Senator Susan Collins has caused financial harm to Maine because her vote to support the Big Ugly bill cut health care for thousands)

COLLINS’S PORK BARREL BALANCE SHEET DOESN’T ADD UP - ….and besides, it’s just more deficit spending

(Op-ed in the Press Herald) Maine can’t afford Senator Susan Collins’ earmarks: The numbers and the reality on the ground don’t lie. 

Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins

Wayne Clark, of Durham, is an eighth-generation Mainer, a retired public relations and marketing executive and author of The Blue Yankee on Substack.

Sen. Susan Collins keeps reminding us how much money she brings into Maine. That money comes from congressional “earmarks” (sometimes known as “pork”). She says she has brought in $1.5 billion over the past five years.

There’s another side to the ledger, though: how much has Sen. Collins’ subservience to Donald Trump and the GOP cost Maine?
Collins (and to be fair most of her colleagues) did not lift a finger to stop DOGE, 😡illegal tariffs, illegal wars, deteriorating foreign relations and the One Big Beautiful (Ugly❗) Bill Act. Nor has she tried to rein in Trump. Can we afford the cost of her votes and inaction❓ First, let’s do a numbers check.

Collins brought in 💲200 million worth of pork in 2022, $308 million in 2023, 💲576 million in 2024, 💲0 in 2025 (no earmarks for anyone that year due to the continuing resolution) and 💲428.6 million in 2026. So, the average per year over the past five years is roughly 💲302 million. Against that 💲302 million number, let’s look at how much Collins’ and Congress’ inaction and obedience to Trump has cost Mainers.

The Maine Center for Economic Policy reports that the total tariffs collected by Trump in the first year equal about 💲1,100 per household. In Maine, that translates to a total of 💲677 million. And that’s just one year. Most of that has been paid by Mainers in the form of higher prices.

The budget bill imposed new work requirements on Medicaid recipients (even though most already work). Maine DHHS estimates that 30,000 Mainers are expected to lose coverage in the first year alone because they can’t navigate the reporting requirements. Just administering the work requirement paperwork will cost Maine $8 million in year one, and 💲5.5 million per year thereafter.
Trump and the GOP declined to extend the tax subsidies that made coverage under the Affordable Care Act actually affordable for many people. A report from Defend America Action says that Mainers who buy health insurance through the ACA exchange will see their coverage costs for next year increase as much as 💲900 per month.
The budget bill adds a work requirement to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and reduces the federal contribution to the costs of running the program. Total loss of money to Maine❓= 💲145 million per year.
Those people who are losing Medicaid covera(ge and many of the ones losing their ACA subsidies will be uninsured. That hits our hospitals: the loss of coverage will cost Maine hospitals 💲66 million per year, and free care is expected to go up by 💲86 million per year by 2034.

Canadian tourism is down (-) 40％, as a result of tariffs and Trump’s insulting behavior toward Canada. In 2024, Canadians spent about $500 million in Maine. So that means Trump and the Congress that let him get away with tariffs and bad behavior cost our tourism sector about $200 million in just one year.

The combination of tariffs and the Iran war have skyrocketed our costs. Coffee is up, beef is up. Gas is up by nearly a dollar in Maine, and it has been up as much as 💲1.40 a gallon. The war Collins didn’t vote against nine times has cost everyone at the pumps.
Now, I wouldn’t add up the numbers above and pretend to have an accurate, defensible total. But it doesn’t take long to overtop Collins’ 💲302.5 million of pork. In fact, the Maine Center for Economic Policy totals the cost to Maine just from the budget bill at 💲400 million per year.

That’s a lot of money talk. The human costs are harder to quantify, but they’re very real. It seems to me we simply can’t afford six more years of this. Pork or not, we can’t afford Susan Collins.

Donald Trump has zero understanding about history but has an ugly genetic motivation for being an emperor

Echo opinion interview published in The New York Times;

Mary Beard Looks at Trump and Can’t Not Think of Ancient Rome

Making American like ancient Rome again. 

It is called the (gross❗) imperial presidency. For decades, presidents of both parties have pushed to expand the power of the office — Donald  Trump has pushed very, very hard, and in ways that might leave some people wondering what year it is.

One of the people who may be wondering is the classicist Mary Beard, who knows better than most that wielding imperial power has a very long history. She reflected on how the political realities of ancient times still resonate today in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. It has been edited for length and clarity.

John Guida: Perhaps ancient Rome can help us think about, and try to make sense of, structures of power in today’s politics. When you see in Washington today plans for a hulking triumphal arch or a version of a gladiatorial fight on the lawn of the White House, what do you think?

Mary Beard: It is hard not to see a reflection of ancient Rome here. That goes without saying in the case of the grotesque triumphal arch. The whole tradition of these arches goes back to Rome itself (sometimes erected to commemorate a special victory, sometimes to commemorate Roman success more generally), and there are several ancient examples still standing (the Arch of Constantine, by the Colosseum, is one of the best known). They were copied by kings and dynasts in the West ever after, from boastful permanent monuments in marble to temporary structures in plaster put up to mark a particular festival.

It’s worth remembering, though, that the original Roman versions would have probably been showier than what the president plans, vulgar as that seems to me. The rather austere ancient monuments we now see have lost their gilding and gold fittings, their paint and the gilded sculptures often perched on top (rather outbidding Trump’s lions — don’t tell him!). It’s worth remembering, too, that the president isn’t the first to have wanted an arch in Washington. We only narrowly missed one originally planned in the 1980s to be part of the Navy Memorial. And of several others proposed, the only one that got built was a temporary plaster version over Pennsylvania Avenue to mark the end of World War I.

Guida: And then the Ultimate Fighting Championship spectacle at the White House marked the president’s 80th birthday.

Beard: Yes, hideous cage fighting on the White House lawn really is reminiscent of Roman gladiatorial combat, hosted by emperors on a vast scale in the Colosseum, and more modestly at their own homes. Once again, though, the emperors outbid the president. I don’t just mean that some gladiators really did fight to the death. Many Roman emperors leaped into the arena to fight with the gladiators (probably in a very carefully staged way). The first “Gladiator” movie was right on that score — another thing we should probably keep from Trump.

Guida: So what role does spectacle play in holding or expanding power❓ How would you explain the difference, if you think there is one, between a Roman emperor’s attending fights at the Colosseum and a U.S. president’s planning a triumphal arch❓

Beard: There are strong similarities between Rome and many later political systems, not only the modern United States. The emperor has to be seen, has to leave his mark (sort of like a dog at a tree❓), has to outbid earlier emperors. So Trump’s ostentatious arch is planned to be a tiny bit higher than any other arch in the world. The Column of Marcus Aurelius, still standing in Rome, was designed to be a tiny bit taller than the earlier Trajan’s Column.

But spectacle could be risky, too. Why did emperors want to compete as a gladiator in the arena❓ Because they were frightened that the popular spotlight was on the gladiators, that they were being upstaged by gladiators … so the only way was to risk looking an idiot by joining them.

Guida: If we compare political systems: The Constitution structures the American version and features a system of separation of powers. There is now intense conflict about the relative strength (particularly the presidency) or weakness (Congress) of those powers.

Is it fair to say that the Roman Republic period — what you have described as a “sort-of democracy” — featured a very early version of separation of powers❓ Can you talk about how that was structured, and how that arrangement built an empire?

Beard: The fact is that the notional division of powers in Rome was often controversial and fought over. I call the Roman Republic (which was such an inspiration to the American founders) a “sort-of democracy” because the power of the individual ordinary man (and I do mean man) was formally defined as less than that of the individual aristocrat. Under very complicated voting arrangements, the votes of the poor counted for less than the votes of the rich. That said, major decisions of war and peace, elections and lawmaking were in the hands of popular assemblies (with all their inequities). The question was how the power of people related to that of the elected magistrates (consuls, etc.) and the Senate. 

By definition, the magistrates were all chosen from among the elite, and the Senate was nothing more than a council of all ex-magistrates that had no formal power, but a huge amount of authority.
Guida: How much do we actually know about that system❓

Beard: This kind of government grew up in a period for which we have very little evidence. Later ancient writers themselves struggled to get their heads around this, and the best they came up with was the idea that Rome was a “mixed” constitution (part democracy, part aristocracy, part monarchical — they were thinking there of the powers of the magistrates). For us the weakness of the system is obvious. It was all very well when there was broad consensus at Rome. But conflict exposed the fault lines. What if the people wanted to flout the (ultimately informal) authority of the Senate❓

It was partly this kind of conflict that brought about the fall of the Republic. There was a symbolic moment in the final conflict between Julius Caesar and his rival Pompey in the 40s B.C.E. The Senate tells both of them to disband their armies. They just ignore the instruction — because in the end, all the Senate had was authority, not power.

Guida: How did that evolve into rule by emperor❓

Beard: The internal fractures that I have just been talking about are part of the story of the evolution of one-man rule. But an even bigger factor was empire. Rome’s vast empire was “acquired” (to put it euphemistically) during the period of the Republic. The emperors inherited the empire; they didn’t acquire it.

The central problem here was that the kind of governmental organization I have just described was fine for a small city-state, but very ill suited to governing a vast empire. For example, the magistrates (who were also military commanders) were elected for only one year at a time. By the first century B.C.E., it might have taken months just to reach conflicts at the margins of empire. And the sheer size of what was now “Rome” produced problems that were too big to be solved by very temporary officials. The Roman Republic began to give some individuals extra powers to deal with those problems. Pompey, for example, was given a huge command to deal with pirates — the Roman word for terrorist — across the Mediterranean.

But those powers in the end surpassed the traditional forms of government, and it was soon clear that the big politicians of the first century B.C.E., with the vast riches of empire behind them, were fighting to become one-man rulers. Julius Caesar was only the last of several attempts.

Guida: You have said that one-to-one comparisons of a contemporary president to an emperor don’t really hold up. What about discrete aspects❓ Does anything about Trump give off emperor vibes and remind you of certain strategies or characteristics of one or another emperor❓

Beard: Comparing Donald Trump to a particular Roman emperor is a good party game, but no more. Nevertheless, you can see similarities between the practices of the current administration and the rule of the Roman emperors, and of many other dynasts through history.

One thing that strikes me is the habit of changing your mind. It is easy to take that as mere vacillation — why can’t Trump just make his mind up about tariffs, Greenland or whatever❓ But it is a classic tactic of the power play of autocrats. Mind-changing is a form of control. It means that everyone, including your own advisers, have to keep listening to you, have to keep adjusting to your new view. There is a wonderful story along those lines told of the emperor Caligula, who in the first century C.E. decides to invade Britain, gets to the shores of the Channel, then says he has changed his mind, has his soldiers collect some seashells and goes back home. That’s power.

Guida: Was character important to the rule of an emperor❓ Was there any connection between good or bad character and the well-being of the empire?

Beard: The character of individual emperors is almost impossible to gauge. The simple reason is that the reputations of these rulers were in the hands of their successors. If an emperor died in his bed and was succeeded by his son and heir, he generally went down as a “good” emperor (it was in the interests of his successor to paint him as such). If he was assassinated, he was usually painted as a monster (he was so awful, the idea was, that he had to be overthrown). 

Some of those assassinated may have been monsters, but not all: They were seen as monsters because they were assassinated, not assassinated because they were monsters.

In general, though, the supposed characteristics of “good” emperors remained remarkably constant throughout the first centuries of imperial rule. They were generous, but not extravagant; they scored notable military victories; they erected buildings for the good of the community; and they were hospitable to the elite (nice, simple suppers up at the palace). “Bad” emperors were the reverse.

Guida: In the Trump era, longstanding arguments over American identity have re-emerged. In short, are we a creedal/propositional nation (unified by beliefs and ideals) or a nation defined by ethnic or religious identities (heritage, or blood-and-soil)?

You have written that ancient Rome was a (surprisingly) inclusive society, and Romans were willing to bring new members into their community and share the privileges of citizenship. Was that inclusivity contested — did “heritage” Romans define a much more narrow ideal of what it meant to be Roman?

Beard: This is one of the most striking and unexpected features of Rome. Now, Romans were not modern liberals, and there was plenty of nasty ethnocentricity. Greeks were often said to reek of perfume; emperors from “abroad” — and they increasingly came from outside Italy — were satirized for their odd accents.

But the basic principle of Rome was that you could become Roman. That was an idea that went back to the myths of Rome’s origins. One mythical founder of the city, Aeneas, was a refugee from Troy; the other more famous mythical founder, Romulus, made Rome an “asylum” welcoming all-comers. One of the central factors here is that you didn’t have to do much to express your Romanness (there’s no saluting the flag). And crucially it was always assumed that a Roman could have two “homes”: Rome and wherever their ancestors came from. The orator Cicero, for example, was Roman and from the little town of Arpinum.

Guida: The Trump Treasury Department would like to print a new 💲250 bill that could feature a portrait of him (federal law prohibits printing money with the image of a living person, so Congress would have to get involved). The department has also announced that his signature will appear on future U.S. currency.

How did Roman emperors use currency as a political tool, and did that shape citizens’ views of power and the powerful❓


Beard: Coinage was crucial in Roman perception of imperial power. Julius Caesar was the first leader in the West in 44 B.C.E. (just before his assassination) to have his living head systematically on the coinage (plenty of the dead were portrayed on earlier coinage, but not the living). It was controversial, seen as a marker of excessive power, but it became absolutely standard after him. Even Brutus, one of his assassins, had his own head on coins a couple of years later.

The point was that forever after the inhabitants of the Roman Empire carried the emperor’s head around in their pockets (and we in Britain still do). One question for the Roman emperor was how to get his image out there. Coinage was one answer to that.

There were also written slogans on coins. How effective these were, we don’t know. Sometimes they seem a bit desperate, or hopeless wishful thinking. I think particularly of “The Harmony of the Armies,” which regularly appeared at times of civil war.

Guida: How did the role of elites — political, business, military — shift in the Republic versus the emperor eras of ancient Rome❓
Beard: There was a lot of nostalgia among the elite for the Republic. But it was mostly no more than that. We like to think that the old elite would have been actively working to undermine the system of one-man rule, but they didn’t. Instead, they conspired against individual emperors, but not against the system of one-man rule itself. After the mid-first century C.E. (at the end of the rule of Caligula), we have no evidence for any publicly expressed desire at Rome to return to the Republic. It’s a regime built on collaboration.

Guida: Did citizens have any means of holding the powerful to account❓

Beard: There was no longer any electoral system of all the citizens to hold the emperor to account, but the venues of popular entertainment were places where the general public could very clearly express their discontent. It’s no substitute for real power, but it was clearly quite frightening for the emperors. The Circus Maximus (where the chariot races happened) could hold over 200,000 spectators, perhaps 250,000, bigger than any modern sports stadium. When the crowd demanded changes there, emperors were wise to give in.

Guida: When Augustus cast a new imperial scheme, he did so, you said, “in the words and slogans and ideas of the old.” How do you separate rhetoric from the evolution, and reshaping, of power❓ What rules or norms that previously constrained power — perhaps particularly with the Senate❓ — were discarded or redefined, and how❓

Beard: That’s exactly Augustus’ point: You can’t separate rhetoric from the reshaping of power. So far as the Senate was concerned, in some ways its power increased under the emperors. Its decrees had used to be merely advisory (“authoritative”). From Augustus on, they had the force of law.

But that is rather overshadowed by other factors, pulling in different ways. So, for example, you could paint the imperial regime as a military dictatorship. The emperor controls the army (for the first time all Roman soldiers were under a single commander). But an awful lot of power between emperor and Senate was negotiated face to face, in a dance of rhetoric and manners. In this the emperor was always the boss, but he could be exposed.

There is a nice story about a legal trial taking place in the Senate, of a man accused of treason. When it comes to a vote, one senator asks the emperor (who is part of the proceeding) whether he will be casting his vote first or last: If last, he said, he fears he might “vote the wrong way by mistake.” It’s a packed story: It is partly ostentatious deference. It partly exposes the power of the emperor. But the senator gets his own way, because the emperor is put in the position of being effectively forced to vote first and to vote for acquittal, to show his mercy — as the senator wanted.

Guida: We’ve heard a lot about flattery in the halls of power — often as applied to dealings with President Trump, whether it’s members of his own cabinet and sycophancy in the G.O.P. or as applied by global leaders. When it is noted, it is generally to criticize.

But you have suggested that in ancient Rome, flattery was an effective tool in interactions among the powerful, including the emperor. Does flattery get a bad rap today❓

Beard: The anecdote I have just told is one answer to that. Paradoxically, flattery can be a means of power. That is not how we tend to think of it. We think of the need to flatter the person in power as demeaning. And so in a way it is, and it has always had a bad rap.

But it is also always more complicated. Flattery can always be ironic (showing up the person at whom it is directed) or, as in the senatorial anecdote, it can be used to get your own way (also showing that person up). But the bottom line is that flattery can disempower the flattered, not just the flatterer. Just imagine it: The emperor is the one person in the palace who knows that no one is ever telling him the truth.

Guida: Is it true that Rome’s administrative state was small by contemporary standards — that it lacked, in today’s terminology, state capacity❓ If so, did alliances help keep the state secure❓

Beard: The administrative footprint of Rome was tiny by any modern standards. So, absolutely right, it ruled with the collaboration of the local elites — and for many of them the prospect of closer links with Rome, of Roman citizenship and the incorporation into the Roman elite itself was a clear incentive. The Roman emperors who came from “elsewhere” — for example, Trajan around the turn of the second century C.E. from Spain, Septimius Severus a century later from North Africa — were a symbol of that incorporation. Rome was essentially an empire of collaboration.

Guida: In the United States, Christopher Nolan’s new film “The Odyssey” opens soon. Why do you think this story remains compelling to contemporary audiences❓ Does Odysseus not having GPS to guide him home have anything to do with it — or the lack of technology more generally❓

Beard: “The Odyssey” shows us that a GPS system will get you “home” only in the most limited sense❗ “The Odyssey” is compelling because it faces so cleverly all kinds of questions that we still face and ensures that we don’t overlook them: What does “home” mean❓ How do you grow up❓ What makes a good leader❓ How do you define the difference between civilization and barbarity❓Is that as easy as we might think❓

Mary Beard is the author, most recently, of “Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old” and a presenter (with Charlotte Higgins) of the podcast “Instant Classics” (and its companion, Bookclub). She is also classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and professor emerita of classics at University of Cambridge. John Guida is an editor in Times Opinion.

Excellent history review essay describing who is an American and the value of birthright citizenship supported by SCOTUS

Echo opinion essay published in the Business Standard*. 

By Howard Chua-Eoan:  Once upon a time, the French were the most enthusiastic aspirational Americans. 

Magical realism of the American dream: 

Birthright, belonging and hope

Inspired by the revolution of 1776, as well as the victory of the Franco-American alliance over the British in the 1781, battle of Yorktown, French polemicists, patriots, philosophers and plebs waxed idealistic about migrating to the brand new nation to share in its promise — la félicité publique of the Enlightenment transformed into “the pursuit of happiness” of the United States (US) Declaration of Independence. The vast possibilities of the future compelled one enthusiast to rhapsodise, “What then is the American, this new man❓” 💜💗☆

The question has been asked again and again in the 250 years since July 4, 1776. On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court rejected the Trump Administration’s attempt to place curbs on the 158-year-old 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which gives anyone born in the country citizenship by birthright. The debate seems to renew with each generation, if not with each year. By naturalization, the US adds about 800,000 new citizens annually — over a decade, a cohort bigger than the population of Hong Kong. 

In fact, the US produces far more freshly naturalized citizens than any other nation.  That’s apart from the estimated 3.5 million baby-citizens delivered each year. There is a metaphysical dimension to being born American in America. It means you are as American as anyone else born anywhere else in America. From Manhattan to Miami to Montana, Americans — as the late 18th century French pondered with awe — are privileged with geographical equality, and enter the world carrying an identity founded on place, not blood, with possibilities as immense as their landscape. Each is a plurality of one.

For now, though, let’s put aside the magic for realism. Americans have always been at odds with each other — often viciously — over who belongs to their promised land. Indeed, despite this week’s ruling, the US has become a much less welcoming place because of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) assaults on migrants (and almost anyone actually) driven by the populist rhetoric of Donald Trump and his (evil❗) acolytes. 

Today, even some newly-naturalized citizens advocate pulling up the ladder to curb immigration. Lawyers for skilled foreign job-seekers are now counselling their clients not to come to the US, reversing advice they’d provided for years.

And yet the American dream continues to draw people from around the world. Government statistics substantiate that magnetic power — in a backhanded way. Applications for immigration visas based on employment and family are backlogged for years, if not decades, as Bloomberg News notes. Depending on the applicant’s country of origin, the H-1B visa — which has been key to cheaper high-tech labor for Silicon Valley — continues to be heavily oversubscribed, in spite of lawyerly advice. It was perhaps the swiftest and most meritocratic way to prove your worth to a country you weren’t born in, but wanted to belong to. No longer. “It is far easier to obta-in any other type of major visa than an H-1B visa,” says a March 2025, report by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit research group focused on immigration, international trade, globalization and the economy.

Well, not quite every other type. Most family-sponsored would-be immigrants are stuck in the torturously long process for “green cards” that designate legal residents and put them on the road to naturalization. There’s an annual cap of 226,000 for those who aren’t immediate relatives of their sponsors; with about 7.1 million people currently waiting in that queue, many may not live to see the land they yearn for.

Moreover, the other evidence of America’s continuing pull is anecdotal. Even with the toll of (evil❗) ICE, people are still drawn to the US, even from supposedly blasé Europe. I track the restaurant industry on both sides of the Atlantic, and I know of cooks, sommeliers and servers in the United Kingdom (UK) who will jump at the first opportunity to show what they can do for an American kitchen. The continuous flow of Japanese chefs is evidence that economic powerhouses in East Asia are not immune to American magnetism. Often, the Brits try a short stint, an informal pop-up or hang around as unpaid stagiare (a controversial type of culinary internship) — all in the hope of convincing a US outfit to sponsor them through the costly paperwork required to win a long-term visa, perhaps even an O-1 for “individuals of extraordinary ability.”

It’s a long shot, but those from the 40-some countries in the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) (including Japan, the UK and most members of the European Union) can use its provisions to enter and stay for as long as 90 days per visit. The VWP is meant to ease tourist travel but it also allows business-types to attend conferences and engage in dealmaking — just not paid labour. That’s leeway enough for anyone — not just restaurant folk — to make professional contacts. But there are limits: If the Border Control Protection agency decides there’s a pecuniary pattern to your travel, you may be served with a long-term ban.

From my perspective as an American abroad, I also find it revealing that the politics and events back home are often central to ordinary conversations in the UK as well as Europe and Asia. Mine are fully caught up in the latest developments as if related to their own well-being. It’s almost personal and domestic. It’s also bipartisan. While there is umbrage about the administration, there is also approval among the more MAGA-ty citizens of the world, who see a country finally aligned with their political proclivities. The recent run of right-wing victories in Latin America is an indicator that Trumpist America has become the spiritual promised land for a growing audience.

In fact, the US was also both beacon and caution back when there were only 13 states of the union. The Frenchman who asked wondrously about “the new man” was once an immigrant farmer in upstate New York and was appalled by slavery. The supposedly class-free republic wasn’t that at all and had embarked on the segregation of society by race. 

Indeed, the 14th Amendment was inspired by the dilemma faced by the children of slaves in the wake of emancipation and the Civil War. Speaking in all-encompassing language, it declared with constitutional authority that every child born in the US was a citizen. It was a remarkably judicious act for a country that would cruelly continue to impose racial identity — and thus social and economic status — based on “a drop of blood” well into the 20th century.

And the sequel was just as momentous. In 1898, the US Supreme Court decision upheld the language of the amendment to apply to the case of Wong Kim Ark, born in California to migrant Chinese parents. He sued after he was barred from re-entering the US after visiting China. This took place at the height of violent pogroms surrounding the imposition of the Chinese Exclusion Act. His victory ensured that citizenship was available to immigrants and their offspring, not just to the established communities of the country — and once again affirmed by the Supreme Court this week (in 2026).
Wong would work as a cook and vanish into obscurity after an itinerant life. The pursuit of happiness did not guarantee dreams would come true. That’s the irony of the “American Dream,” which was coined by the historian James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America. Writing amid the Great Depression, he said the notion isn’t just about prosperity “but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Tensions about who gets to be American are unabated. In the wake of this week’s SCOTUS birthright decision, Trump declared he’d try to get his way via legislative sleights of hand. For now, it is the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, that hold sway: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.” That is an appropriate gift to the country on this momentous birthday: the dream, and the chance, are continued.

Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion's international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine

*Business Standard is an Indian English-language daily edition newspaper,[5] also available in Hindi. Founded in 1975.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are destroying American icons and the principles of our democracy

Donald Trump is a miserable creature who mocks American principles: Published in the Scranton Times-Tribune newspaper.

Donald Trump hosted an ugly and violent wrestling game for America's 250th, denigrating the White House into a quasi Roman Colosseum.

Echo opinion letter to the editor: His name may be gone from the Kennedy Center, but the stench and rankness Donald Trump has visited upon our presidency and White House will take some time to be eradicated.

He has turned the White House into a latter-day Palace of Versailles, decadent gold everywhere, a testament to his garishness. The recent UFC fight reminds us of the bread and circuses of the Roman Colosseum, complete with the violence and the corruption.

In some kind of perverse, reverse karma, Trump is president during the 250th year celebration of our country’s founding on the principles of the rule of law and the ideals of the Constitution, principles he no more believes in than the belief in the tooth fairy.

From Bert Silvestri, in Peckville, Pennsylvania

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What makes it so bad❓

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump and maga Republicans created a dangerous and scary precedent for multiple unjustified mass killings

Echo Letters to the Editor published in the Los Angeles Times and in Yahoo.com: Trump isn't making life more affordable, but he is making it scarier.

After making the pathetic the lame excuse of mistakenly killing at least 175 Iranians, mostly children, with a Tomahawk missile, Donald Trump blithely responds, "Some mistakes are made" ("The Trump administration continues killing without answers," June 29). Really❓ Puh-leeze❗😡

The footage of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti's killings is already forever seared into my brain. And the cavalier attitude afterward of the trigger-happy agents who shot them signals to us they knew in advance they wouldn't face any consequences.

And we see these same familiar patterns in how this administration operates in the Caribbean, where at least 210 people 😔😨😥are now confirmed dead by air strikes because they were allegedly bringing illicit drugs to America in small motorboats, seeming hardly seaworthy enough to reach our shores.

Trump does not know how to make life more affordable in America, but he has shown a rather, uh, killer aptitude for instilling abject terror in the hearts of the citizenry as well as the rest of the world.

From Robert Archerd, in Rancho Palos Verdes, California

Donald Trump and his reflecting cesspool desecrated our beautiful national monuments

Trump’s slimy, swampy eyesore in Washington, D.C.
And the Reflecting Pool isn’t looking too good either.

Echo opinion by Renée Graham published in the Boston Globe.

Donald Trump's reflecting cesspool is a metaphor for his ugly administration.

Since his return to the White House last year, Donald Trump has spent an absurd amount of time trying to remake (I would say "uglify") Washington, D.C., in his own (hideous) image.

As of late last week, tarps still covered part of the Kennedy Center’s façade. On June 13, Trump’s name was removed from the building as ordered by Christopher R. Cooper, a federal judge. Cooper wanted to know why those tarps, which block much of John F. Kennedy’s name, have remained on the performing arts center dedicated as a memorial to the assassinated president.

Where the White House’s East Wing stood for more than a century before Trump had it demolished last year for his 90,000 square foot ballroom/bunker, there’s a massive hole and construction site. Its price tag has skyrocketed from 💲300 million, which the White House once claimed would be fully funded by multibillion-dollar corporations, to nearly 💲600 million, much of it, to no one’s surprise, at taxpayers’ expense.

Trump’s latest authoritarian design debacle is the slimy, swampy eyesore that was once the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It now serves as a reflection of Trump’s slimy, swampy eyesore of a presidency.

Perhaps bored with his and Israel’s ill-conceived war against Iran, Trump announced in April that he had ordered a renovation of the iconic Reflecting Pool in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration on the Fourth of July. 

Trump created a myth, saying the pool was “filthy” and that its bottom would be painted something he called “American flag blue.”

Trump said the project would cost between 💲1.5 million and 💲2 million and would be completed “long before July Fourth.”

And just like the now four-month-old war against Iran that Trump initially said would be over “in four or five weeks,” the pool renovation has become another drawn-out mess of Trump’s own making.

Instead of blue, the pool is a sickly green from the proliferation of algae, which is not a new problem in D.C., but one to which Trump seemed oblivious. That blue painted lining began peeling not long after it was applied, with chunks of it floating in the water.

At least three duck carcasses were recently discovered — one in the pool and two nearby. City Wildlife, an animal rescue and rehabilitation group in Washington, told The Washington Post that toxic algae blooms or chemicals in the blue paint could harm wildlife.

Trump has blamed vandals for cutting a gash in the pool’s lining — that he initially said was 200 feet long and has since inflated to 350 feet — on the bottom of the pool. 

On Thursday, a National Park Service official said that earlier this month, the liner at the pool’s bottom was cut with a knife or razor. The incident was allegedly reported to the US Park Police on June 9, but Trump never mentioned that report.

Then there’s the no-bid contract awarded to a Trump donor’s company to install a water purification system in the pool. The White House claims that Trump was not involved in hiring that firm, owned by John J. Cafaro, a Palm Beach neighbor of Trump’s, who the president once called “a fantastic man.”

Now the National Guard is on patrol at the Reflecting Pool, which has also been surrounded by a fence, to avert any nefarious activities like visitors dipping a finger in the murky water. Six people have reportedly been arrested, and Jeanine Pirro, US attorney for the District of Columbia, said suspected vandals will “face the criminal justice system” in the nation’s capital.

After Pirro’s comments, Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who only found his spine after he decided not to run for reelection, said, “Yet they’re releasing people who pled guilty to assaulting police officers.” Tillis was referring to Trump’s mass pardons of those convicted of crimes committed during the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.

“What freaking parallel universe did I just wake up in❓” Tillis asked.

That universe is no longer parallel but is in control of the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. It’s a place created by Republicans like Tillis, who’ve done nothing as Trump breaks everything he touches and does so without a shred of accountability.

It’s unlikely the Reflecting Pool will be repaired in time for Fourth of July events. And that’s fine. Let that gross green swamp remain exactly as it is, a physical representation of the man who once promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, but instead created one on the National Mall, and within the White House itself.

Maine Write P.S.- And Maine Senator Susan Collins does nothing!