Donald Trump and maga Republicans must end the campaign against the 2026 elections! ICE OUT NOW !!

This is not a drill❗

It’s only February, and the November elections are already in peril.

Echo opinion by David French in The New York Times. 

When I think back to the days and weeks before January 6, 2021, one thing that’s clear is that many of us suffered from a failure of imagination. We knew President Trump’s lies and conspiracy mongering were dangerous, but it’s hard to think of a single person who predicted that a MAGA mob would storm the Capitol.

Very few people anticipated the sheer scale and scope of the effort to overturn the election or that an incredible 147 Republicans would vote not to certify Joe Biden’s clear and unambiguous presidential victory. We did not realize that they would go along with something that plainly corrupt and dangerous.

We must not make that mistake again.

And so I’m going to do something a little bit unusual. I’m going to ask you to imagine alongside me. But this is a different kind of imagination. It’s based on real events — things that are already occurring right in front of our eyes.

So here we go.

It’s Friday, October 30, 2026, and Donald Trump's approval rating is low, abysmally low. He hasn’t been able to reverse the gradual decline that began after his inauguration.

At the end of January his aggregate approval rating was 41.4 percent, and his disapproval rating was 55.7 percent. In June his approval dropped below 40 percent, and it hasn’t come back up.

Meanwhile, Democrats are leading the generic ballot by a wide margin, and Democratic voters are far more enthusiastic about going to the polls than Republicans. In a normal midterm election, this would mean that Democrats would easily take control of the House of Representatives. They could even win the Senate.

But this is not a normal election year.

Now, in October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, (aka the Evil ICE Gestapo) which rapidly expanded throughout the year, is running large-scale operations in Democratic-controlled cities. Hundreds if not thousands more American citizens were caught in the dragnet. So have thousands of lawful residents.

Citizens, lawful residents and undocumented immigrants alike have been shackled and transported to brutal detention facilities in Texas and Florida.

Despite repeated court orders holding that federal officials cannot stop, much less detain, anyone purely on the basis of perceived ethnicity, the stops are still happening on a daily basis in cities across the United States.

Not only has the administration defied hundreds of court orders, it also refuses to discipline rogue officers. A complex web of federal immunities and privileges further insulates these officers from both private lawsuits and state prosecutions.

As a result, nonwhite citizens are reluctant to go anywhere near ICE, and rumors of ICE conducting operations near polling stations spread like wildfire. Thousands upon thousands of citizens choose to stay home rather than risk arrest to vote.

During early voting, reports of citizens discovering they’re no longer on the voting rolls have multiplied. Most of them have Latin-, African- or Asian-sounding names. The voters named Smith or Jones have had no problems. But if you’re a Gonzalez or a Diallo, then you’ve been purged.

Meanwhile, the F.B.I. raided several election offices in blue cities in swing states. Lawmakers in red states have moved to take over election administration in certain blue cities, citing the president’s raids and indictments as justification.

At the same time, his base has continued to radicalize. Democratic protests against the ICE deployments are viewed, in these quarters, as proof that Democrats want undocumented immigrants to vote — that they can’t win without them.

Donald Trump himself stokes their anxiety and their anger. His social media feeds are full of the wildest accusations, constantly repeating even the most specious conspiracy theories about the 2016, and 2020, elections. He keeps up his calls to arrest former President Barack Obama. He also calls for the arrest of Democratic governors and lawmakers.

He tells his base, the people who trust him more than any news source, that the Democratic Party is a criminal enterprise and that its members will destroy the country if they win the midterms.

Right-wing media is full of mug shots of heavily tattooed, scowling criminals that ICE has allegedly yanked from the streets. The banner on the television underneath their mug shots reads “Democrat voters.”

Donald Trump’s raids and indictments prove to them that they were right all along: The 2020, election was corrupt.🤥💢😱❗

And when federal judges issue injunctions requiring federal law enforcement to stay away from polling places, that’s all the proof they need to raise the alarm.

“This election is rigged!” they shout. And they’re right. Just not in the way they think.

The horrifying thing about our current moment is that not a single aspect of the scenario above is far-fetched. In fact, some of it is already happening.

Not only did the F.B.I. raid a Georgia election center last week, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was present. She’s a cabinet-level official responsible for coordinating the activities of American intelligence agencies, yet there she was, in Fulton County, Georgia.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Gabbard has turned much of her attention to investigating the 2020, election, an election that withstood dozens of legal challenges. According to The Journal, she’s investigating possible foreign interference.

The search warrant itself contains a claim that there is probable cause to believe that there is property, data or information at the Fulton County election office that is “evidence of the commission of a criminal offense.”

In the days after the search, two Republican-appointed members of the state election board said that it was “on the radar as an avenue we could take” to seize control of elections in Fulton County. Ninety percent of Atlanta lies within the county.

Federal agents are seizing American citizens. There is an enormous amount of evidence that they are racially profiling their suspects and mistreating their detainees.

Even if federal agents don’t show up at polling places (the presence of armed federal agents at the polls is prohibited by federal criminal law), they raise the risk of travel even for American citizens who might look Hispanic by blanketing majority-Hispanic parts of a given city.

But criminal law is no impediment to Trump. He’ll just pardon the violent men and women who break federal law to keep him in power.

And if federal courts enjoin ICE activities, would anyone trust Trump to comply? As the Republican-appointed chief judge for the Federal District Court of Minnesota wrote last week, “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026, than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”

Pam Bondi, the attorney general, sent Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota a letter promising to “bring an end to the chaos” in his state if he agreed to a list of demands, including granting Justice Department officials access to its voter rolls.

After the F.B.I. raided the Fulton County, Georgia election center, Trump demanded Obama’s arrest on social media and threatened the prosecution of election workers. He claimed, among other things, that Italian military satellites had hacked the 2020, election and that Obama had “conspired with foreign powers, not one, not two, not three, but four times to overthrow the United States government in 2016.” (OMG file under "you cannot make this 💩shit up❗" 

The Italian satellite theory is a jolting reminder that Trump will demand that his core supporters believe almost anything he says, no matter how wild or delusional.

As Jonathan Karl reported for ABC News, this theory “was brought to the White House by a woman who went by several aliases, including ‘The Heiress,’ and was known at the Pentagon for her claimed ties to Somali pirates.”

Rather than discarding the theory as obvious nonsense from an unreliable narrator, Karl says that “then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows directed both the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense to look into the matter.”

Informed readers will know that this column is woefully incomplete. I can’t possibly compile all of Trump’s threats against American elections into a single column. Entire books have been written describing his plot to disrupt the 2020, election.

But one thing is quite clear: He is more dangerous now than he was then. His party controls the House and the Senate. In 2020, Democrats controlled the House.

Trump has filled his administration with cronies and true believers, and his attorney general is one of his chief enforcers. In 2020 Bill Barr, who was then the attorney general, resigned rather than continue to pursue Trump’s stolen election claims.

This time around, by contrast, Ed Martin, a Justice Department official, posted a picture of himself standing next to Sidney Powell, one of the chief legal architects of Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. In 2023 she pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties. The president pardoned her in November.

And what was Martin’s message? “Good morning, America. How are ya’?”

During his first term, the Trump administration largely complied with federal court orders. In his second term, his administration is defying the courts at a frequency that boggles the mind. So even if Trump-appointed judges and justices repeat their courageous performance from 2020 and block any effort by the president to overturn the next election, it’s an open question whether the Trump administration will care.

Donald Trump doesn’t care about the law. He commands an obedient Congress and is supported by a radicalized base of tens of millions of people who believe his lies, represents a threat to the next election. I fear that millions of citizens are still too complacent. They aren’t aware of the peril we face.

And as you take note of each of the incidents I mentioned, you may realize that Trump can unlawfully influence an election without explicitly rigging the count. By deterring his enemies from coming to the polls, he can engineer the outcomes he seeks.

In a future column, I’ll try to describe what can be done to stop him — aside from simply hoping and praying that his lawlessness has limits other than his own morality — but a nation won’t rouse itself if it doesn’t hear the alarm.

So consider this to be something like a fire drill. It’s an alarm, one of thousands that should be ringing across the country. MAGA’s acts of aggression are already intimidating. Trump isn’t just trying to “stop the steal” again; another kind of theft might (probably is) already be underway.

Donald Trump is making dangerous decisions without the advice of any expert advisors: Vice President Vance was a Marine corporal!

When an American president makes an especially weighty decision, there’s some small comfort in knowing that seasoned, steady aides were in the mix, complementing the commander in chief’s instincts with their expertise. Echo essay by Frank Bruni published in The New York Times. 

Donald Trump dropped 15-ton bombs on uranium enrichment sites in Iran with Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth as his defense secretary. (As a matter of fact, Trumpzi Diva Tulsi was even bold enough to tell Trump the truth about Iran's uranium enrichment program, in other words, there was no nuclear bomb in Iran.)

I, for one, am not comforted. None of us should believe that Donald Trump is being well served. Rather, his demand for fealty from his advisors is putting the world in danger.  

By some reports, Hegseth wasn’t consulted all that much — which, I suppose, is its own perverse solace. Trump apparently learned his lesson when Hegseth decided that a Signal group chat was the proper venue for an emoji-laden pep rally about imminent military strikes against the Houthis; clue Hegseth in on the Iran plan, and he might wind up divulging it in the form of charades on “Fox (Fake❗ ) & Friends.”

And Gabbard❓ 🙄Her relationship with Trump is strained, to say the least; he told reporters on Air Force One to pay no heed to her statement several months ago that Iran wasn’t close to or all that focused on developing a nuclear weapon.

“I don’t care what she said,” Trump blurted. Apart from how warm and fuzzy that brushoff must have made Gabbard feel, it spoke volumes about the limits of Trump’s confidence in — and use for — her.

So why did he give her such a crucial job? And how did Hegseth land an even bigger one❓

Because, Donald Trump wasn’t judging prospective senior administration officials on their demonstrated fitness for their positions. Any old president can do that. Shock artists like him want to show how far outside the lines they’re willing to color. The kookier the crayon, the better.

And would-be despots make sure that the people just below them really and truly owe them. Gabbard; Hegseth; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; so many of Trump’s other flunkies — if not for him, they’d never enjoy the titles, the offices, the attention, the entourages they do. That primes their loyalty. It greases their sycophancy.

But while it was one thing to mull the lunacy of many of Trump’s personnel choices as they strutted through Senate confirmation hearings, it’s quite another to confront their inappropriateness when an impulsive, mercurial president takes a risk this enormous, commencing the kind of military intervention he long railed against, in a combustible region that he previously expressed such wariness about.

I found myself transfixed by the tableau late Saturday night when, in nationally televised remarks from the White House, Trump announced that the United States had attacked Iran. 

Like robots, 🤖Vice President JD Vance (a former Marine corporal❗), Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former Fox (Fake❗) News, part time weekend commentator, Pete Hegseth all stood around him with such strenuously blank expressions, such erect postures, it was as if they’d been turned into automatons and feared that any tiny twitch might be interpreted as doubt or disagreement.

If you’ve any doubts about the culture of flattery cultivated by Trump, I direct you to that recent text that he got from Mike Huckabee, his ambassador to Israel, the ally pressing hard for America’s help in defanging Iran. It’s astonishing that Trump posted the text on social media — that he’s so eager to exhibit his acolytes’ praise, so insecure. But it’s no less astounding than the amplitude of Huckabee’s adoration. An evangelical Christian pastor, Huckabee wasn’t offering Trump diplomatic counsel. He was giving him an ecclesiastical massage.

Huckabee wrote that God had saved Trump from an assassination attempt “to be the most consequential President in a century — maybe ever.” “The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else,” he continued, in the best prose equivalent of genuflection that I’ve ever read. He added: “I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. No president in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945.” What a mammoth broom it must take to sweep that much history under the rug.

Concerns about who’s advising a president and how well they’re doing that certainly predate Trump. Most presidents seek affirmation, most have no trouble getting it, and all are pliable because all are human. Vice President Dick Cheney infamously egged on President George W. Bush. President Joe Biden’s protectors shielded him from the truth of his declining health and falling polls.

And the advisers with Trump’s ear right now include people of greater acumen than Gabbard and Hegseth. I’d put Vance and Marco Rubio in that group.

But from the moment they pledged their fealty to Trump, they grew less serious by the week. To track their time with him is to notice ever more performative demonstrations that they share his grudges and will act on his grievances. 

Vance (a self described "Catholic convert!) berates Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in the Oval Office- because he was scripted by Trump to create an echo chamber.

Rubio channels Trump’s xenophobia and animus toward elite universities with a puffed-up panic over international students. 

But what Donald Trump and the world needs at a juncture like this are confident confidants who can play devil’s advocate, not a coterie of toadies 🐸 who whisper sweet nothings in his ear — or have nothing valuable to whisper at all.

SignalGate: Right wing Donald Trump cult media's knee jerk lie response to somehow blame journalist Jeffrey Goldberg?

Trump intelligence officials committed a national security breach❗

Trump’s administration, and Trump himself, attacked Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic magazine and Democrats for demanding accountability for the national security breach. 

Fox News and the rest of the right-wing echo chamber piled on, claiming that the respected journalist Jeffreey Goldberg was lying about what he saw in the text chain. 

Since the administration said nothing in the Signal text chain was classified, Goldberg released the messages the following day. 

Although the information meets the government’s published guidelines for “Top Secret” classification, Tulsi Gabbard, apparently unaware that Goldberg was going to release the text chain, went to Congress on Wednesday and again claimed the texts did not contain any classified information.🤥 (What was she thinking❓)

Will it matter to Trump voters that he and his cult minions endangered national security❓ It is doubtful. Trump’s strongest base of support comes from white voters without college degrees. 

In 2016, Trump won 63% of these voters. In 2020, despite having been impeached, he won 61%. And in 2024, after having been convicted of 34 felonies, he still won 60%. 

One survey prior to the election showed that among registered voters who said they consumed no national political news at all, Trump held a 26-point advantage. 

Likewise, Trump won 91% of the country’s news deserts, defined as counties lacking a professional source of local news, and he won those counties by an average of 54 percentage points.

If what’s past is prologue, then most Trump voters will never read The Atlantic’s reporting or ever know much, if anything, about Trump’s national security lies.

From Rand Nolen, in Houston, Texas

To the Editor:  Every passing day leads me to believe we as a nation are in danger. At first I thought it was just our democracy. Now I believe our very lives are at risk. 

When those at the upper echelons of our national security agencies use Signal to discuss war plans — and invite the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic without realizing it — that tells us everything we need to know. We are being led by amateurs who have the discretion and acumen of (perhaps) high school freshmen. The difference is, instead of engaging in high school gossip, they are discussing national security issues that could compromise the lives of each and every one of us.

From Thomas Bickham, in Bellaire (Harris County) Texas

SignalGate: Pete Hegseth gaslighting Americans because a security breach is dangerous regardless of how he tries to redefine the incident

Signal (SignalGage) incident is 'terrible'❗: Echo opinion letter published in The Winchester Star in Winchester, Virginia.

Signal group chats are now dead, but not before the breach of security of government secret military operations in Yemen. 

The National Intelligence Director, Tulsi Gabbard, appointed by Trump, admitted it was a “mistake." 

The results of this mistake could have been disastrous for U.S. military pilots but fortunately it was not. On the Signal chats there was also CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who has defended the use of Signal chats as “appropriate,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and a nongovernmental journalist employed The Atlantic. 

Unfortunately, I think The Atlantic will soon be attacked by Trump, as he already has PBS and NPR.

These people on the Signal group chat were all people who had been appointed by Trump despite their overall lack of familiarity with government procedures. In the two months since the inauguration of Donald Trump, these government officials did not have time to understand the common-sense procedures of government employees. They had not attained the common-sense necessary to function well in extremely rapidly changing executive edicts.

The Democrats claim that the information exchanged with the journalist was “classified.” I believe them, but it will take time to prove since the government only claims it was “sensitive” information. Time will tell, but in the meantime I think it was terrible even if it was sensitive information- it was still a dangerous ⚠️security breach❗

From Andrew White in Winchester, Virginia

Donald Trump is creating a dangerous regime by eliminating institutional guardrails in place to prevent his incompetent leadership

Echo opinion published by The New York Times Editorial Board:

Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency in countless ways, but one of the clearest is in the company he keeps, surrounding himself with fringe figures, conspiracy theorists and sycophants who put fealty to him above all else. This week, a series of cabinet nominations by Trump showed the potential dangers posed by his reliance on his inner circle in the starkest way possible.

For three of the nation’s highest-ranking and most vital positions, Trump said he would appoint loyalists, with no discernible qualifications for their jobs (❗), people manifestly inappropriate for crucial positions of leadership in law enforcement and national security.

The most irresponsible was his choice for attorney general. To fill the post of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, the president-elect said he would nominate Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.

Yes, that Matt Gaetz.

The one who called for the abolishment of the F.B.I. and the entire Justice Department if they didn’t stop investigating Trump. The one who was among the loudest congressional voices in denying the results of the 2020, election, who said he was “proud of the work” that he and other deniers did on January 6, 2021, and who praised the Capitol rioters as “patriotic Americans” who had no intention of committing violence. The one whose move to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023, paralyzed his own party’s leadership of the House for nearly a month.

Gaetz, who submitted his letter of resignation from Congress after his nomination was announced, was the target of a years long federal sex-trafficking investigation that led to an 11-year prison term for one of his associates, though he denied any involvement. 

The Justice Department closed that investigation (❓-why), but the House Ethics Committee is still looking into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, improper acceptance of gifts and obstruction of government investigations of his conduct. 

Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, blamed Gaetz for his ouster, on the grounds that Gaetz “wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.”

Gaetz is the man Trump has selected to lead the 115,000-person agency that he has called the most important in the federal government, a position whose enforcement role could cause the most trouble for any president with corrupt intent. 

Even for Trump, it was a stunning demonstration of his disregard for basic competence and government experience and of his duty to lead the executive branch in a sober and patriotic way. It will now be up to the Senate to say he has gone too far and reject his unqualified nominations.

Trump’s list of appointments is just getting started, but already includes two other unqualified nominations that he announced this week: former Representative Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense.

Gabbard, who previously represented Hawaii in the House and regularly appears on Fox (Fake ❗) News, is not only devoid of intelligence experience but has repeatedly taken positions in direct opposition to American foreign policy and national security interests. She has appeared on several occasions to side with strongmen like President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Hegseth, a co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is perhaps even more unqualified, given the gravity — not to mention the budget — of the post he would assume. He enjoys some support from enlisted service members and veterans, but outside of serving two tours as an Army infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as time at Guantánamo Bay, Hegseth has no experience in government or national defense.




“He’s never run a big institution, much less one of the largest and most hidebound on the planet,” the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal wrote Wednesday. “He has no experience in government outside the military, and no small risk is that the bureaucracy will eat him alive.” The board went on to call Mr. Hegseth a “culture warrior” at a time when there are much bigger security issues for the Pentagon to be focused on.

It’s far from certain if Hegseth could even obtain the security clearances required for the job. He has said he was one of a dozen National Guard members removed from service at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021, because of concerns that he was an extremist — possibly because of a tattoo he wears that is popular among white supremacists.

These are some of the most consequential roles in government, protecting the country from military and terrorist threats, investigating domestic criminal conspiracies and prosecuting thousands of federal crimes every year. Yet to fill them, Mr. Trump has resorted to people whose only eligibility for office is an apparent willingness to say yes to his every demand.

Gaetz in particular has joined Trump in expressing a commitment to exacting vengeance against anyone they believe has done them wrong. Trump began his campaign by saying “I am your retribution,” and Gaetz broadcasts nothing so much as that. He has no business leading an agency with the role of combating crime, fraud, violations of civil rights and threats to national security, among many other things.

In Trump’s first term, the department was protected by career prosecutors and other civil servants who understood that their primary obligation was to the dictates of the Constitution, not to the whims of the president. But, Trump has promised to purge people like that from his second administration.

The possibility of extreme appointments like these was the reason the Constitution gives the Senate the right to refuse its consent to a president’s wishes. Last week, Republicans won control of the chamber. Now they will be confronted with an immediate test: Will they stand up for the legislative branch and for the American system of checks and balances? Two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have already expressed strong skepticism about the Gaetz’s nomination - of course, he has since withdrawn- and others have declined to express their support.

Trump clearly expects the Senate to simply roll over and ignore its responsibilities. He wants to turn the leaders of major important agencies into his deputies, remaking the federal government into a Trump Inc. organization chart entirely subordinate to him. He recently demanded that the Senate give him the ability to make recess appointments, a way of bypassing the Senate’s consent process when the chamber is adjourned for 10 days or more.

Even Republican senators refused to consent to that demand during his first term, to preserve their constitutional role, and Senate Republicans on Wednesday voted to reject as their leader Rick Scott of Florida, who said he would have no problem allowing recess appointments. Instead, they chose John Thune of South Dakota, who is far more likely to uphold his chamber’s right to refuse consent of president nominations.

In Trump’s second term, senators will immediately be confronted with an extreme set of appointments, even worse than those of the first term. That makes it all the more important that they preserve the ability to say no. 💥

Donald Trump is nominating disinformation diva to be head of the U.S. National Intelligence

Tulsi Gabbard Holds the Knife An Operation We Might Not Survive

Published by Timothy Snyder in the blog "Thinking about....."

You would never want either Gabbard or Putin to operate on your brain❗

Imagine that the day has come for your brain surgery. You are lying, immobilized and vulnerable, on the operating table. Something is wrong, but you hope that it can be repaired. As the anesthesia sets in, you reflect. To be sure, your brain hasn't always performed the way you wished it had. You have made some mistakes, and done some stupid things, regrettable things, wrong things. 

But still, it is the brain that allows for a reconsideration of all that, to adjust, to have some hope and some possibility of doing better next time. Your brain keeps you going, keeps you in touch with the world. Hopefully, yours can be repaired, and you can get back to thinking, being, becoming. You could get better. As darkness descends, you catch a glimpse of a person dressed as a surgeon, approaching your head with a knife and a smile. It's Tulsi Gabbard. Hope gives way to horror.

This dark fantasy suggests, on a very small scale, the national trauma that lies before us. Gabbard is Donald Trump's choice to operate American intelligence. In the intelligence system, a kind of national brain, the Director of National Intelligence oversees and coordinates the work of agencies charged with knowing the world, protecting the integrity of digital systems, anticipating and preventing terrorism, and evaluating national security threats. Gabbard is the opposite of qualified for such a role: she is a disinformer and as an apologist for the war crimes of dictatorships.

Gabbard appears on the world stage as a defender of a million violent deaths.

She is an apologist for two of the great atrocities of the century: the Russian-Syrian suppression of the Syrian opposition to the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship, which has taken about half a million lives, most of them civilians, some of them by chemical weapons; and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has also taken about half a million lives, and has brought the destruction of whole cities, the kidnapping of children, mass torture, and the large-scale execution of civilians.

That is it. That is her profile. Disinformer and apologist. Beyond the United States, in the larger world that US intelligence agencies are tasked to understand, she is associated with her pro-Assad and pro-Putin positions. (In third place, I suppose, would be her propensity to provide the Chinese state media with useful sound bites).

Until 2014, Gabbard said nothing remarkable about foreign affairs. In 2015, just before Putin intervened to save Assad, she began her extraordinary journey of apology for atrocity. In September of that year, Putin sent Russian mercenaries, soldiers, and airmen to Syria to defend Assad. The great advantage Putin could bring to Assad was to multiply the regime's air strikes, which were turned against hospitals and other civilian targets. Hospitals were and remain a Russian specialty. One feature of disinformation is that it is factually incorrect: and so the very least (or most?) that can be said about Gabbard is that she consistently wrong on matters of the greatest moral and political significance. 

But, the other element of disinformation is that it is consciously and maliciously designed to confuse. These memes (biolabs!) are tested and perfected before they are released. Disinformation is the opposite of an innocent mistake: it is concocted to make rational reflection and sensible policy difficult. Disinformation, in other words, is a weapon that one regime tries to spread within another society or -- in the dream of a hostile spy chief -- within another society's intelligence service. That is part of what Gabbard offers America’s enemies, and it is bad enough, because it means that systems meant to protect Americans instead put them in danger. It goes without saying that American allies would be unable to cooperate with the United States, and that patriotic intelligence officers would resign in droves. Informers around the world would cease their work. The US government would be cut off from the world.

As Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard would do enormous harm, unwillingly or willingly. She is not just completely unqualified for this role -- she is anti-qualified. She is just the sort of person enemies of the American republic would want in this job. This is not a hypothetical -- Gabbard is the specific person that actual enemies of the United States do want in the job. The Russian media refers to Tulsi Gabbard as a "Russian agent" and as "girlfriend," with good reason.

Gabbard is worse than unfit. Her public record is as a disinformer and apologist for mass murderers. And there is nothing on the other side of the ledger. There are no positive qualifications. (Yes, she wrote a bestselling book. It became a bestseller because she scammed her followers into donating to a PAC which bought the book in bulk.)

Gabbard is just as qualified to operate on your brain as she is to operate the national intelligence services. Would you let her? She clearly wants to take up the knife. Whose idea, one wonders, was that?

Imagine, because it is true, that the day will soon come when we name the person who will operate the national intelligence services. To be sure, like our own minds, the intelligence services of the United States haven't always performed well. There have been mistakes, and manipulation, and downright evil. But there has also been learning, and some recent, impressive showings, as in the precise and public prediction of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Intelligence services are a central part of government. Just as a brain might need surgery, American intelligence needs reform. But it does not need to be butchered for the pleasure of enemies.

Imagine that the day has come for your brain surgery. You are lying, immobilized and vulnerable, on the operating table. Something is wrong, but you hope that it can be repaired. As the anesthesia sets in, you reflect. To be sure, your brain hasn't always performed the way you wished it had. You have made some mistakes, and done some stupid things, regrettable things, wrong things. But still, it is the brain that allows for a reconsideration of all that, to adjust, to have some hope and some possibility of doing better next time. Your brain keeps you going, keeps you in touch with the world. Hopefully, yours can be repaired, and you can get back to thinking, being, becoming. You could get better. As darkness descends, you catch a glimpse of a person dressed as a surgeon, approaching your head with a knife and a smile. It's Tulsi Gabbard. Hope gives way to horror.

This dark fantasy suggests, on a very small scale, the national trauma that lies before us. Gabbard is Donald Trump's choice to operate American intelligence. In the intelligence system, a kind of national brain, the Director of National Intelligence oversees and coordinates the work of agencies charged with knowing the world, protecting the integrity of digital systems, anticipating and preventing terrorism, and evaluating national security threats. Gabbard is the opposite of qualified for such a role: she is a disinformer and as an apologist for the war crimes of dictatorships.

Gabbard appears on the world stage as a defender of a million violent deaths.

She is an apologist for two of the great atrocities of the century: the Russian-Syrian suppression of the Syrian opposition to the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship, which has taken about half a million lives, most of them civilians, some of them by chemical weapons; and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has also taken about half a million lives, and has brought the destruction of whole cities, the kidnapping of children, mass torture, and the large-scale execution of civilians.

That is it. That is her profile. Disinformer and apologist. Beyond the United States, in the larger world that US intelligence agencies are tasked to understand, she is associated with her pro-Assad and pro-Putin positions. (In third place, I suppose, would be her propensity to provide the Chinese state media with useful sound bites).

Until 2014, Gabbard said nothing remarkable about foreign affairs. In 2015, just before Putin intervened to save Assad, she began her extraordinary journey of apology for atrocity. In September of that year, Putin sent Russian mercenaries, soldiers, and airmen to Syria to defend Assad. The great advantage Putin could bring to Assad was to multiply the regime's air strikes, which were turned against hospitals and other civilian targets. Hospitals were and remain a Russian specialty.

In June 2015, as a congresswoman from Hawai'i, Gabbard visited Syria. During her stay, she was introduced to girls who had been burned from head to toe by a regime air strike. Her reaction to the situation, according to her translator, was to try to persuade the girls that they had been injured not by Syrian forces, but by the resistance. But this was impossible. Only Syria (at the time of her visit) and Russia (beginning weeks later) were flying planes and dropping bombs.

Either Gabbard was catastrophically uninformed about the most basic elements of the theater of war she was visiting, or she was consciously spreading disinformation. Those are the two possibilities. The first is disqualifying; the second is worse.

And if she was spreading disinformation consciously, she was also doing so with a pathological ruthlessness. Anyone who would lie to the child victims of an air strike to their burned faces would lie to anyone about anything. In January 2017, she visited Syria again, this time to speak to Assad. She began thereafter to deny that his regime had used chemical weapons on its own people. That was a very big lie.

In Washington, in speeches in Congress, Gabbard showed an uncanny ability to turn almost any issue into a justification for defending the Assad regime. In 2016, concern for Christians in Syria was a pretext to defend the Assad regime. In 2017, she presented worries about terrorism as a reason to defend of the Assad regime. In 2018, the anniversary of 9/11 was her prompt for defending the Assad regime. In 2019, she found her way from the genocide of Armenians a century earlier to the need to defend the Assad regime. She even worked hard to segue from the lack of affordable housing in Hawai'i to the need to defend the Assad regime. Gabbard's support of Assad was so well known that her colleagues, Republican and Democratic alike, were worried that she would reveal the identity of a Syrian photographer brought to Congress to testify about Assad's atrocities.

For Russia, Syria was a testing ground for Ukraine. The atrocities perpetrated by Russians in Syria were repeated in Ukraine. In 2021, the largest donor to Gabbard’s PAC was an apologist for Putin. When the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February of the following year, Gabbard, a consumer of Russian propaganda, was immediately ready as a channel for the Russian line, including obvious Russian disinformation. Again and again, over and over, her public statements were strikingly similar to Putin’s,

Amidst the farrago of lies that Russia used to justify its full-scale invasion invasion was the completely bogus claim that Ukraine was site of American biolabs that were testing which infections would be most harmful to Slavs (and thus Russians). This lie originates in Russia and was spread by Russian media, along with some Chinese and Syrian echo chambers, and with a set of western helpers -- one of whom was Tulsi Gabbard. She also urged, "in the spirit of Aloha," that Ukraine react to the invasion by surrendering its sovereignty to Russia. She later justified Russia's invasion of Ukraine by the notion, common in Moscow, that Russia was the victim of American attempts to overthrow Putin. She was specifically thanked by Russian state media for defending Russian war propaganda.

To be sure, the wars and the regions are complex. Even if Assad falls, as now looks increasingly likely, Syria will be a mess, with unsavory and dangerous people in power. There is, of course, room for disagreement about American foreign policy, including with respect to Assad and Putin and their twinned atrocities. 

That can all be taken for granted, and provides no excuse whatever for Gabbard's very unusual behavior. It is strange, to say the least, that Gabbard says nothing about these regimes that they have not first said about themselves, and that she uses her platform to spread their own very specific disinformation.

PS: Further sources: In Sketches from a Secret War I write about intelligence, counter-intelligence, disinformation, and active measures. In The Road to Unfreedom I write about the Russian intervention in Syria and the associated atrocities. On the early Russian bombings of hospitals in particular I cited these sources: Amnesty International: “Syria: Russia’s shameful failure to acknowledge civilian killings,” Amnesty International, 23 December 2015; Physicians for Human Rights: “Russian Warplanes Strike Medical Facilities in Syria,” Physicians for Human Rights, 7 October 2015. Russian hackers punished those who wrote about the bombings: "Pawn Storm APT Group Returns," SC Magazine, 23 October 2015.

Donald Trump nominates an incompetent cabinet without reqirement for background check? But many nominees are unqualified.

Echo editorial published in the Boston Globe:

RFK Jr.? Seriously?
Some of Donald Trump’s nominees are real (loooosssy❗) doozies. The Senate must publicly vet them via thorough background checks, committee hearings, and floor votes.

Senate Republicans must be thanking their lucky stars that former representative Matt Gaetz withdrew last week as President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to be attorney general. 

In doing so, Gaetz rescued the Republicans, who will take control of the Senate early in January, from having to oppose his nomination and thereby incur Trump’s assured wrath.

That rejecting Gaetz might have seemed a profile in courage says much about the state of Republican politics today: He was among the least qualified nominees to run the Justice Department in memory and had been one of the most scandal-scarred and disliked men in Congress before he resigned earlier this month. One of his staunchest defenders was former representative George Santos, who was expelled from the House last year as an ethical embarrassment.

Now comes the truly hard part. More than two dozen Trump Cabinet secretaries and other top administration officials will require Senate confirmation early next year, and some of them are (looooossy❗) oozies. For the integrity of their own institution and the good of the nation, the Senate must not simply rubber stamp them all, as Trump and his most vocal supports will demand.

This process must begin by not acceding to Trump’s suggestion that he should be allowed to choose his Cabinet through so-called recess appointments, which would circumvent the gauntlet of Senate approval. The Senate must instead move with dispatch to publicly vet all of Trump’s nominees via thorough background checks, committee hearings, and floor votes.

Though he would be the last to admit it, Trump himself would benefit if his most dubious nominees were forced to answer hard questions about possible ethical issues and policy positions. They should show competence beyond the ability to please a Fox News audience. If nothing else, the process might save him from his own worst impulses.

So where to begin? Start with former representative Tulsi Gabbard, a onetime Democrat turned Bernie Sanders independent turned MAGA enthusiast, who is Trump’s choice to be director of national intelligence. The job entails overseeing the 18 agencies that collect and analyze information from human spies, satellites, and other foreign and domestic surveillance sources. The DNI is the chief intelligence adviser to the president and his national security leadership, the keeper of the nation’s most classified secrets.

Gabbard is justifiably criticized for her lack of experience (and incompetence❗)  in intelligence policy, beyond her service in the Army National Guard. 

But, far more troubling is her bizarre coziness with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard blamed the United States for provoking the aggression, an absurd apology for Putin’s unsubtle expansionist ambitions. And during the Syrian civil war, she accused the United States of supporting terrorists there, even as Assad — an avowed ally of not just Russia but also Iran — was massacring his own citizens. It should come as no surprise that Rossiya-1, a Russian state television channel, called her a Russian “comrade.”

Next up is Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense. Though he has little experience managing a large organization, he did serve with the Army National Guard,  in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of greater concern: He is accused by an unnamed woman of rape during a Republican event in 2017; he asserts he had consensual sex with her. Democrats can be counted on to question Hegseth about this accusation.

But,  Republicans must also look hard at Hegseth’s policy statements, including his vigorous defense of troops accused or convicted of war crimes; his opposition to women serving in combat, though they have been for years; and his being a hyper-partisan Trump loyalist who seems eager to politicize the armed services. The latter would be a dire subversion of t  US military’s long tradition of nonpartisanship.

And then there is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s  (incompetent) pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services. The sprawling agency is nearly as large as the Pentagon and oversees the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For all his support for quack theories, Kennedy has called for improving the nation’s diet. But his obsessive and scientifically refuted skepticism about vaccines is deeply alarming, given the clear benefits of inoculations against not just COVID-19, measles, and the flu, but also once-deadly diseases that have been nearly eradicated, like polio. (HELLO❓ But, wait, wait❗ What about the hypocritical picture taken with RFKjr eating a MacDonald's hamburger with his new master the 😡cult leader DJT❓)

The department not only delivers crucial health care funding to individuals and institutions, it also helps direct the nation’s medical research. At the very least, the Senate must closely interrogate his views on the research and development of potentially life-saving vaccines and other curative treatments.

No one should be surprised if Senate Republicans assist Trump in pursuing his (incompetent) policy agenda, whether sharply reducing immigration, shrinking the regulatory state, reducing US military commitments, opposing Chinese expansionism, reinvigorating domestic manufacturing, or cutting taxes  (for the rich).

If ever there were a magistrate in need of restraint, it is Donald Trump. Who among the Senate Republicans will stand for the good of the nation and integrity of the Senate itself against blind loyalty to the (tryant) president?

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by the newspaper's Editorial Board. 

What the Senate should vigorously oppose are Trump’s worst inclinations toward retribution and overreach😥😞. Never mind that the nation’s security will be threatened by corrupt, hyper-politicized, or incompetent oversight of the military and intelligence agencies. Trump’s own MAGA base will be among the first to be hurt if the nation’s health care system is shipwrecked by bumbling leadership.

In Federalist No. 76, Alexander Hamilton argued that the great benefit of requiring Senate approval of top administration jobs was to prevent “the appointment of unfit characters.” He added: “The necessity of its co-operation, in the business of appointments, will be a considerable and salutary restraint upon the conduct of that magistrate.”

If ever there were a magistrate in need of restraint, it is Donald Trump. Who among the Senate Republicans will stand for the good of the nation and integrity of the Senate itself against blind loyalty to the president?