Excellent history review essay describing who is an American and the value of birthright citizenship supported by SCOTUS

Echo opinion essay published in the Business Standard*. 

By Howard Chua-Eoan:  Once upon a time, the French were the most enthusiastic aspirational Americans. 

Magical realism of the American dream: 

Birthright, belonging and hope

Inspired by the revolution of 1776, as well as the victory of the Franco-American alliance over the British in the 1781, battle of Yorktown, French polemicists, patriots, philosophers and plebs waxed idealistic about migrating to the brand new nation to share in its promise — la félicité publique of the Enlightenment transformed into “the pursuit of happiness” of the United States (US) Declaration of Independence. The vast possibilities of the future compelled one enthusiast to rhapsodise, “What then is the American, this new man❓” 💜💗☆

The question has been asked again and again in the 250 years since July 4, 1776. On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court rejected the Trump Administration’s attempt to place curbs on the 158-year-old 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which gives anyone born in the country citizenship by birthright. The debate seems to renew with each generation, if not with each year. By naturalization, the US adds about 800,000 new citizens annually — over a decade, a cohort bigger than the population of Hong Kong. 

In fact, the US produces far more freshly naturalized citizens than any other nation.  That’s apart from the estimated 3.5 million baby-citizens delivered each year. There is a metaphysical dimension to being born American in America. It means you are as American as anyone else born anywhere else in America. From Manhattan to Miami to Montana, Americans — as the late 18th century French pondered with awe — are privileged with geographical equality, and enter the world carrying an identity founded on place, not blood, with possibilities as immense as their landscape. Each is a plurality of one.

For now, though, let’s put aside the magic for realism. Americans have always been at odds with each other — often viciously — over who belongs to their promised land. Indeed, despite this week’s ruling, the US has become a much less welcoming place because of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) assaults on migrants (and almost anyone actually) driven by the populist rhetoric of Donald Trump and his (evil❗) acolytes. 

Today, even some newly-naturalized citizens advocate pulling up the ladder to curb immigration. Lawyers for skilled foreign job-seekers are now counselling their clients not to come to the US, reversing advice they’d provided for years.

And yet the American dream continues to draw people from around the world. Government statistics substantiate that magnetic power — in a backhanded way. Applications for immigration visas based on employment and family are backlogged for years, if not decades, as Bloomberg News notes. Depending on the applicant’s country of origin, the H-1B visa — which has been key to cheaper high-tech labor for Silicon Valley — continues to be heavily oversubscribed, in spite of lawyerly advice. It was perhaps the swiftest and most meritocratic way to prove your worth to a country you weren’t born in, but wanted to belong to. No longer. “It is far easier to obta-in any other type of major visa than an H-1B visa,” says a March 2025, report by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit research group focused on immigration, international trade, globalization and the economy.

Well, not quite every other type. Most family-sponsored would-be immigrants are stuck in the torturously long process for “green cards” that designate legal residents and put them on the road to naturalization. There’s an annual cap of 226,000 for those who aren’t immediate relatives of their sponsors; with about 7.1 million people currently waiting in that queue, many may not live to see the land they yearn for.

Moreover, the other evidence of America’s continuing pull is anecdotal. Even with the toll of (evil❗) ICE, people are still drawn to the US, even from supposedly blasé Europe. I track the restaurant industry on both sides of the Atlantic, and I know of cooks, sommeliers and servers in the United Kingdom (UK) who will jump at the first opportunity to show what they can do for an American kitchen. The continuous flow of Japanese chefs is evidence that economic powerhouses in East Asia are not immune to American magnetism. Often, the Brits try a short stint, an informal pop-up or hang around as unpaid stagiare (a controversial type of culinary internship) — all in the hope of convincing a US outfit to sponsor them through the costly paperwork required to win a long-term visa, perhaps even an O-1 for “individuals of extraordinary ability.”

It’s a long shot, but those from the 40-some countries in the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) (including Japan, the UK and most members of the European Union) can use its provisions to enter and stay for as long as 90 days per visit. The VWP is meant to ease tourist travel but it also allows business-types to attend conferences and engage in dealmaking — just not paid labour. That’s leeway enough for anyone — not just restaurant folk — to make professional contacts. But there are limits: If the Border Control Protection agency decides there’s a pecuniary pattern to your travel, you may be served with a long-term ban.

From my perspective as an American abroad, I also find it revealing that the politics and events back home are often central to ordinary conversations in the UK as well as Europe and Asia. Mine are fully caught up in the latest developments as if related to their own well-being. It’s almost personal and domestic. It’s also bipartisan. While there is umbrage about the administration, there is also approval among the more MAGA-ty citizens of the world, who see a country finally aligned with their political proclivities. The recent run of right-wing victories in Latin America is an indicator that Trumpist America has become the spiritual promised land for a growing audience.

In fact, the US was also both beacon and caution back when there were only 13 states of the union. The Frenchman who asked wondrously about “the new man” was once an immigrant farmer in upstate New York and was appalled by slavery. The supposedly class-free republic wasn’t that at all and had embarked on the segregation of society by race. 

Indeed, the 14th Amendment was inspired by the dilemma faced by the children of slaves in the wake of emancipation and the Civil War. Speaking in all-encompassing language, it declared with constitutional authority that every child born in the US was a citizen. It was a remarkably judicious act for a country that would cruelly continue to impose racial identity — and thus social and economic status — based on “a drop of blood” well into the 20th century.

And the sequel was just as momentous. In 1898, the US Supreme Court decision upheld the language of the amendment to apply to the case of Wong Kim Ark, born in California to migrant Chinese parents. He sued after he was barred from re-entering the US after visiting China. This took place at the height of violent pogroms surrounding the imposition of the Chinese Exclusion Act. His victory ensured that citizenship was available to immigrants and their offspring, not just to the established communities of the country — and once again affirmed by the Supreme Court this week (in 2026).
Wong would work as a cook and vanish into obscurity after an itinerant life. The pursuit of happiness did not guarantee dreams would come true. That’s the irony of the “American Dream,” which was coined by the historian James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America. Writing amid the Great Depression, he said the notion isn’t just about prosperity “but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Tensions about who gets to be American are unabated. In the wake of this week’s SCOTUS birthright decision, Trump declared he’d try to get his way via legislative sleights of hand. For now, it is the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, that hold sway: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.” That is an appropriate gift to the country on this momentous birthday: the dream, and the chance, are continued.

Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion's international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine

*Business Standard is an Indian English-language daily edition newspaper,[5] also available in Hindi. Founded in 1975.

Donald Trump's Caligula Trap- How to get out of Iran without admitting he surrendered and failed

In Iran, Trump’s victory claims only deepened a self-made catastrophe published in The Guardian by Sidney Blumenthal

Before Donald Trump finally surrendered in his Iran war, he declared victory several dozen times, including on day eight– “We’ve already won!” – day 10 – “The war is very complete”– day 12, proclaiming he had won five times in 13 seconds – “We’ve won, let me say we’ve won.

You know, you never like to say too early you won, we won, ❗we won won five times in 13 seconds – “We’ve won, let me say we’ve won. You know, you never like to say too early you won, we won, we won the bet in the first hour it was over”– and day 39 –“Total and complete victory, 100%. No question about it”– and claimed a deal to end the war was just around the corner 38 times. The first time he raised the prospect of peace, on day 24, he said the two sides had reached “almost all points of agreement”.

Trump boldly affixed his signature with a sharpie to the Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU surrender) on day 110, the 17th of June, at the Palace of Versailles, where the ruinous treaty concluding the first world war was signed. He seemed oblivious to the historical symbolism of the place, but bedazzled by its gold. “Versailles is not gold leaf – Versailles is the real deal,” he remarked.

At a press conference beforehand, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, stood stone-faced as an Easter Island statue, perhaps hoping nobody would notice him, but still tainted with the war by his presence. Trump said about his absent vice-president, who was queasy about the whole venture but has now been assigned the task of defending it: “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”

The next day, Vance insisted🙄 🤥the war was a “win” and falsely stated that lifting oil sanctions was “not a new benefit” for Iran. Trump, who invariably chooses a fall guy for his own failures, apparently does not wish to have anyone become his successor. Vance, for his part, promptly pointed at Israel, where Trump’s MOU is universally excoriated, as the fall guy. “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government,” Vance said, “I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” Vance has been delegated to drink from the poisoned chalice. Welcome to Jonestown.

That day, 18 June, Israel Hayom, the rightwing newspaper that is a mouthpiece for the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and is published by Miriam Adelson, who gave more than $100m to the 2024, Trump campaign, ran a lead editorial addressed to Trump: “...you have gravely harmed the human interests of the enlightened world, and you may be remembered forever as the president who brought about America’s humiliation. You betrayed us, the Israelis. And in a single moment, the contempt you once faced suddenly seems so justified and logical.” Netanyahu, who delivered his fate into Trump’s hands, forgot that Trump abandoned even his mentor, the mob lawyer Roy Cohn, in the end.

Trump lost his war on day one. In fact, Iran first effectively closed the strait of Hormuz following US and Israeli airstrikes that day and formally closed it two days later, achieving asymmetric strategic superiority through control over a crucial spigot of the global economy. On day 43, 11 April, Trump tweeted: “The United States has completely destroyed Iran’s Military, including their entire Navy and Air Force, and everything else.” Trump could not distinguish between tactics and strategy. He confused bombs and bombast with the mission, which eluded him. The more he bombed, the more he lost the plot.

Without any strategic comprehension, Trump’s triumphalism only deepened the bitterness and anger that has followed his eventual loss. In brief, he elevated the Iranian regime into a regional hegemon and a power in the world economy; persuaded the Gulf states that the US is an unreliable ally that could not shield them; increased the influence everywhere of China; condemned Israel after
Netanyahu hustled Trump into a fiasco that other presidents had carefully avoided; further alienated our European allies that prudently distanced themselves; drastically wasted US military power; and shattered US prestige. By the time he had finished, nobody on any side believed Trump should be taken at his word.

In fact, the exercise of Trump exposing himself yet again as a mountebank* is redundant, but now catastrophic with the whole world watching.

What Trump succeeded in obliterating was any rationale he offered for going to war in the first place. He had claimed he already accomplished regime change in Iran amid his dire threats. On day 39, 7 April, he tweeted: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?”

Trump provided his own refutation on day 110, 16 June, piling on praise for the Iranian regime that had consolidated as a theocratic military dictatorship: “You talk about regime change. I never cared about regime change. It [was] never a part … And we’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people. I think actually they’re smarter than the first and second group, but they’re not radicalized and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

Trump is in a class of his own as an American president in launching a war of aggression without a casus belli, a direct offensive provocation, and losing it in short order.

Other presidents haunted by the shadow of defeat in war knew it would discredit them. Two days after John F Kennedy’s assassination, on 24 November 1963, Lyndon Johnson told the US ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr: “I am not going to lose Vietnam.” Three years later, Johnson confessed privately: “I just can’t be the architect of surrender.” “I won’t be the first American president to lose a war,” he told the undersecretary of state George Ball.

President Richard Nixon uttered virtually the same words. “I’m not going to be the first American president to lose a war,” he told his aides in October 1969. Both Johnson and Nixon were undone as they struggled with their inability to end a war they did not begin but which they escalated, as the Pentagon Papers revealed, through vain attempts to achieve what Nixon called “peace with honor”.

Leaders in democracies that lose wars inevitably lose office. There is no case anywhere of a democratic leader politically surviving the loss of a war.

(George W Bush was re-elected in 2004, before the defeat materialized in Iraq and Afghanistan, which by 2016, had broken the Reagan-Bush era of the Republican party and greatly contributed to the rise of Trump.) Despots historically have retained power in the aftermath of defeat only through ruthless repression, coercive control of media and scapegoating, which makes the revolt against them more explosive when it comes.

On day 107, 14 June, Trump’s birthday, Trump had announced the sketchy MOU as “complete”. “Congratulations to all!” he crowed.

In a boon to Iran, Trump waived oil export sanctions, opened access to tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets, and committed to a mysteriously funded $300bn “Reconstruction Plan” that might have unspecified side deals, while entering into 60 days of negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program more than eight years after he withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated under President Obama in which Iran pledged not to develop a nuclear weapon. Trump called it a “horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made”.

On that day, his 80th birthday, Trump staged matches of the UltimateFighting Championship on the South Lawn of the White House in a cage under his gargantuan “claw” as though he had won the war and the fighters victorious in the ring represented his strength. His circus was the opening act of his culture of defeat and its denial.

When asked on day 111, 18 June, by an Axios reporter what insight the war had revealed to him about “the limits of his ability to exert power”, Trump replied: “There are no limits. I haven’t learned that lesson yet. I know there are, but there are no limits.” He claimed that the Iranian signing of the MOU was “probably unconditional surrender”. Trump had called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” on day seven, 6 March.

On 18 June, Trump also declared victory over the algae blooms in the Reflecting Pool that had turned it green after he granted two no-bid contracts for $16m to a firm that previously performed pool work at a Trump golf club but had no history of federal contracting and a campaign contributor and Mar-a-Lago club member who was twice criminally convicted. The interior department tweeted: “The Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear,🤥 and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool – just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.”  🙄

Trump said the pool would “probably” have to be drained again and accused “Radical Left Lunatics” of sabotaging his project with a knife and chemicals, though he presented no evidence. He tweeted about “terrible vandals” and “serious crimes… Years in jail!” On 19 June, the Park police arrested a 67-year-old former Olympic cyclist on a misdemeanor charge of destroying government property for reaching into the pool to touch the “American flag blue” peeling paint. He was released within hours – day 113, another quagmire, another defeat.

In 40AD, the Emperor Caligula, notorious for his inability to “control his natural cruelty and viciousness”, as well as his “gluttony and adultery”. according to the historian Suetonius, marched his legions to the shore of the English Channel to invade Britain, where he suddenly ordered his soldiers to gather seashells as the “spoils” of war. “As a monument of his victory he erected a lofty tower, from which lights were to shine at night to guide the course of ships,” and staged a return to Rome “on his birthday in an ovation”.

Trump is now caught in his miserable Caligula Trap** from which he cannot extract himself. Mocking his self-congratulatory language, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican member of Congress and Maga queen, posted on the day Trump signed the MOU: “Congratulations to all for almost achieving peace to the war that is not a war, spending hundreds of billions of US tax dollars again for another foreign war after we voted no … This, apparently, is what winning looks like.”

Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln:

*a person who deceives others, especially in order to trick them out of their money

**Caligula Trap is a rhetorical or political concept describing a situation where someone makes self-congratulatory claims or declares false victories that they cannot extract themselves from without admitting the deception.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are destroying American icons and the principles of our democracy

Donald Trump is a miserable creature who mocks American principles: Published in the Scranton Times-Tribune newspaper.

Donald Trump hosted an ugly and violent wrestling game for America's 250th, denigrating the White House into a quasi Roman Colosseum.

Echo opinion letter to the editor: His name may be gone from the Kennedy Center, but the stench and rankness Donald Trump has visited upon our presidency and White House will take some time to be eradicated.

He has turned the White House into a latter-day Palace of Versailles, decadent gold everywhere, a testament to his garishness. The recent UFC fight reminds us of the bread and circuses of the Roman Colosseum, complete with the violence and the corruption.

In some kind of perverse, reverse karma, Trump is president during the 250th year celebration of our country’s founding on the principles of the rule of law and the ideals of the Constitution, principles he no more believes in than the belief in the tooth fairy.

From Bert Silvestri, in Peckville, Pennsylvania

Donald Trump created another failed 250th birthday dud embarrassing to all Americans: Trump-land is a bust

Donald Trump’s dreadful Great American State Fair
Attendance is sparse and the heat is extreme, but at least you can pay 💲9 for lemonade.

A storm, overpriced food and a sad ferris wheel : inside Trump’s dreadful state fair published in The Guaardian,by Adam Gabbatt

Attendance at the Great American State Fair is sparse and the heat is extreme, but at least you can pay 💲25 for a pretzel

I have been to some disappointing fairs in my time. There was one, in a small town in north-west England, where the main attraction was a little slide that you rode down on a burlap sack: except the guy who owned the slide had forgotten to bring the sacks, so me and my sister slid down on a T-shirt.

Another time, at a village fete in a place called Longton, I won the main prize at the bingo. It was a whisky decanter with a bottle of whiskey. I was 11 years old, the decanter was broken and some bigger boys took the whiskey. More recently, I looked on as two farmers engaged in a shouting match over whose pumpkin was larger at a fair in Iowa.

Such exposure means I’m probably better equipped than most to see the possibility in Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, but even given my breadth of bad fair experiences, the Trump National Mall even sounds absolutely dreadful.🤢

“A rather embarrassing flop,” MS Now wrote. “A big ol’ dud”, was the verdict of Slate. “To put it simply, miserable,” the New Republic ruled, while USA Today said witnessing the failure of Trump’s fair is “like watching your high school bully host a party that no one attends”.

What makes it so bad❓

Well for one thing, very few people seem to have been going. For another, the fair’s signature attraction, a (quite small) ferris wheel, was plagued by power cuts on the first day. And despite organizers’ claims that 56 states and territories would be represented, each given their own booths at the event, several declined to participate due to the high cost.

The opening ceremony was meant to be a musical extravaganza, featuring acts including Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, The Commodores, Morris Day and the Time, Young MC, Flo Rida, but most of those performers pulled out, several saying they had been unaware the event would have a political undertone.

Instead, people attending opening night got a performance from Trump: specifically, a campaign-style rally during which Trump trotted out his usual claims about how the US is the “hottest country anywhere in the world”. (Ironically, the Virginia booth at the fair was closed on Tuesday due to extreme heat, and the fair itself was forced to close early on its second day, because of a storm.)

Things got worse when a Confederate flag had to be removed from a booth at the fair, prompting one of the sponsors to drop out. Then there was more negative publicity as people found out how much things cost at the event: $25 for a pretzel, $23 for a turkey leg, $9 for a lemonade.

Against this backdrop, Fox (FAKE❗)News has valiantly tried to put positive spin on the fair, like White Star Line claiming people had enjoyed a very pleasant four days at sea before the Titanic hit that iceberg. The channel even broadcast live from the fair on Monday, the idea being to champion the event. But, as the journalist Aaron Rupar documented, all that achieved was to prove that very few people were in attendance.

So what have we learned❓ Maybe the lesson is: don’t try to throw a big celebratory fair when you are a historically unpopular president. Or: if you do host a fair, make sure it is a) good, and b) doesn’t have a racist flag on display.

The fair is larger than the ones I went to as a kid. 

But you know what ❓At least in the past, those fairs were fun. And cheap. The sack/T-shirt slide only cost 20p. The scar on my knee, sustained when friction caused the T-shirt to rip❓ That will last a lifetime.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans created a dangerous and scary precedent for multiple unjustified mass killings

Echo Letters to the Editor published in the Los Angeles Times and in Yahoo.com: Trump isn't making life more affordable, but he is making it scarier.

After making the pathetic the lame excuse of mistakenly killing at least 175 Iranians, mostly children, with a Tomahawk missile, Donald Trump blithely responds, "Some mistakes are made" ("The Trump administration continues killing without answers," June 29). Really❓ Puh-leeze❗😡

The footage of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti's killings is already forever seared into my brain. And the cavalier attitude afterward of the trigger-happy agents who shot them signals to us they knew in advance they wouldn't face any consequences.

And we see these same familiar patterns in how this administration operates in the Caribbean, where at least 210 people 😔😨😥are now confirmed dead by air strikes because they were allegedly bringing illicit drugs to America in small motorboats, seeming hardly seaworthy enough to reach our shores.

Trump does not know how to make life more affordable in America, but he has shown a rather, uh, killer aptitude for instilling abject terror in the hearts of the citizenry as well as the rest of the world.

From Robert Archerd, in Rancho Palos Verdes, California

Donald Trump and his reflecting cesspool desecrated our beautiful national monuments

Trump’s slimy, swampy eyesore in Washington, D.C.
And the Reflecting Pool isn’t looking too good either.

Echo opinion by Renée Graham published in the Boston Globe.

Donald Trump's reflecting cesspool is a metaphor for his ugly administration.

Since his return to the White House last year, Donald Trump has spent an absurd amount of time trying to remake (I would say "uglify") Washington, D.C., in his own (hideous) image.

As of late last week, tarps still covered part of the Kennedy Center’s façade. On June 13, Trump’s name was removed from the building as ordered by Christopher R. Cooper, a federal judge. Cooper wanted to know why those tarps, which block much of John F. Kennedy’s name, have remained on the performing arts center dedicated as a memorial to the assassinated president.

Where the White House’s East Wing stood for more than a century before Trump had it demolished last year for his 90,000 square foot ballroom/bunker, there’s a massive hole and construction site. Its price tag has skyrocketed from 💲300 million, which the White House once claimed would be fully funded by multibillion-dollar corporations, to nearly 💲600 million, much of it, to no one’s surprise, at taxpayers’ expense.

Trump’s latest authoritarian design debacle is the slimy, swampy eyesore that was once the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It now serves as a reflection of Trump’s slimy, swampy eyesore of a presidency.

Perhaps bored with his and Israel’s ill-conceived war against Iran, Trump announced in April that he had ordered a renovation of the iconic Reflecting Pool in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration on the Fourth of July. 

Trump created a myth, saying the pool was “filthy” and that its bottom would be painted something he called “American flag blue.”

Trump said the project would cost between 💲1.5 million and 💲2 million and would be completed “long before July Fourth.”

And just like the now four-month-old war against Iran that Trump initially said would be over “in four or five weeks,” the pool renovation has become another drawn-out mess of Trump’s own making.

Instead of blue, the pool is a sickly green from the proliferation of algae, which is not a new problem in D.C., but one to which Trump seemed oblivious. That blue painted lining began peeling not long after it was applied, with chunks of it floating in the water.

At least three duck carcasses were recently discovered — one in the pool and two nearby. City Wildlife, an animal rescue and rehabilitation group in Washington, told The Washington Post that toxic algae blooms or chemicals in the blue paint could harm wildlife.

Trump has blamed vandals for cutting a gash in the pool’s lining — that he initially said was 200 feet long and has since inflated to 350 feet — on the bottom of the pool. 

On Thursday, a National Park Service official said that earlier this month, the liner at the pool’s bottom was cut with a knife or razor. The incident was allegedly reported to the US Park Police on June 9, but Trump never mentioned that report.

Then there’s the no-bid contract awarded to a Trump donor’s company to install a water purification system in the pool. The White House claims that Trump was not involved in hiring that firm, owned by John J. Cafaro, a Palm Beach neighbor of Trump’s, who the president once called “a fantastic man.”

Now the National Guard is on patrol at the Reflecting Pool, which has also been surrounded by a fence, to avert any nefarious activities like visitors dipping a finger in the murky water. Six people have reportedly been arrested, and Jeanine Pirro, US attorney for the District of Columbia, said suspected vandals will “face the criminal justice system” in the nation’s capital.

After Pirro’s comments, Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who only found his spine after he decided not to run for reelection, said, “Yet they’re releasing people who pled guilty to assaulting police officers.” Tillis was referring to Trump’s mass pardons of those convicted of crimes committed during the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.

“What freaking parallel universe did I just wake up in❓” Tillis asked.

That universe is no longer parallel but is in control of the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. It’s a place created by Republicans like Tillis, who’ve done nothing as Trump breaks everything he touches and does so without a shred of accountability.

It’s unlikely the Reflecting Pool will be repaired in time for Fourth of July events. And that’s fine. Let that gross green swamp remain exactly as it is, a physical representation of the man who once promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, but instead created one on the National Mall, and within the White House itself.

Maine Write P.S.- And Maine Senator Susan Collins does nothing!

Donald Trump is a danger to the entire world order he must be removed from office- Senator Susan Collins where are you?

Echo opinion letter published in Lancaster OnLine in Pennsylvania

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Trump’s threats of more violence set dangerous ⚠️example for the world [letter]

I am rarely shocked by Donald Trump, but he did say something extraordinarily shocking earlier this month that was barely covered.

On Fox (Fake❗) News, as Vice President JD Vance was in negotiations with Iranian representatives, Trump warned Iran over potentially reclosing the Strait of Hormuz, saying, “You close it and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your (strong expletive) country.”

Ignore the F-bomb that exemplifies Trump’s inability to regulate his emotions, ignore his now-commonplace threat to destroy the entirety of Iran, and focus on what’s left. The United States and Iran sent envoys to discuss the ceasefire and potential peace plan, and in a moment of belligerent petulance, Trump threatened to murder Iran’s envoys, who subsequently walked out.
Want to talk about Trump’s penchant for breaking norms❓ Threatening envoys has been perhaps the No. 1 diplomatic taboo, dating back more than 2,400 years to the Peloponnesian War. No matter how opposed you are to your enemy, you do not threaten envoys. It guarantees a continuation of violence.

Trump also broke the memorandum of understanding (I.O.W. the useless MOU) requiring both parties to refrain from the threats of force, but who has ever accused Trump of understanding the barest of diplomatic principles❓💢

For centuries, bedrock moral philosophy has rested on the principle that we should act only in ways we would want everyone else to act. Do we want other countries threatening our envoys, ignoring all diplomatic principles and forever escalating the threat of violence❓ If not, we should not do it ourselves.

It’s extraordinary that in our technological society, in which it becomes easier to destroy all of humanity with each passing day, we have even managed to make it to the year 2026. Great leaders of the past, by definition, have set a moral example we can all follow.

With Trump as our failed leader — and, in many respects, the de facto leader of the world — if everyone followed his example of violence, lies and escalation, I can’t imagine humanity would last another decade.

I believe that it’s time to remove Trump from office and roll the dice with (former Marine Corporal) JD Vance.

From Ben Kreider in Lancaster Township, Pennsylvania

Maine Writer P.S. Senator Susan Collins where are you❓

Donald Trump signed a useless piece of paper called a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran but there is no strategic value to his surrender

An interesting point of view. In summary, the MOU Donald Trump signed is a useless piece of paper.  If Iran can outlast the Trumpzi crumbling administration, the MOU will be as useless as used toilet paper.  Published in Al Jazeera by Adolfo Franco
Opinion|US-Israel war on Iran

The US-Iran MoU: A mirage of an agreement

Both Washington and Tehran know that current deal will not lead to lasting peace. It is merely a strategic pause.

The memorandum of understanding (MoU) the United States and Iran signed is not a peace treaty. It is not even a credible framework for one. A vocal chorus of critics has rushed to portray it as a humiliation – evidence that Donald Trump was manoeuvred into negotiations and extracted a poor deal from a regime that outplayed him.

That reading mistakes a mirage for reality. The Trump administration entered these talks with a precise understanding of what the Iranian regime is, what it wants and what any agreement with it is actually worth. No one in that negotiating team harbors the illusion that Tehran intends to honor commitments that constrain its core ambitions. The MоU is not a peace settlement. It is a mutually understood pause – a tactical intermission chosen by both sides for reasons that have nothing to do with trust and everything to do with time.

The new MoU does not signal that Iran has changed. Its calculus remains what it has always been – survival and expansion, pursued through whatever tactical posture the moment requires. When pressure mounts, Iran negotiates. When pressure eases, Iran advances. Its negotiators are, by all available evidence, prepared to offer assurances they have no intention of keeping. This is not a failure of diplomatic craftsmanship. This is simply the nature of any negotiation with a regime like Iran’s.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Iranian nuclear program. As a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has repeatedly committed to transparent cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. It has repeatedly broken those commitments, blocking inspections, constructing clandestine enrichment facilities, destroying evidence and systematically deceiving the international community. The pattern is not one of occasional noncompliance. It is deliberate, sustained deception in pursuit of a single unwavering objective: the acquisition of a nuclear weapon (although Iran denies this accusation).

A state genuinely committed to civilian nuclear energy has no need for a vast and enormously expensive domestic enrichment program. Nuclear fuel can be purchased – from Russia, among others – at a fraction of the cost and without the international confrontation such a program inevitably provokes.

Iran has chosen the far more costly and dangerous path for one reason: Enrichment is not a means to an end, but the end itself. Its rulers are committed to a nuclear weapon, and that commitment has survived changes in personnel, shifts in rhetoric and decades of pressure.

What this MoU represents is a mutually understood strategic pause, a breathing space both parties have chosen, for entirely different reasons, over immediate confrontation. Iran needs economic relief. A regime facing internal decay and a depleted treasury has strong incentives to buy time, replenish its resources and wait out what it calculates to be a finite window.

Tehran is acutely aware that Trump has roughly two and a half years remaining in office. From its perspective, survival through that period is itself a form of victory.

Washington’s calculus is different in kind. Keeping the Strait of Hormuz open is an immediate, non-negotiable goal – a choked strait means an energy price shock with global consequences. Beyond that, the US has its own repositioning to accomplish. Military inventories drawn down through recent operations are being restocked. Strategic options are being preserved and expanded.

A pause that enables that rebuilding, while avoiding a premature confrontation on unfavorable terms, is not a concession. It is preparation.

The question for Tehran is not whether American resolve exists but whether it can be outlasted. That is a wager the Iranian regime has made before and lost.

The international community will, as usual, observe from a careful distance. Many nations will urge Iran to be stopped while taking few steps to stop it, criticizing US action and inaction with equal facility.

Trump understands this dynamic. It is the foundation of his approach to alliances – the insistence that partners bear proportionate burdens rather than simply drawing on American resolve while contributing little of their own.

The MoU will not resolve the Iranian problem. It was not designed to. When its terms expire or when Iran decides it has served its purpose, the nuclear program will resume its advance, the proxies will be better resourced, and the Strait of Hormuz will once again become a flashpoint.

That outcome is not a possibility. Given Iran’s record, it is a near-certainty. 

Progressive voters finally being heard because we are enraged by Donald John Trump's draconian policies

Of the three New York City congressional candidates endorsed by Zohran Mamdani in Tuesday’s primary, Darializa Avila Chevalier was the weakest.

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Michelle Goldberg: Democrats Are Done With Caution

A sociology Ph.D. student and doctrinaire leftist who has never held elected office, she was running against Adriano Espaillat, head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. He’d built an uptown political machine known as the “squadriano” in New York’s 13th District, which includes Washington Heights, Harlem and parts of the Bronx. Many of the area’s neighborhoods are reliably progressive but not known for their radicalism. After all, in the last presidential election, Donald Trump improved his margin in the Bronx by double digits, one of the largest swings in the country, in part because of voter angst about crime and migration.

Last week, in an interview with the New York Editorial Board, a group of veteran journalists who question local political and civic leaders, Avila Chevalier said she opposed all deportations, even those of violent criminals. A prison abolitionist, she either couldn’t or wouldn’t answer repeated questions about whether murderers should be incarcerated. Both she and Espaillat are Dominican, and on the morning of the election, she walked off a popular Spanish-language radio show after she was asked about old tweets, including some that seemed to disdain Dominican nationalism. (In other since-deleted tweets, Avila Chevalier cursed at Kamala Harris, called Joe Biden a “rapist” and derided his support for Ukraine as “bullying Russia.”) Her name was notably absent from a get-out-the-vote message that Bernie Sanders posted for other progressives on Tuesday.

But in the end, Avila Chevalier won, carried to a narrow victory by the left-wing tsunami that created landslides for the other congressional candidates Mamdani endorsed, Brad Lander and Claire Valdez. She will almost certainly become the most left-wing member of Congress, and Republicans are sure to try to make her the face of the Democratic Party.

New York’s primary demonstrated the astonishing political power of the mayor and of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization that he, Avila Chevalier and Valdez are all members of. It suggests that Democratic voters have been radicalized by the horrors of Donald Trump’s second presidency and infuriated ❗by their leaders’ failure to contain him. And, it’s a sign that after the savagery of the war on Gaza, support for Israel has become toxic among large parts of the party’s base. 

Avila Chevalier was an organizer of the anti-Israel protest encampments at Columbia, whereas the American Israel Public Affairs Committee poured money into a super PAC supporting Espaillat.

The city, of course, is not particularly representative of the rest of the country. New York’s electorate is more progressive, and Mamdani, who has brought a joyful, dynamic energy to the city’s governance, has a unique clout. The same night that his slate dominated in New York, AIPAC’s preferred candidate, Adrian Boafo, won a congressional primary in Maryland.

Still, progressive outsider candidates are surging in many parts of America. There’s now a democratic socialist mayor in Seattle, and a democratic socialist just won the primary to become mayor of Washington. 

In Maine, Graham Platner — who, like Avila Chevalier, had a vituperative social media history — easily defeated the state’s governor, Janet Mills, for the Senate nomination. Voters in Maine’s rural Second District, which Trump won by nine points, chose a progressive, Matt Dunlap, to run for the House seat of an outgoing moderate Democrat, Jared Golden, defeating Joe Baldacci, the candidate endorsed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

This leftist momentum is a bullish sign for progressives in other Democratic primaries, like Abdul El-Sayed, running for Senate in Michigan, and Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, running for governor in Wisconsin. Both are either ahead or competitive in recent polls.

That means the 2026, midterms could end up being a giant national experiment that tests the populist left’s theory of victory. 

For years, it has argued that Democrats have failed because, in thrall to corporate interests, they let themselves become the party of the status quo. Unable or unwilling to galvanize voters with an economically progressive alternative to the right, they’ve offered only timid, business-friendly incrementalism. Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited Avila Chevalier to run for Congress, told me that too often, the Democratic Party “tries to stymie big and bold ideas” in favor of technocratic pragmatism. “I think what voters have really made clear, particularly this past year, is that they are desperate for bold, visionary leadership,” he said.

This spring, I met Hong, a member of the Wisconsin Assembly from Madison, when she was visiting New York. She argued that winning the general election would require motivating voters who feel “disenfranchised or angry at the Democratic Party” with an anti-establishment, working-class campaign. 

Electability, said Hong, is subjective. “We have to take a step back and look at the current political moment and where voters are at and what they care about,” she said. “Who is the candidate that actually responds with a solution that they believe Who is the candidate that presents a vision that they will see themselves in❓”

Hong is right that many voters can’t be mapped onto a neat left-right spectrum. They judge candidates on a whole range of axes — whether they seem like normal people or career politicians, insiders or outsiders, populists or elitists. That’s why there are voters who went from Sanders to Trump, or Trump to Mamdani.

Still, as someone who desperately wants to see Republicans beaten, I’ll admit I’m anxious watching Democrats stake so much on a strategy of left-wing audacity. After all, progressive overreach has backfired in the past.

The D.S.A., remember, also surged during Trump’s first presidency. In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a D.S.A. member recruited by Justice Democrats, stunned the political world with her upset victory over the longtime Democratic congressman Joseph Crowley, and was joined in the House by a fellow D.S.A. member, Rashida Tlaib, and the like-minded progressive Ilhan Omar. Other D.S.A. members won local offices nationwide.

Mainstream Democrats rushed to ally themselves with the left’s insurgent energy. Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker signed onto Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill. 

When the Black Lives Matter protests exploded in the summer of 2020, Harris sent out a fund-raising appeal to bail out people who were arrested protesting in Minnesota. Though Joe Biden beat out Sanders for the presidential nomination, once elected, he worked closely with progressives, adopting ambitious climate policies, expanding the safety net and welcoming migrants. Before the war in Gaza made him a villain to many on the left, he was hailed as the most progressive president in a generation.

All that gives the left a renewed opportunity to wield power. The question is what lessons leftists have learned from the past dismal decade. As both candidate and mayor, Mamdani has usually embodied a practical, optimistic sort of left politics — a sewer socialism — laser focused on New Yorkers’ material concerns. Avila Chevalier represents something different, an academic leftism rigid in its refusal to accept trade-offs or make concessions to ordinary people’s moral intuitions. One approach is a recipe for building, the other for backlash. The danger is that a movement flush with success may think it doesn’t have to choose.

Then came collapse. During the Biden administration, the D.S.A. hemorrhaged members amid sectarian infighting, especially over Palestine. In 2021, some factions tried to expel the recently elected representative Jamaal Bowman for being insufficiently anti-Israel, and the national D.S.A. unendorsed Ocasio-Cortez.

At the same time, centrists swung against a left that had indulged its purist tendencies. Bowman would go on to lose a primary fight to a more moderate challenger, as would Representative Cori Bush, the former Black Lives Matter activist who’d been endorsed by the D.S.A. In the 2024, election, the vast majority of American counties shifted right.

Andrabi attributes Democratic failure to Harris’s uninspiring centrism, and there were certainly people who declined to vote for her out of disgust with Biden’s unstinting support for Israel. But as Blueprint Research has found, swing voters who backed Trump overwhelmingly saw Harris as soft on crime and the border, and “too focused on identity politics.” She was weighed down in part by positions she took amid the frothy left-wing ascendance of 2020.

Maybe this time will be different. The electorate is furious, and now it’s the right that represents a hated status quo. 

Much of the Democratic establishment has proved itself feckless; a candidate as flawed as Avila Chevalier could win only against a complacent political machine that’s lost touch with the people it’s supposed to represent. Calls to abolish ICE were once seen as fringe, but since Trump has turned the agency into something akin to a personal militia, in most recent surveys, a plurality of voters want to scrap it. (Maine Writer- Does Senator Susan Collins know this❓)

All that gives the left a renewed opportunity to wield power. The question is what lessons leftists have learned from the past dismal decade. As both candidate and mayor, Mamdani has usually embodied a practical, optimistic sort of left politics — a sewer socialism — laser focused on New Yorkers’ material concerns. Avila Chevalier represents something different, an academic leftism rigid in its refusal to accept trade-offs or make concessions to ordinary people’s moral intuitions. One approach is a recipe for building, the other for backlash. The danger is that a movement flush with success may think it doesn’t have to choose.