Susan Collins "it is time for you to go". Shame on you. After 30 years in the Senate you have become Donald Trump's rubber stamp

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Abdallah Fayyed

Senator Susan Collins is still in trouble in Maine.

Graham Platner’s downfall hasn’t dampened Maine voters’ hopes of sending new blood to the Senate.

My reporting in Maine started in downtown Portland. Camden Jipson and Raiden Dionne, both 20, were waiting for their bus. I asked them how they’re feeling about the Senate race. Jipson doesn’t like Senator Susan Collins at all. Dionne agreed. What bothers him most, he said, is what’s been happening with immigration enforcement — specifically the crackdowns by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When I asked if they would ever consider voting for Collins in November, they laughed and, without hesitation, said no. Their bus arrived and we quickly parted ways.

There are plenty of Maine voters who feel the same way. That much has been clear since the oyster farmer Graham Platner catapulted out of nowhere to handily win the Democratic nomination for Senate last month. Platner’s campaign fell apart after he was accused of sexual assault and dropped out of the race.

For a moment, it seemed the Democrats were doomed. Of all races in these midterms, Collins’s seat is one of the most important for the party to flip if it wants to regain control of the Senate. The election in Maine is shaping up to be one of the closest in the country. How were Democrats going to select a new nominee without making voters feel like there was a last-minute bait-and-switch?

But after the party held a televised and somewhat awkward debate between eight candidates, and at least 17,000 registered Democrats participated in county caucuses to help pick Platner’s replacement, Troy Jackson quickly emerged as the front-runner. On Saturday, the Maine Democratic Party held a convention that formally named Jackson, a former president of the Maine Senate who ran unsuccessfully for governor last year, as the official Democratic nominee for Senate.

You might expect that kind of 11th-hour drama to dampen the energy in Maine. But many voters are still fired up by the prospect of finally unseating Collins, who was first elected to the Senate in 1996, and is now running for her sixth term. And crucially for Democrats, Jackson is a progressive with policy positions very similar to Platner’s. The party’s hope, it seems, is that Jackson’s politics are similar enough to Platner’s for primary voters to feel their message was heard, even if they didn’t have a direct say in naming the nominee.

Courtney Walton, 41, is a firefighter who considers himself an independent voter. “We need a change,” he said.

Earlier this month, an ICE officer shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant in Biddeford, Maine. Guerrero was married and had a 3-year-old daughter, and his family says that he was legally authorized to work in the United States. The killing struck a nerve across Maine, and protests erupted outside Collins’s office in Biddeford, where demonstrators chanted, “Vote her out!”

“I don’t like how she’s supporting ICE and expanding their funding,” Walton said of Collins. “It’s not what we need right now.” When I asked him if he thinks Collins bears any responsibility for the shooting, he said, “Absolutely. If she supported ICE and voted to increase their funding, then it is absolutely on any of those politicians who vote that way.” Walton, a union member, voted for Jackson in the gubernatorial primary earlier this year, in part because of Jackson’s support for unions. He plans to vote for Jackson again in November, this time for Senate.

Collins has survived controversy before, most notably after casting the deciding vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018. She ended up cruising to reelection in 2020. Since then, Kavanaugh sided with the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, upending abortion rights in the United States. Voters may have finally had enough. Earlier in the race, most polls showed Collins underperforming Platner, and a recent University of New Hampshire poll had her trailing Jackson by three points.

Ashley, 38, a small-business owner in Portland, is a registered Democrat but has voted for Collins in the past. The senator’s vote for Kavanaugh was the beginning of a turning point for Ashley. “She claims to be a moderate, but I don’t feel like she votes like one,” she said. Ashley asked me to use her first name only because she doesn’t want her political views to affect her business.

This year, Ashley voted for Platner in the primary and said she was “very excited” about him because he bucked the establishment, though she ultimately wasn’t surprised by the scandals that sank his candidacy. “People my age now are really confused by the Democratic Party, and you sort of wonder whose interests they have in mind sometimes,” she said. “I feel like [Platner] represented real people in Maine and he kind of felt like a sort of beacon of hope — that maybe some things could change.”

The whole process of selecting a new nominee to replace Platner reminded her of the 2024, presidential election. “At this point, I don’t feel like I have a choice,” she said. “Honestly, this feels a little bit like the Kamala Harris situation — it’s just that’s who the pick is.” Still, she said she likes Jackson and will definitely vote for him in the fall.

That it’s time for Collins to go seems to be a growing sentiment since her last reelection campaign. At a McDonald’s in Brunswick, I met another former Collins voter. Leo Gagnon, 92, has lived in Maine his entire life. He spent more than three decades at a paper mill and another 10 years working for the state — plowing snow and doing maintenance jobs. He voted for Collins in 2020, but plans to vote for the Democratic nominee in November. “Social Security isn’t even keeping up with the cost of living,” he said. “When I was a kid, they always told me, ‘Republicans are for the rich, Democrats are for the poor.’ It’s still that way.”

Collins, he says, has done some good for Maine, but she’s gone too far in President Trump’s direction for his liking.

To be sure, Jackson still has a lot of work to do to build a successful campaign in a short timeframe — and to make sure that the enthusiasm from the primaries doesn’t slowly evaporate. But perhaps the best thing he has going for him is the seemingly lackluster enthusiasm for his opponent.

It’s time for change, Gagnon told me. “We need new blood.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans continue to lie about elections in America. Does Senator Susan Collins know this?

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Ilya Somin:

Trump's big lie isn’t about the six year old 2020 election. He’s targeting the midterms.

During another rambling speech on July 16th, Donald Trump falsely claimed without credible evidence about there have been serious breaches of election security and repeated his assertions that the 2020, election was compromised. As in the past, these remarks are utterly indefensible. And they are likely part of an illegal effort to federalize control over the upcoming midterm elections, so as to tilt the results in his party’s favor. 

Hopefully, America’s courts and federal system will continue to stymie him.

Trump claimed in his speech that some 278,000 non-citizens illegally registered to vote . There is no real evidence to support this, and even he didn’t claim proof there was any significant actual illegal non-citizen voting. 

Decades of efforts to find such evidence — including by the right-wing conspiracy creating Heritage Foundation — have turned up no more than a few dozen cases, over a span of several decades. A search of the Heritage’s election fraud database turns up only 99 supposed cases of non-citizen voting from 1982, to 2025.

Trump also claimed foreign powers intervened to prevent his election in 2020, and that China “obtained” some 220,000 voter files. In January 2021, the US intelligence community — then led by Trump’s own first-term political appointees — concluded foreign interference did not tilt the election against him and that China did not even try to do so. The voter-file access claim makes no sense. As my Cato Institute colleague Walter Olson — an election law specialist — points out, “this means nothing” because it is possible to buy or rent

 voter information from states that make them public information.

These fake claims are intended to bolster Trump’s long-standing assertions that the 2020, election was somehow “stolen” from him. But, overwhelming evidence shows the contrary. 

In 2020-21, Trump and his political allies filed 64 court cases challenging the results in six key swing states. As detailed in “Lost, Not Stolen,” a review of these cases conducted by prominent Republican lawyers, election law specialists, and former federal judges, none of these decisions found significant evidence of voter fraud.

While some cases were dismissed on procedural grounds, 30 were decided on the merits, and in 14 others the plaintiffs voluntarily withdrew their suits (likely because they lacked evidence to substantiate their claims). 

Trump only prevailed in one case — a Pennsylvania decision involving procedural flaws that did not involve near enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s over 80,000 vote margin of victory in that state. Later investigations conducted in various swing states — including those undertaken by Republicans in Arizona and Michigan — likewise found no meaningful evidence of significant fraud.

If some combination of Democrats and foreign powers had managed to “steal” the 2020, election while Trump was in the White House, and avoid detection in the process, one wonders why they didn’t do it again in 2024, when a Democratic president was in power and in control of the Justice Department and the intelligence community. The fact that no such thing happened then is yet further evidence that it didn’t happen in 2020.

The real purpose of Trump’s ongoing lies about the 2020 election and election security may be to bolster his efforts to “nationalize” control of the 2026 midterm elections, so that he can skew results in his party’s favor, at a time when most pollsters and election analysts expect Republicans to lose control of at least one house of Congress, and possibly both.

Fortunately, Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution gives states primary responsibility for election administration, subject to override by congressional legislation. 

No current federal law gives Trump the authority he seeks. Numerous federal courts — including in cases presided over by Republican-appointed judges — have rejected his attempts to change voter ID rules by executive order and take control of state voter rolls. Courts should similarly rule against any potential efforts to use federal law enforcement agencies or — worse still — troops, to seize control of polling sites and ballots, just as the Supreme Court in December rightly rejected Trump’s illegal efforts to use the National Guard in Illinois and other blue states. State governments should also do everything possible to resist such power grabs through the political process and mobilize public opinion against any attempts.

America’s decentralized system of election administration has downsides, as well as virtues. But, as leading election law scholar Richard L. Hasen notes, it provides valuable protection against “a president hell-bent, like Trump, on election subversion.” 

Hasen, previously an advocate of election law centralization, adds that this has led him to reconsider. Americans would do well to heed Hasen’s point and also reject Trump’s bogus claims of fraud, intended to pave the way for his own very real efforts to undermine our elections.

Reader response on this opinion: Trump is laying the foundation for his Big Bad Pouting Party that will follow the coming mid-terms.
Echoing Roy Cohn's advice, Trump makes a practice of stating a LIE, and then REPEATING that lie, over and over, until the lie is gradually ACCEPTED AS TRUTH by the sheep in his flock.

He is claiming voter fraud already, and will continue to bleat this lie, hoping the sheep will swallow it.
Get ready for this latest Feces 💩Fest, America❗ Adolf Hitler's propaganda creator Joseph Goebbels made The Big Lie theory a reality. 

Senator Susan Collins should use her seniority to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump NOW, because he is clearly on the way to declaring martial law in America, rather than accept the outcomes of the 2026, mid term elections. 

Another wrong Supreme Court decision to harm immigrants who have Temporary Protected Status

The cruel reality of our American immigration system. In other words, immigrants who are contibuting to American economy will now be subject to deportation.  How evil is that❓

Temporary Protected Status for immigrants.

The Supreme Court decision allowing the end of protected status for Haitians and Syrians underscores a huge political failure.

Echo editorial published in the Boston Globe. 

The Supreme Court’s decision has allowed the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian migrants has been described as a major expansion of the president’s power to dictate the rules of immigration.

But it was something else as well: a cruel demonstration of the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system and the utter failure of its federal government to make it either more humane or rational.

Congress enacted the law, known as TPS, in 1990 to protect migrants who had fled El Salvador, which was then riven by civil war. Over the decades, the designation has been given to at least 16 more countries facing violent turmoil or catastrophic natural disasters, including not just Haiti and Syria but also Venezuela, Ukraine, and Sudan.

Though intended to provide short-term sanctuary, the status has often been extended when conditions in those countries did not materially improve. So, that is what happened with Haiti, which received the designation in 2010, after a devastating earthquake, and has had it extended more than half a dozen times. Today, the State Department continues to warn American citizens against traveling there because of the threat of “kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest, and limited health care.”

During those many years in the United States, millions of immigrants under TPS legally found work, paid taxes, bore children, and became essential members of hundreds of communities around the country — all while Congress failed time and again to craft a comprehensive immigration policy that might have allowed many of them to find a pathway to citizenship.

More than half a million Haitians live in the United States (including more than 60,000 in Massachusetts), and of those more than 300,000 have Temporary Protected Status. 

By some estimates, one-third of the Haitian TPS holders work in the health care industry. They are medical technicians and hospital orderlies, provide essential home care for the elderly, and work with children with autism or elderly people with dementia. They fill crucial jobs that often go begging for workers.

Here is what Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican congressman from the suburbs north of New York City, had to say after the Supreme Court decision: “Immediately shutting off TPS will create a crisis in our hospitals, nursing homes, and in the I/DD [intellectual and developmental disability] community.” And he is not the only Republican saying such things.

The Republican mayor of Springfield, Ohio — the city that Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, claimed in 2024 and 2025 had been invaded by “illegal” Haitians who spread disease, committed violent crimes, and even ate residents’ pets — called those same Haitians “our neighbors, coworkers, business owners, taxpayers and parents.

“They contribute to our local economy, support our schools, strengthen our neighborhoods and have become part of the fabric of Springfield,” the mayor, Rob Rue, said in a statement following last week’s Supreme Court decision.

The Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, agreed, saying on Sunday that Haitian TPS holders have helped revitalize communities like Springfield. “It’s Haitians who, many times, are taking care of your mom or your dad who has Alzheimer’s, taking care of family members who might be in a nursing home,” Dewine said on CNN’s State of the Union. “And to say we’re going to pull all those [people] out, it’s just not in our own self-interest.”

Contrast those statements about the Haitian community with Trump’s, some of the choicest of which were recounted by Justice Elena Kagan in her blistering dissent to the Supreme Court majority’s TPS ruling: “Filthy, dirty, disgusting,” “like a death wish for our country,” and “poisoning the blood” of the nation.

Kagan called such statements “so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.” Yet somehow Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, could conclude, risibly, that “None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary [of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, at the time] was overtly racial.”

The impending deportation of thousands of Haitian TPS holders has so outraged some residents of Springfield that they are, according to The New York Times, “preparing to protect Haitians, with some making plans to care for their Haitian neighbors’ native-born children and even to hide and shelter immigrants who remain.” (Those children are US citizens, a status reaffirmed by a separate Supreme Court decision Tuesday that upheld birthright citizenship.)

Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat from Hyde Park and cosponsor of a bipartisan bill that passed in the House to extend protections for Haitians, counseled Haitian TPS holders that “until you receive notification regarding your work authorization being rescinded, you are still authorized to work.” And she called on the Senate to pass her bill extending protected status.

The chances of that happening are small, given the anti-immigrant fever that grips the Republican Party. But there is evidence that the nation is tiring of Trump’s cruelty toward migrants, the vast majority of whom are peaceable, law-abiding, and productive members of society.

It is not wrong for Republicans to point out that the T in TPS stands for temporary, and that under the law the status could be rescinded when migrants’ home countries regain some semblance of peace and security. But that has not happened in many of the TPS countries, Particularly not in Haiti.

The bigger issue here is the chronic failure of Congress to replace the ad hoc US immigration system with something more comprehensive, clear, predictable, rational, and humane. In a saner time, it would not be a fever dream to believe that Congress could, with some courage and will, find a way to secure the nation’s borders while also reaffirming its proud role as a beacon of hope and opportunity for tempest-tossed immigrants.

Alas, we are not in that time but here instead, in the Trump era, when it feels daunting to ask Congress to simply apply another layer of duct tape to our jerry-rigged system. For now, though, that would be enough to save, at least for a time, thousands of Haitian, Syrian, and in the fall, probably El Salvadoran TPS holders from being forced to leave the homes, families, and communities they have built in America.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.

Donald Trump and his reflecting cesspool desecrated our beautiful national monuments

Trump’s slimy, swampy eyesore in Washington, D.C.
And the Reflecting Pool isn’t looking too good either.

Echo opinion by Renée Graham published in the Boston Globe.

Donald Trump's reflecting cesspool is a metaphor for his ugly administration.

Since his return to the White House last year, Donald Trump has spent an absurd amount of time trying to remake (I would say "uglify") Washington, D.C., in his own (hideous) image.

As of late last week, tarps still covered part of the Kennedy Center’s façade. On June 13, Trump’s name was removed from the building as ordered by Christopher R. Cooper, a federal judge. Cooper wanted to know why those tarps, which block much of John F. Kennedy’s name, have remained on the performing arts center dedicated as a memorial to the assassinated president.

Where the White House’s East Wing stood for more than a century before Trump had it demolished last year for his 90,000 square foot ballroom/bunker, there’s a massive hole and construction site. Its price tag has skyrocketed from 💲300 million, which the White House once claimed would be fully funded by multibillion-dollar corporations, to nearly 💲600 million, much of it, to no one’s surprise, at taxpayers’ expense.

Trump’s latest authoritarian design debacle is the slimy, swampy eyesore that was once the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It now serves as a reflection of Trump’s slimy, swampy eyesore of a presidency.

Perhaps bored with his and Israel’s ill-conceived war against Iran, Trump announced in April that he had ordered a renovation of the iconic Reflecting Pool in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration on the Fourth of July. 

Trump created a myth, saying the pool was “filthy” and that its bottom would be painted something he called “American flag blue.”

Trump said the project would cost between 💲1.5 million and 💲2 million and would be completed “long before July Fourth.”

And just like the now four-month-old war against Iran that Trump initially said would be over “in four or five weeks,” the pool renovation has become another drawn-out mess of Trump’s own making.

Instead of blue, the pool is a sickly green from the proliferation of algae, which is not a new problem in D.C., but one to which Trump seemed oblivious. That blue painted lining began peeling not long after it was applied, with chunks of it floating in the water.

At least three duck carcasses were recently discovered — one in the pool and two nearby. City Wildlife, an animal rescue and rehabilitation group in Washington, told The Washington Post that toxic algae blooms or chemicals in the blue paint could harm wildlife.

Trump has blamed vandals for cutting a gash in the pool’s lining — that he initially said was 200 feet long and has since inflated to 350 feet — on the bottom of the pool. 

On Thursday, a National Park Service official said that earlier this month, the liner at the pool’s bottom was cut with a knife or razor. The incident was allegedly reported to the US Park Police on June 9, but Trump never mentioned that report.

Then there’s the no-bid contract awarded to a Trump donor’s company to install a water purification system in the pool. The White House claims that Trump was not involved in hiring that firm, owned by John J. Cafaro, a Palm Beach neighbor of Trump’s, who the president once called “a fantastic man.”

Now the National Guard is on patrol at the Reflecting Pool, which has also been surrounded by a fence, to avert any nefarious activities like visitors dipping a finger in the murky water. Six people have reportedly been arrested, and Jeanine Pirro, US attorney for the District of Columbia, said suspected vandals will “face the criminal justice system” in the nation’s capital.

After Pirro’s comments, Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who only found his spine after he decided not to run for reelection, said, “Yet they’re releasing people who pled guilty to assaulting police officers.” Tillis was referring to Trump’s mass pardons of those convicted of crimes committed during the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.

“What freaking parallel universe did I just wake up in❓” Tillis asked.

That universe is no longer parallel but is in control of the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. It’s a place created by Republicans like Tillis, who’ve done nothing as Trump breaks everything he touches and does so without a shred of accountability.

It’s unlikely the Reflecting Pool will be repaired in time for Fourth of July events. And that’s fine. Let that gross green swamp remain exactly as it is, a physical representation of the man who once promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, but instead created one on the National Mall, and within the White House itself.

Maine Write P.S.- And Maine Senator Susan Collins does nothing!

Donald John Trump surrendered to Iran and maga cult knows he is incompetent including Senator Susan Collins

Trump’s Iran deal looks like surrender

Echo editorial board published in the Boston Globe

Donald John Trump's new (former President Obama) agreement with Iran bears striking similarities to the Obama-era accord he famously abandoned.

The reviews of Donald John Trump’s MOU surrender deal with Iran are in, and they aren’t pretty.

On the right, the National Review said Doanld Trump committed the United States to “humiliations,” while The Wall Street Journal editorial board called the deal a “retreat.” 

On the left, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser under former president Joe Biden, said the deal indicated that “the United States basically lost this war.”

From the center right, Andrew Sullivan called it “surrender.” 

And this from the center left, economics blogger Noah Smith described the deal as a Katrina moment when even many of Trump’s defenders “will be forced to admit, in private if not in public, that the man and his administration are grossly, pathetically incompetent.”

If very few across the political spectrum can see value in the deal, the reason should be patently clear: It is a hollow promise, a deal to make a deal that is sounding suspiciously like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA), the Iran nuclear pact negotiated by then-President Barack Obama in 2015, that Trump tore up in 2018.

The new surrender document, the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) calls on Iran to dilute, or “downblend,” ❓-whaaa- its enriched uranium under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency. So did the JCPOA (which also called for removing some of that uranium to other countries). In the MOU, Iran “reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.” 

But Iran has always maintained that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes.

Details for a final deal will be negotiated in the coming two months — an absurdly short time frame for incredibly complex issues. In the meantime, the United States will release billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets. The United States pledges to lift all sanctions if and when a final deal is signed. 

Oddly, all this must be endorsed by the United Nations, a body Trump has long mocked as useless. And by unfreezing Iranian assets before a final nuclear deal is struck, Trump is effectively agreeing to pay Iran to return things to the way they were before February 28, 2026.

Nowhere does the surrender MOU address Iran’s mass manufacturing of ballistic missiles and weaponized drones, or its subsidizing of military proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran pledges to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for commercial shipping — but the MOU seems to leave open the possibility that in 60 days Iran can start taxing tankers to transit the waterway, something it was not doing before.

So, in many ways, Trump’s deal will return the Persian Gulf to the status quo ante — only arguably worse, because Iran now understands that the mighty US military cannot prevent it from strangling the world’s economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply flows.

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, admittedly no friend of Trump’s, summed it up fairly when he wrote on X: “Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

Cassidy’s assessment touches on the cost of this underwhelming settlement. The approximately 15-week campaign left 13 American service members and more than 3,500 Iranians dead. It cost the US military more than $32 billion and nearly drained the nation’s storehouse of missile and drone interceptors.

And the threat the war posed for the global economy was enormous. The sharp reduction in tanker traffic through the strait caused possibly the biggest disruption in oil supply in history, driving the price to above 💲120 a barrel and forcing countries to dip deeply into their reserves.

Before the first US and Israel bombs fell on Iran, gas in the United States was selling on average for less than $3 per gallon at the pump. By early June, the average nationwide price had risen to more than $4 a gallon. All told, according to Moody’s Analytics, the war cost the United States a total of $132 billion in both military spending and higher consumer costs — nearly $1,000 per American household.

Amid the disruptions in oil, natural gas, and fertilizer supplies, the World Bank lowered its forecast for global economic growth to 2.5 percent — the lowest since the COVID-19 pandemic.

No wonder Trump told reporters in Europe after signing the surrender MOU that he was worried that the war was about to trigger a global economic downturn rivaling the Great Depression of 1929 — an outcome that would have made him look as bad as Herbert Hoover. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have ​happened,” the president said.

It was boldly honest of the president to admit that he was so worried about his image for history. But surely the Iranians were pleased to hear that their ability to create global economic havoc has become their superpower against this superpower.

Sending the country into war is a president’s most somber and significant power, and Trump, true to form, has used it rashly in this war. It took a primary loss against a Trump-supported rival for Cassidy to speak honestly about the emperor’s new clothes. Might this be the moment when other Republican members of Congress remove the veil from their eyes and rein in his recklessness before he overreaches again❓

One could be forgiven for not betting on that possibility. But there are midterm elections this fall, and chances are higher that voters will use their ballots to hold the Donald Trump accountable. Trump pledged in 2024, to end military missions overseas and to focus American resources on America’s working people. This war did neither.

Donald John Trump's blundering, costly, and pointless use of the American military has damaged the US economy and its international standing — and it should be beyond the pale for anyone who truly puts America first.

Maine Writer post script- Senator Susan Collins where are you❓

Donald Trump has zero integrity no respect for America's fallen heroes. Memorial Day begins the cruel construction for his hideous arch

In Washington DC, the nation’s capital, this Memorial Day will be like no other. Editorial opinion published in the Boston Globe.

The once unbroken vista across the Potomac River leading to Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place of 400,000 American veterans, last week became something of a construction zone — as plans proceed apace for Donald Trump’s hideous triumphal arch on Memorial Circle.

What the arch is supposed to celebrate — what “triumph,” real or imagined — is itself a matter of controversy and conjecture. What is certain is that nothing — not a lawsuit brought by veterans nor a federal court order halting its construction — will stand in the way of a president more obsessed with monuments than with honoring the fallen service members this day was set aside to honor more than 150 years ago.

Having set his sights on Memorial Circle near the entry to the Arlington military cemetery for his 250-foot arch, topped by two gilded eagles and a gold-plated Lady Liberty — all with wings extended — Trump apparently wasn’t waiting for Congress or the federal courts to give him the go-ahead.

No, exactly a week before Memorial Day 2026, the fencing went up at Memorial Circle, along with an industrial drilling rig and pink flags used by surveyors.

It was days after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had testified at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing. And according to Representative Jared Huffman of California, “there wasn’t a project. Not even a proposal. Just a discussion,” Huffman posted on Instagram.

Asked at that hearing, “Who is the arch being built for?” Burgum responded, “For the American people.”

However, when asked last year by a CBS reporter what the monument was for, Trump pointed to himself and answered, “Me.”

And who are we to not take Trump at his word❓

The design was reportedly inspired by Trump’s fascination with the Arc de Triomphe, which began during a visit to Paris in his first term for a ceremony marking the anniversary of the end of World War I. But the Parisian landmark, its construction begun during the reign of Napoleon, is, however, only 164 feet high. It would be dwarfed by Trump’s proposed 250-foot monument — a figure that’s supposed to represent the nation’s 250th birthday and originally slated to be completed by July 4, 2026.

Meanwhile, the administration has cut medical staffing at the Veterans Affairs Department.

The arch would be more than double the size of the Lincoln Memorial and the equivalent of a 25-story office building, the lawsuit filed against its construction notes.

“Its location on Memorial Circle would situate the monument on an axis between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, obstructing a line of sight that was designed to represent the unification of the Nation following the Civil War and that has existed for nearly a century,” the suit says.

The lawsuit also charges the construction is illegal because it lacks congressional approval and ignores a host of “statutes impos[ing] procedural requirements” for construction in the area.

But mostly, the Vietnam vets and the architectural historian bringing the suit argue it “would dishonor their military and foreign service and the legacy of their comrades and other veterans buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and would degrade their personal experience when visiting Arlington Cemetery or traveling around Memorial Circle and on the Memorial Avenue Corridor.”

And could there be a more stark contrast to the row upon row of simple white gravestones than this proposed gaudy monument to nothing more than the enormous ego of the current occupant of the White House❓🤢

It speaks volumes about the offensiveness of this ego driven project — and its location — that the administration simply couldn’t wait for this Memorial Day to pass before the very pathway to Arlington National Cemetery was desecrated with fencing and drilling equipment.

People, of course, will still come to Arlington, will still place the flags that honor loved ones, brothers and sisters in arms, fallen heroes, as they have since this sacred place was opened to honor the service of those who fought on opposite sides in a war that nearly tore this nation apart. Arlington became part of the healing process — as it was on that day in May 1868, when some 5,000 men and women walked among the then 20,000 graves of Union and Confederate soldiers, decorating them “with the choicest flowers of springtime,” former Union General John A. Logan insisted.

“We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance,” he added. “Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.”

True then. Truer now.

Donald Trump demands fealty from his evil cult but never reciprocates: Trumpism is Fascism

After crushing primary defeat in a primary, the Republican incumbent Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana used his concession speech to deliver a message about — and to — Donald Trump.

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Renée Graham

“When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to,” the two-term senator said. “But you don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim the election was stolen, ... you don’t manufacture some excuse. You thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you’ve had that privilege. And that’s what I’m doing right now.”

What Cassidy also did was something he had failed to do since Trump returned to office — call him out publicly❗ Never mentioned Trump's name. But, only when his own political career was left in ashes was Cassidy willing to singe  Trump.

Cassidy has been a marked man since 2021, when he was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump after the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. At the time, Cassidy said, “Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty.” In response to Cassidy’s vote, the Republican Party of Louisiana censured him.

But Trump, who turned the power of the presidency into a revenge fest, made no secret of his desire to get Cassidy, whom he called “disloyal,” out of Congress. 

In the Senate primary, he endorsed House Representative Julia Letlow, who received 45 percent of the vote and will face John Fleming, a Louisiana state treasurer, in a runoff on June 27.

As soon as Trump returned to office, Cassidy tried to get back into his good graces — only to discover that Trump doesn’t have any. But to appease him, Cassidy voted to confirm every member of Trump’s Cabinet.

That included Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As a doctor, Cassidy knew that Kennedy was not only unqualified to be the health and human services secretary but, also, that he was an anti-vaxxer and a peddler of the junkiest junk science.

But with his vote, Cassidy, a staunch vaccine advocate, appeased Trump and gave Kennedy undeserved trust. That didn’t stop Kennedy from blaming Cassidy for the derailed confirmation of Casey Means, a so-called “wellness influencer” as surgeon general.

In a social media post, Kennedy said that Cassidy “once again did the dirty work for entrenched interests seeking to stall the [Make America Healthy Again] movement and protect the very status quo that has made America the sickest nation on earth.”

Whatever legacy Cassidy hoped to cement during his Senate tenure, his decision to help Kennedy become The Worst Health and Human Services Secretary™ in American history will overshadow all of it.

Cassidy learned what other Republicans, despite their stalwart sycophancy, have found when they thwarted Trump’s fragile ego — he will stop at nothing to destroy them politically.

A year after Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Georgia congresswoman, heckled former president Joe Biden during his final State of the Union address in 2024, Trump excoriated her as a “lunatic” when she pushed for the release of the Justice Department’s files on convicted sex offender and former Trump buddy Jeffrey Epstein.

(House Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky also demanded the Epstein files release, which landed him in Trump’s crosshairs. He faced a tough primary challenge on Tuesday against a Trump-endorsed candidate.)

Without Trump’s support, Greene declined to seek reelection. But she has continued to joust with Trump, and she has said that “MAGA has become a cult.”

MAGA has always been a cult. But not until Trump turned on Greene did she bother to notice. That’s typical of Republicans who only tend to buck Trump on their way out of the door — like Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is not running for reelection. His scathing cross-examination of Kristi Noem in March probably helped get her fired as Homeland Security director.

Having lost his shot at another Senate term, Cassidy should also behave like a man with nothing to lose. Perhaps his concession speech was a preview.

“Let me just set the record straight: Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans and it is about our Constitution,” Cassidy told his supporters. “And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”

Instead of a potential three-term senator, Cassidy is a cautionary tale for Republicans. He traded his conscience for capitulation to a man he knew was not qualified to be a leader. 

In search of his own self-preservation, Cassidy toadied up to a tyrant, placed Trump above country and the Constitution, and still ended up as a loser.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are losing the Iran World War because of cheap drones.

(Meanwhile, the cost of oil keeps going up because Donald Trump declared an illegal war without any plan about how to win or exit.)

Drones are blowing up old assumptions about US foreign policy.

#ImpeachTrumpNOW attention Senator Susan Collins

Echo essay published in the Boston Globe by Stephen Kinzer

America will find it harder to win arguments with military might alone. 

Waging war is one of humanity’s oldest pursuits. That is unlikely to end. Leaders seeking power or glory will always want to prove themselves on battlefields. The way wars are fought, however, changes over time. Today those changes are especially dramatic. Wars used to be won by the side that fielded the biggest, meanest, and best-equipped army. America’s misadventure in Iran is the latest proof that those days are over.

War is becoming democratized. Weaker powers can now resist
stronger ones in new ways. Revolutionaries, like those in Algeria, Vietnam, and Cuba, have often shown that smaller and more agile forces can triumph over larger ones.
Now governments are learning the same lesson. America’s failure to crush Iran, and Russia’s failure to impose its will in Ukraine, show that superior force is no longer enough to guarantee victory. In the new age of cheap drones, the value of expensive missiles, bombs, and fighter jets is suddenly limited. Today’s conflicts in Iran and Ukraine are opening a new era of warfare.

This is more than just an evolution in weapons technology. It is a paradigm shift that threatens the long-term power of countries that rely on military force to deter or resist enemies. The United States is the most prominent of those countries. 

That has profound implications for the course of American power.
The most immediate cause of this sudden reversal of fortune is the development of drones. They have become the poor man’s weapon of choice. That makes them the future of warfare.
Drones are cheap and easy to build. Depending on size and power, they can cost anywhere from 💲300 to 💲50,000. Compare that with the cost of American-made missiles that can shoot down drones: 💲3 million for each Patriot missile, at least 💲10 million for a THAAD interceptor. A drone factory can churn out hundreds in a week. Producing and delivering a Patriot battery takes a minimum of two years. Seeking to take advantage of this mismatch, Iranian leaders have sent swarms of drones to attack targets in Israel and the Persian Gulf. These are not intended to produce military victory. Iranians have realized that they can win simply by surviving. This is naturally unsettling to the United States, which is used to winning wars according to the old rules.
A similar dynamic shapes the war in Ukraine. Russia’s overwhelming military advantage should have allowed it to achieve its war goals in Ukraine just as easily as the Americans were supposed to achieve theirs in Iran. But as the Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke the Elder tartly observed more than a century ago, no war plan survives contact with the enemy. In the early stages of the Ukraine war, infantry charges and armored attacks were common. Now they are rare. The reason is simple: Any operation on open ground can be quickly spotted and attacked by drones.
One key difference between these two wars is the adaptability of the attacking power. Russia shifted its strategy just as Ukraine has. The two belligerents match each other drone for drone.
The United States has proved less willing or able to make such a sharp shift. Our lumbering and overfed defense industry is focused on making highly complex weapons systems that are also highly profitable. As Iran steadily churns out drones, the United States has scrambled to respond. Americans have even turned to their Ukrainian partners for advice on drone technology — a remarkable case of a student surpassing the teacher. 

In the future, if Iran and Ukraine are any indication, countries that adapt more quickly and imaginatively to strategic challenges will have an advantage over those that are slow-moving and tradition-bound.
This presents the United States with profound challenges. The most obvious is a challenge to our way of waging war. There was a time when a simple demand from Washington was enough to terrify a national leader into resigning. But obviously, that no longer works. If the United States wants to continue exercising military power over faraway lands, it will have to find new ways to do it.
The larger challenge for Americans is to decide whether exercising coercive power is what the United States should be doing in the 21st century. Our foreign policy is largely a matter of identifying enemies and finding ways to weaken or destroy them. The alternative would be to accept other countries as they are, and even seek to make them partners in a shared prosperity. Yet in Washington, it is an absolute taboo to suggest that compromising with Russia, China, or Iran could contribute more to our national security than any weapons system.
Raw power no longer brings either victory or stability. This is a gleeful moment for the underdogs. Superpowers do not seem so super anymore.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Donald Trump invented the art of the conspiracy theory. Trump constantly lies it is difficult to determine fact from fiction

 We are all conspiracy theorists now

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Renée Graham

A decade of Trump has warped our sense of truth and facts. 

Frankly, that probably won’t end when his presidency does.

First came the gunshots. Then came the conspiracy theories.

Even before a California man who allegedly tried to assassinate Donald Trump at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association gala on Saturday April 25, was identified, social media was boiling over with speculation that what the Justice Department has charged as an attempt on Trump’s life was fake.

Within minutes, the word “staged” quickly trended on various sites.

It was the kind of spontaneous response that one usually expects from those internet corners where tinfoil is the headgear of choice and where denizens still bicker over the legitimacy of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

But reactions to the shooting weren’t the sole province of the usual “Lone Gunmen” types, who steadfastly believe that the real truth is always lurking out there.

“Has there ever been a president have [sic] this many close ‘attempts’ on their life?” Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas posted on Threads. “Maybe it’s lax gun laws, maybe it’s lack of mental health funding, or maybe it’s fake … who knows … ”❓

Despite no evidence, there is a pervasive sense that this alleged third attempt on Trump’s life in less than two years was concocted to draw attention away from the president’s quagmire of a war in Iran; gas prices averaging more than $4 a gallon; the files where he is named in the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; and the lowest poll numbers in either of Trump’s White House terms.

As usual, Trump did nothing to tamp down the suspicions. It certainly didn’t help that in comments to the media after the rest of the dinner was canceled, he used the shooting to justify restarting construction on that ballroom/bunker that he demolished the East Wing of the White House to build.

Earlier this month, a federal judge allowed construction on the underground bunker to continue for “national security” but halted work on the ballroom, Donald Trump's very unpopular pet project.

“We need the ballroom,” Trump said. He also claimed without proof that the Secret Service and military “are demanding it.” But the only demands came from the MAGA minions on social media, who amplified Trump’s expensive ballroom blitz.

That right-wing offensive only churned even more conspiracies that the alleged assassination attempt was manufactured to promote the necessity of Trump’s 💲400 million ballroom.

This is life when myriad conspiracy theories feed biases and many Americans drift further from the truth. Political polarization has always challenged facts. But no one in recent memory has done more to gut the truth than Trump.

He called the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection a “day of love” and the white supremacist supporters who pummeled police officers and defiled the US Capitol “patriots.” Trump incited that insurrection after he lied that the 2020, presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden was “rigged” and “stolen” from him.

In 2024, Trump falsely claimed that Biden took performance-enhancing drugs before his better-than-expected State of the Union address. He lied that Kamala Harris, then vice president and the Democratic presidential nominee, used AI-generated images of crowds at her rallies. During a presidential debate, Trump bellowed nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.

While what happened at the WHCA event is still being debated, this is unassailable: In a decade where Trump has sowed mistrust, we have all become conspiracy theorists.

As usual, Trump did nothing to tamp down the suspicions. It certainly didn’t help that in comments to the media after the rest of the dinner was canceled, he used the shooting to justify restarting construction on that ballroom/bunker that he demolished the East Wing of the White House to build.

Earlier this month, a federal judge allowed construction on the underground bunker to continue for “national security” but halted work on the ballroom, Donald Trump's expensive and unpopular pet project.

“We need the ballroom,” Trump said. He also claimed without proof that the Secret Service and military “are demanding it.” But the only demands came from the MAGA minions on social media, who amplified Trump’s ballroom blitz.

That right-wing offensive only churned even more conspiracies that the alleged assassination attempt was manufactured to promote the necessity of Trump’s 💲400 million ballroom.

This is life when myriad conspiracy theories feed biases and many Americans drift further from the truth. Political polarization has always challenged facts. But no one in recent memory has done more to gut the truth than Trump.

Trump called the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection a “day of love” and the white supremacist supporters who pummeled police officers and defiled the US Capitol “patriots.” Trump incited that insurrection after he lied that the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden was “rigged” and “stolen” from him.

In 2024, Trump falsely claimed that Biden took performance-enhancing drugs before his better-than-expected State of the Union address. He lied that Kamala Harris, then vice president and the Democratic presidential nominee, used AI-generated images of crowds at her rallies. During a presidential debate, Trump bellowed nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.
, Trump claimed that Iran bombed one of its own elementary schools, killing more than 170 girls, on the first day of the US-Israeli war against Iran, even though evidence points to US culpability.

It’s gotten to the point that even within MAGA, some don’t believe Trump. A recent story in Wired revealed how some of Donald Trump's followers now believe that the first assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania., in July 2024, was staged by Trump.

Without question, the proliferation of AI has blurred the line between what is and isn’t real. That’s an assault on truth, but so is a president who🤥  lies as easily as he breathes.

Like Trump, too many no longer seem to care about evidence before they spread conspiracies to foster their specific worldviews. With social media as an accelerant, measured voices of reason don’t stand a chance, and that won’t end when Trump’s final term ends.

Under the treacherous rule of the most mendacious president in American history, we’ve become Generation Trust No One. And while conspiracies may offer false comfort especially in times of strife, they also become a coffin for truth.

We’ve been polluted by a man hostile toward facts and immune to honesty. That’s what Trump wants. Authoritarians thrive as self-anointed arbiters of information that is skewed, false, and only serves themselves and their hunger for power and control.

Donald Trump obsessed with power but he will fail because his failed leadership is unable to inspire loyalty

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe: 

Trump’s obsession with winning is a losing strategy. 

Raw power can only get a strongman leader so far. 

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it❗

Thank you for your service❗ 😞😰💘💙

By Stacie Nicole Smith, the managing director of the Consensus Building Institute and the director of the Workable Peace Project, a high school curriculum designed to teach conflict resolution.

For years, I watched ninth-graders learn a lesson that continues to elude some of the most powerful people in the world.

These students participate in a classroom role-play exercise based on one of history’s most famous diplomatic exchanges: the Melian Dialogue, recorded by Thucydides in his account of the Peloponnesian War. 

In 416 BC, Athenian envoys arrived at the small island of Melos with an ultimatum: submit or be destroyed. 

When the Melians protested, the Athenians cut them off. “The strong do what they can,” they said, “and the weak suffer what they must.”

The outcome: Athens “won” that conflict. Melos refused to submit and was conquered, its men killed, its women and children enslaved. In the very short term, it was a victory for Athens. 

Today, the logic of “the strong do what they can” seems to define how the world works. Great powers are ignoring the norms that once restrained them: Russia invaded Ukraine, and the United States arrested Venezuela’s leader and bombed Iran. The current administration’s approach to US foreign policy embodies the Athenian ethos, from a zero-sum approach to trade relationships to a willingness to take the country to war. 

In Canada, like the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently lamented at the World Economic Forum’s summit in Davos, “It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”

Those who admire the Athenians’ vision of strength seem to miss the fact that Thucydides didn’t record that exchange to celebrate it. It’s a prelude to catastrophe. Because, within a few years, Athens’s enemies united against it. The empire Athens built by force dissolved precisely because it had been built by force. 

Loyalty from its conquered coalition proved only as durable as the armed force holding it together. I mediated environmental disputes, organizational conflicts, and complex multiparty negotiations, and I have seen how decisions dictated by the powerful are much less stable than agreements designed to meet the interests of all parties.

Students I observed almost always figured this out. In the role-play, some were Athenians, some , and they were prompted to think beyond what they “can” or “must” do. 

Instead, they had to consider what would meet their core needs, uphold their values, and endure the test of time. Students routinely found compromises Athens never even considered — like reduced payment by the Melians* or autonomy over some matters of governance. Those arrangements would have given Athens much of what it needed while giving Melos more reason to accept its rule. This is what mediation experts call the “mutual gains” approach to conflict resolution.

In other words, the students I work with learned the limits of coercion. By rejecting the moral case out of hand, Athens made its contempt for justice explicit and thereby handed every wavering city-state a common cause. Overtly illegitimate behavior reduces the cost of opposing the aggressor, makes coalition-building against it easier, and converts previously neutral parties into motivated adversaries. 

Legitimacy is not a constraint on power — it is a form of power. In their focus on demonstrating strength, the Athenians ignored the strategic importance of building legitimacy.

Mediators know that win-lose deals are almost always worse deals, especially in the long run. The pattern is consistent: One party’s interests are ignored and it is forced to comply with the aggressor’s demands, resentment accumulates, and the forced “agreement” holds only as long as the aggressor can maintain the pressure.

The mediators I work with share the conviction that achieving win-win deals on the world stage is possible. 

People practicing the dynamics of coercion and negotiation firsthand can learn to avoid the pitfalls of the raw, and usually short-lived, exercise of power.

The lesson from Thucydides, then, extends far beyond violent conflict. The ninth-graders in my classroom figured this out in an afternoon. The question is whether today’s strongmen will figure it out before the costs become irreversible.

*Melians were the inhabitants of the Aegean island of Melos, famously involved in a 416 BC, incident during the Peloponnesian War. They maintained neutral, friendly ties with Sparta but were forced into a confrontation by Athens, which demanded their submission. Following their refusal to surrender, Athens conquered Melos, executing all men and enslaving women and children