Donald Trump and evil maga Republicans openly using NAZI symbolism to promote fascism: The GOP is Nazism 2026

How did the GOP become a haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich❓

An echo essay published in The Atlantic by Tom Nichols.

Over the past few months, during his (evil) ICE agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol (aka evil 💢ICE❗) chief Greg Bovino wore an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. 

Printed in Nazi font

His coat looked like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

Bovino as an evil ICE Nazi re-enactor

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. 

A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. 

Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Then, J. D. Vance (aka former Marine corporal- the same rank, by the way, as Adolf Hitler in World War One) shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party. (In December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”)

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. 

More Nazi symbolism at the Labor Department where a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face was hung from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich

documents. December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”

Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X/ account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man❓” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978, book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

The people pushing such trash are offended by the accusation that they are pantomiming Nazis. “Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome,” a DHS spokesperson told Politico. But when even Laura Loomer—conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter—says on social media that “the GOP has a Nazi problem,” then perhaps the GOP has a Nazi problem❗

As a former Republican, I’m aware that the American conservative movement has spent generations fighting off intrusions from the far right, including the John Birchers and the Ku Klux Klan. But I am still surprised and aggrieved by how quickly 21st-century Nazism has found a home in the party of Lincoln. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush repudiated the former Klan leader David Duke, who was running as a Republican to be Louisiana’s governor. Today, Trump and his party haven’t bothered to even pretend to be appalled by the degenerates gathering under the GOP aegis.

So how did a major American political party become a safe space for such fascist people❓

When I first joined the GOP, in 1979, the party around me did not seem hospitable to Nazis. 

In fact, a liberal Black Republican, Edward Brooke, had just finished two terms as our junior senator from Massachusetts; the liberal Republicans Lowell Weicker and John Chafee represented Connecticut and Rhode Island, respectively. In college, I worked in the Massachusetts state House for our hometown representative, a young and principled working-class Democrat (my GOP membership was not a disqualifier; imagine that). I got to know Republican legislators on Beacon Hill because they were close friends with my Democratic boss. Party affiliations were about political disagreements among Americans, not markers of antithetical worldviews.

I was, like many people then, a resolute ticket-splitter, voting often for local Democrats but always for Republican presidents, because I believed the national GOP was a moderate institution. Ronald Reagan, for example, disappointed the far right and his evangelical base by reducing nuclear weapons, leaving abortion rights largely untouched, and granting mass amnesty to undocumented immigrants (something I objected to at the time).

I first encountered the fringe elements of the conservative base in 1990, when I went to work in the U.S. Senate for John Heinz of Pennsylvania. I remember fielding an angry phone call from a constituent who grilled me about whether the senator was part of a globalist one-world-government conspiracy.

The country and the GOP were in the hands of Bush, the ultimate moderate, but extremists were making inroads to power. The populist demagogue Pat Buchanan, crusading against modernity and multiculturalism, challenged Bush in 1992 and garnered 23 percent of the Republican-primary vote. 

In turn, Bush (wrongly❗) gave him the stage at the Republican National Convention in Houston. Buchanan’s speech, which envisioned a “religious war” for the country, shocked many Americans.

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership. For Gingrich, (who later converted to Roman Catholicism.....believe it or not....) politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.

Gingrich was eventually driven from the speakership; Buchanan left the Republican Party to run under the Reform Party, and then faded from public life. But an example had been set of welcoming extremism (extreme ideology, extreme tactics) for the sake of winning.

Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. 

As both men stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.

Soon after McCain’s election loss to Obama, the Tea Party movement barreled into American politics. I was among those appalled by the Tea Partiers’ juvenile public behavior and anti-government nihilism; others believed they represented a new grassroots movement and the future of the party. In the end, their revolt against government bailouts soured into a giant yawp of anger at the first Black president. By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party❓ To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats, then bolted from the party because of Trump.

So, I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

Nixon and Reagan held racist views, as did many men of their generation. (Nixon was also an anti-Semite.) But, they did not govern as racists, and they certainly weren’t Nazis; neither was Gingrich, Buchanan, or any national Republican over the past half century. But years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. Stevens, when he left the party, wrote a book with a bitter title: It Was All a Lie. 

When I told Stevens how often people quote his title to argue that conservatism itself was a lie, he rolled his eyes. 🙄 “We conservatives were right about everything,” Stevens told me. “Especially about the importance of character.”

I asked the writer Geoffrey Kabaservice, who has chronicled the decline of Republican moderates, whether the fall of the GOP was preordained, and why conservatism, once a moralizing movement, became so vulnerable to figures without moral character.

“I don’t happen to believe that conservatism is one of those doctrines that is flawed from the get-go,” Kabaservice told me, “and certainly not in the American context, in which conservatism is a variation on core liberal principles.” In that sense, he said, Reaganism, the strongest vehicle of 20th-century American conservatism, didn’t lead directly to Trumpism—not least because Trump’s vulgar populism is “a repudiation of conservatism.”

But, Reagan’s dominance over the party may have indirectly set the stage for Trump. Kabaservice brought up the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, who created a balance-of-power system that worked only because it relied on Bismarck’s personal influence and political genius; it collapsed without him. Likewise, Kabaservice argued, Reagan enjoined his party to leave room in the tent for moderates and to avoid ideological litmus tests, but the GOP needed Reagan’s “personal magnetism” to keep his followers from spiraling into hyper-partisanship, or even political fratricide.

Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. 

Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried
Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership.

For Gingrich, politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.



Gingrich was eventually driven from the speakership; Buchanan left the Republican Party to run under the Reform Party, and then faded from public life. But an example had been set of welcoming extremism (extreme ideology, extreme tactics) for the sake of winning.

Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. As they stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.Soon after McCain’s electio loss to Obama, the Tea

Party movement barreled into American politics. I was among those appalled by the Tea Partiers’ juvenile public behavior and anti-government nihilism; others believed they represented a new grassroots movement and the future of the party. In the end, their revolt against government bailouts soured into a giant yawp of anger at the first Black president. By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party? To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats, then bolted from the party because of Trump. I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

Nixon and Reagan held racist views, as did many men of their generation. (Nixon was also an anti-Semite.) But they did not govern as racists, and they certainly weren’t Nazis; neither was Gingrich, Buchanan, or any national Republican over the past half century. But years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. Stevens, when he left the party, wrote a book with a bitter title: It Was All a Lie. When I told him how often people quote his title to argue that conservatism itself was a lie, he rolled his eyes. “We conservatives were right about everything,” Stevens told me. “Especially about the importance of character.”

I asked the writer Geoffrey Kabaservice, who has chronicled the decline of Republican moderates, whether the fall of the GOP was preordained, and why conservatism, once a moralizing movement, became so vulnerable to figures without moral character.

“I don’t happen to believe that conservatism is one of those doctrines that is flawed from the get-go,” Kabaservice told me, “and certainly not in the American context, in which conservatism is a variation on core liberal principles.” In that sense, he said, Reaganism, the strongest vehicle of 20th-century American conservatism, didn’t lead directly to Trumpism—not least because Trump’s vulgar populism is “a repudiation of conservatism.”

But, Reagan’s dominance of the party may have indirectly set the stage for Trump. Kabaservice brought up the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, who created a balance-of-power system that worked only because it relied on Bismarck’s personal influence and political genius; it collapsed without him. Likewise, Kabaservice argued, Reagan enjoined his party to leave room in the tent for moderates and to avoid ideological litmus tests, but the GOP needed Reagan’s “personal magnetism” to keep his followers from spiraling into hyper-partisanship, or even political fratricide.

Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. 

The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. 

And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.

What can Americans do in the face of moral rot in a major political party? The only short-term answers are shaming, shunning, and mockery—and punishment at the polls. Decent citizens must ostracize those among them who toy with Hitlerism. Americans—especially journalists—should resist becoming inured to fascist rhetoric. No one should rely on euphemisms about “extreme” comments or “fiery” speeches. Call it what it is: Nazi-like behavior.

When a Gen Z Republican focus group has 20-somethings talking about how Hitler “was a great leader,” even if “what he was going for was terrible,” something is amiss not only in the Republican Party but also in America’s homes, schools, and neighborhoods. Some of these trolls are merely pasting swastikas on their nihilism, but their ideological sincerity is irrelevant. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, his 1961 novel about a man posing as a Nazi: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”


Whatever their intentions, some Americans are expressing or abetting ancient hatreds, smirking at the mention of Hitler, and plastering public spaces with images that Allied soldiers once tore from the walls of destroyed German cities. Political leaders who encourage or tolerate such scoundrels should be driven from office.

Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But, their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. 

If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.The Republicans have a Nazi problem, yes. But this means that the United States also has a Nazi problem. The responsibility for defeating it in the 21st century falls, as it did in the 20th, to everyone—of any party or creed—who still believes in the American idea.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “That 1930s Feeling.” 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans creating a global calamity with the illegal Iran World War: Dangerous "Amateur Hour at the Pentagon"

Echo opinion letter publshed in TRIBLive: 

As if Donald Trump’s actions against health care, education and voting rights, his horrible programs and military orders weren’t bad enough, he now joins Israel in attacking Iran. This war is creating a global economic calamity that has never been seen before.

The Trump administration has no clue as to cause and effect. Soldiers are being killed, the markets are in a downward spiral. In my opinion, the speaker of the House is a puppet who does nothing to lead Congress to stop these terrible choices. 

(Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg who is also a former Navy intelligence officer calls Trump's incompetence "Amateur Hour at the Pentagon".)

We as a nation have lost our international identity. Trump has disrespected the nations that have been our greatest allies, especially the NATO countries. 

I don’t believe we will make it to Election Day. 

If we do it may be too late. #ImpeachTrumpNow

(Where is Senator Susan Collins❓)

From Leonard Mucci in Derry Township, Pennsylvania

Donald Trump and maga Republicans asking for 200Billion $ to fund the Iran war but America's health care system is imploding

An excellent heartfelt personal essay about access to health care and affordability, by Jenisha Watts published in The Atlantic.

In "The Impossible Predicament of the Uninsured" (April 2026), *The Atlantic* staff writer Jenisha Watts highlights the extreme risks of lacking health insurance through her aunt's emergency hospitalization for a burst aneurysm. Her personal story emphasizes how high costs force uninsured, often lower-income Americans, to delay care, ultimately leading to higher, unpayable, and life-threatening medical situations.

The Impossible Predicament of the Uninsured:  

My aunt couldn’t afford to go to the hospital. She ended up there anyway. By Jenisha Watts

The day after Thanksgiving, I got a voicemail. A woman identified herself as a doctor at the University of Louisville hospital: “I believe I may have one of your family members here.”

The message was hard to understand. Most of my family lives in Kentucky, so I didn’t know whom the doctor was referring to. I called the hospital, but kept getting put on hold. Then I tried my aunt—if someone was in trouble, she’d be the one to know. But, she didn’t answer.

A few hours later, her son got in touch with me. My aunt was the one in the hospital. She’d had an aneurysm on the right side of her brain, and it had burst. The drainage tube the doctors used to stop the bleeding kept slipping loose; after three tries, they finally got it to stick. Only then could they do surgery. My cousin Face-Timed me afterward, from the ICU. “Are you ready?” he asked. He angled the camera down to my aunt’s face, and I started sobbing like a sudden rainstorm.

A few days later, I got on a plane from Washington, D.C., to Kentucky and went straight to join my family at the hospital. 

We had always called my aunt “The Glamourina.” She wore feathered hats with sparkly shirts and experimented with different hairstyles: a butterscotch-blond cropped cut, an afro, a bob streaked with highlights. She paid for my first real manicure, when I was in high school. We wore matching striped shirts to the salon, and used an eyeliner pencil to draw fake moles above our lips, like Marilyn Monroe.

She is 58 now, and raised two kids as a single mother. She always treated me like one of her children, and I grew up to look more like her than like my own mom. When I’d talked with her the week before she ended up in the hospital, she’d asked me to play our favorite song, “I’m So Proud of You,” by Julie Anne Vargas. Now the top half of her head was shaved and staples ran in a ladder across it. IVs were taped to each arm, and a machine next to her bed was helping her breathe. She couldn’t speak. When she opened her eyes, they rolled.

Her older son was especially alarmed by how quickly she’d declined. He wanted the doctors to come into her room so they could explain what had happened. But one of our older relatives stopped him, saying that we couldn’t afford to make demands, let alone trouble, because “she don’t have a lick of health insurance.”

We knew that the hospital couldn’t deny her care, but we understood the tightrope you walk when you don’t have money. All she could afford to be was grateful.

We don’t know what caused my aunt’s aneurysm, but she’d had persistent headaches for months, and she’d been worried. Once, when she was driving, the left side of her body turned numb and her toes curled up. She pulled over but didn’t go to the hospital; she couldn’t afford it.

My aunt worked as a hair stylist at a salon for years. Most recently, she was the overnight caregiver for an elderly woman, but she had opted out of her employer-sponsored health insurance because she couldn’t afford the premium. 

Occasionally, she had coverage in the past, but it never guaranteed that she’d actually be able to afford health care. She called me once, defeated, because she was trying to fill a prescription at Walgreens and the pharmacy had flagged an issue with her insurance. She would need to pay out of pocket, and she didn’t have the $134.89. She was often frustrated by spending long spells on hold with insurance agents, and was overwhelmed by the complexity of the plans.

My aunt’s experience with the health-care system is familiar to many Americans. In a 2023 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly a quarter of adults said signing up for a plan was simply too confusing. Even those who have coverage may decide to delay or skip treatment because they can’t afford the out-of-pocket costs, resulting in emergency-room visits and hospitalizations that could have been prevented.

Some years, my aunt made so little money that she might have qualified for Medicaid, but not recently—the income cutoff, if you’re single in Kentucky, is $1,835 a month. Some years, she bought coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges, but eventually she decided it was too expensive.

Many more people are now making that same decision. In 2025, the Republican-controlled Congress voted to let Biden-era subsidies in the ACA, which had helped some 22 million people afford their coverage, expire. Within just two weeks of the cutoff, at the end of December, enrollment had dropped by 1 million people. According to one group’s estimate, families are paying $200, $300, or $1,000 more a month; many have seen their premiums double.

In January, 2026,  Donald Trump released his proposal for a “Great Healthcare Plan,” which suggests that savings from the former subsidies could be sent directly to “eligible” Americans. 

But, who would be eligible❓ The proposal makes no mention of the many people who don’t have coverage. Then, in February, the Trump administration released a list of 43 prescription drugs that Americans can buy for reduced prices. But some of these were already available at those prices or in generic forms, and they make up a tiny fraction of the drugs Americans need; the prescription my aunt couldn’t afford, for instance, is not listed.

Nothing about Trump’s pronouncements changes the fact that millions more Americans will soon be stuck where my aunt was: in the middle—sometimes insured, sometimes uninsured, but always too poor to get the care they need.

As I stared at my aunt in the ICU, I noticed that her eyebrows were freshly waxed, and her nails had bleach-white French tips. Only the week before, she’d texted me about getting her nails done. It was an indulgence she rarely allowed herself: “Woo this pedi feels good. I haven’t had one since last year.” When I rubbed Vaseline on her chapped feet, I discovered her ruby-red toenails.

She could not have known that the decision to finally splurge a little on herself would be a conversation starter with the nurses, who complimented her on her nails and eyebrows. Her grooming signaled to them that she was someone who took care of herself, someone who deserved their attention and respect.

I drove to her house later that week to meet her younger son. We’d planned to check on her bills—to see if we could find her bank PIN or account information to make sure that her finances stayed on track. I found notebooks coated with her handwriting, a list of numbers down each page that looked like an unsolved equation. These, I realized, were her monthly expenses, along with details such as the confirmation codes for bills she’d paid. Stuffed inside one notebook was a pawn-shop notice, announcing its full ownership over an item she’d traded in.

For years, not having enough money nibbled at my aunt’s health. 

She texted me about having severe pain in her back and breasts. She wrote that she had a “knot” in one breast—“I’m thinking just polyps.” She lost a lot of weight and said she was feeling depressed. I suggested reaching out to a psychiatrist to ask for antidepressants. She wrote back: “That cost. That’s why I need insurance.” 

She was tired of pretending to be okay. After paying for her mortgage, water bill, Wi‑Fi, car insurance, and other necessities each month, she’d usually be out of money. She was always transparent with me about her struggles, and sent photos of bills with disconnect notices: a letter from the energy company; an available checking balance of –$59.70; a past-due payment, with the amount owed in bold. Shutoffs have resumed. Make a $172.75 payment today to get your account back on track. She had small wins, such as finally paying off her car. But she still went back and forth to the payday-loan store.

As I sat next to her in the hospital, I couldn’t help but feel guilty. For years, I had been sending her money when she asked, but sometimes I didn’t. I would listen to her struggles and then go on with my life. I was grateful to be financially stable, but frustrated by being the financial rescuer for family members. I wanted to create boundaries, and to escape from the transactional, lopsided part of these relationships.

But I had not thought enough about how much she gave me—in every way she could. She posted about my accomplishments on Facebook no matter how small I considered them. She filled voids for me: self-esteem booster, cheerleader, second mother. In 2014, she used all the money she had to fly to New York to see me graduate from Columbia. She was the only member of my family there. When my name was called and I walked across the stage, she cried so much that someone had to hand her a tissue.

A few months ago, my son turned 4, and my aunt was determined to send him a gift. A manila envelope arrived at my apartment: She had mailed him five individually wrapped Hot Wheels cars and a Spider-Man birthday card. I recorded a video as my son stuffed his hand inside the envelope, pulling out each toy, saying, “Oh, wow. This is awesome.” That night, I sent the video to my aunt. She wrote back at 2 a.m.: “Up looking at videos over n over. He was so excited.” 

She was always trying to give to others, even though she never had enough for herself.

As individuals, and as a country, we tend to pay attention only when it’s too late. Americans who want to cut health-care spending don’t seem to understand that access to preventive care saves not just lives, but also money. Perhaps my aunt’s hospital stay could have been avoided if she’d been able to call a doctor and make an appointment, an option that so many of us take for granted. 

What is a life like my aunt’s worth in America❓ 😢Unfortunately, that determination has been made.

My aunt hasn’t sat up or spoken since the aneurysm, and no one knows if she will again. In January, she was transferred from the hospital to a nursing home. She’s supposed to go home soon, to be cared for by the family, who can’t possibly give her the round-the-clock care she needs. She’s not capable of worrying about health insurance at this point, but if she were, she wouldn’t have to: Now that she’s completely disabled, she qualifies for Medicaid.

Donald Trump hiding his visible health issues tries to conceal his chronic hand bruising. Hand bruising is a symptom of an underlying condition.

Donald Trump's aging hands assessment published in the New York Magazine Intelligencer by Margaret Hartman.

(Maine Writer:  As a registered nurse, my observation is that Donald Trump is taking an anticoagulant to prevent the risk of thrombophlebitis related to his swollen ankles circulatory diagnosis. Anticoagulant therapy causes easy bruising. If Donald Trump throws a clot he would become physically incapacitated.) 

Normally, a 79-year-old man having a bruise on his hand wouldn’t be much of a story. But that changes when the aging septuagenarian in question is Donald Trump.

Trump’s injury was first spotted weeks after the 2024, election, which he won in part by bullying Joe Biden for his decrepitude while pretending he himself possessed almost superhuman health and mental acuity. 

But, for months, the White House dismissed Donald Trump's bruising as one of those hand-shaking injuries you’re always hearing about. Then, when Trump’s terrible hand makeup and swollen ankles raised too many questions, the administration admitted he has a condition known as chronic venous insufficiency. Trump recently revealed he’s taking way too much aspirin, which can certainly lead to bruising.  (In other words, Donald Trump is self--medicating. Americans never hear from the White House physician except when scripted email messages are sent.)

For the past year, Donald Trump has had a persistent bruise on the back of his right hand. It initially came and went, but now the bruise is almost always visible on the president’s hand (though he often makes poor attempts to cover it with makeup).

White House press secretary (aka 3D-pringer Barbie) Karoline Leavitt’s explanation has been similarly unchanging. Since February, she’s given some version of this statement when asked about the bruise: “...Trump is a man of the people, and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other president in history … His commitment is unwavering, and he proves that every single day.”

Still, questions about Trump’s health, and his bizarrely terrible attempts to conceal his physical issues, have persisted. Here’s a guide, which we’ll keep updated, to everything we know about Trump’s health and how the White House is handling his medical issues.
What’s the latest news on Trump’s health❓

A weird rash has entered the chat. The red marks on the right side of Trump’s neck were visible throughout February 2026, and the rash looked pretty bad when the president made his first live remarks about the Iran war on March 2. New York’s Matt Stieb recapped the emergence of this new ailment:  From a quick dive into wire photos, the rash was first really visible, albeit less inflamed, in photos from February 18, when Trump hosted a Black History Month event at the White House. There are also what appear to be signs of irritation in the same spot as far back as February 13, but not much before that. 

The rash looked worse on February 20, when Trump held a press conference to complain about the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down his tariffs. At the State of the Union, it looked even more red. You could also see it on Friday at Trump’s rally in Texas. But by the Medal of Honor ceremony held at the White House on [March 2], it was peeking farther out from his collar and looking way more irritated: Dr. Sean Barbabella, the White House physician explained that the president is “using a very common cream” as a “preventative treatment.”

How long has Trump had the hand bruise❓

It’s been spotted on and off since at least the spring of 2024.

The bruise first drew widespread attention on February 24, 2025, when Trump hosted French president Emmanuel Macron at the White House. A Getty photographer zoomed in on Trump’s hand and noted in the caption that it looked as though he’d put makeup on his hand to cover a bruise.

Since the summer of 2025, the bruise has appeared frequently on the president’s hand, though he usually tries to conceal it.

What did Trump initially say about the hand bruise❓

Though this largely went unnoticed at the time, then-candidate Trump showed off his a hand bruise in a March 2024, Washington Examiner profile. He presented the injury as the result of overly vigorous handshaking:

At the end of his remarks, Trump walked along a rope line on his way out of the room. He shook hand after hand, but rather than a simple handshake, some excited admirers would grasp his hand so heartily, and squeeze so hard, that Trump had to pull back to move on to the next person. Near the end of the line, one woman seized Trump’s hand so vigorously that a Secret Service agent had to deliver a sort of mini karate chop — nothing violent, just a firm tap — to break up the one-sided embrace.

As we walked back to the terrace to resume dinner, I asked Trump, “Weren’t you once famously a germaphobe❓”

“In this business, you just have to get over it,” he said. He held out his right hand and showed that the back was covered by a large, greenish bruise. There were also marks left by female admirers with carefully manicured nails. It happened all the time, he said.

Trump offered the same explanation when asked about the mark on his hand in his Time “Person of the Year” interview, which was conducted in late November 2024:

Sitting under bright lights for a 30-minute photo session ahead of a 65-minute interview, he’s asked to explain the bruising on his right hand. “It’s from shaking hands with thousands of people,” he says.
How did the White House explain Trump’s hand bruise❓

For months, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed Trump, repeatedly claiming it was a totally normal — nay, heroic — hand-shaking injury. 

For example, he’s what she told Fox (Fake❗)News Digital after the early 2025, Macron meeting:  "Donald Trump is a man of the people, and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other president in history … His commitment is unwavering, and he proves that every single day."💩💩💩❗

Is Trump’s bruise always in the same place❓

The large bruise and noticeable makeup splotches are almost always on the back of Trump’s right hand.

However, a discoloration on the back of Trump’s left hand was briefly visible in a video of the Donald Trump golfing with Roger Clemens on August 23, 2025, which posted by the Major League Baseball player’s son, Kacy.

Then, a left-hand bruise made a brief reappearance in January 2026. Trump's *left* hand -- not the one that is usually disfigured -- now has a large bruise and is discolored.

The White House told New York’s Ben Terris that this was caused by him hitting it against a table corner.

How long has Trump been putting makeup on his hand❓

It’s impossible to say. If he or his handlers did a good job applying the makeup, we would have no way of knowing.

Trump was first accused of using hand makeup after the February 2025 Macron meeting, though the bruising remained very visible. By early summer 2025, he regularly showed up to public events with blotches of unblended makeup on the back of his hand. A C-SPAN cameraman zoomed in on the odd mark while Trump talked to reporters outside the White House on July 15, 2025.

Although the White House has professional makeup artists at its disposal, Trump kept appearing with poorly applied concealer. 

Is Trump still putting makeup on the hand bruise❓

For a moment, it seemed like he’d finally given up on his concealer routine. A large dark bruise on the back of Trump’s right hand was visible throughout the day on August 25, 2025.

Nevertheless, the makeup returned at Trump’s “look, I’m still alive” press conference on September 2, 2025. It was a bit harder to spot, so it appeared Trump was getting closer to finding the right shade of concealer. But, the unblended look came back with a vengeance by the time Trump visited the U.K. on September 17, 2025.

And the bruise was spotted peeking through a heavy layer of makeup during Trump’s visit with Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin, on March 17, 2026.

What has Trump said about the makeup❓

He acknowledged his hand beauty routine for the first time in January 2026, telling the Wall Street Journal that he puts makeup on his hands after he gets “whacked again by someone.”

“I have makeup that’s, you know, easy to put on, takes about 10 seconds,” he said.

How else is Trump concealing the hand bruise❓

Trump added bandages to his bruise cover-up routine in early December 2025. Here’s a shot from his sleepy December 2 Cabinet meeting: 

Trump also seems to be hiding his hands behind objects, as the Daily Beast noted on September 5. Trump placed his hands behind a strategically placed “Gulf of America” hat. Last week, official photographs of Trump’s meeting with the South Korean president were cropped so as not to include his cankles.

Amid questions over his health relating to his bruised hands and swollen ankles, the White House has seemingly come up with a range of ways to hide his afflictions from view.  
What’s going on with Trump’s ankles❓

Trump showed up for the FIFA Club World Cup Final in New Jersey on July 13, 2025 with noticeably swollen ankles.

This, combined with another blotchy hand-makeup sighting, sparked a a new round of wild speculation about Trump’s health.

In response, the White House finally revealed that the president had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency.

What happened with those mysterious red marks on Trump’s hand❓

The marks came and went several months before the first hand bruise sighting. On January 17, 2024, Trump showed up to E. Jean Carroll’s second defamation trial with bright red spots on his right hand. Hours of wild online theorizing ensued. But when Trump appeared at a rally that night, the blister-like marks were no longer visible.

When asked about the splotches two weeks later, Trump said, “maybe it’s AI.”

How did Trump reveal his chronic-venous-insufficiency diagnosis❓

After repeating the same dubious claims about the president’s hand-shaking injuries for months, Team Trump uncharacteristically gave in and offered an actual health update at a June 17, 2025 press conference.

“I know that many in the media have been speculating about bruising on the president’s hand and also swelling in the president’s legs,” said Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. “So in the effort of transparency, the president wanted me to share a note from his physician with all of you today.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans do not see oil revenues after illegal attack on Venezuela and no "regime change" either!

A More Pliant Chavista published in the New York Review of Books by  Alma Guillermoprieto: Donald Trump’s decision to support Delcy Rodríguez as Venezuela’s new leader makes clear that oil, not democracy, is his main concern.

This essay by Alma Guillermoprieto describes, in easy to understand prose, what happened when Donald Trump made the illegal decision to kidnap the Venezuelan dictator president Nicolás Maduro. 

Absract: Alma Guillermoprieto's article "A More Pliant Chavista" in the February 12, 2026 issue of The New York Review of Books explores the political landscape of Venezuela, focusing on the U.S. government's oil-driven support for Delcy Rodríguez as a new leader. The piece highlights the shifting alliances in the region, examining how power dynamics evolve from the Chávez era.

History sometimes repeats itself out of sheer malice. 

For example, in 1898, the United States stepped in to help Cuba in its long struggle for independence from Spain, and won. Cubans were grateful but not yet free. American troops were in control of the island, and the US refused to remove them until Cuba accepted eight conditions presented to Congress in 1901, by Senator Orville Platt. The most important provisions of what became known as the Platt Amendment were that Cuba was required to lease land indefinitely to the US for naval stations (thus Guantánamo), that it could not make treaties with other nations, and that to preserve Cuban independence or maintain a stable government, the US retained the right to intervene on the island militarily, which it did four times before the humiliating provisions (but not the lease on Guantánamo) were repealed in 1934. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—the child of Cuban émigrés—must know the Platt Amendment well: the text was burned into every Cuban’s heart, fomented Cubans’ fervent nationalist sentiment, and for decades contributed to the willingness of many of them on the island to put up with Fidel Castro, the great defier of the United States.

Until last year, those provisions were the baldest formulation of America’s imperialist ambitions, but Donald Trump has refashioned and extended the terms under which subject countries can expect to live. Moments before 2:00 AM on the third day of the New Year, explosions and the roar of aircraft were heard over Caracas. The US, claiming the right to depose at will the leader of an independent nation, captured the de facto president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros, and his wife, Cilia Flores, and in doing so shredded the principle that makes peaceful international coexistence possible. It was still January 3, when the couple was tran

A buffoonish man to begin with, Maduro was perp-walked wearing something hat-like on his head that Goofy might have loved. Reporters who gathered in haste at Mar-a-Lago hardly knew how to formulate their questions about an act of war unauthorized by Congress that amounted to a kidnapping. (The administration called it “an extraction.”) The whole thing was grotesque and stupid and horrifying in equal measure, and gaspingly unbelievable, until one remembered what the Platt Amendment revealed about America’s sense of itself.

For weeks we had been watching as the US assembled the largest display of naval and air power in decades around the sunny islands of the Caribbean, with the intention, one foolishly thought, of sticking around for a bit, playing superpower at the expense of American taxpayers, and cowing Maduro into resigning. But no, the Trump administration was both dead serious and reckless. The proof was Maduro in his ridiculous headgear.

María Corina Machado, the stubborn leader of the Venezuelan conservative opposition and 2025, Nobel Peace Prize winner, contributed to the disaster. In the months before the July 2024 presidential elections, she was polling so strongly that the Venezuelan government thought it prudent to ban her candidacy. Never one to give up, Machado appointed the aging politician Edmundo González to run in her place. According to virtually all qualified observers, on election day he won easily over Maduro, former president Hugo Chávez’s appointed successor, who had been in power since 2013, and who proclaimed himself the winner.

This was openly fraudulent but not surprising, and it seems to have reinforced Machado’s long-held belief that a bloodless transition to democracy was not feasible. In the first days of the second Trump administration she spoke with Rubio, an old acquaintance who was the brand-new secretary of state. Rubio is a foreign policy wonk and an old-style anticommunist with a special hatred for the collapsing socialist regime in Cuba and for Venezuela, Cuba’s longtime ally and provider of fuel. Maduro would never allow fair elections, Machado insisted; he was an illegitimate president, he was ruining Venezuela, and he should be kicked out—by force, if necessary. After the election she had prudently gone into hiding, but if she were president, she said in online interviews and meetings, she would open the country to foreign investment and especially to foreign oil companies, most of which had been expelled by Chávez in 2007.

Her argument coincided with the thinking of the new Trump administration, which in its previous incarnation had appeared to care little for Venezuela or adventures abroad. In February 2025, shortly after Rubio’s meeting with Machado, in what no longer seems like an unrelated event, the US designated eight Latin American drug cartels—three of them with members operating in Venezuela—as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. 

In August, the US military parked three guided-missile destroyers just off the Venezuelan coast and soon added assault ships, an aircraft carrier, thousands of troops, and large and small planes. In September the Department of Defense was renamed the Department of War, three days after eleven people—name and nationality unknown—were killed in their motorboat in the Caribbean by a US air strike. More than a hundred others were sadly killed since then.

Machado approved these actions. She called the administration’s strategy “absolutely correct” and said that “Maduro started this war, and Donald Trump is ending it.” This was after she received the Nobel Peace Prize and gushed that he was the one who really deserved it. (Rubio and seven other Republican lawmakers had actually promoted her nomination.) But, Trump, who inexplicably thought he was in the running for the Nobel, was not amused: the administration’s communications director, Steven Cheung, regretted on social media that the Nobel Committee had put “politics over peace” in failing to give him the prize. 

On January 3, during an eerie morning press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump made it clear that neither Machado nor González would be taking power: “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”

To give Machado credit, she fought Chávez and his designated successor from the start, and even if it meant going into hiding she never left her country for Miami or Madrid, unlike so many of her light-skinned, well-off supporters who called Chávez “monkey.” (In turn, he took grinning pleasure in describing himself as un poco indio, un poco negro.) 

Machado, the daughter of an industrialist, could have had an easy life, but she chose instead to shout herself hoarse at endless protest marches and to live with intimidation and threats for more than twenty years, sensing that Chávez, the left-wing populist who was first elected president in 1998, did not want just a one- or two-term presidency and would ruin Venezuela. She was brave, but it was foolish to expect that by calling for the invasion of her own country she would earn the invader’s gratitude.

“They stole our oil,” Trump told reporters that day. Perhaps his most entrenched belief is that everything he wants—Greenland, the Nobel Prize, a woman—belongs to him, even if it is deep underground in a nation some thousand miles away. A gripping moment came when Trump made it clear that the invasion of a nonbellicose country had not much to do with human rights or freedom or anything else with no monetary value.

Would he see to it that the Maduro regime’s political prisoners were freed? “We’re going to take back the oil,” he said. “They stole our assets like we were babies.” Oil was always at the forefront. “We’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be.” “We’ll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries.” Members of his administration listed other riches Venezuela could provide: diamonds, rare earths, gold. But those diamonds and rare earths are found in hard-to-reach, jungle-bound areas virtually ruled by the continent’s oldest guerrilla group, the Colombia-based Ejército de Liberación Nacional, together with assorted other gangs.

How about democracy and free elections❓ “We’re going to run the country,” Trump answered blandly. Run the country, as in an occupying force❓ But who was in charge there now❓ It transpired that the person the United States had chosen to tolerate or support as the new president of Venezuela—“I understand she was just sworn in,” Trump noted casually—was Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez. Really❓ But then…wait❗ Just one more question❓ If Maduro was about to be replaced by the politician closest to him, who was an equally hard-line and corrupt Chavista, then why had all the corpses and terror and fighter jets and hoopla involved in extracting him even been necessary❓

A partial answer is that the Trump team doesn’t care who the ruler of Venezuela is right now as long as she or he keeps everyone quiet and provides access to the oil, and their view so far is that Rodríguez appears to fit the bill. When he was dying of cancer, Chávez chose Maduro—his amiable vice-president and a devotee of the guru Sathya Sai Baba—as his successor. Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader and not, by all accounts, a brilliant man, was soon floundering as the markets and agriculture collapsed, food disappeared from grocery shelves, inflation spiked so high it made people weep, and the oil industry that Chávez had run into the ground simply refused to start up again. Some eight million people—nearly a quarter of the population—left the country, many on foot and with little more than the clothes on their backs.

To stay in power, Maduro relied on the huge network of grassroots organizations that Chávez left behind, systematic repression—a network of spies embedded in those organizations came in handy—and a web of corruption and influence that tied every enterprise, government agency, and illegal source of income back to him. He distributed corruption like largesse wherever there was money to be made. Still, throughout the years, he remained faithful to the legacy of Chávez, the man who gave him his destiny.



The Rodríguez siblings, Jorge and Delcy, are not typical I-come-from-the-pueblo Chavistas. Their father was a member of a militant group that kidnapped an American businessman in 1976. He died while Jorge and Delcy were children, after being tortured in prison, and they were old enough to remember. They became talented professionals (he’s a psychiatrist, she’s a lawyer); she learned French and English, acquired a taste for fine clothes and travel, and is cosmopolitan but also radical. Both belong to what Venezuelans call the Caviar Left. Delcy has been, among other things, the minister of foreign affairs, the head of the intelligence services, and the president of the Constituent National Assembly. Jorge now runs the National Assembly and knows how to talk to foreigners, notably Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell, with whom he negotiated all last year about how Venezuela could avoid invasion.

Maduro appointed Delcy as his vice-president in the 2018 elections and put her in charge of the state oil industry. At once she began to reorder its finances, opened Venezuela to the free market, and indicated that the country would not be averse to some foreign investment in the oil industry. It could be that she is a Chavista though not a socialist, but Maduro kept her close because he saw that she was producing results. The Trump team noticed too. Apparently, while Jorge was talking to Grenell, she was talking to Rubio.

In an interview with The New York Times, Donald Trump said they talk constantly. Do they talk about whether she really is in power or if that’s just a façade❓ Maybe their chats are about the 30 to 50 million barrels of oil that Trump says Venezuela has promised to “give” the US. Or maybe Rubio is trying to figure out, like Venezuelans everywhere and all the rest of us, who Delcy Rodríguez really is, because on one day she will “extend an invitation to the US government to work together on a cooperative agenda” and on another she will claim that drug trafficking and human rights “were an excuse” for the US intervention, “because the real motive is Venezuelan oil.” Rumors are everywhere that Rodríguez, the daughter of a radical socialist who refused to bend under torture, a woman who is known for getting her way and trying to barge into meetings she has explicitly been disinvited from, has signed a two-year Platt-like agreement to let the United States take over Venezuela’s oil industry while she runs the country’s day-to-day business with a bureaucracy and security apparatus that will be left mostly untouched. If so, she can hardly still be thinking of herself as a Chavista at all, for Chávez was nothing if not antiyanqui.

Who knows how long she will last or where her real loyalties lie. Who knows what sector of the armed forces or which generals are willing to support her in the coming months or whether the hundreds of political prisoners will be freed or their numbers multiplied. Who can even tell what Chavismo is at this point, other than some two million individuals linked by state jobs and self-interest. It is possible to read news sites and search the Internet for hours without understanding what happened on January 3.

Trump’s long-term plan for Venezuela has yet to be formulated. He has repeated that the US will be in charge of the country for at least the near future, or “much longer” than a year, he said in the Times interview. But Trump is supposed to leave office in three years. The longer the US is involved in the country, the harder it will be to disengage. Who will have to face at last the chants of “US out of Venezuela”❓

January 3, marked the end of Soviet socialist–style governance, not only in Venezuela but in Nicaragua and Cuba, too; the end of US efforts to be a good neighbor; the end of the ability of democratically elected presidents throughout the hemisphere to trust that they can govern freely. An entire world order is in question, but there is nothing to fill the void, not even a realistic plan to bring back the Venezuelan oil industry. Again: What was it all for❓

—January 15, 2026

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must face the truth. Donald Trump has a list of impeachable offenses Senator Susan Collins alert!

Trump will be impeached in 2027.  Philadelphia Inquirer opinion, by columnist Will Bunch.

(BTW, where is Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins❓)

War❗ Good God, y’all. Since my music brain stopped growing around age 11, Edwin Starr’s “War,” a No. 1 hit from the fall of 1970, always gets stuck in my head every time the United States starts dropping bombs on yet another foreign land, and the tune usually stays there for a long time. 

Meanwhile, there’s not much new to say about Donald Trump’s folly in the Persian Gulf. The bombs keep coming down. Gas prices keep going up. And what is it good for❓ Absolutely nothing.

A political bombshell fell over the weekend. You just didn’t hear it, thanks to all the real bombshells that fell across the Persian Gulf and the Middle East as Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of choice against Iran slogged into its third week.

It had to do with one of the 1,700 pardons or commutations that Donald Trump has issued since he returned to office 14 months ago — including just about everyone involved in the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 but also a rogue’s gallery of ex-GOP officials, crypto scammers, and politically connected folks making massive donations.

Thanks to federal prosecutors, the dark underbelly of the Trump pardon machine was unexpectedly revealed in a court case that, the New York Times reported, appears to be related to a nursing home mogul named Joseph Schwartz. He pleaded guilty in 2024, to federal charges around failing to pay 💲40 million in payroll and Social Security taxes and was sentenced to three years. But, Schwartz only served about three months, after Trump abruptly issued the millionaire a pardon last November.

The Times reported that Schwartz hired a conservative lawyer and friend of Donald Trump Jr. named Josh Nass as a “pardon broker,” an increasingly lucrative business under Trump Sr.’s lax interpretation of his clemency responsibilities. Records show that Schwartz paid Nass 💲100,000, but — according to the Times account — the lawyer apparently believed he was owed a lot more.

According to a federal indictment, Nass hired a Russian-speaking convicted felon to collect another 💲500,000 from his client, telling his alleged goon to “do anything and everything” to get the money. Prosecutors in Brooklyn have now charged Nass with extortion in the matter.

What did the president, and his aides and allies, know about Nass’s pursuit of a pardon payday, and when did they know it❓ 

We don’t know, nor do we know the facts behind the October pardon of Binance cryptocurrency founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who does substantial crypto business with the Trump family, or auto billionaire Trevor Milton, also pardoned last year after donating 💲900,000 to pro-Trump groups, or Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive whose mom gave 💲1 million to a pro-Trump super-PAC and 12 days later ... you guessed it, got a pardon.

Thanks to federal prosecutors, the dark underbelly of the Trump pardon machine was unexpectedly revealed in a court case that, the New York Times reported, appears to be related to a nursing home mogul named Joseph Schwartz. He pleaded guilty in 2024, to federal charges around failing to pay 💲40 million in payroll and Social Security taxes and was sentenced to three years. But Schwartz only served about three months, after Trump abruptly issued the millionaire a pardon last November.

What did the president, and his aides and allies, know about Nass’s pursuit of a pardon payday, and when did they know it❓ We don’t know, nor do we know the facts behind the October pardon of Binance cryptocurrency founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who does substantial crypto business with the Trump family, or auto billionaire Trevor Milton, also pardoned last year after donating 💲900,000 to pro-Trump groups, or Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive whose mom gave 💲1 million to a pro-Trump super-PAC and 12 days later ... you guessed it, got a pardon.

There’s a lot more like this, but you get the point.

Trump’s dodgy pardon practices, with millions of dollars changing greasy palms, deserve a major, Watergate-style investigation. That’s not going to happen — not in 2026, anyway. One Brooklyn blip doesn’t change the reality that Trump’s Justice Department and its lapdog attorney general, Pam Bondi, mainly only do white-collar probes of Trump’s perceived enemies. The Republicans who control both houses of Congress would rather wield their subpoena powers against Hillary Clinton.

But it’s looking more and more likely that a big part of this equation is going to change in January. Nothing is a lock in American politics — sorry, Polymarket bettors — but Democrats have a healthy lead in the polls ahead of this fall’s midterm election, have flipped seat after seat since 2024, and are posting big early turnout numbers.

With Trump’s popularity falling with every uptick of the gas pump, November is looking now like a wave election for Democrats who only need a couple more seat flips to regain the House majority. The party’s new committee chairs will find themselves with power to investigate whatever suspected misdeeds of MAGA World they want to, And — as we saw twice during Trump’s first term — it only takes a simple majority vote to impeach a president.

As Trump himself is well aware. “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be — I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” POTUS 47 told House Republicans at a gathering in January, Well, there actually are reasons.

It’s kind of the opposite of what happened in 2023 when the GOP retook the House with a burning zeal to impeach Joe Biden but didn’t really have anything to charge him with. With Trump, it’s more than a matter of, where does one start? For example:

• The pardon mess, as described above. Trump’s outrageous abuse of his clemency pen has proved America’s founders made a big mistake in granting such absolute power to just one man. Congressional hearings can and should spur pardon reform, but could also expose evidence that could be used in a Trump impeachment case.

• Cryptogate. Presidents used to put their assets in a blind trust, as Jimmy Carter famously did with his peanut farm. Trump, on the other hand, keeps doing deals and has seen his net worth roughly triple to more than $6 billion in just the first year of his second term. There are many tentacles to what I called Cryptogate with this handy guide I published last spring. Trump’s pump-and-dump meme coin launched on inauguration weekend seems a high crime unto itself.

• War crimes. The war in Iran is illegal,❗. The president did not seek congressional approval to start dropping bombs up and down the Persian Gulf as required by both the U.S. Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Act. It’s also an illegal, aggressive war under international law. Ditto his regime-change assault on Venezuela, which killed more than 100 people. Ditto his regime’s unending lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which have no legal basis. Congress can reassert its authority by impeaching Trump.

• Abuse of power in the justice system. The flip side of Trump’s pardons has been the unprecedented attempt to use the Justice Department to go after the president’s perceived enemies, from former FBI chief James Comey to Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. These investigations, directly urged on by Trump in Truth Social posts, have repeatedly failed to pass muster with judges or grand juries, but that doesn’t erase the stain of such clearly wrongful prosecutions.

This list doesn’t even cover some of the more morally repugnant aspects of the Trump regime, such as the brutal and too often deadly mass deportation program and the push to build inhumane warehouse detention centers. Nor does it anticipate future surprises, like the Ukraine phone calls that sparked Trump’s first impeachment in late 2019.

It also doesn’t include the political calculation facing House Democrats. Baring a dramatic change in the zeitgeist, there still won’t be the 67 Senate votes needed to remove Trump from office — a likely replay of his first two impeachments. 

Some will argue that impeachment would be a distraction or even a time waster, preventing Congress from tackling meat-and-potatoes legislation.

That’s not the point. Arguably the biggest task facing the 120th Congress will be simply proving that the United States is still governed by the rule of law. Nothing is more central to that than reestablishing that high crimes and misdemeanors against the Constitution have consequences — including the stain of impeachment.

Most importantly, impeachment hearings are the vehicle to air Trump’s wrongdoing before the American people — much as it was during his first term. 

A national denunciation of a president’s abuse of power — even if it doesn’t end Trump’s presidency — is the first step toward making sure it never happens again.