Michelle Obama is a stunning lady and a wonderful feminine role model for all women

 'Hope is all we have': Read Michelle Obama's full speech at Obama Center grand opening (transcript published by Channel 5 in Chicago)

Mrs. Michelle (Robinson) Obama

She ticked off highlights from her husband's eight years in office, including ordering the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, “standing up for marriage equality” and “listening to science.”

Mrs. Michelle Obama spoke directly to her husband when she stepped up to the podium at the Obama Center grand opening ceremony -- then proceeded to bring him and members of the audience to tears.

And she didn't stop there.💗😇

She ticked off highlights from her husband's eight years in office, including ordering the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, “standing up for marriage equality” and “listening to science.”

President Barack Obama appeared to wipe away a tear as she praised him.

Michelle Obama also referenced the current “anxious and divisive times” and warned against being cynical or complacent as “everything feels so upside down.” She pitched the center as “a respite from all that.”

Well. My goodness. I got my tissue in hand. I don't know about all of you.❓😙💟

Wow. Hello, everyone, and what a beautiful day, right❓🌞 

Nothing like a project by my husband to bring out the sun.

Let me start by thanking Addison for that magnificent introduction, and for exemplifying the heart, excellence and determination that has blossomed right here on the South Side for a very long time.

I also want to send some love to everyone who made this day a reality. The construction workers, landscapers, designers, the architects, artists, chefs, our staff, our board members, our donors. Barack and I simply cannot thank you enough for the care and brilliance you poured into every square inch of this campus. I also want to recognize all of the elected officials and distinguished leaders from around the city, the state, the country, and, yes, the world. Thank you for being here to celebrate with us,

Especially to all of my fellow formers. To Joe and Jill, George and Laura, Bill and Hillary.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your service to our country over so many years and for your constant friendship and support of our family. We love you guys. Truly.

Oh, to our daughters, Malia and Sasha, who will always be my babies. Even though we're no longer playing hide and seek on the South Lawn with Beau or hosting sleepovers in the solarium - I see a lot of sleepover girls here -you both have grown into such brilliant and beautiful young women making your way out there in the world.

Thank you for bringing so much joy and spirit and energy to a life you had no voice in choosing. And for making us proud every step of the way. Love you babe.

Oh, so please indulge me for a moment, because I'm gonna take a little time to do something that I know my husband will not do today. And that is to fully sing his praises.

Barack, you gotta look at me.

I love that.

You told me all those years ago that you couldn't promise me the world. But you could promise me an interesting life.And of course, you outdid yourself and managed to give me both.

I know it hasn't always been easy, but there hasn't been a single second through this experience that standing by your side hasn't left me in awe.

Eight years in The Crucible and not once did you melt from the heat. Not once did you let it harden you. Instead, you used it to reveal your truest essence - your stubborn optimism and unflinching courage, your dazzling brilliance and unpretentious decency, your ferocious work ethic and absolutely unshakable moral fiber.

And to do it all as a first and the higher standard that comes with all that.

The claims that a US senator and constitutional law expert wasn't qualified for the job, the lies about your birthright, your faith, your patriotism, the outrage when you stated the biological fact that if you'd had a son that he too would be Black.

Yet you were unflappable at every turn. Always focused, always calm, always looking at the long view to how absurd it is to even imagine that you might have buckled under the pressure, even once, lashed out in frustration, lost your temper. How absurd it is to imagine that you might have done anything but make our family and this entire country proud.

No, you were too busy.

I'm not done. Y'all. Not done. So much to say.

You were doing the people's work, rescuing our economy, expanding health care, ending a war, ordering the bin laden raid, saving an auto industry, winning a peace prize. For keeping us safe from Ebola, regulating the banks, standing up for marriage equality, listening to science and comforting an entire nation in the face of unspeakable tragedies. And you did it all with such grace and class and cool that you made the hardest job in the world look like a walk in this beautiful park.

Your mother, Toot, Gramps - you are a tribute to their love. They are up there grinning and hugging today because you never forgot who you are and where you came from.

Single mother working hard to get by and get an education and show her son the world. Grandparents who didn't have much but they had the perfect recipe to nurture your flame.

You never forgot the folks in the union halls and church basements here in Chicago, where you first put your ideals to the test. You never forgot all the voters you've registered, and students who taught and neighbors you organized. You never fell for the temptation of a quick fix or an easy payday.

You never changed from that idealistic summer associate who showed up on that rainy day when we first met without an umbrella.

You always gave us the very best within you, and in doing so, you reminded the rest of us that we could, too.

Barack, there are no words to express how proud I am of the way you showed up and continue to show up every single day. It has been an honor to be by your side.

You have made me a better person and have given us all an example that we should strive to emulate. And I hope you know, oh, there is truly no higher calling than that. All right.

To all of you joining us today, our invited guests and everyone listening and watching from afar.

The Obama Presidential Center was created as a beacon of hope, a monument to our unshakable values. The ones my husband has exemplified his entire life: equality, empathy, honesty, inclusion, fairness. Especially during these anxious and divisive times, it is so important that we remember that those values are not unique to my husband.

They are the same ones that your husbands and wives, your parents and children, your friends and neighbors exhibit and pass on every single day. Millions of people in this country wake up doing their very best to live decent and purposeful lives.

Yet we're all tested in one way or another, and there are plenty of times we all fall short.

But deep down in our hearts and souls, we all know right from wrong. We know selflessness from greed, righteousness from injustice. We understand that we all rise and fall together, that every last one of us is an invaluable contributor to the greatness of America. And I'm talking about the workers living paycheck to paycheck, hoping to give their kids a better future. The teachers using their own money to take their students on field trips. The business owners struggling to meet payroll but refusing to close their doors. All those folks sweating over stoves to provide meals for their communities. Folks shivering in the freezing cold to deliver our packages. Picking up trash to keep our parks clean. Volunteers dedicating their weekends to coaching T-ball or directing the church choir, or mentoring a child.

That's where the truth of this country lies. Not in grabbing as much as we can get for ourselves, or knocking folks down to prop ourselves up, but in the overwhelming goodness, the relentless striving, the quiet dignity that is inside all of us, our greatest hope is that this center can reflect back just a fraction of that light, that it can capture the beauty of who we all are, no matter what we look like or where we come from, or how much money we earn, or how we pray or vote or speak or love.

It's why during our administration, we threw open the White House doors to all sorts of folks who don't usually get to meet the President or First Lady.

The families pinch and pennies to send their first child to college. The teenagers, who know that a hot afternoon means the bullets start flying. The military spouses and children serving and sacrificing just like their loved ones in uniform. The native kid showing us that resilience and pride can never be stolen. The foragers and FFA members with calluses on their hands from feeding livestock. The immigrants proving what it truly means to be a dreamer.

These folks, these folks aren't Americans too. They are America. They are the beating heart of this country. They are us and we are them.

And to ignore the simple truth, to refuse to respect the contributions and experiences of people who aren't exactly like us, y'all puts us all at risk.

Failing to see the humanity in all people puts us all on a slippery slope. And once that slide starts, there's no telling where it stops. A dangerous precedent that flies in the very face of our faith. And of the founding promise of this democracy that all of us, all of us are created equal, that each of us is a child of God with inherent value.

And no one, and I mean no one, has the right to sit in judgment of who's American enough.

And that's why, folks, we simply don't have the luxury or time to be cynical or complacent, to wring our hands in despair, to wait for someone else to fix the problem.

Y'all, hope is all we have.

Because hope is the essential spark that lights the fire of change. But hope is a choice. Whether or not we use our voices to speak up is a choice. Voting is a choice. Being a decent human being is a choice. Believing that we still hold the power to build a country that reflects us all is a choice.

The Obama Presidential Center is a living testament to the power of choice, y'all. The historic example that millions of you gave the world about what this imperfect democracy has strived for and achieved. And an urgent call to go out there and do it again.

So I hope that when you walk through this campus and bring your children here, you are reminded of the power of choice and the steady work of change. The arduous, unglamorous march march up that mountain one foot after another, day after day, generation after generation, but I also hope you fully absorb the elation of achieving something together.

You know that feeling when you clear the tree line and see a vista that takes your breath away? A feeling that can never be erased? And I know that can be hard to grasp right now when everything feels so upside down. When fact and fiction run together. When folks seek to stifle speech, limit access to education, devalue diversity, erase the inconvenient parts of our history. When our phones constantly buzz with the latest outrage.

So I hope that this place can offer a respite from all that, at least for a little while.

I hope it can reignite the optimism and empathy and ambition that has always powered this country's greatest change.

So we want you to come here and put away your phones and talk and laugh and cry, because you gonna cry and make new friends.

Get your hands dirty in my garden. Push your baby on a swing in the playground. Have a romantic picnic on the great lawn.

Because that's the work of democracy. To being neighborly, taking care of public spaces, having some fun, enjoying each other, shaking out of the isolation and division that have crept too deeply into our lives.

And to my fellow South Siders.

I want you all to make this campus a part of your lives, be inspired by the world class art, check out the books from our beautiful public library and bring them back on time, drop some beats in the recording studio, hit some corner threes at home court, hold birthday parties, jump start clothing drives, host citywide clean up dates. Here. Use this campus to show off this place we call home.

This joyful place where Marian and Fraser Robinson taught their two kids to dream big.

This hopeful place where an unknown guy with an unknown name took flight. This stubbornly optimistic place where family after family scrapes and claws and laughs and dances their way to a better tomorrow.

That's what this has always been about.

Barack and I have always said that this center is grounded in our stories, but it has never been about us. It's never been for us. And it's going to be here long after we're gone.

So what it becomes and how it's preserved, that work has to be done by all of us. Just like our democracy.

And thankfully, you have shown the world what we are capable of. You've proven that a lasting legacy isn't an award or a name on a building or number of zeros in a bank account, but the difference we make in one another's lives.

It's about seeing each other and showing up for each other and carrying each other. When we're weary or faltering or losing faith.

That's how you build something that endures. And that's what you all have done at every twist and turn of this extraordinary journey. You have protected and proclaimed the hope that beats within the heart of this campus. You've rekindled and renewed this untamable, unpredictable and unbreakable democracy.

And I know that you all are going to astonish us even more in the months and years ahead, because you all have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, that when we truly see each other, when we strive to bring out the best in ourselves and one another, oh, there is no limit to how high we can go.

Thank you all. I love you all. God bless you and God bless this country we love.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must be reminded about how January 6th 2020 was treason

Echo essay reported in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg

Donald Trump's Indecency: 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 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 was 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 (Oh no, no is not at all repetitive, it is first person reporting from the scene and must be told again). 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 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 the party of “evil.”

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 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 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.

President Barack 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❗

Republicans must impeach Donald Trump for violating the Constitution by giving illegal political directives to America's military

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Jackie Calmes

President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush, President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden, must speak against Donald Trump.

George Orwell (b, 1903 in India d. 1950 in London)

Where are the statesmen when the state is under siege by the current corrupt head of state❓

I’ve been mulling that question, hardly for the first time, but on three occasions just in the last few days.

On Monday, the federal holiday celebrating George Washington’s birth, former President George W. Bush posted an essay on the first U.S. president as part of a civic project commemorating the nation’s 250th year. Simply by hailing Washington for traits that Donald Trump utterly lacks — humility, integrity, dignity, self-restraint, willingness to forfeit power — the piece was widely read as a sneak attack on the current president. Bush never named Trump. He thus maintained his years-long, stupefying silence about the man who’s trashed him, his family, his party, his legacy PEPFAR program and, most of all, his country.

As Jonathan V. Last wrote for the right-of-center, anti-Trump Bulwark, if Bush’s words were a veiled attack on Trump, “the veil is so powerful that even light can’t escape it.”

Bush’s essay came two days after former President Barack Obama finally responded to Trump’s week-old racist post that caricatured the first Black president and his wife as apes, thereby mainlining into the body politic one of the most toxic tropes against Black Americans. Asked about it in a podcast interview, Obama was, as usual, too cool. He called Trump’s behavior “deeply troubling” and said “there doesn’t seem to be any shame about this among people who used to feel like you had to have some sort of decorum and a sense of propriety and respect for the office.”

But, like Bush, he never named Trump. And, it’s not even clear that Obama was referring to him. Certainly Trump never was one of those who, as Obama put it, “used to feel … some sort of decorum and a sense of propriety and respect for the office.”

Then there was the third trigger for my musings about America’s M.I.A. statesmen.

On Friday, before the weekend ahead of the holiday honoring George Washington, as the first president and military commander established the indispensable tradition of a nonpartisan military — Trump yet again violated Washington’s precedent. 

At Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, he essentially pushed uniformed young troops to violate the military codes enshrining Washington’s legacy of nonpartisanship. Trump treated them like props at a MAGA rally, lauding Republican candidates and officeholders on hand, mocking past presidents and urging the troops to vote Republican in November.

“You have to vote for us,” the commander in chief ordered them.

This is unprecedented, except by Trump himself. In October, he prodded sailors at Norfolk, Va., to boo “Barack Hussein Obama.” 

In September, he told commanders summoned from around the world that the fight is here at home, a “war from within” American cities. In June, also at Ft. Bragg, Trump damned Democrats and sold MAGA merch, over Army objections.

There’s a darn good reason for the wall that Washington built between the military and civilian government. As the Army Field Manual instructs troops: “Nonpartisanship assures the public that our Army will always serve the Constitution and our people loyally and responsively.” Not just Republicans, and not just Trump.

But, as multiple officers told the website Military.com, “holding troops to account when goaded by the president, who is ultimately the boss, would be impossible.” 

Commanders themselves are mute because, after all, Trump is the commander in chief. They’ve watched as one Pentagon purge has followed another, starting with Trump firing the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top military officer. 

Trump chose, instead, an officer who, he often claims, once donned a MAGA cap and said, “I love you, sir. … I’ll kill for you, sir.”

It’s understandable that active-duty officers don’t make a stand. But, what about America’s roughly 7,500 retired generals and admirals❓ As veteran ML Cavanaugh wrote in the Los Angeles Times after Trump’s Ft. Bragg performance last year, “The military profession’s nonpartisan ethic is at a breaking point.” 

Sure, individuals have spoken out. But, as the military knows better than anyone, there’s strength in numbers.

It’s past time for a large, united front of veteran commanders to challenge Trump. (In fact, a group of National Security professionals are strategically organized to respond to Trumpzism. The group is now focused on support for the the military in Congress, including Captain Kelly, who created a video about the duty to refuse illegal orders.)

Why wait for him to make good on his talk of invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy troops at the polls in this midterm election year, based on trumped-up conspiracies about Democrats’ fraud?

You know who could give the veteran and active commanders some political cover? The former commanders in chief.

Even more conspicuous than the brass by their silence and virtual invisibility in the face of Trump’s assaults — on the rule of law, civil rights, elections, foreign alliances and America’s global reputation — are the nation’s four living former presidents: Democrats Joe Biden, Obama and Bill Clinton, and Republican Bush.

It’s past time for the not-so-fab four to come together to publicly demand that Trump honor the oath of office that each man took, and to school the electorate on the many ways in which he’s dishonoring it — including by continuing to justify his refusal to peacefully transfer power in 2021. But,  each man is so observant of the norm that former presidents should not publicly criticize the incumbent one — again, a precedent from George Washington — that they self-muzzle.

This is Americans’ quandary in these Trump times: Presidents and high-ranking veterans who could speak truth to power are so constrained by their devotion to norms and traditions that they won’t confront a president who’s daily shattering the norms, traditions and laws that form the foundation of this democratic nation.

“This is the master alarm flashing for our democracy,” Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat and veteran, said last week of Trump’s targeting of him and other critics.

That takes us back to my original question: Where are the statesmen to answer that alarm❓

Answer: They are  following ordinary rules despite these extraordinary times. And they must stop. #ImpeachTrumpNOW❗

Americans must express anger against Donald Trump's maga evil racist rants and hideous social media messages

Letter to the Editor: Racist Imagery Threatens the Moral Core of Our Democracy published in Door County Pulse,  in Wisconsin, on February 11th, 2026.

Donald Trump posted a racially obscene image on his (fake social❗) social media platform depicting former President Barack Obama and former beautiful First Lady Michelle Obama with their faces placed on the bodies of primates. 

I am appalled and deeply disturbed that such an evil racist image was posted and that when questioned, Trump reportedly indicated he had done nothing wrong.

This is one of the oldest and most dehumanizing racial attacks in our history. When someone entrusted with immense authority amplifies such imagery, it does more than offend – it signals to the world that the erosion of human dignity is permissible.

We must ask ourselves: Who are we, as a people❓ What vision of humanity do we uphold❓ We must call Mr. Trump out. We must vote him and those who support this behavior out of office. Even more importantly, we must reclaim the moral ground on which our civic life depends. Let your friends, colleagues, and neighbors know that you stand for the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, not because it is politically convenient, but because it is ethically necessary. 

Our Declaration of Independence, which states that “all men [people] are created equal,” offers not simply a historical phrase, but rather a philosophical claim about the nature of human existence. It asserts that dignity is not granted by power, wealth, or status – it is intrinsic. It belongs to all of us or it belongs to none of us. To abandon this belief is to abandon the moral architecture of our democracy.

Let your friends and neighbors know ❗ This hideous racist (evil) behavior from Trump, about our beloved nation is simply and totally unacceptable. We must all hold fast to the values that make us human and to the ideals that make this nation worth striving for.

From Trish Black in  Sister Bay, Wisconsin

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must end racism and demonstrate respect for American citizens and all human beings

Trump keeps reminding us why people in his evil cult support him. It’s the racism❗😡 Opinion published by Liz Granderson, a columnist, in the Los Angeles Times:

Donald Trump posted an evil racist video on Thursday night depicting President Barack Obama and Mrs. Michelle Obama, as apes. 💢

Donald Trump is an evil racist❗

On Friday, February 6, the White House dismissed the outpouring of criticism — but Trump  deleted the post. Was this episode disappointing❓Yes. Surprising❓ Not anymore.

Last spring, after Pope Francis died, Donald Trump posted an AI image of himself as the pope just days before cardinals convened to elect a successor.

So, no — it is not surprising that Donald Trup would choose to post virulent anti-Black imagery during Black History Month.

But it is disappointing here in 2026, that the occupant of the Oval Office is still thinking like that.

Back in 1971, the president of the United States laughed when the governor of California referred to the African delegates at the United Nations as monkeys. Less than 10 years later, that governor became the president of the United States. 

And here we are, half a century later, and yet another president has amplified that racist trope.

Meaning white supremacy is still on the ballot.

That Nixon-Reagan-Trump throughline isn’t tightly wound around policy or principle, but simply that shared worldview. After all, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and Reagan offered amnesty to immigrants — highly un-Trump-like moves. No, their commonality is best revealed in the delight each man took in an old racist attack against Black people.

For Americans who are 50 and older — roughly a third of the nation — this worldview has been the architect responsible for White House policy for most of our lives. And yet, when Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, the forensic investigation focused on grocery prices and her absence from Joe Rogan’s podcast. Some — in trying to explain why Harris lost — mischaracterized her role at the border or inflated her influence on the war in Gaza.

For some reason, race did not seem to receive the same level of scrutiny.

This factor was slighted despite decades of data, such as the wave of white nationalists endorsing Harris’ opponent and the birther movement questioning President Obama’s citizenship. The trio of presidents who are on the record as enjoying depictions of Black people as monkeys — Nixon, Reagan and Trump — all used racist dog whistles in their combined 10 presidential campaigns. Their administrations have tended to be more anti-civil-rights movement than post-civil-rights movement.

Our nation’s attempts at understanding ourselves are continuously undercut by the denial that for some single-issue voters, race is their single issue. Not the price of bacon or their religious convictions. Not Gaza. Just the promise of having a safe space for prejudice. And when the president of the United States entertains racist jokes as Nixon did in the 1970s or shares racist videos as Trump continues to do, undoubtedly there is a sense among the electorate that such prejudice has a home in the White House.

Before Donald Trump used social media to push yesteryear’s 🤢 ugliness, earlier in the week Harris relaunched her 2024, social media campaign account, calling it a place where Gen Z can “meet and revisit with some of our great courageous leaders, be they elected leaders, community leaders, civic leaders, faith leaders, young leaders.” She exhorted: “Stay engaged. I’ll see you out there.”

Whether Ms. Harris plans to run again in 2028, is unclear. What we do know is this:

• Ms. Haarris would never have posted an AI picture of herself as the new pope while Catholics were mourning Francis (or any other time). 
• We know she would not have advocated for immigration officers to racially profile Black and brown Americans or disregard the 14th Amendment to detain children. 

Although we do not know how many of her policy proposals she would have been able to get across the finish line in Congress, what we do know isis  her record of public service to the American people, in contrast with Donald Trump who is suing the American people for $10 billion.

There is nothing wrong with revisiting Harris’ missteps on the campaign trail or debating her electability as she reemerges in the public spotlight. But, now that Trump has resorted to posting monkey jokes about Black people, perhaps updated forensics will consider our well established history of racism among the factors in the 2024, election.😢

It is not a shock that Donald Trump thinks poorly of Black people. Not when you know that more than 25% of those who have held the office were themselves enslavers. Nevertheless, it is deeply disappointing that 250 years into our nation’s story, some of us still deny the role that racism plays in shaping our politics and, thus, all of our lives.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must "get their heads out of Trump's ass"- Missouri Town Hall voter

Missouri Constituent to Republican Congressman Mark Alford: "I am pissed, and I am pissed at you. The man is a dictator. He knows nothing about what he talks about. You need to take your head out of Trump’s ass." pic.twitter.com/B5m3Sx6qve
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 26, 2025

Trump’s cheat code

To the editor of The Chief: A voice for workers published in New York City

We at The Chief-Leader remain committed to independent reporting on labor and civil service. It's been our mission since 1897. 

In each of President Barack Obama’s first 13 months in office, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported job losses. The largest loss, 825,000 jobs, came in March 2009; in total, the BLS reported 3.6 million jobs lost over those 13 months.
What did Obama do❓ Did he fire the BLS commissioner❓ Of course not. Obama rolled up his sleeves and went to work. That’s leadership. By the time President Obama left office in January 2017, he regained those 3.6 million lost jobs and added 11.6 million more.

This past week, we witnessed Donald Trump react to unfavorable data; he whined, scapegoated and falsely claimed to be the victim of politically motivated fraud. True leaders cringe at the tactics that come naturally to Trump.

Unfortunately, Trump’s claims are about as reliable as his golf score. Recently, cameras caught this serial golf cheat in action in Scotland and again in Bedminster, New Jersey, during a tournament Trump claimed he “won.” Bryan Marsal, a Winged Foot Golf Club member, described his golfing experience with Trump: “We go to the first tee … he said, ‘You see those two guys? They cheat. See me? I cheat. And I expect you to cheat because we’re going to beat those two guys today,’” summing up “he believes that you’re gonna cheat.… So if it’s the same, if everybody’s cheating, he doesn’t see it as really cheating.”🤥

Trump isn’t a leader, he is a liar and if you are on his side, Trump demands that you also lie. After telling reporters why he “had” to fire the BLS Commissioner, Trump said that grocery prices have fallen and “gasoline is way down. It’s gonna soon be less than $2 a gallon.” I must be shopping at the wrong supermarkets and gas stations.

Joseph Cannisi

Creaating cheap political stunt in Arlington National Cemetery Section 60 does not end well for Donald Trump

Trump owns the Afghanistan debacle

Scenes from the final days of America's two decades in Afghanistan.

Echo opinion letters published in The Washington Post (Democracy Dies in Darkness) 🌒

Although it is true that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan could have been done with somewhat more effectiveness, but no termination of an operation of this scope could have been done easily.

Evacuees crowd the interior of a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft, carrying some 640 Afghans to Qatar from Kabul, Afghanistan, August 15, 2021. U.S. Air Force/Air Mobility Command Public Affairs: KABUL, Afghanistan

President Joe Biden showed true courage to take an action that neither of his predecessors was bold and principled enough to complete. Yes, we unfortunately lost 13 U.S.😥😯 troops to a bombing at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate during the pullout, and 170 Afghan citizens died.

How many soldiers would we have lost if we stayed in Afghanistan? How much military resources would we have consumed if we stayed❓ The actions the president took should have been taken under Presidents Barack Obama or Donald Trump. 

Neither had the courage. Let’s not tear President Biden down for his action in Afghanistan. Let’s give him credit for taking us out of a situation we most likely should never have been in.

I wish Democrats would confront Trump on this issue and directly ask him why he didn’t withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan as he promised.

From:  Howard Pedolsky, Rockville Maryland

Dear Editor:  Military leaders must speak up❗

I am grateful to those in past Republican administrations and campaigns who have finally endorsed the Democratic candidates for president and vice president. Retired military leaders must follow the lead of retired four-star Gen. Larry Ellis and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

Former guy Donald Trump’s past comments about veterans and his recent stunt at Arlington National Cemetery should make it abundantly clear that making him commander in chief is wrong and dangerous. This should be apparent to all, but Trump’s poll numbers say otherwise.

A quintessential part of leading is setting an example. It is now (💥beyond ❗)  time for respected military veterans, including Trump’s former Homeland Security secretary and chief of staff John F. Kelly, to make it plain to all what a danger a second Trump presidency poses and to make a commitment to do whatever it takes to make sure that does not happen. The only way to show the full depth of that commitment is to endorse Vice-President Harris and Governor Walz.

From Jill Leiner, Baltimore, Maryland

The reason why I "handle" "Quack-Quack" to Rep. Ronny Jackson

 #Quack Quack! 🦆 #SIASDJackson

I am a registered nurse that has the credentials to say that this criticism about the (#QuackQuack) Dr. Ronny Jackson is entirely justified.  Shame on Rep. Jackson for leaping to the unprofessional and unethical action of making a health judgement on a person that he has never treated.

(CNN) echo report by Daniella Diaz:

Former President Barack Obama sent an email to Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician, who went on to become a (right wing) GOP congressman representing Amarillo, Texas , expressing his "disappointment" over Jackson's criticism of Joe Biden's cognitive health in 2020, according to a copy of the email obtained by CNN.

Obama sent the email, which Fox News first reported, when Biden was running for president and Jackson was running for Congress in Texas. Jackson retweeted a video of Biden with the message: "Remember the cognitive test that I gave @realDonaldTrump? The one he aced! Sounds like somebody else might need some testing done!! Scary!!"  (HELLO?  Ronny Jackson asked the former defeated guy to identify a camel  🐫on a grid with squares containing the pictures of animals!)

Jackson received an email from Obama shortly after. The email is included in Jackson's yet-to-be-released memoir titled "Holding the Line: A Lifetime of Defending Democracy and American Values.

"I have made a point of not commenting on your service in my successor's administration and have always spoken highly of you both in public and in private. You always served me and my family well, and I have considered you not only a fine doctor and service member but also a friend," Obama said in the email.

Obama added: "That's why I have to express my disappointment at the cheap shot you took at Joe Biden via Twitter. It was unprofessional and beneath the office that you once held. It was also disrespectful to me and the many friends you had in our administration. You were the personal physician to the President of the United States as well as an admiral in the U.S. Navy. I expect better, and I hope upon reflection that you will expect more of yourself in the future."

First do no harm

Jackson served as a physician for Obama as well as Presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush. 

He retired from the Navy in 2019 before launching his congressional bid.

Jackson's office did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment. Obama's office declined to comment.

CNN's Jeff Zeleny contributed to this report.

American politics is entrenched in the era of Reconstruction: Republicans are the problem

Echo report by Ezra Klein published in The New York Times June 3, 2021‘The Point Was to Win,’ Barack Obama Writes.

Maine Writer- Scary data reported by Klein! Racism is now couched in ambiguous political labels like "The Tea Party". Right wing groups are coming out of their dark hiding places, because #FormerGuy sent them the dog whistle permission to create sedition. Even free and fair elections are not resolving the evil intentions of groups like QAnon, the hideous Proud Boys and the spin off domestic terrorist cults. 

Klein reports this interview with President Barack Obama:

“My entire politics is premised on the fact that we are these tiny organisms on this little speck floating in the middle of space,” Barack Obama told me, sitting in his office in Washington.

I was the one who had introduced the cosmic scale, asking how proof of alien life would change his politics. But Obama, in a philosophical mood, used the question to trace his view of humanity. “The differences we have on this planet are real,” he said. “They’re profound. And they cause enormous tragedy as well as joy. But we’re just a bunch of humans with doubts and confusion. We do the best we can. And the best thing we can do is treat each other better, because we’re all we got.”

How Obama navigated the differences we have on this planet is the primary topic of “A Promised Land,” the first volume of his presidential memoirs. One passage, in particular, had stuck in my mind for weeks. Obama is reflecting on the Tea Party uprising, and the thrumming undercurrent of racism that powered it. He recalls the din of cable news chatter debating the Tea Party’s true nature, and the pressure that built for him to render his presidential verdict. He admits that his White House wanted nothing to do with this debate, in part because it had “reams of data telling us that white voters, including many who supported me, reacted poorly to lectures about race.”

I’m going to quote what Obama writes next at length:

More practically, I saw no way to sort out people’s motives, especially given that racial attitudes were woven into every aspect of our nation’s history. Did that Tea Party member support “states’ rights” because he genuinely thought it was the best way to promote liberty, or because he continued to resent how federal intervention had led to an end to Jim Crow, desegregation, and rising Black political power in the South? Did that conservative activist oppose any expansion of the social welfare state because she believed it sapped individual initiative, or because she was convinced that it would benefit only brown people who’d just crossed the border? Whatever my instincts might tell me, whatever truths the history books might suggest, I knew I wasn’t going to win over any voters by labeling my opponents racist.

The poet Robert Frost famously said that “a liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.” This is not quite true of Obama, but it is nearly true of his authorial style. “A Promised Land,” which covers the first half of his presidency, is not 700 pages long because it limns so many events. It’s 700 pages long because it presents so many different views of Obama and his motivations.

Over and over again, Obama tries to make clear that his assailants have a point, that his perspective is bounded by experience and self-interest. This is true in his personal recollections, which give ample space to Michelle Obama’s doubts about his decision to pursue a political career, and it is true in his political remembrances, which always try to inhabit his critics' arguments, or at least their sentiments.

But what strikes me about that passage is that you can see Obama’s idealism and calculation shimmer into a single point. After suggesting that the motivations of his Tea Party critics were unknowable, he resolves the argument by saying the politics of it were thoroughly knowable. Whatever his own intuitions might tell him — whatever “truths the history books might suggest” — to cry racism, or even to coolly point it out, was to lose votes, and neither his version of hope nor of change would be helped along by defeat.

In our national story, Obama is framed as a practitioner of a kind of anti-politics — an almost naïvely optimistic figure who rose to power downplaying our divisions only to find his administration’s legacy swallowed by them. But his book is a reminder that the inverse story has always been just as true: Obama is thoroughly a politician, and because he understood the depth of our divisions, he treated them gingerly, at times fearfully. In a particularly striking moment, Obama reveals that across the entirety of his presidency, his single largest drop in white support came when he criticized the white police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Black Harvard professor, on the porch of his own home. “It was support that I’d never completely get back,” Obama writes.

Much in our politics is not what it seems. Contrary to the aesthetics of our current political debate, there is a deep optimism in the confrontational politics of the modern left and a quiet pessimism in the caution with which Obama speaks. To ask the question bluntly: Who truly believes America to be a racist country? The political voices who state that view clearly, because they think Americans can be challenged into change, or the ones who try to avoid even implying the thought, because they fear the power of the backlash?

When I brought up that passage about the Tea Party, Obama was frank in describing his calculations. “One of the ways I would measure it would be: Is it more important for me to tell a basic, historical truth, let’s say about racism in America right now? Or is it more important for me to get a bill passed that provides a lot of people with health care that didn’t have it before?” He admitted that there was “a psychic cost to not always just telling the truth,” and fondly referenced the “Key & Peele” skits about Luther, his anger translator. But he didn’t worry over whether he’d been wrong to bite his tongue.

One thing that occurred to me as we were talking is that Obama’s view of his own political situation echoes the current reality of the Democratic Party. Barack Hussein Obama, a Black man running for office during the era of the War on Terror, understood the deck was stacked against him. If he was going to win, he would need the support of people inclined to view him with suspicion. He would need to not just speak to their hopes, but to defuse their fears. To hear Obama tell it, those fears were not just that too much change would come too fast, but that those who fought that change, or just worried over it, would be judged or cast out.

“People knew I was left on issues like race, or gender equality, and L.G.B.T.Q. issues and so forth,” Obama told me. “But I think maybe the reason I was successful campaigning in downstate Illinois, or Iowa, or places like that is they never felt as if I was condemning them for not having gotten to the politically correct answer quick enough, or that somehow they were morally suspect because they had grown up with and believed more traditional values.”

Democrats, too, face an unforgiving context: Their coalition leans young, urban and diverse, while America’s turnout patterns and electoral geography favor the old, rural and white. According to FiveThirtyEight, Republicans hold a 3.5 point advantage in the Electoral College, a 5-point advantage in the Senate and a 2-point advantage in the House. Even after winning many more votes than Republicans in 2018 and 2020, Democrats are at a 50-50 split in the Senate and have a bare four-seat majority in the House. Odds are that they will lose the House and possibly the Senate in 2022.

This is the fundamental asymmetry of American politics right now: To hold national power, Democrats need to win voters who are right of center; Republicans do not need to win voters who are left of center. Even worse, Republicans control the election laws and redistricting processes in 23 states, while Democrats control 15. The ongoing effort by Texas Republicans to tilt the voting laws in their favor, even as national Republicans stonewall the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, is testament to the consequences of that imbalance.

Most Democrats I know are panicked over the convergence of their geographic disadvantage and the Republican assault on democracy. In my view, they’re right to be. Their situation is dire, and if the Republican Party could reorient itself around more competent candidates, it could become catastrophic. Obama has argued that Senate Democrats should abolish the filibuster and pass the legislation necessary to protect American democracy. I wish they’d listen to him on that. But, as of now, the Democrats’ democracy agenda is imperiled, and so are they.

In our conversation, Obama gamely tried to suggest that there was a bright side to the Democrats’ structural disadvantage. “That does mean Democratic politics is going to be different than Republican politics,” he told me. “Now, look, the good news is, I also think that has made the Democratic Party more empathetic, more thoughtful, wiser by necessity. We have to think about a broader array of interests and people. And that’s my vision for how America ultimately works best and perfects its union.”

In other words, the Democratic Party, like Obama, has been forced into a more pluralistic form of politics by its geographic disadvantages. The 2016 and 2020 elections tell the tale. The Republican Party reacted to Obama by indulging its rage and nominating Donald Trump and won the presidency despite losing the popular vote. The Democratic Party responded to Trump by strategically nominating the candidate they thought had the best chance of winning over Trump voters, Joe Biden, and came perilously close to losing the presidency despite dominating the popular vote.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Obama if he still believed you could change people’s politics through policy. He replied with the central what-if of the last decade. “Let’s say a Joe Biden or, the person who was running, Hillary Clinton, had immediately succeeded me, and the economy suddenly has 3 percent unemployment, I think we would have consolidated the sense that, oh, actually these policies that Obama put in place worked,” he said. “The fact that Trump interrupts essentially the continuation of our policies, but still benefits from the economic stability and growth that we had initiated, means people aren’t sure.”

Biden is “essentially finishing the job,” Obama told me. We’ll see. If Joe Biden and the Democrats pass H.R.1 and some version of the American Families and Jobs Plans, then the Obama-Biden approach to politics will have proven itself out. But if they fail to pass H.R.1 or the American Families and Jobs Plans, and then lose the House and Senate in 2022, how open will liberals be to hearing about the virtues of more candidates in the Obama lineage? Not very, I suspect. Coalitions are less emotionally satisfying than confrontations; pluralism doesn’t go nearly as viral as division. The politicians who preach the harder path have to be able to deliver.

Obama knew this full well. “The point was to win,” he writes. “I wanted to prove to Blacks, to whites — to Americans of all colors — that we could transcend the old logic, that we could rally a working majority around a progressive agenda, that we could place issues like inequality or lack of educational opportunity at the very center of the national debate and then actually deliver the goods.”

This is another way in which the reality of our politics defies the aesthetics of our politicians. The true agents of Democratic radicalization right now aren’t leftists in the House but senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who by indulging Republican obstructionism and preferring the preservation of the filibuster to the protection of democracy, are imperiling the entire theory of politics they claim to support.

#RepublicansAreTheProblem!

Ezra Klein joined NYT Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor-at-large of Vox; the host of the podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.”