Americans cannot keep up with Donald Trump's destructive campaign against American democracy: Let's review MAGA cult behaviors

Trump cult MAGA’s Foundational Lie

Echo essay by Jeffrey Goldberg published The Atlantic

Trump's evil cult movement claims to stand with the police. Trump’s decision to pardon the cop-beaters of January 6 exposed his movement for what it is.  By Jeffrey Goldberg

At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, 2020, Donald Trump—disturbed, humiliated, livid—posted the following message on Twitter: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020, Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

In California, David Nicholas Dempsey, a 33-year-old man-child with multiple felony convictions and a profound cult affection for the president, answered the call. On January 6, wearing a tactical vest and an American-flag gaiter, Dempsey came to the Capitol. Shortly before he assaulted several police officers, he shared his perspectives in an interview given while standing near a gallows. The gallows had been erected as a reminder to Vice President Mike Pence to do, in Trump’s words, “the right thing.”

“Them worthless fucking shitholes like fucking Jerry Nadler, fucking Pelosi, Clapper, Comey, fucking all those pieces of garbage, you know, Obama, all these dudes, Clinton, fuck all these pieces of shit,” Dempsey said. “They don’t need a jail cell. They need to hang from these motherfuckers while everybody videotapes it and fucking spreads it on YouTube.”

Dempsey was not an organizer of the siege, but he was one of its most energetic participants. He assaulted Metropolitan Police Detective Phuson Nguyen with pepper spray. Nguyen was certain in that moment that he was “going to die,” he later testified. Dempsey assaulted another police officer with a metal crutch, cracking his protective shield and cutting his head. Dempsey, who was heard yelling “Fuck you, bitch-ass cops!,” assaulted other officers with broken pieces of furniture, crutches, and a flagpole. Prosecutors would later argue that “Dempsey’s violence reached such extremes that, at one point, he attacked a fellow rioter who was trying to disarm him.” All told, more than 140 police officers were injured in the riot, many seriously.

I attended the January 6 rally on the Ellipse, at which Trump told his supporters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” 

Then I walked with the crowd to the Capitol. One woman, a QAnon adherent dressed in a cat costume, told me, “We’re going to stop the steal. If Pence isn’t going to stop it, we have to.”

What I remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not, to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed near the White House to listen to Trump—but I did come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a performance of zealous commitment. Later we would learn that these men—some of whom were Proud Boys—believed that they would actually be arresting members of Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be grifted.

After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Six months later, in the summer of 2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a “day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection. (Fourteen people, mainly senior figures in the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys movements, saw their sentences commuted but did not receive pardons.)

Of the 1,500 or so offenders who received pardons, roughly 600 had been charged with assaulting or obstructing police officers, and 170 had been accused of using deadly weapons in the siege. Among those pardoned were Peter Schwartz, who had received a 14-year sentence for throwing a chair at police officers and repeatedly attacking them with pepper spray; Daniel Joseph Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 12.5 years for conspiracy and assaulting an officer with a stun gun (he sent a text message to a friend, “Tazzzzed the fuck out of the blue”); and Andrew Taake, who received a six-year sentence for attacking officers with bear spray and a metal whip.

A day after the pardons were announced, Trump said in a press conference, “I am a friend of police, more than any president who’s been in office.” He went on to describe the rioters. “These were people that actually love our country, so we thought a pardon would be appropriate.”

Trump had something else to say during that first press conference of his new term: “I think we’re going to do things that people will be shocked at.” This would turn out to be true, but unfortunately, shock does not last. Here is the emblematic inner struggle of our age: to preserve the ability to be shocked. “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” Dostoyevsky wrote. A blessing that is also a curse.

I understand that a review—even a short and partial review—of the past year might seem dismally repetitive. But, repetition ensures that we remember, and perhaps even experience shock anew.

So, in brief: Trump dismantled America’s foreign-aid infrastructure and gutted a program, built by an earlier Republican president, that saved the lives of Africans infected with HIV; he has encouraged the United States military to commit war crimes; he has instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a crusade against vaccines; he has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and idiots to key positions in his administration; he has destroyed the independence of the Justice Department; he has waged pitiless war on prosecutors, FBI agents, and others who previously investigated him, his family, and his friends; he has cast near-fatal doubt on America’s willingness to fulfill its treaty obligations to its democratic allies; he has applauded Vladimir Putin for his barbarism and castigated Ukraine for its unwillingness to commit suicide; he has led racist attacks on various groups of immigrants; he has employed unusually cruel tactics in pursuit of undocumented immigrants, most of whom have committed only one crime—illegally seeking refuge in a country that they believed represented the dream of a better life. Those are some of the actions Trump has taken. Here are a few of the things he has said since returning to office: He has referred to immigrants as “garbage”; he has called a female reporter “piggy” and other reporters “ugly,” “stupid,” “terrible,” and “nasty”; he has suggested that the murder of a Saudi journalist by his country’s government was justified; he has labeled a sitting governor “seriously retarded”; he has blamed the murder of Rob Reiner on the director’s anti-Trump politics; he has called the Democrats

Yet, even when weighed against this stunning record of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was an act not only of naked despotism but also of outlandish hypocrisy. 

By pardoning these convicted criminals, he exposed a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that it stands with the police and as a guarantor of law and order. The truth is exactly the opposite.

The power to pardon is a vestige of America’s pre-independence past. It is an unchecked monarchical power, an awesome power, and therefore it should be bestowed only on leaders blessed with self-restraint, civic-mindedness, and, most important, basic decency.

We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander—they were actually aroused by it—and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.

In an important essay, Andrew Sullivan noted this past fall that Trump’s indecency is comprehensive in style and substance. “It is one thing to be a realist in foreign policy, to accept the morally ambiguous in an immoral world; it is simply indecent to treat a country, Ukraine, invaded by another, Russia, as the actual aggressor and force it to accept a settlement on the invader’s terms,” Sullivan wrote. 

“It is one thing to find and arrest illegal immigrants; it is indecent to mock and ridicule them, and send them with no due process to a foreign gulag where torture is routine. It is one thing to enforce immigration laws; it is another to use masked, anonymous men to do it. It is one thing to cut foreign aid; it is simply indecent to do so abruptly and irrationally so that tens of thousands of children will needlessly die. We have slowly adjusted to this entirely new culture from the top, perhaps in the hope that it will somehow be sated soon—but then new indecencies happen.”

The subject of Trump’s indecency came up in a conversation I had with Barack Obama in 2017. I asked him to name the most norm-defying act of his successor to date. Somewhat to my surprise, Obama mentioned Trump’s speech at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree earlier that year. This appearance has been largely forgotten, but it was a festival of indecency. 

At one point, Trump told the scouts about a wealthy friend of his who, he suggested, did unmentionable things on his yacht.

Obama, a model of dignified presidential behavior (just like nearly all of his predecessors, Democratic and Republican), understood viscerally the importance of self-restraint and adherence to long-established norms. Which is why he was so troubled by Trump’s decadent performance. “You can stand in front of tens of thousands of teenage boys and encourage them to be good citizens and be helpful to their mothers,” Obama said, “or you can go Lord of the Flies. He went Lord of the Flies.”

We are in a long Lord of the Flies moment, led by a man who, to borrow from Psalm 10, possesses a mouth “full of cursing and deceit and fraud.” For many people—government scientists seeking cures for diseases; FBI agents investigating corruption and terrorism; military leaders trying to preserve respect for the rules of warfare; and, in particular, police officers who were brutalized by Trump’s army of deluded followers—these days can seem infernal. Trump’s term is one-quarter over; a piece of advice often attributed to Churchill has it best: When you’re going through hell, keep going.

Donald Trump gave a failed "State of Delusion" speech polluted by lies but Republicans applauded anyway

Echo opinion published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by By Ross Barkan, a political columnist for Intelligencer.

Donald Trump failed to deliver anything to the American people in his "State of Delusion" speech to Congress on February 24 #ImpeachTrumpNOW❗

There’s an old expression in sports that always applies to the losers: “playing out the string.” A team playing out the string has been eliminated from the playoffs but keeps on going simply because there are games on the schedule. A baseball team well under .500 plays out a lazy September series on the road and fulfills its obligations to the fans — and collects paychecks — even though the games no longer have any meaning.

It’s too soon to say if Donald Trump is playing out the string, but there was a whiff of that sort of inevitable failure in his State of the Union address last night (February 24, 2026). 

Most Americans didn’t pay attention at all, and if they did, they’d find the usual Trump — the inanities, the absurdities, the wild boasts, and the outright lies that have come to define his decade of lording over the American political scene. “Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it,” bragged Trump, very much the insult comic running through his tired material. “People are asking me, ‘Please, please, please, Donald Trump, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore, we’re not used to winning in our country. Until you came along, we were just always losing, but now we’re winning too much.’ And I say, ‘No, no, no. You’re going to win again. You’re going to win big. You’re gonna win bigger than ever.’”

Trump is a president with an approval rating below 40 percent. 

There is little evidence to suggest his rating will ever rebound much. There may now be a lower floor than in the first term. The Trump administration’s savagery in Minneapolis destroyed the popularity he had enjoyed on the issue of immigration. 

His advantages on the economy are gone, too, as Americans confront a K-shaped recovery that has thrilled the rich and left much of the rest of the country with higher costs and a meager job market. 

Of course, since 2015, just about any pundit who underestimates Trump is bound, eventually, to face humiliation. It’s easy to suggest that this time will be like all the others. Trump has certainly been unpopular before. He was ostracized after January 6 and counted out during the brat summer of 2024. Many politicians and commentators believed he would destroy the Republican Party instead of refashioning it in his own image. And betting against Trump has typically been a fool’s game.

What’s different now is the passage of time. This year, Trump will turn 80. He is a second-term president — he is in his final term, no matter how much he indulges in the idea of illegally seeking a third term. The Constitution won’t stop Trump — he has little regard for the rule of law — but political gravity probably will. 

If Trump can’t improve his standing in the next few months, Republicans are going to be swamped in the midterms. 

Democrats are very likely to flip the House and could make a serious run at the Senate. This will make Trump’s 2027, even more perilous. Trump's goodwill with the American people is gone, and there are signs that the grip he maintains over his own party could start to slip. Indiana Republicans bucked him on his redistricting scheme, and other rank-and-file Republicans, staring up at the final Trump years, could start to cast about elsewhere for leaders — or find that it’s in their interests to finally defy the president.

Of course, liberals have hoped many times in the past that the GOP would “wake up” to Trump and toss him aside only to find he is unmovable. But, as his rambling State of the (Delusion) Union speech demonstrated, Trump’s great enemy is time. In 2019 or 2022, there was so much potential for the future of Trump. He was a first-term president or a former president gearing up for another run at the White House. A Republican thinking two, three, four, or even five years ahead had to consider Trump and calculate whether any opposition to him was worth it politically. The answer was always “no.” The political graveyard was stacked high with anti-Trump Republicans or Republicans who dared, in particular instances, to face off against him. Mike Pence was the vice-president of the United States, and now he’s a ghost within his own party.

Those days seem to be coming to an end. Republicans are beginning to understand that the second term of Trump has offered almost nothing to campaign on this fall. Inflation hasn’t eased up enough. The tariffs are messy and expensive. The immigration regime is violent and alienating. The safety-net cuts punish the working class and poor. In his first term, Americans were largely optimistic about the economy. That world is gone. In defense of Trump, there are macroeconomic factors that he alone cannot fix, beginning with the stubbornly high prices of housing and groceries. But he’s given no indication he’d care to fix them. Solutions are absent. Instead, in his State of the Union, he pretended the problems didn’t exist or blamed the Democrats.

A (visibly) weakened Trump, of course, is still a dangerous Trump. We do not know what he and J.D. Vance might be plotting for 2028. Perhaps they’ll rerun the 2020, playbook and hope for a more successful outcome. 

All scenarios have to be considered. As Trump’s hand weakens on domestic affairs, he’s increasingly turned to sowing chaos abroad. 

Trump flirted with the full-scale occupation of Venezuela.🤪🙄He’s threatening war with Iran. (Wait! Whatever happened to the targeted bombing of the Iran nuclear site?  Obviously, it failed to completely destroy Iran's nuclear program.)

Trump can (illegally) light the world on fire without congressional authorization.

That, ultimately, may be his legacy, unless he somehow decides to restrain himself. An American president playing out the string is a little different from a baseball team. He can still kill a whole lot of people. (Maine Writer- when will media start to seriously report about the actual numbers of deaths tied to Donald Trump's name❓

Shame on Republicans like Maine's Senator Susan Collins for putting up with and applauding Trump's delusions.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans ignore illegal murder of Venezuelans in open seas without evidence

Getting Away with Murder David Cole
Trump has now ordered the killing of at least seventeen people on the high seas—with no accountability.

Echo essay by David Cole published in The New York Review of Books:  During his first presidential campaign Donald Trump famously claimed that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters. At the time it felt like an empty boast. No more.

Between September 2, and September 19, the US military, acting on President Trump’s orders, bombed three boats traveling in international waters, reportedly killing seventeen civilians in cold blood. Ordinarily when US armed forces kill civilians, the president does not brag about it, yet Trump is apparently so proud of the executions that he posted video footage of them on Truth Social. And while ordinarily the killing of any civilian prompts investigations and apologies, in this instance the administration has promised only that there are more to come. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America,” Trump said during his speech at the UN General Assembly on September 23, “please be warned that we will blow you out of existence.”

There was no conceivable legal authority for these killings. We are not at war with drug traffickers. The “war on drugs” is a metaphor, not a legal term of art that authorizes killing the “enemy.” The human beings on these boats were civilians, and even if there were an actual war going on, the laws of war prohibit targeting civilians unless they are directly engaged in hostilities. Even if the boats’ occupants were, as the administration alleges, carrying illegal drugs, that offense would at most have authorized their arrest, trial, and, if convicted, incarceration for a period of years. It would not authorize the death penalty, much less their summary execution without trial.

Trump has called the dead “narcoterrorists” and has asserted that the eleven killed in the first strike were associated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, a “foreign terrorist organization.” But that designation authorizes only economic sanctions against the group, such as freezing their assets, and criminal penalties against Americans who do business with them. It does not authorize any use of military force, much less the intentional lethal targeting of civilians.

The boats did not pose any conceivable threat to the United States requiring lethal force. They were found on the high seas, reportedly coming from Venezuela. The first boat, according to The New York Times, had turned around before it was bombed, and the military reportedly continued to bomb it even after it had been disabled. Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that they could have interdicted the vessel, but said that instead they bombed it to send a message: “This president is not a talker; he’s a doer—he’s going to do it.”

Trump has maintained that drug cartels kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, presumably through overdoses, and that other nations are not doing enough to stop the trade. The result, he insisted in a letter to Congress after the first strike, is that “we have now reached a critical point where we must meet this threat to our citizens and our most vital national interests with United States military force in self-defense.” But the fact that drugs are a scourge in the US in no way gives the president the authority to start killing drug dealers—here, abroad, or at sea. And it is farcical to cite “self-defense” to justify bombing these ships to smithereens, without even a shred of evidence that they threatened to attack us.

In the absence of any conceivable military justification for these acts, it is difficult to view them as anything but premeditated murder, pure and simple. Federal law makes it a crime to kill a human being “with malice aforethought” on the high seas, and to conspire to do so. As my Georgetown Law colleague Marty Lederman, a former Justice Department official in the Office of Legal Counsel, has explained in an essay on the website Just Security, not only is it “questionable whether the President had any affirmative legal authority to order” the attack, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that, “absent further facts that haven’t yet been disclosed, the strike would appear to have implicated the federal felony murder statutes.”

Maybe “most alarming,” in Lederman’s estimation, is how dramatically these killings break from the Defense Department’s stated commitment, required by international law, not to target civilians, even in wartime. Indeed, Trump’s actions are so indefensible that even John Yoo, who as a Justice Department official authorized waterboarding and other forms of torture against suspected al-Qaeda detainees, and who takes about as robust a view of executive authority over national security as anyone, has seriously questioned the legal basis for the strikes, insisting that it is dangerous to blur the line between law enforcement and war.

But the White House couldn’t care less. This was made crystal clear when Vice President J.D. Vance, ever the good learner at the foot of his boss, posted on X that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” When Brian Krassenstein, a critic of the Trump administration, replied that “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” the vice-president of the United States responded, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

This is not normal. Prior presidents have invoked war authorities on dubious grounds to justify the use of lethal force and other unlawful measures, as when Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada on the pretense of protecting Americans in medical school there, or when George W. Bush asserted the authority to disappear suspected al-Qaeda terrorists into secret CIA “black sites” and torture them, or when Barack Obama resorted to drones to assassinate suspected members of al-Qaeda or ISIS. Each questionable exercise of executive authority eases the way for further expansions. But never before has a US president asserted the authority to order the cold-blooded execution of civilians outside any even arguable military conflict. And never before has a US president then turned around and boasted about his own crimes to the public at large. If the president can order the summary killing of drug dealers on the high seas, why not elsewhere—say, Mexico, or Chicago?

Now a draft bill is reportedly circulating in Congress and the White House that would expressly authorize Trump to execute more “narcoterrorists,” a veritable license to kill civilians without trial. The fact that the White House and its allies are considering such a bill only underscores the absence of existing authority for the strikes. Such a blank check, moreover, would not change the fact that targeting civilians who are not directly engaged in combat is illegal under international law. It would just make Congress complicit in Trump’s crimes.

When the Supreme Court last year granted Donald Trump absolute immunity from any criminal prosecution for “official” acts taken while in office, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent that the Court was giving presidents a green light to kill. Trump has now apparently acted on that opportunity—by his own count, on at least three separate occasions. Yet, in keeping with his 2016, campaign boast, as far as we can tell Trump has not lost any support to speak of as a result. Indeed, amid the White House’s barrage of daily assaults on the rule of law, the killings seem barely to have registered on the nation’s conscience.

So much of what Trump has done since taking office is beyond the pale that it’s easy to lose track. He’s pardoned the January 6 rioters, even those convicted of violent attacks on police. He’s invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority, to summarily deport Venezuelans, even though we are not at war with that country. He’s dismantled agencies that Congress established, and refused to spend billions of dollars that Congress directed him to spend. He’s tried to deny birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants, in direct violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. He’s used pretextual charges of antisemitism to target universities he considers too liberal, and imposed blatantly unconstitutional penalties on law firms for filing cases or hiring attorneys he does not like.

But since long before the founding of this nation, the law has recognized that in the hierarchy of illegal and immoral acts, premeditated murder sits at the very apex. The US remains one of the only democracies to continue to employ the death penalty, a punishment most of the world has rejected as cruel and unusual. But at least there are limits on that sanction. It can only be imposed for homicide (not drug smuggling), and only after a full trial and a robust round of appeals. The hapless—and thus far nameless—persons on board the boats that Donald Trump literally had blown out of the water this month did not even get that. .

—September 25, 2025

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are pointing at the wrong root cause for who caused the gun violence murder in Utah

The Kirk Crackdown Is Underway.

Right wing propaganda is now unleashed.

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Thomas E. Edsall, who contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

Donald Trump and his right wing maga allies are capitalizing (IMO, "exploiting") on the horrible assassination of Charlie Kirk. They are now opening up fresh attacks on liberal institutions, donors and foundations. They seek to portray many on the left as traitors.

Appearing on Kirk’s podcast on Monday, less than a week after Kirk’s death, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, denounced. "We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name."

Miller is totally brain washed by Trumpziism.  He invented this scenario: The organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging that’s designed to trigger, incite violence in the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.

“With God as my witness,” Miller then declared,

We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.

Trump and his maga allies have long exploited “emergencies” to push divisive measures. Now Trump claims that left-wing terrorism is a greater threat than terror perpetrated by the right, a demonstrably false assertion.

Over the last three years, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Cato Institute and the International Center for Counter-Terrorism have amassed evidence showing that right-wing violence is more prevalent than violence from the left.

“The current administration is perpetuating a narrative that (lies❗🤥 ) erases right-wing violence, including January 6th, and blames the increased political violence on only one side,” Jay Childers, a professor of political communication at the University of Kansas, wrote by email in response to my queries.

Over the last three years, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Cato Institute and the International Center for Counter-Terrorism have amassed evidence showing that right-wing violence is more prevalent than violence from the left.

“The current administration is perpetuating a narrative that erases right-wing violence, including Jan. 6, and blames the increased political violence on only one side,” Jay Childers, a professor of political communication at the University of Kansas, wrote by email in response to my queries.

Within hours of the assassination of Kirk on September 10, Trump placed the blame, without any evidence, for political gun violence squarely on “the radical left” in televised remarks:

A tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree, day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.

This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and everyone else who brings order to our country.

On September 12, Trump went beyond dismissing the threat posed by right-wing political violence to arguing that right-wing extremists are in fact justified. 

Asked about violence perpetrated by those on the right, Trump didn’t hold back during an appearance on “Fox and Friends” (aka "Fake❗ Fox and Them"):  I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They’re saying, “We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.”

The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy, although they want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone. They want open borders.

Trump and his MAGA followers have not just turned Kirk’s murder into a political weapon; they are trying, with some success, to use it to build a national movement to publicly out everyone who criticized Kirk on social media after his death. 

They are also trying to persuade employers to fire Kirk’s critics❗

“A campaign by public officials and others on the right has led just days after the conservative activist’s death to the firing or punishment of teachers, government workers, a TV pundit and the expectation of more dismissals coming,” The Associated Press reported on September 14.

Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, the wire service noted, “posted that American Airlines had grounded pilots who he said were celebrating Kirk’s assassination. ‘This behavior is disgusting and they should be fired,’” Duffy wrote on X.

In their article “Trump Escalates Attacks on Political Opponents After Charlie Kirk’s Killing,” my Times colleagues Tyler Pager and Nick Corasaniti reported that Trump and his supporters have initiated “a broad crackdown on critics and left-leaning institutions.”

Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, Pager and Corasaniti wrote, warned “that his agency was closely tracking any military personnel who celebrated or mocked Kirk’s death, and Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, suggested the administration would strip visas from individuals who celebrated Kirk’s death.”

The center analyzed 831 terrorist attacks in this country from January 1994 to December 2022. In recent years, the study found:

• Violent far-right extremist have been responsible for 94 of the 108 terrorism fatalities (87 percent) in the United States in the past five years. This included 2022, when 18 of the 19 fatalities occurred during far-right terrorist attacks.
• Of the 71 terrorist attacks in 2022, 69 percent were perpetrated by those on the violent far right, 20 percent by the violent far left, 3 percent by Salafi-jihadists and 8 percent by ethnonationalists.

The most recent study of political violence is the Sept. 11, 2025, report, “Politically Motivated Violence Is Rare in the United States, by Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“Terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology are responsible for 87 percent of those murdered in attacks on U.S. soil since 1975,” he writes. “Right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total. Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total.”

Because the 9/11 attacks “obscure other trends and are plausibly distinct,” Nowrasteh recalculated the data excluding the attacks. Doing so “reduces the number of murders to 620 from 3,599.”

The exclusion raises the right-wing share of murders in terrorist attacks “from 11 percent to 63 percent (391), the left-wing share from about 2 percent to 10 percent (65), and the unknown/other share to 1 percent.”

Terrorism since 2020, Nowrasteh wrote, paints a slightly different picture. Since January 1, 2020 (total 81), terrorists have murdered 81 people in attacks on U.S. soil. Right-wing terrorists account for over half of those murders (44), Islamists for 21 percent (27), left-wingers for 22 percent (18), and 1 percent had unknown or other motivations.

Nowrasteh did not include the deaths associated with the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol for the following reasons:

• Ashli Babbitt was an attacker/terrorist. I didn’t include her because I only count those who murder victims.
• One attacker/terrorist from a drug overdose. He wasn’t a victim.
• One police officer died of a stroke the day after. The official report was that his death wasn’t a homicide. 
• Four police officers died by suicide afterward. I didn’t count them.

Katarzyna Jasko, a professor of psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and lead author of a 2022 study, “A Comparison of Political Violence by Left-wing, Right-wing, and Islamist Extremists in the United States and the World,” emailed her reply to my questions.

She contended that the claims about left-wing violence by Trump and his allies “are not justifiable.” In recent years, she added, “far-right extremists have been responsible for more cases of political violence than far-left extremists. As our research shows, their attacks are more violent than those by left-wing extremists.”

The study found that:  Among radicalized individuals in the United States, those adhering to a left-wing ideology were markedly less likely to engage in violent ideologically motivated acts when compared to right-wing individuals. By contrast, we found no such difference between Islamist and right-wing individuals.

In terms of violent behavior, those supporting an Islamist ideology were significantly more violent than the left-wing perpetrators both in the United States and in the worldwide analysis. For the U.S. sample, we found no significant difference in the propensity to use violence for those professing Islamist or right-wing ideologies.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment’s program on democracy, conflict and governance, pointed out in an email that over the past six decades there has been a reversal in the ideological character of political violence:

In the 1950s and early 1960s, civil rights activists and leaders were murdered by far-right racists. The murders discredited those in the center who worked within the system to get civil rights legislation and who preached nonviolence, and it helped activists who said that self-defense was the only way communities could protect themselves. So in the late 1960s, violence moved to the extreme left and spread to a variety of causes.

Since the early 1990s, Kleinfeld continued, “actual violence has risen, largely from the right. While it has grown somewhat from the left — especially with regards to violence against property such as business harm from protests and attacks on Tesla dealerships — the numbers are just not comparable.”

The response to the killing of Charlie Kirk, Kleinfeld argued, poses significant risks: “What is most dangerous is when violence starts to get framed as defensive — because that is when more normal people start engaging. The concern with Charlie Kirk’s murder is that it may push the United States over that edge.”

Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland and an author of the Jasko paper cited above, wrote in an email:

Kirk’s death was obviously a very sad and worrying development. On the other hand, the administration seemed far less concerned about the recent deaths of the two Democratic legislators and their spouses from Minnesota. I cannot imagine how lionizing Kirk is going to reduce the growing polarization in the United States.

In fact, Trump and his allies are determined to intensify partisan hostility.

At 7 p.m. on Sept. 10, the day Kirk was killed, the villines-a female character who embodies evil, wickedness, or harmful behavior - Laura Loomer posted on X:  Charlie Kirk’s death will not be in vain. I will be spending my night making everyone I find online who celebrates his death Famous, so prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his da female character who embodies evil, wickedness, or harmful behavioreath. I’m going to make you wish you never opened your mouth.

If Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Miller and Loomer have their way, America will take another step toward becoming a McCarthyite state with the ever-present danger that your colleagues and friends will report your offhand quick-reaction social media posts to government authorities.

As terrible as the killing of Charlie Kirk was, this way of honoring it is repellent.

Donald Trump with Speaker Mike Johnson and MAGA Republicans are supporting hate throwing political red meat to dangerous extremits

The horribly tragic political assassination in Minnesota on June 14, 2025, should not be surprising. 

"His crimes are the stuff of nightmares," Thompson said at a news conference as he outlined the "chilling" details.  Vance Boelter, 57, is accused of killing Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and wounding Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in "political assassinations

Donald Trump’s rally cry on January 6, 2020, fired up a mob turned loose on the capitol. He tried to hide the violence for history by pardoning the convicted criminals who attacked, destroyed, injured and killed.

Echo opinion letter published in the Pagosa Springs Sun a Colorado newspaper:

No Kings peaceful protest sign June 14 2025

Since inauguration day 2025, the talk and the tactics of the Trump administration, its supporters in Congress, and right-wing leaning news, podcasters and influencers have been a steady drumbeat for destroying, demeaning and dehumanizing. Think about wholesale elimination of federal agencies (much of it illegal), broadside attacks on universities, cultural institutions and law firms (also mostly illegal), and brutal treatment of immigrants and protestors, including use of force against members of Congress and local officials in New Jersey and against a U.S. Senator in California. Trump’s objectives are revenge and retribution.

Anyone who disagrees with him is an “enemy”, who, he says should be impeached, jailed, investigated or deported (even if they are U.S citizens. Trump’s moral compass is stuck on HATE.

No Kings peaceful protest sign June 14, 2025

Then, in early June, Speaker Mike Johnson, who holds himself to be a person of deep Christian faith, called for California Governor Gavin Newsome to be tarred and feathered, a gruesome form of vigilante punishment meted out in this country into the 20th century. Johnson’s moral compass is not lined up with his professed Christian faith. IOW, Johnson is a hypocrite.

On June 14, 2025, Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman was assassinated in a shooting at her home in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, United States. Hortman, the leader of the state house Democratic caucus, was killed alongside her husband, Mark. 

Trump called the assassinations “terrible” and Mike Johnson condemned them. But, that is not enough. They and the Republicans need to take responsibility for their role in fomenting, i.e, instigating, the violence. It is they that tossed the match and have been fueling the fire every day for six months.

In fact, the legacy of Donald Trump, with Mike Johnson and the MAGA Republicans, is political assassination by domestic terrorists. How can anybody believe they are leading this nation in the right direction?

From Candice Jones

Donald Trump and the Republicans are supporting an incompetent administration

One by one, Republicans lose credibility as they bow to Trump

Echo opinion letter published in New Orleans Times-Picayune (NOLAonline)

Before Donald Trump was running for president, a man asked my opinion of him. I looked to be sure there were no ladies present, and then I told him what I thought of a self-proclaimed billionaire whose employees had to sue him to get their wages.

The man asked if I was a Blue Dog Democrat, and I said I had been called a lot of things in my time. He explained that it was a man who would vote for a Blue Dog before he would vote for a Republican. I replied I probably was one, but I had once known a good Republican who was kin to me.

Thinking of our present elected leader, I can now say without contradiction why I felt that way. That was several years ago, and time has proven me right.

The ones in office now have their main purpose of pleasing Trump and going along. My congressional representative, Julia Letlow, talks about what she has brought to the district. Of course, she voted against all of it. Lying Clay Higgins swore in Congress that he had proof that the January 6the Capitol rioters 🤥were federal agents dressed up as Trump supporters, and he would bring out proof soon, very soon. That was quite a while ago, and Higgins has not come up with any proof.

The only one we had in elected office who could have finished as a statesman was Bill Cassidy. For some reason, he decided it was more important to please Trump than to take care of his constituents, so he gave us a former dopehead and antivaxxer for Health and Human Services secretary and a former drunk to head the military. As for Sen. "Cornpone" John Kennedy, we were lost from the start.

From Carl Crain in Baton Route Louisiana

Donald J. Trump kicks off a terrible second term while his evilism embarrasses all Americans

I won't be celebrating Donald Trump's inauguration because my values as a citizen and humanitarian won't let me. | Opinion
I’ve not been able to shake the sense that I don’t understand my country anymore. The United States has a problem. It's not united.
by Paul Wesslund Opinion Contributor published in he Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky:

I amd not among those who are wrongmindedly celebrating Donald Trump’s inauguration.

I’m not happy about my lack of enthusiasm, for one of our nation's major civic events. But I’ve not been able to shake the sense that I don’t understand my country anymore.

I grew up learning that the worst thing you could do to our democracy is try to overthrow it. Last November half our country said with their vote that they don’t care about that.

I’m aware (and still stunned) that some would consider what I just wrote a controversial paragraph. So I’m amazed I’ll need to state clearly that the man elected president called a mob to Washington to overthrow the government on Janary. 6, 2021. 

In fact, Trump watched on TV as they threatened to kill the vice president and actually beat the living daylights out of law enforcement. 

More than 140 police were injured. More than 900 rioters have been convicted of crimes committed in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump is calling them patriots and, worse, he quickly pardoned them.

Sadly, the United States I grew up in is torn apart:

To me, January 6 disqualified Trump from the presidency. The campaigns last year featured a lot of important issues: The price of eggs, the need for immigration reform, crime, foreign policy. All are topics for legitimate debate. Unapologetic leadership of a violent coup is not.

Clearly, half the country disagrees with me. The scary part about that is that half the country also agrees with me. We’re torn apart.

Yes, I was hoping for a president who campaigned on a promise of being president for everyone. Nevertheless, the winner doesn’t act interested in the half of the country that clearly voted against him.

Trump has vowed to prosecute high-profile people who opposed him. He scoffs at global warming, one of my top issues facing the world. I detect only contempt for immigrants from the incoming officeholders. Yet my Christian faith calls me to have compassion for refugees fleeing war and other violence.

(Question from Maine Writer❓- Did the Trumpzi Bible, the one printed in China and sold for profit, include the Beatitudes❓ Or, were those verses edited out❓❓  “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” is a Bible verse from Matthew 5:7. It is part of a series of sayings called the Beatitudes.)

As a lifelong citizen of this country I might expect at least a passing nod to my values. Instead, I feel scorn.

While January 20 will be a joyous occasion for the more than 77 million who voted for Trump, for more than 75 million of us it will be a day where our beliefs and priorities will only be targets of ridicule.

I see the endless stream of post-election analysis headlines about how the Democrats screwed up this way and that. How Republicans got this right and that right. But I don’t read those stories. None of that seems to matter when I seem so out of touch with so many of my neighbors.

Donald Trump is the worst president ever rated last by a 2024 survey of American historians

Shame and disgrace: Echo opinion letter published in the Longview News-Journal, a Texas newspaper:

Dear Editor:  It’s a matter of public record that former President Donald Trump was the most corrupt and the most incompetent U.S. president in history. A survey of American historians in the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project rated Abraham Lincoln at No. 1, the best president in our 235-year history, and they rated Trump at No. 45, the worst.

Trump’s bungled handling of the worst global pandemic in 100 years caused the unnecessary deaths of over 200,000 Americans. Now we have learned that Trump sent scarce COVID testing equipment to Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin, while good Americans died in hospitals without their loved ones by their sides, as refrigerator trucks waited on American streets to carry off the dead.

Trump watched on White House TV as common criminals and traitors ransacked the U.S. Capitol and criminally assaulted Capitol police on January 6, 2021, a date that will tragically live in infamy.

Trump’s undermining of NATO, the greatest strategic partnership in U.S. history, puts American military personnel at great risk and threatens our national security.

Trump’s dereliction of duty in these instances brings shame😳😡😒  and disgrace to the once-proud political party that for so long marketed itself as the “party of Lincoln.”

— From John Simmons, in Longview, Texas

Donald Trump is preaching a rash rhetoric of bizarre claims and lies - unqualified to lead

Donald Trump was always unfit to be president, however his apparent cognitive decline since he last ran for office in 2020, is alarming. Echo opinion published in the Yakima Herald-Republic news in Washington state. (A Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial)

He has long spewed lies and conspiracies, but Trump’s rantings have become more delusional — underscoring how he can’t be trusted with the nation’s nuclear launch codes, let alone to manage budgets, unpredictable crises or delicate matters of foreign affairs.

If elected again, his detachment from reality poses a threat to the stability of the country and the free world.

Trump is stuck in a dark place, making it impossible to lead the nation to a brighter future. His fear and anger routine feels especially tired next to Vice President Kamala Harris’ vision of joy and hope. Indeed, the growing wave of enthusiastic support for Harris has seemingly knocked Trump loose of his moorings.

Donald Trump Quotes That Are Completely Ridiculous

In recent weeks, he has significantly reduced his campaign schedule and retreated to his Palm Beach resort, where he gave a rambling news conference that was unglued even by Trumpian standards. With no supporting facts, he claimed the stock market was crashing, that the country was on the brink of a depression, and World War III was looming.

Trump made a number of bizarre claims, including that people were “dying financially because they can’t buy bacon” and that Governor Tim Walz, Vice-PresidentHarris’ presidential vice presidential pick, was “heavy into the transgender world.”

Trump wrongly said everyone would be forced to buy electric cars, and that would require every bridge in the country to be rebuilt because the weight of the batteries made electric vehicles heavier.

He went off on a wild tangent about the time he almost crashed in a helicopter with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, even though Brown says he never flew with Trump.

Contrary to what polls show, Trump said the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was something “every Democrat and every Republican wanted done.” He incoherently said gasoline was “going up $7, $8, $9 a barrel” although gas is sold by the gallon.

Trump repeatedly overstated crowd sizes at his rallies. At one point, he falsely claimed more people attended his speech on January 6, 2021, than the estimated 250,000 who watched the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

Washington DC August 28, 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. delivered "I Have a Dream" during the March on washington. 

By the time the news conference ended, Trump issued 162 misstatements, exaggerations or flat out lies in just over an hour, according to a review of the transcript by a team of reporters and editors at NPR. The full transcript is worth perusing to fully contemplate how Trump could be president again — or how a Fox News anchor could describe his performance as a “clear eyed and sober assessment of the state of the nation.” 

Days later, Trump took to social media to claim the massive crowds turning out for Harris and Walz were fake and had been generated by artificial intelligence. His wacky post makes QAnon conspiracy believers seem cogent.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump wrote. “There was nobody at the plane and she ‘A.I.’d it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DON’T EXIST!”

The election is fast approaching, and this is the nonsense Trump is obsessed about. For the record, video footage and photographs captured by the media and attendees showed large crowds greeting Harris.

Trump, a twice impeached, convicted felon, facing three criminal indictments, went on to argue that Harris “should be disqualified” from running for president because the (not) fake crowd image was election interference.

Such drivel may be chalked up to Trump giving the MAGA masses more bread and circuses. But it is more troubling than that, as Trump is once again undermining democracy by recklessly sowing seeds of doubt in the upcoming election.




During recent rallies, Trump has gone on incoherent rants about sharks and electric boats. He has an odd obsession with fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter.

At a rally in Montana, Trump strangely said no one knows Harris’ last name. Uh, it’s Harris, just like her father, the retired Stanford University economics professor.

On several occasions, Trump has conflated mental asylums with asylum seekers. During a rally in the Bronx, he gave a head-scratching soliloquy about how he puts on his pants. He even claimed President Joe Biden would crash the Democratic National Convention and take back the nomination.

This is way beyond weird and has nothing to do with policies or plans to improve the lives of working Americans. Still, most Republican officials and many in the media ignore or downplay Trump’s peculiar state of mind.

He did the same thing in 2020. Even after losing more than 60 court cases and having his own Homeland Security officials declare the election was the most secure in history, Trump refused to concede and illegally attempted to overturn the results, which culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Trump’s recent meltdowns are part of his broader deterioration. He frequently slurs words, forgets names, and confuses elected officials.

This is not a new issue, but it appears to be getting worse. In 2019, Trump called Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tim Apple. In 2020, he repeatedly referred to Rep. Matt Gaetz as Rick Gates, a former aide who was convicted for his role in the Russian election interference case. More recently, Trump mixed up Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi.

During recent rallies, Trump has gone on incoherent rants about sharks and electric boats. He has an odd obsession with fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter.

At a rally in Montana, Trump strangely said no one knows Harris’ last name. Uh, it’s Harris, just like her father, the retired Stanford University economics professor.

On several occasions, Trump has conflated mental asylums with asylum seekers. During a rally in the Bronx, he gave a head-scratching soliloquy about how he puts on his pants. He even claimed President Joe Biden would crash the Democratic National Convention and take back the nomination.

This is way beyond weird and has nothing to do with policies or plans to improve the lives of working Americans. Still, most Republican officials and many in the media ignore or downplay Trump’s peculiar state of mind.

Normalizing Trump’s unhinged musings is dangerous, and the kid-glove treatment stands in stark contrast to the onslaught Biden endured from the media, Democratic officials, and donors following his lousy debate performance.

Biden’s issues centered more on his speech, stemming from his lifelong struggle with stuttering. During the debate, he looked at Trump with his mouth agape and occasionally lost his train of thought and froze up, adding to the ⏰💥 alarm.

Trump, on the other hand, struggles to form coherent sentences, mispronounces words, and goes off on nonsensical tangents that are detached from reality. His incessant lies border on pathological. He also exhibits a grandiose sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy for others, and a constant need for attention and admiration that can impair leaders who are so deeply focused on themselves.

President Biden wisely put the country ahead of his personal ambition and stepped aside. That leaves Trump, 78, as the oldest presidential nominee in American history. His advanced age is not the only red flag.

In 2017, more than two dozen concerned psychiatrists and mental health professionals warned about Trump’s instability in a book titled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. And more recently, medical experts have expressed concern about Trump’s mental capacity with one psychologist saying his speech, memory recall, and other behavior shows he is “dangerously demented.”

It should be noted, however, that those assertions are a violation of the American Psychiatric Association’s so-called “Goldwater Rule,” which prohibits mental health experts from offering “professional opinions about the mental state of individuals that they have not personally and thoroughly evaluated.”

For his part, Trump claims that he “aced” a cognitive test, though mental health experts note that it is hardly an effective diagnostic tool.

And it’s unlikely that the former president would ever feel compelled to release more details about his mental state.

So it will ultimately be left to voters to determine whether Trump’s outlandish ravings are the product of “a very stable genius,” or someone who is more dangerous, more delusional, and more unfit to be president with each passing day.

Even the Wall Street Journal critizing former Marine Corporal JD Vance!

Echo opinion letter published in Midland Daily News, in Midland Michigan.

Former Marine Corporal J.D. Vance either received a poor legal education or he has adopted the Donald Trump attitude toward the constitution which is that of disdain.

I heard J.D. Vance say he would have done the opposite of Mike Pence on January 6, 2021. He would have sent everyone home with instructions to seat the alternate (fake) electors and then come back. If that is the kind of character he has, he should not hold any office and should not represent that he has a law degree.

From Mark Brissette, from Sanford, a village in Michigan

And wait....❗😉there's more from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ)...

Get a chuckle out of this Google Doodle on July 29, 2024. 😀😉

THE VANCE CATFIGHT — The WSJ editorial board is joining the pile-on over Sen. JD VANCE’s (R-Ohio) comments about “childless cat ladies.”- published in Politico's "Playbook", by Ryan Lizza, Eugene Daniels, Garrett Ross and Bethany Irvine.

In a tough piece posted last night, Paul Gigot and colleagues call the comment “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts” but that “doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”

They see the speed and breadth of the coverage of Vance’s remark as evidence “that this is Mr. Vance’s first big cultural impression, and not a good one.”

The WSJ editorial board are unimpressed with Vance’s efforts to clean things up on Megyn Kelly’s podcast yesterday (“he wasn’t at all apologetic”), and they come away with this surprising conclusion about the episode: “One possibility is that at some level Mr. Vance really doesn’t respect people who make different life choices.”

And then they move on to attack some of Vance’s other past (👽👺weird) ideas. His proposal that families without children should pay higher taxes is “bad policy” and “bad politics” and would amount to using the tax code “as a political and cultural weapon against people who don’t share his values.”

The editorial gives voice to what’s been a quiet murmur we’ve been hearing from some corners of the right all week: Does DONALD TRUMP regret picking Vance? (Ya'think❓😒😵😮)

The Trump campaign “can’t be happy about having to defend” Vance instead of attacking VP KAMALA HARRIS, the Journal writes. They end with a stinging conclusion about how Vance should start using his wife as a surrogate because USHA VANCE “might help persuade swing voters that Mr. Vance respects women more than his comments have made it seem.”

The piece is a notable escalation of the war within the GOP over the Vance pick. The (WSJ) Journal editorial board has sharply divergent views from Vance on foreign policy and trade and doesn’t have much use for his populist bashing of corporations. RUPERT MURDOCH reportedly lobbied Trump not to select Vance, and Vance allies see this piece as simply the continuation of that fight, with the Journal doing Murdoch’s bidding.