Donald Trump's Caligula Trap- How to get out of Iran without admitting he surrendered and failed

In Iran, Trump’s victory claims only deepened a self-made catastrophe published in The Guardian by Sidney Blumenthal

Before Donald Trump finally surrendered in his Iran war, he declared victory several dozen times, including on day eight– “We’ve already won!” – day 10 – “The war is very complete”– day 12, proclaiming he had won five times in 13 seconds – “We’ve won, let me say we’ve won.

You know, you never like to say too early you won, we won, ❗we won won five times in 13 seconds – “We’ve won, let me say we’ve won. You know, you never like to say too early you won, we won, we won the bet in the first hour it was over”– and day 39 –“Total and complete victory, 100%. No question about it”– and claimed a deal to end the war was just around the corner 38 times. The first time he raised the prospect of peace, on day 24, he said the two sides had reached “almost all points of agreement”.

Trump boldly affixed his signature with a sharpie to the Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU surrender) on day 110, the 17th of June, at the Palace of Versailles, where the ruinous treaty concluding the first world war was signed. He seemed oblivious to the historical symbolism of the place, but bedazzled by its gold. “Versailles is not gold leaf – Versailles is the real deal,” he remarked.

At a press conference beforehand, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, stood stone-faced as an Easter Island statue, perhaps hoping nobody would notice him, but still tainted with the war by his presence. Trump said about his absent vice-president, who was queasy about the whole venture but has now been assigned the task of defending it: “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”

The next day, Vance insisted🙄 🤥the war was a “win” and falsely stated that lifting oil sanctions was “not a new benefit” for Iran. Trump, who invariably chooses a fall guy for his own failures, apparently does not wish to have anyone become his successor. Vance, for his part, promptly pointed at Israel, where Trump’s MOU is universally excoriated, as the fall guy. “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government,” Vance said, “I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” Vance has been delegated to drink from the poisoned chalice. Welcome to Jonestown.

That day, 18 June, Israel Hayom, the rightwing newspaper that is a mouthpiece for the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and is published by Miriam Adelson, who gave more than $100m to the 2024, Trump campaign, ran a lead editorial addressed to Trump: “...you have gravely harmed the human interests of the enlightened world, and you may be remembered forever as the president who brought about America’s humiliation. You betrayed us, the Israelis. And in a single moment, the contempt you once faced suddenly seems so justified and logical.” Netanyahu, who delivered his fate into Trump’s hands, forgot that Trump abandoned even his mentor, the mob lawyer Roy Cohn, in the end.

Trump lost his war on day one. In fact, Iran first effectively closed the strait of Hormuz following US and Israeli airstrikes that day and formally closed it two days later, achieving asymmetric strategic superiority through control over a crucial spigot of the global economy. On day 43, 11 April, Trump tweeted: “The United States has completely destroyed Iran’s Military, including their entire Navy and Air Force, and everything else.” Trump could not distinguish between tactics and strategy. He confused bombs and bombast with the mission, which eluded him. The more he bombed, the more he lost the plot.

Without any strategic comprehension, Trump’s triumphalism only deepened the bitterness and anger that has followed his eventual loss. In brief, he elevated the Iranian regime into a regional hegemon and a power in the world economy; persuaded the Gulf states that the US is an unreliable ally that could not shield them; increased the influence everywhere of China; condemned Israel after
Netanyahu hustled Trump into a fiasco that other presidents had carefully avoided; further alienated our European allies that prudently distanced themselves; drastically wasted US military power; and shattered US prestige. By the time he had finished, nobody on any side believed Trump should be taken at his word.

In fact, the exercise of Trump exposing himself yet again as a mountebank* is redundant, but now catastrophic with the whole world watching.

What Trump succeeded in obliterating was any rationale he offered for going to war in the first place. He had claimed he already accomplished regime change in Iran amid his dire threats. On day 39, 7 April, he tweeted: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?”

Trump provided his own refutation on day 110, 16 June, piling on praise for the Iranian regime that had consolidated as a theocratic military dictatorship: “You talk about regime change. I never cared about regime change. It [was] never a part … And we’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people. I think actually they’re smarter than the first and second group, but they’re not radicalized and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

Trump is in a class of his own as an American president in launching a war of aggression without a casus belli, a direct offensive provocation, and losing it in short order.

Other presidents haunted by the shadow of defeat in war knew it would discredit them. Two days after John F Kennedy’s assassination, on 24 November 1963, Lyndon Johnson told the US ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr: “I am not going to lose Vietnam.” Three years later, Johnson confessed privately: “I just can’t be the architect of surrender.” “I won’t be the first American president to lose a war,” he told the undersecretary of state George Ball.

President Richard Nixon uttered virtually the same words. “I’m not going to be the first American president to lose a war,” he told his aides in October 1969. Both Johnson and Nixon were undone as they struggled with their inability to end a war they did not begin but which they escalated, as the Pentagon Papers revealed, through vain attempts to achieve what Nixon called “peace with honor”.

Leaders in democracies that lose wars inevitably lose office. There is no case anywhere of a democratic leader politically surviving the loss of a war.

(George W Bush was re-elected in 2004, before the defeat materialized in Iraq and Afghanistan, which by 2016, had broken the Reagan-Bush era of the Republican party and greatly contributed to the rise of Trump.) Despots historically have retained power in the aftermath of defeat only through ruthless repression, coercive control of media and scapegoating, which makes the revolt against them more explosive when it comes.

On day 107, 14 June, Trump’s birthday, Trump had announced the sketchy MOU as “complete”. “Congratulations to all!” he crowed.

In a boon to Iran, Trump waived oil export sanctions, opened access to tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets, and committed to a mysteriously funded $300bn “Reconstruction Plan” that might have unspecified side deals, while entering into 60 days of negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program more than eight years after he withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated under President Obama in which Iran pledged not to develop a nuclear weapon. Trump called it a “horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made”.

On that day, his 80th birthday, Trump staged matches of the UltimateFighting Championship on the South Lawn of the White House in a cage under his gargantuan “claw” as though he had won the war and the fighters victorious in the ring represented his strength. His circus was the opening act of his culture of defeat and its denial.

When asked on day 111, 18 June, by an Axios reporter what insight the war had revealed to him about “the limits of his ability to exert power”, Trump replied: “There are no limits. I haven’t learned that lesson yet. I know there are, but there are no limits.” He claimed that the Iranian signing of the MOU was “probably unconditional surrender”. Trump had called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” on day seven, 6 March.

On 18 June, Trump also declared victory over the algae blooms in the Reflecting Pool that had turned it green after he granted two no-bid contracts for $16m to a firm that previously performed pool work at a Trump golf club but had no history of federal contracting and a campaign contributor and Mar-a-Lago club member who was twice criminally convicted. The interior department tweeted: “The Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear,🤥 and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool – just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.”  🙄

Trump said the pool would “probably” have to be drained again and accused “Radical Left Lunatics” of sabotaging his project with a knife and chemicals, though he presented no evidence. He tweeted about “terrible vandals” and “serious crimes… Years in jail!” On 19 June, the Park police arrested a 67-year-old former Olympic cyclist on a misdemeanor charge of destroying government property for reaching into the pool to touch the “American flag blue” peeling paint. He was released within hours – day 113, another quagmire, another defeat.

In 40AD, the Emperor Caligula, notorious for his inability to “control his natural cruelty and viciousness”, as well as his “gluttony and adultery”. according to the historian Suetonius, marched his legions to the shore of the English Channel to invade Britain, where he suddenly ordered his soldiers to gather seashells as the “spoils” of war. “As a monument of his victory he erected a lofty tower, from which lights were to shine at night to guide the course of ships,” and staged a return to Rome “on his birthday in an ovation”.

Trump is now caught in his miserable Caligula Trap** from which he cannot extract himself. Mocking his self-congratulatory language, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican member of Congress and Maga queen, posted on the day Trump signed the MOU: “Congratulations to all for almost achieving peace to the war that is not a war, spending hundreds of billions of US tax dollars again for another foreign war after we voted no … This, apparently, is what winning looks like.”

Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln:

*a person who deceives others, especially in order to trick them out of their money

**Caligula Trap is a rhetorical or political concept describing a situation where someone makes self-congratulatory claims or declares false victories that they cannot extract themselves from without admitting the deception.

Donald Trump created another failed 250th birthday dud embarrassing to all Americans: Trump-land is a bust

Donald Trump’s dreadful Great American State Fair
Attendance is sparse and the heat is extreme, but at least you can pay 💲9 for lemonade.

A storm, overpriced food and a sad ferris wheel : inside Trump’s dreadful state fair published in The Guaardian,by Adam Gabbatt

Attendance at the Great American State Fair is sparse and the heat is extreme, but at least you can pay 💲25 for a pretzel

I have been to some disappointing fairs in my time. There was one, in a small town in north-west England, where the main attraction was a little slide that you rode down on a burlap sack: except the guy who owned the slide had forgotten to bring the sacks, so me and my sister slid down on a T-shirt.

Another time, at a village fete in a place called Longton, I won the main prize at the bingo. It was a whisky decanter with a bottle of whiskey. I was 11 years old, the decanter was broken and some bigger boys took the whiskey. More recently, I looked on as two farmers engaged in a shouting match over whose pumpkin was larger at a fair in Iowa.

Such exposure means I’m probably better equipped than most to see the possibility in Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, but even given my breadth of bad fair experiences, the Trump National Mall even sounds absolutely dreadful.🤢

“A rather embarrassing flop,” MS Now wrote. “A big ol’ dud”, was the verdict of Slate. “To put it simply, miserable,” the New Republic ruled, while USA Today said witnessing the failure of Trump’s fair is “like watching your high school bully host a party that no one attends”.

What makes it so bad❓

Well for one thing, very few people seem to have been going. For another, the fair’s signature attraction, a (quite small) ferris wheel, was plagued by power cuts on the first day. And despite organizers’ claims that 56 states and territories would be represented, each given their own booths at the event, several declined to participate due to the high cost.

The opening ceremony was meant to be a musical extravaganza, featuring acts including Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, The Commodores, Morris Day and the Time, Young MC, Flo Rida, but most of those performers pulled out, several saying they had been unaware the event would have a political undertone.

Instead, people attending opening night got a performance from Trump: specifically, a campaign-style rally during which Trump trotted out his usual claims about how the US is the “hottest country anywhere in the world”. (Ironically, the Virginia booth at the fair was closed on Tuesday due to extreme heat, and the fair itself was forced to close early on its second day, because of a storm.)

Things got worse when a Confederate flag had to be removed from a booth at the fair, prompting one of the sponsors to drop out. Then there was more negative publicity as people found out how much things cost at the event: $25 for a pretzel, $23 for a turkey leg, $9 for a lemonade.

Against this backdrop, Fox (FAKE❗)News has valiantly tried to put positive spin on the fair, like White Star Line claiming people had enjoyed a very pleasant four days at sea before the Titanic hit that iceberg. The channel even broadcast live from the fair on Monday, the idea being to champion the event. But, as the journalist Aaron Rupar documented, all that achieved was to prove that very few people were in attendance.

So what have we learned❓ Maybe the lesson is: don’t try to throw a big celebratory fair when you are a historically unpopular president. Or: if you do host a fair, make sure it is a) good, and b) doesn’t have a racist flag on display.

The fair is larger than the ones I went to as a kid. 

But you know what ❓At least in the past, those fairs were fun. And cheap. The sack/T-shirt slide only cost 20p. The scar on my knee, sustained when friction caused the T-shirt to rip❓ That will last a lifetime.

Main Stream media not holing the evil Trumpzi administration to the same standards as with President Joe Biden

 

Trump self-deals, lies and seems to fall asleep in meetings. The media treats it all as ‘priced in’ (IOW already reflects all known information and expected) published in The Guardian by Margaret Sullivan.

As for the corporate news media, they remain highly distractible and largely deferential.

Trump is a sleety sleepy criminal 🥱  

Trump's insane screeds on his ❗ social media posts are unhinged. He falls asleep in meetings. He proudly proclaims he’s not thinking “even a little bit” about Americans’ personal finances in talks with Iran. And he lies constantly about the supposed success of the war with Iran he started for no good reason.  (To quote Joseph Heller in Catch 22: "From now on I will think only about myself". 🤢) 

That’s just the start, of course, when it comes to Donald Trump’s disastrous second presidency. There’s the ruination of the Kennedy Center, the building of a ballroom (or bunker?) to replace the White House East Wing, and the wrecking ball that the Trump-aligned supreme court has taken to the voting rights of Black Americans. There’s the endless self-dealing and the abuse of the justice department’s intended purpose.

And yet, the mainstream media doesn’t make much of any of that, not in any sustained way.

The shocking excesses and corruption of Trump 2.0 are “priced in”.

These outrages, for the most part, are largely treated as, well, Trump being Trump.

It’s as if much of big media has decided that it’s too much trouble to focus, in any sustained way, on developments that would have resulted in weeks of headlines, if not impeachment and conviction, in the pre-Trump era. And certainly in the President Biden era.

“I simply cannot believe I live in a timeline where journalists helped force the last president out of his reelection campaign for being too old, so the country put an unstable 79-year-old who falls asleep constantly in office and none of the same journalists care at all,” one observer, Jamesetta Williams, put it succinctly on X/ (formerly Twitter).

Next month, Trump turns 80. He functions with no apparent restraints, and it seems doubtful that the situation will improve any time soon.

Some extreme outrages do rise to the surface, provoking a raised eyebrow or two.

The New York Times gave its lead news position in print the other day to his “anti-weaponization fund” of 💲1.8bn. It’s intended to use taxpayer money to compensate his allies – maybe including the January 6, convicted criminal rioters who attacked police officers – for being prosecuted by an earlier iteration of the US justice department.

Reporters quoted Donald K Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal watchdog organization, calling it “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history”. And a sub-headline made a carefully distanced reference to “critics” who call this a slush fund.

Ah, the critics. There they are again.

The mainstream media largely shrugged off the slush-fund story, depicting it as politics as usual – no cause for alarm or sustained coverage. The NBC evening newscast by Wednesday had moved on, focusing instead on Raúl Castro’s indictment, the California wildfires and a car explosion in lower Manhattan. And Fox News, home to the fervid Maga base, offered cursory coverage both on the air and online, giving an obligatory nod to Democratic lawmakers who voiced their objections, but mostly handing the network’s microphone to Trump allies such as JD Vance and the loyalist acting attorney general, Todd Blanche.

Granted, there have been a few recent pieces about Trump’s apparent physical and mental decline, including one by Jonathan Lemire in the Atlantic. He acknowledged that Trump hasn’t faced the same scrutiny for his age-related decline as Biden did, and pointed out “questions about his health and increasingly erratic behavior”.

But it didn’t get all that much attention. Nothing does.

One of the problems, of course, is that there’s just so much.

Journalists get geared up to cover one outrage – $1bn for ballroom security! – when another one comes along: $1.8bn for the slush fund!

And ever onward.

Now he’s dissing Americans’ worries about their family budgets, but that fades as he schmoozes the next authoritarian dictator, or threatens “a friendly takeover of Cuba”.

“Flood the zone with shit,” was the way former Trump aide Steve Bannon once described the media strategy. It’s turned out to be a highly effective technique.

One almost can’t blame overwhelmed citizens for wanting to hide their heads in the sand, despite the extraordinary dangers of doing so.

As for the corporate news media, they remain highly distractible and largely deferential. Also, not really unhappy since Trump provides constant outrage, which makes for news, and then he moves on

They do, too.

Often, it falls to independent voices – not associated with corporate media – to say the obvious, loud and clear.

Terry Moran, formerly of ABC News and now on Substack, called the slush fund “plunder” in a recent post, and urged mainstream media to stop using “weasel words”, like unusual or controversial, to report on it. Moran called an associated development, the shielding of the Trump family’s entire tax history from scrutiny, for all time, as “breathtakingly corrupt”.

You won’t hear THAT on the evening news or in the rest of mainstream media.
By the time you read this, they’ll already have moved on. 💢

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans support evil Stephen Miller and his wife Katie Miller cruel child separation from immigrant parents

Evil Stephen Miller delivers for Trump: 145,000 US kids separated from their parents:  A thinktank investigation shows how immigration detention has torn apart families, and experts point to trauma.  Published in The Guardian by Arwa Mahdawi

More than 53,000 citizen children with a detained parent were estimated to be under the age of six. 😢

Evil Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s immigration czar and the architect of some of the government’s cruelest policies, doesn’t care what you think about him. He doesn’t care if you call him “Pee-wee German” or “Weird Stephen” or “Voldemort”, or any of the other nicknames he has inspired; his self-esteem is excellent. (Try Miller's doppelganger, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi public relations officer and chief architect of the regime's messaging.)

Joseph Goebbels (29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945)

“I have a very, very secure, intact ego,” Miller told Fox (Fake❗) News’s Jesse Watters this week after being asked how he felt about his wife, Katie Miller, potentially landing a big distribution deal with Paramount for her terrible Maga podcast. “I’ve never had a larger fan following,” Miller continued. “[A]ny man who works for Donald Trump is a man that is very, very strong and self-assured in his role.”

Well, yes, I suppose you’ve got to be a very, very strong man to separate babies from their parents – which is what Miller will forever be famous for. Back in Trump 1.0, Miller played a key role in implementing a “zero tolerance” border policy that systematically removed more than 5,000 immigrant children, some just a few months old, from their parents at the US-Mexico border. 

A Human Rights Watch report released in December 2024, found that as many as 1,360 children had never been reunited with their parents.😟😠😢

Trump is not the first president to detain or deport the parents of US citizen minors. Nevertheless, he’s doing it at a much faster rate, and in a much crueler way, than his predecessor. 

A data analysis by ProPublica published in March found “ICE arrests of parents doubled in the first seven months of Trump’s second term compared with the President Joseph Biden administration”. It also found mothers were being more aggressively targeted: “Trump is deporting about four times as many moms of US citizen children per day as Biden did.” A Guardian investigation from May uncovered similar statistics.

Another change from Biden administration norms are the guidelines on how immigration officers should exercise their discretion when it comes to families. “A document once known as the Parental Interests Directive has been given a new name under Trump – the Detained Parents Directive,” writes ProPublica. “And its preamble, which once instructed agents to handle immigrant parents in a way that was ‘humane,’ has been stripped of the word.”

Again:  Sadly, Trump is not the first president to separate US citizen children from their immigrant parents. But no other administration has been so callous about the welfare of the children affected. “The bottom line is that there is no systematic approach to protecting the children of those detained by ICE,” the Brookings report states. There is “no government entity … responsible for their wellbeing”. There also isn’t adequate record-keeping, meaning we have little idea what is happening to all these children.

What we do know, of course, is that many of these children are going to be immensely traumatized. Kelly Kribs, an attorney at the Young Center, told the Guardian in May that the separation crisis unfolding now is even more insidious than the family separation policy from Trump 1.0. “It’s leading to all the same forms of trauma that we saw unfold back in 2018,” said Kribs. “But the speed and the scale of the separations now is at a level we’ve never seen before.”

One suspects that the Millers, who have three kids of their own, are not particularly perturbed by these 145,000 traumatized children. Stephen met his wife, Katie, when they both worked for Trump during his first term, and she is just as hawkish on immigration as he is. “DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself – to try to make me more compassionate – but it didn’t work,” Katie boasted to Jacob Soboroff in 2018, according to his book, Separated. She added that colleagues told her she’d think about family separation differently when she had her own kids: “But I don’t think so.” Perhaps she’ll share some more of her charming views with us on The Katie Miller Podcast. (a weekly talk-show style series hosted by conservative communications strategist Katie Miller.)

Iran deployed drones and missiles to punishing effect, but knows that its chief weapon is causing economic pain

Whatever happens next, the poor will pay 💲

The Guardian Editorial

More than 3,300 Iranians, including 383😢 children, have been killed since the US and Israel launched their illegal war, authorities said this week. Asked about Wednesday’s ceasefire deadline, Donald Trump first said that he expected to resume bombing, then unilaterally announced that he was extending the truce “until discussions are concluded”.

Orange man flip flops😕

Whatever happens – or doesn’t – ❓with the US-Iranian peace talks due to take place in Islamabad, the costs of this disastrous (illegal❗) conflict will keep growing. The only thing that the sides have in common is that each needs peace, but thinks that it can force the other into significant concessions. (Clearly Donald Trump is dangerous because he has no idea what he is doing.)

The Iranian economy was already in a desperate state, thanks to years of sanctions and state failure. But the system has been built to withstand coercion and so far, the regime has survived the military and strategic pressure piled on it. It also knows the US bill is eye-watering. The White House last week declined senators’ requests to provide a figure, but the Pentagon has reportedly briefed that military costs topped 💲11.3bn in the first six days alone. That’s widely regarded as an underestimate. 

Professor Linda Bilmes, a Harvard public finance expert, suggests that the war is ultimately likely to cost the US $1tn when factors such as interest payments and long-term veteran-related expenses are included.

Those direct costs are only the start. Ricocheting oil prices have enriched those wealthy enough to speculate on their movement with remarkably perfect timing. But the American Enterprise Institute estimates that the total cost to the average US household, including, for example, higher oil prices, is equivalent to 💲410. The Century Foundation suggests that these “economic poisons” are all the harder for US voters to swallow when the conflict is morally and strategically unwarranted.

UK households will be an estimated £480 a year poorer. The UN development program warned that Arab countries faced an economic contraction of between 💲120bn and 💲194bn after just one month of war. Even China, initially relatively sanguine, appears to be growing more concerned about the impact. But, rising food prices hit the poorest – who spend more of their income on sustenance – the hardest. The World Food Program warned last month that 45 million more people, primarily in Asia and Africa, could fall into acute food insecurity.

Need is rising as aid budgets have been slashed. It is obscene that the money squandered on taking lives could have saved so many – 87 million, according to the UN humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher. It is equally so that more lives will be lost because of this conflict’s economic impact. Peace tomorrow wouldn’t fix the damage. But the longer that this war continues, the greater the devastation that will be wrought.

Iran has deployed its drones and missiles to punishing effect, but knows that its chief weapon is the economic pain it can inflict, primarily through control of the Strait of Hormuz. The International Monetary Fund warned last week that a further escalation could trigger a global recession. Its head, Kristalina Georgieva, had already said that the crisis would remain a threat to the global economy even if it ended overnight. The costs mount over time.  Although the pain is widely spread, it is far from evenly shared. The combination of higher energy, food and fertilizer costs will increasingly hammer poorer and heavily import-reliant nations.

History researchers uncover chilling correlations between Nazi Germany propaganda and Donald Trump racial profiling

Nazi letters reveal paper restorers’ role in compiling Holocaust ‘hitlist’. Researchers continue to uncover Nazi history to show the purposeful intent to create propaganda to support protecting a dominant race and to justify the evil Holocaust. 

Exclusive echo report published in The Guardian: Research uncovers program to make centuries-old records legible to detect people’s ancestry.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) dictator of Germany

Large numbers of paper restorers and bookbinders were recruited by the Nazis and “contributed directly to genocide” during the second world war, according to research.

A British historian has uncovered a Europe-wide program in the 1930s, and 1940s, in which restorers repaired and cleaned historic church and civil records, making them legible so that the Nazis could detect anyone with Jewish ancestry.

Dr. Morwenna Blewett, a researcher in conservation history and associate member of Worcester College, University of Oxford, unearthed Nazi letters and other material showing the role played by craftspeople in restoring registers of births, conversions, baptisms and marriages to seek out inherited “racial” status.

In various public institutions including the German federal archives in Berlin, she found documents that show the complicity of these conservators, restorers and paper chemists, who used their skills within Germany and in occupied countries.

“They were creating an accumulated record of who might potentially be killed – a kind of hitlist, really,” she said. “They went above and beyond to enforce their ‘racial’ registration of populations.”

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. “Even though it was known that there was this need to prove your heritage,” Blewett said, she “looked into the actual technical nuts and bolts of how this was achieved through cleaning documents.

“I found in the archives official documents about engaging bookbinders, as well as letters between various officials talking about cleaning documents, in the hope that these records would represent ‘racial purity’.”

Surviving administrative records show that by 1940 a master bookbinder called Franz Krause, from Neisse, a town now in south-west Poland, was among those recruited.

Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime' book launch - Worcester College

In one passage, a Nazi official wrote: “German church books, which capture the smallest place and every little farmstead in their closely bound mass of more than a hundred thousand volumes, are by far the most important source for the German population history, the proof of descent and the genealogy.”

Manuscripts dating back several centuries were illegible because they had become fragile, dirty and moldy.

Despite their potential importance as historical papers, the restorers used “quite destructive processes”, Blewett said. “They weren’t ensuring the safety of the historic objects, they were making them readable. It didn’t really matter to them what these objects were.”

For example, manuscript pages were saturated with glycerin to make the entries legible, even though that fell short of accepted conservation practice of the time. 

“The physical rubbing in of glycerin risked tearing already damaged paper as well as softening the paper fibes by swelling them,” Blewett said. “I also found promotional material from technical companies that made laminating material that was used to preserve very fragile pages to make them more readable.”

Blewett, who previously worked as a paintings conservator at the National Gallery in London, stumbled across the material in researching cultural heritage organizations set up under the Nazis. “I just found all this material and I didn’t understand why they were talking about bookbinding and cleaning church documents. That led me to look further into what the scheme was and what was related to producing proof of Aryan ancestry.”

Her research features in her new book, Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime, published by Palgrave Macmillan this month. “Through their work, restorers conspired with the Nazi regime to aid and abet criminal acts,” Blewett writes in the book. “Their rewards were rich. But their reputations have largely remained unsullied.”

Michael Daley, the director of the ArtWatch UK restoration watchdog, said the research revealed a “shocking abuse of skill”. “How much power accrues to those who control the appearance of things – for good or ill,” he said.

In his first presidency, Donald Trump called journalists the enemy; a year into his second term, it’s clear that this time around, he’s treating us like one.

From Hungary to Russia, authoritarian regimes have made silencing independent media one of their defining moves. 

Sometimes, outright censorship isn’t even required to achieve this goal. In the United States, we have seen the administration apply various forms of pressure on news outlets in the year since Trump returned to office. One of our great disappointments is how quickly some of the most storied US media organizations have folded when faced with the mere specter of hostility from the administration – long before their hand was forced.

While private news organizations can choose how to respond to this government’s threats, insults and lawsuits, public media has been powerless to stop the defunding of federally supported television and radio. This has been devastating for local and rural communities, who stand to lose not only their primary source of local news and cultural programming, but health and public safety information, including emergency alerts.

While we cannot make up for this loss, the Guardian is proud to make our fact-based work available for free to all, especially when the internet is increasingly flooded with slanted reporting, misinformation and algorithmic drivel. 🙏

Donald Trump created his "NAZI-like" SS squad by using Immigration and Customs (ICE) agents to terrorize immigrants

Ordinary Americans are fighting back against ICE: ‘We’re going to outlast them’

Echo report published in The Guardian:  “'Right now, every undocumented person is at risk,' said Maria, who is undocumented herself."

ICE Alert❗

As evil Donald Trump carries out his mass deportation operation, residents are banding together to block raids and distribute groceries

A year into his second term, Donald Trump’s pledge to stage the “largest deportation operation in American history” has already made an indelible mark on the nation. (Donald Trump broke his campaign promise. He said his deportations would be to remove the immigrants who were criminals. Instead, he has turned Immigration and Customs agents into a Nazi style SS squad where they terrorize immigrant groups separate families without regard for criminal history or due process.)

Tragically, nearly 300,000 people have been deported, and a record 65,000 people are being held in detention centers. Aggressive raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, sometimes with the backing of federalized national guard units, have terrorized immigrant communities from Charlotte to Chicago, New Orleans to New York. Enabled by a supreme court ruling that “effectively legalized racial profiling”, immigration enforcement has separated families, forced targeted individuals to miss work, school and doctors appointments, and caused communities to cancel festivals and gatherings.

Despite the best efforts of the Trump administration to suppress dissent, however, Americans have responded to the aggressive assault on immigrant communities with defiance. 

In cities and communities across the US, residents disgusted by Trump’s attack on their neighbors are banding together in group chats on Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to coordinate community defense. The Guardian spoke with several activists – some seasoned, some brand new – about what they are doing to help.

The real-estate appraiser chasing ICE agents on bicycle.

The Trump administration had launched “Operation Midway Blitz” in early September, sending hundreds of federal agents to Chicago to crack down on supposedly criminal immigrants and intimidate a largely Democratic-voting population; now they had been spotted in Rogers Park, the neighborhood where Jose had lived his entire life, harassing a well-known tamale vendor. (Jose, like many of the activists interviewed in this piece, asked to be identified by a pseudonym out of fear of being targeted by the government.)

Jose jumped on his bike and rode to the intersection in question, where he spoke to bystanders and workers in a nearby restaurant to find out what had happened. When he and a fellow responder spotted a Jeep that matched the description witnesses had given them, they chased it, catching up at a stop light. Jose pulled in front of the SUV and attempted to impede its way. The driver – possibly an ICE or CBP agent – started yelling and threatening arrest; at the urging of another activist, he decided to let the car go. 

Then, three days later, when ICE returned to the neighborhood, Jose and his fellow rapid responders had all begun wearing whistles. They followed the agents’ vehicles through the streets on their bikes, blowing their whistles to alert their neighbors to the raid.

A 49-year-old father who in the past dedicated his free time to performing in Gilbert and Sullivan productions with a local community theater, Jose had no experience in community organizing when he volunteered to join the core team of Protect Rogers Park, a group that had organized resistance activities during the first Trump administration.

“My job is real-estate appraiser of all things,” he told the Guardian. “I mean, what a double life.”

Over the spring and summer, he pitched in as the group organized neighborhood assemblies and trainings to prepare for ICE raids or direct actions. “This might seem cliche but the trainings do work,” he said. “We try to simulate what it’s like when ICE agents are in your face and yelling at you and grabbing. It’s like rehearsal, so you don’t have as much stage fright.” 

Also, there was a social component; the group set up a book club and everyone read Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny together. “It’s community building,” he said. “It’s getting to know the people you’re going to be with when the time comes to go up against ICE. Now, obviously, we’re in it.”

When Operation Midway Blitz began, Jose volunteered to do “rapid response”, but he wants others to know that confrontation is not the only way to help. “You don’t have to go chase after ICE agents,” he said. “If you can be a person behind the computer screen directing people or checking license plate numbers – that’s so helpful. Even just standing on a corner with a whistle around your neck provides incredible peace of mind to vulnerable people.”

For those who are up for chasing ICE around: “We have a few goals,” he said. “The first is you want to get more help if you’re alone. The next is you want to try to help the victim as much as possible. The last thing is slowing them down. I’m not going to be able to go up against armed ICE agents with just my bike, so I’ll just stop traffic. We want to make it so it’s just not worth their while.”

“We’re going to outlast them,” he added. “They can’t sustain this forever.”

The mannequins in the windows of Red Vault in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood tend to wear a selection of the shop’s fashion and fetish wares, from adult onesies to mesh tank tops and leather harnesses. Starting in October, however, store owner Mark Selner added a new accessory to the display: a cheap plastic whistle worn around the neck.

“I’ve been really angry because I was bullied when I was young, and these are bullies,” said Selner, 59, of the ICE and CBP agents who have flooded Chicago during Operation Midway Blitz. “I’m working in the store all the time so I can’t necessarily attend [protests], so what can I do? I saw people handing out whistles and I was like, let me use some of my white privilege for good.”

Sellner ordered a batch of whistles and put up a notice outside the shop that he was giving them away for free. He also posted a sign warning ICE and CBP agents that they cannot enter his business without a judicial warrant, and, on the advice of community organizers, posted a sign on his backroom that says: “Private Area, Authorized Employees Only”. Within a few weeks, he had distributed almost 400 whistles.

“I don’t want any of my customer base to be afraid to be in here,” he said. “I have the sign on the backroom so that, if need be, someone can go back there and [ICE] is not supposed to go back there legally.”

Customers have been supportive and appreciative, Sellner said.

“I had a customer ask me: ‘How much did you pay for the whistles?’ I said it was $22 and he goes: ‘Here’s $22.’ I said: ‘You don’t have to do that,’ but he was like, ‘No I want to. I’m glad you’re doing this.’

“So I used that to buy more whistles.”

When the Trump administration launched a series of aggressive immigration raids in Los Angeles in June, Miguel Montes quickly saw the impact on Boyle Heights, the heavily Latino neighborhood where he was born and raised. Montes is in his final year of studies for a degree in public health, and he also works full-time as a certified medical assistant at a public hospital.

“I noticed that people were not showing up to their appointments at my job,” he said. “People were not even going out to get food, because they were scared.”

Montes’s passion for providing public health resources to his community had seen him set up an organization, Raíces Con Voz, that ran educational events about hypertension, diabetes and the health effects of climate change in his community. Now, the needs were much more immediate. With a small group of close friends, Montes spread the word that he was organizing grocery delivery for families scared of being detained by ICE. The group circulated an online signup form for families in need of support and solicited donations of goods and cash.

Since June, Montes and his group have delivered groceries to about 1,500 families. They are hoping to expand their reach to the Inland Empire; they also want to figure out a way to connect more people with mental health resources. It’s a personal issue for Montes, whose mother was undocumented until recently. As a child, he had not realized how difficult her lack of legal status made things for her.

“Being a first generation Latino, I don’t know anybody who started their own non-profit,” Montes said. “Everything that I’ve done has been trial and error.”

When the Trump administration deployed the national guard and amped up immigration enforcement in and around Washington DC this summer, some parents at a predominantly Latino elementary school in Montgomery county, Maryland, proposed setting up “walking school buses” to accompany children to school. The only problem: not everyone wanted them to.

“The community was like, ‘Nah, we don’t need the white folks walking us to school,” recalled Sarah Hunter, 47. “There were folks saying this is necessary, and folks saying ‘I don’t want you here.’ Sometimes you just have to stand in the fray and be willing to mess up.”

Hunter and her co-parent, Jane Palmer, worked with fellow parents, organizers with the Montgomery County Immigrant Rights Collective and school administration figures to come up with a plan for something that would be actually helpful. The compromise plan they hit upon may still be unwanted for some, but they decided that having to work through any conflict was worth it. “That’s not the worst outcome,” Hunter said. “The worst outcome is that we’re not there and people are getting kidnapped.”

Now, they have a network of about 30 volunteers who are stationed at set locations around the school for a half hour each morning and afternoon during student arrival and dismissal. The volunteers initially identified themselves with a button, but after a parent had 1,000 made, the button spread to the entire school community.

Parent organizers are in touch with other groups that are organizing ICE watch and rapid response in the area, but their volunteers are focused exclusively on the school. “Whenever ICE has been in our school area, we’ve learned about it on Signal before we saw anything visually,” Palmer said.

“We’re really not trying to do surveillance,” Hunter said. “We are greeting families in our community and getting to know each other, saying ‘good morning’, developing friendships.”

“If this does nothing but build community across these populations, then we’ve succeeded,” said Palmer. On Halloween, she wore an inflatable costume of the school’s mascot during her shift outside the school and handed out stickers with the same design as the buttons.

“It was like I was Lady Gaga or something,” Palmer said. “Everyone was talking pictures with me. Some lady handed me her baby to take a picture with … It’s about ICE watch but it’s also about how we build community.”

A chilling scene keeps playing out in the halls of Manhattan’s federal office buildings. Asylum seekers attend hearings before immigration judges, receive a future hearing date, and go to leave, only to be surrounded by a crowd of masked ICE agents who arrest them and whisk them away to the bank of elevators.

The detention trap at New York’s immigration courts has attracted a cadre of dedicated court watch volunteers who bear witness to the daily abductions. Their efforts gained national attention in June, when city comptroller and then mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested as he attempted to accompany an asylum seeker from his hearing to the subway.

As Lander’s arrest showed, there is nothing the court watchers can do to prevent these detentions. Instead, they do their best to get individuals to fill out a form with their name, A-number and emergency contact. Those forms are then passed on to Mi Tlalli, a volunteer collective whose mission is both simple and expansive. “We provide ongoing care,” said Maria, a member of the collective.

What that care looks like depends on what people need, Maria said. The group has been in contact with 3,000 people and families since May, and has provided direct support to 300 detainees. For those who are being held in ICE detention centers, Mi Tlalli puts $50 in their commissary account weekly. A collective of mental health care providers meets with affected children and family members; the group also has a weekly mutual aid distribution for basic necessities.

“We maintain contact with people who have been deported,” Maria said. “It’s not like we can build them a house, but we can send some money for clothing, and give them some hope that someone cares.”

The knowledge that immigrants are cared for is crucial to Maria, who is a social worker in mental health. She recalled a recent case where an individual was detained on a Friday in New York and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana that Sunday. Mi Tlalli spoke to the individual’s family and contacted an activist group in Louisiana, which arranged to have someone visit the immigrant before they were deported.

“That was the last caring interaction that this person had,” Maria said. “That’s better than going to your court appearance and being put on a plane in chains without ever knowing that someone cared about you.”

“Right now, every undocumented person is at risk,” said Maria, who is undocumented herself. “We may not be able to save everyone, but is that going to keep us from helping anyone? As a person who has had relatives kidnapped, and is at risk of being kidnapped myself, I have to hold on to the idea that there is a way we can organize not just being resilient, not just saying ‘deal with it,’ but coming together to care for each other.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must read about the consequences of tyrannical Nazi history during the Third Reich

Can Americans sustain the political courage to oppose Trumpziism❓ Echo essay published in The Guardian, by Jonathan Freedland, and reprinted in the New York Times.  (Note- Impossible to understand why authoritarians are somehow capturing so much political attendion.)

As authoritarian rulers gain ground across the democratic world, making inroads not only in Hungary and Turkey, but even in the United States, a question from the 20th century has resurfaced in the 21st, one that presses on individuals as well as institutions. Put simply, who bends the knee to tyranny and who stands up to it?

A clue can be found in an extraordinary episode from inside the Third Reich that has lain, almost forgotten, for nearly 80 years. 

At the heart of it is a loose grouping of 10 or so friends and acquaintances drawn from German high society, both the aristocracy and professional elite. Their circle included not one but two countesses, an ambassador’s widow, a diplomat, high-ranking government officials (current and former), a doctor, a pioneering headmistress and a former model, among others. What they found in one another was a shared willingness to defy Hitler, in ways large and small.

Except their assumption of common purpose was fatally flawed. In September 1943, they met for a tea party — unaware that one of them was poised to betray all the rest to the Gestapo. That act would lead to arrest and jail and, for several of those present that day, death, whether by the guillotine or the hanging rope. Its ramifications would eventually reach the apex of the Nazi state.

The core mystery that runs through this story is not just the identity of the betrayer, but also why people of privilege and rank, who could so easily have kept their heads down, risked everything. Had they fallen in line, their fortunes, careers and country estates likely would have remained intact. They could have survived the war unscathed. But they chose another path.

Consider Otto Kiep, 57 years old at the time of the tea party, a diplomat who had secured the glamorous post of German consul general in New York City in the last years of the Weimar Republic.

(FYI: The Weimar Republic was Germany's government from 1919 to 1933, established after World War I and ending with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.)

In 1933, an invitation had come to attend a dinner in honor of an eminent fellow countryman, Albert Einstein, who also happened to be the world’s most famous Jew. To accept would be to incur the wrath of his new Nazi masters, installed in power just a few weeks earlier. To refuse would be to side with their campaign of antisemitic persecution. Kiep accepted the invitation and delivered a toast in Einstein’s honor. That brought a summons back to Berlin where he would be hauled before the Führer himself.

Or take Maria von Maltzan, the young countess who turned her Berlin apartment into an unofficial refuge for “submarines” — Jews forced to live in hiding, whose safety depended on staying silent and unseen. (Among them was Ms. von Maltzan’s own forbidden Jewish lover.) Or her fellow countess, Lagi Solf, who broke the rules banning contact with Jews, in order to fetch groceries for the submarines. Carrying full shopping bags, one in each hand, had long been her habit. That way, if she ran into someone on the street she would be unable to give the requisite Heil Hitler salute.

In scouring the archives, including letters, diaries and court testimonies left behind by the group, and by speaking with their surviving relatives, I’ve begun to form an answer to why some were capable of saying no to a mighty and terrifying regime while the vast majority of their neighbors were bowing their heads and saying yes.

Several were committed Christians, adamant that they would ultimately have to answer, not to Adolf Hitler, but to Jesus Christ. Perhaps the most devout was the hostess of the fateful tea party: the innovative educator, Elisabeth von Thadden, whose school, the Evangelical Rural Education Home for Girls, founded six years before the Third Reich, discreetly took in Jewish pupils while their families scrambled to secure the papers that would enable them to flee the country. Her belief that she was accountable to God alone helped Ms. von Thadden face down the Gestapo inspector who came to examine her school for “deficiencies of conviction,” after the authorities learned that she had recited an Old Testament psalm, which, to them, bore the unforgivable taint of Hebrew scripture. (A 13-year- old pupil was the informant.)

Others among the rebels were children of the nobility, convinced their highest loyalty was not to national socialism but to their own ancestors. Hitler might have dreamed of a 1000-year Reich, but these families had already ruled Germany for centuries. They believed that those of their class represented the deep and true Germany, defined in part by its patrician ideal of compassion for the weak. Nazism would be a passing fad; it was they, and the aristocratic inheritance they embodied, that would last.

So it was that Maria von Maltzan could speak to the Gestapo men who raided her apartment with imperious impatience. 

When they demanded she open up the wooden compartment under a sofa-bed — inside which her lover was hiding, holding his breath — she explained that it could not be opened, and that if the secret police were so certain someone was hiding inside, they should aim their guns at it and shoot. She all but dared them to do it. But, she insisted, if they did, they would have to compensate her for the damage, and promise to do so in advance and in writing. Her gambit, deployed with all the hauteur of her caste, worked. Her lover survived.

Several key players in the drama were women whose upbringing shared another striking aspect: a close relationship with a strong father. That was true of Ms. von Thadden and both countesses, Maria and Lagi. In all three cases, the women were not just loved by their fathers; they were trusted by them. In a way that was unusual in the era before modern feminism, they were deemed by their fathers to be the equal of any man, capable of taking on any task. Long after their fathers were dead, the women carried that confidence with them. 

By the time the Nazis ruled Germany, it had blossomed into courage.

The strength of those women was buttressed by that deeper conviction that is perhaps the key determinant of who defies an oppressive regime and who buckles before it: belief in an authority higher than the government of the day. 

Most rebels at the tea party also came to understand that such a belief demanded action as well as thought.

For some, that translated into small gestures of defiance, like Lagi Solf and her shopping bags. For others, such as Otto Kiep, it meant acts of audacious resistance, coming within touching distance of a plot to assassinate Hitler. Through deeds large and small, they demonstrated — to themselves and one another — that obedience was not the only option.

To be clear, most aristocratic Germans did not rebel against Hitler. On the contrary, the German nobility largely fell in line behind the Nazis, drawn in part by the Führer’s pledge to restore titles abolished in the Weimar era. And of course, we cannot neatly read across from that place and that time to our own age.

But if there is a lesson to be gleaned from the deadly fate of those men and women, it might just be that the best safeguard against tyranny is a legion of people who believe in an authority higher than any political program, prince — or president.

Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for the Guardian.