is a visit to the fields above Omaha Beach to realize the enormity and finality of their sacrifice.

The rows of white crosses seem endless at the Normandy American Cemetery; 9,389 graves in Colleville-sur-Mer, France. Another 1,557 names inscribed on the Walls of the Missing. They were climbing those hallowed cliffs into eternity. This is the true cost of freedom.

My great uncle was eventually pulled from the roiling and bloody waters later that evening and made it back home after the war ended.

He spent his first year back in Springfield, Massachussets sleeping in a graveyard every night, with a horse as his only companion, before eventually drifting away from my grandmother’s family altogether.

She would get a call from him out of the blue on Christmas Day sometimes, but as the years wore on those calls eventually stopped coming. My great uncle never got over that fateful day. He may have carried his own demons into battle, which would only have been amplified in the horror. As we know all too well now, the costs of war lasts long after the shooting stops.

That is why it is so insulting and dangerous to have such unworthy men in charge of our nation’s military actions.

Pete Hegseth is a pampered Ivy League prick whose greatest sacrifice is being hungover in the makeup chair at Fox News. He was pulled from his DC National Guard assignment (covering Joe Biden’s inauguration) for being an ‘extremist threat’ due to his ‘Deus Vult’ tattoo, as well as the Crusader’s cross emblazoned on his chest.

Now those Christofasct values are being actively promoted in our military. The same military that Trump skipped out on service in the Vietnam War by receiving five deferments, stemming from his infamous ‘bone spurs’ diagnosis.

Which was written up by a podiatrist who rented office space in one of Fred Trump’s Queens properties - who was threatened with a rent increase if he didn’t help the real estate developer’s temperamentally challenged playboy son dodge the draft.

I often think about how many less fortunate sons went to war in Donald’s place, while he used his time at home indulging in his character defects and ne’er-do-well ways.

No man has ever gotten away with more or given less to his country than Trump. It is never too late to change that: holding him accountable is no longer just about ending one awful criminal’s lifelong spree, it is about saving our republic and honoring those who gave all for this once great land.

DJT is not only not worthy of the office he holds, he isn’t fit to shine the shoes of those he punishes and attacks with his rhetoric and awful policies. The only thing substantial about Donald Trump is how much damage he has caused.

Which of course is not by accident, but the strategy behind his rise to power. He represents what a few who have exorbitant wealth would prefer in place of democracy.

An oligarchy run by bizarre tech bros and tasteless billionaire bozos like Jeff Bezos who looks like he shops in a Caesar’s Palace clothing boutique; he is an overstitched back pocket on Vegas jeans come to life.

The sort of paunchy, middle-aged freak that bedazzled ‘Von Dutch’ t-shirts and Chrome Hearts jewelry were created for - so their rubber-lipped, face-tuned companions could say they look virile in a hotel elevator mirror. The type of wannabe-cool billionaires who have their eyebrows sculpted and use the term ‘manscaped’ unironically.

We can take back this country from his ilk, but will only do so when we recognize who is really pulling the strings. Greed is motivating both this Cabinet and the Wall Street brokers making a fortune from this calamity.

Any corporation that gets in bed with Donald Trump’s administration should be boycotted and shunned. This includes CBS, who could not have beclowned themselves more in their desire to suck up to our mad king.

Whom we must dethrone.

Turn off the TV, put down the phone and realize you are not alone.

The future is right outside of our front door - we cannot allow these men and women to drag us into the past.

For what lies behind us was paid for in heartbreaking, immeasurable loss and tremendous sacrifice.

What lies ahead is up to us.

We honor our everyday heroes by marching forward this Memorial Day. No matter the cost.

I wish you peace.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Trump keeps bragging about the ‘military capabilities’ in his proposed structure, along with its ‘sniper positions’, as if a nation that is bogged down by inflation and an insanely expensive war in Iran somehow is clamoring to hear how many marksmen he can fit on the roof of his taxpayer-funded behemoth to ward off the invading hordes.

The Predator-in-Chief pines for battlements and potential bloodshed - and assumes we all do as well. We don’t. Saturday’s shooting outside the White House will only bolster his desire for a more fortified redoubt in DC, a testosterone-fueled, high caliber temple to Trump, staffed with his very own Praetorian Guard ready to spill blood on his behalf.

Donald burbled on the ballroom’s proposed firepower this week while visiting the dusty construction site where the East Wing once stood; presiding over a cavernous pit where an elegant and understated addition to the ‘people’s house’ once hummed with activity. (I remember delivering packages to the visitors’ check-in back in my bike messenger days and marveling at how accessible our White House seemed, as if it belonged to us).

Trump spoke a day after teenaged mass shooters influenced by far right rhetoric attacked a mosque in San Diego which left three innocent men dead.

Which of course went unremarked upon by POTUS because in doing so he would be going against one of the lynchpins of the MAGA movement: violence. Trump has always been obsessed with violence, and loves to go into graphic detail about its results.

Especially when perpetrated against young women. You need no better indicator of his deep unwellness than this ghastly attribute. Donald will go out of his way to savor the details, as if the violent acts themselves are something that should be ruminated on instead of abhorred and stopped. The kind of details that leave normal people feeling nauseous, Trump finds titillating.

Of course, the political violence and the evil acts perpetrated by those dangerous and demented souls that are inspired by his rageful invective never receive a mention.

This is the only area where he has any rhetorical discipline when it comes to his ‘America First’ poison. The assassination of Democratic politicians in Minnesota last year and the killing of a police officer in Atlanta outside of the CDC were all perpetrated by killers aligned and influenced by the MAGA movement. Not to mention the horrific murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE officers this past winter in Minneapolis.

Trump preys on vulnerable and demented psyches because he feels a kinship with the broken; the con man always understands the instincts of the mark. In Trump’s case, imploring others to violence is merely a cost of doing business and achieving his personal objectives.

And he knows how and when to keep his mouth shut after it happens, or paint himself as the true victim. He has done this over his entire career - and certainly in regard to all of the convenient deaths that seem to follow his rise to power.

An arc of atrocity for which he alone always benefits. It has of course moved well beyond his unlucky Atlantic City casino executives boarding a rented helicopter on a one way trip to a fatal crash on a Garden State Parkway median strip - to attacks on anyone who stands in his way, domestically or internationally.

POTUS’s Pentagon is summarily executing innocent fisherman in the waters off the coast of South America seemingly for target practice, but the real reason is to put on a menacing, imperialist show of force.

DJT’s attack on Venezuela and the capture of Nicolás Maduro was an extension of this mobster mentality. He went in for the oil - and openly brags about how much money the move has made him.

Trump is using warfare on multiple fronts to distract from his role in the Epstein files, his plummeting poll numbers and most importantly for him, as a chance to further enrich his family - by manipulating markets and self-dealing to his sons with Department of Defense contracts.

The leader of the free world is using this long holiday weekend for another round of ‘will I strike a deal or obliterate Iran?’ game show style diplomacy; its only purpose is to extend his own crime spree. The latest deal he has announced is essentially a retreat as he wants to be done and to move on to Cuba, and perhaps Greenland, as insane as that sounds.

The Middle East will be much more unstable and dangerous in perpetuity, while he and his brood have stuffed their pockets, abused our service members and allowed thousands to be killed on the whim of a geriatric drug addict.

Trump’s Pentagon is run by a pugnacious weasel who seems like he was genetically engineered out of Axe body spray, Captain Morgan’s rum and hair gel. Willing to do the bidding of his boss - as long as he gets to flex some bicep in front of the troops.

I have met his kind before - alcoholic sexual predators turned Christofascist proselytizers. Greg Kelly comes to mind, he and Pete are cut from the same cloth. It was the mentality of the entire Fox News network; smarmy, privileged frat bros who got away with the crimes and sexual predation.

Our nation’s healthcare his being run by a man, who along with his little brother, started using heroin when he was still a teenager; the younger sibling, David, sadly died alone from the disease of addiction over forty years ago in a Palm Beach hotel room.

The older brother graduated to decades of addiction and abusive predatory behavior - and went on to become our country’s Health and Human Services Secretary. Anyone who met RFK Jr. along the way can testify to what a loathsome and unstable person he has always been.

Since taking over at HHS, the wayward Kennedy has defunded $2 billion from evidence-based pharmaceutical interventions for opioid use disorders in favor of ‘holistic lifestyle alternatives, exercise and abstinence-oriented wellness farms’. He absorbed the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) into a newly formed entity called ‘Administration for Healthy America’ (AHA).

Tell someone living on the streets in desperate need of a methadone program and a bed in a treatment facility what they really need is more exercise and a protein smoothie. RFK Jr. will make the scourge of addiction and its deleterious impacts on our society exponentially worse.

Like all of Trump’s appointees, and the crackpot Commander-in-Chief himself, their real task is to break things, to destroy a functioning governmental system and turn it into a grifters’ paradise. How many grants will HHS now hand out to opportunists looking to take advantage of families suffering from the ravages of addiction.

RFK Jr. now sells the integrity of HHS to tobacco companies - and prosecutes a war on vaccines in the shadow of the deadliest global pandemic in over a century.

Ebola is back in the news with a vicious outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, made worse by the gutting of USAID. Our public healthcare apparatus, both domestically and abroad, has been dismantled and degraded on purpose, and its effect is to weaken our national security at the very same time the ranks of the uninsured climb to over 25 million in the United States - thanks to the expiration of expanded federal subsidies for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

The GOP Congress who passed Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’, which was largest transfer of wealth into the hands of billionaires in our nation’s history, allowed the Covid-era pandemic protections to expire in deference to the mean-spirited ethos of the Republican Party and their complete obsequiousness to DJT and the oligarchs.

Have a people ever been so abused by those elected to lead them?

Of course the icing on the cake of this awful week was the $1.776 billion Trump just handed himself that will be used to both reward the January 6th insurrectionists, and to fund a shadow militia he will very likely use to attempt to steal the next election.

Make no mistake about Donald Trump’s intention to stay in power as long as his own health makes that possible. My guess is the only way Trump leaves DC is when he shuffles off this mortal coil, and in that case MAGA will still try to retain the power he wielded - by making him into some sort of deity who is guiding MAGA from beyond the grave.

If you can’t picture a teary-eyed Erika Kirk standing center stage in his gold trimmed ballroom speaking of how Trump spoke to her in prayer and endorsing some future ‘America First’ candidate, you may have a failure of imagination. It’s all a carnival show.

The White House ballroom he is building is not just a bunker designed to protect him through the throes of his next attempted coup d’etat, it is a bulwark against democracy itself. He will fill it with Christofascist felons speaking in tongues in honor of his movement and will allow organizations like TPUSA and CPAC to promote the ‘America First’ movement under the auspices of the White House grounds. DJT will be selling proximity, and the officialdom of the ‘America First’ movement.

Press access will be doled out based on varying degrees of complicity; tragically, the corporate media has mostly expressed their fealty and their desire to play ball to be in the room (pun intended).

Can you not picture Fox News broadcasting from the side of the stage at official, highly partisan, MAGA events and piping this sort of faux patriotic pablum into the homes of red state America? Trump knows his audience - and his upcoming UFC fight at the White House on the Fourth of July is but a harbinger of things to come. He understands that he has reduced much of our body politic to base level, reality show entertainment.

The Hatch Act is all but dead in this administration: they will do all they can to further their grift and hold on power. White House events have already turned into informercials - Trump is merely scaling up this operation with his gigantic ballroom.

The odious emperor is entering his bread and circuses era.

That is why he is so obsessed with the expedited construction of it; he knows he will make a fortune from fees for those who use it, and will only allow it to be used by those who will further his ideological cause. This extends to any heir apparent - and I promise you, as bad as he is, his sons have the potential to be just as bad, if not worse.

Trump is the charming one when it comes to that family, as strange as it sounds. His children are far more execrable and irascible in person, and every bit as corrupt and calculating.

They know who their father is and has always been, and and were more than happy to go along with his crimes to live the lives of endless privilege and pillaging they all enjoy. You will never meet any of his offspring that say, ‘I am wealthy enough, I should try and give back to this country that has given me so much’.

They all just grasp for more proximity to power and profit.

Even his grandkids become online grifters and YouTube influencers. No penny is too petty for their manicured hands to reach for, it would almost be comical if it wasn’t so gross and detrimental to the health of our nation.

It’s not enough for Trump and his clan to make a fortune, the only way they ever feel sated is knowing that others are suffering because of their privilege. If this sounds too harsh I will remind you I was Vanky’s handler on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’, and as I often tell people, she and Jared are the ones you really need to watch - especially when they lurk in the shadows.

They will all now live without the threat of any IRS audits going forward, thanks to the deal Trump was able to cut with his own Department of Justice under the awful and illegal authority of his former lawyer Todd Blanche. A man who makes every acidic joke ever made about a lawyers going back to Shakespeare’s days not seem harsh enough.

Has one person ever been so nakedly corrupt as Blanche before? (Admittedly, he occupies a crowded field, Trump 2.0 is the Kentucky Derby of graft). So willing to allow this nation’s laws to become usurped and defiled by a man whose only desire is to enrich himself and escape accountability for his crimes, which of course include decades of sexual predation.

If the full unredacted Epstein files were to be released, the world would know in an instant that Trump not only abused under-aged girls, he trafficked them along with his best friend and associate for well over a decade, Jeffrey Epstein.

Ghislaine Maxwell, of course, knows this - and it is why Todd Blanche visited her in prison, arranged for her cushy transfer and probable commutation of her sentence, if not an outright pardon.

They met to get their stories straight and protect the boss. My friend who was groomed by Trump, who began flirting with her when she was twelve years-old and taking figure skating lessons at his ice rink in Central Park, later told me of the awful crimes Trump and Epstein perpetrated in his NYC townhouse, knows how prominent a role Ghislaine played in the operation. So do many other survivors.

As does Melania Trump, who often partied with Ghislaine around town at events, and was no stranger to the underworld and deviant proclivities of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. No matter how dumb she plays it regarding the matter now.

Trump’s own children and his one living ex-wife all understand the dynamics and criminal exposure of their father should more of the Epstein files be released. None of them will talk, or lift a finger on behalf of justice for the thousands of victims. Vanky herself swam in the same circles as a teenage model signed by Elite Models’ founder John Casablancas, with the blessings of her own father.

One must ask why the story went away so quickly in the mainstream media - after Melania’s bizarre presser at the White House concerning the Epstein files and the insinuations regarding the ex-girlfriend of Paolo Zampolli.

Zampolli had a modeling business that clearly served as a front for sex trafficking young women and girls to wealthy clients, of which Jeffrey Epstein was in fact a partner. He now holds an official position in the current administration, as U.S. Special Representative for Global Partnerships. Does giving such a man a prominent role feel like the actions of a POTUS who is innocent, or a passive player in the Epstein files?

Of course not. This administration and its associates are a criminal cabal made up of folks who are well versed in the underworld, and their hold on power is their best insurance against ever being held accountable for their crimes.

That is why they are working so hard now to consolidate their power - and why the DOJ slush fund of almost two billion dollars is such a dangerous precedent.

Trump himself can dole this money out anonymously to folks who will not only do his bidding, they will help insulate him from his past crimes. It is a boon for those wishing to make the Epstein files and the survivors of his awful sex-trafficking operation go away forever.

I have no doubt Acting AG Todd Blanche was well aware of this strategically, and it is why he was so quick to sign off on the monetarily exorbitant deal. He knew full well both the IRS lawyers and DOJ could have successfully defended themselves against Trump’s collusive lawsuit and he rewarded him anyway.

His job it to protect his client, not the American people.

We need to see the big picture on all of this and expose this corruption for what it is; a further effort to help Trump escape accountability for his crimes.

We should claw back every dime they have absconded with over the course of his administration - and pay the true victims of his malfeasance and decades of predation.

We should also not allow those who profited from keeping silent, such as his children and spouses, to keep the funds they are receiving as a result of Trump’s crimes against our country and the rule of law.

Furthermore, we must clearly speak to the dangers of the MAGA movement and no longer accept a feckless media and political establishment that refuses to elucidate the existential threat to our democracy Trump poses. Or worse, normalizes it.

Otherwise it is simply trouble waiting to happen.

Be well.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Our geriatric, drug-addicted POTUS will indulge in posting AI-generated memes and cartoonish images of himself as a virile Commander-in-Chief consorting with muscular aliens (I’m not making this up) before finally surfacing at 4:30pm for a ‘Healthcare Affordability Event’.

Of course, there is no actual GOP plan for healthcare and the coverage I personally have received for the last 15 years through the ACA expires in 5 weeks. After that, like millions of Americans, I will head into uncertainty and skyrocketing health insurance costs while Trump rakes in billions by exploiting the office of the presidency for his own financial gain.

Trump’s trip to China was President Xi summoning him like an employee, and not only telling him the US was no longer to protect Taiwan and sell them arms - he literally fed him talking points that Donald was to later deliver on Fox News.

It was as low as an American president has sunk on the world stage, mirroring the time Trump groveled before Putin in Helsinki during his first term. Both of those dictatorial leaders are aware of Trump’s long history of sexual predation; President Xi certainly used POTUS’s desire to distract from the Epstein files to get over on the United States.

We are paying a huge price for Trump’s loathsome past, his criminality, his bottomless greed and ignorance. The only success DJT ever points to diplomatically are his own relationships with these dictators because they make sure to promise him that he will personally benefit financially.

This is not governance, it is punitive incompetence and abject corruption.

The Trump administration bombed a school in the opening hours of his ill-conceived and illegal war with Iran in early March.

It is now the third week of May and the Pentagon still won’t take the blame for the lethal mistake that killed 175 children. That is not accountability nor is it our nation acting honorably, as we have the right to expect. It is as far from sober and moral leadership as we have known in our lifetimes.

It is, in essence, exactly what it was designed to be when Pete Hegseth was appointed to the position he was woefully unqualified for - and subsequently fired and demoted all of the career military brass who would stand in the way of what his broken personality desired.

Hegseth summarily purged the upper echelons of the Pentagon of the character and experience that made our military so professional and competent.

He did this to create the sort of Christofascist killing machine he pines for with his goofy, toxically masculine rhetoric and endless physical training videos with our troops. Pilsner Pete stands like a caricature of a smarmy frat boy overdosing on creatine and his first taste of hazing vulnerable pledges. One of those guys who spends his entire workout looking at himself in the gym mirror and uses terms like ‘jacked’ un-ironically.

In summation, he’s a complete tool.

Our Secretary of War gets off on the worst parts of military culture, and masculinity in general, whilst eschewing the very attributes that lead to real manhood: responsibility, ethics, a conscious awareness of the horrors of war and a desire for restraint and compassion over a lust for blood. Having Pete lead our military is one of the biggest indicators of America’s retreat from its responsibilities on the world stage and its disregard for global well being.

He is doing exactly what anyone who knew him in his years as an alcoholic sexual predator at Fox News would expect him to given the awesome powers of his appointment as Secretary of Defense.

Ending service members careers, mindlessly killing without any sense of accountability or remorse, and following the orders of a clueless madman and a consortium of reactionary Christian pastors who prey on the maladjusted minds of stunted men like Hegseth.

Our very own Rambo-wannabe is living proof of the sort of mediocrity Trump has always sought it to accomplish his true goal: breaking things. Donald has a sixth sense when it comes to finding the folks that will have absolutely no qualms helping him accomplish his twisted goals.

One of Pocket Square Pete’s first actions was to dismantle the office set up to prevent civilian deaths, established by his predecessor, former Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin; a man who is everything Pete is not, and whose kind we sadly may not see again in service of our nation while Trump is in charge.

The Civilian Harm Mitigation Response Office (CMRH) was gutted of dozens of positions designed to prevent the sort of collateral damage this administration celebrates.

The Trump regime not only does not want an effective CMRH, they want to use their mindless acts of violence to punctuate their sophomoric memes and barbaric saber rattling. This is not to say there is dishonor among the rank and file service members, but the upper echelons of our military have been going along with what history will come to record as an awful and ignoble moment.

We are only a year and a half into Trump’s second term and he has ordered bombing in seven countries while starting major military ‘excursions’ in two without the consent of Congress, or the blessing of the American people. POTUS is building a war machine to benefit his own business interests - and innocent people are suffering and dying.

Which, given the Trump I knew in my years on television production, will only please him further. He is a very unwell and demented man, and the same family that failed to protect the world from such a bad seed is now profiting from his reckless military misadventures - most prominently his two eldest sons.

They know that the more wars their old man starts while in office, the longer they will profit from all the businesses they are starting that are now receiving U.S. Defense Department contracts.

If you don’t think Cuba is next on this list, you’re not paying attention: they are already laying the groundwork.

Look for a preemptive attack on the communist Caribbean island in the near future -under the guise of preventing them from seeking weapons that could harm the United States, most probably drones.

Trump has also dispatched the odious Louisiana Governor, Jeff Landry, to Greenland this week to insert himself in the Future Greenland Conference in order to sow discord and use the power of the United States to bully an ally, all to assuage Trump’s imperialist interests.

It will also provide further distraction from the Epstein files and give Putin a little cover from the successful assaults by Ukraine on Moscow. All of these things are related; POTUS is essentially a marionette dancing on strings that are being pulled by much more powerful men interested in creating a multipolar world.

The good news is we do not have to accept this insanity.

If Americans truly want to stop Donald Trump, they may be called upon to not only give up certain levels of comfort but to acquaint themselves with the truth - and share it like gospel.

It is not hard to see the motivations of corporate men and women in service of MAGA and its mad king. We must lean into the hope and history of our collective common good. When we come together in service of justice and equanimity we can drive out the darkness.

The danger that Trump poses requires us to move beyond our fear - and closer to love, compassion and empathy. Bravery takes place in the day-to-day actions of the righteous folks willing to stand up and be counted.

To act with kindness over enmity, generosity of spirit over greed and a desire to transcend this bitter and broken moment for the beauty and stillness that comes from an enlightened heart and a focused mind.

We owe it to ourselves and we owe to the world not to fall for the distractions or the forced complacency of despair.

If we want to save this planet from its current chaos and calamity each of us must find ways to do our part in our daily lives.

Every action has consequence and we must always choose aggressive non-violence and awareness. Take these words not as an indictment but as a call to peaceful arms; a return to sanity.

We must rise up like a thunderclap and make our presence known.

There are many who would show us the way, we would do well to listen.

Peace.

*If you enjoy reading ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

POTUS is now promising to withhold a congressionally approved arms sale to the island nation off the coast of mainland China to benefit President Xi, the communist dictator of perhaps our greatest economic and geopolitical adversary.

It is not just American spinelessness on the world stage, it is a complete abdication of the values and moral strength of a once mighty nation in service of oligarchy and incompetence.

Six months into the global pandemic, which would go on to claim over a million American lives in large part to due to Trump’s incompetence, Trump called Covid-19 ‘Kung-Flu’ to wild applause, cheers and laughter from a MAGA youth crowd, ‘Students for Trump’, in Arizona.

At a time when large public gatherings were still a very bad idea and widely prohibited, Trump broke with protocol and started hosting MAGA rallies again in June 2020, which exponentially contributed to the lethal spread long before a vaccine was widely available. Those events killed some of his associates, including Herman Cain, and many hundreds of Secret Service agents tested positive for Covid-19; all for Donald’s own ego and to bolster a campaign for re-election he would go on to lose.

Trump made a global health pandemic infinitely worse to assuage his boredom and feed his narcissism. His xenophobic comments of that time also included ‘China Virus’ which was always a big crowd pleaser for his base.

That same POTUS is now back in power and was in China this past week begging President Xi to open up more of the communist nation’s trade to the wealthiest of American tech titans.

Including the execrable Elon Musk, who builds more than half of his Tesla vehicles in China. The rest of the accident prone, shoddily assembled vehicles are made in non-union factories, under often dangerous and exploitative conditions, here in the United States. Dude’s a real prince and happens to be the wealthiest man alive, dwarfing his nearest rival, his net worth now approaching a trillion dollars.

The ever-awkward ketamine enthusiast looked bored and stoned as he sat for selfies with his Chinese EV competitors at a banquet given for the American delegation in Tiananmen Square’s Great Hall. Visibly huffing and smirking in his half-robot, half-dork-who-thinks-he’s-actually-funny fashion.

I will still never forgive SNL for allowing Musk to host, but then I’ve held a grudge since Lorne Michaels platformed Steve Forbes during the 1996 presidential campaign (he subsequently banned Rage Against the Machine for life for protesting the Republican billionaire’s appearance, as they were that episode’s musical guests).

I’ve spent too much time in the in the industry and New York City to fool myself about where the allegiance of most of our media institutions lies at the end of the day. NBC begged Mark Burnett for the ‘Apprentice’ and we shot the first finale of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ on SNL’s stage in Studio 8H. The first place I witnessed Trump abuse Adderall and struggle to read three syllable words such as ‘arbitrage’.

At the end of the day TV is a business and money talks. Democracy walks.

Musk’s presence in Beijing was clearly meant to signify the co-leadership role he has with President Trump, to whom he delivered the last election; without Elon’s support no future MAGA candidate will even attempt to run. Any talk of a rift between the two men was hopeful at best. He will not easily vacate the position he has purchased at the seat of power. Nor will the other titans in attendance.

Trump and his corporate friends were not there to help the people he is charged with leading, but once again to serve his own interests and those who will make him richer.

Eric Trump traveled aboard Air Force One with his vitriolic wife, Lara, to help solidify a deal for Chinese-made equipment needed for the various military industrial companies he now co-owns with his brother Don Jr., including construction equipment for a U.S. Defense Department contract they have in Kazakhstan; mining tungsten for use in weaponry and computer chips for their various military grade drone companies. They sought another $400 million of U.S. tax payer dollars just this past week for their tungsten mine.

Trump’s second term is the largest windfall ever for Team Trump and makes their years laundering money for the Russian Mob and selling condos through anonymous LLCs to the unsavory characters of the world look like child’s play. Not to mention how successful they have been in recent weeks in getting Trump’s prodigious role in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring out of the headlines of most major media outlets.

The only surprising thing is that Vanky didn’t join in on the merriment, but she presumably had her fill of self-dealing during Daddy’s first term when she received dozens of fast-tracked trademark requests from China for her various businesses.

Trump has always had deep financial ties to mainland China (in addition to his once secret bank account), and used to explore business pursuits in the region. At one point he paid the CCP $188,561 in taxes, much more than he ever paid to his own government; beginning in 2008 he rented most of the 20th floor of Trump Tower to Communist China’s largest bank (ICBC) netting him millions annually.

This is not a man who negotiates, he is a man who accepts bribes and doles out no bid contracts in exchange for kickbacks and is the very reason laws and regulations were established against such self-dealing and corruption in the first place.

DJT represents everything our government tried to regulate, and legislate against, for 250 years: he is our republic’s worst character defects made manifest.

If his clan could still employ child labor or indentured servants they would be all too happy to exploit the suffering of others for their own profit. He has spoken almost wistfully of ‘the good old days’ and criticized the Smithsonian for focusing on ‘how bad slavery was’.

Trump regularly used racial epitaphs and derogatory slurs on the set of ‘The Apprentice’; I personally heard him use the ‘N-word’ to describe a contestant at a taping of a ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ finale in New York City.

When he was shooting ‘B-roll’ in a helicopter ahead of the first season of his NBC reality show, Trump looked out the window at his native borough of Queens below him and went on a racist tirade regarding how the ethnic demographics of the various neighborhoods had shifted since his youth, unleashing a trifecta of slurs to emphasize his ignorance and intolerance.

These sort of racist statements have always been a trademark of Donald Trump and are a partial reason why he makes those around him sign NDAs (the other of course is his criminality and sexual predation). When Trump ran in 2016, Burnett let it be known in the TV production world that he would sue anyone who spoke out about his behavior on set.

I had colleagues who attempted to discourage me from speaking out and I never considered it for a moment. It bothers me that more didn’t understand the urgency of the moment or waited for their NDAs to expire.

To me that is as bad as the sort of ‘saving it for the book’ brand of journalism that has always swirled around Donald Trump. We must put aside self-interest when such a villainous opponent of freedom and equality is soaked in venality and avarice.

The man was involved in over four thousand lawsuits before he ran for POTUS; he has used his army of lawyers and the courts to his advantage but that only really works if you are afraid.

That isn’t to say he hasn’t done tremendous damage to innocent people’s lives through frivolous lawsuits-he indeed has, many times, but we must recognize his malicious use of the judiciary to advance his assault of our country’s norms, and to serve his own needs - or escape accountability for his lifetime of crimes.

Trump has broken our nation’s government in this incendiary moment; he and his ‘America First’ cohorts did so by weaponizing the bigotry and ignorance of millions of Americans who should have known better by now but still don’t.

Nothing belies Trump’s claims as a working class MAGA populist more than his corporate guest list for his trip to Beijing. It is a ‘who’s who’ of titans of industry and finance.

There isn’t a blue collar in sight.

POTUS’s allegiance was always with the Larry Fink’s (BlackRock CEO) of the world; the fact that he rose to prominence conning the ‘Larry the Cable Guys’ of red state U.S.A. will never not be a bitter and tragic irony.

Trump despises the sort of folks that worship at his swollen feet.

Their misjudgment of his true nature and motivations will leave their communities, their farms, factories and hospitals, so broken they may never fully recover. What was once America’s breadbasket and heartland will turn into data centers and desperation. Self-inflicted destruction.

Trump had trades in his personal stock portfolio on 7 of the 17 companies represented in his trip to Beijing. Most substantially, NVIDIA with whom he placed a multimillion dollar trade in February before their deal with META was announced.

Trump’s stock portfolio alone is not just a conflict of interest, it is a crime in plain sight - and our chance to do something about it is slipping away.

The war chest they are amassing, filled by both by the tech oligarchs and the corrupt Trump administration Cabinet members and allies, will be leveraged against freedom and democracy for decades.

Trump is currently negotiating with the DOJ he sued as POTUS for ten billion dollars. He is apparently on the verge of accepting a 1.7 billion dollar settlement, which will be distributed to January 6th defendants and other strategic consorts of his administration and neofascist movement.

This staggering amount will be used as a private fund to pay for his mercenaries and a shadow government. POTUS will preside over a small coterie of board members who can doll out the money to anonymous recipients. This is not only unprecedented, it is extremely dangerous given Trump’s history of malfeasance and violence. I believe he will use whatever methods he can to stay in power.

What this deal essentially represents is a victory for the collusive lawsuit he brought against the Justice Department and IRS for revealing through documents leaked to the New York Times (from IRS subcontractor Charles E. Littlejohn who is now serving five years in a federal penitentiary) that Donald Trump paid only $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and had paid $0 (zero!) dollars in taxes for ten of the fifteen years prior. Part of his scam has always been to claim massive business losses, while at the same time publicly, of course, claiming to be a billionaire.

This tax period covers the time he hosted a reality show on NBC which was predicated on his business acumen and opulent wealth. I paid more in taxes working on the show as a production assistant than its host.

Which is of course why he refused to release his tax returns during his first presidential campaign (along with his various foreign entanglements).

Had he done so, his con job of the American people may have been harder to accomplish; he of course instinctively knew that, and it’s why he kept stalling and promising to release his federal income tax returns when his ‘audit’ was through. A variance on the ‘it’s coming in two weeks’ BS that is a bedrock of his entire shell game in politics.

Tax evasion has been a lifelong pursuit for the Trump clan going back to Fred Trump Sr.; if this DOJ settlement is corroborated it is not only a massive blow to the rule of law, it is an unjust affirmation of his ridiculous claims of governmental weaponization against him by President Biden’s Justice Department.

The DOJ under the tortoise-like tutelage of Attorney General Merrick Garland, basically allowed Trump to run out the clock concerning his cases and get a free pass for his myriad crimes - including the stealing of top secret classified documents related to his Trump Organization business interests overseas, most especially in the Middle East.

Now they are placing him above the law, in concert with a SCOTUS which has enabled his every felonious instinct. It is no accident a giant banner featuring Trump’s scowling visage now hangs over the entrance to DOJ’s headquarters in DC.

POTUS has once again painted himself as the victim and been successful in his bogus claims against our government, which will only further embolden the true believers of his ‘I am your retribution’ schtick. The more he gets to say ‘see, I was right’ to the folks most susceptible to his brainwashing, the closer we come to contested elections and more attempted coups d’état on the horizon.

I worry about the precedent he is setting now that his successors may follow. Including his sons who no doubt have their beady eyes on the golden throne at this very moment.

This abysmal settlement is also apparently freeing him and his family from any IRS audits going forward, which, if the worst case scenario is realized, will have essentially allowed the biggest family of grifters in the our nation’s history to live tax free and above the law for the rest of their lives.

Not to mention rewarding Trump and his allies for the unprecedented violence he fomented and unleashed on our democracy when he lost the election in 2020 and then sent his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol, and attempted to hang his own Vice President to stop the Congressional process of certifying the electors’ votes and formally announcing the results.

An election that to this day he still claims to have won and acceptance of this absurd proposition has become a litmus test to prove loyalty within his ‘America First’ party.

Good luck stopping him next time. Our DOJ just made it much harder. And he knows it.

It’s gonna be long walk home.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Entertainment designed to appeal to the MAGA masses too blinded by the smiling faces of what they believe ‘real’ American families look like to realize the MTV ‘Road Rules’ guy has been a disaster over his entire appointment is cheating them out of safe transportation and enriching his own family, while giving Trump the programming he desires.

I often freelanced at MTV in the period in which Sean Duffy was there and trust me when I tell you, nobody associated with that network should be in a position of power in our government, ever.

If you learn anything from me, let it be to not ever trust anyone you ever saw on reality TV in public office.

They are replacing actual governing with right wing entertainment designed to bolster the cultural hold they have over their base. This was Kristi Noem’s role as well, with all of her cosplay cowgirl stunts; something she engaged in quite prodigiously before finally running afoul of the boss and being replaced with the new DHS Cornhole Cowboy, Markwayne Mullin, who has enriched himself immeasurably since ascending into political life and just this week threatened a surge of ICE agents into New York City.

Minneapolis inspired the nation with their brave stand against Trump’s jackbooted thugs this past, brutal winter; they paid with the lives of too courageous and innocent citizens whose names shall never be forgotten, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

If ICE became so bogged-down in a city rightly known for its niceness and civility how does the self-dealing little beard bro think he is gonna be greeted in The Big Apple? Having lived in New York City and the surrounding area for the better part of four decades, I can promise DHS they will have bitten off much more than they can handle if they bring that fascist act to the five boroughs (Staten Island excepted, of course).

Trump may be teeing up another distraction - and a way to crack down and cause chaos and strife in advance of the looming midterms and the further instability of the domestic economy, as energy prices continue to climb over the hot summer months.

I grew up with a single mom in the 1970s and early 80s, until I later moved in with my grandparents. I lived in neighborhoods where latchkey kids came home to empty refrigerators and relied on school lunch programs to be fed during the day. After school and summer programs provided arts and cultural education to children with limited resources and opportunities.

I saw Ronald Reagan come in and gut those programs - the cruelty of it and what it does to a childhood has never left me.

What we are witnessing now almost makes that time look innocent, and the amount of suffering and the staunching of individual progress in favor of misery for the masses, while the few control everything and profit obscenely is not a world we want to leave to future generations.

A country that no longer invests in its children is not a place that can ever be called great.

We must stand up to this tyranny with all of our might, imagination and faith in a better day.

These are hard times, make no mistake, but there is unity and empathy in the human soul that we must draw on in these difficult times.

I believe in the dreams that still seem far way. I believe in the creativity and spirit of a nation peopled with so many different colors and creeds. Our diversity is our strength. A paintbox of many colors makes a masterpiece when the brush is in the right hands.

I saw Bruce Springsteen earlier this week, he was trenchant and passionate and at times his same old jubilant self, yet focused on this moment with a renewed vigor. The Mighty E Street Band, so famously built for hard times, providing the rollicking backdrop the Boss always needs to get his message and magic across.

I first saw them in the summer of 1985, as a fourteen year-old kid, when an uncle generously bought me a scalped ticket in the parking lot of Giants Stadium on the ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ tour. We sat in the upper tier and it changed my life: I wanted in on whatever it was that moved so many people. Sixteen years later I worked my first of many gigs for Bruce as a runner on a ten show engagement at Madison Square Garden at the end of the ‘Reunion Tour’, and I was able to repay that same uncle’s generosity with floor seats and backstage passes.

I had recently moved in with my grandparents that steamy late summer Labor Day night I first saw the Boss, into a house in upstate New York about a mile from where the 1949 Peekskill Riots had taken place; where a mob of angry white folks attacked concertgoers, and performers such as Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie for giving a free concert in support of labor unions and racial equality.

The supporters were attacked with racial and antisemitic slurs, and accused of being Communists by reactionary working class white folks choosing to stand in the way of progress and equanimity.

I grew up with some of their offspring in my high school years. There were always two sides of the coin in American life, those who stand in the way and those who seek justice and equality. I had listened to Springsteen on my little clock radio as a kid and the stories reminded me of the people and places I had seen, from Baltimore on up the Eastern Seaboard, the late 1970s seemed like one big Bruce song.

It moved me and taught me about hope and the promise of a better life through hard work - and that sometimes, no matter how hard you work, the cards may be stacked against you.

We are doing that once again now, stacking cards against our fellow Americans and denying them not only the right for representation, but punishing them solely on the basis of their skin.

The hard working immigrants targeted by ICE, the majority Black district in Tennessee stripped of their congressional representation, are part of the same through line of injustice in American life - and one we must work against with a renewed fervor.

I was fortunate enough to bear witness to that bright day in January 2009, in advance of President Obama’s first inauguration, when Bruce, Pete Seeger and Woody’s grandson, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, sang ‘This Land is Your Land’ on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

As far as the eye could see, millions of people had gathered in the bitter cold to see this nation make good on a promise. I watched from the steps as they sang, standing next to David Axelrod, whom I presumptuously thanked for his role in the election. He smiled, put his arm on my shoulder and said, ‘Turn around,’ and we both looked out at millions of smiling faces stretching all the way back to the U.S. Capitol.

‘I didn’t make it happen, THEY made it happen! That’s how this works,’ David wisely said to me. He was indeed correct.

I got it. I could feel it. So could they.

We need to summon that spirit again.

When Pete, Bruce and Tao walked back into the tent after their performance, I asked Tao about the twelve string guitar he had been playing. It was the iconic instrument Pete had used to sing all those amazing Guthrie songs written by his dear friend Woody; brought out special for this once in a lifetime occasion.

Tao looked at me and lifted up the face of the instrument to discover a giant crack that appeared on its weathered wooden top. ‘Aww man, it cracked in the cold,’ he said to me.

I replied exuberantly, ‘That’s ok man, this was definitely the moment to give up the ghost…that guitar rose to the occasion and gave its all, that crack makes its journey complete, Woody would be proud!’

It wasn’t destruction but resolution, a fulfillment of destiny, delivered not by kings or rich men but by the masses, the everyday folks that this country truly belongs to - and who came together and made that election, and that beautiful day, happen.

We will make the next one happen too.

And the one after that.

‘From California, to the New York Island

This land was made for you and me’

Keep the faith.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but your support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.

We’ve all seen the bruises on his hands at this point, yet the mainstream media continues to ignore the story, and the reality of his rapid and increasing decline. Trump rambles and slurs his way through curated press events which have become a daily sort of ‘proof of life’ for the drug-addled geriatric who otherwise has the thinnest of presidential schedules in modern history.

The White House staff fill his daily calendar with phrases like ‘Executive Time’ and ‘The President participates in a Policy Meeting’ which are designed to mask both his unmanageability and complete lack of work ethic.

Often, Trump posts to his social media accounts during the hours designated as policy meetings - reacting in real time to something he just saw on television, belying his own administration’s attempts to provide cover for his dysfunctional schedule.

For the last two Saturdays in a row his Presidential Daily Schedule, as published by Roll Call, has been suspiciously missing: it jumps from Friday to Sunday (they publish Saturday after the fact, and last week included his mysterious leaving his golf course to travel to a ‘dentist’ in Jupiter, Florida late in the afternoon in full golf attire).

There’s a complete dental unit in the White House for security purposes - so the White House’s excuse that his visit was ‘previously scheduled’ does not stand up to scrutiny and points to something else. Yesterday, there was no indication of his whereabouts until a White House Press Pool reporter noted POTUS was traveling to his Trump National Golf Course around 2pm ET where Donald watched part of a LIV Golf Tournament behind bullet proof glass with his son Eric, Larry Glick, an Executive VP at The Trump Organization, and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, Governor of the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia.

My guess is he wasn't doing the business of the people.

I have watched this pattern occur over the last year, where the Office of Presidential Scheduling leaves Saturdays open and vague. My assumption is POTUS is receiving some sort of medical treatments in the mornings (which would explain the pronounced bruising, often clearly visible in the earlier part of the week).

Trump confidently boasts of ‘acing’ his three cognitive tests every chance he gets like a man who is the last to know old age has robbed him of both lucidity and vigor. (Truth be told he was never anything approaching healthy, and would ask for a golf cart to bring him from his SUV into the Museum of Natural History where we taped the last few ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ finales. A distance of about a hundred feet was more than he cared to travel on his own; part of this is sheer laziness and part of it was failing health even then).

POTUS has clearly not been told by his doctors the cognitive tests are given to detect dementia in elderly patients. DJT instead uses it as an opportunity to brag that he is the only president to take them, how difficult they are, and that Barack Obama, the former President of Harvard Law Review, U.S. Senator and first Black President of the United States would not do as well as the man who once lost a fight to an umbrella, and still uses his finger to read.

Is there any universe in which anyone thinks those two men are approaching anything close to equal in terms of intellect or physical stamina? I have watched Jared and Ivanka make fun of the fact that Donald does not read and has no interest in it. Trump is famous for driving his golf cart all the way on to the putting green, both to cheat by arriving ahead of his opponents, and to avoid even the slightest physical exertion.

POTUS thinks the term ‘asylum seekers’ means that migrants were released from a mental health facility, not fleeing political prosecution; a distinction he has failed to make now over the course of two presidencies. It says a lot about the caliber of the staff around him that nobody has sought to correct him of this false notion. Instead they prefer to let him stumble along in his stupidity. Donald is not merely slipping, he is lost, and his disinhibition and demented nature are making an already aberrant and violent personality all the more dangerous.

The press should call this out and not simply dance around the issue.

We are not talking here of some harmless geriatric slipping into mumbled remembrances of times gone by, but a violent man who sees himself on par with Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte - and wants to reshape the world around him into some sort of empire of idiocy.

A monument to the bad taste and predatory instincts of the worst human being to ever hold higher office in the United States of America. Who has so successfully burst through any guardrails and decorum that he has formed around him a phalanx of sycophantic GOP senators and representatives, and stacked our judiciary with such a corrupt and venal coterie of judges that the stink of partisanship they emit would make a mangrove swamp in July smell sweet by comparison. These men and women are not simply partisan, they are treasonous.

They are stripping away the rights of the citizens they were sworn to protect and nailing our Constitution to a Christofascist cross. Cowards hiding behind the coattails of a bully, taking their own shot at destroying America itself to become the few who will benefit from its broken dreams. Clarence Thomas turned his back on his own people for a Winnebago and Ginny’s Federalist Society-funded bank account.

If you truly know what you’re looking at, its hard to even look these days.

Trump is so maliciously malignant and venal that it is quite tempting to focus solely on all of his crimes and misdeeds - and ignore the profound larceny and immorality of those around him. To hope it will all suddenly go away when he is gone. It won't.

Admittedly, his misdeeds are so voluminous that college courses on his corruption will be taught some day (assuming that higher education still exists after the mean lady from WWE gets done destroying our Department of Education). We shouldn’t overlook however the many dozens of folks in his orbit who aid and abet his graft.

This has always been the modus operandi of Donald Trump; his children, his wives and his siblings have all engaged in covering up decades of criminality, addiction and predatory behavior. They are codependent coconspirators.

Do not lose sight of the fact that Trump spent decades sexually assaulting with impunity and was rewarded for his crimes with television contracts and a supplicant press, while a coterie of billionaires lined up to put money into his greasy little hands.

Do you believe for a minute that the concept of due diligence was a foreign one to the lawyers at NBC when they drew up a multimillion dollar contract for a man who had been in the tabloids for literally decades - and who the New South Wales government had refused to allow to open a casino in Sydney’s Darling Harbor in 1987 due to his extensive Mob ties?

The Australian police cited Trump’s Atlantic City casinos as evidence of organized crime associations and advised the government it would be dangerous to do business with the consortium Donald had formed.

Or do you think the chance to make some Mark Burnett bucks with the bankrupt pretend-billionaire married to the former adult escort and his odious unqualified children was enough to make them look the other way? There was certainly ample evidence of Trump’s misdeeds and malfeasance by 2003 when ‘Apprentice’ was green lit.

Do you think Jeff Zucker, then president of NBC Entertainment and the folks in the C-Suite at 30 Rock were unaware of Jeffrey Epstein and his ties to Donald Trump? How about when Zucker left to run CNN where he completely ignored Trump’s ignoble past in the 2016 election, choosing instead to focus on the ‘ratings gold’ he has always known Trump to deliver.

It was a business to these folks, and it still is, while our democracy crumbles before our very eyes.

On top of this - witnessing our backsliding into a cesspool of division and the cult-like embrace of POTUS’s solipsistic dogma, a small but very powerful handful of people entrusted to serve our nation are giving into their pecuniary desires, instead of living up to their responsibilities.

What we have seen over the last year and a half is the apex of America’s greed, an orgy of overindulgence consummated by a chosen few.

Trump wasn’t just criminal and addicted, he was a mean-spirited racist on the set of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’. This was no secret to the cast and crew. I personally heard him use to the ’N-word’ to describe an exceptional Black woman contestant, Holly Robinson Peete, and subsequently block her from winning the show in favor of a much less qualified white man, Brett Michaels.

It’s the same pattern and behavior we see now as he calls a Black woman reporter, ABC’s excellent Rachel Scott, a ‘bitch’ for asking a tough question about his attempts to distract from the Iran war, after he ordered his motorcade to drive him over surface of the National Reflecting Pool.

Which he has now partially painted an awful shade of urinal cake blue. The Decorator-in-chief awarded a $6.9 million contract to an associate of his to pay for this indignity. To say nothing of the publicity stunt itself, which no doubt damaged the floor of the pool not designed to hold the weight of a such heavy vehicles.

POTUS committed these ghastly and unnecessary ‘restorations’ to put his own mark on the Lincoln Memorial; site of this country’s most historic and inclusive moments, including Dr. King’s March on Washington and his fabled ‘I Have A Dream Speech’, and the National Celebration of President Obama’s Inauguration, which took place the Sunday before ‘44’ was sworn in for the first time (and of which I participated in the HBO broadcast as a logistics coordinator for the performing talent. It was a career highlight, as were the two subsequent inaugural balls I worked on with Prez Obama).

To say it was an epic day is an understatement. President Obama’s first inauguration felt like something many millions of American had sought over many lifetimes had finally come to fruition. It was tangible; it felt like hope was no longer just flowery language but had been fashioned into a real world result. As if the future so many had dreamed of and sacrificed for was finally upon us.

It came at the right moment when this country needed guidance out of the 2008 ‘Great Recession’ financial crisis and the two post-9/11 wars started by the Bush/Cheney regime. One of which was under entirely fabricated terms and for which many of our allies have not forgiven us for dragging them into, out of both NATO solidarity and the depth of the empathy the world felt for the U.S.A. after the horrific terrorist attacks.

Their good nature was exploited by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld on behalf of KBR/Halliburton. It was good for the military industrial complex, bad for America.

But for Trump and the folks he represents, the relief and pragmatism that Obama brought to Washington, along with racial progress and equality in government was a dire threat - and they have responded with not only the MAGA movement and the neofascism of ‘American First’, but the disemboweling of our federal agencies under ‘Project 2025’. The dismantling of USAID alone was a middle finger to the world.

Now we are a bogged down in a war with Iran that our Commander-in-Chief has not only lost interest in, he is actively ignoring and feebly rebranding as somehow ‘won’.

It is far from over, and as Trump heads to China this week he will be approaching his meeting with President Xi as a substantially weakened president - and the whole damn world knows it.

By any real metric the U.S.A. has been bested by Iran and their control over the Strait of Hormuz; the options left to this administration all point to an emboldened regime in Tehran. To put it mildly, this was an abject geopolitical disaster which will not only cause suffering in the region, it will leave much of the rest of the world holding the bag when Trump finally cuts and runs and sets his sights on Cuba.

Not to mention the threat and strain DJT has put on the global economy because of his ill-conceived, whimsical war. One which continues to be a cash cow for Trump family insiders; a $920 million short was placed on the oil futures market at 3:40am this week, a little over an hour before news broke in the middle of the night that Trump and Iran were nearing a ’14 Point Deal’ to end the war.

Oil markets dropped on the news and whomever (my guess is Barron) placed the bet netted a $125 million profit in a couple of hours. There are only so many folks who have access to almost a billion dollars of liquid capital to place shorts in the market; nobody was doing this on a whim or a hunch, and it reflects the same pattern employed over and over again in the seven plus weeks of this war.

Someone is making a killing off of the killing.

Of course fighting broke out again within 24 hours of the announcement of the latest ‘peace deal’ proposal and Iran has yet to even respond to it, in yet another successful humiliation of Trump’s feckless diplomacy.

The only thing this ‘excursion’, as Trump so inappropriately tries to brand it, is accomplishing is opportunities for market manipulation and no-bid Pentagon defense contracts for his eldest sons’ business interests.

Anyone who doesn’t think the world’s intelligence agencies are aware of the financial malfeasance occurring in regard to this war and how that weakens our geopolitical position hasn’t looked hard enough at the damage being done. Which is not that surprising, given how most of the cable news networks and newspapers focus on the daily outrages over deep dives into the carnage created by Trump’s ineptitude.

Trust is a commodity on the world stage and we are losing it, both with our allies and our adversaries. This strengthens our opponents and weakens our position.

When you think about the sacrifices made on behalf of this nation by so many selfless men and women who dedicated their lives to the betterment of out nation and believed in the American idealism, to have so much moral capital go up in smoke is simply heartbreaking.

The human cost of this calamity cannot be overlooked. Trump didn’t want Cabinet members, he wanted content creators - folks so bereft of any moral bearing or sense of obligation that they would create the sort of curated content that Fox News viewers crave. The fast food of jingoistic political life.

The cultural and ideological resentment, and the self-affirming illusion that the only folks who truly matter in this country are the White Christian Conservatives who support Donald Trump. Many of whom show up to worship at the feet of his gold statue, as several evangelical ‘faith leaders’ did this week at Trump Doral.

In the very same week leading up to Mother’s Day, when a chirpy Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, made the rounds of MAGA-friendly cable TV outlets to brag about kicking 4.5 million Americans off of their SNAP benefits.

Everyone else is ‘the other’, to be treated with suspicion and contempt, if not outright aggression. Which means children and elderly and disabled folks will go hungry so billionaires can receive more of a tax break, courtesy of Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ which is so mean-spirited and stacked to favor the rich at the expense of every day citizens, ‘cruelty’ does not begin to cover the damage it will do to generations of people. It will cost lives - and the members of Congress who voted to pass it could care less.

The attacks on healthcare, combined with cuts to nutritional assistance, will leave millions of people sick and hungry while the oligarchs who back Trump will make record windfalls and the MAGA faithful will continue to gorge on the reactionary stupidity that generations have been groomed to consume with salty, dripping lips.

Engorging themselves on the tallow of their temporal tyrant. Gleefully stuffing their faces with the empty calories of hatred and malicious intent towards their fellow man.

Which in the truest sense of the word is themselves - you are always meeting yourself in the deepest of spiritual terms. That is what love thy neighbor means.

Never before have so many people celebrated their own demise, the rapture of the ruptured. Bifurcated from their own innate humanity in favor of a godhead who couldn’t care less if they lived or they died as long as they serve his needs in the moment.

It’s as if they are having a party in the backyard while their own house burns down. Too intoxicated by the flames and smoky destruction to realize it will ultimately leave them possessionless and out in the cold. The flames of rage consume all in its path and the thrill of retribution that Trump has promised them will ultimately lead to their own undoing. I wish more of them realized how much they were losing and how quickly.

That hour of recognition is fast approaching.

*If you enjoy ‘Noel’s Notes’ please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All content is available free but paid support makes it possible. Thanks for reading and sharing.