Donald Trump and maga Republicans will be held accountable for horrible behavior because history will never forget!

History’s Judgment about those who go along, by Michael Luo published in The New Yorker: Some civil servants and senior officials in the Trump Administration are experiencing bouts of conscience. (Ya'think❓)


During the second Donald Trump maga cult administration, there has been unprecedented cruelty, in a myriad of ways.

Perhaps, above all, are the unexplainable ways that Trump managed to cajole, cow, or simply command people in his Administration to carry out even his most undemocratic wishes with remarkably little dissent.

Some civil servants and senior officials, however, are experiencing bouts of conscience. In March, Erez Reuveni, a veteran Justice Department lawyer, was promoted to the position of acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation. He decided to personally take on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been wrongly sent back to El Salvador, in violation of a 2019, court order. On April 5th, Reuveni told his supervisor he would not sign an appeal brief that said Abrego Garcia was a “terrorist.” According to a whistle-blower complaint that Reuveni later filed, he said, “I didn’t sign up to lie.” He was suspended and then fired.

Other career prosecutors have chosen to step down. In February, when Trump officials moved to dismiss corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, it triggered resignations from Danielle R. Sassoon, the interim United States Attorney in Manhattan, and from Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, the two officials in charge of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. 

In September, Erik Siebert, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, resigned, after his investigations into Letitia James and

James Comey stalled and Trump demanded that he be fired.

There has been turnover in senior ranks of the military as well.

In October, Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, abruptly announced that he would retire at the end of the year. Tensions had reportedly been mounting between Holsey and the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, particularly over the admiral’s concerns about the legality of drone strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. Now military experts have raised the possibility of war crimes, as lawmakers investigate a drone operation on September 2nd that destroyed a boat and killed everyone on board.

The excesses of the Trumpzi Administration seem only to be escalating. A ProPublica investigation, published in late October, found that ICE had arrested more than a hundred and seventy American citizens, nearly twenty of whom were children. In November, after the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national, Trump suspended the issuance of visas for people travelling on an Afghan passport, halted the processing of all asylum claims, and vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.”

Anyone still serving in the Trump Administration must reckon with the reality that, when the government has previously perpetrated egregious miscarriages of justice, history has not been forgiving to those who’ve gone along, however reluctantly.

A graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II.  (I read this book with a library reading group and recommend it.  My first time to read a "graphic" book and I appreciated the experience.)

Consider the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. On the morning of December 7, 1941, when Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand people of Japanese ancestry lived in the continental United States, most of them on the West Coast. Nearly two-thirds were American citizens. Wild reports—later debunked—of lights signalling to Japanese vessels offshore proliferated. Public fears about a potential enemy attack from within began to spread, even as intelligence officials in Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration believed them to be baseless.

Lieutenant General John DeWitt was the head of the Army’s Western Defense Command. Driven by his own alarmism and his suspicions of members of the “Japanese race,” he began pushing for the removal of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, a revered figure in Roosevelt’s Cabinet, initially had doubts about the legality of the plan, as did his deputy, John J. McCloy, though they ultimately supported it, as a matter of military necessity. But lawyers for the Justice Department, who bore responsibility for the handling of “alien enemies,” argued that a mass evacuation was unnecessary and likely unconstitutional.

The debate culminated in a tense meeting, on the evening of February 17, 1942, at the Georgetown home of the Attorney General, Francis Biddle, who had joined the Cabinet only a few months earlier. Edward J. Ennis, the head of the Justice Department’s “aliens” division, and James H. Rowe, the Assistant Attorney General, were forceful in their opposition to the plan. But Biddle, who had also been opposed, was noticeably reticent, Rowe later recalled.

Then, an Army official drew from his pocket a draft evacuation order, and Biddle revealed that he had dropped his objections to it. Ennis nearly wept.

Two days later, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, which led to the U.S. government dispatching the entire Japanese American population of California, Oregon, and Washington to ten concentration camps, as Roosevelt initially termed them, in the interior of the country. (The final camp did not close until early 1946.) Justice Department lawyers went on to defend the policy in court and, most controversially, took steps to obscure from the Supreme Court reports that cast doubt on the military justification and showed that Japanese Americans were overwhelmingly loyal to the United States.

In the decades since, numerous historians, as well as members of a federal commission that, in 1981, held hearings across the country, have studied the path to the executive order. The circle of blame has included not just Army and War Department officials but Biddle, who chose to “surrender,” as the historian Peter Irons put it, in his book “Justice at War.” Biddle admitted in his memoirs that, being “new to the Cabinet,” he was reluctant to challenge Stimson, “whose wisdom and integrity I greatly respected.” Irons also scrutinized Ennis’s decision to sign on to a misleading brief to the Supreme Court, observing that “institutional loyalty had prevailed over personal conscience.”

Standing firm on principle sometimes sits opposite other factors, such as fealty to colleagues and professional ambition, but it invariably comes from within. During the early days of the first Trump Administration, Sally Yates, who had been Obama’s Deputy Attorney General and had stayed on as the acting Attorney General, directed her staff not to defend an executive order from Trump restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries—his so-called Muslim ban. Trump fired her.💢❗

Several months later, Yates delivered a commencement-week speech to graduates of Harvard Law School, in which she talked about the need to hone the “compass that’s inside all of us.” 

Introspection about difficult decisions that involve conscience, she said, helps “develop a sense of who you are and what you stand for.” For those in the second Trump Administration, the time to answer those questions could be now. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 22, 2025, issue, with the headline “Conscientious Objectors.”

Xenophobia and Cherry Trees

An echo report published by NBC News, written by Angela Yang

Burned and vandalized: A history of cherry blossoms bearing the brunt of xenophobia*: From December 8, 1941's attack on Pearl Harbor to the COVID-19 scapegoating, Japanese cherry blossom trees have a history of being destroyed during times of heightened anti-Asian sentiment.

George Takei captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father’s—and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In a stunning graphic memoir, Takei revisits his haunting childhood in American concentration camps, as one of over 100,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon—and America itself—in this gripping (graphic) tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.

WASHINGTON, DC- In early spring every year, a sea of bright pink flowers frames outdoor spaces from the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle to the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., as thousands of cherry trees reach full bloom. The trees, which are nonnative to North America, now blossom across the country after the U.S. first imported them from Japan more than a century ago.

People visit the cherry blossoms as they bloom at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., on March 24. Saul Loeb / AFP

In fact, the trees symbolize a history of friendship between Japan and the United States. They also have a variety of meanings — including life, death and renewal — for the Japanese diaspora. Yet, at times when fear and prejudice flare up in the U.S., they have also been targets of violence against Japanese Americans or Asians at large.

After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1941, vandals cut down four of the cherry trees around Washington’s Tidal Basin, inscribing “To Hell With the Japanese” on one of the severed trunks. Cherry blossoms have been an iconic sight in the capital since Tokyo gave them to the U.S. in the early 20th century.

Since 1912, Washington has regularly hosted an annual National Cherry Blossom Festival, which draws more than 1.5 million people every year to celebrate the friendship between the two countries. The festival ceased throughout much of World War II as anti-Japan sentiment spiked, according to the National Park Service, and people insisted on renaming the trees “Oriental” cherry trees.

As Asian Americans confront another wave of xenophobia brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and tense U.S. relations with China, a Japanese cultural center in San Francisco’s Japantown — the largest and longest-standing Japanese American community in the country — has felt the scapegoating continue.

Three cherry trees were vandalized outside the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California at the start of 2021. After an outpouring of support from donors, the center planted four cherry blossom trees this year and hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony Saturday to dedicate the fourth tree to the donors.

When the center found the trees last year, every branch had been ripped off to leave only the trunks. Law enforcement agencies did not label the incident a hate crime, but one thing was clear to Paul Osaki, the cultural center’s director: This was more than breaking a few branches —it was an act meant to destroy the trees.

“It really felt like an attack against our cultural heritage. And so that hurt,” Osaki said. “I’d almost prefer them to attack me versus those trees. They were very special and meant a lot more than just a tree growing up in the sidewalk.”

The cherry blossoms, which were planted nearly 30 years ago to commemorate a visit from the emperor and empress of Japan, were the first to have been planted in more than half a century. The city uprooted every tree in Japantown from the 1960s to the 1980s during a redevelopment initiative targeted at areas of “urban blight” — defined partly as neighborhoods with major influxes of non-European populations — the San Francisco Planning Department said in a report.

Osaki said residents first got notice in 1948 about the urban renewal project, which planned to raze and reconstruct much of Japantown at a time when Japanese Americans were still a “very hated community” as a result of World War II.

Families in the area, many of whom had just begun returning from prison camps a couple of years previously, were given a deadline to sell their homes or be evicted.

The cherry blossom trees that were removed during the period included those planted by the earliest generation to settle down in the part of San Francisco that became home to the country’s first Japantown, Osaki said.

When the U.S. first received the blossoms from Japan, officials rejected them. About two years before the blossoms were planted, Japan had given Washington an initial gift of 2,000 cherry trees. But when they arrived in 1910, the Agriculture Department discovered upon inspection that they were diseased and infested with insects, according to the National Park Service. The trees were burned.

Some anthropologists, including Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, are skeptical about whether the trees were, indeed, infested. An editorial published in response by The New York Times also said: “We have been importing ornamental plants from Japan for years, and by the shipload, and it is remarkable that this particular invoice should have contained any new infections.”

After the turn of the century, Ohnuki-Tierney said, U.S. isolationists found themselves gradually beginning a tug-of-war with policymakers who were open to greater internationalism.

Nativist Charles Marlatt headed the Agriculture Department’s Bureau of Entomology, which inspected imported plants.

Marlatt, who held strong concerns about pests from nonnative plants, had campaigned unsuccessfully for plant quarantine legislation. Entomology experts have suggested that his honeymoon trip to China and Japan, during which his wife contracted an unknown illness that later caused her death, influenced his concerns.

“The plants from Japan and China, on one hand, people tried to welcome them. On the other hand, the isolationists started to object to them,” Ohnuki-Tierney said. “And it is very interesting the way anti-Asian racism very, very easily comes up in the United States.”

So when Japanese officials prepared a second shipment, they enlisted multiple quarantine and horticultural experts to supervise the cherry trees’ cultivation before they reassured the Agriculture Department that preventive measures had been taken to eliminate the possibility of pests. Park Service records show that that batch of trees was accepted and planted along the Potomac River in 1912.

Since the end of World War II, the Park Service has recorded no further acts of vandalism to cherry trees in the capital — although the concern has resurfaced in light of increased violence against Asian communities in recent years, said Ryan Shaffer, the president of Japan-America Society of Washington.

Shaffer, who is on the board of the Cherry Blossom Festival, oversees the Sakura Matsuri Japanese Street Festival, the largest annual celebration of Japanese culture in the U.S. Both events had been disrupted for the past two years, and Shaffer said it was “incredibly heartening” to see this year’s full-fledged festivals attract even larger turnouts than those of 2019.

“Many of us in the national capital region and around the country could easily forget that the cherry trees were connected to Japan at all, because they’ve become such an iconic and treasured piece of the cultural legacy of our area,” he said. “That’s why it’s important for everybody to come out and show their love for the cherry trees and Japan’s gift to the United States every spring.”

*xenophobia- dislike or prejudice against people from other countries.