Donald Trump and maga Republicans must face the truth. Donald Trump has a list of impeachable offenses Senator Susan Collins alert!

Trump will be impeached in 2027.  Philadelphia Inquirer opinion, by columnist Will Bunch.

(BTW, where is Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins❓)

War❗ Good God, y’all. Since my music brain stopped growing around age 11, Edwin Starr’s “War,” a No. 1 hit from the fall of 1970, always gets stuck in my head every time the United States starts dropping bombs on yet another foreign land, and the tune usually stays there for a long time. 

Meanwhile, there’s not much new to say about Donald Trump’s folly in the Persian Gulf. The bombs keep coming down. Gas prices keep going up. And what is it good for❓ Absolutely nothing.

A political bombshell fell over the weekend. You just didn’t hear it, thanks to all the real bombshells that fell across the Persian Gulf and the Middle East as Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of choice against Iran slogged into its third week.

It had to do with one of the 1,700 pardons or commutations that Donald Trump has issued since he returned to office 14 months ago — including just about everyone involved in the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 but also a rogue’s gallery of ex-GOP officials, crypto scammers, and politically connected folks making massive donations.

Thanks to federal prosecutors, the dark underbelly of the Trump pardon machine was unexpectedly revealed in a court case that, the New York Times reported, appears to be related to a nursing home mogul named Joseph Schwartz. He pleaded guilty in 2024, to federal charges around failing to pay 💲40 million in payroll and Social Security taxes and was sentenced to three years. But, Schwartz only served about three months, after Trump abruptly issued the millionaire a pardon last November.

The Times reported that Schwartz hired a conservative lawyer and friend of Donald Trump Jr. named Josh Nass as a “pardon broker,” an increasingly lucrative business under Trump Sr.’s lax interpretation of his clemency responsibilities. Records show that Schwartz paid Nass 💲100,000, but — according to the Times account — the lawyer apparently believed he was owed a lot more.

According to a federal indictment, Nass hired a Russian-speaking convicted felon to collect another 💲500,000 from his client, telling his alleged goon to “do anything and everything” to get the money. Prosecutors in Brooklyn have now charged Nass with extortion in the matter.

What did the president, and his aides and allies, know about Nass’s pursuit of a pardon payday, and when did they know it❓ 

We don’t know, nor do we know the facts behind the October pardon of Binance cryptocurrency founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who does substantial crypto business with the Trump family, or auto billionaire Trevor Milton, also pardoned last year after donating 💲900,000 to pro-Trump groups, or Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive whose mom gave 💲1 million to a pro-Trump super-PAC and 12 days later ... you guessed it, got a pardon.

Thanks to federal prosecutors, the dark underbelly of the Trump pardon machine was unexpectedly revealed in a court case that, the New York Times reported, appears to be related to a nursing home mogul named Joseph Schwartz. He pleaded guilty in 2024, to federal charges around failing to pay 💲40 million in payroll and Social Security taxes and was sentenced to three years. But Schwartz only served about three months, after Trump abruptly issued the millionaire a pardon last November.

What did the president, and his aides and allies, know about Nass’s pursuit of a pardon payday, and when did they know it❓ We don’t know, nor do we know the facts behind the October pardon of Binance cryptocurrency founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who does substantial crypto business with the Trump family, or auto billionaire Trevor Milton, also pardoned last year after donating 💲900,000 to pro-Trump groups, or Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive whose mom gave 💲1 million to a pro-Trump super-PAC and 12 days later ... you guessed it, got a pardon.

There’s a lot more like this, but you get the point.

Trump’s dodgy pardon practices, with millions of dollars changing greasy palms, deserve a major, Watergate-style investigation. That’s not going to happen — not in 2026, anyway. One Brooklyn blip doesn’t change the reality that Trump’s Justice Department and its lapdog attorney general, Pam Bondi, mainly only do white-collar probes of Trump’s perceived enemies. The Republicans who control both houses of Congress would rather wield their subpoena powers against Hillary Clinton.

But it’s looking more and more likely that a big part of this equation is going to change in January. Nothing is a lock in American politics — sorry, Polymarket bettors — but Democrats have a healthy lead in the polls ahead of this fall’s midterm election, have flipped seat after seat since 2024, and are posting big early turnout numbers.

With Trump’s popularity falling with every uptick of the gas pump, November is looking now like a wave election for Democrats who only need a couple more seat flips to regain the House majority. The party’s new committee chairs will find themselves with power to investigate whatever suspected misdeeds of MAGA World they want to, And — as we saw twice during Trump’s first term — it only takes a simple majority vote to impeach a president.

As Trump himself is well aware. “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be — I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” POTUS 47 told House Republicans at a gathering in January, Well, there actually are reasons.

It’s kind of the opposite of what happened in 2023 when the GOP retook the House with a burning zeal to impeach Joe Biden but didn’t really have anything to charge him with. With Trump, it’s more than a matter of, where does one start? For example:

• The pardon mess, as described above. Trump’s outrageous abuse of his clemency pen has proved America’s founders made a big mistake in granting such absolute power to just one man. Congressional hearings can and should spur pardon reform, but could also expose evidence that could be used in a Trump impeachment case.

• Cryptogate. Presidents used to put their assets in a blind trust, as Jimmy Carter famously did with his peanut farm. Trump, on the other hand, keeps doing deals and has seen his net worth roughly triple to more than $6 billion in just the first year of his second term. There are many tentacles to what I called Cryptogate with this handy guide I published last spring. Trump’s pump-and-dump meme coin launched on inauguration weekend seems a high crime unto itself.

• War crimes. The war in Iran is illegal,❗. The president did not seek congressional approval to start dropping bombs up and down the Persian Gulf as required by both the U.S. Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Act. It’s also an illegal, aggressive war under international law. Ditto his regime-change assault on Venezuela, which killed more than 100 people. Ditto his regime’s unending lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which have no legal basis. Congress can reassert its authority by impeaching Trump.

• Abuse of power in the justice system. The flip side of Trump’s pardons has been the unprecedented attempt to use the Justice Department to go after the president’s perceived enemies, from former FBI chief James Comey to Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. These investigations, directly urged on by Trump in Truth Social posts, have repeatedly failed to pass muster with judges or grand juries, but that doesn’t erase the stain of such clearly wrongful prosecutions.

This list doesn’t even cover some of the more morally repugnant aspects of the Trump regime, such as the brutal and too often deadly mass deportation program and the push to build inhumane warehouse detention centers. Nor does it anticipate future surprises, like the Ukraine phone calls that sparked Trump’s first impeachment in late 2019.

It also doesn’t include the political calculation facing House Democrats. Baring a dramatic change in the zeitgeist, there still won’t be the 67 Senate votes needed to remove Trump from office — a likely replay of his first two impeachments. 

Some will argue that impeachment would be a distraction or even a time waster, preventing Congress from tackling meat-and-potatoes legislation.

That’s not the point. Arguably the biggest task facing the 120th Congress will be simply proving that the United States is still governed by the rule of law. Nothing is more central to that than reestablishing that high crimes and misdemeanors against the Constitution have consequences — including the stain of impeachment.

Most importantly, impeachment hearings are the vehicle to air Trump’s wrongdoing before the American people — much as it was during his first term. 

A national denunciation of a president’s abuse of power — even if it doesn’t end Trump’s presidency — is the first step toward making sure it never happens again. 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must pay attention to No Kings peaceful protests but instead are in panic mode about the growing movement

Echo opinion essay published in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Will Bunch.  

Then they fight you: How the ‘No👑 Kings’ protests are winning America:  A massive turnout of over 7 (plus➕) million (with a tally on the ground being 8.2 million1) and a panicked White House showed Saturday why the No👑 Kings protests matter, a lot.

Outlined against a blue, gray October sky on a perfect fall morning, Carol Otis, in her Obama-Biden T-shirt, joined more than 1,000 people Saturday who lined both sides of the busy Eagle Road thoroughfare in Havertown, Pennsylvania, to yell, wave signs, and provoke an endless cacophony of car horns against an authoritarian Donald Trump regime.

Demonstrators gather for a ’No Kings’ rally in Philadelphia on Saturday.Joe Lamberti / For The Inquirer

“I could probably name 7,000 reasons why,” the 77-year-old recent retiree from Drexel Hill told me, “because every day there are 18 things that happen that are just what Trump says — and then there’s the GOP talking about this ‘hate rally.’"

There is a famous quote about mass protest movements — with murky origins (misattributed frequently to Gandhi) — that says: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” 

Saturday’s massive ”No👑Kings" protest that filled main streets and public squares from New York and D.C. to smaller burgs like Havertown showed that the effort to halt and reverse dictatorship in mid-2020s, America has already prompted a half-laughing, half-fighting response from an increasingly unpopular White House and its right wing (make America a dictatorship) allies.

Ignored at first, the “No👑Kings” protest movement is rapidly accelerating toward the then-you-win phase. 

Indeed, the over-the-top alarmism from Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called it a “hate America rally,” or Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — who called up his state’s National Guard in Austin to pump up a ridiculous narrative about rock-throwing radicals instead of the peaceful, joyous events in 2,700 different locales — proved that “No👑 Kings” struck a raw nerve.

So Otis didn’t make a sign and chose instead — like many in this protest in the heart of suburban Delaware County — to wave an American flag, “because people who carry the flag do not hate America and as you can see there are a lot of flags.”

She laughed, then added sarcastically, parrying one of the more absurd GOP talking points: “We’re all paid protesters❗😀George” — Soros, the liberal billionaire — “where are you? I don’t see you. I’m waiting for my handout.”

The day was not only nonviolent, but also historic. The estimated over 7 million who showed up across America marked the second-largest one-day protest in U.S. history, surpassed only by a very different type of event, the first Earth Day in 1970. That was roughly 40% larger than the first “No👑Kings” event in June, and in talking to protesters Saturday it seemed the turnout was only boosted by the right-wing rhetoric, that anti-Trump protesters must be some kind of domestic terrorists.

“Knowing that they’re feeling threatened makes me know this is what needs to happen,” Gary Fishbein — 65, from Bala Cynwyd, with his American flag T-shirt and Eagles cap — told me. His words were nearly drowned out by the steady honking of supportive cars passing the undulating sea of signs that were as funny as “Does This Ass Make My Country Look Small” or as simple as “Dogs Against Fascism” (held by the canine’s companion) or just, “Freedom to Speak.”

The official White House reaction, as related to one reporter, was “Who cares?” But guess what❓ They clearly cared, a lot. You could see that in the week leading up to the demonstration, with the increasingly insane rhetoric and warnings about “antifa” — a tiny, unorganized sliver of young rock-throwing radicals who were nowhere in sight Saturday — that aimed to neutralize the reality that millions of everyday Americans are sick of seeing a masked secret police snatch people off the streets.

Just a short time after the “who cares” comment, Trump himself posted a shocking — to the extent that anything can be truly shocking anymore — AI-created video to Truth Social that showed him piloting a jet fighter wearing a king’s crown (!!) and “bombing” a large U.S. urban protest march with brown, liquid, um, excrement.

I guess that was supposed to be the fascist version of four-dimensional chess, that our 47th and possibly last president could mock, ridicule, and dismiss “No👑Kings” by confirming everything that the largest protest in 56 years was all about, that our government is hijacked by a monarch who defecates on his own subjects. 

Indeed, the reality is that Trump’s late-night video reeked more of panic and fear 😱than its crude subject matter.

The biggest American protest doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The reason that 7 (plus ➕) million people are in the streets is that Trump long ago squandered any chance for a honeymoon after his narrow reelection in 2024. 

Rather, his approval rating is just nearly 40% in the latest Gallup poll (even lower in some other surveys). And like the protester Otis said, there are about 7,000 reasons — including higher prices in the supermarket, a looming doubling of health insurance premiums for millions of Americans, and a 20-days-and-counting shutdown of the federal government with no end in sight.

But it was Trump’s mass-deportation crusade, and the brutal tactics by those masked and unbadged goons for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies — grabbing migrants (and, in at least 170 documented cases, U.S. citizens) off the street and lobbing tear gas at anyone who protests — that was cited again and again by the marchers when I asked them why they are in the streets.

Ben Liptock — 38, who lives in Havertown and teaches in a North Philadelphia public school, and came with his 9-year-old son, Bobby — explained that we need to “continue to show people that you’re not alone in today’s America — it’s scary to protest." 

Also,  Liptock said he felt they had to be there for his many immigrant students — some who’ve gone home to find their dads deported — who can’t safely demonstrate themselves.

“If I looked a little different I wouldn’t be able to show my face and protest power,” Liptock said. “There are people in the shadows right now and they’re 😠😠😨😥terrified.”

It arguably cut both ways that the suburban crowd in Havertown was overwhelmingly white, with most older than the median U.S. age of 38. Others echoed Liptock that this breed of protester can use its privilege to speak for those who can’t, and any true mass movement needs the white metro middle class to succeed. But the lack of Black and brown faces or members of Gen Z (who’ve powered uprisings in parts of Asia and Africa) remains a significant problem for “No 👑 Kings.”

Someone like Emilio Ovalle ― a lanky 19-year-old student from West Chester University waving a sign with a Mark Twain quotation ("they're a mighty ornery lot. It's the way they're raised"). — stood out in the crowd on Saturday. The son of an immigrant from Guatemala, Ovalle also cited the deportations as his No. 1 issue, and while he said many of his friends oppose Trump he also understands their reluctance to protest.

“Part of it has to be the Democrats — they’re not good at getting the young vote,“ he said. ”The right is very good at appealing to a lot of the insecurities, especially in younger men."

This would seem to be the next mission for “No👑 Kings” going forward, to build a bigger network with groups such as Gen Z teens and 20-somethings or African Americans. Those groups also have major issues with the Trump presidency but feel them in different ways and express them in different venues than the ones like Facebook or MSNBC that are popular with the first wave of protesters.

That said, it’s impossible to ignore what the “No Kings” movement has accomplished in a matter of months. By raising their voices, protesters have encouraged Democrats in Washington to at least slightly stiffen their backbones, as shown by the current budget battle. They are winning new converts from the disaffected middle by exposing the depths of Trump’s unpopularity.

And they are reassuring their friends and neighbors to keep the faith in a dark moment — that there are far more Americans who want democracy than dictatorship. “It makes you feel good that you are not alone, that a lot of people feel the same way,” Michael Tempone, a 73-year-old from Upper Darby waving American flags with his wife Stephanie, told me.

There were thousands of American flags across the nation Saturday, and no reported violence, and close to no arrests — zero in New York City (where the NYPD is not known for its restraint) or San Diego or fearmongered Austin. That is driving the Trump regime bat-guano crazy, because they have not crushed the resistance, and they know their days are numbered. As I walked back to my car, I heard one protester chuckle to his partner, “This is the best ‘hate America’ rally that I’ve ever been to.”

Vote Ohio Blue or risk the QAnon cult consequences

Echo opinion published in The Philadelphia Inquirer  by Will Bunch.

This QAnon-flavored soundtrack to Trump, GOP’s fascist right turn should terrify you. A terrifying Trump rally in Ohio — punctuated by a dictatorial rant backed by QAnon-associated music — highlights an alarming GOP turn.

If you are a political fanatic, you’ve surely heard the old saying that when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. That’s been proven true in this fraught year of 2022 as Christian nationalism rises to our extreme right, but no one predicted this:

That U.S. authoritarianism would also come with a bat-guano crazy musical soundtrack — music that sounds like a Bible Belt altar riff but is actually tied to the weirdly popular QAnon conspiracy theory whose legion of followers believe there’s an elite global cabal of child-trafficking, baby-blood-drinking liberal politicians and movie stars.

This terrifying crossing of some kind of autocratic Rubicon happened — where else? — at a Donald Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Saturday night.

Trump rallies are a tricky thing to cover, some 20 months after the 45th president left the White House in seeming disgrace after a failed coup and two impeachments. There’s an understandable desire to want to not give these increasingly hate-drenched rallies any oxygen, in the vain hope the flame will completely flicker out. 

Moreover, #TFG's Fidel Castro-length rants increasingly offer little political insight but long flights of narcissistic grievance about his 2020, election loss and an enemies list that grows longer each day.

But, even had it been stripped of its creepy musical backing, Trump’s apocalyptic closing diatribe from an arena in the epicenter of Rust Belt industrial decay demands our attention — as the current front-runner for the 2024, GOP presidential nomination continues to steer his followers toward an authoritarian cult of personality, committed more to its warped leader and his perceived slights than any justifiable cause.

Trump insisted, without evidence, that Russia’s bloody unprovoked invasion of Ukraine “never would have happened with me as your commander in chief, and for four long years it didn’t happen.” The ex-POTUS veered from China threatening Taiwan to a litany of grievances against the FBI agents and prosecutors honing in on his cache of top-secret documents and his post-2020 election tampering to an old enemy in the media: “Fake news is all you get, and they are truly the enemy of the people.” That echo of Joseph Stalin wasn’t his only callback to an era where rising dictatorship inevitably led to death on a massive scale. “We have a president who is cognitively impaired,” Trump said, falsely, “and in no condition to lead our country, which may end up in World War III.”

The ax-grinding is getting worse, but the (creepy) music is new.

The swelling, quasi-religious (or maybe late-night inspirational infomercial) melody that accompanied Trump’s Ohio jeremiad (complaints!) wasn’t random, according to Trump-tracking experts. Last month, the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters for America identified that rising melody — hinting of a coming storm — that appeared again Saturday in Youngstown as either a) “Wwg1wga,” with its title an abbreviation of the main QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all,” that was posted to Spotify in 2020 and often appears with online posts about the conspiracy theory, or b) an exactly identical number called “Mirrors,” as claimed by Team Trump.

Media Matters noted Trump’s use of the tune in an August posting of an anti-Biden rant to his website Truth Social sparked praise and great excitement in the online community of QAnon true believers, with one saying it “might be the biggest nod they’ve ever given us [to be honest].” Wrote another: “That’s not an accident. Team Trump knows exactly what they’re doing.”

Seems so. This week — as legal filings expose the seriousness of the federal probe into his taking classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, while prosecutors turn up the heat on his close allies around the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — a panicked Trump went full QAnon in a posting spree on Truth Social, including a photo of the ex-president wearing a “Q” lapel pin over the key slogans of the conspiracy theory, that “a storm is coming” and “Wwg1wga.”

The most striking thing about Trump’s Wagnerian moment in Youngstown on Saturday was the reaction of the crowd in the not-full arena, many of whom raised their right arm forward as the music swelled. Most also raised up their index finger or a No. 1 symbol indicative of the QAnon slogan, a callback to their Dear Leader that they “got it.” Several even flashed the “Q” hand signal. 

QAnon hand signal is scary and a throw back to Nazism

Horrible photos and videos of mass, zombie-like right-arm obedience to America’s wannabe dictator rekindled chilling memories of Nuremberg rallies or Leni Riefenstahl documentaries, of the terrible places that cultlike devotion can lead.

Trump is counting on this to save him. He told interviewer Hugh Hewitt there’d be “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before” if he is criminally indicted. Experts in authoritarianism who saw videos of the Youngstown rally said they are alarmed at the increasingly fascistic tone of his movement, and his blatant appeals to violence.

Seth Cotlar, a Willamette University historian focused on the far right, called the rally a validation of his prediction that Trump was headed “toward something more closely resembling a warlord. At this point his rallies mostly just involve him pointing at ‘enemies of the people’ and waiting for his supporters to do the rest.”

Agreed Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian who studies dictators: “Trump is a national security threat. He is radicalizing QAnon [people] further and exposing others at these rallies. He is preparing them to be his next army of thugs, ready to do his bidding when he needs them.”

Some might like to pretend that this is strictly a “Donald Trump problem,” a would-be felon desperate to save his own skin. But the reality is that this fascistic virus has infected most of the Republican Party, on the eve of a midterm election where the American Experiment itself is up for grabs. The Former Guy was in Ohio, after all, to endorse and rally support for the GOP’s grateful Senate hopeful, J.D. Vance. That candidate — who rose to prominence with a Hillbilly Elegy promising hope that he could lead others down a path away from Appalachian dysfunction as he’d done on his own Ivy League odyssey — has instead embraced Trump and his ugliest instincts. 

As the fall campaign begins, the signs of rising Republican fascism — rallying the masses by dehumanizing “out” groups like migrants or the LGBTQ community, or the idea that Christian law trumps pluralistic democracy — are everywhere. You certainly saw it last week in the unlikely setting of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts — where Trump’s chief rival to lead the GOP, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, took credit for what amounted to a kidnapping of 50 Venezuelan migrants, seen not as hungry human beings but as pawns in a political game.

Some 24 hours later, Trump Sr. ended his Ohio event with the musical notes of what’s known as “an altar call.” Don’t call it a coincidence. Call it Christian fascism. Will it lead to violence? It already has, as in the recent case of the Michigan man who killed his wife and injured his daughter after falling down the QAnon rabbit hole after the 2020, election. And it can only get worse.

As I awoke Sunday morning to the predictable shock and awe over Trump’s newest outrage, a song got stuck in my head. Not “Wwa1wga” or “Mirrors” or whatever the heck that was behind Trump, but the one that Bruce Springsteen released back in 1995, when the rust-bitten smokestacks of the Mahoning Valley were beginning to tumble. In “Youngstown,” The Boss sang of the bitter disillusionment of veterans who fought for America in World War II and Vietnam only to lose the war for prosperity at home.

Left unsaid by en was how these resentments, when allowed to fester, can and will be exploited by the very worst people — the hucksters and con men using you to save themselves and probably make a buck, as with the gold coin ads that now flash on TV telecasts of Trump rallies. What transpired Saturday was a culmination of an American nightmare. It can’t happen here? It just did. Here in Youngstown.

And we’re seeing it here in my home state of Pennsylvania, where the Republican gubernatorial nominee, State Sen. Doug Mastriano — an enthusiast for the Big Lie of election fraud and a Jan. 6 participant — is openly embracing Christian nationalism. His last rally on Friday featured both Donald Trump Jr. and a well-known leader of this movement to lord religion over politics, the Texas pastor Lance Wallnau, who endorsed Mastriano and predicted “a new birth of (fake!) liberty.”

Will Bunch is a national columnist — with some strong opinions about what's happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government.