International outrage on the record about corrupt Donald Trump and his incompetent administration

 Fara Kaufman  @justfara

BREAKING: (Published on X/ - formerly Twitter) French Senator Claude Malhuret TORCHES Donald and his alcoholic, drug-addicted administration on the floor of the Luxembourg Palace: "Every time the Epstein affair resurfaces, bombs explode somewhere in the world and cause a distraction!" This might be the greatest MAGA takedown of all time. Nobody was spared... "A year ago, here in France, I compared Trump's presidency to Nero's Court. I was wrong. It's the miracle court. 

An anti-vaxxer, former heroin addict as Minister of Health," he said, referring to RFK Jr. Malhuret's comparison to the mad Emperor Nero is fitting. It's said that he fiddled while Rome burned. In Trump's case, he's building a ballroom while the entire world goes up in flames. "A climate-skeptic Minister of Economy. 

An alcoholic (a.k.a.Hegseth) and TV host, Minister of the Armed Forces," Malhuret continued, referring to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. "An old Qatar agent, Minister of Justice. A groupie of Putin, Minister of National Security," Malhuret went on, referring to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Bondi previously worked for the Ballard Partners firm which raked in $115,000 a month by lobbying on behalf of Qatar. 

"A Turkish proverb says 'When a clown settles in a palace, he does not become king, it is the palace that becomes a circus'," said Malhuret. "His fine team has decided to create a competitor to the UN. Since the creation of the Board of Peace, Trump has triggered more military strikes than Biden during his entire term." 

"Every time the Epstein affair resurfaces, bombs explode somewhere in the world and cause a distraction," he continued. "Bomb more to win more." This is how the world now sees the American president: as a pedophile desperately exploiting his role as commander-in-chief to obscure the fact that he preyed on children with his long-time pal Jeffrey Epstein. "There isn't a single country where Trump did not take advantage of the situation to enrich himself without ever forgetting his family. 

A Boeing plane offered by Qatar," he said, referring to the 💲400 million jet that Qatar "gifted" to Trump. "Investment in all Gulf projects or elsewhere. Stock market manipulation that only a few insiders benefit from." "Any one of these conflicts of interest would have caused an immediate procedure of impeachment here," Malhuret. "But we are not here. We are in MAGA's America where public business is conducted in favor of private interests." 

Rarely have we heard such an exhaustive yet succinct distillation of the Trump administration's rampant criminality and incompetence. By focusing on individual Cabinet members and what makes them uniquely unfit for office and then expanding the aperture to the broader patterns of corruption and malignancy, Malhuret delivered a master class in political messaging. 

Every mainstream outlet in the U.S. should be running this speech to show Americans what the world thinks of our leaders. 

Since they won't, please make sure to like and share to spread this far and wide❗

Donald Trump said he does not think about consumers! Yes, he said that!

Donald Trump Is Now the Un-Populist

Donald Trump, on May 12, 2026, while taking questions from reporters about the Iran conflict. When asked if he was considering Americans' financial situations during negotiations, he responded, "Not even a little bit."

Published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by Ed Kilgore

From the expensive and unnecessary ballroom to the illegal Iran war, to blatant self-dealing, Donald Trump is ignoring the will of the people — to his Growing Old Party's peril.

Less than four months from now, early voting begins in the 2026, midterm general elections. Political scientists differ on exactly when voting intentions are formed, but the consensus is that for the vast majority of the electorate, it happens well before the last-minute rush of campaigning. Most Republicans, whose control of Congress is at risk in November, are acutely aware that they are running out of time to convince swing voters that their sour perceptions of Donald Trump’s job performance — always the single most important variable affecting midterm outcomes — are erroneous. And at almost every turn, the president seems to be on a mission to make that as hard as possible.

While assessments of Trump’s handling of a broad range of issues have remained well underwater for over a year now, there are particularly and especially salient negative perceptions of how well he’s dealt with high living costs (arguably the issue that most determined his 2024 victory over Kamala Harris) and whether his strange and aimless war with Iran was a good idea. Trump’s two biggest problems are dangerously interactive, since the Iran war’s effect on global energy prices has clearly boosted domestic inflation, and his prosecution of this “war of choice” has come to symbolize his refusal to focus on the public’s actual concerns. For all the interminable discussion of a GOP “affordability agenda,” it’s getting very late in the year for that agenda to suddenly appear.

And, most recently, despite the intense loyalty congressional Republicans have consistently shown toward Trump, an unprecedented revolt has broken out, for the moment shutting down the legislative process. The growing GOP grievance is that Trump is continuing to elevate personal hobbyhorses (e.g., his White House ballroom project, which he now wants taxpayers to subsidize, and his bizarre new slush fund for alleged victims of Biden administration persecution) over the measures Republicans need to stay in office.


The implications of this revolt go beyond smooth executive-legislative relations or even the unity of the GOP. Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump from the perspective of ethics, policy, the U.S. Constitution, or the health of democratic institutions, his prowess as a gut-level politician has been universally, if grudgingly, respected. An essential ingredient of the loyalty he has inspired in the Republican ranks has been his ability to bend traditional conservatism to “populism,” a voter-friendly blend of themes and proposals that probably saved the GOP from the irrelevance it seemed to be courting before he came down the escalator in 2015. He famously convinced a party in love with “entitlement reform” to lay off trying to slaughter the sacred cows of Social Security and Medicare. He talked Republicans out of a near century of free-trade orthodoxy because culturally conservative blue-collar voters hated NAFTA. And he convinced the militarist wing of the GOP that massive defense spending didn’t require actually using it in unpopular “forever wars.”

Now comes the terrifying possibility that the man who made Republicans “populists” is himself becoming the ultimate un-populist. Trump is not just ignoring (or, because he can only acknowledge praise of himself, actively denying) public opinion; he seems to be courting unpopularity. Americans really dislike his beloved tariffs, and although Trump has the perfect legal excuses to stop pursuing them, he still persists. Trump can’t stop bashing Obamacare, even though he got badly burned on the subject in his first term and has no coherent replacement for it. His war in Iran was the rare U.S. war that was unpopular from the get-go, but he can’t seem to let go of it, and it’s an even bet he’ll start another war before suppertime. The political “outsider” who was too rich to bribe is now the consummate insider grabbing money with both hands to enrich his family and friends and the most disreputable of his supporters.

Most astonishing of all, the veteran entertainer who understood the intense resentment of working people for elites who seemed to mock them while fleecing them is now becoming the elitist-in-chief. He is explicitly annoyed that people struggling to make ends meet don’t appreciate they are living in a “golden age” in which stock markets climb dizzily upward on record corporate profits. He’s angry that Americans don’t just take his word for it that they need to pay higher prices for gasoline or light and heat so that he can win some more wars and peace prizes. And he is indifferent at best to how very bad it looks that he is devoting more time to his many tacky and self-glorifying vanity projects than to his day job. Many regular folk used to enjoy watching Trump thumb his nose at the powers that be. Now he’s the Man, the very opposite of a plucky underdog.

For Republicans who desperately need his help to retain their offices and their power, it increasingly appears that Trump has lost touch with the country. Yes, he’ll help them in the midterms by rigging congressional districts and perhaps interfering with the vote itself, but not by bending to adverse public opinion. It would be one thing if like some second-term presidents of the past, he drifted toward lame-duck status and began ceding power to his allies and successors. But no: Trump dominates news media and the political landscape more forcefully and ubiquitously than ever. (The more Trump talks, the more he contradicts himself and his advisors.)

He’s in danger not only of squandering his party’s midterm-election hopes, but of handing his putative heir J.D. Vance an anvil and the GOP an indelible MAGA brand — even as the idea that he has restored “American greatness” becomes ridiculous to all but his fiercest acolytes.

It’s possible, of course, that such assessments once again underestimate the 47th. Perhaps, against all expectations, he will snap out of his extended fugue state and begin listening to the public and his party leaders. But, Donald Trump would be well advised to make his 80th-birthday wish Make Trump popular again. In the meantime, the candle  he’s already🕯️ blowing out is his own.

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.”

Donald Trump is a bully and Republicans must impeach him for death threats to elected lawmakers

Trump’s violent rhetoric endangers democracy

An echo opinion published in The Daily Record in Maryland

Incredibly, Donald Trump, 🤢who is the President of the United States, accused six Democratic members of Congress of “seditious behavior punishable by death.” Their so-called crime in his eyes was to advise United States service members to refuse to obey illegal orders. Yes, the president called for the execution of members of Congress because they told servicemen and women to obey the law.

Melania Trump's failed anti-bully campaign

Donald Trump called their experienced advice, set out on a videotape, “seditious behavior at the highest level,” and he demanded they be arrested and tried for their crimes. He shared another post saying, “Hang them [sic] George Washington would.” 🤥

All who serve in the military swear a solemn oath to uphold and protect the Constitution. To be clear, the US military’s Uniform Code of Justice allows a military member to refuse to obey a “patently illegal order.” That would include an order that directs the commission of a crime or the violation of constitutional rights. In his first term, Trump suggested that the military shoot peaceful protesters in the legs, an illegal and unconstitutional action should it have occurred.

We don’t know for sure yet whether Donald Trump actually believes he has the right to execute these members of Congress, or any service member who refuses to obey an illegal order, or whether he is playing to his maga cult supporters. 

But, what we do know is that political violence in this country is on the rise, and his statements calling for execution serve as a dog whistle to those who might do the president’s bidding.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, announced recently she has received threats of violence after Trump attacked her, because she refused to remove her name from the Epstein Files discharge petition. 

In a short time, we witnessed the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the fire bombing of the residence of Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, and the murder of an elected Minnesota Democrat, on June 14, 2025, state representative Melissa Hortman was assassinated in a shooting at her home in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and her husband Mark was also murdered. 

Our politics have become far too violent, and we must find a way to tone down the rhetoric. All six who Trump threatened are under 24-hour protection and one senator received a bomb threat.

Donald Trump, when he issues threats like the one he has directed at the six members of Congress, acts more like a 250-pound, 10-year-old schoolyard bully than the leader of a free nation. His actions are wrong, they are evil, dangerous and frankly, they are revolting. 

We are aware that nothing will distract him from doing this in the future, that there is no one to rein him in partly because he believes he’s above the law, but we wanted to go on record to express our views.

#ImpeachTrumpNow

Americans must learn how to oppose Trumpziism evils by calling for political civility - some NYTimes opinions

Civility and Disagreement in American Politics 

Echo: To the Editor of the New York Times:
Re “Being Polite Won’t Save Us,” by Roxane Gay 

The greatest danger in American politics is not incivility but unreasonableness ❗— the refusal to listen, the denial of facts, the abandonment of deliberation.

Calls for civility were often used as a weapon for control, especially against those demanding justice. But, civility isn’t politeness. 

Rather, its purpose is for everyone in public dialogue to emerge feeling connected, respected and heard.

Rarely, does it make headlines, but in many local communities democracy still works.

City councils and school boards show a core civic truth: Disagreement isn’t just natural, it’s necessary. We are meant to argue — and to make better decisions by working through those disagreements together.

Civility protects the processes that give everyone a voice and a chance to participate. Disagreement, even when passionate or angry, is not the enemy. Being unreasonable is what’s un-American.

From Matt Lehrman in Scottsdale, Arizona

And this, To the Editor: Roxane Gay rightly exposes the hypocrisy about MAGA movement’s disingenuous calls for political civility, which are like punching your neighbor in the face and then insisting the two of you sit down like adults and talk out your differences.

The Trump administration latches on to values-laden language and phrases — ( i.s., cleché) “law and order,” or “fighting antisemitism” or “civility” — only as a springboard for its ambitions and pursuit of power.

Political civility isn’t a fantasy. The misuse of the term by the MAGA movement is just another tactic in the campaign to dismantle democracy in this country.

From Mark Bayer, in Falls Church, Virginia, a former chief of staff for Senator Edward J. Markey, of Massachusetts.

To the Editor: History’s most transformative leaders, from President Abraham Lincoln to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., prove that civility and moral urgency can effectively coexist and amplify each other’s power.

To the Editor: If I were to make a list of the main problems in today’s political discourse, calls for more civility would not be among them.

Of course it’s possible to misunderstand or misuse the concept. But as Gandhi said, the true meaning of civility is the inner desire to do good to your opponent. 

Given the dominance of brutality and indecency in today’s politics, isn’t that an idea worth considering, especially because it’s so rare?

From David Blankenhorn, in  New York, the writer, founder and president of the nonprofit organization Civic Life.

Donald Trump finally has a conspiracy theory he cannot climb out of....Jeffrey Epstein is an evil Trump twin

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Jonah Goldberg: Donald Trump and the company he kept. 

#Evil Twins Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were two peas in a poisonous pod....the company they kept!

Trump is a convicted sex offender accused of rape and he is a philanderer who was revealed by Stormy Daniels in testimony given under oath. But, somehow, 😞we are supposed to believe that Donald Trump never sent Jeffrey Epstein a 50th birthday message loaded with sexual inuendoes written inside the outline of a woman's body. Of course Donald Trump was involved in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking operation because he hung out with the evil guy for years and sent him a birthday card that he wants us to believe he never sent to one of his best friends. This stuff is planly crazy❗Trump must resign, all he ever does is lie, lie and lie more to cover up all his other lies.

Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein❓” Donald Trump shot back at a reporter during a Cabinet meeting. “This guy’s been talked about for years. ... I mean, I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration.”

It’s hard not to chuckle at the mess the Trump administration has made for itself with the Epstein files fiasco. Don’t worry, I am not going to wade too far into the “merits” of the controversy. Still, a very brief recap might be helpful.

Epstein, the famous financial consultant and sex-trafficking sleazeball to the rich and famous killed himself in jail during the first Trump term. And ever since, the extended MAGA universe — often egged on by Trump himself — has convinced itself that Epstein was at the center of a vast web of underage sex, blackmail and intrigue. He had to have been murdered to keep his “client list” secret, insisted many. When Trump returned to the White House, and put MAGA  all-stars Kash Patel and Dan Bongino at the top of the FBI — both big boosters of various Epstein-related theories — the understandable expectation was that all would finally be revealed. Early on, Attorney General Pam Bondi (aka "nurse Ratchet" wanna'be) said she had the Epstein client list on her desk and would reveal all soon.

Then, (ooops political inertia hit❗) last week the administration officials announced they could find no evidence to support the conspiracy theories. Bondi said she misspoke about the client list. The MAGA world went bonkers. Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly smelled blood in the water. Shouts of cover-ups and insinuations or accusations that Trump must be on the list proliferated. Bongino may be thinking of resigning. Kash Patel is begging friendly journalists to take him at his word. And Trump is trying to shame everyone out of even talking about the guy.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think there are all manner of legitimate — and interesting! — questions to ask about Epstein’s clients, about how he made money (billionaire Leon Black said he paid Epstein $170 million for “tax advice” — that’s a lot of advice) and, yes, about Trump’s relationship with Epstein (and Bill Clinton’s).

And given how Trump launched and sustained his political career relentlessly pushing unfounded conspiracy theories — including birtherism, the 2020 “rigged” election and so many others — it’s difficult to muster any sympathy for the Mar-a-Lago Macbeth, as Epstein’s ghost plagues him like a sleazier Banquo. In fact, what is delicious about the whole spectacle is that no one — other than Epstein’s underage victims — is worth rooting for. Patel, Bongino, Bondi and the denizens of MAGA media are all caught in a no-win situation: Support Trump and his “coverup” of their favorite conspiracy theory or alienate Trump by refusing to drop it.

The primary intention, as always, is to intimidate the reporters. 

But, what often lends weight to the intimidation is the fact that Trump’s own people — from social media influencers to Fox (Fake❗) News hosts — will follow his cues and annoy, harass, mock or criticize mainstream reporters who ask unwanted questions to Donald Trump. In fact, because the Epstein fiasco divides those very people who trusted him when he said he would release the files,  could be a sign about Trump’s waning influence within his own cult coalition. The fact that the divide is larger and louder on the Epstein files than on any another issue, including Israel, Ukraine, tariffs, Medicaid cuts, debt and deficits, or Trump’s myriad shady business deals, only heightens the schadenfreude.

If he is covering up his own shady involvement with Epstein, that would, of course turn the dial to 11. But assuming we know about as much as we ever will, it doesn’t really matter politically who is right about Epstein or why Trump wants people to stop talking about him. The relevant fact is that he’s made it clear what he wants, and many of his own minions and enablers think it’s in their interest not to give it to him.

That so many people are refusing to drop the issue may be the most significant thing about this whole episode. Trump has a long history of trying to dictate what counts as a legitimate question or topic. Lately has become more strident. When a local reporter asked about the lack of advance warning for the recent Texas floods, he snapped, “Only a very evil person would ask a question like that.” He’s told reporters to never ask him whether he “chickens out” on his tariff schemes.  (Maine Writer- Obviusly, Donald Trump is possessed by evil himself "what goes around comes around". Everybody knows how the Jeffrey Epsetin - Ghislaine Maxwell duo were evil and everybody who knew them are now suspected of being involved in their sex trafickking clandestine demonic operation.)

Democracy protects all the people from autocracy: Protect Migrant rights! Due process under th elaw

Echo editorial published by the Houston Chronicle:

Yes, the Tren de Aragua is a notorious gang. Its members traffic in people and drugs. They torture and kill with impunity in countries where they operate. They are despicable and dangerous criminals.

But, the gang is not what the White House makes them out to be: an invading military force. An invading military force looks like the Russian army, invading Ukraine. Or Allied soldiers, storming the beaches of Normandy.

Listen to someone like White House advisor Stephen Miller, (aka Hermann Göring's dobbleganger❗) and you’d expect Tren de Aragua soldiers to be scrambling onto Padre Island beaches in their own version of D-Day.

So how are we meeting this supposedly clear and present danger? Are Miller and company urging the president at least to call out the Civil Air Patrol, the U.S. Air Force’s civilian auxiliary? Armed with high-powered binoculars, Civilian Air Patrol members and young cadets could rush to the shores of the Gulf of — Mexico❓ America❓ — and scan sea and sky for jets flying in formation from the south, for submarine conning towers on the horizon.

Of course, the White House crew doesn’t actually believe we face a military tanks-and-commandos invasion. 

When the MAGA Republican administration use the word “invasion,” they mean something different. Usually, they’re talking about the huge number of people who either presented themselves at the border or crossed illegally during the first years of the Biden administration.

Those people look nothing like an organized army, or even a rag-tag militia, bent on some military objective. They’re a mix of individuals. Some are legitimate asylum seekers fleeing persecution; some are people simply seeking better jobs; and yes, some may be dangerous criminals.

The dangerous criminals should be deported; that’s a no-brainer. And that’s regular old law enforcement, not warfare.

But rather than sort through these people, to do the hard, slow work of separating the vicious from the well-meaning, the Trump administration is whipping up an emergency to justify acting in bad faith. The president effectively closed paths to asylum and terrified would-be migrants by sending (as far as we know "innocent") immigrants to a Salvadoran prison known for its cruelty, and without so much as a charge, trial or sentence.

It took a federal judge from Texas — a Trump appointee, in fact — to call the administration on its absurd and blatantly unconstitutional misuse of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. It’s a wartime authority enacted during the presidency of John Adams. The act allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation with whom we’re at war. Presidents have invoked the act three times: The War of 1812, World War I and World War II. It’s probably best known as the dubious rationale for the incarceration of more than 100,000 innocent❗ Japanese Americans during World War II.

U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., a 2018 Trump appointee, issued a permanent injunction last week against the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador without any semblance of due process — a right guaranteed by the Constitution. A former partner with the Houston law firm Baker Botts, the judge wrote that Trump’s reliance on the act “exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”

Doing his own research, Rodriguez found that the words of the Alien Enemies Act in their original sense referred to armed forces. “[Trump’s proclamation] makes no reference to and in no manner suggests that a threat exists of an organized, armed group of individuals entering the United States at the direction of Venezuela to conquer the country or assume control over a portion of the nation,” he wrote in a 36-page ruling.

“Plain, ordinary meaning.” The judge’s words could have tripped off the tongues of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, perhaps the two most fervent constitutional “originalists” on the Supreme Court. The OG of “originalists” himself, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, would have concurred. Whether Rodriguez is an originalist, we can’t say. What we can say is that he respects the Constitution, a claim we cannot make for this president or his anti-immigration henchmen.

On Sunday, Trump admitted that. During an interview on “Meet the Press,” he was asked whether he believes he needs to uphold the Constitution. The president responded, “I don’t know.”

Never mind that upholding the Constitution is literally the president’s job. When Trump took the oath of office — which is all of one sentence — he swore to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” He’s not supposed to stress-test the Constitution, bend it to his will or look for loopholes.

But that’s not how Trump sees it. “I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said,” he said during the NBC interview. His “brilliant” lawyers are trying to twist plain language and subvert American values. Trump is treating the Constitution like pliable taffy — not like the rock of American government and values.

Rodriguez is merely the latest of numerous federal judges attempting to remind the president that the rule of law still prevails, however threatened it might be.

The Venezuelan migrants the administration accused of “invading” the U.S. remain confined to a detention center near the Rio Grande Valley town of Raymondville. They may or may not even be gang members. Rodriguez, adhering to the law, did not say they have to be released immediately. He did not say they couldn’t, at some point, be deported. But he did side with the migrants on something fundamentally American: their constitutional right to “due process.”

“Due process.” Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment shorthand for justice, equality and fairness under the law, the phrase is fast becoming a mantra during these early months of Trump’s second term because of his willingness to circumvent laws and procedures. Whether it’s his effort to peremptorily end birthright citizenship or fire government employees without cause or cyclone through federal agencies, leaving wreckage and hardship in his wake, he’s likely violating the law and then daring judges to stop him. More and more are taking the dare on behalf of the American people.

Rodriguez’s order applies only to Venezuelan migrants held in the Southern District of Texas — which includes Houston — although judges in other jurisdictions where migrants are being held are likely to reach the same conclusion. Nor is Rodriguez’s order the final word. The government is likely to seek relief from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, whose ultra-conservative judges could very well reverse Rodriguez. The case is likely to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s due process at work.

Earlier, facetiously, we mentioned the Civil Air Patrol. But it’s worth noting that during World War II, members of the venerable organization were credited with spotting 173 Nazi subs off the Atlantic coast and officially sinking two. 

Today, we too are volunteers on guard — not against Nazi invaders or Venezuelan gangs, but against a White House willing to subvert the Constitution.

Using our voices and our votes, working in alliance with honorable jurists like Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., we’re in a fight for the future of our constitutional republic.

Obviously America has yet to recover from the Civil War- One historian explains why

 A lot of learning in this history education essay, about Manisha Sisha's research, reports how the failure of the post Civil War Reconstruction is impacting America today:

Book review by Adam Horchshild

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic Reconstruction 1860-1920

This essay is a book review, authored by Adam Hochschild, published in The New York Review of Books. 

A Maine Writer spoiler: I would not want Mr. Hochschild to be my history teacher. He gives a lukewarm review to Ms. Sisha's research, but I learned a lot by reading his review. 

My take away question raised by Mr. Hochschild's essay is this, "Would Donald Trump have found a right wing proxy Ku Klux Klan MAGA cult if America had succeeded to achieve the intended goals of the post Civil War Reconstruction❓

Thank you Manisha Sisha for writing about the Reconstruction era in American history. Her research may not be expressed the way Mr. Hochild would have written about the subject, but he does justice to describing Ms. Sisha's insightful perspective about how America has not recovered from the Civil War. (My humble opinion).

This short overview was published in an on-line book site: "We are told that the present moment bears a strong resemblance to Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War when the victorious North attempted to create an interracial democracy in the unrepentant South. That effort failed--and that failure serves as a warning today about violent backlash to the mere idea of black equality."

Manisha Sinha is an Indian-born American historian, and the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016) and The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (2024).

One Brief Shining Moment essay by Adam Hochschild: Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a (sadly) different America.

In the sweltering days of early July 1913, more than 50,000 men gathered for a most unusual reunion. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, both Union and Confederate veterans from forty-six states traveled to the battlefield. The War Department provided field kitchens, latrines, cots, and long rows of tents. Boy Scouts and other volunteers pitched in to help the elderly pilgrims, a few of whom had to be taken away in horse-drawn ambulances when felled by heatstroke. Hundreds of photographs show the old soldiers, in Panama hats, white shirts, ties, and suspenders, with medals pinned to their dark vests. Their faces bristle with beards, mustaches, and side-whiskers, all gray or white, and they have that slightly shocked, frozen look that people often show in group photos from long ago.

A climax of the reunion came on July 3, when men who had taken part (or said they had taken part) in Pickett’s Charge and its repulse by Union troops met at the stone wall that had been a center of the fighting and shook hands across it. Photographers eagerly caught more images of the two armies’ veterans—some wearing parts of their old uniforms—greeting one another or dining together at long wooden tables. President Woodrow Wilson, the first southerner to occupy the White House in nearly half a century, arrived on July 4 to speak to “these gallant men in blue and gray”:

We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten…. How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic.

Manisha Sinha does not mention the Gettysburg reunion in her provocative The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, but it is an apt symbol of a central argument she makes: despite its surrender in 1865, the South eventually achieved at least a draw over the central issue that the Civil War was fought to resolve—the rights of Black Americans. In President Wilson’s saccharine “the quarrel forgotten,” there was no hint of Abraham Lincoln’s famous words at that same battlefield fifty years earlier about “the unfinished work” of achieving “a new birth of freedom.” And much of what had happened in between was anything but “benign and majestic.”

Just as we talk about the First Republic, the Second Empire, or the Fifth Republic in France, so Sinha divides American history into phases, although the transition from one to another is not so neatly demarcated, sometimes taking years. Her focus is on what she calls our Second Republic: the promise of Reconstruction following the Civil War. This period, she points out, brought not just new rights for the formerly enslaved but hope for women and Native Americans, surprising flashes of solidarity with freedom struggles elsewhere, and “the forgotten origin point of social democracy in the United States.” All of this, however, was destined to be soon replaced by what she calls the American Empire—a regime that resumed seizing land from Native Americans, ruthlessly suppressed organized labor, and acquired its first overseas colonies.

Reconstruction was bitterly opposed by reactionaries, most notably the ghastly president Andrew Johnson (“This is a country for white men,” he wrote, “and…as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men”), who was in office after President Abraham Lincoln’s death in 1865, until 1869. Sinha reminds us why the radical hopes of Reconstruction enraged racists like Johnson. There were corrupt or incompetent officials, to be sure, but besides safeguarding freedom for some four million slaves, Reconstruction was “a brief, shining historical moment” that held open a door to a different America. Both Black and white northern volunteers went south to work as teachers for former slaves who had previously been barred from all education. Even though most Black Americans never got their promised forty acres and a mule, some 25 percent owned at least a small amount of land by the century’s end. The Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution guaranteed them full citizenship and, for men, the right to vote. Johnson, nostalgic for his days as a slave owner (when he had really been, he claimed, “their slave instead of their being mine”), angrily vetoed one civil rights measure after another, but Congress usually overrode him.

The most important Reconstruction agency was established in 1865: the Freedmen’s Bureau, “a sort of proxy state for African Americans” that did everything from helping them settle on public land to protecting them from wage theft and assault by white planters furious at losing their human property. Its schools taught more than 200,000 children over the course of seven years. It ran orphan asylums and more than sixty hospitals, and its medical workers also treated the newly freed in their homes.

All of this was still grossly inadequate to the needs of millions of impoverished men and women newly freed from slavery and surrounded by resentful, armed whites, but nonetheless, Sinha declares, “the Freedmen’s Bureau was the first government social welfare agency in US history.” Among other achievements, it founded and helped fund a number of what today we call HBCUs—historically Black colleges and universities. The most prominent, Howard University, bears the name of General Oliver Otis Howard of Maine, an ardent evangelical who lost an arm in the Civil War and was the Freedmen’s Bureau’s first commissioner.

Much of this picture is largely familiar from the work of historians ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Eric Foner. What Sinha adds to it are the intriguing signs of a wider radicalism that flourished, if briefly, as this idealistic moment began. Other historians have noted such connections, but I’ve not seen such an array of them compiled before. A Black division of the Union Army, Sinha writes, “called itself ‘Louverture,’ after the leader of the Haitian Revolution.” The country’s first Black daily newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune, declared that “whether the victim is called serf in Russia, peasant in Austria, Jew in Prussia, proletarian in France, pariah in India, Negro in the United States, at heart it is the same denial of justice.” One meeting of Black citizens of Illinois in 1866 warned “lovers of…constitutional liberty” of the dangers of a “coup d’état” such as the one staged in France some years earlier by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. Their statement also spoke of “the aboriginal man of America, once the undisputed possessor of this continent,” who was “by coercion” robbed of land.

Indeed, for a time it seemed as if the Second American Republic might promise a better deal for Native Americans. Ely Parker, a Seneca, had served as a Union officer and aide to General Ulysses S. Grant; the surrender terms that Robert E. Lee signed at Appomattox were drafted in Parker’s handwriting. Four years later, when Grant became president, he appointed Parker commissioner of Indian affairs. Parker pushed for a more peaceful policy toward his fellow Native Americans: protection of their land rights, opportunities for education, and more.

The new constitutions that southern states adopted right after the war (almost all soon amended or ignored) were often wide-ranging. Alabama established an agricultural college and property rights for married women, and its constitutional convention resolved that ex-slaves could collect pay from their former owners for the period they were kept enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation—surely America’s first reparations bill. Sinha, who has a frustrating tendency to race through long lists of events, quotes, laws, and resolutions, does not say if anyone was actually able to collect.

Although several of the conventions debated land reform, none of them enacted it. On the other hand, state constitutions created tax-funded public school systems on a wide scale for the first time in the South, with South Carolina…and Texas making attendance mandatory…. They did away with undemocratic laws that penalized the poor, imprisonment for debt, as well as capital and “cruel and unusual” punishment for minor crimes. Most also protected laborers and sharecroppers by giving them the first share, or lien, on the crops they produced.

Finally, during Reconstruction, Black southerners were elected to office for the first time: to the US Senate and House of Representatives and—more than six hundred of them—to state legislatures.

All these advances, of course, were doomed. As southern whites reasserted their power, they swept away the Black officeholders; in 1874 eighty former Confederate officers were elected to Congress, and by 1910 one, Edward Douglass White of Louisiana, was chief justice of the Supreme Court. The early moment of promise had existed only while the defeated South was under military occupation. The last remnants of that came to an end in the Compromise of 1877, following a disputed presidential election. In return for Rutherford B. Hayes entering the White House, all remaining federal troops were withdrawn from the South. That left white southerners free to impose Jim Crow laws and to use poll taxes, lynching, and a ruthless campaign of murder, mutilation, and castration to terrorize Blacks, prevent them from voting, and ensure that the South would remain white-dominated and highly segregated for nearly a century to come.

It was also a South dominated by the wealthy, for poll taxes reduced voting by poor whites as well as Blacks. 

Again, Sinha’s wide perspective covers more than race:

Once in power, conservatives passed laws that adversely affected all poor and working people, including fence laws that cordoned off common grazing lands…. They also rescinded lien laws that protected sharecroppers and wage workers. Virginia…even authorized whipping for petty theft.

Central to the book is her assertion that crushing the Second Republic was a precondition for the rise of the American Empire. The white elites who overthrew Reconstruction, she writes,




helped make possible other antidemocratic policies and forces, from the conquest of the Plains Indians to the establishment of American empire to the crushing of the first mass labor and farmer movements.

The troops withdrawn from the South were then deployed against Native Americans. Gone from power was Ely Parker and his talk of peace. General Howard of the Freedmen’s Bureau later showed a very different spirit as he led a war against the Nez Perce people. “The rise of the Jim Crow South and the conquest of the West, often told as separate stories, were parallel events connected at a fundamental level,” Sinha writes. General William Tecumseh Sherman, leader of the Union Army’s march through Georgia, was in the field again, declaring, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux even to the extermination of men, women, and children.” Just as the progressives looked overseas, Sinha points out, so did the new empire builders: Sherman sent officers to England to learn how the British were so successful in their colonial wars.

Among those protesting the brutal seizure of Indian lands were many abolitionists. Lydia Maria Child urged in 1868 that “the white and Indian must jointly occupy the country.”
William Lloyd Garrison wrote that “the same contempt is generally felt at the west for the Indians as was felt at the south for the negroes.” He compared a ruthless massacre in Montana to British vengeance following the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Other abolitionists also thought internationally. When the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner argued for civil rights, he compared the treatment of Blacks in the South to the sufferings of the lower castes in India, colonial subjects in Africa, and Chinese immigrants here at home.

The last Indian resistance was crushed in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The big expansion of our overseas empire came eight years later as the United States seized Spain’s colonies, most importantly the Philippines, after the Spanish-American War. Many Confederate veterans had been welcomed back into the US Army for these campaigns. One of them, Major General Joseph Wheeler, got his enemies mixed up and shouted, as his men advanced against Spanish troops in Cuba, “We got the Yankees on the run!”

On the run, also, were labor unionists. Sinha writes that “federal troops, once deployed to secure freedpeople’s rights,” were now “being used on a wide scale to put down striking workers.” In an apt analogy, she reminds us that just as slaveholders had once talked of states’ rights but demanded a federal fugitive slave law, now postwar railroads and industries fended off laws about safety and working hours but demanded that government soldiers suppress unions. And they did, on a huge scale, from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 onward. Intriguingly, Sinha mentions that the Pennsylvania Railroad magnate Tom Scott may have been one of the architects of the Compromise of 1877, although the full story of that fateful bargain will never be known.

It is poignant to imagine the America that could have been if the Second Republic had survived. If Lincoln had lived, or if he had chosen a more enlightened vice-president; if more federal troops had remained in the South; if their presence hadn’t been bargained away…there are many more ifs.

Some of those ifs could have given us a country with less bloodshed and more justice, but I doubt that they would have changed as much as Sinha implies. She writes, for example, that “the conquest of the West after the war…was not inevitable.” I fear it was. As the nineteenth century went on, the powerful new tools of the imperial age—trains and steamboats, the repeating rifle and the machine gun, telegraph lines to send orders to distant troops and officials—enabled colonizers or settlers to seize land across the world at an accelerating pace. It happened on the Great Plains under a capitalist democracy in the United States; it happened in Central Asia and the Caucasus under the absolute monarchy of tsarist Russia; it happened in Africa, India, Australia, and Southeast Asia under a variety of European regimes like Britain, France, and Germany. Even the great Frederick Douglass reflected a touch of this spirit when he said that there might be “a deficiency inherent to the Latin races” and advocated American annexation of what today is the Dominican Republic.

If the Second Republic had lasted longer, would Black Americans be better off today? Surely yes. But even under the best of circumstances, with both an administration and a Congress generous and enlightened, would the victorious North have had the necessary decades-long commitment required to undo the vast gulf in income, wealth, land ownership, education, and more that was slavery’s legacy? I doubt it. Short of revolution—which seldom has ended well—such differences are stubbornly enduring. In every country once blighted by slavery, the huge economic gap between descendants of slaves and masters yawns wide, even on the many Caribbean islands where the former far outnumber the latter and control the government as well.

I wish I could say that Sinha’s writing is as fresh as her perspective. It’s not. Important terms she uses, like the “contraband camps” where refugees fleeing slavery gathered during the Civil War, go undefined and barely described. She piles up cavalcades of detail about matters that are well known, such as the horrific years of terror that restored white supremacy in the South, while she rushes past other eye-catching but less familiar events. She devotes only part of one sentence, for instance, to the proposal by Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire for a federally funded “uniform national system of primary and secondary education.” Versions of this bill passed the Senate three times in the twilight of the Second Republic, but never the House. Think how different America would be if a Black child in the Mississippi Delta had as much money spent on her education as a white one in Silicon Valley.

Sinha also never slows down to paint a narrative picture—whether of a particular community, say, that experienced the dreams and then the crushed hopes of Reconstruction, or of a typical meeting of one of the Black “conventions” of this period that she calls a “missing link” to the twentieth-century civil rights movement. She never gives us full, flesh-and-blood portraits of any of the major figures, especially those like Douglass who had a clear vision of the America that might have been.

Nonetheless, it’s valuable to have her history of unfulfilled hopes. The nation we had become when the frail Union and Confederate veterans clasped hands at Gettysburg in 1913, fell short of the one that at least some of those Union soldiers thought they were fighting for. As the white-haired men met, few Blacks in the South could vote, and in that year alone fifty-one of them were lynched. Native American children were forced to go to the notorious government boarding schools where they were punished if they spoke their native languages. By 1913 the American Empire was well underway; US troops were stationed in Hawaii, Cuba, Guam, Nicaragua, and the Philippines, a list that would grow far longer as the decades passed. One crucial promise of the Second Republic—the right to vote—was finally fulfilled in the 1960s with much effort, suffering, and sacrifice of lives. More remain to be realized. Given the new occupant of the White House, we may well find ourselves living under a Third Republic, with which those side-whiskered Confederate veterans might have been very satisfied.

Adam Hochschild’s most recent book is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. He is working on a book about American social movements of the 1930s. (May 2025)

Donald Trump: How to destroy democracy in 100 days! Republican cult followers are enabling incompetence

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Ben Rhodes: 100 Days❗ That’s All It Took to Sever America From the World.

In 1941, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt marshaled support for the fight against fascism, his chief antagonists were isolationists at home. “What I seek to convey,” he said at the beginning of an address to Congress, “is the historic truth that the United States as a nation has at all times maintained clear, definite opposition to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past.” Roosevelt prevailed, and that victory expanded America’s relationship with the world in ways that remade both.

Eighty-four years later, Donald Trump is systematically severing America from the globe. This is not simply a shift in foreign policy. It is a divorce so comprehensive that it makes Britain’s exit from the European Union look modest by comparison.

Consider the breadth of this effort. Allies have been treated like adversaries. The United States has withdrawn from international agreements on fundamental issues like health and climate change. A “nation of immigrants” now deports people without due process, bans refugees and is trying to end birthright citizenship. Trump’s tariffs have upended the system of international trade, throwing up new barriers to doing business with every country on Earth. 

Sadly, foreign assistance has largely been terminated. So has support for democracy abroad. Research cuts have rolled back global scientific research and cooperation. The State Department is downsizing. Exchange programs are on the chopping block. Global research institutions like the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Wilson Center have been effectively shut down. And, of course, the United States is building a wall along its southern border. (Pope Frances: Build bridges not walls")

Other countries are under no obligation to help a 78-year-old American president fulfill a fanciful vision of making America great again. Already a Gaza cease-fire has unraveled, Russia continues its war on Ukraine, Europe is turning away from America, Canadians are boycotting our goods and a Chinese Communist Party that endured the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution seems prepared to weather a few years of tariffs. Travel to the United States is down 12 percent compared with last March, as tourists recoil from America’s authoritarian turn.

The ideologues driving Trump’s agenda defend their actions by pointing to the excesses of American foreign policy, globalization and migration. There is, of course, much to lament there. 

Yet, Trump’s ability to campaign on these problems doesn’t solve them in government. Indeed, his remedies will do far more harm to the people he claims to represent than to the global elites that his MAGA movement attacks.
Start with the 💲economic impact. If the current reduction in travel to the United States continues, it could cost up to $90 billion this year alone, along with tens of thousands of jobs. 

Tariffs will drive up prices and productivity will slow if mass deportations come for the farm workers who pick our food, the construction workers who build our homes and the care workers who look after children and the elderly. International students pay to attend American universities; their demonization and dehumanization could imperil the $44 billion they put into our economy each year and threaten a sector with a greater trade surplus than our civilian
aircraft sector.

Moreover, the economic outlook gets worse with time. Why would other countries choose to invest in a country where the president roils global markets through social media posts, profits from crypto schemes that fleece ordinary people and undermines the rule of law upon which commerce depends❓ It’s far more likely that nations will make trade deals and forge supply

 chains without the United States while China and its growing list of partners accelerate a movement away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

In the short term, treating international relations like a protection racket could yield some bilateral transactions. Yet, something more fundamental is being lost: trust. An America that, for all its mistakes abroad, guaranteed the security of its allies. An America that, for all its nativism, took in refugees and educated countless world leaders through its universities and exchange programs. 

An America that, for all its hubris, responded to humanitarian crises and showcased an appealing cultural openness. An America that people around the world liked more than its government.

Frankly, the destruction of that trust will hurt us more than the rest of the world. This was certainly the case with Brexit, a project animated
by the same blend of nationalism and nostalgia that has propelled Trump. Nearly a decade after voting to divorce Europe, Britain finds itself wrestling with a predictable incapacity to generate growth, a diminished position in its own region and a growing factionalism in its politics. Less than a third of Britons now believe they made the right decision.

We are following that course on a global scale. After 250 years of growing more diverse and more connected to the world, Trump and his cohort are imposing the staid (sedate 🥱😌😒) insularity of self-imposed decline. The draining of democratic values from our national identity will leave America defined by its size, power and quixotic lust for profit: a place, not an idea. 

Roosevelt left us the inheritance of believing we were the good guys. But, Trump is eviscerating that pretense as cuts to U.S.A.I.D. have almost certainly caused more civilian deaths than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

So, here is at least some good news: A nation’s relationship with the world is not defined solely by its government, particularly one as big and multifaceted as the United States.

In the first Trump term, state and local governments remained committed to combating climate change, welcoming immigrants, protecting higher education and sustaining global ties. All those efforts will be harder in our new Trumpzi reality, but that only makes them more important. 

As the Republicans often remind us, we live in a federal republic, and communities that maintain connections to the world will be better positioned to succeed than those that choose to follow Trump down the rabbit hole of isolationism.

Our institutions also have a choice. Part of what has shocked the world about their capitulation to the Trump administration is the failure to grasp that the moral choice is the best path to self-preservation. Law firms can choose to care more about the law than whether a callous competitor will pick up some of their business. Universities can build credibility within an interconnected world instead of validating the lie that a few students chanting “Free Palestine” is more dangerous than afar-right takeover of academic freedom. The entertainment sector can tell compelling stories about a consequential era instead of algorithmically designed superhero junk. Billionaires can spend money on STEM education for girls instead of financing celebrity trips into a higher part of the atmosphere.

At a more individual level, Americans can demonstrate that they don’t want to be defined by Mr. Trump’s xenophobia. There are international students who fear for their safety; defend their right to be here. There are colleagues and customers around the world; American businesses should engage them in new ways. 

There are enormous shortfalls in humanitarian assistance; American philanthropy should fill as much as it can. There are Republican members of Congress whose constituents will be devastated by  Trump’s policies; make them more afraid of losing their voters than the threats of a lame-duck president. (Uhg😟😰.....Maine Writer:  Impeach Trump NOW❗)

But, he wrong way to respond to our current emergency is to promise, as President Joe Biden did, that America will be “back.” That ignores the enormous mistakes elites made over the last three decades and the political context that allowed Trump to return to power with the mind-set of an arsonist. We’re not coming back, and that’s OK. Indeed, it’s an opportunity.

Instead, our intention should be to return to the world as a different country. That requires something that Americans have not always done well: listening. We have much to learn. And ironically, we now have more in common with people in other countries living under corruption, autocracy and oligarchy. 

Perhaps this chapter in our national experience can be a moment when we find a new kind of solidarity with others who have been through versions of what we are now experiencing.

Indeed, the United States will never be a normal country, if there is such aa thing. Like China and Russia, it is too big, too shaped by a revolutionary and imperial past, too rived by traumas that it has inflicted and absorbed. 

What Roosevelt understood is that America’s peculiarities could stir us to a more enlightened form of self-interest. As a multiracial nation connected to the world and committed to a set of freedoms core to our identity, we could never afford to follow the foolish path of America First — a slogan that amounted to capitulation to fascism.

America’s strength has always been connected to the fact that it comprises people from everywhere who chose not to be defined by a ruler or to fear the future. 

At a time when power in the world is becoming more diffuse, our shifting demographics should be seen as a strength — not something to be feared or suppressed through a reactionary politics that shuts out the world. If we continue down that path, the procession of civilization will leave us behind, in a fearful, diminished and impoverished place. If we recover our sense of agency, we can re-engage the world as a part of it — neither hegemon (i.e., "leader") nor hostile.

Ben Rhodes is a contributing Opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We’ve Made.”