Maine Writer

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Wednesday, April 02, 2025

Republicans must IMPEACH Trump Now! Tariffs and idiotic threats to take over soveriegn nations are lunacy!

Dear Senator Susan Collins:
Echo❗ Impeach Trump Now❗ Letter to the Editor Opinion
Published in Castro Valley Forum, California:
Extortion is the act of obtaining something of value from someone through threats or coercion. 
Extortion relies on creating fear or a sense of danger ⚠️in the victim. The ultimate goal of the extortionist is to gain something from the victim. This most commonly involves money, but it can also extend to coercing someone into specific ACTIONS OR INACTIONS.

Extortion is a crime. The core principle is that it is illegal to use fear tactics to exploit someone. Trump's modus operandi is extortion. He threatens people, institutions, (law firms and judges) and even other countries to achieve his evil aims. 

Trump has turned America from a country that is admired and emulated to one that is feared and loathed. Impeach Trump Now

From Robert Thomas, in Castro Valley, California

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Donald Trump created a Pepe Le Pew foriegn policy position towards Canada: Another weird meme will live with

Echo opinion report published in The New York Times by Stacey Schiff
The Truly Terrible Idea That Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Donald Trump All Share

Donald Trump’s creepy remarks about Canada as “our cherished 51st state” may seem to have descended, bafflingly, from the clear blue sky. But American designs on Canada have a long history, predating even our independence and featuring some very familiar names. “You are a small people,” concluded one early overture, “compared to those who with open arms invite you into a fellowship.”

The approaches have changed over time, but the courtship has invariably played out with all the grace and romance of Pepé Le Pew* on the trail of Penelope Pussycat. On several occasions, it has blown up in our faces. “Alas, Canada, we have had misfortune and disgrace in that quarter,” John Adams warned some 250 years ago. As another president now hints at a northern expansion, we might care to remember the humbling earlier forays.

In October 1774, the First Continental Congress resolved to dispatch an appeal to Quebec, which was then essentially a synonym for Canada. Over 18 eloquent pages, the letter enumerated the rights of a free people. Though it urged no acts of hostility, it reminded the Canadians that they could expect no better treatment from their common sovereign than did their American counterparts. Might they care to travel — “in order to complete this highly desirable union” — to Philadelphia for the next Congress, in May? To the high-minded rhetoric was added a prod: Canada would be wise to count the rest of North America among its “unalterable friends” rather than its “inveterate enemies.”

Though no Canadian delegates materialized in Philadelphia that May, Congress remained undeterred. A new letter went out “to the oppressed inhabitants of Canada,” this one drafted by John Jay. British rule, the letter argued, reduced Canadians to slavery and endangered their religious freedom. “We can never believe that the present race of Canadians are so degenerated as to possess neither the spirit, the gallantry, nor the courage of their ancestors,” the letter continued. How would they explain their cowardice to their children? It ended with a familiar threat: The Americans hoped the Canadians would not “reduce us to the disagreeable necessity of treating you as enemies.”

Ewwwww 👃.....Go away!

Before it adjourned in August 1775, Congress authorized an invasion of Canada. In a full-battalion-to-remind-you-of-my-love kind of missive, George Washington informed the Canadians that Benedict Arnold was heading their way with a detachment. “Come then, my brethren,” he wrote, “unite with us in an indissoluble union, and let us run together to the same goal.”

Congress was sanguine about the prospects, expecting, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “every hour to be informed that Quebec has opened its arms to Colonel Arnold.” Around the time Washington was writing his hopeful letter, Arnold and his ludicrously ill-equipped men were surviving on dead dogs and boiled cartridge belts.

Though the siege of Quebec proved a disaster, Congress continued to believe the Canadians were eager to join their revolt. “The unanimous voice of the continent is Canada must be ours, Quebec must be taken,” crowed John Adams in February. Congress that month opted for diplomacy, appointing a commission that consisted of Charles Carroll, among the wealthiest men in America and a French-speaking Catholic; his Jesuit cousin, Father John Carroll; and two members of Congress. The eldest of the group, the longtime colonial fixer and the American with the greatest experience of the wider world, was Benjamin Franklin.

The commissioners were not only to persuade the Canadians that union was in their best political interest, but also to seduce their northern neighbors with dreams of glory. It was to promise freedom of religion and establish freedom of the press. Against all odds and at some expense, a printing press also made its laborious way to Montreal. It was one illustration of the American understanding of her northern neighbors: Over 90 percent of French Canada was at the time illiterate.

The members of the commission traveled less comfortably than did the press, meeting with gale winds and ice floes. They slept in the woods, on a tented ship and in a pillaged cabin, amid weather that could freeze shut a sentry’s eyes. Franklin’s legs swelled. Boils erupted on his skin. He recognized that he had taken on an assignment that at his age — he was 70 — would likely spell his end. He wrote farewell letters to friends.

In Montreal, the delegates discovered they had embarked on the original Canadian goose chase. It was difficult to convince a people that they should place themselves under American protection when the American troops were without provisions or funds, undisciplined, underdressed and unfit for duty. Nearly half had succumbed to smallpox. Shortly after British reinforcements arrived, the commissioners reported miserably to Congress: Canadians “have suffered us to enter their country as friends” and the Americans managed to turn “their good dispositions towards us into enmity, and makes them wish our departure.”

Franklin, said to be “pitifully unwell,” returned home, accompanied by a Montreal couple who took “such liberties in taunting at our conduct in Canada,” he reported, “that it came almost to a quarrel.”

Congress appointed a committee to investigate the Canadian fiasco, producing a long list of causes but omitting the obvious: The Canadians had no interest in revolt. As Father Carroll noted, they did not believe themselves oppressed. Not only did their interests refuse to align, but also the Canadians entertained very different ideas about government. It was almost as if Canada were a foreign country.

For all the miscalculations, neither Franklin nor Washington could relinquish the idea of annexing Canada. 

Nor could the Marquis de Lafayette, who was promised a command of 2,500 men and given instructions to invade. 

Somehow, the expedition was meant to head out in February, not an ideal time for a Canadian “irruption.” No one had bothered to supply the troops with winter clothing. Congress called off the mission, which Lafayette had described as a “hell of blunders, madness and deception.” His second in command was left wondering if those who had cooked up the ridiculous plan had been traitors or idiots.

At the end of the War of Independence, before the 1783 peace negotiations, Franklin attempted a Hail Mary pass: Should the British not offer up Canada as reparations for the many towns they had burned? Surely a gesture of good will was in order. The British did not find the idea compelling.

Despite the vexed history, we seem — at least one of us seems — to be here again.

It isn’t easy to beat up on modern-day Canada, which hasn’t offended anyone since the great Turbot War of 1995 (Spain, fishing rights). 

For all the early American missteps, at least in the 18th century, the motives were clear: The northern colonists felt vulnerable to British and Indian attack. 

As Washington had it, Canada “would have been an important acquisition, and well worth the expenses incurred in the pursuit of it.” 

But, today, there is no sane motive, unless mugging a sovereign nation that happens to be both your closest friend and your most trusted trading partner constitutes reasonable foreign policy. 


Even George Washington would be hard-pressed to write an appeal to modern Canada — the land of universal health care, universal maternity leave and affordable tuition; a country with a sense of decency, gun control and superior life expectancy; a country that still teaches cursive handwriting — that could persuade it to unite with its southern neighbor. We do not appear to be running together to the same goal. Pepé Le Pew is never going to get that cat.

Already , America has submitted to remedial instruction on the cost of overstepping our northern border. In 1812, U.S. generals boasted all over again about liberating Canada, still a British colony, from “tyranny and oppression.” 

Brig. Gen. William Hull, glorying in the sight of the American flag flying over present-day Windsor, Ontario, demanded a cordial welcome for the invading force, there to emancipate. Two summers later, in a retaliatory raid, the White House went up in flames.

Stacy Schiff, the author of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” is at work on a book about Benjamin Franklin.

*A series of Warner Bros. cartoons, introduced in 1945. Depicted as a French anthropomorphic striped skunk, Pepé is constantly on the quest for love and pursuit of romance but typically his skunk odor causes other characters to run away from him.

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American voters have the tools to fight Donald Trump autocracy: YES you and I have ability to make change

I was introduced to the Holocaust as a middle schooler. 
Echo guest editorial published in the Penn Bay Pilot newspaper, in MidCoast Maine/Rockland, Thomaston, Camden. 
Like any child would, I had a hard time fathoming the mass murder of so many people- over 6 million (+ plus 😔😡😨). 

I am not sure I was taught about the slippage of democratic norms, the years of capitulation and fear. I remember asking my mother why no one tried to stop it❓ She had vague answers, about it being far away, with it being hard to tell what was going on. 

Needless to say, the question lingered.

I kept that question with me while touring our nation’s Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. more than two decades ago. I stood for many minutes in the room dedicated to America's response, reading New York Times articles from the late 1930s, finding vague information, a lack of clarity, and what I perceived as a lack of alarm.

I worry. We Americans are now in the same place of inaction and vague, unfocused alarm, even though hate, racism, and an authoritarian regime are plainly amongst us. 

No ocean separates us from this horror. Not one location in the USA has been spared the change in our method of governance.

You and I — all the American people, no matter who we voted for, or even if we voted (a third of the electorate didn’t) — have been gut-punched and rolled.

We no longer live in a democracy. The administration is on a path to an autocratic regime in which dissent, rule of law, peaceable, and non-corrupt behavior is replaced by lies, intimidation, corruption, violent destruction of institutions, and disregard for the courts — replaced by the whims of the new leaders.

The Trumpzi-ism administration has fundamentally altered the way our country is governed. This is not a time to pretend this will solve itself, or go away. It won’t. We, the American people, are the ones who’ll change what’s happening. We are now at war, and we, the American people are the troops. (According to the Oxford Dictionary, war is “any active hostility or struggle between living beings; a conflict between opposing forces and principles.”)

Now’s the time to fight. These are your weapons:your emotionally regulated self that does not quiver in fear or dive back under the covers (or get lost in doom-scrolling);
  • Your attention and understanding of context and big picture — this is not a singular shift, it’s part of a global trend — read Autocracy, Inc.; On Tyranny; How Democracies Die;]
  • Your voice—it’s time to be loud, and get used to speaking up for democracy;
  • Your words — talk to others about what you’re seeing and feeling. Write. There is certain to be several negative comments made at the bottom of this essay. Our best work is to ignore them. 
  • Your energy is precious. Instead of taking the bait from those who are gullible enough to believe that they’re actually safer, or that their eviscerated autocratic government is now more efficient, use your words and energy to chat with your neighbors, call a friend, gather at one of the many democracy meetings being held (visit indivisible.org or jointheunion.us to search for a group near you); your imagination—spend some time considering where this is all heading. 
The Trump administrations’s power grab and the moves of Project 2025, plus the capitulation of the Congress, is a sign that those currently in power in the Trump administration want to move this country permanently to an autocratic state. 

These aren’t the moves of an administration that intends to allow free and fair elections or to cede control even if elections are held. Once you’ve gone down that deep hole, consider the country you’d like to live in. Consider how you want to be governed. What role can you play in the next USA? Use your imagination to paint those pictures of the after time, when we rebuild from this destruction. There will be a resurgence of democracy.
  • Your creativity: it’s well known that autocrats don’t like to be ridiculed. So write the script of an absurdist play about where these leaders wind up in their dotage; or get out your paints and depict the way you want this war to end; or channel your rage into a bakeathon whose goods you share with neighbors; or create the best protest signs; or write the next anthem (creative endeavors also bring joy, which nourishes us during the struggle); 
  • Your ability to show up and protest (March 29 was national take down Tesla day teslatakedown.com; April 5 is a day of national protest about all of the administration action—Hands Off; see indivisible.org);
  • Your pocketbook—he current administration is motivated by greed, using corruption and dealmaking to line their pockets. Circumvent their money grabs: boycott large corporations, shop local, reduce your consumption overall. Consider delaying paying taxes until you’re convinced those dollars are being legally spent. 
  • Your trust in yourself—your voice matters, your behavior makes a difference;
  • Your trust in an inclusive, USA of the future — keep up your practices that promote diversity, many voices, the role of women; refuse to diminish people to “other;”
  • Your community and your trust in your neighbors—do what you can to tighten those bonds;
  • Your local government—get involved, inquire about your community’s plans for emergency notifications, mutual aid, and formation of neighborhood teams to help when crises strike; 
  • Your belief in our democracy, and our ability to come together to win it back.
We’ll overturn this administration and win this war — non-violently, with the world’s strongest force: human hearts and minds pulling together to serve the future of our one planet.  

I’ll see 👀 you out there.

From Molly Mulhern lives in Camden, Maine

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Tuesday, April 01, 2025

Resistance clarion call! Donald Trump is a worse narcissist than we ever thought he could be, his cruelty flashbacks to Nazi Germany

Trump is worse this time❗
Echo opinion letter published in the Idaho Statesman in Boise Idaho:
The foundation beneath our feet is shaken by the arrogant, constantly repeated MAGA cult continuing big lies, the daily unchecked power of executive orders that silence agencies, the firing of inspector generals that safeguard power that is misused and the narrow confirmation of a totally unqualified Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.

We are witnessing the disruption of millions of migrant lives waiting for asylum without discretion as they are hunted in fields, schools, workplaces, and churches. Wielding his now presidential signature to suspend membership to world organizations, Trump has silenced the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) and canceled cancer research, pardoned violent hoodlums that killed capital police officers with blatant disrespect for the rule of law. 

We the people of this nation shudder and dread what is coming. And still, his bloated ego bad-mouths a prayer for mercy at the National Cathedral by Archbishop Mariann Edgar Budde (Episcopal Diocese of Washington).
National Cathedral 

Trump threatens other countries with the extortion of tariffs if they do not cave to his whims. This all in one week. This singular dismantling of our government as we know it. This testing the rule of law. These threats that create chaos, discord and further division. This toxic disregard for the 14th Amendment that ensures birthright citizenship for children born in the United States. This narcissistic grab of unchecked power planned by the unelected personnel like Elon Musk and the ghoul Russel Vaught that created Project 2025. Trump is not making America great again. Instead, his cruelty is putting into play motions that will serve the wealthy and extend power to a few on the backs of the working many❓ 

Unacceptable! Intolerable! Resist! Regroup! Reclaim! Disobey! Do not give up hope! 

From Joye Lisk, in Eagle, Idaho

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Elon Musk is colliding with Holocaust denialism and must be severely reprimanded for his irresponsible Nazi behavior

Echo opinion letter published in the Idaho Statesman newspaper in Boise Idaho:

Musk thinks Germany should forget the sins of Nazism❓ Maybe so he can reenact them | Opinion

Elon Musk tells German far-right crowd the nation should move beyond "past guilt" ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day😓😨🕎✡️

I’m seeing shades of Adolf. The de facto president (Elon Musk) addressed a far-right group in Germany and told them to get past the Nazi problem. 

Did he mean forget about that time or deny it happened or it wasn’t as bad as perceived or as what❓

A group of four uniformed officers marching in a parade of SA stormtroopers, or 'brownshirts', in Berlin, Germany, circa 1929. The stormtroopers were a paramilitary organisation of the German Nazi Party, playing a key role in the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s. (Photo by Henry Guttmann/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Look what Trump/Musk and devotees have unleashed. Trump in his complete forgiveness to all the insurrection/riot idiots created the immediate comparison of Nazi Brown Shirts, subsequent SS Troops, the Gestapo. Previously we all said it mustn’t happen again, but it certainly seems that it is happening. Why❓ 

From Janette McFarland, in Fruitland, Idaho

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Donald Trump unleashed his Immigrations ghouls on innocent legal immigrants who are obeying the law!


Red Alert: 

Trump Administration is Disappearing Legal Foreign Nationals
including our Canadian Neighbors! 
So many of us in Maine and New England have friends and relatives who live in Canada. We often visit back and forth. 
Echo opinion published in the Topsham Scoop electronic newsletter
at this site here.

We are neighbors. At first our Canadian friends curtailed their travel to Maine and elsewhere in the US in protest of Trump's bullying tariffs and threats of annexation. Rightly so. But now, ominously, tourists and other legal residents and travelers from Canada and Europe are being randomly detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), thrown into cement cells, often transported to for-profit prisons, provided virtually no access to communication, phones, lawyers, or even told of alleged errors or wrongdoing.

It happened to Canadian Jasmine Mooney, who was held in detention for 12 days, apparently, because she goofed and went to a border crossing, instead of a consulate, to arrange for her U.S. work permit.

It happened to a Welsh tourist, Rebecca Burke,  held for 19 days in Tacoma, Washington, because, she thinks, some at ICE thought, erroneously, that she might be trying to work here without the right visa. It happened to three German citizens as well, one a permanent resident in the United States. (Axios, 3/20/25).

These brutal detentions without a hearing are happening to other immigrants too. Lawful permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil is still being held without charge because he peacefully protested for Palestinian rights. Over 200 Venezuelans were hurriedly arrested and boarded on planes with no process at all to a notorious prison in El Salvador, dubiously contracted for use by the Trump Administration. A District Court has held they were denied due process. 

On appeal, before a three judge panel, one judge noted during oral argument that Nazis had more due process being deported in WWII than these Venezuelans. (ABC, 3/24/25)

These situations are harrowing❗ Naturally, who would want to risk crossing our borders, even legally❓ Tourism is falling, but, most distressingly, so is the Constitution of the United States.

This is not who we are. We are not a brutal authoritarian gulag state - are we❓ Not by law. The 5th Amendment of the Constitution says we shall not deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. 

It applies to anyone, whether or not a citizen, in the United States. No one should be held in detention in this country or stripped of legal status without a fair hearing so they can state their case - due process of law. Period.💢

If the Administration either decides to ignore court orders or gets a corrupted Supreme Court to see the law their way, they will be able to sweep up virtually anyone and disappear them. Citizens or immigrants, legal or not, who knows❓ For there will never be a right to a hearing to figure out who they were. That is the power of abusing the
5th Amendment of the Constitution. We must protest it here.

In the meantime, I'll visit my family in Canada, so my relatives need not risk coming here and meeting a dangerously brainwashed ICE agent. Indeed, Canada, maybe you could save us and annex Maine❓ We ordinary people would surely be more secure.

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Illegal takeover of Greenland raises a memorny about an alternative: Re-Open Loring Air Force Base instead!

Viewing aurora borealis in Aroostook County, Maine
Echo opinion letter published in The County.
https://thecounty.me/2025/03/26/caribou/greenland-or-loring/

To the editor:
  As Donald Trump blusters about illegally seizing Greenland for America’s national defense, maybe every resident in Aroostook County, Maine can call the White House and remind them about the Loring Air Force Base
*.

In 1993, they deployed the Base Realignment and Closure [Commission], which was originally meant to decrease the defense budget. But what happened❓ They closed down Loring, which was a major economic driver for this region of the state of Maine, besides a strategic location for national defense. They moved all the planes and staff and money to the southern states of Alabama and Mississippi and left Aroostook barren without any federal economic driver to build up and maintain the region.


I know the MAGA cult crowd loves to do their own research, so I invite them to look up the numbers for defense budget from 1993 to 2024. How much was each year as we get to today? All that money, not spent in Aroostook over the time period.
In 1960, Aroostook County had a population of 120,000 residents. Today, we barely scratch at 70,000 people. Granted the base was comprised of a maximum of 7,000 military personnel for its capacity. But, how many residents, working, running businesses were an offshoot supporting the base and its staff? Many.

Every resident in Aroostook County, especially the cult MAGA [proponents], should be lighting up the White House switchboards (202-456-1111) demanding the reopening of Loring Air Force Base and to STOP wasting time by going after Greenland.

Call Senators Susan Collins and Angus. Call Representative Jared Golden. Tell them that Loring base needs to reopen, period, now. Aroostook prosperity depends on it and America’s national defense requires it.

From John Orlando in Van Buren, Maine (Aroostook County)

*Limestone, Maine: 30 years after its closure, veterans share memories of Loring Air Force Base: Those who served at Loring will always remember the base for the crucial and sometimes frightening role it played at the height of the Cold War. Two veterans who were stationed at the base and still live near it recently shared stories of their service and the base’s history.

In 1947, the U.S. Air Force chose Aroostook County to host one of the new Strategic Air Command bases, meant to house and possibly deploy nuclear weapons. The move came when the U.S. was engaging in a nuclear weapons arms race against the former Soviet Union, now Russia.

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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

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Monday, March 31, 2025

Let's write more about German history after World War II and the Nazi devastation

How Germany Remade Itself after the Holocaust an echo essay two book reviews Christian Caryl published in The New York Review of Books:

After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany by Michael H. Kater (Yale)

Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 by Frank Trentmann (Knopf Doubleday)
A postwar history of Germany suggests that its progress toward democracy has not always been as stable or straightforward as modern-day observers might assume.

This essay/book review article (two books) is an excellent  brutally told refresher about the devastation Naziism wrought on the German people and their culture- and it all happened in plain sight. 

On February 23, Germany held a nationwide election. The results were disturbing, if not completely unexpected. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the conservative party that has served as a pillar of Germany’s democratic system for nearly eighty years, came in first with 28.5 percent of the vote, a relatively anemic result. Finishing second, with 20.8 percent, was the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a revisionist far-right party that rejects migrants and has been implicated in an attempt to overthrow the federal government. The Social Democrats (SPD), who have long been one of the country’s leading mainstream parties, posted a dismal 16.4 percent. The outcome confirmed a long-standing trend: the assumptions that undergirded Germany’s democratic institutions after World War II are being upended. The CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, has already started talks with the SPD about the formation of a new ruling coalition. 

Whatever form it takes, though, Merz has categorically vowed to exclude the AfD.

Yet perhaps we should not be entirely surprised. A close look at the postwar history of Germany suggests that its progress toward democracy has not always been as stable or straightforward as modern-day observers might assume. Michael H. Kater offers an apt cautionary tale in After the Nazis, his history of post-1945 West German culture, which mingles a general chronicle of events with a few elements from his own biography.

In 1962, he writes, he came up with a provocative plan for his doctoral thesis: he would write about a little-examined pet project of Heinrich Himmler. In 1935, two years after the Nazi seizure of power, the SS leader created a pseudoscientific organization that aimed at providing a scholarly basis for Nazi theories about the “master race.” Himmler named it the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Legacy), and it was soon dispatching researchers to record folk songs in Finland and conduct phrenological studies in Tibet (the presumptive ancient homeland of the Aryans). Even within Germany these efforts were openly ridiculed by serious scholars. Hitler seems to have regarded the Ahnenerbe with derision, and its real-world effects remained limited. Yet Kater grasped that examining its history could offer a useful perspective on Nazi ideology and how it was shaped.

Two weeks into his work in the West German Federal Archives, however, Kater ran into an unexpected obstacle. The deputy director, Wolfgang A. Mommsen, accused him of misplacing files and peremptorily cut off his access. Kater responded by borrowing money to travel to the National Archives in the US, which held a full copy of Ahnenerbe records that had been microfilmed by the Americans for use in the war crimes trials in Nuremberg. “As I had suspected,” he writes in After the Nazis,  "
I had been thrown out of the Bundesarchiv on a pretext, for I found Mommsen’s name in the Ahnenerbe files repeatedly. A Nazi Party member since 1937, he had assisted it in the looting of archives in occupied eastern territories."

Kater discovered that the USSR (aka "Russia) considered prosecuting Mommsen for war crimes after the German surrender, but he had managed to evade charges by making himself useful to the Western occupation authorities: “Thereafter, he re-entered the archivist’s profession in 1952, becoming president of the Federal Archives in 1967. In 1972 he received the Federal Cross of Merit from Bonn.” Kater finished his dissertation on the Ahnenerbe, and it was published as a book in 1974.

In West Germany in the 1950s, and 1960s, the case of someone like Mommsen was at once scandalous, but also entirely routine. 

After 1945, the victorious powers had vowed to cleanse German officialdom of Nazi functionaries, but this was easier said than done. The Nazi (short for National Socialist German Workers) Party—a true mass organization—had had, at its peak, eight million members, a staggering one tenth of the Reich’s citizens. The Allied occupiers couldn’t run the country on their own, so they found themselves relying on the help of Germans who had the requisite technical and administrative experience—and the overwhelming majority of those were ex-Nazis.

In some ways, as Frank Trentmann points out in Out of the Darkness, his magisterial history of the “moral remaking” of postwar Germany, the Soviets had it easier in their zone of occupation, where they had a ready-made reservoir of leaders at hand: they installed German Communists, released from the concentration camps or repatriated from the USSR, in important positions. After the German Democratic Republic was formed in 1949, its leaders began incorporating lower-ranking ex-Nazis into their governing institutions, a process that required “political conversion” to the new socialist order. “Since ordinary Nazi Party members had simply been ‘betrayed’ by fascism,” Trentmann writes, “there was no need for atonement.”

Matters were more complicated in the West. “Communists had been among the Nazis’ first victims, and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany, or the GDR) saw itself as the fruit of their heroic victory,” Trentmann explains. “The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany, or the FRG), meanwhile, defined itself as the lawful successor of the German Reich, which meant taking on its liabilities.” (While the division of their country was painful to many Germans, Trentmann notes that it effectively solved one big problem of the Weimar Republic, where right-wing and left-wing militias had battled each other in the streets. The East German Communist Party now had to focus its energies on building its new state, giving it little interest in promoting subversion across the border.)

The Americans, the British, and the French each took different approaches to denazification in their respective zones (which eventually were combined to form the Federal Republic). The British, for example, instructed German war crimes courts to follow an Allied guideline that specified that, as Trentmann relates, “[not having] himself pulled the trigger did not exempt [a person] from criminal conviction, nor did the fact that he was following orders.” The Americans, by contrast, allowed the courts in their zone “to follow the conventional criminal code” and to “judge [war criminals] according to the law at the time,” an approach that led to frequent acquittals. But in both the East and the West the initial urge to weed out former Nazis soon gave way to the exigencies of governance. Some eventually ascended to the Federal Republic’s highest positions. Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had worked in Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, served as chancellor from 1966 to 1969; Karl Heinrich Lübke, who served as president for ten years starting in 1959, had worked during the Nazi era for Albert Speer’s Armaments Ministry, which made extensive use of slave labor.

In retrospect, none of this seems terribly surprising. During their time in power the Nazis had thoroughly “harmonized” (gleichgeschaltet) the country’s institutions, subordinating every administrative body and virtually every element of what we would today call “civil society” to the dictates of the party. Uprooting this pervasive presence was an enormous task.

And yet despite this, the Germans were remarkably successful at disentangling themselves from their baleful past. “Over the course of the past eighty years, Germany has gone through a remarkable moral and material regeneration,” writes Trentmann. In After the Nazis, Kater quotes a political scientist who called the postwar Federal Republic “the most successful attempt at democracy in German history.” Today, Germany stands as an exemplar of the virtues of parliamentary democracy and is a pillar of the European Union. Rarely, though, does anyone consider what an extraordinary and hard-won achievement this is.

So how, precisely, did the Germans pull it off? The answers remain of interest not only to historians but also to other societies contemplating the transition from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. As both Trentmann and Kater show, the outcome was by no means assured.

On May 8, 1945, the Third Reich came to an end. Eighty million Germans confronted an apocalyptic scene. The economy lay in ruins, shattered by years of aerial bombing and months of ferocious ground combat; in many cities barely a building remained intact. Government-issued currency had lost so much of its value that it was supplanted as a primary medium of exchange by cigarettes. The victorious powers stripped the country of a quarter of its territory, and 14 million ethnic Germans from areas ceded to the USSR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia began a long trek to join their compatriots in the West.

Germans had spent the war years in comparatively privileged circumstances thanks to the Nazi regime’s exploitation of conquered territories. Now they faced starvation, epidemics, and homelessness. “In July 1946, the average German man in his twenties weighed 130 pounds,” according to Trentmann. “By February 1948, that had dropped to 114 pounds.”

In some ways, the moral and spiritual consequences of the defeat were even more devastating than the material ones. The Third Reich stood exposed in the eyes of the world as a criminal state. The systematic murder of six million European Jews led a long list of German sins. The gas chambers and the execution pits had also claimed Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, and disabled people; concentration camps housed dissidents across the political spectrum, from Communists to priests. Nazi Germany had conquered Europe and governed its conquests on the assumption that it could exploit defeated people and their resources without any legal or ethical constraint. In the course of the war, the Third Reich and its fascist allies had slaughtered countless Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Yugoslavs, often treating noncombatant civilians just as viciously as they did uniformed soldiers. Millions of slave laborers were taken from their home countries and subjected to lethal working conditions.

The sheer scale of German defeat underlined the moral failures of the Nazi regime. Six million soldiers were dead or missing. The combat veterans who managed to make it home were often physically and emotionally crippled. For many of them, their sense of emasculation was compounded by the fact that their wives had been empowered by the war, which had pushed them into jobs and responsibilities they now found hard to relinquish. In the East, the widespread rape of women by Soviet soldiers had dramatized the inability of their absent husbands to defend them. In the West, the swagger and wealth of GIs, boasting ample quantities of “nylon stockings, chocolate and cigarettes,” made for a different form of humiliation. (The actress Hildegard Knef called the Americans “taut soldiers with tight bottoms and fixed bayonets”; she later married one.)


Even on a purely emotional level, the vaunted “master race” was now irrefutably under the mastery of others in every sense that counted. As the Allies became occupiers, they braced themselves for partisan warfare by forces still loyal to the Führer—the infamous “werewolves.” Yet the anticipated guerrilla war never materialized—one more testimony to the finality of the regime’s collapse. After World War I many Germans had succumbed to conspiracy theories that absolved the military from defeat on the battlefield and blamed it instead on alleged Jewish intriguers in the government (the so-called stab-in-the-back myth). In 1945 it was hard to blame anyone for the catastrophe but the all-powerful leader who had so clearly led the country into the war. Indeed, in the ensuing decades, the unsurpassably evil Hitler offered a useful alibi to many Germans wishing to conceal their own complicity. As both Trentmann and Kater show, many sought refuge from the heavy weight of the past by trying to assert their own forms of victimhood.

Yet, even if most Germans didn’t believe that they bore personal responsibility for the crimes of the Hitler NAZI regime, there was still an inescapable sense of guilt. 

Trentmann offers ample evidence that many experienced Allied bombing raids as direct retribution for the atrocities committed against the Jews. Most ordinary Germans hadn’t known the precise details of the extermination program, which the Nazi government had tried to keep secret, but the scale of the crime precluded the complete ignorance that many later tried to claim. Modern scholarship concludes that at least 200,000 people were directly involved in implementing the Holocaust, and that number doesn’t include the many soldiers of the regular armed forces who also took part in genocidal actions. (Many Germans persisted for years in clinging to the idea that the regular German army, the Wehrmacht, had remained unsullied by the unspeakable crimes of the SS, but subsequent scholarship revealed this to be yet another myth.)

Too many had been involved in the savagery. Still, this morally compromised Germany gradually began to find its way forward. Denazification produced wildly different results in the two halves of the divided nation. The East, deeming itself free of any responsibility for the Nazi era, promoted a version of history in which Communists were the Nazis’ main victims and that gave little acknowledgment to the Holocaust. In its early years the West lurched between confronting the past and effacing it. 

Even so, the purge of the highest-ranking Nazis on both sides of the divide in the years immediately after the war did at least provide space for new elites—some of them former political prisoners or returning émigrés—to establish themselves.

There is no making sense of postwar Germany without considering Konrad Adenauer, who became chancellor of the new Federal Republic at its founding in 1949, and served for the next fourteen years. He was also the first leader of the CDU. Adenauer, a Catholic and former mayor of Cologne who had opposed the Nazis before their seizure of power and studiously avoided any political activity during their reign, was imprisoned after the failed plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. When he assumed his new position as the leader of the West German government, he was seventy-three years old.

Kater only has a few lines about Adenauer and sticks mostly to the conventional view of him as a stuffy, somewhat authoritarian figure. Trentmann offers a much more interesting interpretation. While acknowledging the chancellor’s paternalism, he argues that Adenauer “oversaw an extraordinary transformation, in domestic as much as international policy.” It was Adenauer, known as der Alte (“the Old Man”), who oversaw the adoption of the Basic Law, a new constitution designed by leading legal scholars to overcome the institutional weaknesses of Weimar democracy. Among other things, it created a solidly federal structure and prevented political fragmentation by excluding from parliament parties that failed to win at least 5 percent of the vote (a provision later adopted by many of the postcommunist states in Central and Eastern Europe). When the Western Allies finally implemented a wide-ranging currency reform in 1948, Adenauer and his economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, seized the chance to pass a series of reforms that ushered in the much-vaunted “economic miracle” that ultimately transformed Germany into a champion of European growth. Adenauer believed firmly in what came to be called the “social market economy,” which combined free market economics with extensive social protections and strong labor union participation.

By joining the European Coal and Steel Community (the forerunner of today’s European Union) in 1951, Adenauer signaled that henceforth the Federal Republic would side firmly with the West, breaking a long-standing German foreign policy orientation toward Central and Eastern Europe. This was not the only available option. Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the opposition SPD, long favored a course of neutrality that some believed might persuade the Soviets to allow East and West Germany to reunify. Many Germans were tempted by this vision, but Adenauer would have none of it. Instead he brought the Federal Republic into NATO in 1955, despite widespread popular resistance to rearmament. Yet voters validated the Old Man’s choice. In 1957 the CDU won a 50.2 percent majority under the slogan “No Experiments.” Trentmann describes this as one of the most famous mottoes in German election history—and also “one of the most misleading.” He views Adenauer, like the nineteenth-century Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who unified Germany, as a “white revolutionary,” a leader “who understood that to conserve required radical change, not standing still.”

Adenauer’s attitude toward the past was complex. He put an end to denazification procedures and defended an amnesty for ex-Nazis as the only option for maintaining governability. “You do not pour out dirty water,” he once declared, “if you do not have any that is clean.” Yet he also took an active part in the decision to pay huge sums to Israel as a form of compensation (Wiedergutmachung—literally “making good again”) for the Holocaust. “For Adenauer, Wiedergutmachung was about accountability,” Trentmann writes. “Once old accounts had been settled, forgiveness could follow.”

Adenauer’s strong hand had an unexpected side effect: it spurred many members of the younger generation into political activity. The 1950s and early 1960s are typically portrayed as a period of reactionary stagnation, but Germany’s postwar democracy was never solely a top-down project. Trentmann chronicles the myriad new paths that individual Germans began to seek. Volunteerism and civic activism swelled. Young people built ties to their counterparts in countries that the Third Reich had once occupied, accepting and demonstrating responsibility for Nazi-era crimes. By the late 1950s, he notes, many Germans were already expressing dissatisfaction with the short sentences handed out by domestic courts for Nazi-era atrocities. The 1958 trial in Ulm of men who had taken part in the mass shootings of Jewish civilians during the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe resulted in appallingly mild verdicts—a pattern that was repeated in the 1963–1965 trials in Frankfurt of Auschwitz officials. German judges insisted that Nazi-era crimes could be tried only according to the standards of law valid at the time they were committed, which usually led to acquittals or minimal sentences. As the inadequacy of this approach became all too apparent, German courts began to accept that unprecedented crimes could only be tried according to broader humanitarian principles.

Kater’s sweeping account is unfortunately marred by dogmatic judgments and stylistic infelicities (aka, inappropriate expressions).

Nonetheless, it does an impressive job of chronicling how culture aided Germans’ gradual acknowledgment of these burdens of the past. One of my favorite figures in the book is Joseph Beuys, an elfin prankster who infused his conceptual art with a quirkily tactile sensibility. During the war his Luftwaffe plane was shot down over Crimea, and he was rescued by Tatars who brought him back to health by encasing him in lard and felt—or that, at least, was what Beuys claimed. These two materials later assumed a prominent place in his art, which combined elements of playfulness and mourning in weirdly resonant ways that seemed calculated to provoke the guardians of establishment culture. And that, of course, was very much the point. Throughout the postwar years, Kater shows, avant-garde artists and musicians contributed mightily to developing new tolerance for cultural experimentation, international influences, and liberal politics.

In 1947, the literary magazine editor Hans Werner Richter convened the first meeting of a group of mostly young writers united in their opposition to Nazism and its legacy. 

Several of the most important members of what came to be known as Group 47 had fought in the war. They included Martin Walser and the future Nobel Prize winners Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, all of whom channeled their wartime experiences into works that defied the widespread determination to draw a veil over the past. Even these well-meaning efforts, however, had their limits. The poet Paul Celan, who wrote in German, was a Jewish Holocaust survivor from pre-war Romania whose hermetic (very rigid) writing tested the very notion of artistic communication after the murder of millions.

When he staged an eccentric reading of his work at a Group 47 meeting, his listeners reacted with condescension (though Kater insists that this was grounded in simple miscomprehension rather than antisemitism). Just because you had an anti-Nazi stance didn’t always mean that you could produce good literature—or that you could recognize it when you saw it.

Both Trentmann and Kater demonstrate that Germany’s progress toward today’s emphatically liberal democracy was often bumpy and ambivalent. (The Federal Republic only abolished long-established laws against homosexuality in 1969.) A crucial moment, Kater contends, came when university students began to rebel against the continuing ubiquity of ex-Nazis throughout institutions of higher education. The children of former Nazis were strikingly prominent in the rise of the Red Army Faction, the left-wing terrorist movement that set Germany on edge in the 1970s, prompting both tortured ambivalence and open approbation among some progressive intellectuals. Kater has an especially useful section on the Historikerstreit (the Historians’ Debate) that broke out in the 1980s when a group of conservative scholars began arguing against the uniqueness of the Holocaust (particularly in light of the millions of deaths for which Stalin was responsible) and against the need to embrace Germany’s responsibility for it.

It wasn’t only conservatives, however, who struggled to come to terms with the legacy of the Third Reich. In 1989, amid the collapse of the East German state, Grass was among the many cultural figures who declared that the two Germanies should remain separate in recompense for the magnitude of Nazi crimes—even though Germans on both sides of the Wall voted overwhelmingly for unification as soon as they got the chance. Grass’s dramatic stance appeared in a strikingly different light when he admitted in a 2006 interview—seven years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize—that he had served in the Waffen-SS near the end of the war.

It is a fitting measure of the success of the Federal Republic of Germany that we tend to take its prosperity and its pacifism for granted. Collective German remorse has been an especially important element in this rehabilitation. By 2015 attitudes toward the Nazi past had evolved to the point that President Joachim Gauck, a former civil rights activist from the GDR, could declare, “There is no German identity without Auschwitz.” No other country, Trentmann notes, has “turned past sins into a source of civic pride like Germany.”
This astonishing metamorphosis reminds us that collective cultural identities, which might appear to be stubbornly fixed, are in fact profoundly mutable. 

We shouldn’t necessarily take this as reassurance, as the rise of right-wing populist groups such as the AfD demonstrates. Germany will remain a model liberal democracy only if its leaders and its citizens continue working to keep it one*.

*Like the American patriot Benjamin Franklin warned, "a Republic, if you can keep it!"  In other words, Republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people. 

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Immigrant abduction and roundups: Regardless of your political beliefs, this is not the nation I grew up in

Masked agents arresting innocent immigrants in the streets❓
Nazi tactics❗ Echo opinion letter published in The Winchester Star, a Virginia newspaper: 

Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, just left her home in Somerville , Massachusetts, to meet with friends when she was detained by U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents, lawyer Mahsa Khanbabai said in a petition filed in Boston federal court. Khanababai called the arrest by masked agents "terrifying."😱😳😈

Dear Editor: It is beyond belief that masked federal agents are arresting people on the streets of America. I understand protective gear if necessary, but last week masked agents arrested a woman and whisked her off into custody and transported her to isolation in Louisiana. 😡😢💢 Regardless of your political beliefs, this is not the direction our country should be headed. 

Holocaust Museum✡️Jewish sector street scene  in 1930s Paris France
If masked agents can arrest this woman, what stops masked agents from arresting any person in this country and sending them to an unknown location? Not the country I grew up in.

From Gary W. Baylis in Frederick County, Virginia

⚠️Kristi Noem’s disturbing failure of compassion — and of leadership- The Hill

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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

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Sunday, March 30, 2025

Security communications were available to Pete Hegseth but, instead, he used Signal- commercial text WWHT?

Letters: Donald Trump’s administration shows incompetence with SignalGate security breach leak. #WWHT❓
Echo opinion published in the Chicago Tribune:

Fire Hegseth NOW! 
Blatant incompetence and a complete disregard for America’s safety — how could so-called senior officials in President Donald Trump’s administration not check who was in the chat when discussing war plans? And why were they using a nongovernment, commercially available application like Signal instead of the numerous secure methods of communication readily available to them? 

The journalist, editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, from The Atlantic showed more concern for our national secrets than our Senate-confirmed so-called “experts.”

This is just another example of the misplaced confidence of the Trump administration. Consider Elon Musk’s unfocused fiscal chainsaw, 
❗😱Trump’s constant flip-flopping on tariffs and the thinly veiled bribes from corporations that believe they will never receive fair treatment from this government without making payoffs. Even with the daily examples of ineptitude in the last 60 days, it’s absolutely outrageous that this security breach could happen.

This incompent administration is constantly trying to impress us, wrongminded, that it knows best and has all the answers, but its actions show just the opposite. 

Administration officials are absolutely clueless, sloppy and incompetent.  From Joe Szczepaniak, in Wheaton, Illinoia

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SignalGate opinion letters: "US national security might have been compromised and Trump’s strongman shtick surely was"

Eccho opinion letters published in The New York Times:
SignalGate
To the Editor of The New York Times The egregious disclosure of classified information regarding the U.S. military strike in Yemen against Houthi rebels to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, via an commercial unauthorized group chat warrants an immediate investigation. The public and Congress need to know how such an unthinkable national security breach involving the highest-level administration officials, including the vice president and the secretary of defense, could have occurred.

The overriding question that needs to be answered is whether this breakdown is a one-off event, or reflective of a more systemic laxity within the administration. The latter would be in keeping with President Trump’s history of mishandling classified documents.

At a minimum, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, should resign.

From Mark Godes in Chelsea, Massachusetts

To the Editor: The real harm of the intelligence breach in the group chat about the military operations in Yemen is in the content of the conversation itself. To a foreign adversary, this thread represents what could be considered the holy grail of intelligence. China, Russia and Iran now have direct insight into how defense and intelligence officials strategize and make decisions, revealing vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

This breach compromises national security in ways that could have long-lasting consequences. It is a serious lapse in safeguarding sensitive information. The C.I.A. spends thousands of hours of research in trying to ascertain exactly this type of behavior in the leaders of our adversaries.

This incident should serve as a clear wake-up call that the people currently running our intelligence and defense communities are wholly incompetent and should be replaced with professionals.

From Brian L. Tell in Palm Springs, California.

To the Editor: There is plenty of blame being aimed at the Trump administration officials who used a commercial text platform to discuss the nation’s planned military actions in Yemen. 

They should all be held accountable.

However, there is another group equally responsible for this dangerous lack of professionalism: the senators who confirmed individuals so clearly unqualified for their positions. 

Rather than insisting that Trump nominate experienced, competent candidates, the Republicans on Capitol Hill capitulated to pressure, putting a team of underprepared individuals in critical government roles. Unfortunately, this may not be the last on-the-job security breach we see from this group. I hope I am wrong.

From Anne Krick in Warrenville, Illinois

To the Editor:  The bungling of a text chat hosted by Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, that included Marco Rubio, the secretary of state; the defense secretary Pete Hegseth; and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, clearly demonstrates that Elon Musk’s “government efficiency” efforts are focused on the wrong aspect of government. Instead of laying off thousands of dedicated hard-working government agency employees, he and his army of ax men should be examining the incompetence and inefficiency at the highest levels of government — in the form of the president’s appointees. The level of incompetence and inefficiency should keep them busy for quite a while.

From Ken Lefkowitz in Medford, New Jersey

To the Editor: If Trump truly were a strong leader, he would demand the resignations of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, for their involvement in the Signal affair. This move would demonstrate an unwavering commitment to the security of the nation and zero tolerance for incompetence and bad behavior among his senior leadership team. But instead the president has exposed his inherent weakness by responding with his usual denial, name-calling and bluster.

Our national security might have been compromised. Trump’s strongman shtick surely was.

From Steve Nelson in Williamstown, Massachusetts

To the Editor:  Well, it didn’t take long for the wheels to start coming off the Trump administration’s clown car. Will this be enough for the supine Republican Congress to finally begin putting country over self?  And then there is the incompetent defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, calling Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of  The Atlantic, a “so-called journalist.” This so-called journalist had more integrity and concern for our country than the Republicans who were on the security breached Signal group chat!

From:  MacKenzie Allen in St.-Clement-Rancoudray, France

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