Donald Trump is a bitter evil old man who has no respect for creative arts. His attacks on the Kennedy Center are intentionally criminal

Barbra Streisand Slams Trump’s “Unchecked Ego” Amid His Kennedy Center Demolition Threats

Echo report published in The Hollywood Reporter by Carly Thomas

“You can easily imagine my indignation at seeing this revered institution become the subject of such a bitter struggle over one man’s name and unchecked ego,” she wrote in a lengthy statement.

Barbra Streisand is criticizing Donald Trump over his controversial mishandling and abuse of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

The EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) award winner released a statement on her official website Thursday, a day after an image that photojournalists captured through the windows of Air Force One showed Trump examining a poster board that appeared to display the words: “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.”

“In 2008, I was deeply honored to be included in the 31st annual class of Kennedy Center Honorees. For me, and for so many artists, that honor represented something larger than a career recognition. It represented a belief in the importance of art to the life of a democracy,” Streisand wrote. “That is why what is happening to the Kennedy Center is so galling and painful to witness.”

Her comments came as a district judge in Washington instructed the Kennedy Center on Thursday to provide at least 30 days’ notice before carrying out any significant changes to its renovation or construction plan, “including but not limited to any ‘demolition’ of the center’s main building,” The New York Times reported.

The Kennedy Center has been at the center of a legal battle as Trump has slammed a court decision to block his name, two times now, from being added to the building’s exterior. On Wednesday, the president told reporters that the arts institution may be “ripped down” if his name does not appear on the building, CNN reported.

Streisand continued, “When Donald Trump attempted to put his name alongside the late President Kennedy’s on the building’s entrance, the move was met with widespread opposition from artists and much of the public. A federal judge subsequently ruled that the Kennedy Center’s name could not be changed without an act of Congress, and Trump’s name was removed from the building’s façade.

“Yet the fight continued. After his name was removed, a humiliated Trump ordered a large tarp placed over the façade, where it remains today. The Trump-aligned board then relentlessly lobbied again to add his name, prompting another federal ruling that blocked their effort,” she said. “And now, a thoroughly defeated Trump has announced that the Kennedy Center is being closed for what the completely stacked board describes as a major renovation. 

Oddly, when Trump’s name was still on the building, there was no discussion of closing it!

“You can easily imagine my indignation at seeing this revered institution become the subject of such a bitter struggle over one man’s name and unchecked ego,” Streisand added in her statement, which also included a photo of her and John F. Kennedy in 1963, as well as an image of her and Morgan Freeman at the 31st annual Kennedy Center Honors in 2008.

Read Streisand’s full statement:  In 1964, in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s shocking assassination, Congress passed legislation designating the National Cultural Center as a living memorial to him.

The Kennedy family and other American leaders wanted a meaningful way to preserve his legacy. Re-naming the Cultural Center in JFK’s honor was a fitting choice, because he was a true champion of the arts.

Since then, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has stood as one of America’s great cultural venues. Many of the world’s most accomplished actors, musicians, singers and dancers have graced its stages.

In 2008, I was deeply honored to be included in the 31st annual class of Kennedy Center Honorees. For me, and for so many artists, that honor represented something larger than a career recognition. It represented a belief in the importance of art to the life of a democracy.

That is why what is happening to the Kennedy Center is so galling and painful to witness.

When Donald Trump attempted to put his name alongside the late President Kennedy’s on the building’s entrance, the move was met with widespread opposition from artists and much of the public.

A federal judge subsequently ruled that the Kennedy Center’s name could not be changed without an act of Congress, and Trump’s name was removed from the building’s façade.

Yet the fight continued. After his name was removed, a humiliated Trump ordered a large tarp placed over the façade, where it remains today. The Trump-aligned board then relentlessly lobbied again to add his name, prompting another federal ruling that blocked their effort.

And now, a thoroughly defeated Trump has announced that the Kennedy Center is being closed for what the completely stacked board describes as a major renovation. Oddly, when Trump’s name was still on the building, there was no discussion of closing it!

You can easily imagine my indignation at seeing this revered institution become the subject of such a bitter struggle over one man’s name and unchecked ego.

It is difficult not to think about what President Kennedy himself would have envisioned for the Center: not a monument frozen in time, but a living place where artists could challenge, inspire, provoke, and bring Americans together through the transformative power of the arts.

The Kennedy Center was meant to pay tribute to a beloved president, and to advance his philosophy that artistic achievement was proof of a free society. He believed that when the creative impulse cannot flourish freely, a society loses its vitality.

Yet another reason why it is so important that Americans exercise their right to vote in the upcoming midterm elections❗

Donald Trump and maga Republicans continue January 6th treason with threats to sabotage the 2026 mid term elections

Every one of America’s 39,000 full-time journalists should be using their voice and platform to report on the possibility that this year’s elections could be stolen, subverted, or canceled by Donald Trump and his allies.

January 6th insurrectionists - treason❗

New York Magazine Intelligencer by Errol Lewis

It’s a mistake to treat November 3 as a normal contest between Republicans and Democrats when powerful forces are pursuing a much darker outcome. And nobody should rule out the use of extraordinary measures after the violent January 6, attack on the Capitol, which was intended to halt the certification of an election Trump clearly lost.

Trump has claimed for years that “elections are unfair and has been working to undermine our election system,” Michael Waldman, president of the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, recently told me. “We should never lose track of how extraordinary that is, to have the federal government and the president of the United States trying to undermine confidence in elections. The more noise, the more confusion, the more people think maybe I can’t vote because of this or that, the easier it might be, not just to keep people from voting, but to cast doubt on the results.”

Earlier this month, the New York Times editorial board captured this ominous moment in a blunt and welcome piece: “Trump Is Sabotaging the Midterms. The Supreme Court Must Stop Him.” 

In the editorial, it sounded the alarm over Trump’s executive order, issued in March, that would have required all states to submit their voter-registration rolls to the U.S. Postal Service, which would then attach a barcode to each voter’s information and make decisions about whether they were eligible to get an absentee or mail-in ballot. It was a brazen flouting of the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which specifies that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

“The country has built a system in which Americans can have confidence,” the Times board wrote. “Trump is trying to wreck it. The Supreme Court should protect it.” The high court appears to have agreed, striking down Trump’s order in a terse three-sentence opinion this week.

But a serious threat remains: As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan detailed in their best-selling book, Regime Change, top Trump officials have discussed scenarios in which widespread riots, protests, or other national disorder — provoked by ICE or other federal agencies — might provide an excuse to invoke the rarely used Insurrection Act, which allows for federal troops to be deployed in American communities. (The law was last invoked in 1992, in the wake of rioting in Los Angeles after the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King.)

“After January 6, 2021, you can’t rule anything out. And yes, there is a desire to use the Insurrection Act,” Haberman told me. “At this point, the Supreme Court has said that Trump’s National Guard deployments were unlawful to states that did not want it. That really only leaves them with active-duty troops to send in, with actual federal military, if they were going to do it. They’ve made no secret about how they’re trying to get control of voter rolls.”

In a possible dress rehearsal for post-midterms turmoil, the FBI seized 660 boxes of voting records in May from Fulton County in Georgia, where Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that voter fraud caused his loss of the state in the 2020 election. Why seize the records? “We don’t know what we don’t know. I am deeply concerned about interference,” Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta’s mayor and the Democratic candidate for governor, told NBC’s Blayne Alexander in August. “There’s been a constant erosion of access to the right to vote, from the removal of ballot boxes in Georgia to reducing the number of days that we can really vote in this state. So it’s been this gradual chipping away at the foundation of election integrity.”

We don’t know exactly what and where a possible attack on voting will take place. When asked by a member of Congress if the military is planning to mobilize around Election Day, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, gave a less than reassuring answer: “I have neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order concerning the role of the Joint Force in the upcoming November 2026 midterm elections,” he replied.

This week, at a contentious Senate hearing, FBI director Kash Patel would not rule out deploying FBI agents at polling sites. “Do you pledge that you will not in any way interfere in the will of the American people when they go to the polls in November❓” asked Senator Peter Welch of Vermont. “I pledge unequivocally that I will not participate in your charade of lies,” Patel replied.

The good news is that a determined, bipartisan army of current and former elected officials, attorneys, and journalists have organized to defend against election interference. The States United Democracy Center is providing legal assistance to help local communities safeguard elections, including by running a website, ElectionDeniers.org, that identifies those who supported Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020, election and are currently running for office. “Our tracking tool helps define the democracy landscape, so that we can understand and counter dangerous efforts to change the rules of how elections are run and change the referees (the people who oversee our elections),” the organization’s website notes.

The Democracy Docket website is also an indispensable clearinghouse for updates on litigation designed to block election subversion. And Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine journalist who founded and runs the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University, is hosting a Democracy Summit for journalists to get up to speed on how to report on the midterms.

“Part of your work is actually convincing your bosses that we might be objective about a lot of things, but democracy cannot be one of them,” she recently told a group of young reporters during a workshop sponsored by the National Association of Black Journalists. “When the Washington Post says ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,’ it is taking a side and saying our job as journalists is the protection of democracy. 

So, instead of framing these stories as about partisan politics and about racial politics, we have to frame them about democracy.”

Donald Trump hit a brick wall when he made the illegal decision to invade Iran. Republicans must demand accountability but they are cowards.

 Trump was ‘shocked’ that Iran fought back. He shouldn’t have been.

A deep history of Persian resistance presaged the pushback.

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Stephen Kinzer

Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Future historians may tell the story of the Iran war through a quote from Donald Trump that perfectly encapsulates it. “We were shocked,” Trump said after the first US-Israeli attack failed to destroy Iran’s government. “They fought back.”

Donald Trump was fresh from an easy triumph in Venezuela, (abduction of President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas) thought Iran would fall just as easily. But instead of success, he hit a brick wall.

Only by ignoring every serious scholar and intelligence analyst was it possible for Trump to delude himself into thinking that Iran was a soft target. In fact, the opposite is true. History, religious tradition, and political culture combine to give Iranians extraordinary resilience.

Iran has one of the richest histories of any country on earth. It is 10 times as old as the United States, tracing its roots back to Persian emperors like Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes. 

Iranians consider themselves part of something that is grand and magnificent. Their attachment to their country is profoundly emotional.

One reason Iranians resist foreign intervention so fiercely is that they have had so much practice. 

• Alexander the Great 
• Genghis Khan, and 
• Tamerlane ravaged their land. 
• Arabs invaded and imposed Islam. 
• In the 19th century, Russia seized large swaths of Iran’s territory.

The name of one of the treaties by which Iran lost that territory — Turkmenchay — has become a curse word in Iran. 

As a result, any Iranian who supports a deal with the United States risks being accused of accepting “another Turkmenchay.” That is the equivalent of banishment from Iranian politics. This intense historical sensitivity makes any US-Iran accord difficult.

Another obstacle is the sorry record of relations between the two countries. Iran was an incipient democracy after World War II, but its government challenged the economic order imposed by the United States and Britain by nationalizing its oil industry. 

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower used the CIA to depose Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had led the drive for oil nationalization. That led to a quarter-century of royal dictatorship, followed by the 1978-9, hostage crisis and nearly a half-century of religious rule. The one seeming breakthrough, President Obama’s 2015, nuclear deal, evaporated after Trump withdrew from it. Americans may see Iran as malign and untrustworthy, but the feeling is mutual.




The binding effect of Shia Islam, which most Iranians profess, also gives them inspiration to resist. Its two most revered figures, Ali and Hussein, were 7th-century martyrs who the Shia believe died defending justice against tyranny. This legacy, enriched over centuries, has given Iranians a sense that suffering oppression at the hands of evildoers is pleasing to God. 

Even many unbelievers have absorbed the Shia principle that it is morally wrong to capitulate to iniquitous (IOW "morally wrong") power.

Shia believers do not have a “martyr complex,” as is sometimes asserted, but neither do they succumb easily. Trump’s recently announced economic sanctions — a “crushing economic operation,” he called it — will undoubtedly hurt many Iranians. It is unlikely, however, to drive them to demand that their leaders make a deal with Americans or Israelis.

Domestic Iranian politics combines with history and tradition to stiffen the country’s resistance. The country’s new leaders are decidedly more militant than those who were killed in the first wave of US-Israeli attacks. They see this war as a gift because it gives them a historic chance to kick the United States out of the Middle East. That gives them an incentive to fight on and to reject compromise or cease-fire.

Iranians do not cheer for their government. Many and perhaps most of them wish for a different kind of society. Nevertheless, at this moment, the Revolutionary Guard and its allies are the ones defending Iran against an enemy that seems to want to end its existence as a sovereign nation. People naturally support their leaders when their country is attacked. President George W. Bush’s popularity rating soared to 90 percent after the 9/11 bombings. Iran’s government is benefiting from that same rally-round-the-flag impulse.

For years the United States has pursued a policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran. Its defenders have a simple explanation for why it has failed: It hasn’t been maximum enough. Just keep turning up the pressure, they insist, and at some point Iran will collapse into America’s lap. Trump’s new sanctions, which he called “an economic D-Day” for Iran, are the latest iteration of “maximum pressure.”

Iran’s great weapon in this war is its resilience and ability to absorb pain. Americans are unhappy to read that more than a dozen US service members have been killed since this war began. Iran, by contrast, absorbed hundreds of thousands of casualties in its war with Iraq in the 1980s. While Americans grumble about rising gas prices, Iranians have endured economic devastation wrought by decades of US-sponsored sanctions. It’s clear which country is better girded for a long conflict.

Trump launched this war with the same combination of arrogance and ignorance that shaped his predecessors’ interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. All of his tactical gambits have foundered on the shoals of Iranian resistance. This war has shown the world more than tragedy. It is also a reminder that 25 centuries of Iranian history have forged a remarkably tenacious nation.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are not supporting American democracy

Echo opinion letter published in the Pennsylvania Reading Eagle

The slogan of the MAGA (cult❗) movement has always been “America First.” But it appears to be moving our society in a direction that is profoundly un-American.

MAGA`s social model is a two-tiered society of the rich and the poor, with the middle class eliminated or reduced. The upper tier will be difficult to move into, with harshly enforced standards of race, religion, social class and education. Rights will be rationed out only to those meeting the approval of the ruling elite. Political dissent will be ruthlessly suppressed. We are seeing this already in the legal harassment of journalists and the consolidation of media outlets.

In short, MAGA`s America will follow an authoritarian pattern, with a rigid class structure resembling that of the European aristocracy that our ancestors rejected 250 years ago.

Patriotic Americans need to act now to preserve our democracy. 

Use your rights to speak out, organize and vote while those rights still exist.

From Steven R. Gruber in Robeson Township Pennsylvania

Donald Trump is a selfish creature who lies about everything and very wrong to criticize Canada and our Canadian neighbors

Letter: It’s wrong to take on our friends in Canada
Donald Trump's short-sighted incompetent policy overlooks generations of cooperation.

Echo opinion letter published in the Pennsylvania Reading Eagle:

I hope we all remember that the first safe place of rest and peace for Americans coming from Europe on September 11, 2001, and after was our neighbor Canada. 

The kind and caring friends in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia housed and cared for foreign travelers for weeks. They never mentioned tariffs from the United States or that Donald Trump called them very impolite and rude names. They just loved us without thinking about their own fears and sadness.

I grew up in Detroit, where Canada was a bridge or ferry away. We shared Great Lakes summer vacations; we took trips to see another country where they looked just like us and smiled more.

9/11 is hard to bear 25 years later. Many of us are ashamed by how we treat our northern and southern neighbors. Have patience with us.

This ill will cannot last must longer. 

From Gail Dawson-White in Wyomissing Borough Pennsylvania

Americans desperately need disaster relief from the corrupt Donald Trump administration- Vote Blue!

Letter: It’s one disaster after another in the Trump administration
Donald Trump's promises amount to nothing or worse.

Published in the Pennsylvania Reading Eagle:

Donald Trump promised to lower gas and grocery prices. 🤥He didn’t. He said he wouldn’t start any wars. 🤥He did.

He said he put tariffs on Canada now because they’re ripping us off. But in his first term he made a deal with Mexico and Canada that he called “the most significant trade agreement in history.”

Months of international negotiations, led by nuclear physicist Ernest Monez, produced the previous Iran nuclear deal. The eight signatories included the European Union, China and Russia. The International Atomic Energy Agency did regular inspections. Nothing was bombed, and nobody got killed to accomplish this. International commerce flowed freely through the Strait of Hormuz.

With no evidence of Iranian cheating other than gut feelings and a nudge from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump started the “four to five weeks incursion” to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability. He sent Jared Kushner (who still lacks security clearance) and Steve Witkoff to negotiate a new deal. They are experts in finance, not in international diplomacy. Neither one has any background in Middle East history, culture, traditions and religions or nuclear science. It’s obviously not going well.

Bombs have caused destruction that will cost us taxpayers billions to replace. Many thousands were killed, including school kids and 18 Americans. 😢

Commerce is strangled, prices are rising, there’s no exit plan, and Iran is more determined than ever to build a bomb.

But the Jeffrey Epstein teenage sex trafficking scandal has not been in the news for a while now.

From Jane Beck in  Brecknock Township,  Pennsylvania

Vote Blue❕

Donald Trump is a desperate old man creating a legacy of delusional insanity- He cannot prove his September 11, stolen valor claims

Trump Has Untethered Himself From Reality

New York Times guest opinion essay by Thomas E. Edsall

"...60 messages posted online over 10 hours and 41 minutes offered a window into Trump’s own unique reality, one anchored not in fact but in an expression of ego..."

Trump demonstrated for the few who remain in doubt that his mind is trapped in a fictional world where he is the heroic savior of the nation, if not all mankind.

Trump was supposed to honor the men and women who braved death or died on September 11, 2001, but most of all he honored himself, portraying himself as willing to lose life or limb during the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Speaking at a Tunnel to Towers Foundation event honoring police officers, firefighters and other first responders, Trump recounted his memory of 9/11 and the days that followed. It has to be read in full to be truly reckoned with.

I want to just thank my people. I took a lot —— I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened. And they were — they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do. I’ll be honest. It was, it was raw.

Nobody had seen anything like it ever. We had other buildings. The United States Steel Building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down.

And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, “Got to get out of here!” And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, “Fellas, I can run myself.” But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.

The words were barely out of Trump’s mouth before the challenges to his version of events began.

At 6:30 p.m. that same day, CNN’s Daniel Dale published “Fact Check: Trump’s Story About Being Carried Away by Firefighters After the 9/11 Attack,” which begins:

Donald Trump has for years told false or unproven stories about what he supposedly saw and did on 9/11 and soon after. As the 25th anniversary of the terror attack approaches, Trump told another story at the White House on Tuesday — in which he claimed to have been carried away by firefighters amid fears of an imminent building collapse at some point after the attack.

It’s possible there are elements of truth in Trump’s latest story, versions of which he has told before, but he hasn’t provided any evidence for it. And some parts of his account — which he delivered at an event honoring 9/11 first responders — are misleading at best. He was miles away from the World Trade Center on 9/11 and was not whisked out of any building near ground zero that day.

Trump, New York magazine’s Nia Prater and Chas Danner wrote in “Trump Repeats Disputed Yarn About His 9/11 Role,” “is telling iffy 9/11 stories again.” Prater and Danner contended, “used his speech to repeat a questionable anecdote about his whereabouts and actions in the aftermath of the tragedy and later defended his recollection as questions arose.”

Trump himself quickly sensed the suspicions questioning the veracity of his comments and posted a defense of his remarks on Truth Social later last Tuesday night:

Everything I said was exactly accurate and, to prove the point, I am attaching clips of me there with numerous of my people, including my then Head of Security, Matthew Calamari, who has confirmed that very sad trip to Lower Manhattan, many times, to many different Journalists, but it’s a story that just won’t die. The Fake News doesn’t want to listen, even when they know their story is false.

Trump acknowledged that he and his crew did not go to ground zero on the same day as the twin towers’ collapse, but claimed “I was there as soon as the Law allowed.”

Twenty-five years ago on September 11, whatever else he was doing later, Trump was four miles away at Trump Tower, where he called into WWOR-TV to say that he could see out one window to the World Trade Center. He also took the time, on a day when nearly 3,000 people died, to mention that a building of his, 40 Wall Street, “was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest,” as my news-side colleague Katie Rogers noted last Tuesday. “And then,” Trump continued, “when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”

As Rogers pointed out, “It wasn’t.”
A 2019 PolitiFact report, “Donald Trump Says He Spent a Lot of Time With 9/11 Responders. Here Are the Facts,” makes perhaps the most damning case against Trump’s claims. PolitiFact interviewed Richard Alles, a New York Fire Department battalion chief on Sept. 11, 2001, to check out similar claims about 9/11 that Trump made earlier:

Alles said he had no knowledge of Trump being at the site or sending 100 or so workers there to help.

“I was in a supervisory role with the Fire Department at the time,” said Alles, who said he was on the scene about 20 minutes after the second building collapsed. “I was there for several months — I have no knowledge of his being down there.”

If Trump had sent a crew of 100 workers, “there would be a record of it. Everybody worked under direct supervision of the Police and Fire Department and the joint commander for emergency services. 

Is there a chance he was ever down there by himself and I didn’t know it❓ It’s possible, but I know of no one who ever witnessed him there.”

In a September 9, article, “60 Posts in 10 Hours: How Trump’s Social Media Reflects His Version of Reality,” my colleague in the newsroom Peter Baker provided crucial insight into Trump’s macho, almost fantastical, notion of himself.

Over Labor Day weekend, Baker wrote, "Trump’s social media account roared to life. In what has increasingly become his weekend habit, he unleashed a daylong barrage of posts that put the bully in the modern bully pulpit."

There were images of Trump intimidating Canada’s prime minister with a hockey stick, personally bombing enemy targets and patrolling dark streets with killer robots. There were maps showing the United States taking over other countries, and maps renaming a state. There were attacks on the “Dumocratic Party” and tributes to himself as “the Greatest President of All Time!”

The 60 messages posted online over 10 hours and 41 minutes offered a window into Trump’s own unique reality, one anchored not in fact but in an expression of ego. For years, his social media feed was said to be a mirror of his id. But with A.I., it has become the manifestation of how he wants to be seen in a more visual, visceral way than ever before — as a warrior, as a conqueror, as a historical figure, as a younger and thinner and more muscular version of himself.

On Thursday, at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump pushed his narcissistic fable-making to the breaking point, telling the gathering:

"Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. They don’t care. I am going to go out and I’m going to get my friends, my family. And we are going to vote on Nov. 3."

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, pointed out in an email that Trump’s distortions of reality have an impact on much more than beliefs in his claims about what he was doing on September11:

Trump’s loose relationship with reality extends to the issues that define our life, like inflation, public health, the war with Iran, our alliances or whether our elections are valid. For every seemingly harmless story where he inserts himself into the tableaux of history, there is a torrent of dark conspiracies that shape how we are governed.

At this moment, Americans are legitimately worried that the Supreme Court might grant Trump a license to threaten the integrity of the midterm elections because — not despite — of his long history of lying about election fraud.

Every time he insults another country or world leader, it feels less like a deliberate diplomatic strategy as his followers insist, and more like an indicator of the absence of such work, marking the indifference of a social media addict craving his next dopamine hit.

Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, argued in an email that Trump’s narcissism on its own is not surprising: “Research on American presidents has linked narcissism with charisma, leadership and performance. Anyone who runs for president has to feel special enough to believe they should lead the country and, arguably, the free world.”

Nevertheless, Trump is a special case, even among the few whose egos are large enough to prompt a bid for the presidency:

He keeps declaring that he’s ended wars that haven’t ended. He still demands that people accept that he won the 2020, election. He casts himself as either the triumphant hero or the innocent victim of nearly every major event.

He can’t simply be a leader who sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. Increasingly, he can’t acknowledge where he’s gone wrong. He insists that he’s always been right, regardless of the evidence or the consequences of his policies.

On April 30, of this year Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed, Democrats of Rhode Island, placed in the Congressional Record a statement by 36 prominent medical specialists questioning Trump’s mental fitness for office: “We are compelled to warn of a president of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public.”

Acknowledging that they had not examined the president face to face, the specialists wrote:

We have closely followed his behavior and his statements over the past year. Objectively observable signs of serious medical concern include: marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganized and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during critical public proceedings.

Grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility, imagery of himself as pope suggestive of a divine mission, being a mythical warrior hero, depicting himself as combat pilot — dropping feces on civilians, and claims that his decision-making authority is unlimited — with no need to consider domestic and international laws and constrained only by his “own morality.”

The medical specialists did not hold back:  Severely impaired judgment and impulse control, reflected in reckless threats of violence, advocacy of lethal force against civilians, encouragement of extrajudicial actions by armed supporters, repeated threats and often actions — judicial, prosecutorial, police, military and by invoking emergency power — against political opponents and others who disagree with him.

Significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications — e.g., 150 social media posts in one night — fixation on perceived enemies, persecutory ideas and prolonged, disproportionate attacks on specific individuals and institutions.

The medical experts concluded that Trump’s actions, rhetoric and general behavior, reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline. If we were called upon under the 25th Amendment to judge the president’s present ability to discharge the duties of his office, we would have to conclude that he lacks the capacity to do so.

For the reasons cited above, emphasizing that he presents a clear and present danger to our country and to the world, it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the president of the United States and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.

The reality, however, is that no action to remove Trump from the White House will happen until he does something so threatening and damaging that drumming him out of the White House becomes an inescapable necessity — no small comfort for a nation looking forward to 28 more months of an unstable man holding the presidency.

From the comments: My concern is not so much that Trump lives in a fantasy world, but that he has successfully enticed so many other Americans to live in it with him.

Last weekend I saw a brief interview with a Trump supporter decked out in a MAGA cap and full, bright red, Trump regalia. Asked about high gas price, he did admit that they were way up, and when asked who was responsible, he immediately said, "the liberals". When asked how he could believe that, his response was, "they're doing it to make Trump look bad". When the interviewer pointed out that liberals have no political power, the man shrugged and said he didn't know how they were doing it, but they were. Just another day in Trumpistan.

Donald Trump's litany of lies includes where he said he was on September 11 in 2001 but...hmmm....he wasn't. Who knew?

Trump: The man who wasn’t there on September 11

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Renée Graham

On that harrowing morning 25 years ago this week, Tania Head said she was working in the World Trade Center’s South Tower when a second plane hijacked by terrorists plowed into the building. 

Her fiancé, she said, was killed in the North Tower, which had been struck by the first plane. Head claimed that she too might have perished if not for Welles Crowther, a young man who died after saving her and others, and came to be known as “the man in the red bandana.”

None of what Head claimed was true. On Sept. 11, 2001, she wasn’t even in this country.

“The Woman Who Wasn’t There,” a 2012, documentary, tells Head’s bizarre story, one which was so believable that she became president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network. Her story finally unraveled when a New York Times reporter found glaring inconsistencies in her September 11, survival story.

Head isn’t the only 9/11 fabulist. Bizarre, but Donald Trump can’t stop telling lies about where he was and what he did on that day and during its immediate aftermath.

At a Washington, D.C. event on the Ellipse Tuesday to honor first responders who died on that solemn day, Trump falsely claimed that he was saved at Ground Zero by firefighters “right after” the attacks as he stood near another building that he said was at risk for collapse.

“I’ll never forget two firemen, we thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big, strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world,” Trump said. “They grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ They literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up, and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down.”

There’s no proof that Trump was at Ground Zero “right after” the attacks. But with his pathological need to center himself in every scenario, even something as sacred as a September 11 memorial event isn’t safe.

After his falsehoods about his 9/11 whereabouts trended and were roasted on social media, Trump, on his own site, later posted that he wasn’t at Ground Zero during the attacks, but arrived “shortly thereafter.” Then he continued with his obligatory anti-media tirade and comments about his “VERY HIGH” approval ratings, which according to CNN, sit at a dismal 35 percent.

On Friday, Trump will skip the 9/11 commemoration at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. Reportedly, once he was told he could not make a speech there — which no president has been allowed to do since 2012, because the National September 11 Memorial and Museum avoids partisanship — he backed out.

Instead Trump sttended a ceremony at the Pentagon, which was also struck by a hijacked plane. That’s also where the president marked the day last year, though the most notable thing about his attendance was his apparent struggle to stay awake.

Since the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pa., Trump has spun various unproven tales about what he was doing that day. On Tuesday, he again claimed to have taken “hundreds” of construction workers to Ground Zero to help the cleanup effort after the attacks, although there’s zero evidence that he did any such thing.

Most offensively, Trump, in 2015, claimed to have “watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” Later asked to explain further, he said, “There were people cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations.”

Steven Fulop, then-Jersey City’s mayor, called Trump’s comments “shameful.”

More than a decade later, Trump’s shamefulness was on display during his remarks at Tuesday’s 9/11 remembrance. What he said is comparable to stolen valor — all of the glory and adulation, but none of the real blood, sweat, and tears. By inserting himself into the narrative and wresting the spotlight toward himself, Trump again tried to promote himself as something that he, unlike the first responders, has never been and will never be — selfless and brave.

This is an excerpt from Outtakes, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham. 

Donald Trump and the maga "tinkerbell" effect: Just clap your hands and lies become fake news

On the first day of Donald Trump's second term, he said, was a national emergency (at least according to the himself). On January) 20, 2025, he declared a "national energy emergency," pledging to tap into America's oil and gas reserves. 

Echo opinion essay published by Troy Farah in Salon and Yahoo news.com

As Salon reported, experts said the "energy crises" at that time, was a false alarm. 

At the time, the U.S. was doing fine with its fossil fuel production. The bigger problem, one that Trump continues to deny, centers on curbing emissions and addressing our planet's overheating problem.

Roughly 18 months later, things have clearly changed. The nation is steeped in an energy crisis of Trump's own making, largely due to his tariff agenda and illegal war of choice with Iran. 

Despite a flurry of vague timelines and a litany of lofty promises, it doesn't seem like we'll be out of the woods any time soon. 

Trump's kidnapping of Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, and the recent announcement that the U.S. will take control of the country's oil fields to the tune of some 65 billion barrels, smacks of desperation. Yes, Exxon Mobil has agreed to go along with the theft, but it may be more lip service to the president, as extracting oil from Venezuela would be extremely costly and risky compared to drilling domestically. At any rate, it will be a long time before we see the effects of those moves on gas prices, ethical and environmental ramifications aside.  (Meanwhile, the Venezuelean government owns those oil fields regardless of how much Trump talks about taking the oil...it's a gimmick.)

Nevertheless, Trump keeps making promises that require more than a little faith (IOW, they cannot pass the straight face test). 

Right before he jetted off to his sad little ego-boosting convention in Dallas, the Trump stopped to talk to reporters at Joint Base Andrews. They asked him about the still soaring price of oil and a timeline for the end of the Iran war. First, he claimed that the U.S. is winning the war, that Iran is in shambles and its economy had all but collapsed, and that the American military even has control over the Strait of Hormuz. The worst will be over, he said, immediately after the November midterm elections. Or maybe a bit later than that.

"Right after the election, oil prices are going to be tumbling downward," Trump said on the tarmac. "They're going to be tumbling down and we'll get them down. I think for gasoline, we'll get them below 💲2 a gallon."

Don't get hung up on the timeline, he added. It'll happen when it happens! Just trust me and vote Republican. That's his pitch, anyway.

The last time gas was 💲2 a gallon was during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when demand for oil was destroyed because many people were staying home to avoid spreading a deadly virus. I can still remember how blue the skies in California seemed during that brief interlude. Too bad air quality can't be like that all the time. I'm not wishing another pandemic on us, mind you. My point is there are always tradeoffs. Trump knows this — he's only gotten richer as gas prices have jumped, thanks to his investments in the industry. A recent report from Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee found that "Trump saw his wealth go up by as much as 💲15.5 million just through stocks he owned in oil and gas companies at the end of 2025."

It may not surprise you that Trump's prediction about a sudden drop in gas prices seems unlikely. This week, oil came in at slightly over 💲104 a barrel, the highest it's been since July, and on Thursday, diesel hit an average of $6 a gallon — for the first time ever. It goes without saying that the ripple effects this will have on shipping and agriculture, and thus food prices, will be profound. Trump may want to take a page from Europe, where fuel prices are also hitting record highs, leading to widespread protests.

All of this while the U.S. and Iran continue to trade strikes across the Middle East. The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that it had destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in retaliation for attacks on its warships, while Tehran hit back at American targets in Jordan, where at least 18 ballistic missiles were intercepted but no casualties were reported. Given this flare-up in fighting, reporters asked if there would be an end to this war. (IOW, has Iran surrendered yet❓)

"I think the war will end immediately after the election," Trump said, claiming that Iran "can't hold out any longer . . . They're desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice, weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon. All they want is a nuclear weapon. And if they had a nuclear weapon, the whole world is in deep trouble." (Iran has never had a nuclear weapon.)🤥🤥🙄❗

The immediate follow up question was about whether or not there will be a new "nuclear deal" with Iran, something Energy Secretary Chris Wright said earlier this week might not happen any time soon, if at all. "There may not be a nuclear agreement. It may be simply destroying their capabilities to do it. An agreement may await a next administration in Iran. 🙄We simply don't know that," he told ABC News on Sunday.

But Trump claimed he'd be "doing much more than a nuclear deal," before immediately admitting that he wasn't looking to negotiate at the moment. "Originally, I wanted to make a deal," he said. "We're so far down the line they have very little country left right now, so we're not looking for it. Yes, a negotiation could possibly happen but it's not something we're looking at. This war will end immediately after our election." (Ahhh, hmmm, wait, is this "yes"..."no"...."maybe"❓)

Isn't that convenient❓Both the Iran war and high gas prices are extremely unpopular among all voters, which virtually all political analysts predict could swing votes in favor of Democrats. 

Trump's blustering response to all this is to keep calm and vote MAGA. It'll all be resolved immediately after the elections or maybe months later. It's a coin flip, really. All you have to do is👏 clap your hands and believe❗

Clap your hands and lies magically become fake news❗

Despite offering absolutely no evidence for his claims, at least Trump called the Iran conflict a war, something Vice President JD Vance has been strangely reluctant to do. It's certainly possible that the Iranians are delaying an end to the war in order to hurt Republicans in the midterms, or they could even wait until Trump is out of office entirely before discussing an end to hostilities. 

But Iran's position arguably has more to do with Trump's volatile negotiating strategy than with some nefarious October surprise plot.

What we have here might be an example of the Tinkerbell effect, named for the "Peter Pan" character who could be resurrected from death by audience participation, i.e. belief in fairies. Psychologist Brittany McGeehan described it this way: "If you hold the belief that the power of your belief has an impact on your situation, you will increase your autonomy. Rather than becoming a victim to life, you will begin playing an active role and, therefore, start taking positive steps forward."

I don't know if that's great life advice or not, but it certainly feels germane to the Trump administration's strategy. Just saying and believing something will happen will make it happen, right❓ Who would put it past this president to embrace woo-woo manifestation as domestic and foreign policy❓ There are other conclusions we might draw, of course, such as that the president actually has zero control over the situation, and that things are likely to get more expensive and more explosive before they get better. Maybe if we all hold hands and close our eyes, we can manifest a collective reality check for Donald Trump: He lost this war long ago, and his inability to recognize or admit that truth is what's really choking the economy.

A version of this essay first appeared in Crash Course, Salon's free morning newsletter.