An essay about the Bible Belt Southern diversity from The Conversation

A journalist coined ‘the Bible Belt’ 100 years ago – it’s been oversimplifying the South ever since. Published in The Conversation by John Hayes. 

Just over a century ago, the words “Bible Belt” first appeared in print. And as historian John Hayes explains, the phrase has been oversimplifying the South ever since.

As the U.S. midterm elections come near, for example, perhaps you’ll hear a pundit invoke the Bible Belt cliché to explain Southern politics, linking voters’ behavior at the polls to conservative Protestant beliefs. Even in 1924, though, that picture of Southern culture was far from complete. There were truths within it, like Baptist and Methodist churches’ strong sway over society. But it boiled the region’s diversity down into a single image, ignoring important factors like race and class.

Members of the Primitive Baptist Church in Morehead, Kentucky., attend a creek immersion baptism in 1940. Marion Post Wolcott/Library of Congress

And if the image of the Bible Belt wasn’t really accurate 100 years ago, that’s all the more true today, in a rapidly changing South. It’s “the cliche that just won’t die,” Hayes writes – but it “could use some serious scrutiny.”

“Look No Further❗” a billboard on the side of the highway beckons, drawing my gaze toward the red cover of a Bible. “You Are Worthy of Redemption❗✝️”

Not far away, another sign urges me to “Keep Christ in Christmas.” Then farther down the road a third appears: “Jesus: COMING SOON” its bright colors announce.

Signs like these are familiar to me: I’m a historian who studies the U.S. South and lives in it. I know how easily they can evoke the South – or, I should say, a certain image of it. As that image pictures it, the South is “the Bible Belt”: a place where people are really religious, and, as a result, socially and politically conservative. Indeed, in this year of midterm elections, you’re almost certain to hear pundits invoke “the Bible Belt” as shorthand explanation for Southern political behavior.

The phrase has been around for a century. Its endurance, however – and the “evidence” behind it today – could use some serious scrutiny. I spotted those roadside signs, for example, in Ontario, Canada, a thousand miles from what anybody would think of as the South.

Of the many things said about the South over the years, “Bible Belt” is the cliché that just won’t die.

Skewering the South

“Bible Belt” entered the lexicon in 1924, in the pages of The American Mercury, a magazine co-founded by H.L. Mencken. 

Based in Baltimore, at the upper edge of the South, Mencken was one of the nation’s most prominent journalists in the decades between the world wars.

The acerbic satirist had skewered the South in his much-discussed 1919, essay “The Sahara of the Bozart,” depicting it as a vast cultural wasteland. 

Then, in 1925, he closely covered the Dayton, Tennessee, trial of biology teacher John T. Scopes, who had been charged with violating the state’s law against teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Mencken famously lampooned it as the Scopes “monkey trial.”

He coined “Bible Belt” in his regular column of short news items, then employed the phrase routinely. By it he meant a place where two Protestant groups, the Baptists and the Methodists, dominated not just religious life, but also the mores of the whole society. The whole region, Mencken argued, was a Baptist-Methodist stranglehold where fun and free thought were banished.

Whose Christianity❓✝️⛪

It’s true that in the early 20th century, Baptists and Methodists dominated the South in a way that they didn’t anywhere else. 

To trace the bloc of states where over 50% of religious congregation members were Baptist or Methodist was to trace the region’s boundaries with uncanny precision.

But beneath commonalities, religious life was divided by both race and class. Black Baptists and Methodists met in their own churches: autonomous institutions that came to be known, collectively, as “the Black church.” The region’s poor Christians drew on inherited traditions and their own hardships to craft a folk version of Baptist-Methodist faith – what I’ve written about as “hard, hard religion.”

These religious divisions paralleled political ones. Through techniques like poll taxes and literacy tests, 🙄😡 the Southern states severely restricted the franchise, effectively stripping Black and poor white Southerners of their voting rights.

The social order that Mencken described as the Bible Belt, then, expressed the culture of elite and middle-class white people, the ones with the political power to enforce it.

“Bible Belt” joined other phrases that expressed how the early 20th-century South differed from national patterns. Amid industrializing, urbanizing America, the South was “the Cotton Belt,” the world’s leading cotton producer, with a predominantly rural, agricultural population. Political contests marked the nation, but in the “Solid South,” the Democratic Party monopolized politics. 

With high poverty, low wages and limited capital, the South was the prosperous nation’s “No. 1 economic problem,” as President Franklin Roosevelt put it in 1938. And the violent racial oppression of the “Jim Crow South” was what many Black Southerners eagerly fled when doors of opportunity opened in other regions.

A new South


A century later, so much has changed.

Most Southerners, like most Americans, live in suburbs and work in a service economy. Republicans hold a political majority in the region, but they have to compete for it. Southern-based corporations like Walmart, McKesson and Exxon Mobil are in the top 10 of the Fortune 500. And what legal scholar Michelle Alexander calls “the New Jim Crow” – the system of mass incarceration that disproportionately criminalizes people of color – is not confined to the South, but nationwide.

Old lines of difference between the South and the rest of the nation have faded. So have the once-common nicknames that described them – with the stubborn exception of “Bible Belt.”

A quick glance at the news shows its persistence, with headlines discussing “The Bible Belt’s Beliefs About Women,” or describing one Arkansas town as “the Bible Belt’s LGBTQ Oasis.” The cultural issues reported in stories like these are no doubt real, but framing them as expressions of an enduring Southern Bible Belt seems to imagine religion as unchanging, timeless.

In reality, both the region’s people and their religion are changing dramatically. More Black, Latino and biracial people live in the South than in any other part of the country. White people make up just 52.5% of the regional population. The rapidly changing South is dynamic, second only to the West in demographic diversity.

This shapes religion, too. As the 2023-2024 Pew Religious Landscape Study showed, Black and Latino Americans are more likely than white Americans to identify as Christian. 

In fact, the faith of Black Southerners (predominantly Baptist) and Latino Southerners (predominantly Catholic) is a reminder that the South is not a religious monolith.

Meanwhile, white Baptists and Methodists are not the force they used to be. Their main institutions, the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church, have been declining in membership for decades. The same Pew study showed that a mere 12% of Southerners identify with either denomination.
From ‘Bible Belt’ to ‘culture wars’

Internally, both denominations have had major splits on whether women can be leaders and whether to recognize LGBTQ identities. Such splits reflect divides that sociologist James Davison Hunter diagnosed in 1991 as “Culture Wars.”

Consider his book’s subtitle, though: “The Struggle to Define America.” In these culture wars, the battlefield is the nation. The fighters are not regions, but political factions. What they’re fighting over is the legacy of the social movements of the 1960s: civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, the environment.

The fact that the culture wars for America can be found in the contemporary South is a testament to just how much the once-distinct region participates in the dynamics of national life. Those wars may sound louder in the South than elsewhere, but that’s not the expression of a changeless Bible Belt; rather, it is the historical pattern that reactions are often strongest where change is most pronounced.

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Donald Trump and maga Republicans approve importing beef or unknown origins: An important essay reports stomach turning information

Why Did Trump Order Up 660 Million Pounds of Mystery Meat?

Echo New York Times opinion by Eric Schlosser author of the book Fast Food Nation.

If you buy a T-shirt at Gap, it will have a label that tells you where it was made. That’s federal law.

The same is true for automobiles, appliances, television sets, every fresh or frozen fruit and vegetable sold at the supermarket.

Beef and pork are notable exceptions to these laws. And that may help to explain why Donald Trump signed a proclamation last month that will allow the duty-free importation of about 660 million pounds of inexpensive beef.

If American consumers knew where that beef was coming from, they might not want to eat it.

The cuts of meat covered by Trump’s proclamation aren’t fresh sirloins, rib-eyes and filets. They’re lean beef trimmings that will be added to fattier American cuts to make ground beef. 

They’re small chunks of frozen meat that could have been kept in cold storage overseas for years. They are the quintessence of generic industrial meat, imported here to be subsequently processed in massive grinders that combine pieces of tens of thousands of cattle from multiple countries, mainly into fast food hamburgers.

I’ve been a longtime critic of food-safety practices in the U.S. meatpacking industry. But some of the practices in the 16 countries currently authorized to export raw beef to the United States are worse than any on these shores. During the past year, China rejected two shipping containers of beef from Uruguay after finding residue of an anti-parasitic drug in the meat, and rejected beef from Argentina reportedly because it tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause serious blood disorders.

One of the worst food-safety scandals occurred in Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of beef. In 2017, the Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meatpacking plants after allegations that government inspectors and politicians were being bribed to allow the sale of contaminated beef. Rotten meat treated with ascorbic acid and other chemicals to mask the contamination had been sold to hospitals and schools in Brazil and also exported. Executives at the Brazilian company JBS, the largest beef producer in the world, later admitted to bribing inspectors.

American cattle industry leaders say that Mr. Trump’s move will hurt domestic ranchers and do little to reduce the price of ground beef. They say the real cost savings will be enjoyed by meatpacking companies, fast food chains and supermarkets.

Why did Trump come up with this scheme to import hundreds of millions of pounds of beef❓

“Regime Change,” the recent book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, contains an interesting clue: a White House meeting last November between Trump and Joesley Batista, whose family controls JBS.

Mr. Batista had long been considered persona non grata in Washington, having been jailed in Brazil as a result of, among other things, paying $186 million in bribes to almost 2,000 politicians, including three Brazilian presidents, to obtain state financing for his family’s company. In 2019, after JBS bought several American meatpacking companies, Senator Marco Rubio and his colleague Robert Menendez deplored JBS’s “admitted criminal conduct,” its “business relationships with Venezuela’s Maduro regime, as well as its growing reliance on financing from entities aligned with the Chinese government.” The senators argued that allowing JBS to own U.S. companies could endanger America’s food supply and national security.

Mr. Batista gained the White House meeting last November, Ms. Haberman and Mr. Swan wrote, because of his friendship with Melania Trump. In addition, a JBS subsidiary had donated $5 million to Trump’s second inauguration, the largest gift from any individual or corporation. Not long afterward, JBS got approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a privilege the company had sought for almost a decade.

After the White House meeting with Trump, Mr. Batista flew to Venezuela at Trump’s request, met with President Nicolás Maduro and urged him to resign. Mr. Batista’s unusual diplomatic endeavor did not succeed, but in July, a company owned by his family acquired a major stake in Venezuelan oil production, with the blessing of the new Trump-backed government there.

The European Union suspended imports of beef from Brazil this past Thursday because of concerns about antibiotic misuse. Trump’s proclamation facilitating beef imports from Brazil took effect the same week. Calling these facts to public view, the writer Shanley Hunt allowed that perhaps it’s just a coincidence. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump announced his intention to allow duty-free foreign beef just a day after another meeting with Mr. Batista at the White House. Perhaps that’s a coincidence, too.

And yet it’s remarkable that the livelihood of American ranchers is being shaped in private meetings between the president of the United States and a representative of Brazil’s largest exporter of beef.

Country-of-origin labeling on beef used to be mandatory in the United States. That changed in 2015, when a Republican-controlled Congress, led by Speaker of the House John Boehner, ended the requirement. Just over a year later, Mr. Boehner was appointed to the board of JBS Foods International.

Today, four large meatpacking companies control about 85 percent of the market for beef in the United States. Two of those companies — JBS and National Beef — are Brazilian-owned. Smithfield Foods, America’s largest pork company, was purchased by a Chinese company in 2013. Although Smithfield doesn’t currently import pork from China, if it ever does, that fact won’t appear on the label.

Last year the Senate majority leader, John Thune, and Senator Cory Booker introduced bipartisan legislation that would once again require that meat be labeled according to its country of origin. In March, the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, introduced separate legislation that would require tougher antitrust enforcement in the meatpacking industry, break up the big four beef companies, strengthen protections for independent ranchers and place limits on foreign ownership of American meat companies.

Those bills are a good start. In the early 1970s, before the administration of President Ronald Reagan gutted antitrust enforcement, the top four beef companies had only 21 percent of the U.S. market. When that market was truly competitive, Americans ate more beef than they do today, the nation had more than twice as many cattle ranchers — and foreign corporations didn’t control the most valuable sector of American agriculture.

Until a new labeling act gets passed, if you want to eat a hamburger, I suggest going to your local butcher shop, rather than the supermarket, ordering cuts of American beef and asking for them to be ground on the premises. Or grind it at home. Otherwise, there’s really no way of knowing what’s in your meat, or how many international borders it crossed to reach your plate.

Donald Trump and Republican oligarchy will exploit immigrants to create a permanent labor class like slavery

Although this opinion is a little difficult to understand, I fully appreciate and support the premise, in short, the anti-immigration movement is, in truth, being manipulated by oligarchs to create a permanent low cost labor pool, akin to slavery. 

Actually, I have been thinking about this exploitation for quite a while and now the concept is explained, if you can grasp it, in this essay, by Jean Guerrero, in the The New York Times.

This spring, 2026, the prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes decided that the war on immigrants was a lost cause. “Country’s over,” he said on his Rumble show. “We’re already a nonwhite country.” Earlier this year, he declared immigration a “dead issue,” arguing that President Trump “blew it” by linking arms with oligarchs and waging war on Iran.

“Immigration is becoming one of these issues that is used almost exclusively just to trick white people,” he said, a rare display of clarity for a man whose many bigotries tend to orient him toward confusion. In an anti-semitic post on X/, he argued that anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim talk was a distraction. “Probably the best way to prevent Muslim immigrants from coming here or attacking us is to stop killing them and destroying their countries for Israel,” he wrote. And last month, he wrote on X: “The populist Left has all the energy now. Trump’s broken promises over immigration, Iran & Epstein have completely deflated any enthusiasm on the Right.”

Fuentes is just one of the influential figures in the anti-immigrant movement who are criticizing Trump’s foreign policy, which has set in motion a refugee crisis within Iran as his interventions in Latin America create the conditions for a long-term increase in mass migration to the United States from that region.

The discontent among immigration restrictionists emerged despite Trump’s crackdown on immigrants living in the United States. The administration muted the performative cruelty of its mass deportations after its deadly, unpopular actions in Minneapolis; however, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement surged to nearly 50,000 in July, the highest single monthly arrest total of Trump’s second term. Pundits and provocateurs who dread demographic change have spotlighted the contradiction with his foreign policy.

Disillusionment among immigration restrictionists can be traced to late last year when Trump began illegally blowing up boats in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean, a performance of cartel warfare that was a prelude to his capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. (Maine Writer: By the way, where is that Venezuelan oil❓)

Trump endorsed a Honduran candidate whose party has been tied to cartels, protecting a start-up city there for tech billionaires. “Efforts to transform other societies end up remaking our own,” warned Mark Krikorian, an immigration restrictionist, in an article for Compact magazine, “Intervention Leads to Immigration.” Mr. Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that appeared to have influenced Trump’s first-term immigration policies. He cited examples such as the Vietnam War and years of U.S. interference in Central America that drove a million people to leave.

The anxiety from leaders in the anti-immigrant movement has received less attention than the outcry from Trump’s isolationist voters. But it could be more consequential because immigration is the president’s signature issue — the one he relies on to divide and conquer. The disillusionment reveals an extraordinary, if uneasy, window of possibility: Working-class white Americans who are anxious about immigration could awaken to the fact that their interests are aligned with those of people of color across the world who want to stay in their homelands. They share an enemy: corporate and political elites who extract, exploit and expel across borders.

There have been moments in American political history when working-class solidarity briefly cut across racial and national lines. There was the Rainbow Coalition, a class-based multiracial alliance that the Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton created in Chicago in 1969, the year he was assassinated. It included white Appalachian migrants and other white workers from the Young Patriot Organization, who renounced racism to unite with Black and Latino activists in opposition to shared economic oppression and who wore Confederate flag patches with Black power symbols.

In the late 1970s, labor organizers in Arizona split with the United Farm Workers union over its attacks on undocumented immigrants and established a more radical, transnational model of labor organizing that refused to distinguish between documented and undocumented farmworkers and built solidarity across the U.S.-Mexico border. “We are all subject to the same underlying disease: the inhumane and ethereal transnational corporation that has regard only for profit,” wrote union organizers in 1981.

People like Mr. Fuentes are too racist to embrace cross-border or multiracial organizing. But his declaration that immigration is a “dead issue” is a sign that Trump’s most powerful spell could be breaking. If working-class white Americans can be persuaded that their real enemies are the oligarchs and warmongers enriching themselves at everyone’s expense, not the migrants fleeing the chaos those oligarchs create, a different kind of politics could become possible. And Fuentes, like others on the right, is beginning to point the finger at the transnational tech billionaires behind Trump and Vice President JD Vance, like Peter Thiel. In fact, Fuentes often uses the term “globalist” to advance anti-semitic, racist and false propaganda about Jewish people controlling everything and replacing white populations with immigrants of color. In fact, transnational oligarchy benefits from race-based divisions that distract everyone from the oligarchs’ exploitation of all people. Americans all along the political spectrum are beginning to turn against parts of that oligarchy. In an era of extreme polarization, opposition to A.I. and protests against data centers are strongly bipartisan.

If anything can heal the rupturing body politic, it may be opposition to what the journalist Gil Durán details in his new book, “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.” He writes: “All around the world, Silicon Valley oligarchs are scheming to acquire land, resources and power. They see a world in decline and seek to profit by hastening its collapse — and remaking it in their own image.”

The Trump administration already revealed that the goal is not a strong American work force, but a forever exploitable one in service of transnational elites — which requires unregulated expansion of extractive technologies like artificial intelligence and locking immigrant laborers into a vulnerable state. Trump’s Labor Department has quietly restructured the H-2A guest worker program to make foreign farmworkers cheaper to hire, cutting hourly wages by up to $7 and allowing employers to count housing in their compensation. The United Farm Workers has sued, arguing the rule will depress wages for American farmworkers and push them out of the labor pool. Last week, a federal judge ruled that the changes were illegal, and ordered the Labor Department to redraft them.

Congress has also tried to expand this architecture of exploitation. 

A bipartisan bill would broaden H-2A eligibility to year-round employers currently excluded, like dairy farms. Other policies reveal the shift: Trump’s effort to revoke birthright citizenship would help create a hereditary underclass with fewer constitutional protections.

Trump’s immigration policies are not intended to eliminate immigrant labor; they are intended to strip that labor of bargaining power and rights. Trump’s foreign policy is perniciously symbiotic with that system. As he deports immigrants with jobs, with homes and with children who are American citizens, he is laying the foundation for the long-term displacement of newly marginalized people who will be more exploitable because they have no roots here.

What began as a push to expel and exclude dark-skinned immigrants from the United States has become something more sprawling and sinister: a transnational project of population control in service of elites. Call it transnational oligarchy — the strategic use of immigration policy and foreign interventions to manufacture and maintain an exploitable labor force. This is not compatible with white nationalism or any nationalism. It does not believe in borders. It believes in constraining the political and economic power of an ever-expanding category of undesirables.

“Various societies have tried sourcing cheap labor from non-functioning states,” wrote Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and one of his most powerful advisers, in February on X. “The West is the first to import failed-state labor with full political rights: welfare, voting, and citizenship for the migrants and their families. When citizenship is global, self-rule is impossible.” It was one of his most revealing posts to date; the main problem, according to Mr. Miller, isn’t the sourcing of cheap labor. It’s the extension of rights to that labor.

Why would Miller defend Trump’s machinery of cross-border displacement❓ Miller is arguably the most radical anti-immigrant ideologue in U.S. history, but he has also been passionately defending Trump’s destruction overseas. “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he told Jake Tapper of CNN in January.

As I documented in “Hatemonger,” my 2020, biography of Miller, he has long worked to strangle legal pathways into this country for nonwhite people. He is one of the main reasons federal agents are rounding up people of color with no criminal records, and it is his aggressive enforcement strategy that has led to anti-ICE protesters being shot in the streets. He is a longtime ally of Krikorian’s center, which influenced his views. For years, he has argued that mass migration hurts American workers, while benefiting corporate elites. Now his boss is embracing a foreign policy that is the fondest wish of those elites.

The administration’s war on immigrants is a Trojan horse for the eradication of equal protection under the law to create a permanent caste of laborers without rights.

Both Democratic and Republican leaders have pursued transnational oligarchy at the expense of immigrants and working-class Americans; it is not a one-sided evil. But Mr. Trump and Mr. Miller have mastered it in one of the most perverse acts of political gaslighting, convincing working-class Americans to see them as the opposite of wh“Mass migration is a wealth (and political power) transfer from the American working class to migrants and to corporations,” Miller said in a post on X/ last year, conflating immigrant rights and corporate profits, as he often does, when in fact the inverse is true: corporations increase profits by offering low wages. It’s the war on immigrant rights, which Miller has pursued with zeal, that harms working-class Americans and entrenches inequality.

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, he was organizing his Poor People’s Campaign and fighting for an economic bill of rights, which sought to amend the Constitution to establish a natural human right to be free from poverty and involuntary servitude. He wrote that it would help poor whites, whom he called “derivative” victims of slavery. “As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the Black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth,” he wrote. “It was free only to bargain from the depressed base imposed by slavery upon the whole labor market.”

Now, the subjugation of immigrants has taken the place of slavery in depressing the base of the labor market. Miller wants us to blame immigrants and those who advocate a pathway to citizenship — as if slavery were the fault of the enslaved and abolitionists.

It is time for a political movement that rebuilds economic dignity across borders — one that unites the white worker in Appalachia and the Indigenous land defender in Honduras, and exposes the war on immigrants for what it is: a war on labor here and across the world.at they are.

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.