Donald Trump and maga Republicans are over their heads in a coverup concerning the Epstein files

The Epstein files remain a flashpoint in public discourse. Letters to the editor nationwide emphasize themes of lack of transparency, government accountability, and calls to investigate the full release of all unredacted documents. Recent opinions have varied from demanding the complete unsealing of all records to criticizing current Justice Department stonewalling. 

Echo opinion letter published in The Cap Times, in Madison, Wisconsin:  Dear Editor: Our U.S. Justice Department has not been in this bad shape since the Watergate scandal, as we learned in last week's House committee hearing.

Its purpose was to determine who was responsible for not fully complying with release of the Epstein files. The buck was passed by former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who explained that even though she was the boss, she was not in charge over this matter. She explained that her assistant, the current acting attorney general and former personal lawyer to President Trump, Todd Blanche, was put in charge, presumably at the president's request.

This reminds me of the coverup orchestrated by President Richard Nixon leading to the "Saturday night massacre." On Oct. 20, 1973, facing a subpoena to turn over his secret tapes to Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Instead, Richardson refused and resigned.

Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, but Ruckelshaus also refused and resigned. 

Nixon then ordered Solicitor General Robert Bork to fire Cox. Bork did so, leading to Nixon's impeachment.

It is becoming clearer every day that there could be a coverup concerning the Epstein files like there was with the Nixon tapes. Maybe, after the upcoming midterms, there will finally be accountability, as there was over 50 years ago.

If the rule of law is to exist, then we need this to happen. If it doesn't happen, then we might as well cancel our 250th birthday party.

From Irwin Kass in Madison, Wisconsin

Donald Trump threw a temper tantrum on Meet the Press when confronted with truth by Kristen Welker

Don't kid yourself. Trump’s abusive treatment of Kristen Welker was planned. Opinion letter published in The Columbus Dispatch: Donald Trump abruptly ended a sit-down interview with Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker ripping off his microphone and walking out after she challenged his repeated claims of a rigged 2020, election. "You're a one-sided crooked network. Sorry. Let's call it quits because I've had enough," Trump said before getting up and leaving.

The exchange aired on NBC's Meet the Press, which Trump had agreed to appear on for the first time since returning to office. Welker pressed him on evidence for his allegations of vote-counting fraud in California and his baseless claims that the 2020, election was stolen

Donald Trump is a lifelong criminal. He spends his days not “Making America Great Again” because that sounds like work. 

Echo opinion published in Jackson Hole News

Instead, he’s turning over every stone, looking for a new and previously unimagined way to grift both America and the MAGA faithful.

Donald Trump sells watches, phones, Bibles, hats, NFTs, meme coins, T-shirts and don’t forget pardons. He hangs giant pictures of his face on the Justice Department, Labor Department, his name on the Kennedy Center, a ballroom, an arch, and his autograph on money. When asked about when negotiating with the Iranians how much Americans are suffering, he didn’t lie for once. He said, “not even a little bit.”

Trump has been found responsible for decades-long over-valuating his property values to get loans and under-valuating his properties for taxes. Hiding his business records to pay off a porn star. He can no longer have a charity for misusing the funds. He’s bankrupted some of the contractors who built his casinos. He’s a liar, a cheat, a grifter, and on top of that he has natural corruption of everything he touches. He has corrupted the pardon power to the tune of 💲1.3 billion, cheating Americans out of restitutions they were owed until the criminals were pardoned.

From Ron Paradis in Alta, Wyoming

Maine Democrats support Mr. Graham Platner because we know how Senator Susan Collins is no longer representing Maine

This essay was published on the Facebook Page of Alan Caron:

Mr. Graham Platner and his wife Amy Gertner

Say what you will about Mr. Graham Platner, the Maine Democratic candidate for Senate, but here's what strikes me, as a longtime observer and participant in Maine elections. 

Obviously, the guy has been under-estimated since day one. He wasn't supposed to compete against a sitting Governor. He was too far left for Maine. He wasn't supposed to stir up the state with over 80 packed town meetings, the likes of which I've never seen in a primary in Maine.

Then he wasn't going to survive the tattoo and the angry online posts. He certainly wasn't going to survive the texting and the old girlfriends telling it all.

Tons of people with political experience, it seems, has misread this race. Mr. Platner actually pushed a sitting Governor out of the race in a Democratic primary. Try to find where that has happened before. How is it that all the insiders seemed to forget what an outsider campaign looks like? Or that having a party that is a 'big tent' means having a lot of different kinds of people in that tent, including ones that make you uncomfortable or don't look and sound like you?
Here's my take on why Platner seems to weather it all. 

In fact, the guy is SAYING SOMETHING. He's saying something that people are hungry for. Not policies and programs. Not bipartisan patty cake. Strong action aimed at the roots of our economic and political problems. And he says it better than just about anybody.
Platner's acceptance speech on election night should be studied in communications and politics schools for the next decade. It ran for 22 minutes on national news channels, which is unprecedented. They just couldn't turn it off because it was compelling.

Whether you like it or not or agree with his politics, the guy is a force of nature. And that's what too many people are missing and many more people are looking for. And the people who are responding to his call couldn't care less about someone not using approved language. Heck, that's part of what they like, because that's someone closer to who they are.

Here's another thing they like. Platner said in his acceptance speech that if you believe in transformative change for the country, you have to believe in transformative change in individuals, and the idea of redemption.

Now, Republicans will do the same thing that Democratic insiders have done. They'll, of course, want to destroy anyone who dares to challenge the status quo. They'll measure election chances by the old playbook. They'll think politics today is just like it's always been. And they'll underestimate the distress that people are feeling who don't live in enclaves of comfortable life. It's a distress, by the way, that they promised to reduce in the last election but that has actually gotten worse.

Obviously, greater problem for Republicans is that they don't have an answer to what Platner is saying about the billionaires taking over and enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else. They don't have a response to the corruption of politics or the vacuuming of wealth from the bottom and middle to the top.

A year ago, ironically, Republicans were arguing for Trump and for the outsiders. They were the change agents, raging at the elites in Washington and everywhere else. Now, with Collins, they have to sell the status quo when nobody wants to hear it.

I tell my Republican friends 'don't underestimate this guy'. The working class guys agree. They hear it and they see it around them. And they like what he's saying too, even if they're not ready to tell their Republican friends. It's not complicated: they want change. We keep saying they're moving Right or they're moving Left. They aren't really doing either. They're just voting for whoever they feel can bring a better deal for people like them.

Right or wrong, they felt that Democrats had become a party of educated know-it-alls who not only couldn't hear working class people but actually thought that working class people, and especially working class men, were not enlightened enough or too dangerous to be welcome among Democrats.

Mr. is the antidote. He's hit the bullseye, and the people who have drifted from the Democratic party since Obama are paying attention. Those people will decide the election in November.
So now they'll be a lot of handwringing by some Democrats who should spend their time and energy on something far more productive - fighting to defeat Collins. And they'll be bold predictions by Republican operatives about how Platner will be crushed or how Collins always wins. But in disruptive and restive moments like this, that stuff doesn't win elections.

Too many Democrats have been consumed with the dangers for Platner. How about we take a minute to tally the dangers for Collins❓ She's in the worst election cycle for Republicans since the Nixon impeachment. She has a party that isn't nearly as energized as Democrats and which includes a sizeable number of voters who don't like her much. And in a contest over where Republican-leaning men go, she will certainly lose some of the base.

Worse, this election will be a referendum on Trump and she can't distance herself from Trump without incurring the wrath of MAGA or Trump himself.
Her biggest problems aren't among Republicans, though. The key to Collins success, over the years, is that she has always had these three things in place:
1. Republicans who didn't like her because she wasn't conservative enough or she was a woman, always held their noses and voted for her anyway.
2. She could always count on at lease 15% of Democrats to support her.
3. She's always gotten more than her share of Independents.
This year, she can't count on any of that. The number of Republicans unhappy with Trump and MAGA is growing. Some will not vote and others will vote Democratic. She will certainly lose support among Democrats and Independents because of her votes on Supreme Court nominees, cuts to health care and support for wars.

Like it or not, this is a miserable year to be a Republican. There's a wave coming and it's going to sweep out a lot of Republicans whether they're MAGA or not, or whether they voted for Trump 100% of the time or a more 'courageous' 95%, like Collins.
In fact, 'd argue that these are the worst conditions that Collins has run in, and against the toughest opponent she's ever faced. Because Mr. Platner has energy, with a message and his finger on the pulse of today. 

And Senate Collins thinks talking about all the bridges she funded and how relevant she is in an irrelevant Congress is what people care most about. (Reality check, Maine property tax payers provided the base funding for all her pet projects, she has not provided sustainable revenue for any of what she throws federal money at.)

Strap yourself in, my friends. Maine is about the be The Show that people across the country will be watching and discussing. What happens here will help to answer not only who controls Congress next year, but also whether Democrats can stem the tide of working class drift toward Republicans. If they can, the country will have more confidence that Democrats should be given a chance, again, to lead the change that America has been asking for and so desperately needs. That will produce a Democratic President in 2028.

Donald Trump created an ugly mess in Washington DC making his 80th aging birthday and the nation's 250th looks like graffiti on steroids

Los Angeles Times columnist Jackie Calmes nails it (“As we approach July 4, the capital is, fittingly, a mess,” June 4, 2026). 

This piece reminded me of the “Great Gatsby”* party some months ago, where the president entertained guests amid giant martini glasses brimming with scantily clad women. 

But here’s what F. Scott Fitzgerald had to say about these sorts of gatherings and people:

“They were careless people … they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money 💲💰,or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Thanks to your columnist for ringing this 🔔bell.

From David Lester, in Santa Ynez, California

*Donald Trump hosted a lavish "Great Gatsby"-themed Halloween party at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. It featured scantily-clad women dancing inside giant martini glasses. The event, complete with flappers and showgirls, drew significant media attention and political criticism for its opulent optics.

Sites central to the pilgrimages that millions of Americans make each year to Washington D.C., especially the White House, are a mess. The once-verdant park remains a construction site, with makeshift fencing only partly obscuring the vast scar that was once the East Wing and the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. Cranes sway in place of the felled trees, to build President Trump’s billion-dollar ballroom despite court orders and overwhelming public opinion against it. The South Lawn has been replaced with a gargantuan circus-tent-like arena for Ultimate Fighting Championship cage matches and a Trump-picked audience of thousands. Yes, cage matches. To mark not the nation’s birthday but the president’s 80th aging on June 14.

Because it’s all about Trump.

Nearby, the Reflecting Pool sweeping from the Lincoln Memorial to the World War II Memorial and Washington Monument remains dry, its water replaced with crews painting the basin “American Flag Blue” — another Trump vanity project that’s millions over budget and behind schedule. Cross over Independence Avenue and the grounds near the Martin Luther King Jr. and Jefferson Memorials are also fenced off, obscuring more construction-related structures for Trump’s unauthorized, possibly illegal “National Garden of American Heroes” for 250 statues of folks as varied as John Adams and Kobe Bryant. Another jarring sight: National Guard troops still needlessly patrol the areas.

At the adjacent Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River, four bronze equestrian statues are getting a $5 million coat of 24-carat gold leaf. But there’s worse: For nearly a century, the bridge has offered one of the most beautiful vantages in Washington, an unbroken scenic stretch from the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington side to Arlington National Cemetery and its historic, hilltop Custis-Lee Mansion on the Virginia side.

Every time I drive the route, I’m awed. Trump, however, sees only a site for narcissistic self-glorification: Work is underway at a small traffic circle in the middle — again, despite pending litigation from veterans and Democrats — for a massive 250-foot triumphal arch dedicated, Trump has said, to “me.”

What triumph justifies such a tribute? Certainly not the war in Iran.

Visitors going up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol see massive banners of Trump hanging from the departments of Labor, Agriculture and, most obscene of all, Justice. They pass the U.S. Mint, charged lately with devising a $250 bill and a $1 coin featuring Trump’s mug.

The banners, the currency and all the rest — it’s hardly the adulatory message appropriate to a people who, by the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, renounced a king and went on to create a democratic republic.

As usual in springtime Washington, aka school-trip season, this week I’ve seen dozens of buses disgorging students, many in their identical T-shirts advertising farflung hometowns and schools. I’ve felt somewhat sorry for those young people seeing monumental Washington now, for what might be the only visit of their lives.

Still, this semiquincentennial can be a teaching moment, for all Americans.

The capital’s scars are a metaphor for Trump’s selfish, anti-democratic destructiveness. He contrives his projects one after the other, designs them, picks the architects, contractors and even materials, and lets out the opaque, no-bid contracts, all without consulting Congress or honoring its constitutional power of the purse — until he needs more money, like for the ballroom that he’s said wouldn’t require a dime from taxpayers. 

When sued, he all but defies the courts, calling for the impeachment of federal judges who rule against his tributes to himself.

Look on the bright side: But for Trump’s abuses, Americans wouldn’t be giving so much thought on this 250th birthday to the words of the declaration and the Constitution, to the founders’ courage and the framers’ careful balance of powers, and the ways in which those protections need shoring up.

It’s not just Washington that’s suffered Trump’s damaging (ugly) touch. In Philadelphia, where the declaration was drafted and signed at Independence Hall, the nearby site where George Washington lived as president was horribly marred by the teardown of plaques that had described the founders’ enslavement of people at their properties. Trump is in court, fighting to whitewash that bit of history, instead of allowing it to stand as a testimony to America’s long-running struggle to live by the declaration’s aspirational words: “all men are created equal.”

Fifty years ago, the July 4 bicentennial was all the more resonant because it came soon after the Watergate scandal. “The system worked” was the common refrain then. The system hasn’t been working to curb Trump’s lawless reign; Congress and the Supreme Court instead have been enablers. Yet just in time for the semiquincentennial come signs that the system is working, but from the bottom up: Voters are showing a spirit of ’26 against the worst, most monarchical president in U.S. history.

And it’s their local celebrations that give the Fourth its meaning, just as John Adams hoped for in a letter 250 years ago to wife, Abigail. The day, he wrote, should be marked ever after by “Shews, Games, Sport, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.”

Had Trump simply honored Adams’ words, he would have been content to simply be the presider in chief amid the country’s semiquincentennial festivities. And he’d be more popular for it. But that’s not Trump: He’s chosen to play the king in his court of controversy, dividing when unity is wanted.

So it is that seven of nine performers canceled their scheduled appearances at Trump’s planned festivities on the National Mall from June 25 through July 10. That, together with last Friday’s judicial order that he take his name off the Kennedy Center, prompted a 206-word tantrum on social media Saturday night. Trump now threatens to celebrate with a MAGA rally on the Mall instead.

But, he’s not reading the room, or his dismal unpopularity polls.

Democrats must create a new period of Reconstruction after Donald Trump and maga Republicans are voted out of office

Echo opinion published The New York Times by Jamelle Bouie:

Liberty under attack by Trumpism is in dire need of Reconstruction!

This past week in early June, 2026, I wrote about the need for Democrats to construct a Project 2029 that takes the revolutionary nature of the Trump regime seriously and seeks not to restore what was, but to build something new in the wake of this conjuncture.

In it I refer, as I often do, to the Reconstruction period of American history — the roughly 10 to 15 years following the end of the Civil War — as inspiration for how Democrats might approach that task.

In particular, the Radical Republicans who spearheaded the most far-reaching attempts to reconstruct the South embraced a constitutional vision rooted in the broad authority of Article I of the Constitution. Part of this was by necessity. After Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, they had to contend with President Andrew Johnson, a vicious white supremacist who opposed Black civil rights and sought a speedy end to Reconstruction so that he might build a new political party on a Jacksonian vision of white supremacy. They also had to contend with a Supreme Court that saw itself as a bulwark for a narrow and restrictive vision of the Constitution.

The leading congressmen of the period had their own conception of the relationship between Congress, the presidency, and the courts — shaped in large part by their battles with the slave power. 

But, Reconstruction Republicans were also determined to secure and consolidate the political settlement of the Civil War against their foes in government. Congressional supremacy then was as much about the moment as it was about a deeper political perspective.

Here I want to highlight two things about the way congressional supremacy worked.

First, is that the Reconstruction Congress rejected the Supreme Court’s authority to invalidate its legislation. It was Congress — representing the entire people — that had the right and authority to say what the Constitution meant and it was the duty of the Supreme Court to enforce that meaning on the states. 

To stymie the court, this Congress took steps to limit the court’s jurisdiction, to directly repudiate court rulings with its own laws, and to reshape the Supreme Court itself — including preventing President Johnson from appointing new members when old ones died or left the bench.

The second is that the Reconstruction Congress leveraged a long-dormant part of the Constitution, the Guarantee Clause, which says that all states shall be guaranteed a republican form of government. It was under the Guarantee Clause that Republicans pursued their most far-reaching efforts to reconstruct the South.


As I wrote, should Democrats have control of the White House and both branches of Congress in 2029, they will be faced with a project of reconstruction, not restoration. You could do worse in those circumstances than to ask: What would Charles Sumner do❓

What would Thaddeus Stevens do❓ What would John Bingham do❓

They wouldn’t stand by and allow their project to be destroyed by the hostile forces arrayed against them. They would look to the Constitution which, for all of its flaws, gives Congress the power and authority to make its vision reality.

My column this week was on the prospect of a Project 2029, and why any effort worthy of the name must have a vision for reconstruction, not restoration.

If this is all true, and it is, then any plausible response to Project 2025, must include a larger vision for the future of the American Republic. A Project 2029, cannot be a collection of Democratic Party agenda items. It must articulate a broad new conception (aka, a new Lazarus❗)  of the nation’s political order — one that will guide the way a future Democratic-led government might wield power. 

Above all, Democrats must have a plan for reconstruction — for building something new on the wreckage of what Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have wrought — not for restoration of what was.

Donald Trum and evil maga Republicans do not want us to know the difference between human beings and space aliens!

You cannot make this stuff up❗

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by M. Gessen

White House’s Latest Provocation Is ‘Grotesque and Terrifying and Juvenile’👽🤢

“They walk among us.” The glowing green letters emerge ominously against a dark backdrop. Above them hover the words “aliens” and “declassified,” suggesting the release — long awaited in some corners of the internet — of secret government files concerning extraterrestrials. Slowly, tantalizingly, more text appears: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.” Then the big reveal: It’s not the trailer for a horror film; it’s a White House web page, posted last Thursday. And the scary creatures in question aren’t extraterrestrials; they’re the other kind of aliens — the immigrant kind, the kind hunted by ICE.

“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the page announces. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children and lived seemingly normal human existences.” That’s the joke: Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, 😟but make it a troll.

This web page, which invites users to look up the number of immigrants supposedly arrested on charges of criminal activity in American cities and towns, belongs to a subgenre of Trumpian gestures that are menacing and sophomoric at the same time. “Grotesque and terrifying and juvenile” is how Ernesto Verdeja, a genocide-prevention expert at the University of Notre Dame, described it to me. These gestures are hard to write about: The ugliness is undisguised, so what is there to say❓

And yet, these statements, step by preposterous step, change the world we live in. 

With phrases like “They do not belong here” and “Deport them all,” the page struck me as an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants. But Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, thinks that the purpose of the page is not to get Americans to do anything: It’s to get them to do nothing, while the government commits its campaign of cruelty against millions of people just trying to live in peace. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”

Valentino co-founded the Early Warning Project, which assesses the risk of mass atrocities around the world. To be sure, anti-immigrant violence in the United States does not approach the scale of the atrocities Valentino usually studies. But, the dehumanizing language of the sort used by the Trumpzi administration is, he said, “a pretty standard indicator” of risk, a necessary if insufficient condition of mass violence directed at a particular group.

“It’s not that it turns normal people into murderers,” Valentino said. “It’s that it turns them into bystanders.”

To the extent that the Trump administration has pulled back on its violent anti-immigrant campaign, it has done so because nonimmigrants have stepped up — in the courts and, especially, in the streets. The most dramatic confrontations took place this past winter in Minneapolis, but in the months since the federal government ended its occupation of that city, resistance has continued. In Newark, N.J., demonstrators have been protesting the conditions at the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility. At least 63 people have been arrested in the past week alone. 

In New York City, a relatively new coalition called Hands Off NYC has, since January, trained more than 7,000 volunteers to peacefully resist ICE. The Aliens web page, Valentino thinks, is intended to discourage this kind of activity.

“The key is that you are supposed to see your city with a big red dot over it,” Valentino said, referring to a map on the website, then click to read, supposedly, the number of immigrants who have been charged with crimes. (For example, “Jamestown, N.Y.: 10; larceny, obstructing the police; Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nigeria.”) “And you see the charges — do you want to risk your life for this kind of person?”

When the page went up, the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration advocacy organization, happened to be hosting a gathering of data experts. Participants thought they saw something interesting. “The page is poorly coded, badly designed and yet weirdly transparent about some things the administration hasn’t been transparent about before,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the council, told me. It appeared that the map was based on raw data of ICE arrests — information that the government had mostly kept secret since the beginning of Trump’s current term. The map is possibly the best document to date of the scale of the ICE campaign, which, it shows, has raged not only in big cities but in small towns, where it’s sometimes less visible.

As is usual for the Trump administration, the figures are decontextualized and misrepresented. In addition to the map, the page contains a supposed tally of “encounters,” a term that has one meaning in 1970s, sci-fi and another in Customs and Border Protection-speak, where it typically refers to instances in which immigrants are apprehended. What struck me after spending too much time staring at the page was that it wants you to be afraid of all aliens: the space kind and the “illegal” kind, but also the “legal” kind, foreign-born people who have been living in this country for decades. As for the counter, it’s tracking nothing. The numbers just tick upward at a perfectly steady pace, one every second and a bit.

Underscoring the sophomoric aspect of this astonishing document is the fact that it’s shot through with references to “The X-Files.” I caught only one of them: The last lines say, “The truth is no longer out there. It’s right here. Right now” — a nod to the show’s tag line. Verdeja, the Notre Dame professor, grew up with the show, so he pointed out some other echoes, such as the combination of interplanetary warfare and a deep-state conspiracy. But superimposed on all that pop culture are the white supremacist tropes. The sentences about aliens “walking among us, living in our neighborhoods,” Verdeja said, read to him like invocations of the Great Replacement theory, which has become so familiar as to seem almost mainstream. “It’s similar to the way Jews were talked about in Europe in the 1920s, and ’30s,” Verdeja said.

He made the comparison gingerly, wary of falling into an alarmist cliché. But the ideologues of Trump’s immigration policies are taking no such pains. A couple of days after the “Aliens” page was published, Gregory Bovino, the former head of the U.S. Border Patrol who oversaw the federal immigration operation in Minneapolis, traveled to Portugal for a meeting of far-right politicians to discuss “remigration,” a concept that refers to the forcible displacement of millions of people on the basis of their ethnicity in the wake of World War I — what we now call ethnic cleansing.

Driven by the same nativist and xenophobic ideas, the United States adopted the Immigration Acts of 1921, and 1924, which ended mass immigration by introducing national-origin quotas designed to favor Northern and Western Europeans and exclude nonwhite immigrants almost entirely. These quotas stayed in place for four decades — until they were repealed just over 60 years ago, which is when the White House page claims the story of the aliens begins.

The point of making historical connections is not to say that any two actions, or any two eras, are exactly alike. Context always changes. But it’s important to see that this web page isn’t just a troll. It didn’t come out of nowhere. Provocations like this are part of an old and terrible story, and it continues to be written today.

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are killing innocent people at sea, like the humans they target are in a video game!

 Echo article published in USA Today by Cybele Mayers-Osterman

US boat strikes killed (like in evil video games) over 200 innocent people. Service members have questions? But, Donald Trump could preemptively pardon service members for acts committed during his term.

Maine Writer comment- Donald Trump cannot pardon the guilt experienced by many who were ordered to kill innocent people without evidence of them having engaged in any crimes. 

U.S. military killed more than 200 😓😞😡people in strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific in the last nine months in what legal experts and former military lawyers broadly agree constitute illegal military orders that service members should refuse to follow.

While there is no record of troops refusing to follow these orders, at least a handful of service members grappling with these questions have sought legal advice, according to anonymous hotlines for U.S. military members.

Before the Trump-era boat strikes, the United States viewed the drug trade as a law enforcement issue and tasked the Coast Guard with interdicting boats trying to bring drugs into the country.

The military has published dozens of videos of the attacks on social media – grainy, black and white videos taken from above of boats speeding through the water before they explode into balls of flame.

And Trump officials continue to say the attacks are lawful. ❓

At a June 2, 2026, Senate budget hearing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said every boat strike "has a legal officer on the deck that has to make a determination about whether the call is legal or not."

The Pentagon referred USA TODAY's questions to U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military operations in South America and the Caribbean. The command said in a statement: "All operations are conducted deliberately and lawfully, in full compliance with U.S. and international law, including the law of armed conflict." 

"All targeting criteria are developed according to legal, operational, and intelligence requirements."

Since the first strike on Sept. 2, scores of legal experts and former military lawyers have characterized the strikes as extrajudicial killings or murders. Members of the military are required by U.S. law to refuse illegal orders.

Dan Maurer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former military lawyer, said he hoped the boat strikes would serve as an (unethical❗) example for future generations.

"It’s going to be a shameful episode in the history of American military operations, and I hope it becomes a case study in what not to do," he said.

Maine Writer- sadly but inevitably, reparations must be paid from the United States to the countries where illegal boat strikes killed so many innocent people. Humans are not "video games".❗😡

Donald Trump only wakes up when he can bully, lie and denigrate Americans and people he wrongly perceives as being weak

Echo opinion letter published in The Virginian Pilot newspaper:

Trump’s ugly coercive style rarely has positive results

Donald Trump is the American bully — and nobody likes a bully. Throughout his political career, his communication style has heavily relied on public humiliation, aggressive behavior and personal attacks. When dealing with individuals — including political rivals, journalists and private citizens — he frequently uses derogatory nicknames and targeted social media campaigns to isolate and disparage his targets.

Internationally, this confrontational approach translates into a transactional foreign policy — everything is a deal.

What kind of deal can he make❓ Rather than relying on diplomacy using professional negotiators, he frequently uses public threats, tariffs and the withholding of foreign aid to pressure both adversaries and allies. This behavior often undermines international agreements and strains traditional diplomatic alliances.

This pattern is starkly visible in Latin America, where his playbook is designed to force sovereign nations into submission. His approach in Venezuela was to arrest President Nicolas Maduro on narco-terrorism charges and then dictate the terms under which Venezuela can participate in global oil markets. 

In Cuba, he has boasted about an imminent friendly takeover or military intervention. Trump recently used federal indictments against former Cuban President Raul Castro to try to force political collapse in the country.

This bullying coercive style usually just makes people mad and want to dig in their heels. It rarely results in positive outcomes.

From David M. Grochmal, in Virginia Beach, Virginia

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are supporting the evil commander in THIEF greed!

New York Times echo opinion by Thomas Friedman

 Trump Has Failed as Commander in Chief❓Who knew❓🙄

With each passing month, Donald Trump behaves more like America’s commander in thief than its commander in chief.

How so❓ Let me count the ways. We are a nation at war today, with tens of thousands of troops deployed near Iran. 

Generally, when our nation has been at war, the commander in chief’s top domestic priority is to keep the country united. Because there is nothing more demoralizing for U.S. troops fighting abroad than to look back and see our country ripping itself apart at home. And, there is nothing that encourages an enemy to hold out for better terms for ending a war with America than seeing America at war with itself.

But, how has Trump risen to that commander-in-chief unifying duty❓ He has not lifted a finger to bring the Democrats behind his war. Instead, he’s prioritized acting like an autocratic monster  "in thief". At the same moment Trump was asking our men and women in uniform to make the ultimate sacrifice, he engaged in a brazen, in-your-face attempted heist of the U.S. Treasury to benefit himself, his family and his political allies, which could include those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. It was so outrageous that even some of his most reliable Republican Party sycophants couldn’t accept it.

Trump conspired with his own Justice Department, headed by his former personal lawyer, to use taxpayer money to create a 💲1.776 billion political slush fund, supposedly to compensate those Trump supporters who “suffered weaponization and lawfare” at the hands of his predecessor. In fact, as this paper’s editorial board noted, it would “reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president.”

Fortunately, a federal judge put a temporary hold on the scheme that no one described better than the Republican former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops❓ Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.” In the face of all that opposition, Trump’s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Tuesday he was withdrawing this terrible plan.

If Trump had an ounce of integrity, instead of scheming to set aside 💲1.776 billion to potentially pay off these phony defenders of freedom’s frontier — loyalists who ransacked and defecated in the halls of Congress — he would direct Congress to spend that exact amount to support today’s real defenders of freedom’s frontier: the Ukrainian Army. It is both resisting Vladimir Putin’s attempt to crush Ukraine’s democracy and sapping Russia’s ability to threaten the other free countries of Europe. God bless Ukraine’s fighters.

Alas, though, Trump apparently wants money only for people who tried to overthrow our Constitution at home, not for those who want to emulate our constitutional democracy abroad.

In addition, the Trump-directed Justice Department quietly inserted, as a supplement to that slush fund deal, a one-page document signed by Blanche stating that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Trump, his family members or his businesses. That measure remains in force, Blanche said on Tuesday.

Trump has another moniker suggesting his ethical challenges: “trader in chief,” as The Associated Press recently proposed. Why❓ Because “recent presidents have stayed away from trading stocks in companies whose fortunes they could lift or scuttle with the stroke of a pen, but Donald Trump smashed that precedent in the first quarter of this year with more than 3,600 buy and sell orders,” The A.P. (Associated Press) wrote, “many of them involving companies whose profits have been directly impacted by his decisions as head of the government.”

That was an average of 50 trades a day in stocks that included U.S. military suppliers affected by the Iran war. “If he were defense secretary, he would be committing a crime,” Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics adviser in the George W. Bush administration, told The A.P. “Technically he can do this, but it is a fundamental breach of trust.”

Not only has Trump choked off virtually all U.S. financial aid to Ukraine, but he is also reducing U.S. troops on the ground in NATO countries right when Putin, sensing he is losing the war, is increasingly threatening them.

Just as Americans are starting to realize that Trump is becoming a predator on our system — trying to manipulate the justice system to generate cash available to his Jan. 6 pirates and immunity from ongoing inquiries into taxes for himself and his family — our allies are concluding that Trump’s America is becoming a dangerous predator on them.

Indeed, something is happening with America’s traditional allies that I never thought I would see in this lifetime or the next. In the post-World War II era, we and our allies together embraced the doctrine of “deterrence” against the Soviet Union, and later Russia, to prevent any attempt by the Kremlin to forcibly expand its influence into the free world or put neighbors under its thumb.

Not any longer.

• Our allies watched Trump threaten to make Canada the 51st state and to seize Greenland from Denmark. 
• Our allies have watched him start a war with Iran without consulting NATO and then demand that NATO help rescue us from what has turned into a mess. 
• Our allies watched Trump slash U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine, but put the Russian aggressor on the same moral footing as that country 
• And then, top it all off with reckless, ill-conceived tariffs on all our allies.

As a result of all that, something unprecedented is happening: “Deterring Trump’s America is now becoming a strategic priority of our allies as much as deterring Russia was,” Nader Mousavizadeh, the chief executive of Macro Advisory Partners, a geopolitical consulting firm, and a former senior adviser to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, told me.

And how could it not❓ When you look at how Trump has hammered Canada with tariffs, it is hard not to conclude that the worst position for a country to be in during the second Trump administration “is to be America’s closest ally and have integrated your economy, energy systems and military with that of the United States,” Mousavizadeh said. Everyone can now see, he added, that Trump will “weaponize any country’s dependence on America and use it to extract whatever he can in the narrowest and most tactical and transactional definition of American power.”

No wonder that after Trump stepped up his rhetoric about taking over Greenland, European NATO members — Germany, Sweden, France, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland and the United Kingdom — all announced plans to send small military contingents to Greenland to bolster the Danes.

Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland, noted in an essay for the Atlantic Council that though these NATO allies tried to frame their move as necessary to bolster Arctic security, they also “have used the word ‘deterrence.’ For Europeans to speak in such terms about the United States, even implicitly, is a low point, but it is needed.”

Let’s not forget that early on Trump forced Ukraine to give the United States access to critical minerals in return for U.S. help against a Russian Army trying to overrun it. This is the real “Trump Doctrine”: Oppose America, and I will tariff you; depend on America, and I will extort you.

The only rational response for our allies is to try to “deter and diversify,” Mousavizadeh concluded. And if Trump keeps this up for his full four years, he added, “no NATO leader can ever again responsibly agree to the degree of dependence on U.S. technology, U.S. defense systems or financial systems” that NATO countries long took for granted.

I have been in Portugal this week and I have been shocked by the degree to which European business executives speak of having lost faith in American institutions ❗and in America as the guarantor of global legal norms — something they have always taken for granted. It is literally disorienting for them, like hikers who have lost their compass.

In short, having a president who behaves like a commander in thief — not a commander in chief — is costing us dearly at home and abroad. This perversion of the American presidency is undermining the very alliance structure that won two world wars and the Cold War and generated one of history’s longest ages of peace and prosperity. Every day we tolerate such behavior we endanger our children’s future.

P.S. Senator Susan Collins where are you❓ Impeach Trump now❗

By Thomas L. Friedman, the foreign affairs Opinion columnist.