Donald Trump disrespects solemn September 11, ceremonies by throwing a temper tantrum because he cannot give a speech at ground zero

On Friday, the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attack on New York City's twin towers, the Pentagon and the terrorist highjacked airplane crash in Pennsylvania, is a milestone memorial. Americans will remember the terrorism attacks that took at least 2,977 lives on September 11, 2001. The deadliest attack on the United States of America, 9/11 is seared indelibly in our nation’s memory. Editorial Board opinion in the Sun Sentinel.

NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: (SEPTEMBER 11 RETROSPECTIVE) Smoke pours from the twin towers of the World Trade Center after they were hit by two hijacked airliners in a terrorist attack September 11, 2001 in New York City. (Photo by Robert Giroux/Getty Images)

As with another day of infamy at Pearl Harbor nearly 60 years earlier, just about everyone still living can recall where they were and what they were doing when they heard about it.

Once again, the nation’s defenses were down, beguiled by a presumption of invulnerability.

The memorial services this week are an occasion to renew the vow “Never again.”

The reasons to remember:😔  More importantly, they honor the nearly 3,000 men, women and children who paid the highest possible price on 9/11. They are the reasons to remember.

Most of the victims, including 343 New York City firefighters, will be honored at the site of the World Trade Center, the first of the terrorists’ targets, where hijacked airplanes destroyed the iconic twin towers on a Tuesday morning.

Other ceremonies will be at the Pentagon and at the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville, Pa., which credits the passengers and crew who fought their hijackers with saving the U.S. Capitol.

All four living former presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, plan to attend the New York City ceremony at Ground Zero.

An unseemly Trump boycott, Donald Trump does not plan to attend. Insead, Trump is scheduled to be at the Pentagon ceremony instead. That’s despite his advance team having scouted the New York site. Vice President JD Vance will represent him there.

As the New York Times told readers, Trump’s choice bespeaks several of his unsavory traits, specifically vanity, petulance, arrogance and narcissism. The paper said his snubbing of the event is because he wouldn’t be allowed to give a speech.

Trump will speak at the Pentagon, where he also spoke on September 11, 2025. He’s the boss. Nobody would stop him from being the center of attention there — certainly not Pete Hegseth.

A verbal hissy fit:  Trump threw a verbal hissy fit over the Times’ article, larding a social media post with insults aimed at Maggie Haberman, one of the reporters who wrote it.

It never seems to occur to him that the louder and more vituperative his outbursts, the more they confirm what he’s trying to deny. A prudent politician would have tried to deflate the issue with a simple “not true.”

The White House cover story makes it worse. He’s scheduled to depart the next day for his golf course in Ireland for the British Open tournament. Leaving from any of the major New York area airports would disrupt more traffic than a departure from Washington, so they say.

But the inconvenience to civilian air travel in the vicinity of New York never seems to occur to him when he flies, often, to his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., or to attend events in the city, such as the U.N. General Assembly.

Once again, taxpayers will foot the bill for Air Force One and his large retinue so Trump can pump up the patronage and profits at one of his properties.

It’s just as well, perhaps, that he will not be at Ground Zero Friday. It’s a pity that we have a president whose presence would detract, in many eyes, from the dignity of the event and the memory of the victims.

Unfinished business:  Friday would not be the appropriate moment, but there needs to be a renewed discussion on the legacy of 9/11 — on what has been accomplished or remains undone 25 years later.

Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization responsible, was driven from Afghanistan, its leadership decapitated, the chief planner of 9/11 put in prison. But its remnants persist in scattered forms around the Middle East, a threat not to be taken lightly.

The lessons of the unnecessary war in Iraq and the overlong presence in Afghanistan failed to deter Trump from plunging the U.S. into a poorly planned, uncalled for war with Iran for which there is no end in sight.

And trials have yet to be held for four of the five men accused of the 9/11 plot — a fifth has been found mentally incompetent — who have been held in U.S. custody since 2002, and 2003. The self-proclaimed mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is scheduled for trial at Guantanamo Bay in 2028.

His confessions after prolonged torture by the CIA have been ruled inadmissible, properly so. That, too, is a lesson to be remembered.

Since 2021, the New York 9/11 anniversary planners have not allowed speeches by any politicians. The ceremony is solemnly devoted to reading the names of those who died there. The silent presence of dignitaries should suffice.

That will be especially moving on Biden’s part, considering he is suffering from metastasized cancer.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board

Donald Trump is an evil creature who created a cult of personality. Republicans must expel this evil from our government.

We need Republicans who will stand up to Trump

Echo opinion letter published in TribLive.com

Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins is not listening❗

Republicans like Senator Susan Collins who refuse to stand up to Donald Trump, a creature who abuses his authority, should be voted out and replaced by Republicans who are not part of a cult of personality or beholden to one man.

The unwillingness of Republican members of Congress, like Reublican Senator Susan Collins, to speak out against Donald Trump’s flagrant misuse of authority will damage the world’s perception of and the trust in the United States for decades.

Donald Trump's communication style — crude, rude, abrasive, bullying, disrespectful, cruel and antagonistic — is beneath the standard we should expect from our elected leader.

We must hold our elected Republican legislators accountable for the mess our nation is in. Democrats, when they regain control of Congress, must also resist the temptation to govern through the same divisive tactics.

Finally, we need to overturn Citizens United and place reasonable limits on political contributions. Allowing wealthy individuals to exert disproportionate influence over elections undermines our democracy.

We can do better. Our nation deserves much better.

From James Mitnick in Aspinwall, Pennsylvania

Donald Trump appointed incompetent Pete Hegseth who puts American military at risk for serious short-term and long-term harm

 Pete Hegseth Is a Wrecking Ball

New York Times echo opinion by David French

It is difficult to fathom the damage Donald Trump is doing to America’s national security. He is making our nation more vulnerable than it has been at any time since the cloudiest days of the Cold War.

Trump administration scandals come with such speed and frequency that it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. 

One minute you’re reading about potential war crimes in the Caribbean. The next moment there’s a news alert about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s ongoing purge of generals. Then you click over and read a story about depleted stocks of some of America’s most important munitions.

That’s a fraction of the havoc the administration has wrought. In a strange way, the very frequency of the scandals works to the administration’s advantage. Each new story distracts us from the last one, and we don’t have a minute to pause, take a deep breath and look at the whole picture.

Let’s take that deep breath now.

Before I do, I want to be careful not to be too alarmist. Our military is still highly capable, and we have watched it successfully execute some extraordinarily difficult missions during Trump’s second term. The capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and the rescue of two downed American airmen from the heart of Iran were remarkable feats of skill and courage.

There are also signs that the Navy has been slowly, painstakingly making progress toward reopening the Strait of Hormuz — traffic through the strait is well below prewar averages, but some ships are getting through.

Just as the Trump administration grossly miscalculated when it launched its war on Iran, the Iranian regime may have miscalculated when it refused to cease hostilities after winning what would have been a decisive victory through the memorandum of understanding it negotiated with the United States.

It’s comforting — I guess — to know that Hegseth can’t undo the effects of a generations-long commitment to excellence in just 20 months.

That’s the end of the good news. From the top down, Trump is replacing the highly imperfect meritocracy of American public service with an idiocracy, and his corrupt idiocrats are creating profound short-, medium- and long-term harms to American national security.

At the same time, to maintain the stalemate against Iran, the United States is drawing resources from other, more dangerous theaters of potential conflict. There are now no active carrier battle groups in the Pacific region, for example, exactly when China has ramped up its military activities around Taiwan.

The short-term damage is serious enough. Even just to achieve what is at best a stalemate in the Persian Gulf, the administration has created a critical shortage in interceptors that can shoot down missiles and drones and in other precision munitions, including some of our most advanced offensive weapons.

The lack of interceptors is escalating the crisis in Ukraine. Russia is able to pound Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with ballistic missiles virtually at will, creating a critical vulnerability for the Ukrainian war effort. Last week, for example, Kyiv endured the longest sustained bombing campaign on the Ukrainian capital since the opening days of the war.

The Economist also reported that Putin is planning to throw hundreds of thousands of additional troops into the fight, and he’s provoking NATO with a series of incursions so severe (including, according to the German government, an attempted drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany) that it prompted John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, to visit Russia to reportedly warn Putin against any further aggression.

As long as Iran — a longstanding ally of Russia that’s closely linked to its neighbor through the Caspian Sea — remains in the fight, it can continue to deplete our interceptors to the point where it might take years to bring our stocks back to acceptable levels, even if we ramp up production at immense cost.

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of terrible self-imposed wounds to America’s alliances. There are obvious immediate risks, for example, to withdrawing troops from allied nations or shortening military exercises with South Korea, but the damage done by engaging in trade wars with allies and threatening aggression against Greenland (remember that❓) can’t be repaired by just one administration.

Our allies learned an important lesson from Trump’s second election. It’s not just that Trump is mercurial and unreliable, it’s that the American electorate is mercurial and unreliable.

More than 77 million Americans compared Trump’s first term with Joe Biden’s only term and said, “More Trump, please.”

Even if the next Democratic president tries to reconcile with our allies, every allied government will be asking itself, “How long will this last❓” Every prudent allied government will hedge its geopolitical bets, and that can harm the United States in incalculable ways.

Our allies fear not just that they’ve lost Trump, but even worse, they fear that they’ve lost a substantial portion of the American people.

We’ve already seen the consequences of American faithlessness. The Trump administration has pitched a fit demanding allied aid in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, only to be greeted with stony silence. Why should our allies expend blood and treasure standing with an American government that didn’t even have the decency to consult them before launching its costly, poorly planned Middle Eastern adventure❓

Why should they expend blood and treasure standing with America when America is also threatening the independence and sovereignty of NATO member states❓ They are getting enough of that from Putin.

The end result might be a period of extended Western vulnerability as Europe bears the considerable costs (and takes several years to increase its defense capabilities) to deter Russia even while it can’t count on the United States to fulfill its treaty obligations.

The long-term threat is to the character and competence of the armed forces. They are becoming politicized, and the politicization of a military can both destroy its combat effectiveness and turn it into an instrument of domestic oppression.

If you are under the delusion that Hegseth’s purges are about competence more than loyalty — a welcome corrective to the excesses of D.E.I. programs — well then, as we say in the South, bless your heart.

The sycophancy that pervades Trump’s second term is creating perverse incentives. I was struck by a recent piece in The Dispatch (where I used to write and still contribute to podcasts) by Mike Nelson, a former special forces officer who is a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project.

Nelson focused on Chris LaNeve, a lieutenant general and the commander of the 8th Army in Korea. LaNeve video-conferenced in to Trump’s inaugural ball to praise Trump, and Trump praised him right back. “Is this man central casting or what❓,” Trump said, “If I’m doing a movie, I’d pick him to play my lead.”

Trump did exactly that. “In February 2025,” as Nelson writes, “Hegseth fired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short as his senior military adviser and named LaNeve as her replacement.” Months later, Hegseth fired Gen. James Mingus, the Army’s vice chief of staff. And who did the White House name to replace him? You guessed it — General LaNeve.

Army Chief of Staff asked to 'retire immediately' by Donald Trump’s defence sec Pete Hegseth, reported in The Mirror

That’s not the end of LaNeve’s meteoric rise. Again, here’s Nelson, “Six months after that, Hegseth fired the occupant of the Army’s top job, General Randy George,😡💢” who was serving as chief of staff, “and — to quote Gomer Pyle — surprise, surprise, surprise, LaNeve has been serving as the acting chief of staff since and is Hegseth’s pick to permanently fill the job, although he seems to face some pushback from G.O.P. senators.”

Maybe General LaNeve is genuinely gifted enough to merit those promotions — I can’t say — but the chain of events has set a terrible example for future commanders.

Trump’s critics aren’t the only ones alarmed, I’d refer you to the recent resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. As Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan and Michael Scherer reported for The Atlantic, in a recent White House meeting, “Army Secretary Dan Driscoll brought his concerns about the future of the Army under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directly to President Trump.”

Driscoll was reportedly worried that Hegseth’s purges were hampering the ability of the Army to transform itself. And this is just as the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are demonstrating that the world is in the midst of another revolution in military affairs, and we are not prepared.

“Hegseth’s purge of the military has been so dramatic,” they wrote, “that with Driscoll gone, the military’s largest service is left without a top civilian leader, a Senate-confirmed top general, a confirmed Army general in charge of operations, or a confirmed commander of Army troops in Europe.”

If you pay close attention to the news, you know that my list of negative developments is woefully incomplete (for example, granting the Pentagon an ownership stake in a Venezuelan oil venture is more reminiscent of the way that the Chinese or Iranian militaries work than the way the United States military is supposed to), but it should suffice to paint a clear picture.

The combination of corruption, stupidity and sycophancy — the Pentagon was recently caught surreptitiously employing conservative media influencers who reliably defend Hegseth online — that pervades the Trump administration is now infecting the Pentagon at the moment that our most powerful enemies are becoming more aggressive.

I loved my time serving my country. It was one of the great honors of my life. If anything, I’m biased toward viewing the military in general and the Army in particular through rose-colored glasses. But my view is getting darker. Terrible leadership of even the most virtuous institutions can have terrible consequences.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that the battlefield is the most unforgiving place on earth.

Donald Trump broken promise to erase the unsustainable federal debt but guess what? It just hit $40 trillion. OMG

In 2016, Trump pledged to erase the federal debt. It just hit $40tn
Echo article published in The Guardian by Steven Greenhouse.

The trillion💲 in tax cuts going to the rich and corporations could have instead been used to address the affordability crisis.

Dear reader, I recognize that your eyes might glaze over at any mention of the nation’s $40tn federal debt. But your reaction to this mind-boggling number shouldn’t be ennui; it should be outrage and dismay.

Outrage is in order because the nation’s debt has climbed to more than $40tn under Donald Trump, even though back in 2016, when the debt was less than half what it is today, candidate Trump insisted that he’d totally eliminate the debt within eight years. That was yet another example of the Demagogue-in-Chief’s willingness to say anything, no matter how insincere or untrue, to woo voters.


Not only has Trump failed to reduce the debt, he has spectacularly increased it. Take Trump’s “big, beautiful (hideous❗) bill” and the huge tax cuts it lavished upon the very rich and corporations. 

That legislation is expected to increase the nation’s debt by a whopping $3.4tn over the next decade. Worse, during Trump’s time as president, including his first term, the federal debt has climbed by a colossal $11.6tn.
Outrage is also in order because the trillions in tax 💲cuts going to the rich and corporations could have instead been used to address the affordability crisis that is squeezing so many Americans.
Those trillion💲 could have gone to creating more affordable childcare for every family or increasing subsidies to hold down soaring healthcare premiums or expanding government aid to make college more affordable.

Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and the $40tn debt have worsened the affordability crisis in one important and painful way. They have helped push up long-term interest rates to their highest level in nearly two decades, and that has pushed up mortgage rates, too. The unhappy result: housing has become less affordable, when housing affordability has already been a big problem for young Americans. Higher mortgage rates often mean that homebuyers have to pay several hundred dollars more in interest each month.

Interest rates have climbed not only because investors are dismayed that the national debt has hit a record, but also because Trump’s tariffs and war against Iran have fueled inflation and because investors are unsettled by all the chaos Trump has created at home and abroad.

Outrage is also called for because of the way Trump and his Republican yes-men in the Congress jumped to enact giant tax cuts when their super-wealthy donors and friends said jump. In a move that shows how rigged the system is, Trump and the GOP legislated these tax cuts for the rich and corporations even though the wealthy and corporations were already doing perfectly well and would continue doing just fine, with their mansions, yachts and private jets, even without those tax cuts. Of the $4.4tn in tax cuts in the “big, beautiful (hideous❗) bill”, nearly half go to the richest 5% of Americans.

If any further evidence is needed to show how the Republicans in Congress have sold their souls to billionaire💲, millionaires and corporations, the increased debt caused by the big, unbeautiful (hideous❗) bill’s tax cuts will be a burden on our children and grandchildren for decades to come. 

By the mid-2030s, the nation will have to pay more than $2tn in interest payments each year to finance the federal debt. That’s double the $1tn a year we are paying now – $1tn is slightly less than what the government spends on Medicare, is higher than this year’s Pentagon budget and is more than five times what the federal government spends on education each year.

All this is maddening for another reason. In recent decades, Republicans held themselves out as the party of “fiscal responsibility”. But they’ve really become the party of fiscal irresponsibility. During George W Bush’s two terms, with his tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy and his expensive, ill-fated war against Iraq, the federal debt ballooned by 85% (by $4.9tn). In Trump’s first term, the debt soared by $7.8tn (a 39% increase), stemming from his initial big tax cuts for the rich as well as increased Pentagon spending – and then there was more than $2tn in emergency spending to stabilize the economy during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

During Trump’s second term, the debt is likely to soar by nearly $8tn once again. Trump is pushing for a record $1.5tn annual defense budget, far higher than any previous year, even though it will send our country’s debt further into the stratosphere. Some of that money will go to redesigning aircraft carriers merely because Trump dislikes how the current ones look.

Bill Clinton was the last president to have an annual budget surplus, but Democratic presidents have also pushed up the federal debt. During Biden’s four years as president, the debt rose $8.4tn, partly because of the annual budget deficits he inherited from Trump and partly because of his $2tn-plus pandemic-era emergency spending package to stabilize families’ finances and ensure the US didn’t sink into a deep economic downturn.

The federal debt has grown even larger than the country’s overall gross domestic product. Indeed, the ratio of the debt to GDP will soon be higher than the record 106% where it stood when the second world war ended. Franklin D Roosevelt ran up huge debts for an urgent reason: to defeat Nazi Germany and its allies. In sharp contrast, under Trump, the US is running big deficits, of approximately $2tn a year, for the opposite of urgent reasons: to finance a disastrous war in Iran and to give big tax giveaways to two powerful groups that were already prospering, eg the ultra-wealthy and corporations.

It would be a very different thing if Trump were borrowing money to build a better future, as people do to build a new house or pay for college. But Trump is not jacking up the country’s debt to improve our future; he’s not spending to improve education, childcare or our country’s infrastructure or to fix the housing crisis.

I am not a fiscal conservative and nor are many Democrats, but it is a real concern that for the first time in US history, other countries and many investors seem truly worried about the record size of the federal debt. Those worries have spooked financial markets and pushed up interest rates.

As the midterm elections heat up, the Democrats should attack Trump and the Republicans over the huge, fast-growing federal debt. Democrats need to make clear that Republicans have become the party of fiscal irresponsibility.

We can agree that the $40tn debt isn’t a sexy issue, but the Democrats can and should turn it into a hard-hitting and winning campaign issue that they can use to hammer Trump and the Republicans, along with the affordability crisis and Trump’s calamitous war against Iran.

Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author.

Excellent opinion essay about Donald Trump and the lies he creats with his Sharpie pen by John Casey.

 At 80 years old (and counting), Donald Trump is scribbling on maps. The fool holding the Sharpie is dangerous

Donald Trump is delusional and experiencing cognitive decline. He believes doodling on a map constitutes power. He is also applying the same warped logic to wars, tariffs, and Americans’ rights, writes John Casey.  Echo opinion published in Advocate news.

I am in a bit of a tit-for-tat with my building’s management over what I believe is its plan to raise my rent considerably when my lease comes up for renewal in September.

So, this morning, I sent management an email informing it that, effective immediately, the pool at the center of our complex would no longer be called “the pool.” From now on, I wrote, it shall be known as John Casey Lake.

My hope is that renaming a body of chlorinated water after myself might convince management to lower my rent rather than raise it. 

I’m so proud of myself for putting management in an impossible bind.

My inspiration for this came from the “stable genius” Donald Trump. It’s exactly the same logic he used this week when he sat at the Resolute Desk, picked up a Sharpie, crossed out “Lake Ontario” on a map, and wrote “LAKE AMERICA” in its place.

Trump signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to make the change official within 30 days and told reporters Canada has “been ripping us off for a long time.”

The problem with this edict is the same one confronting my rent-lowering scheme: It’s laughable, unserious, and downright stupid. My landlord isn't going to cut my rent because I decided to name a swimming pool after myself.

And Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has been openly sparring with Trump over tariffs and recently said Trump could “kiss my ass,” is not suddenly going to accept worse trade terms because the lake between the two countries now has “America” scrawled across it in thick black ink.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the move outright, pointing to the lake's Indigenous name and history. To Trump, his Sharpie is a magic wand. He wields it to sign warped and toothless executive orders or to try to change the course of history.

But the only result is that the felt tip of his Trump-branded permanent marker becomes a bit drier with each stroke.

This is not Trump’s first ridiculous Sharpie stunt. In 2019, he held up a hurricane map with a crude loop drawn around Alabama, insisting the storm was headed there after the National Weather Service had already said otherwise. It became known as “Sharpiegate.” Oh, how little we knew then.

He also used a Sharpie to sign an executive order on his first day back in office officially directing U.S. federal agencies to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” and since that move, America has gained…thinking…still thinking…absolutely nothing.

We all know what he reportedly drew with a Sharpie — and then signed — on Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous 50th birthday card. (By the way, did the White House ever deliver on a handwriting analysis of his signature❓Trump claimed it wasn't his signature. 🙄🤥🤥)

And although Trump did not use a Sharpie, earlier this year, during the illegal conflict with Iran, he mused about renaming the Strait of Hormuz the “Strait of Trump,” then corrected himself to “Strait of America.”

Upon hearing this threat, I can just see the hard-line leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran frantically trying to negotiate a quick surrender. (Ahhhh.....and, has Iran surrendered yet❓)

The bottom line on all of this might be drawn with a Sharpie, but the force driving the madness is Trump’s abject foolishness. That Sharpie doesn’t move until Trump puts his folly to paper.

Trump's foolishness is at the heart of everything he does. A White House ballroom nobody asked for. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running health policy with no relevant background. On his watch, the United States has endured the worst measles outbreak in decades, while seemingly every day brings another announcement that something Americans eat has been contaminated and could make them sick — or worse. Kash Patel running the FBI without qualifications while jetting around the world on his government-sponsored private jet. And most foolishly, Pete Hegseth, a blubbering talking head with no management experience, running the Defense Department, the federal government’s largest department by far, while insisting on a “high T” fighting force that he insists looks like the sea of shirtless gay men you could find at a circuit party.

It’s the same lunacy that reportedly led Trump to “save” Natalie Harp and Walt Nauta, whose primary duties are printing memes and delivering Diet Cokes, by whisking them away in a catering cart to a secret third plane in Turkey while leaving behind Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent after Air Force One was allegedly threatened by Iran.

And foolishness is the thread that runs through 

• tariffs slapped on our closest neighbor and largest trading partner for reasons that shift from week to week; 
• a war with Iran that didn't need to happen; 
• ICE operations that look like scenes from 1930s and 1940s Germany; 
• missile strikes on boats full of civilians in international waters;
• the sanding down of Black and LGBTQ+ history from federal materials; 
• and his obsession with stripping transgender people of rights and dignity. 

These foolishly stupid actions are genuinely consequential and genuinely alarming.

But underneath all of them sits the same batshit crazy impulse on display with the Sharpie and the lake.

There is a famous proverb that perfectly encapsulates Trump: “A fool finds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own opinion.” It is an apt description about how much of the world sees Trump. He’s just playing silly games with himself and that ever-present Sharpie, with little understanding of the implications of those games.

Allies don’t quake at a map with a name crossed out; they roll their eyes and double over in laughter, just as my building management would if I renamed a pool after myself during a lease negotiation.

If anything, the lake stunt hands Canada another reason to dig in, not less. Pointless provocation rarely earns concessions. It mostly just deepens divisions, particularly in the relationship with Canada that Trump has squandered for no reason other than his own delight.

I don't know what comes next as Trump’s public conduct grows more erratic and unserious. Trump has floated renaming other waterways before, so at this rate, don't be shocked if the Atlantic Ocean gets crossed out with a Sharpie on a poster board and named the American Ocean.

It is at once a joke and a threat. Trump has it in for our NATO allies. Hell, he wants to occupy Greenland. If he spots some bizarre negotiating advantage — or a chance for revenge — he is liable to try anything.

It's easy to laugh at, but the laughter shouldn't obscure the recklessness of it all. A Sharpie can change a name on a map, but that doesn’t mean it’s drawing reality. My pool is still a pool. 

YES❗Lake Ontario will always be Lake Ontario. And the longer Trump wields that Sharpie, the more foolish — and dangerous — the joke becomes.

Birthright Citizenship affirms what is common sense: Innocent babies have no control over where they are born.

Opinion: Birthright citizenship is not a wartime exception
‘I was born behind barbed wire to parents the U.S. classified as “enemy aliens.” … Because of the Constitution’s assurance of birthright citizenship, I was born an American citizen.’

Echo report published in The Mercury News by Larry Oda.

I was born behind barbed wire to parents the United States classified as “enemy aliens” during World War II. Yet, because of the Constitution’s assurance of birthright citizenship, I was born an American citizen.

That fact is a lesson in American law and character — one that should matter now as Donald Trump attempts to evade June’s Supreme Court ruling upholding birthright citizenship through new executive orders.

One order purports to bar the children of “alien enemies” from acquiring birthright citizenship. It is wrong on multiple levels. It misapplies a wartime concept for lands seized by foreign armies. More fundamentally, it again would strip children of their right to citizenship based on their parents’ actions — exactly what the Supreme Court rejected.

Since the War of 1812, and through two world wars, children born in the United States to parents classified as alien enemies have been recognized as American citizens.

This history is personal, because I was born at the Crystal City WWII Department of Justice Family Internment Camp in Texas, alongside many other children of German, Italian and Japanese descent. Their parents had been swept up in a period of wartime hysteria and the deliberate imprisonment of Japanese community leaders. They had done nothing against the United States.

Yet, even in that dark period, the United States recognized something fundamental: the circumstances or ancestry of a child’s parents did not determine the child’s citizenship.

Because we were born on American soil, we were afforded the right to belong. And we exercised that right. Many of the children with whom I grew up in camp went on to make significant contributions to this country. We served in the military. We built successful careers and businesses. We became educators, community leaders, civil rights advocates and public servants. We demonstrated, in countless ways, that citizenship is not merely a legal status — it is an opportunity to participate fully in the American experiment.

I have tried to do my part as well. I am a veteran. During the Vietnam War, I served in the U.S. Navy aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ranger, working in the Integrated Operational Intelligence Center with a top secret security clearance. 

After the war, I returned to college and earned a master’s degree and enjoyed a career in public service. I have also had the privilege of serving four terms as president of the Japanese American Citizens League, the nation’s oldest and largest Asian American civil rights organization.

I share this history because it demonstrates something essential about America: children should not inherit the political status, fears, or accusations directed at their parents. The current executive order is part of a years-long effort to retreat from that principle. It invokes the language of wartime “alien enemies” in a time of peace and attempts to impose a restriction on citizenship that, historically, only applied when an enemy captured and took control of land during a war.

The lessons of Japanese American incarceration should make us especially wary when our government once again suggests that the children of immigrants should be treated as less
American because of who their parents are. We have seen where that thinking can lead.

I have confidence that the courts will continue to uphold the constitutional principle of birthright citizenship and reject efforts to circumvent those protections through executive action.

But courts cannot be the only line of defense. The American people must draw the line as well. We must reject the notion that citizenship can be conditioned on ancestry, the nationality of one’s parents or the government’s judgment about whether a family belongs here. We must remember that the strength of American citizenship comes precisely from the fact that it is not inherited from one’s parents’ nationality or withheld because of their circumstances.

As the Supreme Court concluded, “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.’” That promise extended to me. No president has the power to decide that children born in America today belong any less than I did*.

Author Larry Oda is one of a small number of Japanese Americans still living who were born to incarcerated parents during the World War II incarceration carried out under Executive Order 9066 and related wartime authorities.

*In other words, babies have no control over where they are born and must be exempt from discriminatory political actions created by racists like Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and their cult.

MAGA Stephen Miller and the cult are obsessed with "birthright citizenship" but their objections are racist propaganda

What Trump gets wrong about ‘birth tourism’ (Frankly, there is no such thing.....women of other nationalities do not give birth in the U.S. as "tourists".....they want their children to have access to American passports for the purpose of being able to apply for American education in private schools, colleges and universities.  Also, these women, regardless of where they came from, pay cash for their labor and delivery.  Thousands of American women are the mothers who need Medicaid, not the immigrants.)

Echo report published in the Boston Globe by Amy Reed Sandoval

The right-wing panic over birthright citizenship is built on a simple tale of foreigners gaming the system. My interviews with Mexican mothers at the border tell a very different story.

Amy Reed-Sandoval is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of the book “Intimate Borders: Feminist Migration Ethics.”

Donald Trump isn’t giving up on his quest to get rid of birthright citizenship. In August, he signed two new executive orders cracking down on so-called birth tourism to the United States. Stephen Miller, his homeland security adviser, said “people come here, pretend to be a tourist … say they want to go to Disneyland.

“But the real reason they’re here is to have a child, to make that child an automatic citizen, leave our country. ... It gives them access under this broken system to welfare benefits … and all the other rights and privileges that belong solely to Americans.” (HELLO❓But even many needy Americans are unable to access these "rights".)

Condemnation of birth tourism has become Trump’s go-to argument for attacking birthright citizenship, the right, a century and a half old, granting citizenship to individuals who are born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ nationality.

The Trump administration even deployed this argument when it asked the Supreme Court to get rid of birthright citizenship. The court upheld that right last month. But the administration’s rhetoric seemed to have some effect: Justice Clarence Thomas devoted much of his dissent to describing the abuses of birth tourism.

But the Trump administration’s preoccupation with birth tourism is an obsession and not justifiable.

Start with this: The documented number of cases of pregnant women coming into the country just to give birth to an American citizen is very small. In fact, a recent Penn State study showed that “birth tourism accounts for fewer than 0.3 percent of all US births in any year between 2014-2024.” According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2024 about 9,500 babies were born to mothers with addresses abroad. The Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative group that supports immigration restrictions, put the number of potential birth tourism births at 20,000 to 26,000 in its most recent estimate, still only a small fraction of births to mothers who do not live in the United States.

MAGA's Miller, Thomas, and Trump act as though there aren’t safeguards in place to prevent birth tourism. But though it’s true that there is a cottage industry of businesses that charge wealthy foreigners tens of thousands of dollars for private coaching on how to give birth in the United States, the US government has always had the power to deny visas to people whose motives they deem suspect. If a couple misrepresents their intentions for visiting the United States, that is considered visa fraud. And the Justice Department has already prosecuted travel agencies found to be promoting birth tourism.

The Make America Great Again birth tourism narrative — that women come here to access welfare benefits or get US citizenship themselves — offers a warped and simplistic vision of the motivations that foreigners have for giving birth in the United States. In reality, their reasons are complex. I interviewed 30 Mexican women living in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso who had crossed the border from Mexico to give birth. All had legal permission to enter the United States, and all had paid out of pocket for their health care. Still, they were regularly treated by many immigration officers and medical professionals as if they were doing something illegal.

I asked the women to tell me their reasons for giving birth in the United States. And they agreed to speak with me as long as they could remain anonymous.

“I knew I had to move my family to the United States to receive prenatal care,” one woman said while rocking her napping daughter in her arms in their El Paso home. “My baby could come at any minute, and I was told my own life was in danger.”

Some women told me that they had no intention of permanently relocating themselves or their families to the United States; they simply wanted to give their children a broader array of life options. Relatedly, one woman told me that she is concerned about gender-based violence on both sides of the US-Mexico border — but particularly about high rates of femicides in Mexico. When she found out she was going to give birth to a girl, she decided she wanted to give her daughter legal options for international migration if she needed to relocate for her safety.

“It’s better to have two citizenships than one,” she told me over a heaping plate of flautas in a downtown El Paso restaurant. She had just crossed the border from Ciudad Juárez — where she and her family still live — for a day of shopping and errands. “If things get really bad here [in Mexico], she won’t have to suffer through the process of asking for asylum.”

Another woman told me that she decided to have her baby in the United States because there was a chance that her husband, who is employed as a truck driver, was going to be transferred from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso. She was preparing to keep the family together.

“But it would have been much easier for me to give birth in Ciudad Juárez; I would have preferred it!” she lamented during our interview at her kitchen table. And one woman told me that she felt that giving birth in the United States would make her a “true fronteriza,” a true woman of the borderlands, with deepened cultural and political ties to both the United States and Mexico.

Some reported that they wanted to give their children the opportunity to connect with relatives in the United States, many of whom are US citizens. Some said they wanted to have access to better health care in the event of pregnancy complications.



Of course, my sample size of 30 was small, and I only interviewed middle-class women with legal permission to enter the United States.

However, it is clear from what I and other scholars have been able to document that there is little chance that hoards of migrant women masquerading as Disneyland tourists are dipping into the social welfare systems by way of their deviant childbirth practices.

These arguments may not convince people who are determined to see the end of birthright citizenship. But it’s simply not true that birth tourism is a large enough issue to warrant skewering a constitutional right, and the over-the-top rhetoric inflicts real harm.

This birth tourism myth gets used to justify holding nearly 70,000 people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers across this country, 70 percent of whom have not been charged with any crime. This dangerous myth also supports sexist ideas, as reflected in a statement by MAGA lawyer Mike Davis, who called on Trump to “get these pregnant women and women who could be pregnant the hell out of our country,” and in another by Sean Davis, CEO of the right-wing media outlet The Federalist, who called for the “sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

The MAGA birth tourism myth is just that, a myth. Its job is not to address a real problem but to dismantle a cherished constitutionally protected right.

Post Script, this article is focused on Mexican women. Reed-Sandoval overlooks the other nationalities of women who chose to give birth in the United States for the purpose of obtaining American passports for their babies at birth. This makes it it easier for their children to attend American schools, colleges and universities. Plus, all of these transactions are paid with cash, the pre-natal care, the labor, delivery and the tuitions to attend American private schools, colleges and universities. Stephen Miller's objection to "birthright citizenship" is entirely racist. 

Donald Trump and maga stupidity created a preventable international trade war with "lose-lose" failed result

Echo opinion by Bill Saporito published in The New York Times:

Canada has lots of options about where to sell their aluminum. Donald Trump failed to secure the American relationship with Canada whereby aluminum was available. But now ❓ 
Not so much❗

The list of Canadian imports now subject to 50 percent tariffs in the United States includes steel, seaweed, ink, animal hides, dog leashes, saddlery, suitcases, plywood, knit hats (toques, to Canadians), floating docks, furniture, whiskey, honey and, of course, hockey sticks. But the tariffs on aluminum show most starkly the irrationality of President Trump’s trade war with our northern neighbor.

Canada shipped nearly $10 billion in aluminum products to the United States last year. The metal is used in construction, cars, furniture, drink cans and countless other things. Trump has every obligation to enforce trade laws and prevent other nations from taking unfair advantage of us. But the Canadian aluminum industry hasn’t bilked the United States. America needs aluminum to keep its auto plants running and to keep food and drink prices down, and Canada is just better at making it.

Aluminum isn’t cooked like steel; it’s made from alumina, a powder refined from bauxite ore and zapped with electricity until it renders into a metal. The electric bill alone can account for up to 40 percent of the manufacturing cost. When you think about trade with Canada, it’s useful to imagine aluminum not as a metal but as electricity in solid form.

With its abundant snow, lakes and rivers, Canada has huge hydroelectric power resources, often in sparsely populated areas. As a result, the country has lots of reliable, inexpensive electricity, which gives it an edge over the United States in aluminum smelting. Today there are eight smelters operating in Quebec and one in British Columbia, producing about 3.6 million tons of metal annually. The United States gets 60 to 70 percent of its imported aluminum from Canada.

The United States tried to develop a competitive domestic aluminum sector. It began to expand with the Tennessee Valley Authority, a Depression-era project that was a model for rural electrification initiatives across the country. Low-cost energy attracted increased investment in aluminum smelters, like the one in Alcoa, Tenn., the ultimate company town. Alcoa, founded in 1888 as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, became the biggest aluminum smelting operation in the country. But the population grew after World War II, and in the second half of the 20th century the energy crises helped flip the cost calculus. Many American smelters shuttered.

Canada’s often less expensive, more reliable energy supply — nobody’s moving into northern Quebec to compete for it — proved decisive.

Since 1980, almost 30 American smelters have shut down, with companies typically citing inadequate guarantees about the supply and price of power as the reason. You can’t just hope that there’s enough juice to run the smelter.

Alcoa led the retreat to Canada. The company today operates three aluminum plants in Canada and has just two operational plants in the United States. It’s looking to sell some 10 of its shuttered or curtailed sites to the data center industry. One of its remaining smelters, in Massena, N.Y., depends on a New York State allocation of low-cost power and recently received several million dollars in incentives. Alcoa is investing nearly 💲60 million in the plant through 2028. Canada might call that a state subsidy — cheating — but without it, the company can’t operate competitively.

The closure of struggling American smelters means that the United States must import — and that the cost of tariffs is destructive to American industry. As of March, the automobile industry had paid more than 💲35 billion since 2025, thanks to tariffs on aluminum, steel and car parts and other items. This is money that carmakers could have spent on research and development or lowering car prices.

Trump wants to reverse history and create domestic manufacturing jobs in industries such as aluminum. He’s not the only one. The dream of increasing well-paying manufacturing jobs was what inspired states such as New York to shell out money to open factories and keep them in business. Alcoa’s plant in Massena pays 💲37.71 an hour for a general mechanic.

Donald Trump has failed, at least so far. Manufacturing jobs have declined in his second term. On aluminum specifically, Trump is promoting a 💲4 billion smelter in Oklahoma, backed by the United Arab Emirates-based Emirates Global Aluminum and Century Aluminum, along with 💲500 million in federal dollars and a couple of hundred million in state incentives, including tax breaks. This factory might get built, but few — if any — others will.

Even with all the incentives, building smelters in the United States isn’t all that appealing. Our electric grid is in terrible shape, electricity rates are rising, and the Trump administration is actively discouraging new sources of power, such as renewables. And no one knows whether Donald Trump will waver on tariffs again. Try selling your board of directors a multibillion-dollar, two- or three-year investment on that basis. Emirates Global might be willing to shoulder the risk, but few other companies are.

It’s not cheating when Canadians undersell American aluminum producers. It’s an advantage. It’s logical for the United States to import lower-cost Canadian aluminum and invest in industries in which America enjoys its own advantages — chip design and artificial intelligence, for instance.

Who would flout this logic, trashing a 150-plus-year relationship with a close ally in a disruptive attempt to separate two interdependent economies❓ Oh, right.🙄

To our Canadian friends please accept our apology because Americans wrongly elected stupid Donald Trump and Republicans will not impeach him

Stupid Donald Trump tariffs are hurting Canadian tourism in the U.S. But let's be honest about the bigger picture. Tariffs are hurting everybody.

Echo opinion published in the Sun Sentinel by the Editorial Board

Canadians aren’t simply staying home because of higher prices caused by Donald Trump's stupid tariffs. Many are deliberately choosing not to spend their vacation dollars in the U.S.  because of how Canada has been treated by the Trump administration: the tariffs, threats, repeated talk of making Canada the “51st state,” and the increasingly hostile rhetoric toward a longtime ally.

Echo letter published in The New York Times: "Something vital is being ignored in the negotiations about tariffs between Canada and the United States — the decades of warm and mutually supportive neighborliness between our countries. I’ll always remember the many Canadians who stepped forward immediately in solidarity after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Before that, their troops fought and died on Normandy’s Juno Beach just as American paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne, including my father, were engaged at Utah Beach.
Canadian travel to the U.S. fell about 25% last year, costing our tourism industry billions of dollars. The decline has continued in 2026 as Canadians choose other destinations. They are spending their money elsewhere," From John Elder in Bristol, Vermont

This should concern Florida especially. Canadians have long been among our most important international visitors. This isn’t simply a tourism problem — it is the economic consequence of alienating people who have traditionally loved coming to America.

If we want Canadian visitors back, lowering tariffs would help. But restoring goodwill and treating Canada as a valued neighbor and ally would help even more. From Andrea Culberson, in Weston, Florida

Extending a sincere apology😢

Canada, please accept our sincere apologies for the behavior of stupid Donald Trump.  I think little Donny failed in the “plays well with others” department and he never developed that emotional skill set. Even though he had 30 dolls, he wanted everyone else’s, too. Thus, he grew up a bully and a sore loser. And when those dolls became real life women, he grabbed them by their private parts, just because he could. I guess it’s all about the power trip.

Canada, please know you are America’s BFF and that is one of the few things most Americans can agree on these days. Please know his insane reign will end one day soon, and we will have a real president again — one who works for the benefit of all Americans and our allies, not just for his own wealth and ego.

I have no idea where this animus to our allies came from. (IOW, it is completely idiotic❗)

The Donald actually had a good idea when pressing NATO allies to contribute their fair share. But his personality defect could not let him take the win, and he had to double down. Your leader’s speech at Davos established what inspirational, moral leadership looks and sounds like. Making Donnie look bad (even though it was his own rambling, self-praising, Greenland poking and general incoherence that made him look like a fool) was the unforgivable sin. Don’t abandon us, Canada. We need you and love you. From Tanya Miller, in Hallandale Beach, Florida