“The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge”

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

Stalin, source: Medium

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.

James Comey, John Brennan; source: CNN

The shells were arranged in the formation “86 47.” That, of course, is common shorthand for dismissing or removing Trump, the 47th 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.”

Source: Deadline

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

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.”

Jeff Goldberg, source: PBS

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

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

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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.

James E. Ryan, source: Virginia

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 buildingsdiversify 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.

Columbia University

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 detainmentdeportation, 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.

Source: The Federalist Society

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?”

Trump’s attack leaves us with uncertainties aplenty

Source: Silicon Republic

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.

Jeffrey Lewis, source: Middlebury

“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.”

David Albright, source: AIJAC

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?

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?

Some of Trump’s critics are warning of just that

Los Angeles, source: NPR

“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.

Tom Nichols
Heather Cox Richardson

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.

“There are none so blind …”

Sometimes, misinformation is a choice

Source: AZ Quotes

An old acquaintance who handled PR for the New York Stock Exchange when I covered it years ago has become something of a troll on LinkedIn. A committed Trumper, he makes a point of sharing or “liking” often bizarre claims that reinforce the president’s narratives.

For instance, this fellow recently warmed to a meme that claimed that DOGE had found a Louisiana man with 34 names and addresses who was collecting $1.1 million a year in Social Security payments. Never mind that several other posters warned that this was bogus or that I had shared a Snopes fact-check tracing the post’s lineage and demonstrating how it was false.

My acquaintance’s response: “There’s a lot of truth out there that you are ignoring.” And he, like Trump, then invoked President Biden’s alleged flaws (never mind that Biden hasn’t been president since January).

Is the common practice in PR to not admit when one is wrong and, instead, to deflect, changing the subject when it’s unpleasant? Do they teach that in PR school or do people just learn that on the job, developing bad habits that perhaps their bosses love?

Similarly, a cousin often shares memes such as one that shouts: “OBAMA EXPOSED AS FOREIGN-BORN CIA ASSET — MILITARY CONFIRMS TREASON, ELITE TRAFFICKING TIES, AND FRAUDULENT PRESIDENCY.” Another, she drew from Breitbart, proclaims “100 DAYS OF GREATNESS,” citing the recent jobs report and arguing that the economy was defying doomsayers.

The nonsense about Obama is obvious, as is the fact that he left the presidency in January 2017 after two terms. For its part, the enthusiastic Breitbart link flies in the face of stock market plunges, the Commerce Department’s report of shrinkage in the gross domestic product and the flatness in the unemployment rate at 4.2 percent, up from as low as 3.4 percent in the spring of 2023. The post labels as “doomsayers” the responsible forecasters who have upped the chances of the recession, something even Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledges.

Such memes and the people who share them raise a host of questions. Among them: do the creators and the sharers pay attention to legitimate news sources? And, more troubling, how gullible are they? Have they lost — or never had — all sense of critical thinking?

Perhaps they live in a world – as Trump at least pretends to – where such sources as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Reuters, AP, etc., are outlets of “fake news,” all conspiring to embarrass him with false reports. Perhaps, as a result, they turn to a world of wacko memesters, swallowing whole each new bit of pabulum that flows by algorithm onto their phones or laptops.

Admittedly, mistrust in legitimate media abounds and has grown over the years. According to Gallup, as of this past February, Americans are divided into rough thirds with just 31 percent trusting the media a great deal or a fair amount, 33 percent saying they do “not [trust it] very much,” and 36 percent, up from 6 percent in 1972, saying they have no trust at all in it. The slide has been a long time in coming: About two-thirds of Americans in the 1970s trusted the “mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio” either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to “[report] the news fully, accurately and fairly,” Gallup reported. “By the next measurement in 1997, confidence had fallen to 53 percent, and it has gradually trended downward since 2003.”

Trump rode such media distrust into successful elections in 2016 and again last fall. Give him credit: as a talented huckster, he knows how to get on board a train when his marks are coasting along on it. His charges against the media played into the hands and hearts of the 49.8 percent of voters who elected him last November and the 41 percent to 43 percent who approve of his job performance lately, though not most of us, the estimated 53 percent to 55 percent who disapprove of his work lately.

We also know that sources of responsible news coverage have been drying up or have been cowed by Trump. His browbeating has led to pullbacks on editorial comment at The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, for instance. Indeed, it’s passing rich that The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for cartoons by Ann Telnaes, who quit the paper in January when it refused to run a cartoon criticizing owner Jeff Bezos for his Trump obsequiousness.

Trump’s pursuit of CBS for “60 Minutes” already has driven a major producer to quit, citing a loss of journalistic independence. The network’s parent, Paramount, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of the company to Skydance, run by the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison. Recall that Trump sued over what he regarded as a deceptively edited interview in October with Vice President Kamala Harris, a suit most experts see as baseless and far-fetched.

Moreover, the numbers of newspapers publishing across the country have plummeted, depriving Americans of vital sources of independent information. More than one-third of print newspapers have disappeared in the last two decades and of the rewer than 5,600 papers remaining, some 80 percent are weeklies, according to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative.

So, if Trumpers ever tapped sources of responsible journalism before, they will have fewer such opportunities going forward. Instead, they will have memesters and the likes of flaks such as White House spokesman Karoline Leavitt. Remember that in March Leavitt inadvertently spoke truthfully in saying that Trump’s Department of Justice would focus on “fighting law and order,” with more substantial misstatements following, such as her claim that tariffs constitute “a tax cut” for Americans.

Then there is Leavitt’s insistence that the Trump Administration is “complying with all court orders,” even as it has refused to bring home an immigrant it has admitted was wrongly deported. Remember that the Supreme Court ordered his return with no dissents.

Like Leavitt, my acquaintance who worked in PR may subscribe to the Trumpian notion that reality is whatever that president says it is. And my cousin may simply be misinformed by relying on random Netizens instead of turning to real news outlets. The tragedy for American democracy is that over the coming few years, if trends continue, the misinformation and deceit they accept may become institutionalized. We seem well on that way to that now.

Source: Visit Sweden

On a personal note, this Substack will be on hiatus for about three weeks. My wife and I will go biking in Scandinavia, happily if temporarily distant from the Big Liar. Stay strong, dear readers, and stay well informed for us.

‘You say you want a Revolution, well …’

If they’re going to change the world, universities need to do more

Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, 1830. Source: DiPLO

A couple weeks ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks called for something akin to a revolution.

“It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising,” he wrote in a piece headlined “What’s Happening is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.” He argued: “It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.”

Are we beginning to see the rise of such a rival power or, more properly, rival powers? Glimmers are emerging in some universities that are uniting to fight federal funding cuts and other actions President Donald J. Trump has taken to shatter what he sees as “woke” culture.

But, so far, the efforts seem oddly timid. Either university administrators fear being too out front in hopes they can avoid Trump’s vindictiveness or they think — mistakenly — that they can weather the gathering storm.

Rutgers profs David Salas-de la Cruz, left, and Paul Boxer

Showing less fear, a pair of Rutgers professors — chemist David Salas-de la Cruz and psychologist Paul Boxer — in March drafted a “mutual defense compact.” They proposed bringing together the 18 schools in the Big Ten athletic and academic conference in resistance to Trump.

This compact would commit the schools to provide “meaningful” cash for a defense fund aimed at supporting any member “under direct political or legal infringement.” It would provide legal counsel, governance experts, and public affairs offices “to coordinate a unified and vigorous response” that could include countersuit actions, strategic public communication, amicus briefs and expert testimony, legislative advocacy and coalition-building.

Quickly following suit, faculty senates at more than a dozen of the schools endorsed the idea. Encouragingly, they include those groups at Rutgers, one of my alma maters, and my prior employer, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The resolution passed at Rutgers called on the university’s president, Jonathan Holloway, to “take a leading role in convening a summit of Big Ten academic and legal leadership” to start the compact.

But Holloway has demurred. While he supported the “ethos” of the resolution, he did not formally endorse it, noting that he is stepping down at the end of the academic year, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. “I’m a president walking out the door in two months,” he said in a senate meeting. “Presidents going out the door have no lobbying power with their peers.”

Instead, Holloway encouraged faculty senators to “work with their colleagues in other university senates and shared-governance councils, whether in the Big Ten or beyond, to further test their thinking, understand what may or may not be possible, and identify the local constraints and freedoms that define the actions of peer institutions,” according to a spokeswoman.

Mealy-mouthed? PR-speak for “no way can we do this”?

Already, a spokesman for Ohio State told The Washington Post that “it is not legally permissible for the university to participate in a common defense fund.” Other administrators have not taken up the idea publicly, including representatives for leaders at Indiana and Nebraska who did not respond The Chronicle’s request for comment.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that the top university officials may hope a duck-and-cover strategy will serve them better. But that is likely only because they haven’t yet had to fight, as Harvard has. Recall that Harvard has brought suit against the administration for freezing billions in federal grants.

Dani Rodrik

Some Harvard professors have even pledged to donate 10 percent of their salaries this year to support the university’s fight. “If we as a faculty are asking the University administration to resist the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom, we should also be willing to share in the financial sacrifice that will be necessary,” Harvard Kennedy School professor Dani Rodrik told The Harvard Crimson.

So far, all but one of the Big Ten schools have been spared the sort of attacks Trump had lobbed at Ivy League schools. The exception, Northwestern, lost $790 million.

But Trump’s wrath – and his social engineering – may be unavoidable. Nine of the Big Ten schools have gotten a letter from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights warning of “potential enforcement actions” if they failed “to protect Jewish students on campus, including uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities,” according to The Post.

Of course, the claim of fighting antisemitism is little more than a ruse, an excuse to undertake a far-reaching remake of higher education. Yes, antisemitism is a real issue — especially at Harvard and my other alma mater, Columbia — and needs to be rooted out. But, for Trump, it’s just a pretext.

As for other schools that have stayed clear of the president’s broad-gauge volleys, it is just a matter of time before they are hauled into the fight, like it or not.

Take note that the hit list of Project 2025 – the right-wing blueprint that Trump is following, despite disavowing it during the campaign – has a hefty array of education targets.

The agenda includes so-far incomplete measures such as capping support for indirect research at universities, authorizing states to act as accreditors or setting up alternatives to current accrediting bodies, terminating the public service loan forgiveness program, banning critical race theory and eliminating PLUS loans, among other things. Here is a handy tracker on how the Project’s efforts are proceeding.

As Ms. reports, only one-third of the Project’s efforts have been completed, so much more remains for the balance of Trump’s term.

And perish the thought that any shreds of diversity efforts could remain unscathed on campus. Schools could be prosecuted on civil rights grounds for that, including programming aimed at putting first-generation students on the same footing as others. The administration is investigating at least 45 schools in an effort to end “racial preferences and stereotypes.”

Jonathan Fansmith, source: ACE

“Big Ten institutions haven’t been in the crosshairs, but they can read the writing on the wall,” Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for the American Council on Education, told The Post. For many college presidents he represents, the prevailing thought now is: “Trying to keep a low profile won’t stop the attacks.”

Yet he said he also suspects they would be wary to sign on to the compact without knowing exactly what it would require.

Only administrators, not faculty senates, can commit their institutions to the united front.

The Rutgers university senate supported the Big Ten compact with its vote on March 28. Organizers there plan a teach-in next week and May Day protests in support of the compact, journalism professor Todd Wolfson told The Washington Post. He expects a protracted fight with administrators over the summer.

“We have had to lead and they have followed us,” Wolfson said. “Now we will demand they actually put resources into defending our campuses.”

Wolfson also serves as president of the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP is a union with chapters at more than 500 schools, including several in the Big Ten. It was among the first groups to sue the Trump administration over federal cuts to higher education funding.

Separately, about 10 Ivies and elite schools have put together what The Wall Street Journal called a private collective to fight deep cuts already mandated against them.

Perhaps because their schools already are being scorched by Trump, individual trustees and presidents are involved in the collective. The newspaper reported that participants have discussed red lines they won’t cross in negotiations with the White House. One such red line, for instance, is relinquishing academic independence, including autonomy over admissions, hiring, and what they teach and how it is taught.

The group has gamed out how to respond to demands presented by the Trump administration, which has frozen or canceled billions in research funding at schools it says haven’t effectively combated antisemitism on their campuses.

So far, Trump’s minions have been successful in picking off universities and law firms by attacking them one by one. So it’s not surprising that they are fretting about unification efforts, according to a source cited by the Journal. Within the past two months, the task force warned the leadership of at least one school not to cooperate with other schools to defend against the task force demands, one source told the paper.

Additionally, the American Association of Colleges and Universities has come out with a statement condemning what it called “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American colleges and universities.” The petition was signed by more than 500 higher-education leaders nationwide.

“We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” the statement said.

Speaking, of course, isn’t enough. As Harvard has done, taking the fights to court – the last redoubt, given the supine Congress – will be essential.

Brooks’s “uprising” has a long way to go, but Trump is certain to give timid administrators plenty of reason to man the barricades.

Failing grades

Trump is setting us back with his war on education

Source: India Today

Over the last 14 years, folks in China have welcomed me to teach fairly often. Whether they were graduate students at Tsinghua University or undergraduates at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, the students I was privileged to teach were smart and hardworking. Some even asked for extra homework, a request I never got at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, even from some outstanding students there.

That’s why a new report from Bloomberg News is alarming. Headlined “Why US Men Think College Isn’t Worth It Anymore,” the piece bemoans the erosion of working-class men’s status and prospects in the U.S. In that decline, a turn away from schooling is key.

“As U.S. men forgo higher education, the demographic group as a whole has lost ground in other areas too,” the piece reports. “Working-class men today are less likely to be employed than they were four decades ago, their inflation-adjusted wages have barely budged in more than 50 years, they’re less prone to get married or have children, and an increasing number report having no close friends. Men are also four times more likely than women to die by suicide. Data show that men age 18-30 spent an average of 6.6 nonsleeping hours alone each day in 2023, 18 percent more than they did in 2019 and over an hour more than women did, according to a report by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.”

The suggestion, of course, is that a college education can boost earning power, aid in social mobility and status, and lead to better health and wellbeing. All those things are backed up by data. A wealth of it shows that more schooling drives such benefits.

Perhaps not surprisingly, higher education also increases one’s ability to think critically and, in theory, spawns smarter political decision-making. The disproportionate support Donald J. Trump has enjoyed among the less schooled, the so-called diploma divide, suggests as much. Dumb voters vote dumbly, it seems.

But perpetuating ignorance may be why so many on the right decry higher education and why President Trump is leading a war on it. He just launched his newest volley in an executive order attempting to reshape the college accrediting process.

The order asks the secretary of education to “hold higher education accreditors accountable including through denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination for poor performance or violations to the federal Civil Rights Act,” a White House official told CNN.

As the news outlet reported, the order also “directs the attorney general and the secretary of education to investigate and terminate unlawful discrimination by American higher education institutions, including law schools and medical schools,” the official said.

Trump’s order would shake up the arcane but pivotal world of college accreditation, a move Trump has called his “secret weapon” in his bid to remake higher education, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The order aims to use the accrediting system to combat what Trump views as discriminatory practices and “ideological overreach” on college campuses, the Journal reported. It would put a greater focus on intellectual diversity among faculty — presumably putting more conservative ideologues in the teacher’s lounge — and on student success. It also would make it easier for schools to switch accreditors and for new accreditors to gain federal approval.

Source: Digital Marketing Institute

As the newspaper reported, accreditors set standards that must be met to access federal financial aid. The federal government gave $120.8 billion in loans, grants and work-study funds to more than 9.9 million students in the year ended last September. To earn an accreditor’s seal of approval, higher-education institutions must prove they meet standards covering everything from their mission and admissions policies to the quality of their faculty and programming.

“Revoking accreditation is an existential threat for these universities,” Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, told the paper. “If you lose Pell grants and lose student loans, for most colleges that means you’re done.”

The effort mirrors Trump’s slash and burn approach to education. As the Journal reported, proposed cuts to National Institutes of Health funding, currently being fought over in court, have driven universities to freeze hiring, rescind graduate student offers and pause research. The White House has targeted several Ivy League schools, including ColumbiaHarvardPrinceton and Brown, with federal grant cuts or freezes, citing antisemitism concerns.

Trump, of course, has particularly attacked efforts to promote diversity on campus, echoing the themes of far-right extremists. Such rightists amplify a national undercurrent of dissatisfaction with schooling.

“Similar messaging has come from activists such as Charlie Kirk, who traveled to more than two dozen colleges before the 2024 election on what he called the ‘You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,’ to try to get more members of Generation Z to cast a vote for Trump,” the Bloomberg piece notes. “Almost one-third of U.S. adults said they have little or no confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in June 2024—before Trump’s latest tirades against academia. In 2020, 41 percent of young men aged 18-29 voted for Trump; that number jumped to 56 percent in the 2024 election.”

Should this worry us all? Unquestionably.

Trump’s demagogic promises of restoring a 1950s culture in which a high school degree and a well-paying assembly line job guarantee the American Dream seem as fictional as his vows to cut grocery prices and scale back inflation. The sepia-toned nostalgia he trades in is nonsense in the 21st century.

That brings me back to China. In the current great power competition, the country has some key edges over the United States. Start with the population disparity: 1.4 billion compared with 342 million. Then move onto governmental systems, where one prizes stability and competence and the other lately has been erratic and unpredictable. But most of all, consider education, where China graduates nearly 4 million college students year, nearly double the U.S. tally.

For educators, of course, the last category is the most unsettling, especially since so many Chinese are drawn to science and technology. As MSNBC reported, China graduates almost twice as many STEM-oriented Ph.D.s than the U.S., an estimated 77,000 versus 40,000, according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Exclude international students from that count and China outpaces the U.S. 3 to 1.

The Chinese students I taught were representative. They worked like demons and were respectful of knowledge and education, realizing that school was their ticket upward in society. And, simply put, if these edges continue, the Chinese are going to beat the pants off us.

Meanwhile, our president would take us on sorry steps backwards. Yes, globalization driven by trade liberalization from the Reagan years onward has hollowed out American manufacturing, driving lower-skilled work overseas. And, yes, this has eroded the American Dream for many, at least for those who thought assembly-line jobs were the smartest route upward.

TikTok mockery, source: Newsweek

But is the answer really a return to such low-skilled work, the sort that Chinese meme-makers are satirizing? Is the answer a remaking of education to suit the political whims of some fantasists who momentarily are in power? Is the answer not, instead, a ramping up in university education, a stepping up that would better equip the U.S. to compete globally?

The multiple tragedies now unfolding in Washington and spreading, cancer-like, across the nation’s campuses are quite a partisan matter — one in which the Democrats have ceded far too much ground. Ever since at least the Clinton Administration, Democrats have lost the working class, particularly men.

Just recall how President Bill Clinton championed higher education as a sensible response to economic change. Consider his message in his 1998 State of the Union address:

“I have something to say to every family listening to us tonight: Your children can go on to college,” Clinton said. “If you know a child from a poor family, tell her not to give up-she can go on to college. If you know a young couple struggling with bills, worried they won’t be able to send their children to college, tell them not to give up-their children can go on to college. If you know somebody who’s caught in a dead-end job and afraid he can’t afford the classes necessary to get better jobs for the rest of his life, tell him not to give up-he can go on to college. Because of the things that have been done, we can make college as universal in the 21st century as high school is today. And, my friends, that will change the face and future of America.”

Source: Florida Trade Academy

Of course, since then, college has grown out of reach for many — or just something they feel they can’t or don’t want to achieve. Recall that less than less than 38 percent of American adults have bachelor’s degree to higher.

And that proportion may shrink, as college costs soar and state support shrinks in many places. As the Bloomberg piece notes, sticker prices in the Ivy League are near $100,000 a year, while public in-state schools cost about $25,000 annually, according to the College Board. “These costs also disadvantage lower-income women and girls, but it’s boys and men who are more often taught (consciously or not) the value of starting to collect a paycheck as soon as possible,” the report says.

Indeed, given such costs, it may be reasonable for many to forgo pricey schooling to instead seek a trade-school salary. And many may be more suited to that than to computer science or, heaven help us, the humanities.

But where does that short-sighted approach leave American society overall? Will there really be enough jobs for the underschooled? Is it really smart for our society generally to underfund higher education?

And, longer term, what road does that approach put our politics on? Does it blaze a path to enduring demagoguery, a country in which people unequipped to think critically can repeatedly be suckered by slick salesmen who make unfulfillable promises?

Some highly competitive and smart folks China would love just such a result. For the rest of us, however, the answers will earn us a dismally failing grade.

Guilt and regret?

Perhaps not for J.D. Vance

Though he’s an outspoken atheist, British author Ian McEwan is something of an expert on guilt and regret. His 2001 novel, “Atonement,” gives us both in spades through a young girl who wrongly accuses a housekeeper’s son of assaulting her sister. The girl spends her life trying to make amends, something she can’t quite ever do.

McEwan may have something to teach Vice President J.D. Vance. Recall that Vance, a seemingly devoted convert to Roman Catholicism, has long been carrying water for his conscience-free White House master. At his boss’s command, he has battled the pope and U.S. leaders of the Church, particularly over immigration.

In the wake of Pope Francis’s death on Easter Monday – barely a day after the Church’s top leader briefly met with the vice president – it’s easy to think of the McEwan character, Briony Tallis, whose awful error prompted a lifetime of regret. One must wonder: will the pope’s sudden passing spawn such sentiments in the vice president, for whom Francis was in theory an infallible confessor? Will Vance have second thoughts now about his actions and arguments?

Source: Associated Press

On Easter Sunday, Vance visited the pontiff in Rome. Ever gracious, the pope gave him chocolate eggs for his children.

But the day before that, on Saturday, Church officials gave the vice president reason to ponder whether the horrific policies he and his president have carried out on migrants are misguided – as Francis long contended. Vance met with a pair of the pope’s deputies, Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop Paul Gallagher, who seem to have given him an earful.

“There was an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners,” a Vatican statement said. “Finally, hope was expressed for serene collaboration between the state and the Catholic Church in the United States, whose valuable service to the most vulnerable people was acknowledged.”

So, did this lead to a Damascus moment for Vance? Did he show any signs of reconsidering his anti-migrant efforts? Did he show any regret or guilt over the wrongful deportation and imprisonment in El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others like him?

It appears not. Indeed, Vance’s often-demonstrated arrogance and slavishness to Donald J. Trump seemed on display in the description of his meeting there by his office.

The vice president and Parolin “discussed their shared religious faith, Catholicism in the United States, the plight of persecuted Christian communities around the world, and President Trump’s commitment to restoring world peace,” Vance’s spokespeople said.

As the Associated Press reported, the Holy See has expressed alarm over the administration’s crackdown on migrants and cuts in international aid while insisting on peaceful resolutions to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The reference to “serene collaboration,” moreover, appeared to refer to Vance’s claim that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was resettling “illegal immigrants” in order to get federal funding, an assertion Catholic leaders deny.

In a Feb. 10 letter the pope suggested he had been following the “major crisis” in the U.S. concerning the mass deportations program.

“The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” he wrote, as Axios reported.

Earlier, Vance had defended the administration’s actions by invoking on X the medieval Catholic theological concept of “ordo amoris.” The Yale-educated lawyer argued, legalistically, that this “order of love” idea meant responsibility to one’s family supersedes an obligation to a “stranger who lives thousands of miles away.”

“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance posted, according to AP.

But the pope set him straight. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis responded. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating … on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Tom Homan, source: PBS

That led another White House bully into the fray. Trump “border czar” Tom Homan, also a Catholic, weighed in against the pope, essentially telling his infallible church leader to butt out. Homan told reporters that Francis “ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us,” The Hill reported.

The contretemps between the leaders of the Church and the lackeys in the White House almost certainly will have no impact on U.S. policy. After all, that is guided by a cruel monomaniac who seems to believe himself far more infallible than any mere pope. And, for his part, Vance is a reliable toady.

But one must wonder whether many American Catholics, especially in light of their leader’s death, will now question the White House approach. Certainly, Trump has given them ample reason — again — to question his mental stability and vindictiveness. Consider what the president had to say on Easter:

“Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country,” Trump wrote on social media. “Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten!”

Unhinged? Vile? Why do otherwise bright people like Vance not see that?

The key to Vance’s apparent blindness may lie in his autobiography. The vice president, who detailed the string of men his drug-addicted mother brought into his life in his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir, has long sought father figures. Trump, it appears, is the ultimate one.

Certainly, Francis — a kind, compassionate and thoughtful man — would have made for a better mentor, a father figure with a heart. But it may be that Vance’s Catholicism doesn’t run all that deep and his thoughtfulness is surprisingly shallow.

Long into her old age, the fictional Briony Tallis made up stories in which she atoned for her errors, though she failed in reality to do so. Perhaps Vance someday will develop enough self-reflection to succeed where Tallis didn’t. For now, however, he seems as oblivious as his master.