Donald Trump and maga Republicans dug themselves into a shithole war and they cannot get out unless they lie about it

Echo opinion letter to the letter of the Columbian news:

Trump digs a hole for U.S.❗

Donald Trump buried himself in a big hole at the behest of the Israelis and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Now, the Republicans are spinning that the military Marines on Kharg Island, located off the coast of Iran, are not “boots on the ground.” ❓A dangerous typical Republican lie 🤥😔❗ .

Trump is whining loudly that “nobody will help me❗” Those he insulted in Europe told him it’s “his war.” I love that!

Yesterday, I paid 💲67 to fill my Subaru — 💲5.20 a gallon 💲❗at Shell. Republicans also state that doesn’t matter. ❓ 

Midterm elections this year will surely stick it to Republicans. (Maine Writer- if voters will be allowed to get to our polling places....❗❗) For the GOP, the only hope is to rig the election, cheat in other words. Cheating is a one-way street with Trump and Republicans —😟 only they get to do it. 

From Bill Kelley in Yacolt, Washington State, published in the Columbian 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are funding very unpopular and expensive failed military operations

 Opinion echo by Nicholas Kristof published in The New York Times:  The 💲1.3-Million-a-Minute War. And no plan for the undefined expensive military operations❗

Let’s ponder for a moment the vast sums that we’re pouring into the war with Iran.

The Pentagon has requested 💲200 billion (more than $1,400 per American household) to fund the war, but even that understates the total cost.

Linda Bilmes, a Harvard expert on financing war, told me that most of the costs will arrive later. 

For example, any soldier who develops a medical disorder or aggravates an existing one will receive lifelong benefits and medical care. If today’s troops claim such benefits at the same rate as those who participated in the 1990-91 gulf war, that alone would eventually cost at least 💲600 billion, Bilmes said. Not to mention, of course, the human toll of all of this.

All told, she expects this Iran war to cost taxpayers more than 💲1 trillion.

Here are some ideas of what the war money could be used for instead. My calculations are conservative, based on Pentagon reporting that the first six days of the war cost 💲11.3 billion — and even that incomplete tally amounted to more than 💲1.3 million a minute.

• For a bit more than two weeks of this war, we could offer free college education to every American family earning less than 💲125,000 annually, at a cost of around 💲30 billion a year.

• For less than three weeks of war, or 💲35 billion, we could run a nationwide pre-K program for 3- and 4-year-olds.

• For 💲75 million, about an hour’s worth of war, we could provide three books free to every child in America who is living under the poverty line, according to Kyle Zimmer of First Book, a nonprofit that works on early literacy. Research suggests that books like these can help get children reading and improve their outcomes.

• A woman dies in the United States every two hours, on average, from cervical cancer. Screening all uninsured women who need it would cost perhaps 💲1 billion and could save hundreds of lives, according to Dr. Linda Eckert, a cervical cancer expert at the University of Washington. That’s less than 13 hours of the war bill.

• We could get glasses to all 2.3 million low-income schoolchildren in the United States who need them but don’t have them. The base cost would be about 💲300 million, according to Vision to Learn, a nonprofit that does this work. The bill would be what we spend on four hours of this war.

• For about 💲34 billion a year, less than three weeks of war, we could restore health insurance subsidies that the Trump administration let expire last year. One analysis predicted an additional 8,800 preventable American deaths as a result.

The war money would save even more lives if we allocated part of it abroad. Indeed, we spent more on the first three days of war than we spent (💲4 billion) on all humanitarian aid in 2025. Consider what we could achieve internationally:

• For $400 million or less, a bit more than five hours of war, we could deworm all children in need worldwide, according to Evidence Action, a nonprofit that works on deworming. This would result in stronger, healthier children and adults.

• For 💲380 million, less than five hours of war, we could provide vitamin A supplementation for the 190 million children who need it. Helen Keller Intl, a nonprofit engaged in this work, says this would prevent up to 480,000 child deaths each year and virtually eliminate blindness from vitamin A deficiency.

• About one day’s worth of war spending could save more than 350,000 lives from malaria, through a rigorously studied screening and prevention program, according to Esther Duflo, an economist at M.I.T.’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

• For 💲4.3 billion, less than three days of the war bill, we could largely end the most terrible form of malnutrition, called severe wasting. That would save about 1.5 million children’s lives annually. We would accomplish something historic: For the first time in the history of humanity, large numbers of children would no longer be starving to death.

We have to know that numbers like this are never totally
reliable — but that’s true of military costs as well. George W. Bush’s administration in 2003 put the cost of the Iraq war at 💲40 billion; it ended up costing perhaps 💲3 trillion.

Moreover, my figures are based on only the initial costs of the Iran war. And even the estimate of 💲1 trillion for the full cost doesn’t include the bills for more expensive gasoline we’re now paying and for pricier fertilizer and food that are likely soon.

If we reallocated this war spending to needs at home and abroad, Americans would have access to school from pre-K to college and would have health insurance, and large numbers of children worldwide would not starve to death — and we would still have billions of dollars left over.

We can cough up the cash when there’s political will, such as to drop bombs halfway around the world. But where is the political will to get people health care or education, to build rather than to destroy❓

I’ve chosen my 2026 win-a-trip winner, Brunella Tipismana Urbano, and she’ll join me on a reporting trip this year (possibly to Bangladesh). Tipismana Urbano has had a remarkable journey already: She grew up in Peru, taught herself English and will graduate this year from Yale with almost perfect grades while working as a student journalist, writing for Bloomberg and penning a novel. The runners-up are Kaja Andrić of New York University, Michal Ruprecht of the Wayne State University School of Medicine and Jessica Sachs of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Congratulations to all.

Postscript by the author Nicholas Kristof: In this column, I try to make the point that the military toolbox, while essential, is an exceptionally expensive one (in both dollars and lives alike) — and we shouldn't pour money into wars without pondering how else that money could be used to build rather than destroy. The 💲2 trillion that went to the Iraq War, for example, could have gone to creating nationwide pre-K and child care, or universal health care, or free college. So now, as we pour billions of dollars into the Iran War, where do you dream the money could go instead❓

Maine Writer- And Republicans are completely complicit with this "no way to win" wasteful stratagy.

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

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

An echo essay published in The Atlantic by Tom Nichols.

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

Printed in Nazi font

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

Bovino as an evil ICE Nazi re-enactor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Echo opinion letter publshed in TRIBLive: 

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

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

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

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

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

If we do it may be too late. #ImpeachTrumpNow

(Where is Senator Susan Collins❓)

From Leonard Mucci in Derry Township, Pennsylvania

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

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

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

The Impossible Predicament of the Uninsured:  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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