Donald Trump and maga Republicans must put an end to political prosecutions based on retribution. Pam Bondi must resign.

Echo report published in Washington Monthly electronic news by James Zirin.

James Comey. the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and former District Attorney for the New York Southern District, was (barely) indicted for making false statements and obstructing Congress. 

The gossamer-thin charges, issued by a federal grand jury, came after Donald Trump pressured the attorney general to indict Comey for perjury before the statute of limitations expires next week. At issue: whether Comey lied during a Senate hearing in September 2020, about the FBI’s investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016, election, and whether his deputy, Andrew McCabe, authorized a leak to a reporter. An inspector general’s report, probably not shown to the grand jury, casts doubt that anything was untoward on Comey’s part. The president’s norm-shattering crusade against Comey included pressuring Attorney General Pam Bondi, bouncing his own respected pick for U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and replacing him with an insurance attorney who worked on Trump’s personal defense team and has no prosecutorial experience. The former is reported to have balked at making the indictments Trump wanted. The latter seemed to have no such hesitation. That Comey may well have elected Trump in 2016, by violating Department of Justice policy and giving long, rambling remarks about Hillary Clinton’s emails—a case he closed that summer and then, with great fanfare and little evidence, reopened days before the presidential election—is one of the ironies of our era when justice can best be seen through a fun house mirror. It’s a shocking development and proof that Trump’s presidency is a revenge-driven one and is in full throttle. I suspect, with great sadness, this will not be the last of the Trumpian revenge indictments.

I came of age in the law when presidents and prosecutors were made of sterner stuff. In 1967, when I joined the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, I became steeped in the Justice Department’s tradition of non-partisan independence.

Mr. Comey would head the office after 9/11, but when I was there, the head was the legendary prosecutor Bob Morgenthau, who would later become the longtime Manhattan District Attorney. Public service was in his DNA. His grandfather was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, nominated by Woodrow Wilson. His father was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary. He was a friend and appointee of President John F. Kennedy.

No one asked me about my politics when I interviewed for the job. In fact, I was a registered Republican. The “Boss,” as we affectionately called Morgenthau, expected that we, as federal prosecutors, be guided only by the facts and the law in each case. Politics was foreign to our culture. We were lawmen, not political apparatchiks. We investigated Republicans and Democrats with equal fervor, sharing and sharing alike.

Today, under Donald Trump, tradition is seriously compromised. The Communist Manifesto predicted the “withering away of the state,” and under Trump, we are witnessing it shrivel or loom all-powerful, depending on how you look at it.

Forget that Trump has diminished if not extinguished the government’s commitment to foreign aid, medical research, Medicaid, sensible economic regulation, the environment, and the arts.

Forget the First Amendment infraction that two late-night television political satirists have been forced off the air, with two others said to be “next” as part of the crackdown on media using libel actions and threats to block legitimate mergers and acquisitions. Trivial is the footnote that in the face of public outcry, The Walt Disney Company, ABC’s parent, has announced Jimmy Kimmel’s show is back on the air. The abridgement of free speech continues. Under pressure from the government, right-wing media company Sinclair, which operates nearly 40 ABC stations across the country, says it will not restore Kimmel’s show to the airwaves it licenses. It announced it will preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! with news programming. Nexstar, which owns roughly 30 ABC affiliates and is seeking regulatory approval from the Federal Communications Commission for its merger with Tegna, says it will follow suit.

Forget that the executive claims it has the authority to impose harsh tariffs when that power is explicitly granted to Congress by the Constitution.

Forget that Trump threatens to send the military or ICE agents to blue cities across the country to carry out law enforcement activities, even though it is illegal under the Posse Comitatus statute.

Forget that Trump has attempted to undermine the Federal Reserve’s independence by trying to fire Lisa Cook, a Biden-appointed member of the Fed’s board of governors, over a minor issue related to a mortgage application filed before she took office or that virtually all living Fed chairs and former Treasury secretaries have filed an amicus brief spelling out the grave threat posed by this president to Fed independence.

Forget that releasing all the Justice Department files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein would be a simple matter and could erase lingering suspicion about lurid details of his 15-year relationship with Trump, but most of the documents remain secret.

Forget that three Trump supporters—Trevor Milton, Carlos Watson, and Devon Archer—each convicted of securities fraud, were pardoned, potentially undoing civil penalties that could total hundreds of millions of dollars. Also, forget that the Justice Department is ignoring the investigation of Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar. Homan allegedly took a paper bag of cash, worth $50,000, to help FBI agents posing as businessmen secure government contracts related to the border.

From all this, we might swallow hard and move on.

But the final straw is that Erik Siebert, U.S. Attorney for Eastern Virginia, was forced out of office for refusing to indict Trump’s personal enemies after reviewing the facts and the law. Siebert resigned, though Trump claims he had fired him. Siebert, a seasoned lawman appointed by Trump himself, believed there was no crime to prosecute. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office: “I want him out.” The issue? Siebert refused to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully went after the Trump Organization for fraud and is a key figure in much of the litigation state attorneys general are bringing against Trump. Siebert’s office was looking into Jim Comey and declined to pursue charges against him.

Siebert was a seasoned and respected career prosecutor. He began his career in 2010 as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. He spent nearly 15 years prosecuting a wide range of cases, including violent crime, international and domestic drug trafficking, illegal firearms, fraud, child sexual exploitation, illegal immigration, and public corruption. Trump appointed him interim U.S. Attorney the day after his inauguration on January 21, 2025. He received awards and accolades for his prosecutions. He was a Metropolitan Police Department officer in Washington, D.C., from 2002 to 2006. His father-in-law is a former Virginia Attorney General and a counselor to Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin.

Siebert had support from Virginia Republicans and the commonwealth’s Democratic U.S. Senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine. They knew he was a dedicated career prosecutor. He had the respect of the judges in his district. When his 120-day interim term ended in May, the court unanimously reappointed him to continue in office.

Trump, the self-styled chief law enforcement officer of the country, has flagrantly abused his power. His conduct in seeking direct control over the hot-button cases in Pam Bondi’s Justice Department makes any parade of other horrors pale in comparison. We are living through a period of maximum danger for the nation.

Even before Siebert resigned, ABC News predicted that the administration would appoint a U.S. attorney to investigate James more aggressively. “It looks to me like [James] is very guilty of something,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week, “but I really don’t know.”

So, who would that person be, ready to do the master’s bidding? The Washington Post reported it would be Mary “Maggie” Cleary. Cleary, who has limited federal experience and has spent much of her career in the Virginia state system, joined the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in September 2025. Her LinkedIn bio states she “served in the Culpeper County Republican Committee.” She undoubtedly recognizes the immense power of the prosecutor, claiming in an essay published this year that she had been “framed” as participating in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol—an incident she says ended with her being cleared by investigators and inspiring her to pursue a U.S. attorney position.

After the Post reports on Siebert’s successor, Trump abruptly shifted his stance on Truth Social, claiming that he judged that his enemies were “all guilty as hell.” Guilty of what? If he had read the United States Code, it would probably have been the sections related to conspiracy to defraud the United States or mishandling classified documents, for which he was indicted.

Then, he proposed a different nominee, Lindsay Halligan, a “Special Assistant to the President” who has worked on the information purge at the Smithsonian. Before this, she practiced insurance law in Florida, joined his legal team, and handled her first federal case in 2022 when Mar-a-Lago was searched. She has never been involved in any prosecution. Unlike Cleary, who was somewhat qualified for an Assistant U.S. Attorney’s position, Halligan lacks the remotest experience to qualify her for this important role.

Halligan brought an indictment against Comey, and a grand jury has agreed. What now? A federal district judge might dismiss the case for lack of evidence or because this is a selective and vindictive prosecution; Trump himself has given Comey’s attorneys ammunition with his public statements. If and when the Comey case ever reaches trial, prosecutors will have the Herculean task of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to twelve jurors when there’s a mountain of evidence that the prosecution was selective. And then there is always an appeal. What a waste of judicial resources!

And beyond the prosecutions of Comey and perhaps James, Trump’s push for indictments of his two enemies could undermine public confidence that other cases are being pursued for valid reasons.

Here’s the full text of what our president said:

And the follow-on to the purge of Siebert is the pressure on Maryland U.S. Attorney Kelly O. Hayes, another veteran career prosecutor. Hayes has the purported mortgage fraud case against Senator Adam Schiff, another of Trump’s enemies, and the one against his former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, for mishandling classified documents. Hayes reportedly told associates that she well understood the grave consequences if she declined to bring a case against a Trump enemy because the evidence of criminality was insufficient.

If history doesn’t repeat itself, it’s said to rhyme. In 2006, President George W. Bush fired nine U.S. attorneys for what seemed like political reasons. His Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, appropriately resigned over the scandal. 

As Watergate sadly proved, politics has no place in public prosecutions.

If left unchecked, Trump will transform us into a nation where criminal law enforcement becomes a political tool for the president. We tend to mock Latin American countries as “banana republics,” implying they are places where the government suppresses opposition. However, there is much to learn from Latinos about respecting the rule of law. Argentina prosecuted its former president, Jorge Rafael Videla, for crimes committed during his regime, and Brazil did the same with its leader, Jair Messias Bolsonaro. Yet, we seem unable to do even that.

Opinion by James D. Zirin, author and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New York’s Southern District. He also hosts the public television talk show and podcast Conversations with Jim Zirin

Donald Trump and the Republican unpopular big ugly tax cut bill and tariff prices. So what do the maga do? They cheat: Gerrymandering

Trump’s Increasingly Creative Authoritarianism

Echo interview published in The Washington Monthly:

Donald Trump’s recent efforts to seize Harvard’s patents and militarize DC show how the president is leaving no avenue untouched in his bid for absolute power.

The Trump administration has become increasingly creative—and ruthless—in its use and abuse of existing policy tools to further its agenda. It has, for instance, weaponized the Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights to reverse its historic mission. Instead of promoting diversity, it’s now working to end it. More recently, Trump has threatened to use legislation passed in 1980—the Bayh-Dole Act—to take over Harvard’s patents. While intended to give government the ability to compel the licensing of patents in fairly narrow circumstances—such as to protect health and safety—the law, in Trump’s hands, has become yet another cudgel to use against Harvard (and, potentially, other elite universities).

In this week’s politics roundtable, editors Paul Glastris, Bill Scher and Anne Kim talk about Trump’s creeping authoritarianism, as well as the false promise of revenues from Trump’s tariffs. 

Also discussed is how Democrats should respond to the escalating arms race over redistricting.

Anne Kim:  Let’s talk first about Trump’s tariffs, which have finally gone into effect. On average, we’re talking about 15 percent baseline tariffs on most goods coming to United States now, plus higher tariffs against certain countries that Trump is targeting for a variety of reasons. That includes a 50 percent potential tariff on Brazil for its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was accused of staging a coup after losing an election, and a threatened 50 percent tariff against India for buying Russian oil. Bill, you wrote a recent column for the Washington Monthly that disputes the president’s conclusion here. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Bill Scher: Trump talks as if the federal government collects more revenue in tariffs that we’re a wealthy country. That’s not how most people really look at wealth. It doesn’t mean that you and I get more money if the federal government collects more money in revenue.

And it does seem like we are collecting more revenue from tariffs than before. If the July 2025 tariff number of $29.6 billion reflects what we will be paying going forward, the annual cost will be $355.2 billion. So that’s a lot more money into the federal government coffers.

But remember, we’re paying that.

Businesses have been trying to absorb the cost but now they’re saying they can’t keep doing this.

Anne Kim: It does seem like every day there’s a new story about how small businesses in particular are getting hit by this. And it seems that even large companies like Walmart and Amazon are beginning to announcethat they’re going to be doing price increases. And let’s not forget that these are incredibly regressive taxes.

Bill Scher:Well, not only are the tariffs regressive, if you’re middle class or working class, you pay a larger share of your wealth in goods than someone who’s a mega-millionaire. And this has been known about tariffs going back to the 19th century. This is why we got rid of these tariffs because people understood it was a very regressive system.

Trump also just passed a tax cut—the “One Big Beautiful (aka "ugly") Bill Act”—but the tax breaks in that law are also skewed to the wealthy. In fact, there are analyses that say if you’re in the bottom 40%, you’re actually going to pay more or lose more of your income. So it’s regressiveness on top of regressiveness. And I think it’s a huge opportunity for Democrats going into 2026 and 2028 to say, “We’ve got a great way to relieve you on taxes—we’re to make those tariffs go ‘poof.’” Instant tax cut for the working class. And if we need that revenue so badly to alleviate our debt burdens, well, we can replace that with tax increases on the wealthy who got a sweet deal from the Trump administration.Anne Kim: Republicans are starting to propose tariff “rebates” as a way of, well, acknowledging that tariffs are going to take a bite out of people’s budgets. It hearkens back to maybe 10 years ago when we were all talking about carbon taxes and consumption taxes, and proposing rebates as way to make these taxes less regressive.

Paul Glastris:Yeah, it’s sort of how you put the lipstick on the pig of an unpopular policy.

Well, the other thing that’s going on here is that the public is beginning to see price increases. The BIG newsletter has a piece out today about the freak out that’s happening on TikTok as people perceive that back-to-school prices this year are way higher.

And on top of that, the big retailers are using this moment to bring in what’s called “dynamic pricing.” First of all, you look at these TikToks and people are saying, “Look, they’ve scratched out the old price or they’ve whited out the old price,” and the new price is now 30 percent higher on everything from swim trunks to home decor to groceries. But what they’re also doing is taking off the prices. Now you go into Walmart and other retailers and use your phone to scan a code to get the price, and that price can change by the hour or by the day.

People hate it because they can’t plan their budgets if they don’t know going into the store what the price is going to be. And the larger context here is that it’s true that a lot of companies have held off increasing prices until now. But what’s also happening is that companies are using this as an excuse to bring in this dynamic pricing to be able to essentially extract more profit. They can know by your phone what your income is and charge you more for diapers and then the next person, right? Or they can see that there is a diaper shortage coming in two weeks and jack up prices. This is a pricing power that big retailers have wanted to use, and they’re going to use it now whether they need to be passing on prices from tariffs or not.

Anne Kim: It’s like airline pricing coming to your school notebooks and backpacks!

So let’s turn to redistricting. Texas has been trying to redraw its map in order to gain five Republican seats. Democratic lawmakers have fled the state in order to break the quorum and prevent this plan from succeeding. Abbott has issued civil arrest warrants. Meanwhile, blue state governors in California and New York, for instance, are talking about hatching their own redistricting plans and there are even some strategists who think that Democrats should go further. 

For example, I was kind of struck by this op-ed in the Washington Post over the weekend arguing that Democrats should “go nuclear” by  retaliating against Texas based companies. For instance, they say, “blue states could band together to divest pension fund investments from and bar state contracts with Texas companies.”

What do you guys think about that particular escalation of tactics? 

Bill Scher:  Well, I think Democrats are doing the right thing so far. Texas Democrats have no obligation to be handmaidens for what Republicans are trying to do. But having said that, I suspect the Republican gerrymander is going to backfire on them. It’s very heavily reliant on gains in Latino majority districts, which has not been a reliable group for Republicans, and those gains could easily recede in a in a wave election

That’s why this op-ed that you shared struck me as very excessive, because they’re talking about things like having other states punish Texas economically. But there’s not a lot of explanation about they could actually execute that and escape being slapped down by courts. So it would probably involve a lot of years of litigation and for what? 

Texas is trying to squeeze out five more seats. They may not even successfully do it on Election Day. The average pickup for the opposition party is 25 seats, and Democrats need three to win back the House. 

And if other states fight fire with fire with their own gerrymandering, I’m totally fine with that because I generally feel that gerrymandering ends up being largely a wash at the end of the day. So I don’t see the need to try to push the envelope to economic warfare, which could really backfire politically and may not even be necessary.

Anne Kim:  It seems reflective of some broader frustration among rank-and-file Democrats that the party “just isn’t doing enough.” The Democrats are always playing by the rules, playing nice, etc. etc. 

Bill Scher:  Those who are prone to complain that Democrats aren’t fighting hard enough come up with wilder and wilder ideas to prove that they mean business, and it’s always a balancing act between fighting hard and fighting smart. But economic warfare is going to really rub a lot of people the wrong way. 

Paul Glastris:  To be fair to the authors, what they’re saying is you threaten this in the same way that during the Cold War, each side threatened the other with destruction of their cities, not because you want to destroy their cities, but because you want to strike enough terror that neither side uses the weapon. 

What they’re arguing is that blue states have far bigger economic footprints than red states, so if they band together and threaten economic warfare, that might be enough for Republicans to sort of think twice about turning their side “up to 11.”

But look, Democrats have used pension funds for many years to advance political interests. In some sense, this isn’t that new. 

But what I would say is the Trump administration is being aggressively creative with policy in a way I don’t think very many people foresaw. We see every day some new use of federal power that may or may not be constitutional, but there’s no one there to tell them not to do it. And Democrats have to be thinking, if not now – because their power is limited to states and backbench press releases in Congress – what are the policies that they’re going to pursue that are creative and aggressive now that the administration has set a precedent and the Supreme Court has allowed a lot of this expansion of power.

It’s a setup for when Democrats come back to use those levers themselves, and I do think there’s a ripe opportunity here, if not in the moment,  to plan for the future about what the Democratic agenda will be.

Anne Kim: Speaking of economic warfare and creative uses of policy, let’s turn to Trump’s escalation in the fight against higher ed. So there have been a couple developments here. The first is that the administration is now demanding that colleges hand over all admissions data, including on race, grades, and standardized test scores. Columbia and Brown have actually agreed to do this as part of their “settlements” with the government. 

Paul, you’ve been the arbiter of the College Guide for 20 years now for the Washington Monthly. What do think the long-term implications of this particular move are going to be for college accessibility all the things that the College Guide has stood for the last two decades?

Paul Glastris: Well, the way I look at it, is that the Trump administration is following everyone else in putting all its focus on elite universities, which educate 5 percent of students. A lot of this battle that the administration is waging against these hated elite institutions is trickling down to damage the universities and even the community colleges that educate 90 percent of college students. And most of these universities don’t have big DEI budgets. They didn’t have big protests during Gaza. They’re not rife with “woke” classrooms. They’re mostly people going to marketing classes taught by adjunct professors who have normal politics.

But there is a kind of a conspiracy in in the media and in politics to make everything about Columbia. So part of me is upset that this battle is going to again screw the average college student.

Anne Kim:  One small consolation is that the New York Times reported that there’s literally no one actually available to collect all the race and admissions data anyway because of the 100 people who worked for the National Center on Education Statistics, only four of them are left. So it may end up being kind of a toothless thing, but it does set a bad precedent.

The second thing I wanted to ask about was the government’s threat to seize control of Harvard’s patents under the compulsory licensing regime outlined under the Bayh-Dole Act. And this is actually something that the Monthly has supported in the past in different contexts. So Paul, I would love for you to clarify the intent of the statute and how that’s an abuse in this particular context.

Paul Glastris: Well, I’m not a patent lawyer. I’m not even a lawyer. But we have at the Monthly done considerable reporting by people who know the subject. And yes, the federal government has the ability to utilize this clear statutory power to force the use of patents in ways that advantage the American people. And we were arguing that they should do so to lower drug prices by taking the patents away from drug companies that misuse them and providing other means of producing these drugs in order to lower prices.

The Trump administration is not going after the drug companies, it’s going after the universities using the same statutory language. So it could well be legal with a pliant Supreme Court – maybe it becomes constitutional – but it’s for a very different cause.

But it does go to the point that there seems to be more aggressive use of policymaking on the Republican side than the Democratic side. When we started writing about this issue, arguing for march-in rights to bring down drug prices, it was when the Obama administration spent years debating it internally and not doing it. Then Biden comes in and they spent several years actually advancing the ball but left office without doing it. Donald Trump’s been in office six months and they’re already doing it. So that gives you a pretty good measure of the willingness of one party to push the envelope versus the other.

Anne Kim: So to wrap things up, Donald Trump is making announcements as we speak about the pending militarization of DC. So what are you guys expecting from that? What are you expecting the response to be and what else are you watching for this week?

Bill Scher: It’s another case of Donald Trump inventing an issue out of nothing. Crime is down in DC. There was a high profile incident involving someone he knew personally, and so he’s made that into a giant issue to give a justification for federal intrusion.

And to Paul’s point, this is how the Trump administration operates. They’re on full tilt all the time to aggressively deploy and weaponize the power of federal government when it suits their political games. Otherwise, they’re hyper-libertarian. They’re denying disaster relief even not just in blue areas, but in red areas. They’re decimating the federal workforce. They’ve decimated the Medicaid program, which is going to affect a lot of people again, not just in blue areas, but in red areas. They want to take down the Department of Education.

You can credit them for their diabolical creativity, but I think Democrats can be very well positioned to say these folks want to use the federal government to serve their own ends. And they don’t want to use it at all to help you.

Paul Glastris: I agree that what may in the end bring down the Republican Party and Donald Trump is this aggressive policy overreach. But I wouldn’t take away from that the lesson that Democrats shouldn’t be aggressive because it’s going to take real aggressive policymaking to deliver to voters what they clearly want, which is affordability, lower prices, better incomes.

All of that is going to take much stronger use of federal power than the Biden administration even used. So Democrats have to think very hard about how to do that, and how to deliver on the promises that they make when they next have a shot at voters.

Anne Kim : Well, thanks very much, gentlemen. See you next week. 

Donald Trump Republicans cannot prove damage caused by the bunker busting attack on Iran without evidence

 Will Trump's Bombing Raid on Iran Prove Not Just a Bust, But a Disaster?

A longtime military and intelligence insider explains why the failure to destroy Iran’s nuclear bunkers may have weakened U.S. power far beyond the Middle East. Published in the Washington Montly Newsletter, by Paul Glastris.

Where is the Iranian enriched uranium?

Yesterday, June 24, CNN broke the news (an exclusive reportt) about a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) preliminary report showing that the Iranian nuclear programs at underground facilities targeted by U.S. airstrikes over the weekend were not “completely and fully obliterated,” as Donald Trump claimed, but instead were likely set back a matter of months. 

To get a better sense of that report and what it means, Paul Glastris spoke with a source who has had a decades-long career in the U.S. military and the intelligence community, serving both in and out of government. The source requested anonymity to speak freely. The following is an edited version of our conversation:

Are you surprised that this DIA report was leaked?  Not at all. The results would be of high interest. Hundreds of folks at least would be on the distribution list or have access to the report.

How reliable is this report?  Time will tell. But, the DIA is the key intelligence agency that does these kinds of after-action damage assessments. That’s their traditional role and they’re very good at it. Their assessments are typically based on a combination of imagery, signals intelligence largely provided by the NSA, and human intelligence that comes from the CIA, the Israelis, and other sources. The DIA would have pulled these strings together to come up with their assessment of the damage. These nuclear sites have been the focus of the United States and Israel for decades and we’ve built up considerable sources over the years. The Israelis have clearly penetrated Iran at the highest levels. So presumably, in addition to what we can see from satellites, we are hearing chatter from within the Iranian national security bureaucracies. We will see. This is only a preliminary report, but it is not encouraging.

Are you surprised at what seems to be the limited degree of damage to these facilities? No, the United States military has been toiling for several decades to develop weapons capable of destroying underground facilities. These complexes are called “Hard and Deeply Buried Targets” (HDBT). These efforts started all the way back in the Clinton administration when the Secretary of Defense was looking at options for taking out Libya’s underground chemical weapons complex at Tarhuna. At the time, none of the options on the table were palatable, so the quest began to develop air delivered munitions that could take out these targets. It proved far more difficult than anyone would have imagined. The government established a test facility, a mock underground chemical and nuclear production facility, out in the western US and bombed it literally for years. Every type of bomb or combination of bombs were used, rarely did it cause any more than superficial damage to the facility. So, this latest weapon, long in development but never deployed, has demonstrated once again that if an adversary simply digs deeply enough, the laws of physics are on their side. So, these results were disappointing, but by no means surprising, following a long history of failure against this type of target. That’s a major reason why previous administrations have been resistant to using them.

If this initial report proves true, what are the consequences? The consequences are terrible. As long as we didn’t use them, Iran didn’t know for sure how damaging they could be. That gave us leverage with them. Now, the situation is reversed. We’ve revealed or confirmed that our most fearsome weapon, or the most fearsome we’re willing to use—we could drop nukes or send in the 82nd Airborne, but that’s not going to happen—can collapse the entrances of tunnels but not destroy facilities buried deeply in a mountain. Going into any negotiations with them, they know our limits. 

That doesn’t mean Iran is in a strong position. Israel has decimated its military, and its economy is in ruins because of sanctions. In any negotiations with Trump, it’s the sanctions they want lifted. But now they’re in a much better position to get what they want than they were before this bombing run, especially considering other intel suggesting that the regime removed some or all its highly enriched uranium and centrifuges out these facilities before the attack.

And not just Iran. Every other adversarial regime now knows these weapons are essentially duds. That weakens our leverage considerably with all of them. I am sure Kim Jung Un is happy in North Korea today.

What do you make of the fact that Trump is continuing to insist that the facilities were totally destroyed? I’d say that’s not going to fly. If I’m the Iranians, I’m going to clear the rubble from the entrances of those facilities and then invite CNN and Al Jazeera to bring their cameras into the tunnels and show that they’re still there, still functional.

Paul Glastris is the editor in chief of the Washington Monthly

Republicans cannot possibly ignore the Donald Trump corruption evident for all to see in the Qatar flying brothel "bribe jet"

Trump’s Qatar Airplane Problem Keeps Flying

Echo essay published in Washington Monthly by James D. Zirin

The president’s (corrupt) inability to distinguish between public and private interests reaches new heights with the gift of a foreign 747.

Qatari jet gift turns spotlight on Trump graft allegations

Donald Trump’s Middle East trip took him to three countries where his company has significant investments, including an 80-floor hotel in the United Arab Emirates, Trump-branded apartments in Saudi Arabia, and a $5.5 billion golf club in Qatar.

Trump is, of course, comfortable receiving a private jet as a “gift” from the Qatari royal family. This act has legal, ethical, and security concerns that even the president’s most loyal allies have questioned. The plane will be given to the Department of Defense and then become the exclusive property of the Trump Presidential Library after he leaves office. It will, therefore, be available to Trump for the rest of his life.

Presidential aircraft have not only security but also defense capabilities. If you try to imagine, say, Beijing, offering to refurbish the Situation Room, the president’s private residence in the White House, the Oval Office, and the presidential limousine, someone might say, “Beware the Chinese even bearing gifts.”

In addition to being a form of transport, the aircraft is used for war planning, is a de facto residence for the president, and includes a bedroom and shower.

No White House would allow a Beijing crew to redo 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  

To ensure the plane’s security, it would require ripping it apart. No wonder Kathleen Clark, an ethics specialist at Washington University Law School, told PBS that the gift is no boon for taxpayers. The government’s costs are projected to exceed a billion dollars.

“The government isn’t getting the equivalent of Air Force One for free, Clark said. “They’re getting an airplane frame that they will then have to—as you say—strip down and examine” for surveillance devices, then rebuild from the studs. “This is no bargain. It’s not even a corrupt bargain. It’s just corrupt.”

Trump is famously incapable of observing long-standing lines between public service and private profit. Another name for such tendencies is corruption. The Constitution couldn’t have quite anticipated a president’s refusal to form a blind trust and keep a hand in his businesses while in office. Still, they drew red lines since the Founders were petrified that foreign monarchies would try to overthrow their new government. The president had to be a natural-born citizen, senators citizens for 14 years, and representatives for seven. And gifts from abroad were blatantly forbidden.

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution provides, as follows:

[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States] shall, without the consent of the Congress accept of any present, Emolument…of any kind from any King, Prince or foreign state.”

Trump once said he wanted to “terminate” the Constitution to overturn the 2020, election and reinstate him to power. 

When it comes to terminating the Constitution, beware the opening wedge. The Constitution is but a detail that always seems to get in his way.

Amber Phillips, a Washington Post political reporter, points out that Trump’s dealings with the Middle East are just one aspect of his conflicts of interest, involving lobbyists leading government agencies, selling Bibles, earning millions off cryptocurrency, and more.

“Conflicts of interest are the hallmark of both of Trump’s presidencies,” Meredith McGehee, an independent expert on Congress and advocacy, government ethics, and money in politics, told The Washington Post. “The fact that he got away with a lot of apparent conflicts in his first term, I think, has emboldened him in his second. The magnitude is jaw-dropping.”

According to Phillips, here’s the deal.

Lobbyists. He’s elevated lobbyists to senior government roles:  Trump 1.0 tried to keep lobbyists from taking positions in government, but in Trump 2.0, oil and mining lobbyists with deep ties to their industries are leading energy policy for the U.S. government, according to the Campaign Legal Center. Trump has also relaxed the reins on what foreign lobbyists can do, which “leaves the United States susceptible to hostile foreign influence,” CLC reports.

Firing Watchdog Officials. Many of Trump’s moves are being fought in the courts. He fired inspectors general and other watchdog officials who probe corruption in the government. He may have ignored the law to do it. The watchman sometimes waketh in vain, but it makes no difference if there is no watchman.

Merchandising. He shamelessly sells merchandise in a way that smacks of a Byzantine bazaar, everything from a Sharpie pen ($3) to a Bible ($60) and more. Past presidents have made millions writing and selling books, but McGehee said it seems unprecedented how brazen Trump is by hawking his wares while still in office. “I can’t think of another president who had this dynamic,” she said. 

Crypto. The pick of the litter in Trump’s merchandising is his venture into cryptocurrency, the very financial product that he once condemned. An Emirates fund invested $2 billion in a Trump crypto firm. His family is involved in several crypto businesses, but sticking out is a Trump digital coin, a $TRUMP meme coin. The meme coin technically has no inherent value, but individuals are deeply invested. Investors were recently spurred to buy millions of dollars’ worth of the coin to earn an invitation to an “intimate, private dinner” with the president. The “intimate, private dinner” will be held next week at his Virginia golf club for the top 220 holders of the $TRUMP coin. Every day, Trump supporters have lost money as the coin’s value plummeted, but Trump, like a stockbroker, earns money every time coins are sold, bought, or traded. The Trump group has garnered hundreds of millions in fees and crypto sales so far, report The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and Jeremy B. Merrill. To crib the title of Fred Schwed’s 1940, Wall Street classic, “Where are the customers’ yachts?” 

“A [president] who has almost 40 percent of his net worth in his crypto ventures points out Norman Eisen, past White House ethics czar and co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment in 2020. “At the same time as he is regulating the digital currency industry—and, for good measure, has substantial foreign government cash pouring into those ventures!” writes Eisen.

In his first term, Trump was criticized for putting up foreign visitors to the White House at his Washington hotel. There, they held events trying to win favor. What is going on now makes what happened in Trump 1.0 look like the petty corruption Donald Trump grew up with in Queens. As Eisen says, “It is the single most profound presidential conflict of the modern era.”

Sovereign Wealth Funds. Trump’s family and friends are awash in cash gushing from the desert. According to The Wall Street Journal, sovereign funds from the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia and Qatar “have committed more than $3.5 billion to a private-equity fund run by Trump’s son-in-law,” and that “state-backed funds from Qatar and the U.A.E. were major investors in a $6 billion fundraising round” for Elon Musk’s xAI. Sporting a groomsman’s gray tie, Musk sat behind Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the president spoke in Riyadh.

McGehee, the government-ethics expert, said Congress is the only check on a president with such a multitude of conflicts. The Supreme Court already granted presidents immunity for official acts. But Congress could probe Trump’s business deals—as Republicans did with President Joe Biden’s family—and at least bring the focus to how he is ripping us off, if not pass appropriate legislation.

But even as Republican lawmakers increasingly express discomfort with the GOP’s proverbial blind eye to the telescope, Trump told reporters that the plane was “just a gesture of good faith” by the Qataris, and there the matter lies. 

Rest assured, if the Democrats win the House in 2026, item one on the agenda will be the Qatari plane and the Emoluments Clause. 

Nevertheless, Republican lawmakers do not appear to be worried* (❓), and in any event, they do not want to risk a public confrontation with the president. (Republicans in Congress are "kool-aid cult" intoxicated and they cannot think for themselves.)

“So, he’s going to keep doing this until he can’t,” McGehee said, “and there is a hubris there that I think is beyond even just having a conflict. I think the American people are mistaken if they believe that just because you’re rich, you can’t be bought.” And just because you’re rich, you can still be sold.

By  James D. Zirin author and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New York’s Southern District. He also hosts the public television talk show and podcast Conversations with Jim Zirin.

*Maine Writer Post Script:  Republican's short term memory loss. Sarah Palin launched her political career when she listed Alaska's state paid for luxury jet for sale on eBay.  

Donald Trump is irresponsibly destroying America as we knew it but why is he jealous about John and Jackie Kennedy?

One would like to think that RFKjr, (Rober F. Kennedy Jr.) would raise objections about this cruelty towards his family's heritage.  Although RFKjr is an  one of the incompetents in Trump's circus cabinet, he is still a Kennedy, and should express pride in his uncle's legacy, as a former and martyred president.

Trump’s (cruel and insane❗) War on John and Jackie Kennedy.

(IMO Trump is jealous about their lingering 90 percent positive popularity, even today.)

From ripping up the lovely White House Rose Garden to redoing Air Force One and the Kennedy Center, it’s Mar-a-Lago gilt versus Camelot taste. By Margaret Carlson published in the Washington Monthly.

John Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy

Obviously, Donald Trump never promised us a Rose Garden. 

Nor did he warn us that in his first 100 days, he would rip up the storied Jacqueline Kennedy Garden outside the White House’s West Wing and pave much of it for dancing, making it a glorified patio like the Mar-a-Lago one where he holds court. Nor did he divulge his intentions to force himself on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He muted his obsession with painting over the robin's egg blue color scheme on Air Force One that the Kennedys had given the presidential plane, and that no commander-in-chief since has considered removing, what with its echoes of blue skies and Tiffany’s boxes.

The through line of Trump’s dark to-do list is blotting out the Camelot aesthetic of John and Jackie Kennedy, erasing the halcyon Jacqueline Kennedy years, when the then 31-year-old First Lady remade the White House long after it was due for a lift following the Depression and World War II. After such bleak days, First Ladies Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower concentrated on the country’s recovery. It took the young presidential spouse (née Bouvier) and mother of two to use her brief, shining moment to return the Executive Mansion to its former glory. She did it and won over the country.

The 47th president wants a White House with all the subtlety of a Russian oligarch’s yacht and a Qatari Sheikh’s palace. Gold tchotchkes abound, including two golden cherubs imported from Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s aesthetics may prove to be as unpopular as his tariff-happy taxation of everything from coffee to Camrys. There’s a gulf (of America) between the public's impression of Trump’s first term and Kennedy's. According to Gallup in 2023, 90 percent of those polled held a favorable impression of JFK. A scant 46 percent felt the same way towards the first Floridian president.

That’s a lot of ground to make up, and Trump’s left no myth untouched. Erasing Jackie’s magic touch—ordering a coat of robin's egg blue on Air Force One–was high on his to-do list ever since his first term. He told CBS he wanted a paint job that “looks more like America” and “isn’t a Jackie Kennedy color.” Trump came up with a Democratic blue so dark it looks black, and a Republican red so bright it dominates. For their part, Democrats wanted no paint job at all, and neither did the Air Force generals who would be paying for it. He yearned for his long-awaited Boeing to arrive.

Then there is Qatar❗Last Sunday, the Qataris came dangling a fully tricked-out luxury 747, the likes of which no president has seen, including the well-to-do Kennedys with their dump of a Boeing 707. The deal had two parts: The plane would first go to the Department of Defense and then to Trump’s presidential library when he finishes his second (or third?) term. Eric and Don Jr. could then squabble over it when they weren’t collecting billions on their own digital currency and the myriad other businesses they’d hustled across the globe when Dad was in the Oval.

There should be a law, and there is. The Constitution strictly prohibits foreign gifts. But that’s never stopped Trump before who said he’d be “stupid” not to accept the Qatari plane, and so would the U.S. Treasury. “The maintenance we spend on those old planes, you wouldn’t even believe it.” That’s the Donald, always thinking of others, but not with his brain, if he believes a Middle Eastern sultan is spending $400 million for nothing in return.

The attached strings are hanging from every overhead bin. If this were Trump’s twist on the Harrison Ford movie, Air Force One, the president would be midair when the call came in advising him that the aircraft was under Qatari control with a course set for a NATO member with an extradition treaty if he didn’t do exactly as told. Trump actually walked onstage at the 2016 Republican convention to “The Parachutes,” part of the 1997 film’s soundtrack. Life doesn’t imitate art. It cuts and pastes it.

But, alas, Trump may not be getting a shiny new plane under the Christmas tree, after all, just a stocking with three pencils and two dolls. 😜A little due diligence and it turns out the Qataris were trying to dump this plane for years, lowering the price but finding no takers until they found a mark in the author of The Art of the Deal. The 747-8 was illiquid, and its decor appealed to a very small audience of other Qataris and the Donald. Even Middle Eastern oligarchs find millions of dollars in repairs, maintenance, and storage painful. This is why they were happy to unload it and insisted all gifts are final. There would be no returning the plane at the end of Trump’s second term (or third!). It would go to his presidential library and then, perhaps, to the Trump kids to squabble over who would keep it operable. Who’s the “stupid” one now❓

It was audacity, not fortune, when the 47th president pulled off a hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center this winter. Trump mowed down half its board, replacing them with MAGA loyalists, and its head, Deborah Rutter, with Richard Grenell, the director not of plays but of national intelligence, in his first term. 

Trump booted the Kennedy Center’s chair, the noted philanthropist and private equity mogul David Rubinstein, and installed himself. Almost immediately, Lin-Manuel Miranda canceled Hamilton's scheduled performance. To that, Trump huffed, so what, he didn’t like the first Treasury Secretary anyway, even if he was the founder of the New York Post, in 1801.

Maybe “My Shot” and “You’ll Be Back” isn’t the vibe of a septuagenarian whose taste runs to Cats, with its three full-blown renditions of his beloved “Memories.” 

Fortunately, another favorite, Les Misérables, was on the calendar before the hostilities. But in the time it takes to get a drink at intermission, ten members of the Les Miz cast went rogue. Hamilton, he could let pass, but fewer voices belting out “Do You Hear the Voices Sing?” Never! In a statement, Trump lamented the partisan politics; he just wants his Kennedy Center to be “a place where people of all political stripes sit next to each other and never ask who someone voted for.” Except at board meetings.

Trump has taken over a nationally beloved citadel he never set foot in during his first term, after several of the artists being honored criticized him. Chairing his first board meeting, he proposed that as a “king of ratings,” he should start emceeing the Honors because “every network will start bidding on it, going crazy.” Maybe, but CBS’s broadcast already wins the ratings as it is. Since his second coming, the Washington Post cites a 50 percent drop in ticket sales.

Never mind that. On opening night next month, June 11, Trump will debut as chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which could be the Donald J. Trump Center by then. A box seat costs only $2 million, not that much if you consider it includes a VIP reception.

Occasionally, Trump has to go home to eat, pray, sleep, and love—three of those anyway, maybe only two—in a house that Jackie restored to its historically correct state and incidentally invades Trump’s workspace. She traced the Resolute Desk, a gift from Queen Victoria made from wood salvaged from one of Her Majesty’s ships, to a storage room in the basement, refinished it, and installed it in the Oval Office, where Trump signs Executive Orders of dubious legality. Jackie’s prime time tour of the White House, broadcast on two networks and syndicated to 50 countries, was watched by 56 million people.

As every president does, Trump gets to add some personal touches to his surroundings: choose which of the Founding Fathers' wigged heads will hang in the Oval Office, the design of the carpet, the material of the drapes, and the placement of family photos. 

But Trumps' gone wild, encrusting anything that doesn’t move with gold lamé, on the fireplace mantel, the ceiling, the Rococo mirrors, gold frames around the portraits (he bumped Obama’s to make room for his), and gold eagles nesting on side tables. There were so many yellow objets behind the president as he called President Voldomyr Zelensky a big loser, it wasn’t farfetched to assume one of them was a trophy Trump collected for being a big winner.

The Oval Office weighed down with metal, Trump moved out of doors to finish Melania’s stripmining of the Rose Garden, which the Kennedys had installed. The main objective was upgrading its slow-draining irrigation system, but Jackie’s crabapple trees somehow disappeared to an undisclosed location in the process. Michael Beschloss, the historian, called Melania’s landscaping an “evisceration” that erased “decades of American history.” He suspected one reason was to clear a better camera angle for her speech at the Republican convention held there due to COVID in 2020.

She fired back that he’d misjudged her landscaping: “His misleading information is dishonorable & he should never be trusted as a professional historian."

Starting any day now, Trump will finish the job unless a curator stops him, ripping out the manicured space to pave it over for a terrace (so womens’ Jimmy Choo stilettos won’t sink in the soft ground), adjoining a ballroom he intends to build (like Mar a Lago’s) so that after dinner he can curl his fingers into a ball and fist dance the night away to “YMCA,” once a gay anthem and now a MAGA hymn.

Melania isn't around enough to help Trump’s crusade, only 14 days in the last four months, and her jacket back in the first term was a warning that “she really doesn’t care.” The former model is reclusive, largely emerging to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars for speaking and showing up. She’ll get a cut of the $40 million documentary about her life produced by Bruce Ratner and streamed by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon. Inside the White House, she was not keen on her official duties. 

While Jackie formalized Christmas at the White House with a “Nutcracker” theme her first year and a “Children’s Tree” her second, complete with tours, in 2018, Melania featured 40 blood red trees flanking each side of a hall, spooking the children. A viral meme of white Handmaid’s Tale hats atop the trees spooked the parents, and no tours. About the criticism she should have expected, and may have welcomed, she told her long-time friend and a manager of the 2017, inaugural, who by then was taping her, “What the f**k do I care about Christmas decorations?”

The worst thing Trump could do to the Kennedy legacy was give an outlet to a member of the troubled second generation beset by drugs, alcohol, divorces, and suicides. Over a thousand new cases of measles this month, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr is still saying from his position of authority, “There are problems with the vaccines.” At Congressional hearings last week, the 71-year-old wouldn’t give a straight answer to a repeated question about whether he’d vaccinate his own children. After a few more grillings like this, he won’t have the credibility to reduce the additives in Cocoa Puffs.

Kennedy isn’t the worst Trump appointee, but the worst Kennedy ever appointed to a post of such urgency. When the opponent of Vax Americana goes dancing on what was once his aunt’s Rose Garden, and watches Kennedy Center board member Lee Greenwood crooning “Proud to Be an American” at the arts center named for his slain uncle, we will have achieved full Trump. The saving grace is that Jackie, who would be 96 this summer, didn’t live to see it.

Margaret Carlson is a Washington Monthly contributing writer.

Donald Trump is the worst American president of all time. Trump tariffs are terrible for the world's economy!

Echo essay published in the Washington Monthly by Robert J. Shipiro" "devastating capital flight that could leave many of our leading financial institutions insolvent..."

Trump’s Perfect Storm that Could Sink the American Economy

It’s not just the president’s trade-destroying tariffs, erratic shifts in policy, and fiscal recklessness. Look at the rule of law—or lack thereof.

Donald Trump has steered the American economy into a perfect storm. In the book, film, and now in real life, a rare combination of destructive forces comes together and magnifies the damage. This storm could break the U.S. economy.

Trump’s tariffs are the most destructive force. Their first-order damages begin by arbitrarily driving up the prices of every product and input we import, followed by price hikes on most competing products and inputs made here. This will leave less money for everything else, depressing growth and jobs even as inflation accelerates—a textbook definition of stagflation. And these first-order costs are compounded by retaliatory tariffs by the primary targets of Trump’s levies, further slowing jobs, wages, and growth.

Six months ago, our economy grew at a healthy 2.8 percent rate, and inflation had eased sharply. Now, Trump’s policies ushered in rising prices and the first stage of a recession.

His program’s second-order costs follow from the unprecedentedly high tariffs on goods and inputs from our three largest trading partners. The 145 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports and China’s 125 percent retaliatory tariffs have established for now a mutual embargo between the world’s two most important economies, alongside Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on most goods and inputs our companies buy from suppliers in Mexico and Canada.

If these policies remain in place, they will not only raise prices and slow the economy. By mid-summer, their punishing blows will disrupt supply chains, and Americans should expect the types of shortages their grandparents had to endure during World War II. Despite these inescapable second-order costs, Trump and his apprentice dealmakers have yet to begin negotiations with China, Mexico, or Canada—in large part because the president’s personal pique and economic delusions dictate our indefensible positions.

It gets worse. Most U.S. imports from our major trading partners are inputs for U.S. manufacturers, products made by their foreign subsidiaries, or energy we need, and truncating our access to those imports will damage a broad array of separate economic activities related to them. (Hat tip to Brad DeLong.)

Cripple our access to electronic parts from China, vehicles from Canada, or vegetables and fruits from Mexico, and American companies will have no choice but to wind down the jobs and spending for their related marketing, accounting and legal services, transport, and ultimate sales. Our economy will also lose the value American consumers and businesses derive from using those electronics, cars, trucks, and foodstuffs. It will pummel American manufacturers whom Trump claims he wants to help.

If Trump’s inane tariff regime remains in place for six months or longer, its first and second-order effects could trigger a deep recession akin to 1981-1982 and 2008-2009. And unlike those recessions, the Federal Reserve won’t be able to help much. The tariff-driven inflation will limit the central bank’s ability to cut interest rates, a dilemma that drove Trump to threaten Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Equally important, the bond and equity markets’ thumbs-down responses to Trump’s tariffs and threats signal an even more serious problem: Investors are losing confidence in Trump, his presidency, and perhaps the United States. It’s especially true for foreign investors who reinforced the message by moving away from the dollar, because they’re investing less in our stocks and bonds.

If their response to our president’s ineptitude and capriciousness persists, it could be ruinous. The stability of our financial system depends on trillions of dollars in foreign capital. In 2024, foreign investors and governments held $18.4 trillion in U.S. stocks and $8.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities, about 30 percent of all our stock and 30 percent of all our bonds. While most American investors will likely wait out the coming storm, foreign investors with $27 trillion in American financial assets have plenty of alternatives. In a word, the United States could face destabilizing capital flight.

To stave off this grim prospect, the Treasury Department and American corporations will have to offer foreign and domestic investors higher returns. (Yields on U.S. treasuries soared after Trump revealed his chaotic tariff regime and have decreased only slightly since then.) So, regardless of what the Fed does, market interest rates may rise even as the economy declines.

It may not be very far off because the Treasury’s challenge to attract funds to keep the government running is coming to a head. The Treasury already planned to float $1.8 trillion in new bonds in 2025, and that burden will increase substantially as the economy weakens. On top of that, Republicans in Congress will very soon approve Trump’s deficit-busting budget, draining $5 trillion in revenues over 10 years for another round of his 2017 tax cuts, which are set to expire and perhaps up to $4 trillion more for Trump’s other tax promises, plus another $1.5 trillion in increased defense spending.

Trump and his economic courtiers count on tax cuts and higher spending to ward off recession, and in normal times, they might have been right. But their hopes are delusions under the new conditions they’ve created since the higher interest rates needed to attract the capital the government and U.S. corporations need will thwart most or all of any stimulus.

Our gathering economic storm includes another feature that could drive the economy onto the rocks. Apart from the tariffs, Trump’s aggrieved attacks on the rule of law also threaten the willingness of foreign investors to continue holding and buying American bonds and stocks. Along with the rest of us, they see Trump and his administration unilaterally abrogating contracts, withholding appropriated funds, dismissing court decisions, attacking judges for enforcing their rulings, deporting people without charges or hearings, providing special treatment for large contributors and favored companies, and threatening law firms and universities without any legal basis.

The erosion of the rule of law under Trump can have enormous economic significance for a foreign government, investor, or company with stakes in our economy. They now know that the U.S. government may ignore its contracts with them or decide not to enforce their agreements with others when it serves the political or personal interests of the president. That’s the way the world works in the kleptocratic dictatorships in Russia and Venezuela, and virtually no one invests in their stocks and bonds.

By following their lead, Trump and his apprentices risk devastating capital flight that could leave many of our leading financial institutions insolvent. In addition to his deeply destructive tariffs, Trump’s sweeping campaign against the rule of law in the United States has raised the economic stakes from a rocky business cycle to a potential financial and economic meltdown with terrible consequences.