Donald Trump and religious zealots stopped religious refugee immigration. This policy is not Christian denying our nation's religious history

 Trump’s refugee policy hurts people fleeing religious persecution.

Editorial published in the Boston Globe by the editorial board.

Despite priding itself on religious liberty, the White House is on track to admit no refugees fleeing countries with a record of religious persecution.

In a sadly 😢dubious milestone, the White House is on track to resettle zero refugees fleeing countries with a record of religious persecution in the fiscal year that ended Wednesday, according to an analysis by World Relief and Open Doors US, two Christian humanitarian organizations that advocate for persecuted Christians. At a time when religious persecution remains at high levels worldwide, that’s a shameful record.

Persecution affects many different religious groups, including Christians, Muslims, Jews, Yazidis, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians, among others. Nearly 5,000 Christians alone have been killed due to their religious beliefs in the past year, according to Open Doors US.

Refugee resettlements are down sharply overall through the 2026 fiscal year ending Wednesday. In January of 2025, Donald Trump suspended the refugee program entirely, and in September of 2025, he set the 2026 fiscal year admissions ceiling to an extremely small number of 7,500 refugees before raising it later to 17,500, with white Afrikaners given priority. Meanwhile, the US State Department has not released its annual report on religious freedom conditions worldwide since 2023.

Since the failure to accept Jewish refugees before the Holocaust caused a reckoning over asylum policies in Western countries, the United States has played a significant role in accepting refugees facing persecution based on race, religion, or nationality. Since 1975, the US has resettled more than 3 million people fleeing some kind of serious persecution, and the Refugee Act, which led to the US Refugee Program, was passed in 1980.

As of December 2025, the United Nations estimated that there are 117.8 million people worldwide displaced due to persecution, violence, or other human rights violations. About 41.6 million of those are classified as refugees by the UN. Roughly 39 percent are children, and 70 percent came from just six countries: Afghanistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela.

Often times, religion is tightly tied together with ethnic, racial, or social persecution, so there is little tracking of specific types of persecution, World Relief vice president of advocacy and policy Matthew Soerens told the editorial board. However, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom has identified 18 countries whose governments have engaged in “systemic, ongoing, and egregious” violations of religious freedom, including Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, North Korea, and China.

During Trump’s first administration, the White House expressed prioritization of religious refugees. In a 2019, speech on religious freedom, Trump stated that “No matter the case, America will always be a voice for victims of religious persecution everywhere. No matter where you go, you have a place in the United States of America.”

But his actions haven’t matched his words. World Relief and Open Doors US said the failure to admit a single religious refugee would be a modern first. Along with nearly 3,500 other evangelical Christians, they petitioned the White House last week to reopen the refugee program more broadly.

But the president has shown little sign of changing course. Last week, the Trump administration moved to keep the cap at 17,500 refugees, still prioritizing white Afrikaners, according to reports.

Additionally, the administration allowed nearly $1 billion in funding, much of which would have gone toward a Health and Human Services account supporting refugees and asylum seekers, to expire this week.

“When federal support for this work falls short, the need doesn’t disappear. It falls to the schools, congregations, and local communities that have to step up in the absence of federal leadership,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of refugee resettlement nonprofit Global Refuge, said in a statement.

Ara Torosian, an Iranian American pastor in West Los Angeles, came to the United States as a refugee fleeing religious persecution for his faith. “America did not ask me to stop being Iranian; it gave me the freedom to stop being afraid,” he told the report’s authors.  “If America stops being a refuge for people running from tyranny, we lose something far greater than a policy: We lose part of who we are.”

Compelling message from the Maine Holocaust Human Rights Center in Augusta

Deeply Grateful essay:  Thank You for Such a Meaningful Annual Celebration from the Maine Holocaust and Human Rights Center.

We gathered at the Portland Museum of Art for an evening rooted in gratitude, community, and a shared commitment to making Maine a more welcoming and compassionate place for all.

As the sun set over the Museum's Sculpture Garden, longtime friends reconnected, new relationships began, and people from communities across Maine came together to celebrate one another and the extraordinary work happening throughout our state.

At the heart of the evening were this year’s Gerda Haas Award recipients: the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, In Her Presence, and Hope Acts. Their leaders, Sue Roche, Mufalo Chitam, Claudette Ndayininahaze and Madeleine Saucier reminded us that meaningful change is never the work of one person. Rather, it is made possible by communities of people who choose, again and again, to stand alongside one another. Each of our honorees echoed similar themes: the importance of building supportive, interconnected, close communities where everyone contributes and thrives. The daily work it takes to do this successfully. They offered heartfelt thank-yous to the many, many people who bring about change while noting the urgency of everyone’s participation. Maybe its a conversation, holding open a door, seeing the talents, being curious and open-hearted. It takes all of us, helping as we are able. As Mufalo said, “I accept this award with profound gratitude—but I do not accept it alone. I accept it on behalf of the MIRC team, our coalition partners, and the communities whose courage guides our work every day. This award carries their fingerprints. Their voices are in this room.”

That connection to the next generation was especially meaningful when we celebrated three remarkable Maine students. Lauren Jordan of Noble High School received the $1,000 Lawrence Alan Spiegel Remembrance Scholarship for her essay, More Than Memories. The essay expresses her long interest in the Holocaust, both in school and in conversations with her grandfather—and a growing sense of personal responsibility in welcoming classmates into community. Nela Parker of Cony High School and Grace Jiang of Dexter Regional High School were recognized with the Mathilde Schlossberger Outstanding Student of the Year Award for work exploring remembrance, responsibility, and Jewish resistance. Nela's story Have You Seen Sofia? explores how it feels when a close friend is taken away by ICE. Grace's picture is an abstract depiction of her thoughts and feeling abut the courage and spirituality of resistance. Read more about them on our website.We were also honored to recognize photographer and author Jack Montgomery with the Distinguished Service Award for his work creating From the Holocaust to Maine: Testimonies of the Survivors. Through his portraits, the personal testimonies of Maine Holocaust survivors, and presentations across the state, Jack has helped preserve these histories and bring them to new generations.

We ended the evening together over coffee and dessert, reflecting on the people and stories we had heard. 

What stayed with me was not simply what we celebrated, but who filled the room: people committed to belonging, human dignity, justice, and one another.

To everyone who joined us—to our honorees and to all who helped make the evening possible—thank you. I am deeply grateful for this community and for the many ways you continue to carry the HHRC’s mission forward.

With gratitude, 💙 From: Tam Huynh, Executive Director

Donald Trump's next television show on Trump TV can be a sequel to "dumb and dumber"

To the editor — I have had the privilege to have Barack Obama as my president. And I have had the despair to have convicted felon Donald Trump as president (NOT my president, just the president). Fake president.
Echo opinion letter published in the Yakima Herald Republic:

Petty ❗— that’s the best description of Trump. Petty, petulant, vindictive.  Trump has scuttled dam water agreements designed to help save salmon. Because he doesn’t care. It’s not

💲💵money paid to him.💥

Trump has retaliated against news agencies, terminating their access to the White House press offices. In response, the news should stop reporting on Trump, period. He will shrivel up and die without constant attention. Let him. Let him throw tantrums and have people not know about them or respond to them.


Trump says America will never be a communist country; he never says that America is already a country run by an autocrat.

Trump might be the worst and dumbest president the U.S. has ever had. He couldn’t see that tariffs would obviously raise prices for us taxpayers. Or that blocking the Strait of Hormuz would result in soaring oil prices. Dumb and dumber.

From Michael Martin in Selah, Washington state

Senator Susan Collins falsely claims to have helped Maine health care but she obviously missed the hospital in her own hometown neighborhood

Echo investigative report published in The Maine Monitor by John Forbes:  In addition to losing six nurses in four months, the emergency department no longer has a designated person to check in patients at night, nurses said.  (Just my opinion here, but having worked ER in a small Maine hospital, the utilization at night is very low but the issue is security. Eliminating this position does not provide a buffer between the patient and the clinical team. Frankly, just the thought gives me a creepy feeling.)

About half of the nurses in the emergency department at Northern Maine Medical Center in Fort Kent have resigned, straining emergency care for patients at the 25-bed critical access hospital and worsening staff morale, said Ami Maxwell, a registered nurse in the emergency department and leader of the hospital’s nursing union.

In June, the emergency department had 13 registered nurses. Ten worked full time, and three worked flexible, per-diem shifts as needed. Since then, five full-time nurses and one per-diem nurse have left the hospital or put in their notice, said Maxwell and Kim Paradis, a nurse of 24 years who worked her last shift at the Fort Kent hospital on Saturday, Sept. 26.

Maxwell said the emergency department has taken on three contract nurses so far. Last week, Maxwell said, she trained the travel nurse who replaced her former coworker — a fellow nurse who was also a close friend.

Still, Maxwell and Paradis said they are concerned about patient safety, particularly overnight, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

The hospital’s emergency department is staffed during this time by two registered nurses, one nurse practitioner or physician assistant, one physician, one security officer and a nurse supervisor, who does not take on an assigned patient load, according to the hospital’s statement.

Sime said a small number of patients come through the department overnight. It averages 19 patient visits per day — and one to two patient visits at night.

Last week, the hospital told employees it would cut overnight staff in the emergency department further, moving from two registered nurses to one nurse and a nurse technician, Maxwell said. The hospital scrapped the change, however, after criticism from staff, she said.

“[It is] not a model we are moving to,” Sime confirmed.

The hospital previously had only one registered nurse on staff overnight until 2023, when it added another nurse, according to the hospital’s statement.

Tension between the hospital’s administration and nursing staff has remained palpable after nurses voted to unionize and join the Maine State Nurses Association more than two years ago, Maxwell and Paradis said. Since then, nurses alleged intimidation and retaliation from the hospital, according to reporting by the Bangor Daily News.

After they unionized, communication between nursing staff and hospital administrators became severely limited, and the workplace became more toxic, Paradis said.

“I just didn’t recognize the place that I once worked at,” she said of her decision to leave the hospital.

Hospital spokespeople did not respond to questions from The Monitor about whether they agreed that there was low morale and how the hospital aims to treat employees.

The hospital and nurses agreed on a contract in May. The contract set out a standardized process to address staff grievances, protections from being fired without just cause and a pay raise, but not the nurse-to-patient ratios the union wanted, Maxwell said.

Financial challenges have added strain.

Northern Maine Medical Center maintained in its statement that its financial position has “vastly improved, year over year.” However, the hospital ended its 2025 fiscal year with 💲3.6 million in losses — its largest revenue loss since at least 2002, excluding 2005, and 2006, when data was not available, according to its tax forms. The hospital brought in more than 💲84.8 million in revenue, but its expenses topped $88.4 million in 2025.

It also lost 💲18,000 in fiscal year 2024, and 💲3.5 million in 2023. The hospital had a positive net income of 💲5.3 million in 2022.

The hospital said it has taken steps in response, including converting to critical access hospital status, a designation that helps rural health care facilities stay viable through special Medicaid reimbursements. It said it has “developed strategic partnerships to share costs.” And it has grown some specialty services for emergency patients.

In 2023, the hospital shuttered the obstetrics unit, citing a continuing decline in the birth rate alongside staff shortages at the hospital, following a similar trend across the state. Officials told The Monitor the decision was not financially related.

A year later, the hospital abruptly closed its child adolescent psychology unit to cut costs. The decision came as a shock to nurses, who told the Bangor Daily News they were not warned of the change. The closure prompted calls from nursing staff for more transparency from administrators.

In addition to the nurses, the emergency department’s manager abruptly left in June, the nurses said. Both Maxwell and Paradis said the hospital did not provide an explanation why.

“Everybody wants to leave,” Maxwell said.

Then, on September 6, the hospital eliminated the waiting room clerk position responsible for checking patients into the emergency department at night, Maxwell and Paradis said.

Now the remaining nurses and other staff — who are trained on the registration process, according to the hospital — are responsible for checking in patients who may be experiencing an emergency. The next-closest emergency room is in Caribou, nearly an hour’s drive away.

When a patient walks in through the doors of the emergency department between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., an electronic ding sounds in the back area where nurses and other staff are working, to alert them to come to the waiting room, Maxwell said.

The dual responsibilities are a danger to patients, she said, because nurses can’t respond to multiple significant traumas at the same time.

“We care about our patients, and they’re asking us to do things that we know are wildly unsafe,” Maxwell said.

The Maine Monitor asked the hospital what it was doing to ensure patient safety in the wake of the clerk’s departure.

In a written statement, the hospital responded, “Northern Maine Medical Center maintains a staffing model designed to provide safe, continuous emergency care 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ensuring patients have access to care at all times.”

The hospital did not respond to The Monitor’s request for an interview with Chief Nursing Officer Jennifer Albert.

Hospital spokesperson Pam Sime declined to comment on personnel matters. However, she said the hospital hires contract staff in the event of an unexpected staff departure to maintain coverage until a replacement is recruited.

Donald Trump tariffs are failing to achieve job growth in the United States- Mexico is prime example for how to work with other middle world partners

This essay is part of “The New World Disorder,” a series exploring the disintegration of the postwar international system and how countries are adjusting as America steps aside.

Echo opinion essay published in The New York Times by Mary Beth Sheridan, who writes extensively about trade in Mexico and Latin America. She reported from El Paso, Texas and Juárez, Mexico.

No one expected the artificial intelligence revolution to appear here, on the edge of the Mexican city of Juárez, across from a patch of tiny homes where Roger Vilchis sells Tostitos and Coca-Cola from a roadside stand. His neighborhood is all dust and heat, with dogs sleeping in the dirt roads and norteño music bouncing through the air. A sign on a chain-link fence warns: “It is prohibited to throw garbage or dead animals here.”

So when a long white building started rising a few years ago on a tract of land the size of several football fields, Mr. Vilchis, 25, figured it might be a shopping center. It turned out to be a factory — and not just any factory. To the astonishment of the neighbors, the plant belonged to Inventec, a Taiwanese giant with over $20 billion a year in sales that makes servers for artificial intelligence. No A.I. backlash in this blue-collar barrio: “We saw it as good,” Mr. Vilchis told me. “We realized there will be more work.”

The Inventec facility, one of several new server factories in this desert valley bordering Texas, is a looming testament to how Mexico is surviving — and even challenging — the Trump administration’s escalating assault on free trade. At a moment when the post-World War II global trade architecture is teetering, Mexico is testing the notion that the United States can unilaterally decouple from the rest of the world.

While “free trade is no longer the reality we are living,” as Mexico’s economy secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, put it recently, Mexico and other middle powers are banking on their competitive advantages and indispensability to the U.S. economy to withstand the Trump administration’s tariff campaign. 

While Washington throws its might into dominating the global A.I. market, Mexico has become an increasingly important supplier for America’s artificial intelligence boom, providing more than one-third of the United States’ imported computer servers.

This growth has accelerated despite Donald Trump’s best efforts to replace America’s longtime free-trade philosophy with economic nationalism. On July 24, after the Supreme Court struck down the president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, the administration introduced fresh tariffs on goods from more than 80 countries, citing an obscure law against unfair trade practices. 

Traffic at the border as cars wait to cross into El Paso. Credit...Ingrid Leyva for The New York Times

A month later, Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on an array of Canadian exports, which took effect after trade negotiations collapsed.

In all of these moves, Trump has broken sharply with a U.S. policy consensus dating back to the post-World War II era: that international agreements to cut tariffs promote growth and stability. To Trump, free trade is not a tide lifting all boats; it is more like a hurricane, crashing into domestic manufacturing and killing jobs. 

Since he took office, average U.S. tariffs on imported goods have more than quadrupled, from 2.1 percent to almost 10 percent, according to the independent Tax Policy Center.

Mexico has not been exempt, enduring new tariffs on its cars, steel and aluminum — all critical exports. Trump dismissed the trade relationship, claiming that Mexico produces nothing the United States needs: “I mean, hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things.”

The numbers, as they often do with this administration, tell a different story. Mexico surpassed Canada as the United States’ biggest trade partner in 2024, and its lead over that country and China, ranked third, has only continued to grow. 

Supercharged by America’s data center build-out, Mexico’s exports of goods to the United States surged by 16 percent year-on-year in the first seven months of 2026 — to a record of nearly 💲359 billion. The burgeoning Mexican server industry has become a symbol of  Trump’s competing priorities: to establish U.S. dominance in artificial intelligence, but also to rein in trade deficits.

I traveled to Juárez in August to understand how Mexico and other middle powers are adapting to this more chaotic and disordered trade environment — and navigating these contradictions. 

Some governments have won reprieves from harsh U.S. tariffs by increasing investment in the United States — in Taiwan’s case, a stunning 💲250 billion for semiconductor plants and tech manufacturing — or further opening their markets to American goods. Several have agreed to other U.S. demands in a kind of quid pro quo; Mexico, for example, is subjecting foreign investment to an enhanced national-security review and ramping up cooperation against drug cartels.

But such concessions don’t tell the whole story. Donald Trump's effort to use tariffs to steer manufacturing back to the United States can only go so far; some economic paradigms are so entrenched that even Trump will have a hard time reversing them.

Nowhere is that clearer than in Juárez.

Decades ago, Juárez — just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas — was known for its cotton fields and quickie-divorce industry (Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe were among those who untied the knot here). Its transformation into an industrial powerhouse began in the 1960s, when the Mexican government created the “border industrialization” program, a scheme that allowed export-oriented assembly plants, or “maquiladoras,” to operate in a free-trade zone stretching along the Mexican border. 

By the late 1990s, when I began to visit Juárez as a reporter, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, had sparked an explosion of factories. Today the city is a sort of shop floor for American industry.

Trump has made no secret of his disdain for NAFTA, which he  called “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere.” Throughout his first term, he negotiated a successor treaty to NAFTA known as the U.S.M.C.A, which included rules that were more favorable for U.S. automakers, among other things. During this term, he has refused to join Mexico and Canada in inking a 16-year renewal of the U.S.M.C.A, opting instead to delay while he seeks even tougher terms.

But the border has an economic logic all of its own. Unwinding U.S.-Mexico supply chains “would have a monumental economic and political cost,” Luis de la Calle, a former Mexican trade negotiator, told me. Many U.S. businesses — from A.I. data centers that get their servers from Juárez to Iowa farms exporting chicken feed — now rely on Mexico, as a supplier or customer. 

For American consumers, that trade has kept prices in check on strawberries, compact cars, pacemakers and countless other products. With U.S. inflation stuck above 3 percent, and the cost of fuel surging, Donald Trump only has so much room to maneuver — whatever his dreams of a fortress economy.

Indeed, Trump’s efforts to impose 25 percent tariffs on Mexico’s and Canada’s exports to the U.S. in March 2025, were met with an outcry from U.S. industry and a drop in the stock market. 

Days later, the White House changed its mind, exempting products that comply with U.S.M.C.A rules — accounting for about four-fifths of Mexico’s exports to the United States.

“Reality,” as Mr. de la Calle said, “will end up winning.”

César Ochoa has watched Mexico go global. He is one of Juárez’s city fathers, a 64-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair and a banker’s neat attire. His office is a hushed, wood-paneled sanctuary just off a noisy six-lane highway lined by tire shops, gas stations and burrito stands. Such is Juárez.

Mr. Ochoa arrived in the border city in 1992, a Mexican rancher’s son who had made his way to Harvard Law School. 

A few years earlier, Mexico had joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a rules-based system promoted by the U.S. government after World War II to lower tariffs and rebuild the global economy. (It would later evolve into the World Trade Organization.)

Since the 1940s, the Mexican government zealously protected its fledgling industrial sector, walling off imports with high tariffs and limiting foreign investment. But the result was inefficient, uncompetitive firms. By the 1990s, Mexico was desperate for economic growth and foreign capital.

When NAFTA took effect in 1994, “the gates were opened,” Mr. Ochoa recalled. Mexican stores were bursting with cheap TVs and stereos, Levi’s jeans and Snickers bars. American businesses rushed in to do joint ventures. Mr. Ochoa helped OfficeMax set up its Mexican franchises. Home Depot and Costco stores sprouted around the country; Walmart became one of Mexico’s biggest employers.

NAFTA offered U.S. companies access to Mexico’s fast-growing consumer market and a vast pool of workers who often earned less than 💲2 an hour. If the corporations benefited, many of their employees did not. 

In the United States, millions of American factory jobs vanished — a drop that many economists attribute more to automation and the China shock than NAFTA, but one that nonetheless caused deep pain in the Rust Belt and ultimately catalyzed support for Trump. In Mexico, shantytowns sprung up to house laborers pouring into the industrial boomtowns, and Juárez became infamous for the murders of hundreds of women.

The NAFTA border frenzy didn’t last. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, offering an even lower-cost work force and drawing tens of thousands of factory jobs away from Mexico. 

Then came a bloody drug war starting in the late 2000s. Still, Juárez persisted, developing a complex logistics and manufacturing infrastructure.

And bilateral trade continued to grow. Americans came to rely on the tomatoes, berries and avocados that are the fruits of Mexico’s longer growing season, while American grain producers, with their more advanced technology and colossal farms, became the suppliers of half the corn consumed in Mexico. 

Car parts zipped back and forth from Mexico to America to Canada in a three-country assembly of vehicles. In 2020, a startled Pentagon had to appeal to Mexico to open factories that were closed during the pandemic, and help the U.S. maintain critical supply chains for its defense contractors.

Thousands of white buses now rumble through Juárez each day, delivering workers to factories. Scores of major international firms operate big factories, and smaller manufacturers can now open plants in a matter of weeks, thanks to the system of so-called shelter companies that provide a vast array of services — leasing factory space, hiring employees, handling import-export permits, and even stamping out thousands of tortillas for hungry workers.

“Geography is destiny,” said Mr. Ochoa. The trade momentum, he said, isn’t determined solely by the terms of the next agreement. “It’s driven by the needs of the U.S. market.”

If Juárez’s rise was powered by American corporations, the current boom belongs to the Taiwanese.

As trade tensions mounted between the United States and China, a wave of companies have “near-shored” factories reliant on lower-cost labor from Asia to Mexico. Today, four of Taiwan’s manufacturing giants — Foxconn, Inventec, Wistron and Pegatron — have operations in Juárez.

Initially, this so-called Taiwanese cluster pumped out goods like iPhones and Dell computers. But in the last few years, the factories have pivoted, amid exploding demand for technology for artificial intelligence and cloud computing. According to local officials and current and former employees, and confirmed by the state government, the companies now make the servers that fill the data centers of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other companies, taking advantage of duty-free entry to the U.S. market under the U.S.M.C.A. Last year, computing technology became Mexico’s largest export. So far, Trump has refrained from imposing tariffs on those goods, given the economic and strategic importance of A.I. (Or, as he recently branded it: “superintelligence.”)

Taiwanese firms are also investing north of the border, lured by incentives from both the Biden and Trump administrations. TSMC, which makes the majority of the world’s advanced semiconductor chips, plans to plow 💲265 billion into several massive factories in Arizona. As the United States focused on producing high-end chips, Mexico’s well-established infrastructure was ready to build more basic, complementary electronics, like servers. Over the decades, the Juárez factories “enabled us to train these incredible engineers and technicians,” Pancho Uranga, a vice president at Foxconn, told me.

Today, more than one-third of college and tech-school students in Chihuahua, the state including Juárez, are studying science, technology, engineering or math. Officials have poured millions of dollars into the construction of two tech centers in the city, which will offer residents training in machine learning, robotics and other skills.

Despite the excitement building at the prospect of an A.I. windfall, so far the boom has been a mixed blessing. 

Unlike the Mexican vehicle industry, which generates around one million jobs and has given rise to a large domestic auto-parts industry, the server plants employ relatively few people — and a lot of machines. And the expensive servers, which cost anywhere from around half a million dollars to 💲7 million apiece, are pumping up the Mexican trade surplus with the United States, as Trump rails against bilateral trade imbalances. (He sees them as a sign the United States is being “ripped off,” a view most economists reject.) 

Now, to avoid tariffs on other critical industries, Mexican officials are searching for ways to cool down the red-hot server exports. But any such effort would most likely hurt the A.I. giants currently keeping the U.S. economy afloat.

The Taiwanese keep a low profile in Juárez. My requests for interviews at the factories — via company officials and press offices, Taiwan’s official representative in Mexico and state authorities — were met with polite noes. 

Most U.S. firms that contract the Taiwanese manufacturers to make their laptops, servers and other products impose strict nondisclosure rules. The U.S. companies reportedly buying the servers also declined to confirm they were made by firms in Juárez.

To be sure, Trump can claim credit for pressuring some manufacturers to move jobs back to the United States from Juárez and other cities. But the results are modest. Consider the case of Eric Wong, who manages factories in Juárez for two Hong Kong-based companies that produce goods for the U.S. market, including plastic Christmas wreaths, holiday lights and kiddie pools. 

Mr. Wong shifted some production of extension cables to a plant in the El Paso suburbs this year, after tariffs raised the cost of copper inports. But that only created around 100 jobs on the American side. Another 1,500 workers remain in Juárez, doing work that isn’t feasible at U.S. wages; clients like Walmart will only pay so much for a Christmas wreath.

Trump’s effort to dismantle free trade with Mexico faces not just economic headwinds, but political ones. So many constituencies benefit from the U.S.M.C.A. that it has generated rare, strong bipartisan support. The 41 U.S. southern border counties in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas collectively generate 💲1 trillion a year in gross domestic product, according to recent research. A 30-foot-high steel wall may snake across the edge of Juárez, a powerful sign of Trump’s efforts to cordon off the country. But it cannot obscure just how deeply intertwined the borderlands are.

On my trip to Juárez in August, I visited a notorious neighborhood called Anapra, on the western outskirts of the city. When I first reported from there in 1997, it was a dusty hellscape of treeless desert, where factory workers lived in shacks cobbled together from cardboard and wood. The air was thick with eye-watering smoke from brick makers burning tires and old oil to heat their ovens.

Today, the shacks have been replaced by small cinder-block homes with running water. There is an air-conditioned supermarket, as well as a gym, a hardware store and a restaurant called “Pink Sushi.” Living standards have risen, albeit not to the first world standards once predicted by NAFTA enthusiasts.

What’s even more striking are the townhouse developments where Juárez’s engineers and factory managers live, flanking strip malls with fancy taco joints and hair salons offering 💲200 color jobs. I did a double-take at a concrete monument: the Arc de Triomphe, or a copy of it, anyway. Behind it sat a gated community of mini-mansions called Campos Elíseos — Juárez’s own Champs-Élysées.

These are “islands of prosperity,” a local economist told me. It seemed an apt metaphor for how free trade has affected Mexico over the past few decades. A number of states in the north and central regions have flourished, but they are surrounded by an informal national economy in which around half of Mexican workers continue to toil in precarious jobs, with lower wages and few benefits. The government has hiked the minimum wage but failed to make the kind of structural reforms, like improving education and infrastructure and encouraging deeper local supply chains, that could allow these other areas to advance. 

Like in the United States, the fruits of globalization have disproportionately benefited better-educated workers. Yet exports are the most vibrant part of Mexico’s economy, and even leftist politicians who once opposed NAFTA — including President Claudia Sheinbaum — are eager to preserve free trade.

Mexico has so far resisted the worst of Trump’s trade war, thanks to its deep commercial ties with the United States and the preferential treatment its exports still receive through the U.S.M.C.A. 

Ms. Sheinbaum’s administration has been actively managing up, too, stressing its bona fides as an ally, and may yet persuade the U.S. president to lower tariffs. Mexican officials have expressed optimism that a new trade accord is near.

But one of the other core elements of the free trade agreements — certainty — has taken a beating. In Juárez, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment are on hold, awaiting the results of the U.S.M.C.A. talks. With Trump using tariffs as an all-purpose weapon — to press countries to curb drug trafficking, to lower their trade surpluses, to stop buying Russian oil — any agreement is subject to change.

In Juárez, the high-tech industry continues to grow, betting that the demands of the U.S. economy will prove more durable than the whims of one man. On the last day of my trip, a young commercial real estate agent named Juan Alberto Mayorga drove me around southeastern Juárez, pointing out manufacturing plants springing up. His firm had just sold one to Inventec: an airy building of nearly 386,000 square feet, almost as big as New York City’s Bryant Park, just down the street from the other Inventec plant.

The newly acquired site had been designed to hold not one but two mega-factories. Already, bulldozers and backhoes were scooping and pushing the sandy earth outside the building. The agent looked on happily, saying, “They’re certainly going to develop more.”

Mary Beth Sheridan is a journalist specializing in Latin America and a fellow at the Georgetown Americas Institute. She was the Mexico City bureau chief for The Washington Post from 2023 to 2025.

Donald Trump is a corrupt leader but maga Republicans line up in lock step formation to defend his immoral administration

It's unfortunate our nation's 250th anniversary occurred with corrupt Donald Trump in office. His approval rating is 32%. 

Echo opinion letter published in the Lexington Herald-Leader, a Kentucky newspaper:

Impeach the evil bastard❗

Any objective layman who doesn't agree with this assessment has a cognitive impairment.

Donald Trump is the worst president ever, devoid of any moral compass. Any objective layman who doesn't agree with this has a cognitive impairment. A 34-time convicted felon and accused violator of the emoluments clause, he must be expelled from office. What about the crypto scheme❓ After midterm elections, Congress must use the 25th Amendment. Democrats likely will control the House and Senate. Trump's revenge campaign is demented.

The rioting January 6 anarchists were pardoned, a black eye in our history. We are welcoming only White South African immigrants, with them being eligible for 💲4,500 in initial federal aid, clearly a racist agenda.

ICE and its racially evil profiling are disgusting. Soon, they'll be wearing shock gloves. Pre-election Trump stated there will be "no new wars." About 70% of Americans say the Iran war has hurt the U.S. What is the bloodshed's purpose? What is the exit strategy❓ The war has cost the U.S. 💲43.6 billion as of September. Casualties are at least 18 U.S. soldiers dead, over 800 U.S. soldiers injured, and around 3,600 Iranians killed, including more than 100 schoolchildren in a February bombing. The runaway freight train of national debt is $40 trillion, with a 💲4 trillion (BTW that's a number with 12 zeros❗) increase in the last year and a half. 

Like Trump's six bankruptcies, he is trashing the economy. His terrible tariffs have led to unchecked inflation and economic hardship. Grocery prices and the Consumer Price Index have continued to increase. Gas is about 💲4.50 per gallon, up from about 💲3.10 at the start of Trump's second term.

The rioting January 6th anarchists were pardoned, a black eye in our history. We are welcoming only White South African immigrants, with them being eligible for 💲4,500 in initial federal aid, clearly a racist agenda.

From Scott Riemenschneider, in Meyers Lake, Ohio

(Maine Writer post script:  Senator Susan Collins must read this letter.)

Donald Trump continues to spew a litany of lies without every showing proof for his fake news and evil accusations

On the long playlist of Donald Trump’s self-pitying complaints, one tune has blared louder than any other: Elections are rigged — against Republicans generally and him specifically.

The Most Laughable of Trump’s Many Lies

Echo opinion by Frank Bruni published in The New York Times

In 2016, he sang that song in advance of the actual voting, to discredit the Hillary Clinton victory that most polls and pundits predicted. In 2018, he sang it with an extra note of fear, no doubt realizing that Democrats’ takeover of the House meant trouble — which soon came in the form of two impeachments. 

In 2020, he sang it operatically, a Pavarotti of paranoia, and it served as the menacing soundtrack for the unconscionable violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

He has never given it a rest, and with the midterms almost upon us, it has been roaring from speakers here, there and everywhere. Although the Supreme Court stymied him, Donald Trump sought to limit mail-in voting, claiming that it wasn’t a vehicle for broader participation in elections but a scheme by which Democrats stole them. 

Trump's evil administration sued states for their voter rolls. His sycophantic F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, suggested a potential need for federal agents at polling sites to ensure “election security.”

What nonsense. And our saturation familiarity with it often numbs us to the revealing perversity of it. As much as anything else that Trump says or does, his insistence on corrupted elections reflects his dedication to fiction; his discipline and stamina in the service of a self-promoting lie; the willful gullibility of many of his supporters; and the inability of logic or evidence to pierce the armor of his and their delusions.

Go back to 2016, when it looked as if Hillary Clinton would defeat him. Trump keened that nothing about the election had been fair and nothing about its results could be trusted. Then something miraculous happened. He won. And what do you know? That outcome could be trusted.

Well, not exactly: Clinton’s advantage of nearly three million ballots in the popular vote was bogus, fraudulent, the rotten fruit of illegal voting and Democratic chicanery. But a party crooked and potent enough to tilt that tally that far in her favor somehow failed to master the more important math of the Electoral College, in which Trump’s victory was of course legitimate and righteous.

Got it. Makes exquisite sense.

Trump didn’t merely spout gibberish; he convened a panel to validate it. Anyone remember the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, better known as the “voter fraud commission”❓ Kris Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, took the wheel and proceeded to steer the effort absolutely nowhere. It never found the proof of fraud that it promised, and it sputtered to a stop less than a year after it theatrically revved its engine.

Evidence (or the lack thereof) is no match for Trump’s and his supporters’ persecution complexes. The astonishing sum of 💲787.5 million that Fox (Fake❗) News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems in 2023, to settle a defamation lawsuit was tantamount to an admission that the networks’ anchors and executives knew or suspected the bogusness of the stolen-election conspiracy theories, such as the corruption of Dominion’s machines, that (Fake❗) Fox promoted after Joe Biden’s 2020, victory. But did that quiet Trump’s protestations that he’d beaten Biden❓ Nope. Nor did his supporters seem any less receptive to being told that they’d been wronged.

They know what they know: The establishment is out to get them. And they never bother to explain how that establishment is at once so insidious and so inept. They never address the now-you-rig-it, now-you-don’t inconstancy of Democrats, who apparently steal certain elections but nap through others. 

Instead, the Republicans retained or won majorities in both chambers of Congress in 2016, one chamber in 2018, one in 2022, and both in 2024, when of course Trump also prevailed, beating Vice President Kamala Harris in the popular vote and the Electoral College.

I’d have to ask Donald Trump: How and why did Democrats and the Deep State let that happen❓ And, if voter rolls are a mess, voting sites are poorly monitored and mail-in voting (which you use) is thievery’s handmaiden, isn’t your victory in 2024, every bit as suspicious as Biden’s in 2020❓ Or, will you tell me it’s not, because you and your fellow Republicans are so much more ethical than Democrats❓

Readers, feel free to take a pause to control your laughter.

Laughable is what all of this would be if it weren’t such an ugly reflection of the state of American politics. Trump’s persistence in attacking the voting process and all his related hooey, such as calling January 6 a “day of love,” suggest the extent to which truth now matters less than the ardor, creativity and endless repetition of lies🤥🤥🤥. Say something consistently enough, with a thick enough air of conviction, and it will sound true to those inclined to receive it that way.

That’s partly because more and more Americans choose to believe whatever the leaders of their tribe tell them and whatever justifies their prejudices or bolsters their sense of victimization or entitlement. Such convenient credulity is especially pronounced in the MAGA movement, where any drubbing Republicans take in these midterms will almost certainly be dismissed as a hoax.

That leaves us in a dangerous place. ⚠ Partisanship with blinders this thick threatens the health of a society, which depends on a measure of grace in losing and on voters as invested in democratic processes as in getting exactly what they want. Trump’s chorus of “rigged” and “fraud” pulls them in the opposite direction. 

And the volume of that wretched music will only increase between now and the first Tuesday in November. #VoteBlue❕

Senator Susan Collins was given protection from criminal prosecution by Donald Trump's justice department

 Susan Collins’ fundraising tactics sure look crooked to me | Steve Collins

Echo opinion published in the Portland Press Herald by Steve Collins

New reporting suggests our senior senator promoted a shady contractor in return for campaign cash. More investigation is urgently needed.

Senator Susan Collins has been bribed to keep silent about Donald Trump. She has been pandering for money for several years and has been corrupted by power.

Opinion:  Back in 2019, I received many invitations to head to University of Maine to see a nifty new boat created by the world’s largest 3D printer.

How I wish I’d gone.

That outing might have provided a clue that while Senator Susan Collins sometimes hauls truckloads of federal cash to Maine, it comes with a price.

As a shocking and deft investigation by ProPublica this week showed, the company behind the boat, a little-known Hawaiian venture named Navatek, got Collins’ help after its top executive wrote a 💲150,000 check to a super PAC helping Collins with her 2020, reelection bid.

At the boat unveiling event in 2019, Collins and other dignitaries saw “a 25-foot patrol boat with a hull form developed by Navatek, a leader in ship design and a UMaine Composites Center industrial partner” in 3D printing the 5,000-pound vessel.

Collins told the crowd, “Just think of the implications for our military if they could print two prototypes of new, fast boats. I know Navatek is working on that right now. That’s going to be good for both taxpayers as well as our military service members who will ultimately benefit from this technology.”
Except, guess what❓ That wasn’t the case. The project, funded by a budget provision pushed by Collins, may have helped UMaine and Navatek — but didn’t mean anything to our Navy, the ostensible beneficiary.

Drop by the Corner Bakery on Capitol Hill and you can pick up an Uptown Turkey-Avocado Sandwich served on ‘Harvest Toast’ for 💲13.49.

But going there can prove a lot more costly if you’re angling to get help from Collins.

Two months after the lunch, the super PAC boss, Scott Reed, told Navatek officials that Collins would get the company 💲32 million in Navy contracts, according to the nonprofit news organization, which said it reviewed a trove of emails and legal documents.

A cheap lunch led to millions of taxpayer dollars for a shady contractor that ultimately had little to offer the Navy. Collins raked in hundreds of thousands to promote her campaign. Par for the course in the nation’s capital, perhaps, but it stinks.

We’ve known for years that Navatek ran a crooked operation — its former CEO is in federal prison — and that it had ties to Collins.

What ProPublica added to the tale are stunning details that paint Collins and her staff as in on the action and the confirmation the FBI had launched an investigation into her connections to Navatek — an investigation that died when Donald Trump took office and he fired nearly everyone who had a hand in it.

Collins’ camp insists the five-term senator did nothing wrong. Her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, said Collins’ actions as chronicled by ProPublica amounted to “corruption of the highest order.”

Trump arguably does much worse in full view of the public nearly every day.

Suddenly, though, we have a plausible explanation for the reluctance of Maine’s senior senator to stand up to Trump’s tyrannical moves: The president protected her reputation by eliminating personnel behind the FBI probe. At most, he may have shielded Collins from facing federal criminal charges.

Everybody, and that includes Sen. Collins, should agree that further investigation is needed now.

#VoteBlue❕

Donald Trump knows absolutely nothing about Canadian history so a literate person in the White House can read this to him

Donald Trump must tear down this (tariff) wall | Opinion

Echo opinion published in the Portland Press Herald by Roger W. Bowen:

Our Canadian neighbors deserve an apology from America’s leaders.
Roger W. Bowen is a political scientist who has published two books about Canadian affairs and the country’s relationship with the United States.

Since 1775 the U.S. has invaded Canada three times and has “won” only once. Planned but not undertaken, on at least two separate occasions America’s foreign policy makers developed two different “contingency plans” to invade Canada.

If Donald Trump, who wants Canada to become America’s 51st state, tries to have his way, he’ll likely rely on one of these plans.

In 1775, both Lower Canada (Quebec) and America were British colonies whose subjects were outraged by the wrongs they were forced to endure at the hands of their imperialist overlord.

Very aware of the growing anti- British sentiment among the people of Quebec and America’s 13 colonies, Britain focused on how to keep the angry North American colonists on both sides of the border from joining forces.

The decisive Battle of Quebec (City) forced an American retreat. Similarly, the United States had at best mixed results in the War of 1812, but did not win. Our one “military” victory against Canada happened in the late 1830s in the so-called “Aroostook War.” It in fact was a series of skirmishes between lumbermen on both sides of the Maine-Canada border that came to an end with a negotiated treaty setting the boundaries of the Maine-New Brunswick border.

Actual armed conflict between the two neighbors has been rare. “War Plan Red” of 1930, was a contingency plan for the American army and navy to work together in order to stop an invasion of the homeland by Britain. This plan assumed that British troops would invade America primarily from Canada, and that the British navy would ship war materiel through Halifax, Nova Scotia.

War Plan Red called for seizing Halifax, even using poison gas, and occupying all major Canadian cities and its electrical power infrastructure.

A second untested plan was instigated by American war planners based on real events in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

French President Charles de Gaulle had visited Quebec in 1967 and famously uttered “Vive le Quebec libre,” effectively telling French Canadians that Quebec should separate from Canada.

Quebecois leaders responded. Rene Levesque quit the Liberal Party and formed the Parti Quebecois and soon thereafter issued a “manifesto” that would require a referendum on Quebec’s future. From the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa one confidential cablegram to Rufus Smith of the U.S. Department of State predicted that an independent Quebec “might try to throw a line over to Louisiana, Maine, etc.” in the event of a separatist upheaval.

A young political scientist who was a strong supporter of America “projecting” power in Southeast Asia/Vietnam was Zbigniew Brzezinski. At Columbia University Brzezinski developed an institute to study communism and wrote a well-received book about Soviet totalitarianism that caught the attention first of John F. Kennedy, then President Johnson on whose State Department’s Policy Planning Council Brzezinski participated and to which he offered his considered yet alarming view that de Gaulle’s entry into Canada and Levesque’s separatism might well destabilize Canada and harm the United States. That view was based on a detailed, inter-agency analysis that became National Security Staff Memorandum # 9, portions of which remain classified today.

Brzezinski’s concerns expressed in 1967, seemed prescient just three years later during the FLQ Crisis when Prime Minister Eliot Trudeau suspended the civil liberties of Canadians following the Front for the Liberation of Quebec (FLQ) kidnapping British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Quebecois official Pierre LaPorte, whom they later murdered.

Trudeau made the case that many Canadians “apprehended insurrection” due to the “climate of terror and violence” perpetrated by the radical wing of the FLQ. Its radicalism went continental once American Black Panther Stokley Carmichael called for Canadian Blacks to “get all the guns you can” and “be prepared to kill for your people in the long period of armed struggle against white society.”

Mark Rudd and Jerry Rubin, both American anti-Vietnam War radicals, allegedly encouraged rioting by separatists in Vancouver.

By 1971, the FBI concluded that the FLQ is not “just another bourgeois movement” but instead had the effect of turning Quebec into a bastion of rebellion against all central authorities.

Enter Donald Trump. The trade war that he started in order to force Canada to kowtow has hurt America’s reputation more than Canada’s so far. U.S. polls show that 80% of all Americans continue to give Canada high favorable ratings, while 80% of Canadians view Trump unfavorably and 75% do not trust U.S. negotiators to play fair. Canadians are boycotting many American manufactured goods and American travel destinations in order to show their contempt toward the bully south of its border.

Canada deserves an apology from America’s leaders.

Treating neighbors as you wish to be treated is an honorable notion in democratic civil society. 

Trump seems not to understand this basic norm, so it must be left to the Congress to issue an apology to Canada (That means you Senator Susan Collins❗) when the tariffs are finally suspended and the saber-rattling ends. The official apology might end with a “thank you”🙏 for responding quickly and forcefully with military assistance following the tragedy of 9/11.

Senator Susan Collins is a partisan Donald Trump loyalist who accepted huge amounts of GOP political money to support the Trumpian evil agenda

Susan Collins Delivered Maine Up to Trump

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Michelle Cottle

“I deliver for the state of Maine.” 🙄🤥💥

(Maine Writer:  Senator Susan Collins needs to know what our first heating oil bill is for the upcoming winter.  $598.96 including a 1% veterans discount. This oil tank will have to be refilled in December.  Maine people cannot afford this high cost to stay warm with heating oil. People will die. They will suffer frostbite, hypothermia, even freeze to death because Senator Collins voted to support the One Big Beautiful - Ugly- Bill, many lost access to health insurance and Medicaid.  But, in the political ads, we are supposed to say, "Thank you Senator Collins"❓  For what❓ )

These seven words, uttered by Senator Susan Collins in a recent sit-down with Politico, are the heart of her re-election pitch this election. Every election, really.

The sole Republican senator still hanging on in a blue state, Collins, running for her sixth term, has for decades defied political gravity by selling herself as a moderate, independent, bipartisan pragmatist focused on getting stuff done for Mainers — a voice of political sanity amid the growing din of polarization and dysfunction. It is an above-the-fray appeal that feels designed to flatter voters as much as herself.

But here’s the thing. However moderate or pragmatic or pleasant she may be, Collins has a limited ability to influence what happens in today’s Senate, a starkly polarized chamber dominated by leadership and currently functioning mostly as a rubber stamp for an authoritarian president. Too often she is left scrambling to do damage control in response to the chaos created by her own party. In this environment, her national-vibes-versus-local-results construct is, at best, outmoded. These days, Collins is not delivering for Maine so much as she is delivering up Maine to the Trump agenda.

Serving in the Senate is a team sport, now more than ever. Party leaders keep a tight grip on how the chamber functions, what legislation proceeds and how key pools of campaign cash get distributed among members. (Maine Writer:  In other words, politics has become obsessed like never before with money.)

Ideological heterodoxy (definition: any opinion, belief or practice that strays from official, traditional or accepted standards) is frowned upon. Cross-aisle cooperation is discouraged. As rank-and-file senators will grumpily tell you, gone are the days when iconoclasts and independent thinkers held serious sway. The chamber is increasingly dominated by a “maximalist partisan position,” as Senator Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat, put it to me last year.  Inside this polarized Thunderdome, Collins’s chief influence is as one more warm body giving her team the majority, and by extension the team leadership control over the agenda.

Also, respecting norms does not automatically make for moderate, sensible outcomes. Collins has cast some of her more upsetting votes in recent years under this banner. Her belief in granting as much deference as possible to presidential nominees, for instance, led her to support the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the head of health and human services, Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Last year, Collins supported a procedural motion to allow the president’s big signature bill — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — to come up for debate on the Senate floor. The senator did so, she explained, out of respect for the authority of her conference’s leadership.

Ms. Collins sometimes scores wins that a blue-state electorate would appreciate. Over the years, she joined Democrats in passing a host of bills, and she has provided a key vote to block measures backed by her party. During the first Trump administration, she was one of three Republicans who helped kill the push for the so-called skinny repeal of Obamacare.

On the campaign trail, Collins makes much of her focus on real results for her home state, putting her relationships and institutional knowledge to productive use. She and her campaign team can tick through numerous examples in which she secured federal investment in this business or protected funding for that public program. Forget the national vibes; she is all about getting stuff done for Mainers.

Except that, in recent years, this often involves merely undoing sweeping damage done by Donald Trump — getting grants restored to the University of Maine or preserving funding to hire seasonal workers at Acadia National Park. This summer, she won tariff exemptions for Canadian road salt and cement.

While Collins might be commended for calculated actions, like scoring road-salt relief — and for her outspoken criticism of tariffs more broadly — the Trump’s feud with Canada will still kick her state in the teeth. 

Winning seasonal workers for Acadia pales next to the pain caused her constituents by the administration taking a sledgehammer to the federal government. 

Whatever targeted funding she secures to sustain rural hospitals in Maine seems unlikely to make up for the harm inflicted by the Medicaid cuts in Republicans’ big, beautiful bill. And on it goes.

Collins’s electoral endurance has long driven the Democrats batty. This year, with the political winds blowing hard against the G.O.P., the blue team is more desperate than ever to crack the senator’s image as a different kind of Republican. They point out that she votes with Trump 95 percent of the time. They dismiss her breaks with her party as political theater likely coordinated with the White House. Her 2018, support of Mr. Kavanaugh is a hot line of attack.

But the real issue may be that it no longer much matters what kind of Republican Collins is. With Trump running amok, and congressional Republicans loath to stand up to him, Ms. Collins’s presence in the Senate is, on balance, costing her state far more than it is contributing. This cycle, the only way to really deliver for Maine is for its voters to reject Ms. Collins’s long-running yet increasingly specious argument that she is somehow above the political fray.

Senator Susan Collins called to give accountability for fraud accusations that were buried by Trump's justice department- WWWTP?

It’s Maine’s turn to be concerned about Susan Collins | Editorial
The senator’s complacent response to open allegations of bribery sends voters a very clear and disrespectful message.

Echo editorial board opinion published in the Maine Sunday Telegram.

The words “fraud, waste and abuse” have formed part of a popular Republican Party slogan in recent years. The party’s most prominent figures obsess publicly about the ferreting out of wrongdoing they insist is rampant in government, at the federal level as well as here in Maine.

Against this intolerant backdrop, one might think that last week’s reporting by ProPublica on the killing off, in 2025, of a federal investigation into allegations of bribery by Sen. Susan Collins and staff would be met with a degree of solemnity if not humility. Think again.

The Collins campaign’s emphasis on the events taking place “seven years ago” cynically attempts to detract from the crux of the story, which hinges on the collapse of the investigation — reportedly active until the beginning of last year — due to a newly insufficiently staffed and uninterested FBI.

This editorial board isn’t about to make fun or light of the name of the made-up LLC used on the scan of the $150,000 check presented by ProPublica (“the Society of Young Women Scientist [sic] and Engineers”) which sought to exploit the white-hot cause of women in STEM.

Nor are we going to attempt to adjudicate on what the emails between Kao and political operative Scott Reed suggest or reveal.

In a functioning and properly resourced government, that’s a job that falls squarely to the Department of Justice. It’s a process that, once commenced, ought to have been followed to its logical administrative and legal end.

So let’s keep the focus on the demise of the probe and the conditions that led to its abandonment. Whether or not there are 3D-printed vessels to show for this tortured bit of negotiating, as Collins’ staffers were at pains to highlight with flashcards at a Portland press conference last week, becomes irrelevant in that light.

In the absence of anything approaching law enforcement as usual — an expectation reasonably held by the public, a basic check on congressional power — it’s audacious to insist on innocence and stoke conspiratorial lines of thinking by reaching for terms like “partisan hit job.”

Collins was quick to set the mood, labeling the exhaustive and level reporting a “a partisan hit job” and questioning why “anyone would take the word of a felon who’s been convicted twice” and “a convicted liar.”  (OMG this is beyond ludicrous❗)

That this particular felon — a Hawaii-based military contracting executive named Michael Kao — was found guilty of money laundering and fraud would seem to some to increase his credibility on such matters. For many of the claims made by Kao, the reporting referred to corresponding emails and other materials.

“Shame on ProPublica,” Collins told the Wall Street Journal, having said she was “offended” by the reporting — “so offensive” and “disgraceful.”

It is extremely disappointing to watch Collins and members of her staff move to immediately discredit a thorough and fair piece of investigative journalism on political and personal grounds.

The Trump administration has wailed about fraud while studiously dismantling the apparatus that’s in place to catch it. Borrowing straight from ProPublica: “Trump’s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.”

This is just one of many unsettling paradoxes of this second presidential term.

Voters are bothered by this appearance of wrongdoing — it would be hard not to be. To be satisfied that this is best we can do, a voter would need to be disillusioned with the executive branch to the point of defeat.

There’s a world in which Sen. Collins, her staffers and supporters could confidently and respectfully acknowledge that widespread disquiet. That hasn’t happened. We’re not at all hopeful that it will.