About Joe Weber

Now the Jerry and Karla Huse Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska's College of Journalism and Mass Communications, I worked 35 years in magazines and newspapers. I spent most of that time, 22 years, at BUSINESS WEEK Magazine, leaving in August 2009 as chief of correspondents. So far, I have worked in central New Jersey, New York City, Denver, Dallas, Philadelphia, Toronto, Chicago, Beijing, Shanghai and Lincoln, Nebraska. The adventure continues.

Entering the reality-distortion zone

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s truth-scrapping efforts reach deep

Big Brother, source: Michael Radford’s film,’1984;’ source: El País

George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in “1984” had a peculiar mission. Its job was not to spread truth at all, but rather to insure that history and current information aligned with the views and goals of the infallible Big Brother and his ruling party. When reality differed, the descriptions and accounts had to be bent accordingly.

Echoes of that approach abound today, it seems.

Take, for instance, what Washington, D.C. looks like. The district that Donald J. Trump sees is a dystopian spectacle of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” The capital, he tells us, has been “taken over by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” along with “drugged out maniacs and homeless people.”

Presumably, the president is not referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, mob he incited at the Capitol or to the current mostly supine GOP members of Congress and the Senate. Certainly, he’s not referring to the district crime rates as reported by its police.

If one looks at the D.C. police reports, violent crime in the capital is dropping. Homicides fell 32 percent in the district between 2023 and 2024, to 187 last year, the lowest tally since 2019. And the murder rate is down again about 11 percent this year, with 100 recorded so far. Indeed, per capita, D.C. doesn’t even crack the list of the 30 most dangerous cities in the U.S.

To Trump, as with Big Brother and other would-be tyrants, however, reality is not what data tells us. It is, instead, what Trump conjures up in his own mind. Indeed, independently developed data is, to him, an inconvenience that should be suppressed. And incendiary language must reflect the reality of his fevered imagination.

Independent information gets in the way of Trump’s efforts to dispatch federal troops to whatever scene he deems appropriate, for instance. Thus, immigration is an “invasion” a term that justifies the development of detention camps and roundups on the streets by masked authorities. Thus, military forces can be stationed on Los Angeles streets to suppress a “rebellion,” even if a major general involved doesn’t seem to see that.

And independently generated data gets in the way of Trump’s vision of an economy now on the way to a “golden age.” When a Bureau of Labor Statistics report suggested that hiring slowed in July and was weaker than expected in the prior two months, Trump took umbrage at the figures and so fired the bureau director. He moved to install a Heritage Foundation lackey who has suggested deep-sixing monthly jobs reports and presumably will generate shinier numbers.

When people outside of government, moreover, don’t sing his tune, Trump argues for finding new crooners. Thus, he now is pressuring Goldman Sachs to can Jan Hatzius, the firm’s longtime chief economist whose views on the economy-draining effects of tariffs mirror those of many other economists. Trump took to Truth Social to say that firm chief executive David Solomon should “go out and get himself a new Economist.”

Reality bending by Trump and his minions entered a new realm with the president’s deployment of 800 National Guards in D.C. and his seizure of the police department there, as well as his attack on the nation’s preeminent Wall Street firm. These big stretches by Trump could amount in the end to little more than headline-grabbing stunts designed to distract us from the ways his staffers are burying Epstein scandal information.

But Trump’s deflection and misinformation efforts aren’t all that new. Consider the administration’s moves to rewrite American history in national parks and historic sites with a March executive order mandating that such sites not “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history,” but instead emphasize the “progress of the American people” and the “grandeur of the American landscape.”

No matter whether it’s true or not, unflattering information is not welcome in the America Trump is making great again.

And this reality-twisting, whether economic or cultural, seems likely only to deepen. The White House now plans to review exhibits by the Smithsonian Institution to “ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” as one lickspittle wrote. The effort will “support a broader vision of excellence that highlights historically accurate, uplifting, and inclusive portrayals of America’s heritage.”

Propaganda, in other words.

National Museum of African American History; source: Washington, D.C.

One can only wonder how this will play out in a couple Smithsonian facilities that have been more thorough in efforts to fully describe our history, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian. Administrators may be hard-pressed to find a lot uplifting about the nation’s earliest years regarding Blacks and Native Americans, though they will surely be pushed to do so.

Of course, reality distortion is a familiar tack for many Trump toadies. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claims that Trump’s White House is the “most transparent in history.” So why, one wonders, is that White House removing transcripts of Trump’s comments from an official database – which would allow historians and others to easily check his tortured words against reality — and instead is posting limited numbers of videos?

Writing as Orwell, BBC producer Eric Arthur Blair published “1984” in 1949. Blair was appalled by the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But his fictional “Oceania,” the superstate that was home of the Ministry of Truth, included the Americas and the British isles.

Some 76 years on, at least one political leader seems to be doing his best to make Orwell’s vision a reality — of sorts.

“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Joe Weber

But Malcolm Forbes’s famous admonition holds no brief in Trumpworld

J.B. Milliken, source: University of California

Talk about a baptism by fire. Only a week into his job as president of the sprawling University of California system, James (J.B.) Milliken, has been plunged into a risky battle with Donald J. Trump. Milliken has had to be unequivocal about a $1 billion extortion demand Trump’s minions are trying to impose on UCLA, one of the pillars of the 10-campus system.

“As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians,” said Milliken, a son and grandson of small-town Nebraska bankers. “Americans across this great nation rely on the vital work of UCLA and the UC system for technologies and medical therapies that save lives, grow the U.S. economy, and protect our national security.”

Ostensibly, the federal demand is being made to settle claims that university officials tolerated antisemitism in demonstrations against the Gaza War in the 2023-24 academic year and that its diversity polices breached anti-discrimination laws. The demand is being accompanied by requirements for policy changes dealing with admissions and gender identity in sports and housing, as well as the abolition of scholarships for racial or ethnic groups.

In fact, however, the diktat is the biggest yet in a campaign inspired by authors of a Project 2025 effort, Project Esther, which nominally targets antisemitism on campuses, but more broadly assaults “wokeism” in the academic world. The project was developed largely by Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser to Trump and vice president at The Heritage Foundation. Coates, a self-described committed Christian, holds three degrees in Italian Renaissance art history, and planned on an academic career until she grew alienated by what she called a “very noxious anti-Western worldview” at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, according to The New York Times.

Columbia University, source: the university

The $1 billion demand ratchets up the stakes in the longstanding Trumpist and Heritage Foundation assault on major universities. The administration forced Columbia University into a $200 million deal and Brown University into a $50 million settlement. Negotiations are under way for a resolution with Harvard, with a $500 million figure being bandied about. Still more extortions could well be on the way from other schools under the gun by Trump.

But these deals beg several enormous questions. How will extracting the hefty sums of cash advance education at these schools, for instance? Sure, policy changes that could include cuts in pro-Palestinian academic departments could help foster a balance in curricular offerings, but does cutting diversity efforts have anything but a negative impact? If the administration truly aimed to improve higher education, wouldn’t it be making more money available, perhaps supporting educational efforts more sympathetic to Israel, not imposing brutal penalties?

Already, the University of California has overhauled practices in some areas called for by the Trump administration — including a ban on protest encampments and the abolition of diversity statements in hiring, as the Los Angeles Times reported. So, why does Trump want to humble the system financially? What really underlays his animus toward these schools?

Certainly, part of this must be longstanding Republican animosity to California and perhaps to the likelihood that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom could be a presidential candidate in the 2028 election. The $1 billion proposal came just a day after Newsom said UC should not bend “on their knees” to President Trump, as the other schools have.

“We’re not Brown, we’re not Columbia, and I’m not going to be governor if we act like that,” Newsom said. “Period. Full stop. I will fight like hell to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Even more personally, however, one must wonder at the motivations of a disgruntled former academic such as Coates, or of the middling transfer student into Penn’s Wharton School, Trump. Are they driven by grudges, by a need to punish those by whom they feel wronged or who shunned them? Recall that one of Trump’s former professors called him “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Certainly, the rarely articulate Trump’s feelings about schooling are clear from his plans to eliminate the Department of Education.

Explorations of Trump’s motivations are legion. Perhaps one of the best, however, is a new offering by The New Yorker’s David Remnick. As a child, Remnick writes, “Little Donny” was “a pigtail puller, an unruly loudmouth who tormented his teachers and hurled insults and rocks at other kids. When Trump was thirteen, his father, Fred, shipped him off to a military school, in Cornwall, New York.” There, “Trump made it plain that his delight in domination was the immutable core of him.”

Remnick tells us that Marc Fisher, who co-authored “Trump Revealed,” an early biography and character analysis, once told PBS that, as a cadet, Trump “used a broomstick as a weapon against classmates who didn’t listen to him when he told them what to do. He was in part enforcing the rules of the academy, but he was equally so enforcing the rules of Donald Trump.”

There’s no doubt that Trump exults in having powerful people and institutions quake at his feet. “They’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much,’ ” he bragged, after certain law firms started making their pitiful arrangements with the White House. “They’re just saying, ‘Where do I sign?’”

But, even beyond Trump’s need to force schools to quiver before him, other worrisome trends may cloud our national future long after the would-be tyrant is gone. Where we were once a country that built great universities — private and public — because we realized they were essential to national growth, much popular sentiment is against expansion — at least as reflected by rightist politicians. Hostility to higher education is widespread.

California may be case story No. 1. Growth was long the mainstay of the system, which now serves more than 295,000 students. Before he landed in the cauldron he’s now in, Milliken ran other university systems, getting an early start as president of the University of Nebraska, from which he had graduated in 1979. When he led the NU system, from 2004 to 2014, the university was punching far above its weight, so much so that its flagship campus in Lincoln joined the Big Ten athletic and academic conference in 2011.

Milliken, a lawyer, got his post at Nebraska in part because he had worked as the legislative assistant to an influential Republican congresswoman from the state, Virginia D. Smith, the only woman to serve in the House from the state. Republicans such as Smith had long championed higher education and she served on the House Education Committee.

Enthusiastic backing for higher education among Nebraska Republicans for decades allowed officials to build a university where nearly 50,000 students now attend, most hailing from a statewide population barely topping 2 million. Without such crucial support, the school’s flagship campus in Lincoln could never be good enough to rub shoulders with the likes of the University of Michigan, Northwestern, the University of Southern California and Rutgers in the Big Ten.

And yet, some MAGA-inspired state leaders today are now pulling in their horns in ways that threaten the university’s health and prospects. At the flagship campus alone, legislative trims are forcing the chancellor to direct officials to come up with $27.5 million in cuts to a $1.67 billion budget for the coming year, atop several years of smaller budget trims. Thus, the campus and the university overall are offering deals for veteran tenured faculty to quit early, a move that will reduce the school’s vitality, and officials may shrink or consolidate departments that took decades to build.

“I suspect there will be programs, majors, units, departments, all of those things will change,” said journalism professor and faculty senate president John Shrader, a former colleague of mine in UNL’s journalism school. He said the faculty expected some cuts, but the sheer scale—$27.5 million compared to last year’s $5 million—is staggering. “Not one part of this campus will be unaffected.”

Oh, how times have changed. Some time ago, I was privileged to write a biography of an influential Republican leader, Clayton Yeutter, a Nebraska-born statesman who headed the Republican National Committee along with taking on many other crucial government roles. When Yeutter testified at his confirmation hearing to become the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in 1989, he spoke passionately about the importance of education.

“We should not aspire to competing with the rest of the world on wage rates, in agriculture or anywhere else,” Yeutter argued. “We must compete on the basis of technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, institutional flexibility and personal and institutional freedoms. All those are built on education!”

Certainly, Yeutter knew first-hand about the power of schooling. His training at the University of Nebraska, from his undergraduate years through a law degree and doctorate in agricultural economics, lifted him from the life as the son of a small-town immigrant farmer into some of the nation’s most important jobs. Along with Ag Secretary and RNC head, he served as Ronald Reagan’s U.S. Trade Representative, where he opened the U.S. and the world to freer global trade.

Long before his Washington achievements, however, as a governor’s top aide he had championed funding for the University of Nebraska. His efforts laid the groundwork for the school to expand into its current four-campus system, which now includes membership in the Big Ten for its flagship campus.

The growth in the NU system has been breathtaking. The system’s nearly 50,000 students, spread across Lincoln and campuses in Kearney and Omaha, are a far cry from the fewer than 7,000 when Yeutter graduated in 1952. The university’s growth far outstrips gains in the state’s population, which was below 1.37 million in Yeutter’s time and still barely tops 2 million.

No doubt that story has been echoed all around the country, at least in states where education has been a priority. At least for now, however, the era of growth has been brought to a grinding halt by today’s Republicans. Will they or their successors someday look back on this time with shame, seeing it as a period when they shortchanged the nation?

One can only hope that Milliken and his like can prevail or, at least, show up the Trumpist forces for the damage they are causing and its effect on our young. As a Nebraskan might say, the seed corn must be kept healthy. Today, it’s at great risk.

Whose history is it?

Posted on July 14, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trumpists try to rewrite the American story, but plenty of smart folks stand in the way

Six years ago, in the thick of Trump I, Heidi Schreck’s Obie Award-winning and Pulitzer-nominated play, “What the Constitution Means to Me” opened on Broadway. The work dealt with immigration, sexual assault, domestic abuse, women’s rights and abortion.

Schreck’s viewpoint was clear: our nation’s founding guide was a flawed document, rooted in its time, that at first mainly enshrined the rights of propertied white men. As history and the play suggested, the Constitution regularly needed — and got — updating and broadening to include more Americans (thus, its many amendments over the decades).

Reviewed widely and well, “Constitution” was perfect for the time. The play suited a period when women and minorities worried about their rights becoming narrowed after many years of expansion. As The New York Times put it, Schreck’s work was a “paean for basic fairness: The American Constitution, admired as it is, fails to protect all of us from violence and discrimination.”

Smithsonian magazine in 2019 reported that Schreck’s play “talks about the marginalization of women and other demographic groups, about domestic violence and sexual abuse. She calls out the founders and later interpreters of the Constitution for their male-centric view of the world, in her groundbreaking analysis of what she sees as a living document that can evolve with our times.”

And now, with revivals of the play popping up in places as far-flung as Bethesda, Maryland, and New York City, Boston and Los Angeles, “Constitution” seems more timely than ever. We recently saw a production in our town, Silverthorne, Colorado, that was by turns inspiring, unsettling and discouraging.

The play was inspiring because one could see how far we’ve come, but unsettling because one also sees how recent the gains have been. And it was discouraging because we now seem to be turning the clock backward. Wife beating, for instance, was legal in many states until the 1870s and after that it was widely ignored by authorities or treated as a private family matter until the 1970s. And it wasn’t until 1994 that the Violence Against Women Act was passed, treating domestic assault as a crime. All astonishingly recent.

All, perhaps, fragile in light of the horrendous and persisting rates of what experts call “intimate partner violence.” IPV, the experts say, kills 1,300 women in the U.S. each year and injures 2 million.

And then there’s the matter of a woman’s right to choose. In the U.S., abortion was criminalized in the 1880s and not legalized until the 1970s, and it has been systematically been restricted in many jurisdictions since. In all, 41 states now have restrictions on choice, including a dozen states with complete bans. Perhaps not coincidentally, it also took more than a century for women to get the right to vote, enshrined in the 19^th Amendment in 1920. And now, we see widespread efforts to suppress voting by everyone, especially by people of color.

That troubled history – that long and clawing struggle to broaden the rights of so many Americans – is essential knowledge for all of us. Not only does it put our freedoms into perspective, but it casts into bold relief today’s efforts to dismantle or restrict such rights. And that throttling effort is being led, it must be said, by a relatively small group of privileged white men who are riding on the resentments of a larger group of such men (and some women) who feel threatened by the social changes of recent decades.

“The way certain developments in the economy, in politics and in the social world have gone in the last 40 years has led to working-class white men … feeling like their authority has been undermined,” sociologist Raka Ray, dean of social sciences at UC Berkeley, said in a 2022 university publication. “When you get strong feelings of anger and despair in a group or a population, that can turn very quickly into giving encouragement to the politics of resentment or the politics of revenge.”

A broad range of Berkeley scholars quoted in the piece, “Loss, fear and rage: Are white men rebelling against democracy?,” contended that millions of American men — most of them white, many of them working-class — have seen recent years as “a time of unravelling.” Their industries have been dying, their wages stagnating and their political power and cultural status diminished. Moreover, the scholars suggested, “core ideas about manhood and masculinity” have been in flux.

These disenfranchised folks, of course, constitute much of the MAGA base. Donald J. Trump didn’t invent them, but he has become their avatar. Shrewd marketer that he is, Trump has cast himself brilliantly as the voice of their anger and resentment, wrapping his act in the flag even as he so ignores the history – flawed and otherwise – that Old Glory represents.

Indeed, ignoring, denying or simply forgetting the flaws in our history of the kind the play so painfully depicts is a key part of the Trump project. He and right-wing government officials around the country seem determined to erase unflattering information about the American past, perhaps because they owe their successes to the ignorance of their supporters and want to perpetuate it at every turn.

A few years ago, when I taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, state leaders shut down a university-wide scholarly effort to investigate the treatment of minorities historically by the university and the state, for instance. They even drove out the chancellor, a religious Republican and an honest and fair scholar, who had pressed for the effort.

One enterprise slipped through the ban, however, because it was commissioned by The Omaha World-Herald and supported by the College of Journalism and Mass Communications. The results were eye-opening for the class’s 21 students, as they found widespread mistreatment and poor newspaper coverage of groups ranging from Greek immigrants and Native Americans to Blacks over decades.

It’s questionable whether such an academic undertaking would be tolerated nowadays, as UNL – much like many schools across the country – is under pressure to purge efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion, critical race theory and “wokeism.” As The New York Times reported, Trump and his top aides are “exerting control of huge sums of federal research money to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which they see as hostile to conservatives and intent on perpetuating liberalism.” That drive has extended from the Ivies, including Harvard and Columbia, to state universities such as the University of Virginia.

A collage of Putin invoking Stalin; source: Smithsonian

This Orwellian attack on education – reminiscent of the Soviet and later Russian rewriting of history – at times has been absurd. The most recent nonsensical example is the Interior Department’s plans to remove or cover up all “inappropriate content” at national parks and sites by mid-September, as well as the request for park visitors to report any “negative” information about past or living Americans, as reported by The Times. This mirrors an executive order Trump signed in March entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that directed the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution museums.

Trump’s propagandistic move drew heat from plenty of academics. The American Historical Association, joined by a bevy of other organizations, issued a statement that said his order “egregiously misrepresents the work of the Smithsonian Institution.” It held that “The stories that have shaped our past include not only elements that make us proud but also aspects that make us acutely aware of tragedies in our nation’s history. No person, no nation, is perfect, and we should all—as individuals and as nations—learn from our imperfections.”

“Patriotic history celebrates our nation’s many great achievements,” the AHA said. “It also helps us grapple with the less grand and more painful parts of our history. Both are part of a shared past that is fundamentally America. We learn from the past to inform how we can best shape our future.”

For his part, the president unleashed a review of whether monuments, memorials and other Interior Department information and content “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”

Of course, the “false reconstruction” that Trump and his partisans claim is really the view of historians far more versed in the facts – uncomfortable as they may be — than the president and his toadies ever could be. Recall that Trump was a middling transfer student at the University of Pennsylvania whom a former prof called “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!”

The efforts by the right to rewrite American history will likely go little further than various institutions than Trumpists can influence – regrettably perhaps including the Smithsonian and our national parks. They may rename military bases for Confederates such as Robert E. Lee. They may even get statues of rebel heroes restored in some places.

But too many historians have written too much over too many years for Trump’s anti-historical crusade to have an enduring effect. Indeed, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how historians will cast Trump over time. A 2024 survey of historians, the “Presidential Greatness Project,” put Trump dead last among all presidents after his first term. How might a post-2028 survey rank him?

Happily, we will always have the talented likes of Heidi Schreck to make sure our past isn’t forgotten, especially when a troublesome present makes it more important than ever to keep true facts alive, as “living” as the Constitution.

“The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge”

Posted on July 9, 2025 by Joe Weber

So says Hamlet. And the bellowing in Trump’s Washington is loud.

In 1938, Joseph Stalin ordered the executions of scores of Russian officials as he consolidated his grip on power. Figures as important as Nikolai Bukharin, a Bolshevik theoretician and former chairman of the Communist International, and former premier Alexei Rykov were killed side by side. Scores of others were murdered or exiled in Stalin’s Great Purge, as the vindictive and paranoid leader sought to vanquish anyone he felt deserved punishment or seemed threatening.

Is history repeating itself, albeit in a bloodless way, in the United States? Is another power-obsessed leader hellbent on punishing anyone who has slighted him? Is this modern headman flouting traditions of political civility in a quest to quash any opposition and assert his authority?

Consider the actions of Donald J. Trump and his minions against such figures as former FBI director James B. Comey and former CIA director John O. Brennan. Both are being put under the gun, metaphorically, for their roles in the 2016 investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.

As The New York Times reported, CIA director John Ratcliffe has made a criminal referral of Brennan to the FBI, accusing Brennan of lying to Congress. And law enforcement officials hounded Comey and his wife, following them in unmarked cars in May, as his cellphone was tracked after he posted a photo on social media of seashells he said he had found while walking on a beach during a vacation.

The shells were arranged in the formation “86 47.” That, of course, is common shorthand for dismissing or removing Trump, the 47^th president; it’s a slang reference that can be found on T shirts. (“86 46” was used in the same way for former President Biden). When Comey’s Instagram post triggered a furor in Trumpist circles, the former FBI chief deleted it. But Trump put the Secret Service up to “interviewing” Comey about what the easily slighted president claimed was an exhortation to assassination.

And then there’s the pursuit of Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, who was hauled up before the House Oversight Committee in its investigation of the former president’s mental acuity. O’Connor cited doctor-patient privilege and his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in refusing to testify. As Politico reported, the doctor’s lawyers pointed to a Justice Department investigation into the same subject, saying it raised the risk of potential incrimination, even though they insisted his claim of the right did not imply that O’Connor had broken the law.

So great is the fear of persecution in Trump’s Washington that a physician can’t open up about a matter that should be more one of historical rather than partisan interest. Remember that little more than Trump’s viciousness against his predecessor is driving the congressional probe.

Recall, too, that Trump’s Justice Department has sued all 15 federal judges in Maryland, including the chief judge, over an order that blocked the immediate removal of immigrants. While the only thing at risk for the judges is reputational, the extraordinary move undercuts the authority of such courts, especially since the suit will be heard by a Trump-appointed judge in the western part of Virginia.

As The New York Times reported, Georgetown University Law Professor Stephen I. Vladeck said the suit was in keeping with the Trump administration’s efforts to delegitimize the federal bench. “I think we are seeing an unprecedented attempt by the federal government to portray district judges not as a coordinate branch of government,” he said, “but as nothing more than political opposition.”

Trump’s toadies have similarly targeted scores of others who offended their dear leader or had the temerity to object to administration policies. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, recently put on administrative leave 139 employees who signed a “declaration of dissent,” arguing that the agency no longer is living up to its mission to protect human health and the environment, as reported by the Associated Press. The agency, in a statement, said it has a “zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting” the Trump administration’s agenda.

Earlier, Trump revoked the security clearances of prominent Democrats. Among them: Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Hillary Clinton and former diplomat Norman Eisen. He even denied security protection to former officials in his first term, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, putting them physically at risk and in need of hiring their own bodyguards.

Trump also fired FBI officials and senior Justice Department career lawyers, especially those who worked with former special counsel Jack Smith on a pair of criminal investigations into Trump. He revoked the security clearances of 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter suggesting that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop could have been Russian disinformation. And he revoked the clearances of top lawyers at major law firms he felt had worked against him, denying them the ability to work.

No one should be surprised by the often-vindictive Trump’s actions, even if they fall well beyond the pale of normal presidencies. While addressing a crowd in 2023 at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump declared, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Of course, especially after he was convicted of 34 felonies, Trump feels deeply wronged. And grace against opponents has never been a calling card for the former New York developer who is still punishing Columbia University for refusing years ago to buy a parcel of overpriced land from him. When he was interviewed by TV psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw in 2024, he said: “Well, revenge does take time. I will say that… And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest. You know, sometimes it can.”

Stalin’s purges were far more deadly than Trump’s, of course. The Russian seized power in a bloody revolution, after all, not an election. And yet, much as Stalin was able to muster the power of the state – legions of servile bureaucrats — against his enemies, so is Trump able through his lackeys to exercise his vengeful will against anyone who has triggered his pique.

Are we dealing here in a difference in degree, but not in kind? It took years for Stalin to build the power he exercised. At 79, Trump almost certainly won’t have as much time, though his lapdog followers will. We have yet to see just how far his and their virulence will go.

A tale of two Dons

Posted on July 3, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump appears to have exceptional role models

Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, source: Screen Rant

Ya gotta hand it to Donald J. Trump. His immorality and dishonesty rival only his self-dealing and self-delusion. But he works the system like nobody else, except maybe another Don, the fictional mob boss Don Corleone, who bestows deadly punishment if crossed.

Consider Washington Don’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” Of course, it passed, even as several Republican legislators decried it either for boosting the national debt by between $3 trillion and $4 trillion over a decade or for slashing Medicaid by $1 trillion, along with imposing cuts in food aid to the poor. The bill squeaked by the Senate in a 51-50 vote, with the tie broken by Vice President JD Vance. It slipped by in the House 218-214.

In the Senate, just three Republicans showed some cojones. Kentucky’s Rand Paul and the already-endangered Maine Sen. Susan Collins voted no. They joined North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, who announced he would retire before casting a vote that would otherwise have led to a Trump-backed primary challenger in 2026. “Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER!” Trump said on his Truth Social. “He’s even worse than Rand ‘Fauci’ Paul!”

In the House, the only Republicans to stand tall were Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. And Massie has felt Trump’s wrath for a while now. “MAGA should drop this pathetic LOSER, Tom Massie, like the plague!” Trump posted last week.

Truth isn’t a high priority for Trump and his minions. But some of these opponents spoke uncomfortable truths about a bill that will reward high-end earners with a continuation of 2017 tax cuts, which were otherwise slated to expire, at the expense of lower-income Americans, particularly in healthcare.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, source: Newsweek

“The Medicaid program has been an important health care safety net for nearly 60 years that has helped people in difficult financial circumstances, including people with disabilities, children, seniors, and low-income families,” Collins said. “Approximately 400,000 Mainers – nearly a third of the state’s population – depend on this program…. A dramatic reduction in future Medicaid funding, an estimated $5.9 billion in Maine over the next 10 years, could threaten not only Mainers’ access to health care, but also the very existence of several of our state’s rural hospitals.”

Collins took a principled stand even though recent polls suggest she would face an uphill fight if she seeks a sixth term next year. As Newsweek reported, a University of New Hampshire poll found that only 14 percent of Mainers have a favorable opinion of Collins, compared to 57 percent who see her unfavorably. Another 26 percent are neutral, the poll found, while 2 percent say they don’t know enough about her to say. That gives her a net favorability rating of –42, which is virtually unchanged from June 2022, when her rating stood at –40.

Similarly, Tillis warned that his party was making a mistake “and betraying a promise” in imposing the healthcare cuts.

But just as the Godfather’s Don seemed shrewd in his criminal operations, so do Washington Don and his allies seem in their politically foul ones — or at least they are trying to. “At the core of Republicans’ newly finalized domestic policy package is an important political calculation. It provides its most generous tax breaks early on and reserves some of its most painful benefit cuts until after the 2026 midterm elections,” The New York Times reported.

But will that bit of wool-pulling work?

Perhaps Washington Don and Co. expect so many folks to enjoy such 2025 tax benefits as a higher standard deduction and the elimination of taxes on tips and overtime that they won’t bridle at the pain borne by less well-off folks through cuts in health insurance and Medicaid. Maybe the Republicans are betting that this lag will shield some of their Congress members from furious constituents.

Is the electorate that dumb, though? It’s true that nearly a majority did vote for Trump last November, so perhaps he and vulnerable Congress members can count on such folks again. Still, when onerous work requirements and trims in Medicaid benefits begin to hit, perhaps some Trump supporters will realize what they voted for.

Nonetheless, the Don’s ability to work the system is extraordinary. In other ways, too, he has shown his brilliance at manipulation, particularly when it involves fellow billionaires.

He played Shari Redstone at Paramount like a fiddle, extorting a $16 million settlement for an offense by CBS’s “60 Minutes” that amounted to nothing more than common television editing. Earlier, he fleeced Disney’s ABC for the same amount because an anchor called him a rapist when the technical term was sexual abuser. And he cowed Jeff Bezos into changing the editorial policy at The Washington Post to abandon election endorsements and end its practice of running a broad array of opinion.

All the outfits had reasons for genuflecting to Trump. Redstone wants to sell Paramount to Skydance in an $8.4 billion deal that Trump’s Federal Communications Commission must rule on, and on which it’s been dragging its feet. For its part, Disney fretted that it might have lost a lawsuit brought by Trump in red Florida and worried that such a fight could hurt its brand, its “family-friendly movies, television shows and theme park rides that appeal to people of all political persuasions,” as The New York Times noted. And Bezos is beholden to Trump for business units far more important to him than the Post, notably a rocket company and Amazon.

Like a mob boss, Trump knows where the pain points are.

But, despite these high-profile scalps in his record of press intimidation, Trump hasn’t yet reached the level of an autocrat he admires, Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Recall that Trump said of Orbán: “He’s a very great leader, very strong man. Some people don’t like him ’cause he’s too strong.” Striking a different tone, the Associated Press, has explained how the Hungarian rules through “a sprawling pro-government media empire that’s dominated the country’s political discourse for more than a decade.”

For now, the U.S. still remains blessed with some courageous media outfits that haven’t been cowed. For those in the electorate who pay attention, they offer a beacon illuminating the ways of Trump and his GOP.

Consider the exceptional piece The New York Times recently ran that explained how Trump’s business empire was teetering last year, making it financially necessary for him to run for reelection to the White House. “His office building in Lower Manhattan generated too little cash to cover its mortgage, with the balance coming due. Many of his golf courses regularly lacked enough players to cover costs. The flow of millions of dollars a year from his stint as a television celebrity had mostly dried up,” the paper reported. “And a sudden wave of legal judgments threatened to devour all his cash.”

But now that he’s the leader of the free world, Trump’s businesses appear to be thriving. Many consider this self-dealing beneath a U.S. President, but Trump is as shameless as a Third World tinpot dictator.

“The president and his family have monetized the White House more than any other occupant,” the Times reported. “The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.”

Similarly, The Atlantic shines bright lights on Trump’s misuse of his elected position:

“He’s accepted a $400 million plane as a gift from a Middle East autocracy that hosts both Hamas and the Taliban, and also may be the home of a new Trump hotel,” Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg said on PBS’s “Washington Week with The Atlantic. “He’s dined with top investors in one of his cryptocurrency projects and reportedly promised to promote the crypto industry from the White House. He’s pardoned prominent Republicans and reality T.V. stars, including a man convicted of securities fraud, who, with his wife, donated $1.8 million to Trump’s reelection campaign, for good measure.”

Goldberg added that Trump’s family is charging half a million dollars to join a private club in Washington, D.C. He’s building a golf resort in Vietnam, a country that sought and got tariff relief, and a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City. “The Trump organization is planning to build a Trump Tower in Riyadh, for good measure,” Goldberg noted. “After a dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to pay $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, the most expensive licensing fee ever paid for a documentary.”

So, not all media voices have been silenced or humbled. As a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team called the Paramount capitulation “another win for the American people” and said that Trump was holding “the fake news media accountable,” many others have noted the sword the president’s wields through the FCC.

Trump’s efforts might even constitute bribery, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has suggested.

“With Paramount folding to Donald Trump at the same time the company needs his administration’s approval for its billion-dollar merger, this could be bribery in plain sight,” Warren said in a statement. “Paramount has refused to provide answers to a congressional inquiry, so I’m calling for a full investigation into whether or not any anti-bribery laws were broken.”

Some independent media, too, have suggested that such potent language is well-suited to Trump and his cronies. Mother Jones headlined a piece about the Paramount dealings “Trump’s Mob-like Shakedown: A Scandal Starring ‘60 Minutes,’ Paramount, and the FCC”

“This is an Olympic conflict of interest,” the outlet’s Washington bureau chief, David Corn, wrote. “Trump, via [FCC Chairman Brendan] Carr, can squeeze Paramount and Redstone and force a settlement of his lawsuit, which could result in Paramount paying millions to him. It’s a mob-like shakedown: Hey Paramount, you want your billions? Reach a deal with Trump. And Carr is his Luca Brasi—the enforcer who applies the pressure to serve the criminal kingpin.”

Of course, bribery – or rather the despotic misuse of government power by a sitting president – would not be inconsistent for a man convicted of 34 felonies, as well as someone on the hook for $90 million plus because of his sexual abuse. And it would not be inconsistent for someone who keeps an iron grip on his party through means any real Godfather would envy.

In about a year and a half, with Congressional elections, voters will get the chance to either show their admiration for the Don’s handiwork, celebrating it in the perverse way some fans of novelist Mario Puzo exalted mob chiefs, or to make a different call. Just 29 percent of voters support Trump’s bill, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, as reported by The New York Times. And roughly half of voters — including 20 percent of Republicans — say they expect the bill to hurt them and their families, according to a Fox News poll.

Trump, who is also a skilled huckster, will now set out to persuade the skeptics — and those done dirty by his bill — that what they see with their own eyes and feel in their own wallets isn’t really there. Will Americans fall for his claims, as they did last November? As they still say on CBS and ABC, stay tuned.

The sins of the past

Posted on June 28, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s assault on higher education threatens to repeat them — or worse

Jefferson looks over his university; source: PresidentsUSA.net

Founded by slaveholder Thomas Jefferson in a state where 20 percent of the population is now Black, the University of Virginia might reasonably be a place that owes the state’s minority population something. And yet, only a fraction of the undergraduate UVA student body is Black (variously reported as 6.2 percent or 8 percent). And, after other minorities are counted, nearly 57 percent of undergrads are white, College Factual reports.

Diversity has been even more of a nonstarter among the faculty at Mr. Jefferson’s university. More than 82 percent of the faculty are white, according to College Factual, with the share of Black faculty variously reported as 5 percent or 9.8 percent.

So, it’s not terribly surprising that James E. Ryan, a UVA Law graduate, saw a need to boost diversity, equity and inclusion efforts when he took over as the school’s president in 2018. In his inauguration speech, Ryan committed to redressing UVA’s longstanding racial imbalances.

As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, he said the campus community should “acknowledge the sins of our past,” including slavery, eugenics, and the exclusion of Blacks and women well into the 20th century. The university needed to recognize both Jefferson’s “brilliance and his brutality,” he argued.

Ryan also praised that fact that most UVA students at the time were women (a demographic reality at many campuses) and spoke highly about hundreds being among the first in their families to attend college. He warmed to the idea that the freshman class then was the most diverse in the university’s history.

As might be expected, this all didn’t sit well with some alums. A couple of the good ol’ boys in 2020 co-founded the Jefferson Council, an advocacy group that the Chronicle described as “committed to reducing the influence of progressive students, faculty, and staff, and restoring a more traditional UVa.”

The alums involved saw the university’s investment in DEI as wasteful, the news outlet reported, and they argued that it forced leftist dogma down the throats of Wahoos, as UVA students are known. They lambasted efforts to rename buildings, diversify admissions, and spend millions on DEI-focused administrators. Through blogs and social-media posts, they documented what they saw as the university’s mistaken priorities, and they put New Jersey-born Ryan into their gunsights.

With Donald J. Trump leaning on the school, the good ol’ boys have now won. Ryan quit after Trump’s Justice Department bridled at his refusal to dismantle the DEI programs and demanded his scalp, according to The New York Times. He stepped down rather than having the school risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds, as other universities have.

“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in an email to the school community, The Wall Street Journal reported. “To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”

Of course, this is just the latest university administrator’s head Trump or his supporters can claim. Their trophies now include Katrina Armstrong, driven out at Columbia in March after Minouche Shafik was forced out last August; and M. Elizabeth Magill, ousted at the University of Pennsylvania in December 2023, just a short time before Claudine Gay was driven out at Harvard. A fifth university chief, Martha E. Pollack surprised the Cornell University community in May by stepping down amid a threatened $1 billion in funding cuts.

Trump has put some $9 billion at risk at Harvard, with another $3 billion or so at risk at those above and other prominent schools. Those under the gun also include Princeton, Brown and Northwestern, as well as Johns Hopkins, a research gem where $800 million in cuts have led to hefty layoffs and where up to $4.2 billion in federal support is in danger.

The attacks are personal to a degree – Trump has a particular animus to Columbia, which once refused a $400 million land purchase he tried to foist on it (it’s not accidental that he cut $400 million from the university, or that the money hasn’t been restored even as Columbia largely capitulated to his demands). Also, recall that Trump himself was a middling transfer student into the University of Pennsylvania, where a professor of his said “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!’”

But the assaults also reflect the longstanding hostility rightists have had against the academic world, dating back at least to the days of Richard Nixon. Recall that Nixon famously said, “the professors are the enemy,” a phrase JD Vance reprised in late 2020 at a National Conservatism Conference.

Recall racist Gov. George Wallace’s assault on “pointy headed intellectuals,” which was mirrored decades later by Trump’s attack on “those stupid people they call themselves the elite.” The attack played well with Wallace’s undereducated followers back then and still resounds with Trump’s underschooled loyalists now.

It’s all something of a replay, though those earlier assaults had none of the teeth Trump’s latest ones have. The broad-gauge attack the president and his acolytes have mounted has been enormously costly. Consider what The Atlantic reported at the end of March:

“But college life as we know it may soon come to an end,” the magazine reported. “Since January, the Trump administration has frozen, canceled, or substantially cut billions of dollars in federal grants to universities. Johns Hopkins has had to fire more than 2,000 workers. The University of California has frozen staff hiring across all 10 of its campuses. Many other schools have cut back on graduate admissions. And international students and faculty have been placed at such high risk of detainment, deportation, or imprisonment that Brown University advised its own to avoid any travel outside the country for the foreseeable future.

“Higher education is in chaos, and professors and administrators are sounding the alarm. The targeting of Columbia University, where $400 million in federal grants and contracts have been canceled in retribution for its failure to address campus anti-Semitism and unruly protests against the war in Gaza, has inspired particular distress. Such blunt coercion, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, amounts to ‘the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare.’ In The New York Times, the Yale English professor Meghan O’Rourke called it and related policies ‘an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist.’”

The administration’s twin rallying cries are fighting anti-Semitism and killing DEI. The former, of course, is just a fig leaf, a handy excuse for bludgeoning administrators because some students angry about the Gaza War misbehaved in the school year before last. Those protests were usually handled, if not always well, and mostly didn’t recur in the year just ended. Still, they are bogeymen the rightists can invoke as example of dissent they just can’t tolerate.

The DEI assault is more substantial. White Trumpians angry about minorities becoming more prominent feel disadvantaged, as they have ever since affirmative action began in 1965. Back then, President Johnson issued an executive order requiring federal contractors to take affirmative action to ensure equality of employment opportunity without regard to race, religion and national origin. Ever since then, any steps to give disadvantaged groups a leg up – and to adapt to our increasing national diversity – have been castigated by angry whites as unfair.

So, it’s no surprise that at UVA some white alums have resented the modest advances Blacks and other minorities have made and DEI efforts to help them. To them, 57 percent is apparently not a high enough share of whites among students; nor is 82 percent of faculty.

A third rallying cry among the Trumpians is intellectual diversity in the college communities. What that means is that professors are just too damn liberal — another longstanding canard — and they should be driven out in favor of rightists. That is taking root in some places. Just look at what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has done with the New College of Florida in Sarasota, where ideologues have marched in, particularly as scholars in residence. The right sees this is as a model for remaking universities nationwide.

Judging from my days as a student and more recently as a professor, there are indeed plenty of liberals on faculties. That’s likely because liberals generally tend to be more adaptive to social change than conservatives, almost by definition, and being attuned to such change is natural in the academy. Still, there also are plenty of conservatives, and not only in economics departments and business schools. And is the liberal-conservative split even an issue in the sciences, tech and ag areas, for instance?

There are lots of scary elements about the changes Trump and his minions are enacting. One is a very conservative idea — that the drive amounts to social engineering by an elite in Washington — a Trumpian elite — not change coming from the grassroots. It is one thing if spontaneous change is demanded by the public around the country, in various states where legislatures fund education; another if it is directed by federal authorities.

Another troublesome factor is that many of the changes now being forced on private institutions are moving into the public ones. UVA is an example, but not the only one. We’ll likely see more such state universities in the dock going forward. More university presidents are likely to be driven out or quit under the pressure.

And where will this all leave students? Well, federal funding cuts will leave them with fewer intellectual opportunities as programs disappear. What’s more, in some states dominated by Trumpian rightists such cuts are being amplified by stinginess in state funding. As a result, many students are paying more for less.

In Nebraska, where I taught for 14 years, the state government’s contribution to the university system will rise roughly 0.6 percent in the coming year, far below the 3.5 percent increase that the Board of Regents had sought to account for inflation. The Trumpian Gov. Jim Pillen, who wanted the state to have “the courage to say no, and to focus on needs, not wants,” had originally pushed for a 2 percent cut, The New York Times reported.

“We will need to continue to reduce spending and make increasingly difficult choices to ensure fiscal discipline,” Jeffrey P. Gold, the University of Nebraska’s president, said before the regents voted to impose cuts and increase tuition. Students at the flagship campus in Lincoln will pay about 5 percent more.

It took many decades for higher education at both private schools and top-tier public ones, such as UVA, to develop into an international bragging point for the United States, a magnet for the world. That system, moreover, has long been the engine of American economic growth. Tragically, all that is under siege and it’s not clear how or when the damage we’ll see in the coming three and a half years can be undone.

The “end of the beginning?”

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s attack leaves us with uncertainties aplenty

Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1925 developed what came to be known as the Pauli exclusion principle. It holds that identical particles cannot occupy the same quantum state at the same time. Non-scientists have since broadened the idea to say that no two objects can fill the same spot at the same time.

But what of ideas? And what of competing and equally bad realities? Can two disparate and conflicting things coexist, especially when matters of politics, war and religion are involved?

Tragically, perhaps, we have an example now with Donald J. Trump’s attack on Iran. On the one hand, the world is surely safer if that country can’t now develop a nuclear bomb.

Certainly, Israel is more secure without that. And so are any of the many other enemies of the ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, the “cleric” whose bloodthirstiness belies any claim to holiness. We can include on his enemies list most of the western world, along with neighbors such as Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia, as well as Jews everywhere.

U.S. and Qatari troops and staff await U.S. President Donald Trump at the Al-Udeid Air Base southwest of Doha on May 15, 2025. Source: CNBC

On the other hand, all those enemies are now just as surely more at risk of lesser attacks. Terrorist assaults, missiles — perhaps even dirty bombs that could spread radioactive material over large areas — are all at the Shi’ite ayatollah’s disposal. Indeed, he already has sent missiles into Qatar in a failed retaliation at the U.S. military location, Al Udeid Air Base. What more awaits his enemies in coming weeks, months, even years?

In other words, the Trump attack is difficult to assess because this unquestionable act of war could bring safety to many for a long time, even as it poses great dangers to many, perhaps for a longer time.

So, was it a good move or not? Will history look back on Trump’s swaggering Marshal Dillon move as the bold and visionary effort of a courageous leader, a Churchill in a world of Chamberlains, as one right-wing rabbi suggested? Or was this a short-sighted, impulsive and power-mad bit of machismo that ultimately will deepen the U.S.’s plunge into an unresolvable Middle Eastern quagmire, possibly this generation’s Vietnam or Afghanistan?

Of course, with the ruins at the Isfahan, Natanz and Fordo nuclear-development sites still smoldering, a huge amount remains unknown. Vice-President JD Vance hinted that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium remains intact, for instance, saying “we are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel and that’s one of the things that we’re going to have conversations with the Iranians about.”

That appears to contradict his boss’s claim that Iran’s nuclear program was “totally destroyed” or “obliterated.” Trump’s claim was undercut, too, by the leaders of the U.S. military, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine saying that an assessment of damage to Iran’s nuclear sites was “still pending,” and Caine hedging that it was “way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.”

Similarly, the judgments of a couple independent experts fly in the face of Trump’s bravado. Consider the remarks of Jeffrey Lewis, a professor of nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, which tracks Iran’s nuclear program.

“At the end of the day there are some really important things that haven’t been hit,” Lewis told NPR. “If this ends here, it’s a really incomplete strike.” And Albright said: “I think you have to assume that significant amounts of this enriched uranium still exist, so this is not over by any means.”

Put another way, we either are now just entering the cliched but on-target “fog of war” or we are seeing the beginning of the removal of an horrific threat to Israel and the West. Judgments by very smart observers are conflicting:

“Those who claimed that Trump would flinch and back down at the last moment, that he is always afraid to take the next decisive step, were proven wrong,” the hawkish Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal wrote on YNet. “The Chinese watched and saw a great power willing to defend its interests and its allies in the region. The Russians saw Iran’s capabilities—some equipped with Russian weapons systems—easily crushed by the Israeli Air Force. By deciding to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, Trump has begun to rebuild the image of a superpower that stands by its principles and is ready to deter its rivals. This is not only important for Israelis, but for the entire world. This is not the end, but it is certainly the end of the beginning.”

And then there is the opposite view of Zev Shalev, an Israeli-South African television producer and author of the “Narativ” Substack.

“Pentagon planners aren’t talking about surgical strikes,” Shalev argued. “They’re discussing deployments, supply lines, and regional bases. They know what civilian leaders refuse to admit: there’s no such thing as a quick war with Iran. Once American forces engage, we’re committed to decades of conflict in the world’s most volatile region. Iran has prepared for this moment since 1979. They’ve built a war machine specifically designed to survive initial strikes and then bleed America through sustained asymmetric warfare. They’ve studied our weaknesses, positioned their assets, and created the perfect strategic nightmare for American forces. Russia and China are waiting. They’ve engineered the ultimate trap for American power: a war we can’t win, can’t afford, and can’t escape. And they’ve found the perfect mark to spring it—a cognitively compromised president who mistakes manipulation for respect.”

Can both views be true at the same time?

Certainly, one hopes that Pentagon planners have contingency plans for all eventualities, though Shalev doesn’t cite any sources for reporting what such planners are up to or know. Nonetheless, even if his comments are just conjecture, they are not unreasonable.

For sure, what is unreasonable is Trump seeming to think – or at least suggest – that his effort was a one and done, something that would force the Iranians to the bargaining table to sue for peace. “We did not assault anyone, and we will never accept being assaulted by anyone,” Khamenei said, as reported by Reuters. “We will not submit to anyone’s aggression – this is the logic of the Iranian nation.”

And just before the explosions in Qatar, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian wrote on X: “We neither initiated the war nor seeking it. But we will not leave invasion to the great Iran without answer.” The missiles Iran sent into Qatar killed no one – probably because Iran back-channeled a warning about its plans in advance – but they underscored Iran’s intent to respond.

What is also unreasonable is Trump ignoring the views of his own intelligence agencies by arguing that Iran was on the brink of getting a bomb. His own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, in March testified on Capitol Hill that the U.S. “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” Only later did she backtrack, as Vance more recently claimed that “a lot has changed” since Gabbard’s March testimony.

Is this all shades of the fictional weapons of mass destruction that were invoked to justify the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq? Given Iran’s very real nuclear-development effort, the argument for decisive military action – the Trump bombing – seems far more reasonable than the Iraqi action was. Almost certainly, the Iranians would love to have a nuclear bomb — sooner or later.

However, what happens now is problematic. As even critics of prior efforts at diplomacy with Iran admit, the country plays the long game (see Stanford’s Josef Joffe). Will it now bide its time, making small gestures as it tries to regroup after the blows to its military leadership and ordinance? Or might it escalate to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, restricting the world’s oil supplies? Then again, will it lay low but hit again when it judges the time right, in a year or two or three?

And will Trump soon be forced to realize this isn’t a reality-TV show where the plot unfolds in days and he comes out on top in the end? Will he be forced to kill the Iranian leader, as he threatened to do? Will he be forced to push for regime change, the mantra of other failed U.S. military efforts?

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” Trump cartoonishly posted on Truth Social.

And where would that put us but even deeper into the mud, as happened in so many wars before?

Questions abound. But, eventually, we’ll find out whether Trump’s cowboy actions — all done without the legally required assent of Congress — will amount to the end of the beginning, maybe a prelude to far worse. If physics offers any guidance, two opposing ideas can’t really be right at the same time.

Long live democracy or long live the king?

Posted on June 16, 2025 by Joe Weber

The would-be monarch is fighting hard but just may lose

Philadelphia’s “No Kings” Protest, June 14; source: AP

Crowd estimates are notoriously unreliable. But it appears that between four million and six million Americans angry enough to march on “No Kings Day” last Saturday don’t like the idea of a monarch in the White House. And, given the latest approval ratings for Donald J. Trump – 39 percent or lower, the lowest since January – it is likely that many more who stayed home don’t either.

Of course, some like the idea of an absolute ruler – or something close to it. The Project 2025 folks, for instance, love the so-called “unitary executive theory,” which holds that the Constitution vests power in the executive branch in the president, giving him the power to command at will, hiring and firing and issuing edicts as he sees fit.

“A president is elected by the whole American people,” is how Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller put it in a February press briefing. “He’s the only official in the entire government that is elected by the entire nation. Right? Judges are appointed. Members of Congress are elected at the district or state level.”

“Just one man,” Miller continued. “And the Constitution, Article 2, has a clause, known as the vesting clause, and it says, ‘The executive power shall be vested in a president,’ singular. The whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president. That president then appoints staff to then impose that democratic will onto the government.”

Certainly, Trump agrees. That’s why he has fired top officers at such independent agencies as the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and more recently, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And he also issued an executive order taking direct control of independent regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.

By appointing loyalist Kash Patel, moreover, he seized control of the FBI, where Patel has been polygraphing agents to find news leaks. And he upended the Justice Department, where appointee Pam Bondi has turned its guns on anyone who investigated Trump in past times. He also fired 18 inspectors general from federal agencies.

“It’s good to have a strongman at the head of a country,” then-candidate Donald Trump declared at a New Hampshire campaign rally back in January 2024, as NPR reported.

Thus, no one could be surprised that he could unilaterally order National Guard troops and Marines into a state where officials didn’t invite them and don’t want them. After California officials sued Trump over the move, he lost an initial judgment and is now fighting in a federal appeals court to keep the troops on the ground.

Poster at anti-Trump demonstration in Frisco, Colorado

Trump, of course, seems to feel he can defy court orders he doesn’t like. Thus, D.C. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg, found reason to believe that administration officials defied his order requiring a halt to deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. And in several cases involving the withholding of federal funding, judges found the administration to be violating injunctions to restore funding.

So much for checks and balances, one might say. And more power to the advocates of the unitary theory or, perhaps more apt, the monarchists.

In some ways, this is cyclical. Those of a certain age will recall that John F. Kennedy felt no reluctance to appoint his brother, Robert, as Attorney General, leading the Justice Department. Only norms and self-restraint regulated much presidential power for much of our history. But, as NPR reported, after Richard Nixon resigned in a scandal over abusing such power, Congress spent years passing laws to limit that power. Inspectors general emerged to attack waste, wrongdoing and inefficiencies.

“We’re still living with those laws today,” conservative legal scholar John Yoo told NPR. “And one way to understand what Trump is trying to do, and I’m not saying even that Trump understands this is what he’s doing, but the presidency, the way it’s designed, urges him to do it, [is] he’s trying to snap those bounds that were imposed on the presidency in the post-Watergate era.”

So, Fox News contributors such as Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, are keen to attack Democrats for trying to preserve those bounds with efforts such as the “No Kings” demonstrations. “Monarchy Malarkey” Turley called it on his website and in a column for The Hill.

“It is a curious campaign, since every indication is that our constitutional system is operating precisely as designed,” Turley argued. Courts have ruled for and against the president, he added, suggesting everything is just fine, except that Democrats are trying to breathe life into their failed “Democracy is Dying” theme.

“The danger is that these Democratic politicians are fueling the most radical and violent elements in our country with their ‘rage rhetoric,’” he contended.

Assassinated Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, Sen. John Hoffman; source: NPR

Turley’s timing in making that absurd contention couldn’t have been worse. Recall that a Trump supporter, Vance Luther Boelter, in the predawn hours of “No Kings Day” assassinated former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in their home outside Minneapolis. He also shot state Sen. John Hoffman, also a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, though they survived. And Boelter had a hit list of 45 Democrats.

Recall, too, Trump’s egging on of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And his claim afterward that the Capitol terrorizers were “patriots,” followed by his pardon of those who attacked police and others. Can we expect anything better of a man whose disdain for law and order is demonstrated most clearly by his own 34 felony convictions, findings for which he has avoided justice?

For Trump apologists, important questions loom. Is the system really operating as designed when Congress and most of the Senate are supine in the face of Trump efforts against universities, including Turley’s GW? Is it really operating when the president thumbs his nose at courts? Is it really operating when a president can countermand the wishes of a state’s governor and a big-city mayor? Or when, out of sheer vindictiveness, he can ramp up his deportation plans by targeting Democrat-led cities where the protests were largest, such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York?

“We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest cities,” Trump ranted on his Truth Social platform. “These, and other such cities, are the core of the Democratic Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.”

In the face of such George III-like furor (see the brilliant royal take in “Hamilton”), is the system really performing as it should? Or are critics such as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman onto something in supporting the “No Kings” efforts.

“America is no longer a full-fledged democracy,” Krugman argued in his Substack. “We are currently living under a version of competitive authoritarianism — a system that (like Orban’s Hungary or Erdogan’s Turkey) is still democratic on paper but in which a ruling party no longer takes democracy’s rules seriously.”

But Krugman doesn’t believe Trump has won — yet.

“Trumpists, however, haven’t yet fully consolidated their hold,” Krugman wrote. “America still has a chance of reclaiming itself from the grip of brazen corruption, mindless destruction, and contempt both for the rule of law and for our erstwhile allies. We don’t have to become a country bullied into submission.”

For that view to prevail – for American liberties and reasonable government policies to succeed – it likely will take more and bigger “No Kings” days. It will likely take a huge voter turnout in one and a half years to send a message in the Congressional elections that, indeed, most Americans have no use for the would-be monarch. And it will take a resounding rejection of Trump’s GOP two years after that to begin restoring health to the Republic.

Encouraging as they are, four, five or six million anti-monarchists are just a start.

Is the”police state” dawning?

Posted on June 9, 2025 by Joe Weber

Some of Trump’s critics are warning of just that

“Flatbed train cars carrying thousands of tanks rolled into Washington, D.C., yesterday in preparation for the military parade planned for June 14. On the other side of the country, protesters near Los Angeles filmed officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) throwing flash-bang grenades into a crowd of protesters. The two images make a disturbing portrait of the United States of America under the Donald J. Trump regime as Trump tries to use the issue of immigration to establish a police state.”

From the opening above, historian Heather Cox Richardson, a professor at Boston College, went on in her popular Substack to paint a bleak picture of the use of military and law-enforcement forces under the orders of the president.

She noted that the administration has insisted that many immigrants – even some in the U.S. legally – are criminals with no right to due process. Thus, masked officers dressed in black could grab people up off the street or pick them up when they appeared for legal appointments in courthouses. And thus officials could rush immigrants off illegally to the equivalent of a U.S.-funded penal colony in El Salvador.

Richardson also quoted the president’s point man on immigration – deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller – as saying that recent protests at a federal detention center in Los Angeles constituted an “insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.” Thus, the administration could order some 700 Marines to join some 2,100 National Guard troops Trump dispatched to quell protests, even though California Gov. Gavin Newsom did not request the military help and is suing to oust these uninvited soldiers.

Unsettling as all that may be, does it constitute the actions of a “police state?” A usually thoughtful nephew who works in law enforcement panned Richardson’s comments. Everything she writes, he argued in a post to me, is “skewed” and those who don’t see that are “willfully blind.”

While my nephew offered no details on what, if anything, is amiss in her comments on the police and military actions in California, there is no question that the term “police state” is strong stuff. So, too, is the argument that Trump is steering us into one. And so, too, is some of the rhetoric by Democratic officials.

For instance, consider a comment in The Wall Street Journal from Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who as a Marine officer served multiple tours during the war in Iraq. “This is Trump’s dream,” Moulton said. “This is exactly what he has wanted to do: turn the military against the American people. Donald Trump has never respected what Marines do overseas but has always wanted to use them to force his political agenda at home.”

So, the questions arise: Is Richardson’s argument that Trump is out to “establish a police state” unhelpful and “skewed” hyperbole? And is Moulton’s contention correct that Trump – who himself dodged the draft in the Vietnam era – is using the military to force his agenda regarding immigrants and perhaps other elements on us all?

On the first point, let’s turn to Merriam Webster. A police state, the dictionary tells us, is “characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures.”

So, one must ask, is it repressive federal control when a president overrides the wishes of an elected governor to deploy force? Moreover, do masked ICE officers constitute “secret police?” And does disregarding the “judicial organs” of the government – the courts – reflect the actions of a would-be tyrant out to enforce his will through the military and police?

If the answer to any of those questions is “yes,” then the term “police state” doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. Moreover, when combined with the imagery of a military parade in the nation’s capital slated for that would-be dictator’s 79th birthday, is it overwrought to think that suppression of dissent by force is out of bounds? Is not such imagery designed to intimidate both those from abroad who might threaten the U.S. and those at home whom Trump wants to crush?

Parade in D.C. following 1991 Gulf War, source: The New York Times

Is a parade of weaponry and soldiers in the nation’s capital — à la North Korea or Russia — not the action of a would-be fascist (a loaded term, too, but perhaps an apt one)?

One must note that most of the normal checks and balances in our government have evaporated under the one-party control of the Senate and the House, since that controlling party operates under Trump’s thumb. The president has cowed nearly all the potential critics in his party. Stepping up his control of the military seems likely to eliminate one other potential stumbling block.

To their credit, however, one force for checking tyranny – the judiciary – still seems to be operating properly. The courts, right up to the Supreme Court, have been a last bastion of resistance, often on immigration questions.

Indeed, it is heartening that the administration after insisting that one illegally removed immigrant – Kilmar Abrego Garcia – would never return to the U.S., has brought him back in the wake of a Supreme Court order demanding that. Abrego Garcia will soon face charges in a court of law, as he perhaps should have earlier, and we’ll see whether the administration’s accusations against him have any merit.

And yet the courts can act far less quickly than Trump can. At this point, the administration is battling an extraordinary 269 lawsuits (and many more if one regards scores of suits involving foreign student visa cancellations as more than just one giant action). Many of those suits could take years to wind their way through the system, perhaps even long after Trump is out of office. Certainly, they will gum up the courts.

Will judges decide that Trump’s actions in California are improper? That they amount to the uninvited actions of someone seeking to create nothing less than a police state? We’ll find out in time. For now, we do have the comments of academics such as Richardson, partisan critics such as Rep. Moulton, and writers such as those at The Atlantic.

Consider the insights of Tom Nichols, a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College who writes for the magazine. He called Trump’s military callup “yet another assault on democracy, the Constitution, and American traditions of civil-military relations.” He argued that Trump’s advisers “seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans.” And he held that the president “sees the U.S. military as his personal honor guard and his private muscle.”

Alarmingly, Nichols theorized that Trump may be looking long term here, “trying to create a national emergency that will enable him to exercise authoritarian control.” And he pleaded for Angelenos to not rise to the bait, to remain peaceful, saying “the last thing anyone should do is take to the streets … and try to confront the military or any of California’s law-enforcement authorities. ICE is on a rampage, but physically assaulting or obstructing its agents … will provide precisely the pretext that some of the people in Trump’s White House are trying to create.”

As Nichols perceptively put it, “The president and his coterie want people walking around taking selfies in gas clouds, waving Mexican flags, holding up traffic and burning cars.” Of course, most of the demonstrators in Los Angeles have been peaceful, as here:

From his “invasion” rhetoric on, however, Trump has tried to cast himself as the leader of a war. It’s the responsibility of intelligent observers – such as Richardson and Nichols — and of officials such as Moulton to point up the hollowness and buffoonery he instead exhibits.

One could argue that their strong language is over the top. But do we want to wait until there are armed soldiers occupying the other arms of government or patrolling the streets all across the country to find out? Their warnings bear attention.

Go West, young man (and woman)

Posted on June 4, 2025 by Joe Weber

But will the gutting of exchange programs let them come to the U.S.?

A couple decades ago, our family welcomed a high school foreign-exchange student from Sweden into our home. Frida was excited about coming to the United States. And, taking a liking the country, she has returned several times since, particularly at the urging of her National Hockey League-loving husband. Now, Frida’s 14-year-old son wants to do the same by attending a religious summer camp next year in the U.S.

In a delightful couple weeks in Europe and Scandinavia, we just visited these friends in their charming Swedish village. We also spent time with a former exchange student of ours from Stockholm, Johann, whom we also hosted years ago. Johann would like to join us in the Colorado mountains next winter to show us his Alps-trained skiing skills.

Frida, her son, and Johann are much like so many other foreigners for whom the U.S. has been a magnet. For millions, our country has represented freedom, adventure and opportunity. For those who come for education – especially at the undergraduate and graduate levels, along with high school – the country has opened pathways that have enriched them and our country alike.

Tens of thousands of high school students have come to the U.S. under such programs over the decades. Just one of many such efforts, the Future Leaders Exchange Program (or FLEX), boasts some 30,000 alumni, for instance. And it dates back only to the 1990s.

“While in the U.S., FLEX students gain leadership skills, learn about American society and values, and teach Americans about their home countries and cultures. FLEX students perform community service in their U.S. communities and act as ambassadors of their home countries,” the outfit’s website notes. “Many are inspired by this spirit of volunteerism to develop and implement innovative projects in their home countries, using the skills and ideas they gained while on program. FLEX students are naturally curious and enthusiastic citizens of the world.”

Former Moldova PM Natalia Gavrilita, source: NY Times

Some become leaders in their home countries. Natalia Gavrilita, one FLEX alum, for instance, wound up serving as her nation’s prime minister.

But in its xenophobic fervor, the Trump Administration seems to be doing its best to pare back or eliminate such exchanges. First, it suspended State Department grant programs under the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs that supported a slew of exchange programs.

And now, the administration intends to defund that State Department unit. The president’s fiscal 2026 budget – largely mirrored by the recently passed House budget bill – called for cutting the funds in the State Department international exchange programs by 93 percent, some $691 million. This could jeopardize such programs as AFS Intercultural Programs, along with the Germany-oriented Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX), the Future Leaders Exchange Program (FLEX), the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program (YES) and the American Cultural Exchange Services (ACES) program.

Trump’s budget cuts, if enacted by the Senate in coming days, could toss the rich legacy of such exchanges on the dustheap. They will undercut the so-called soft power by which America shows a welcoming face to the world.

“The proposal demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of exchange programs and would do the exact opposite of making America safer, stronger, and more prosperous,” wrote Mark Overmann, executive director of the Alliance for International Exchange. “International exchange programs are a proven investment in America – an investment in our economy, in our people, and in our foreign policy influence and interests. In order to expand America’s global influence, it’s important to invest more in international exchanges, not less.”

In addition, the State Department has just imposed a freeze on consular interviews for visas for foreign students and visitors while it fashions rules for officials to review their social media accounts. “The Department is conducting a review of existing operations and processes for screening and vetting of student and exchange visitor (F, M, J) visa applicants, and based on that review, plans to issue guidance on expanded social media vetting for all such applicants,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio cabled officials.

For now, these swords hovering over exchange programs haven’t been driven home yet. The Senate could restore funding as it reviews Trump’s budget. Indeed, after a recent funding freeze was declared illegal by a court, money needed for AFS and ACES activities was restored – at least temporarily – as reported by the Toledo Free Press.

Moreover, some Republican senators are chafing at some of the bill’s effects – though mainly because of the plan’s trims on Medicaid, as well as its explosive effect on the national debt. In a New York Times opinion piece, Missouri Republican Josh Hawley called “slashing health insurance for the working poor” both “morally wrong and politically suicidal,” for instance. And fiscal hawks, for their part, want even deeper cuts in spending.

Still, Trump is pushing the Senate to pass his bill by July 4.

Will the student exchange programs – with their comparatively small constituencies – survive? Certainly, they are not getting the headline attention of, say, Medicaid and programs to feed hungry American children.

Still, advocates for such programs such as NAFSA: Association of International Educators are doing their best to rally exchange-program enthusiasts to make their voices known. Whether the group can marshal enough power to stand up to Donald J. Trump remains to be seen.

In the face of Trump’s many assaults on international students at the university levels — what remains surprising is that so many foreign students – at all levels — still want to come to the U.S. Even as he erodes the nation’s standing globally, Trump hasn’t destroyed that desire.

Harvard international students, source; NY Times

His attacks on U.S. universities and the limits he has tried to put on international students at Harvard – though temporarily blocked by a court — surely will make a dent. Certainly, schools in Europe will capitalize on fears among foreign university students that they could face harassment and deportation.

But, for now, America still shimmers as a promised land for many. That status took a couple centuries to develop and is well-rooted. Can one benighted presidential administration destroy that? The damage will be real, but it may vanish in time — just as this administration surely will.

The Big Picture

Author Archives: Joe Weber