Donald Trump a convicted sex offender and Jeffrey Epstein friend who visited Epstein's island 7 times

Greatfeful for E. Jean Carroll for finally revealling the former guy Donald Trump as a convicted sex offender.

Echo opinion letter published in Village-News, in Florida:

Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled in August that the jury verdict showed Carroll's rape allegation was "substantially true" and dismissed the counterclaim. In May, Carroll was awarded a combined $5 million for sexual abuse and for a 2022 denial by Trump that the jury concluded defamed Carroll.

To the editor:  Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled in August that the jury verdict showed Carroll's rape allegation was "substantially true". In May, Carroll was awarded a combined $5 million for sexual abuse and for a 2022, denial by Trump that the jury concluded defamed Carroll.

Donald Trump took at least seven trips on Epstein’s private plane to Epstein’s private island where he hosted parties with hundreds of underage girls. Many of these woman have filed sexual assault charges against these men over the decades that have been hidden and stalled in the United State’s court system due to powerful natural of the men involved. All this evidence is becoming unsealed. Now.

Donald Trump has said Epstein was a “terrific guy”, adding details about their shared interest in “beautiful women.”

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told in the New Yorker magazine: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Trump already has a rape conviction of E.J. Carroll, in New York city, with his second defamation federal case starting on January 16th surrounding Ms. Carroll. His affairs with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDongal while he was married to his third wife, who he also cheated with, all indicate he is untrustworthy con-artist, and sexual predator who is unfit to hold any public office.

Ralph Bennett Village in Osceola Hills, in Florida

Donald Trump continues igniting The Big Lie controlling cult kool-aid drinking Republicans

Trump’s rants about NATO are making the U.S. weaker

"Russia has repeatedly signaled that it has aims beyond Ukraine, toward NATO members, those weak arguments have evaporated. Certainly, our allies believe the threat is very real."- Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times, by Jonah Goldberg.

On September. 12, 2001,  within 24 hours after the 9/11 attacks, representatives of the then-19-member NATO convened to invoke Article 5 of the organization’s charter, which holds that an “armed attack” on one member “shall be considered an attack against them all.” This was the first and only time Article 5 has been put into effect. For the following two decades, NATO forces fought alongside us in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

But, on Saturday, former (Trump derangement syndrome!) President Trump ranted against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at a rally in Las Vegas.

“We’re paying for NATO, and we don’t get so much out of it,” he lied. “And you know, I hate to tell you this about NATO: If we ever needed their help — let’s say we were attacked — I don’t believe they’d be there. I don’t believe. I know the people. I know them. … I don’t believe they’d be there.”

Trump has long talked about NATO as if it’s some sort of obsolete club where everyone is supposed to pay dues into a common kitty, but the U.S. has been left picking up everyone’s tab. That’s not how it works. NATO’s standalone budget is about $3.5 billion, of which we pay 16%, roughly $560 million. A new aircraft carrier costs about 20 times that. All other “NATO spending” takes the form of domestic defense expenditures by individual member states. When he was president, Trump was right to pressure other countries to spend more, but now that they are spending more, he doesn’t care or credit the change.

Trump’s calumnies (making false and defamatory statements) against NATO are offered to bolster his distortions about supporting the Ukraine. In his telling, both are examples of how the United States gets ripped off by its alliances and foreign engagements. 

He claimed we’ve spent “$200 billion-plus” on Ukraine, while the Europeans “are in for $20 billion.”

Donald Trump telling even more lies?  Who knew?

This, too, is false. According to the Ukraine Support Tracker, the European Union has contributed more to Ukraine than the United States. We’ve committed not $200 billion-plus but about $75 billion, about half of that in military assistance. The EU total is roughly 77 billion euros, or $83 billion. In terms of share of gross domestic product, the U.S. ranks 30th for Ukraine support, just behind Ireland and Malta.

We look better if you count only military aid, for the simple reason that we have the hardware Ukraine needs; Malta, not so much. Indeed, as my American Enterprise Institute colleague Marc Thiessen notes, the important thing about our military aid — at least for domestic political purposes — is that it doesn’t take the form of giving Ukraine a blank check, as many Republicans claim. Nearly 90% of military aid dollars stay in America, disproportionately in Republican districts and states, because they’re used to purchase the weapons that go to Ukraine.

If you care about U.S. relative military superiority, supporting Ukraine has been a huge bargain — degrading Russia’s military, helping to update ours and bolstering the security of our biggest trading partner without putting American troops at risk.

While it’s always useful to point out Trump’s thumbless grasp of the facts, none of this is exactly new information for people who actually care about the facts. The problem is how little facts seem to matter these days.

Prior to Russia’s lawless invasion of Ukraine, the argument that NATO was obsolete had some superficial plausibility. 

But now that Russia has repeatedly signaled that it has aims beyond Ukraine, toward NATO members, those weak arguments have evaporated. Certainly, our allies believe the threat is very real.

And those aren’t the only threats on the world stage. Proxies for Iran killed three U.S. servicemen over the weekend in a drone attack in Jordan. Russia, China and Iran have grown quite chummy. 

Our ally Israel is in a bloody war with Hamas, an Iranian proxy that ignited the conflict on October 7, 2023. 

In short, this is the dumbest possible time to be talking about how America shouldn’t honor its alliances and commitments.

President Biden’s critics love to argue that when it comes to Iran and China, “weakness is provocative.” They’re right. But it’s also true with Russia.

And tough talk can signal weakness, too. Trump’s denigration of NATO might sound like political “toughness” to his fans. But what Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping hear is evidence of NATO’s weakness.

NATO, and our alliances generally, make America stronger. They allow us to project power globally at a fraction of the cost of doing so in other ways. For those who disagree, it’s worth considering why the case against NATO made by the former president has to rest on so many lies. If the facts were on Trump’s side, he’d offer some.

@JonahDispatch

Donald Trump is guilty per a jury of his peers to be a sexual abuser

Listen up Representative Elise Stefanik! My question? Why is Elise Stefanik obsessed with the sexual molester DJTrump?

Many of Donald Trump’s supporters have daughters.
Echo opinion letter published in The Daily Gazette a
Schenectady, NY newspaper:

Daughters were sexually abused, they would demand that the offender be punished to the full extent of the law.

Therefore, I am puzzled why these individuals continue to support the former buy Trump, given his history of sexual abuse of women.

For example, rTrump was found guilty of sexually abusing journalist E. Jean Carrol, who had accused the former president of sexually abusing her in the mid-1990s. The jury ordered Trump to pay $5 million in damages to Carroll.

Why did Carroll wait so long to bring her lawsuit? For many years, she was barred by the statute of limitations in New York state, which was just five years following a sexual assault. 

However, in May of 2022, the state enacted the Adult Survivors Act (ASA), which permits victims of sexual assault to file civil suits during a one-year period, from Nov. 24, 2022, to Nov. 24, 2023.

During the Carroll trial, Trump’s infamous 2005 Access Hollywood video was screened, showing him saying that because he is a “star,” he is entitled to sexually abuse women.

When you support Trump, you are demeaning all women.

Don Steiner in Schenectady New York

Donald Trump is not qualified to run for any political office and should be taken off the ballots

Echo opinion letter published in The Washington Post:

As an independent and former Republican, I believe that once the wheels start coming off the Trump bus, it will happen at a quick pace. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley should remain in the race for the Republican nomination for president. 

Former president Donald Trump is an adjudicated financial fraud in three recent trials, was ordered to pay writer E. Jean Carroll more than $83 million for defaming her, and is facing 91 criminal charges. 

Voters are owed these trials before the election. 

Also, I will not vote for anyone who supports Trump for president. Full stop❗💥

Keith Wilson, in Charlotte North Carolina

Antisemitism in Nazi Germany and Communism created barbaric totalitarian evil systems where many millions were murdered

The swastika stands for evil and mass murder. 

So does the hammer and sickle.

In January, two gruesome anniversaries are noted in the history of 20th-century totalitarianism. Echo opinion published in The Boston Globe by Jeff Jacoby:

Russian Revolution of 1917, Revolution that overthrew the imperial government and placed the Bolsheviks in power.

Sunday was the centennial of the death of Vladimir Lenin. The architect of the Bolshevik Revolution and first ruler of the Soviet Union was 53 when he died of a brain hemorrhage on January 21, 1924, in Russia.

From among 230 000 children deported to KL Auschwitz only 700 were liberated.

Saturday was the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the extermination camp in Poland where 1.1 million victims were murdered by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1945. The United Nations in 2005, designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Why has the UN never dedicated a similar day of remembrance for the victims of communism?

In fact, the communist system introduced by Lenin led to more slaughter and suffering than any other movement in history. 

For sheer murderous horror, there has never been a force to compare to it. The Nazis didn’t come close. Although the Adolf Hitler’s evil regime eradicated 6 million Jews in the unprecedented genocide of the Holocaust, the Germans also killed at least 5 million non-Jews, among them ethnic Poles, prisoners of war, Romani people, and the disabled.

But the Nazi toll adds up to barely a tenth of the lives that have been extinguished by communist dictatorships. 

According to “The Black Book of Communism,” a magisterial compendium of communist crimes first published in France in 1997, the fanaticism unleashed by Lenin’s revolution has sent at least 100 million men, women, and children to early graves. 

Beginning in 1917, communist regimes on four continents — from Russia and Eastern Europe to China and North Korea to Cuba and Ethiopia — engineered death on a scale unmatched in human annals.

Yet communism rarely evokes the instinctive loathing that Nazism does. To this day there are those who still insist that communism is admirable and wholesome, or that it has never been properly implemented, or that with all its failings it is better than capitalism. Many people who would find it unthinkable to deck themselves in Nazi regalia — when Britain’s Prince Harry wore a swastika armband to a costume party in 2005, a major scandal ensued — view communist-themed fashion as trendy or kitschy.

In Manhattan’s East Village, the popular KGB Bar — named after the USSR’s terrifying security network of secret police and torture sites — features Soviet propaganda posters and literary readings. Would any New York hipster ever set foot in a pub called Gestapo?

Amazon sells scores of shirts with hammer-and-sickle designs or the images of communist dictators like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, who were among the greatest mass killers in history. Search for “Nazi T-shirts,” on the other hand, and what comes up are shirts showing a swastika in a red circle with a slash (“No Nazis”) or proclaiming: “Punch a Nazi.”

What accounts for the difference? Both Nazism and communism filled the world with pain, terror, and death. Yet communists are not regarded with the same revulsion that Nazis are. 

In the public’s perception, Hitler and his Nazi Party have no equal as incarnations of supreme evil. Why isn’t communist tyranny viewed the same way?

A number of reasons suggest themselves.

First: In the war against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union ended up fighting alongside the Allies. World War II gave way to the long-drawn-out Cold War, but America’s alliance with Moscow left in many minds the belief that when it mattered most, the communists were on our side. 

Really❓ Russia on "our side"❓

After all, the free world had labeled Nazis as the supreme evil. So anyone who helped destroy Nazis must not have been supremely evil themselves.

Second: The Nazis made little effort to disguise the abhorrent malignance on which their movement was based, above all its genocidal antisemitism. They made no secret of their implacable hatred for Jews and other “subhumans” or their belief that an Aryan master race should rule the world. Conversely, communist movements have almost always cloaked their malice and brutality with tempting rhetoric about equality, peace, and an end to exploitation. Partly as a result, the myth persists to this day that communism is really a noble ideology with the potential to liberate mankind.

Third: Nazism was utterly discredited by the fate meted out to Nazi Germany — unconditional surrender, an Allied occupation, war-crimes trials, and the hanging of senior Nazis. By contrast, communist dictatorships in Moscow and elsewhere entrenched their hold on power. The end of the Cold War eventually brought down communist governments in Russia and Europe, but even then, there was no public accounting for the ghastly crimes they had committed.

Fourth: The Holocaust became such a “byword for modern barbarism,” as the authors of “The Black Book of Communism” put it, that even mass murders of greater magnitude in the communist world seem to recede in significance. In crucial ways, the Holocaust stands alone: Nazi 卐 Germany deployed every resource at its command to construct a vast industry of death with the goal of rounding up and destroying every single Jew in Europe — not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. There is good reason that so much attention has been paid to the Holocaust by scholars, historians, educators, and artists.

As a result, however, the far greater level of bloodshed committed by communist regimes has never achieved the same public awareness.

Fifth: There are pictures of what the Nazis did. Filmmakers and photographers entered the death camps in 1945, and recorded what they found, providing images that shocked the world’s conscience and became iconic emblems of human savagery. But there were no Allies to liberate the Soviet gulag or to halt the agonies of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. If there are photos or films of those atrocities, few have ever seen them. The victims of communism have tended to be invisible — and suffering that isn’t seen is suffering most people don’t think about.

These are explanations only, not justifications. Nazism was unspeakably evil and only an ignoramus or a monster would deny it. Communism, too, has been unspeakably evil — no “ism” in history has spilled more blood or crushed more lives. From anyone with a conscience or a working moral compass, the response to both should be the same: Never forget, never forgive.

Journalist Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jeff.jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby. To subscribe to Arguable, his weekly newsletter, visit globe.com/arguable.

Antisemitism: What does "It depends on the context" really mean? Harvard has a lot of explaining to do.

 'It depends on the context', former Harvard President Claudine Gay.

Echo report published in The Boston Globe, by Mike Damiano and Hillary Burns:  Harvard plunges into roiling debate about what is considered antisemitism, "Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews", (Working definition of antisemitism.)

Feeling alone and estranged, many Jews at Harvard wonder, "What’s Next"❓ After one of the most trying weeks in the university’s recent history, some students question whether they have a place on campus. (Menorah on Harvard campus.)

A poster of a kidnapped Israeli baby defaced with the words “Israel did 9/11.” A mural in Harvard Yard that claims “Zionism is racism.” Chants by student protesters to “Globalize the intifada.”

Are these verbal salvos antisemitic? Are they violations of Harvard University’s campus rules? 

What about calling for the genocide of Jews?

These questions are at the center of the explosive controversy at the school, which has faced months of criticism that it failed at two of its most basic duties: to protect students and to protect free speech. 

In recent days, the university provoked backlash, yet again, with its selection of a Harvard professor who opposes a prevailing definition of antisemitism to lead the school’s efforts to combat this brand of bigotry.

Derek Penslar,* a leading scholar of Zionism, believes that the definition of antisemitism officially used by the US government, and increasingly considered in the enforcement of civil rights law, is too vague, too broad, and can be used to censor anti-Israel speech that he believes should be tolerated on college campuses.

But this position puts Penslar, who is Jewish, at odds with many Jewish advocacy groups, who view the definition — which has been adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and dozens of Western nations — as an essential tool for tracking and combating antisemitism.

The dispute boils down to questions about whether some forms of anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian speech are antisemitic.

In fact, the debates have provoked donor revolts at Harvard and many other elite schools, prompted accusations of bigotry among undergraduates, and unsettled many American university campuses since the October 7, Hamas-led attack on Israel, and Israel’s retaliatory war in the Gaza Strip.

There are at least three major definitions of antisemitism currently in common use, all of them disputed by one faction or another.

1. An ancient and amorphous hatred, antisemitism can be clear to see or hard to pin down. It can take the form of conspiracy theories about Jewish control of politics, media, or the economy.
2. And, some contend, it can disguise itself as criticism of Israel or Zionism, the movement begun in the 19th century to create a Jewish state in the Holy Land and, since the founding of Israel in 1948, to defend its right to persist.
3. Those tensions are crystallized in the argument over the IHRA definition, which defines both overt hatred of Jews and certain types of criticism of Israel as antisemitic.

“Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” is antisemitic, according to the definition. “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” is also antisemitic, it says.

For many Jews, that is a bedrock tenet. The movement to create a Jewish homeland gained momentum after growing antisemitism in Europe turned into the Holocaust, when the Nazis killed an estimated 6 million Jews as their “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

It convinced many Jews that only a Jewish state could keep them safe.

They also helped topple former Harvard president Claudine Gay.

At a December 5, congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, she was asked if “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment. “It depends on the context,” she said, prompting calls for her resignation. She stepped down on January 2.

But critics of the IHRA definition, including free speech advocates, pro-Palestinian activists, some Jewish scholars, and Jewish pro-Palestinian groups, say that its language is overly broad and can be used to recast legitimate criticism of Israel as antisemitic.
“It’s riddled with ambiguous language, which is a problem because it allows it to be weaponized against Palestinian advocates,” said Dov Waxman, professor of political science and chair of Israel studies at UCLA.

Penslar is a co-signatory to a competing definition, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which contains specific carve-outs saying that some controversial forms of anti-Israel speech and action, such as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which aims to economically isolate Israel, are not inherently antisemitic.

The proponents of BDS, like other pro-Palestinian activists, criticize Israel for what they describe as its oppression of Palestinians. 

Israel has controlled the West Bank, a majority-Palestinian territory, since 1967 when it won a brief war against surrounding Arab nations. Palestinians there are subject to a military justice system, while Israelis are tried in civil courts. 

State-sanctioned Israeli settlements in the West Bank have displaced Palestinians and made it difficult for them to move freely through the territory. 

In the Gaza Strip, a blockade enforced by Egypt and Israel since Hamas took control of the territory in 2007 throttled the economy and made it difficult to access essential goods, such as medical equipment.

Hamas, a US-designated terror group, has regularly launched rocket attacks at Israel from Gaza, and Israel has responded with retaliatory military campaigns.

On October 7, Hamas led an attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and included the murder of families in their homes, widespread rape, a massacre at a music festival, and the kidnapping of around 250 people, including children. 

Israel responded with an invasion and bombardment of Gaza that has killed more than 25,000 people, according to Palestinian officials, and displaced nearly the entire population of two million people. 

The fallout from the devastating violence in the Middle East has rippled through American campuses, drawing the attention of the federal government. In that context, the debate over the IHRA definition is far from a mere academic concern.

Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina who is leading a House committee investigation into antisemitism at Harvard, told the Globe Thursday that she plans to rely on the IHRA definition. Foxx added that she has not heard concerns that the definition is too broad and can be used to suppress speech.
“We think that’s the gold standard,” she said.

The Trump and Biden administrations have incorporated the IHRA definition into US policy.

“Agencies enforcing Title VI” — a part of US civil rights law that applies to almost all colleges and universities — “must consider IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism,” Herbie Ziskend, a White House spokesperson, told the Globe.

More than 30 colleges and universities are currently facing civil rights investigations opened since October 7, by the Department of Education into alleged discrimination against “shared ancestry groups,” such as Jews, Muslims, or Arabs.

Some of these complaints include allegations of antisemitism. In evaluating those claims, federal officials must take the IHRA definition into account, according to a Trump-era executive order that has remained in effect under Biden.

A federal lawsuit filed earlier this month on behalf of several Harvard graduate and law students accuses Harvard administrators of failing to protect Jewish students from “severe and pervasive” antisemitic harassment on campus, and cited the IHRA definition to bolster its argument. 

Some of the alleged harassment involved anti-Israel slogans that could be deemed antisemitic under the definition.

In the fall, hundreds of Jewish alumni joined in sending a letter to top Harvard leaders asking them to adopt the IHRA definition as the school’s official definition of antisemitism, a move that could, if implemented, affect student disciplinary decisions. (Harvard has not adopted the definition and declined Globe requests for comment.)

That letter was part of a broader push, from some Jewish alumni and advocacy groups, to convince universities to adopt the IHRA definition. They say it would help schools draw clear boundaries between permissible political speech and speech that amounts to bigotry.

Some believe that if Harvard had adopted the IHRA definition before October 7, the university might have avoided much of the animosity that Jewish students say they are experiencing on campus, said Sacha Roytman Dratwa, chief executive of the Combat Antisemitism Movement, a US nonprofit.

Roytman Dratwa, who is based in Israel, added that he does not believe slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “Intifada, intifada” should be considered acceptable speech.

But he acknowledged some gray areas. For example, some activists allege Israel is committing apartheid in the way it discriminates against Palestinians. Determining whether such a charge is antisemitic “really depends on the context,” 💬he said.

Really❓

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a phrase embraced by Hamas that some Jews hear as a call for the violent destruction of Israel, which sits between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. 

Some pro-Palestinian activists say the slogan is a call for the political enfranchisement of Palestinians in a new state encompassing the current borders of Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. 

In other words, the Jewish state, as it now exists, would cease.

The term intifada, which means “shaking off” in Arabic, was coined to describe an uprising from 1987 to 1993, against Israel’s military occupations of Gaza and the West Bank. It was marked by widespread Palestinian protests, some of them violent, and a deadly Israeli response.

In the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, Palestinian militants carried out suicide bombings, including on buses, at hotels, and at restaurants. One attack by a suicide bomber sent by Hamas killed 30 civilians and injured 140 more during a Seder.

Some pro-Palestinian activists say chants supporting intifada are a call for Palestinian liberation and dispute the interpretation that they amount to an endorsement of violence against civilians.

But Charlie Covit, a Jewish undergraduate who says antisemitism is resurgent at Harvard, wonders if his classmates understand the full context of what they are saying.

“There were some students chanting ‘long live the intifada,’ and kind of laughing,” he said. “Do you know the defining event of the intifada was when 30 people at a Passover meal were blown up?”

Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College in New York, was the lead drafter of the IHRA definition. 

Bard, and others, wrote it in 2004, primarily to serve as a tool for European bureaucrats who were trying to track antisemitism on the continent, he said in an interview with the Globe.

It was for “bean counters,” he said, trying to place instances in one statistical bucket or another.

“It wasn’t designed to say, ‘Let’s call this person an antisemite,’ ” he said. He has watched with alarm, he said, as the definition has increasingly been used as a “speech code.”

Stern, who is Jewish, added that he personally dislikes some of the same types of anti-Israel speech that proponents of the IHRA definition would like to see barred. “There is a correlation between some anti-Zionist speech and a level of antisemitism we see in the world,” he said. “But there are a lot of gray areas.”

Instead, Bard favors a campus environment where students are free from harassment and discrimination, but still understand “they are going to hear things that they might find disagreeable,” he said.

• Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com. 
• Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her @Hilarysburns.

*Harvard recently announced two task forces: one on combating antisemitism and one on combating Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias. The university announced Derek Penslar, a faculty professor of Jewish history who directs the undergraduate program in that field, as co-chair of the task force on antisemitism. Shortly thereafter, some commentators denounced him for having signed an open letter that referred to Israel as an “apartheid regime”...(reported in SLATE).

Donald Trump was the instigator- leader of the January 6 coup even if Secret Service drove him away from the Capital steps

"...another way of saying 'secure an unelected second term in office' is 'coup'.” Adam Serwer in The Atlantic.

Echo opinion letter published in the South Whidbey Record, a Washington state newspaper:  

Dear Editor:  There are mountains of evidence that the former guy Trump had been working on his attempted coup since before 2016, (first the incessant lying about stolen elections, then he and his closest allies energetically organizing the attack after the 2020 loss). 

True, although on January 6th, the Trumpzi wasn’t on the Capitol stepsm he said he wanted to be there. But, what mafia don is present at the scene of the crime❓

On January 6th, while lives were threatened, and lost, against the backdrop of the gallows, ("Hang Mike Pence!) Trump contentedly (like in a state of mental dissociation!) watched it all on TV. 

Did he know, but could not act? Or did he know, and not care to act? He should have called in the troops; he should have thanked his supporters for coming and sent them home, not to the Capitol; he should not have lured them to DC with the claim “it will be wild.” But he needed some unwitting fools to provide cover for his violent, anti-democratic followers. As they are rightfully sent to prison, boss Trump remains free.

Trump has not been indicted for his insurrection. He has been indicted in four criminal cases, as recommended by our peers who sat on independent Grand Juries.

We all know Trump would have given Ukraine to Putin! 

As for our present candidates, Biden has demonstrated backbone, good judgment and honesty. Trump, as did Herod, waits to see who can pay the most. The inflation caused almost entirely by COVID and Putin is now slight and dropping. 

Unemployment remains low, and the investments in energy transition and manufacturing will pay big dividends down the road. A Biden-led future looks promising. Israel? Same mess since I was a boy (now 71). I bet your children won’t see that area resolved in their lifetimes, either.

And now Hitler’s words and goals are coming from Trump’s mouth. Hitler meant every word. Should we think Trump doesn’t know what he is saying? 

Citizens should speak plainly. If you support Trump’s insurrection, say so, but don’t try to blow it by anyone that it wasn’t an attempted coup and that, oh golly, 😒Trump had nothing to do with it. 😡

In the centuries of our nation, did we ever see anything like this until Trump? What else do you need to see?

When will the Trump faithful place our democracy and our laws above their clamoring for a dictatorial “champion?” Evidently, never.

Message received.

John Seyfried,  Bayview in Washington state

Donald Trump is on trial again is delusional and now owes E Jean carrol $83.3 million for defamation

Trump on the Trail and on Trial- (can we spell 💲83.3 million 💲💲❓ 😅)  Echo opinion article published in The New Yorker, by Benjamin Wallace-Wells. 

Is it clever, or deluded, for Trump—who complained last week that he has been indicted more times than Al Capone—to see his trials as a political opportunity?

Trump is delusional about his mounting & growing & expensive legal problems.

By January 21, 2024, as a way of launching the race for the Republican Presidential nomination, the Iowa and New Hampshire contests offer a neat thematic juxtaposition: in the Midwest, candidates fight for the social-conservative vote; in New England, for the support of small-business owners. Last week, after winning the Iowa caucus by thirty points, Donald Trump complicated the story by ping-ponging between New Hampshire and a Manhattan courtroom, where a jury is considering the amount of damages he now owes E. Jean Carroll for defaming her by saying that she lied when she accused him of rape. 

“Here’s my schedule for the next four or five days,” Trump told a crowd in Atkinson, New Hampshire, on Tuesday evening. “I come here, I meet with great groups in New Hampshire. I then get on the plane late at night when it’s snowing and freezing out—wonderful. And the pilot says, ‘Sir, it’s gonna be tough.’ And I get there early in the morning, I go to a Biden witch hunt, then I come here in the afternoon.” Trump’s trials, in which he faces ninety-one felony counts, have often been described as a potential distraction for the candidate. But Trump, who complained in Atkinson that he has been indicted more times than Al Capone, did not sound distracted or gloomy about the prospect of spending that time in court. Quite the opposite.

Trump wasn’t required to appear at the Carroll trial at all. But he found it politically advantageous to be there, not so much menacing the courtroom as Dennis-the-Menacing it. On Tuesday, when potential jurors were asked whether they believed that the 2020 election had been stolen, three raised their hands (none was selected), and Trump raised his hand, too. On Wednesday, Carroll’s lawyer said that Trump was disrupting the proceedings by “muttering” loudly enough for jurors to hear him say that the trial was a “con job” and a “witch hunt.” The judge threatened to throw him out. “I’d love that,” Trump replied. But, as he has been pointing out on the campaign trail, the indictments and trials have had a way of strengthening his support among Republicans. Trump’s first Presidential campaign, in 2016, was launched in an atmosphere of displacement and rage. This one is being conducted in a posture of relentless victimhood.

Maybe that’s a more effective position than at first it sounds. One way to interpret it is that the trials have imposed a deadline and he is in a race to beat it: to consolidate the support of the Party before his most serious cases get under way, so that he can campaign against the charges as partisan fictions. This may explain his curiously subdued performance after his win in Iowa, which derailed the campaign of Ron DeSantis, his only real challenger on the right. Speaking at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, Trump praised both DeSantis and Nikki Haley, and repeatedly urged the Party to “come together.” In recent campaign appearances, Trump tended to stand alone on the stage and deliver a harangue, but in Des Moines he was flanked by his sons Eric and Don, Jr., and devoted part of his meandering victory speech to the sports preferences and tall height of his youngest son, Barron. 

Donald Trump, political conciliator and family man❓ 😳😨😣😬

Hello❓It would be a real turn. But organizing his campaign around the idea that the trials are a Democratic setup means that Trump has to get the whole Party behind him, even those members who have long found him immoral, vindictive, or extreme.

Trump isn’t really running as a populist insurgent this time. Rather, he’s acting like something closer to a conventional leader of the Republican Party—though it’s a party, of course, that he has completely remade. 

Trump's evil reëmergence as the right wing front-runner in this 2024, election, after he tried to overturn the results of the last one, has required both capitulations within the Party (from Mitch McConnell’s failure to push G.O.P. senators to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial to Marco Rubio’s and Ted Cruz’s endorsements, last week, of the candidate they once denounced) and mistakes made outside it. The Biden Justice Department’s yearlong slow roll of its January 6th investigation, out of a “wariness to appear partisan,” as the Washington Post put it, now looks a little naïve. The trouble for Biden isn’t just that Trump remains the central figure in U.S. politics. It’s also that, to some voters, Biden’s inability to move his predecessor offstage just demonstrates the ineffectualness of his Administration. 😞

Trump’s unity stance may be superficial—not even a full day after his Iowa win, he was back to mocking DeSantis and Haley—but it seems that it can still have an effect. The religious conservatives who helped defeat him in Iowa in 2016, largely supported him this time; at Davos, mainstream business leaders including Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, found ways to praise him. 

On Friday, (Uncle Tom❗) Senator Tim Scott, who is viewed as an approachable moderate, endorsed Trump over Haley, his fellow South Carolinian. 

Chris Christie was the last Republican contender to criticize Trump over January 6th, and the former President probably expects that, if he keeps attacking judges and prosecutors, and pushing grandiose claims of immunity (such as that, absent an impeachment conviction, he wouldn’t be criminally liable even if, as President, he had ordered seal Team Six to assassinate a rival), most of the remaining holdouts in the Party will, if not support him, shuffle their feet and look the other way.

Is it clever, or deluded, for Trump to see his trials as a political opportunity? He has already been found liable for sexual abuse, in the Carroll case, and he still faces charges of financial fraud, taking documents marked classified from the White House and refusing to give them back, and conspiring to overturn a federal election—not exactly a winning roster. 

On the icy campaign trail this month, Trump’s presence has been something short of overwhelming. His events are held mostly in hotel ballrooms and country clubs, rather than the arenas of yore; he says little that is new; the crowds tend to thin noticeably as he rambles on. They chuckle when he says “crooked Joe Biden,” but there is nothing like the cascading chants of “Lock her up!” directed at Hillary Clinton in 2016. Even Trump’s Iowa “landslide” consisted of just fifty-six thousand votes, and half of Republicans wanted someone else. Lately, Trump has been working into his stump speech an attack on Fani Willis, the Fulton County D.A., who indicted him for conspiring to pressure Georgia officials to invalidate his loss in the state in 2020—and whom one of his co-defendants has accused of an alleged conflict of interest. For Trump, the attraction of the trials, in an election characterized so far by general indifference, may be quite basic. They give him something to talk about. ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 29, 2024, issue, with the headline “Trials and the Trail.”

Clarence Thomas grew up in segregated Georgia but now votes policies against his Black experiences

Echo opinion letter about "Uncle Thomas", published in the Washington Spectator:

Clarence Thomas is a hopeless Uncle Tom, a stooge for white conservatives and a hypocrite. The depths of his hypocrisy can be
seen when one considers that he grew up in segregated Pinpoint, Georgia at a time when Georgia crackers did all they could to suppress and dehumanize black folk.

However, he was fortunate to come along in an era when black civil rights pioneers had paved the way for more open minority college admissions (affirmative action), and he was admitted to Holy Cross and later to Yale Law School.

But for affirmative action, Thomas would have had little chance of admission to Holy Cross and no chance of admission to Yale Law School where he admittedly struggled.

His Yale Law School credential nonetheless likely helped him win important Republican sponsorship for senior government positions, culminating in a US Supreme Court seat.

Thomas was thus a classic beneficiary of affirmative action❗ Even he has admitted that.

He escaped the poverty and racial oppression of his youth and obtained a first-rate education; yet instead of using his good fortune to help other young black folk achieve the same opportunities that he had, Thomas shamelessly became an arch enemy of
affirmative action and a water carrier for white conservatives who seek to turn back the clock on black educational and career progress, women’s reproductive choice, black voting access and the like. 

 And he’s apparently so much under the influence of white
conservatives that he’s failed to take action to temper his wife’s participation in extreme right wing causes—her high-profile advocacy has already created the appearance of a
conflict of interest for him and will continue to do so as January 6, and other conservative pet peeve cases come before the Supreme Court.

Clarence Thomas, whom I long ago dubbed Uncle Thomas, has thus taken Uncle Tomism to new heights. He’s shown no evidence of having black pride or a sense of the myriad struggles that black folk and women have suffered through in this country.

What he has shown is self-hate and hopeless attempts to whitewash himself and escape his racial identity. The problem is that he can run but he can’t hide. So long as "Uncle Thomas" doesn’t respect himself, and remember his own roots in racist Georgia, the white conservatives won’t respect him either. And that likely includes his wife- (right wing extremist Ginni Thomas). 

They’ll just shamelessly use him as a hapless pawn to further their narrow political interests.

James T. Breedlove in Philadelphia, PA

Crazy to allow Donald Trump on the ballot- Trumpzism is a danger to democracy

Echo opinion letter published in The Chronicle a newsaper published in Centralia Washington state:

Donald Trump in the Manhattan court

It’s hard for me to fathom what I am hearing from grown-up Americans. Democrats of all stripes join with Republicans in predicting Donald Trump will soon be the shoo-in Republican candidate for president in 2024. 💥😔😞

OMG! In their minds, apparently Trump has an inalienable right to run for office, even though already found liable and fined for civil sexual assault, found liable and soon to be fined for large-scale business fraud, and likely soon-to-be convicted of some or all of 91 felony counts of breaking the criminal law.

It is clear that nary a Republican or Democrat and nary a news media anchor or talk show host in this country has ever read a serious book about Athenian, Roman, Israelite or Anglo-Saxon democracy. Throughout its history, democracy has always been defined by its fierce protection of the processes of people’s government. Democracy does not allow anyone to appear on a ballot for any office of public trust who is an inveterate liar and sexual predator, a financial fraudster, a civil insurrectionist who interferes in sacred state election procedures and inspires mayhem and civil riot at a perilous moment in a national election process, a thief of protected government documents, a friend of foreign autocrats and mobsters, or a citizen who pays thousand-dollar-an hour lawyers millions to delay actions in civil and criminal courts for years. It simply cannot happen in any sane democratic republic.

Athens and Rome, the prototypes for our own republican system of representative government, regularly impeached politicians who committed malfeasance while in office or committed public or private crimes while wooing the electorate while not in office. Greece and Rome first suspended their civil rights, next sequestered or expropriated their wealth, and finally sent them packing into mandatory exile for years or forever. They lost civil rights when they offended civil statutes.The idea that nobody is above the law in a democracy was first clearly validated in the Hebrew republic, which began around 1,200 BCE, some 600 years before Athenian and Roman democracy. Aaron Wildavsky, a past president of the American Political Science Association, wrote a book titled Moses as Political Leader (Shalem, 2005). He called our attention to the fact that even Moses was impeached by the Israelite people late in his career for an offense at the “waters of Meribah.” God commanded that Moses not be allowed to cross-over Jordan and enter the Promised Land with the rest of the 12 tribes. To “go before God” in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament meant going to court. 

If the very highly moral Moses was first impeached, and then found guilty and exiled by his own Hebrew republic, how can a modern democracy let an inveterate liar and ignoramus like Donald Trump run for school board let alone president of the United States❓

Democrats and many Republicans today sit on their hands hoping that criminal courts will convict Donald Trump before the election of some of the 91 charges currently pending against him and thus remove some of the luster of his popularity as a candidate before November 2024. Folks, his popularity is not the issue. His civil right to run for office is the issue. We have laws saying convicted or imprisoned felons cannot vote. That also implies they cannot run for or hold public office as well. Imagine disqualifying a prisoner from voting but allowing him to run sacred public operations from a prison cell. That’s what cartel thugs do, not American civil servants.

Listen up my fellow Americans❗ Donald Trump cannot be on the ballot in 2024, in any state devoted to rule of law, not merely because it would be political suicide for a nation to bestow a full slate of civil rights upon a multiply indicted or freshly convicted criminal (a likely outcome in one or more of the criminal trials). He cannot be on the ballot also because it would demonstrate something even worse, that neither of our two hallowed political parties has enough constitutional intelligence to understand or courage to deal with aspiring leaders who intend to dispense with law and rule like a medieval king or an Oriental despot.

If state legislatures do not already have them, then they need to enact laws suspending or ending the civil right to vote and run for office for civil fraudsters and criminal felons of any race, gender, ethnicity or national origin.

From Kimball Shinkoskey formerly of Lewis County

Filled with grief and rage about the misguided and unhinged Donald Trump

Echo opinion letter to the editor: Trying to understand the Trumpzi base by Terry Larson, published in the Topeka, Kansas Capital Journal newspaper.  

Tump is not qualified to be a candidate for president.  

Trump is dangerous!

Trumpziism is Nazism

This opinion letter published in 2020, is as timely today, because the facts are completely current. Insightful people have been warning Americans, even before 2016, when the Trumpzi decided to run for president, even though he is not qualified to hold any political office.

I can forgive those who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. However, if they continue to support him, I cannot respect them. I have used every relevant adjective to describe my feelings toward this truly incompetent, corrupt and cruel individual who became this country’s president. There I go again.

However, I am so filled with grief and rage that it is difficult to stop.

The tragedy of Trump is that he can be what he is because of that core of supporters aka his base, of course, those cowardly enablers we know as Republican elected officials. Are the members of his base so filled with hatred and intolerance that Trump is the god that they made in their own image?

Fox keeps harping about Trumpziim.  An echo chamber of distortions and outright lies poison the gullible viewers’ minds and souls. Trump was warned. Trump called it a hoax. Trump promoted false cures. Fox, Trump, Trump, Fox — where does one begin and the other end?

As a fortunate beneficiary of 12-step recovery, I have learned an important truth: If you have a problem, you are part of the problem. Donald Trump blames everybody and everything else for all of his problems. This is very sick behavior. 

I don’t understand why his base and the Trumpzi enablers don’t see it as his paranoia and rage can be seen on our TV sets almost every day.  Enablers are sick people, too. The Trump base? Perhaps they are even sicker.

From Terry Larson, in Topeka, Kansas

Nikki Haley certainly needs American History lessons about racism, slavery and civil rights

Echo opinion published in NOLA.com in Lousiana:

Not long after sundown on the day the United States of America honored the life of one of its greatest civil rights leaders ever, Martin Luther King Jr., an animated politician blurted out one of the most ridiculous claims in the history of this great country.

Ed Pratt: Never a racist country? Surely Nikki Haley knows better than that❗

Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley proclaimed, “We’ve (the USA) never been a racist country.”

Wait❗ Isn’t battling racism and seeking rights for Americans the reason why King is annually saluted? 

So, I guess Haley, and those like her, never got the memo. 

Or, maybe she is joining the group working hard to whitewash our country’s history.

I’ve written before about my U.S. Army veteran dad and me being confronted by a White teenager who refused to sell him two sno-balls, and she made it clear why when she said, “We don’t serve Negros.”

My brokenhearted dad was convinced that he was a victim of racism. Silly, right?

In my early days as a reporter on the old evening newspaper State-Times in Baton Rouge, a White reporter held up a magazine for me to see the headline about a popular television miniseries: “Roots best watched from end to beginning.”

Let’s be clear, most folks in this country are working hard to treat people as people and that has led to improvements in employment, education, housing and other areas. But, my goodness, Nikki, there is a contingent who are unabashed racists and another group who don’t believe they are racist.

I’ve written before about my U.S. Army veteran dad and me being confronted by a White teenager who refused to sell him two sno-balls, and she made it clear why when she said, “We don’t serve Negros.”

My brokenhearted dad was convinced that he was a victim of racism. Silly, right?

In my early days as a reporter on the old evening newspaper State-Times in Baton Rouge, a White reporter held up a magazine for me to see the headline about a popular television miniseries: “Roots best watched from end to beginning.”

Get it, Nikki? Funny, huh? But not racist, right?

Let’s talk about the biggie — slavery. I guess holding human beings just a step above captive animals was just a thing or a phase, huh, Nikki? Nikki, have you seen what the belly of the slave ships were like?

Nikki, I know you read stories about places where people who look Black like me could not sit at the front of a city bus. 

I’m thinking that if you and your family were around at that time, some folks may have said something about you sitting in those front seats, too. But asking you to move to the back would not have been racist, though, right?

Nikki, Nikki, Nikki. Did you hear about the White people in Tulsa, Oklahoma who went into a prosperous Black section of town and burned it down? After finishing the dastardly deed, no harm nor foul to the perpetrators. Your thoughts?

Now, that I’m thinking about it, I recall you saying a couple of weeks ago that slavery was not at the heart of the Civil War. 😒😟😳❓ 

Indeed, even many racists agree that keeping slaves on those cotton farms was the foundation for the Civil War.

Hey Nikki, you know several GOP-controlled legislatures around the nation are trying to make it more difficult for Black and poor people to vote. Shouldn’t voting be as accessible as possible?

You know, Nikki, I’m anxiously waiting for your comments leading up to February. You do know what that is, don’t you? 

You know, February is Black History Month. Pay attention 😅, Nikki, you may learn something about what a race of people has faced since 1619, and what they have been doing about it.

Or, given your recent outlandish comments, you may say something else to cause jaws to drop and for you to appear, well, you know.

Email Edward Pratt, a former newspaperman, at epratt1972@yahoo.com.