Tag Archives: Donald Trump

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Trump’s Free-spending Habits: Do Congressional Appropriations Matter Any More?

President Trump put up another taxpayer-paid television ad on Sept. 30. The spot, first flagged by political ad-buying firm Medium Buying, flaunts a flashing series of missile strikes and F-22 jet acrobatics interlaced over bombastic speech from Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

It’s like a free-for-all.

Donald Trump’s first administration reallocated billions in funding from the military and Treasury to construct a border wall Congress had explicitly declined to fund.

His second administration has been equally brazen and blatant in ignoring Congress’ power of the purse. 

Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently funded enhanced security for himself by taking about $12 million from the department’s Office of Minority Health. The Wall Street Journal noted that the Reagan administration created the Office after a landmark report showed that Black life expectancy in the U.S. was shorter than white Americans’ and that Black babies were more likely than white babies to die.

Meanwhile, Trump’s administration has thrown the 433 sites managed by the National Park Service into turmoil, shifting funding and workers to pet projects in Washington, according to the New York Times. Earlier this year, the administration used at least $67 million generated by entrance fees from parks to help fund projects in Washington favored by Mr. Trump, like the botched Reflecting Pool repairs. 

In August, the Washington Post reported that to assemble funding in that account, the White House budget office authorized a series of transfers from the U.S. Secret Service and the White House Military Office totaling $500 million, planning and budget documents indicate, while an additional $305 million came from private donations., primarily using taxpayer dollars. Instead of seeking Congressional appropriations, the administration has pieced together funding from other agencies and private donors and directed it to an account intended routine maintenance of the executive mansion. To build the fund, the White House budget office authorized a series of transfers from the U.S. Secret Service and the White House Military Office totaling $500 million.

And now USA Today just reported that The Trump administration is using public dollars not appropriated for that purpose to produce and pay for a television ad that features President Trump urging Americans to “defeat communism,” while touting his economic record and personal resilience, as a choir in the background recites the verse “Love me. The ad reads “Paid for by the U.S. Government” at the end.  “It appears to mark an extraordinary breach of White House practice under previous presidents separating public funding from political advertising,” USA Today observed. 

Trump Administration’s TV Ad

Despite criticism, another government-funded political ad promoting Trump aired on Fox News Sunday, during “Saturday Night Live,” “Fox News Sunday,” and several college and NFL football games. The 30-second ad showed a grim-faced Trump walking down a hallway as audio from a rally speech played in the background. “This is the final battle,” Trump says. “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state.”

“We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all,” Trump says in the ad.

Sept. 27 Ad.

The taxpayer money used to fund the ads that started airing last week came from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an arm of DHS that oversees the Border Patrol and customs and immigration at airports, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Four high-ranking House and Senate Democrats wrote a letter to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles demanding the Trump administration immediately take an earlier ad off the air off the air and report exactly how many taxpayer dollars were spent creating and airing the illegal political propaganda. “If President Trump wants people to love him, he can pay for it himself,” the letter said. 

“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and utterly illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” the lawmakers wrote, noting the ad constitutes a blatant violation of Section 718 of Division E of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026, which forbids any federal funding from supporting propaganda, as well as other federal laws.

The White House has responded that the ad is nothing more than “a public service announcement”.

 Trump’s diversion of federal funds for purposes not explicitly appropriated by Congress has been a central flashpoint across both of his presidential terms. “Critics and lawmakers argue that the administration’s actions bypass federal law, while the administration has relied on emergency powers, executive orders, and legal maneuvers to pause, claw back, or redirect funds to fit its policy goals,” says international law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.

Congress needs to reassert its power of the purse and its responsibility to the American people NOW!

UPDATE

The Washington Sun reported on Sept. 29, 2026 that on Sept. 19, the White House Office of Management and Budget gave Customs and Border Protection $20 million for “OBBBA commemorative events.” The next day, CBP awarded the advertising company LMD Agency Inc. a contract for $20 million for a “national media campaign.”

Three days later, the administration began running pro-Trump national ads featuring the president railing against communism and praising his past achievements. Lawmakers are pointing to the $20 million apportionment as an unauthorized use of funds, claiming the administration went around Congress to pay for an ad campaign that the law had deemed prohibited.

LMD Agency received the $20 million contract from the CBP’s public affairs office as part of a larger contracting vehicle the ad agency already has with the US Coast Guard.

That larger contracting vehicle is normally used for Coast Guard recruitment campaigns, according to a review of federal spending databases. Because LMD Agency already had a larger “indefinite delivery vehicle” contract, CBP did not have to run a separate solicitation process to award the contract.

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Texas Congressman Picking People’s Wallets With Deceptive Pleas

Congressman Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican in office since 2021, knows how to pull a fast one in the fundraising festival.

Rep. Ronny Jackson

He’s blanketing email inboxes with a deceptive, plaintive plea from Team Ronny. This one came to me in Oregon:

Ronny’s no stranger to controversy.

In March 2021, a scathing Pentagon inspector general report said he engaged in “inappropriate conduct” while serving as a White House physician, made sexual comments and “disparaged, belittled, bullied and humiliated” subordinates. The report also said he “engaged in inappropriate conduct involving the use of alcohol during two incidents” on overseas presidential trips in 2014 and 2016.

President Trump nominated Jackson to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs during his first term in 2018, but Jackson withdrew his nomination after accusations of drinking on the job and over-prescribing medications to patients. 

Texas voters in the heavily conservative 13th Congressional District later elected Jackson to Congress in 2020 anyway with a strong endorsement from Trump. 

Now Jackson’s out there playing tricks with emails ostensibly seeking the opinions of recipients on the midterm elections:

“Patriot, we’d like to invite you into the inner circle,” the message says. 

“You’ve gone above and beyond to display the traits of someone who truly cares about their country, their community, their family, and the future of traditional conservative civilization. Therefore, we wanted to reach out to you personally, one-on-one, to get your thoughts on the outlook of the upcoming midterm elections.” 

To lend a patina of legitimacy to the message, the plea then includes a series of questions:

❓DO YOU SUPPORT PRESIDENT TRUMP’S PLAN TO DEPORT ILLEGALS?

❓DO YOU BELIEVE OUR NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT RISK IF AMERICA LACKS BORDER SECURITY?

❓ARE YOU PLEASED WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP’S JOB PERFORMANCE SO FAR?

❓DO YOU BELIEVE THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE DOING MORE TO STOP ANTI-AMERICAN IDEOLOGY FROM BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS?

❓ARE YOU GLAD DONALD TRUMP IS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?

❓DO YOU SUPPORT THE SECRETARY OF WAR, PETE HEGSETH?

❓DO YOU BELIEVE REPUBLICANS WILL MAINTAIN MAJORITY CONTROL IN CONGRESS AFTER THE 2026 MIDTERMS?

❓If the 2028 Presidential Election were held today, who would you prefer to win?

Then, of course, comes the real message. “Add Your name and submit your answers” along with a $20.26 contribution or show your dedication with a contribution ranging from $47 to $3,500. 

 “Your contribution will benefit Texans for Ronny Jackson and Trump National Committee JFC”, the email assures recipients.

Ah yes, but how much to each? In tiny barely readable text, the message says you have click through to find out. If any recipients do, they will discover that $19.25 of a $20.26 contribution will go not to Trump, but to “Texans for Ronny Jackson TX-13”. Only $1.01 will go to “Trump National Committee JFC. The same percentage division applies to all contributions.  A $1000 contribution will send $950 to Jackson and just $50 to Trump, a $3,500 contribution will send $3,325 to Jackson and $175 to Trump. 

To add insult to injury, unless you are careful and uncheck a box, the pledge will become a monthly recurring contribution with an indeterminate end date. In adopting this scheme, Jackson joins other politicians who have been criticized for manipulating contributors. 

In 2021, the New York Times reported that the Republican National Committee and the campaign committee for Donald Trump had refunded $12.8 million collected from people in the first half of 2021 who thought they were making a single donation. Instead, the online solicitation signed them up for weekly contributions. 

Four state attorneys general have begun looking into the online fund-raising practices of both political parties, specifically seeking information about the use of prechecked boxes to enroll contributors in recurring donation programs that spurred a wave of fraud complaints and demands for refunds last year.

The attorneys general for New York, Minnesota, Maryland and Connecticut sent letters to WinRed, which processes online donations for Republicans, and ActBlue, which processes online donations for Democrats, asking for documents related to the practices.

In 2023, researchers at Columbia University who analyzed millions of campaign contributions found that about half of top Republicans had signed donors up for automatic recurring contributions.

Critics allege that the practice is an attempt to intentionally manipulate small-dollar contributors. In May 2021 the Federal Election Commission (FEC) voted unanimously to recommend that Congress officially ban pre-checked recurring donation boxes, demanding mandatory “affirmative consent”. Congress has not, however, taken action to ban the practice.

Similar efforts at the state level have failed, too. In 2025, for example, the New Jersey assembly considered, but didn’t pass, Assembly Bill No. 5559 (the “Political Donation Transparency Act”) which would have prohibited automatic enrollment in recurring political contributions and established penalties for violators. A 2026 effort in Missouri failed as well when  HB 1788, which would have restricted recurring contributions, passed the Missouri House, but ultimately died in the Senate.

Jackson is seeking another term in November. He will face Democratic candidate Mark Nair, who ran unopposed for his party’s nomination.

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Are Socialists Taking Over Colorado And Beyond?

In Colorado’s June 2026 primaries, 29-year-old Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros unseated 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in the dark-blue 1st Congressional District, which consists largely of Denver residents. 

As the overwhelming favorite against her Republican opponent in November’s general election, Kiros, 29, is expected to be the first self-identified socialist to be elected to Congress in Colorado history.

“We just proved that if you organize the people, you can beat the organized money,” Kiros told Colorado Newsline after her win. “And we’re going to replicate it in races all across the state.”

Will they?

Before pundits and the public accept this assertion, let’s step back and examine what just happened in Colorado’s 1stCongressional District. 

The numbers suggest that the real victor was voter apathy, as in so many political contests across the country. Non-voters default to being led by the preferences of voters. That, combined with the creation of safe party districts, is increasingly turning primaries into the real elections. 

Bear with me now.

In looking at the 1st Congressional District race, it’s important to recognize that it was limited to registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters. There are 477,098 active registered voters in the district. Of those, 187,317 are registered as Democrats and 236,454 are registered as Unaffiliated voters. So, the number of eligible voters in the Democratic primary totaled 423,771.

But only 157,645 people, or 37.2 % of those eligible, voted in the primary. 

That translated into 83,855 for Kiros, 62,715 for DeGette and 11,075 for the Democratic party candidate, Wanda James.  In other words, the Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros won the primary with just 19.79 % of eligible voters, only a few more than would fit in the Denver Bronco’s stadium.

Overwhelming? A massive sign of a cultural shift? A rejection of a more moderate political climate?  I don’t think so.  

A similar situation in New York City is why caution is warranted in interpreting recent races.  

“Turnout in New York’s closed primary races is typically small—even Mamdani  won last year’s Democratic mayoral primary with less than 7 percent of the city’s overall population backing him,” City Journal reported. “Tuesday’s results do not prove, then, that the majority of residents in New York are hard-left socialists. They instead suggest that, since most potential voters remain politically apathetic, a small but well-organized machine like the DSA’s can deliver big results.”

There’s a parallel here with Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George’s victory in Washington, D.C’s mayoral Democratic primary, which has led some to declare her win a mandate. There are approximately 357,000 registered Democrats in Washington, D.C., making up roughly 75% of all registered voters in the District. Only about 38% of registered Democrats voted and George won with just 75,000 votes. A mandate? Hardly. 

So, calm down folks. 

This isn’t to say that the new socialist legislators in the House won’t be able to muck things up. 

As commentator Gerard Baker has observed, “The victory by “democratic socialists” and their allies in New York Democratic  primaries last week is a signal moment in the nation’s descent into political dystopia. Sure, we can overstate its importance. New York isn’t America. What passes for cool radicalism in Brooklyn’s Park Slope would get you a psychiatric evaluation in most of the country.”

In addition, if Democrats retake the House in November, their margin is likely to be slim and an enlarged cadre of disruptors will be able to challenge leadership. Republicans are also likely to try to tar the entire Democratic Party for its association with the Democratic Socialists. President Trump has already called the socialist nominees “godless” communists who are threatening the country. At a Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering, he urged religious conservatives to prevent a “communist” victory in the midterms,saying his pro-Christian policies would be reversed if Democrats returned to power. 

Hang on. 

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Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Park: Don’t Fence Me In

Lafayette Park north of the White House is one of the most prominent hubs for political protests in the country and a beacon for the first amendment.

So, of course, President Trump, not content with destroying the Rose Garden and the West Wing, is continuing his rampage through Washington’s landmarks with a move to permanently surround the park with an 8-9 ft. fence. That would allow the park to be closed at Trump’s discretion.

On Thursday, July 16, the Commission of Fine Arts, a federal design panel stuffed with Trump supplicants, indicated support for the plan. 

“This is definitely the president’s park, but also the people’s park, and it’s to be made open, but also closeable, so that it can be made safe,” James C. McCrery II, the vice chair of the Commission, told the New York Times.

Safe for whom? Safe from whom?

The park has long been the site of multiple political protests, including picketing by suffragists demanding voting rights, protests for women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), demonstrations by civil rights and anti-war activists, LGBTQ activists, anti-nuclear war encampments, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

In 2021, the National Park Service and the White House Historical Association added three wayside markers on the north side of the park that tell the story of protest in the park, the construction of the White House by free and enslaved laborers, and the influence of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in preserving the character of the park.

In this Library of Congress photo from 1917, suffragists march with banners, picketing outside on the sidewalk in front of the White House.

The Secret Service, the Executive Office of the President and the Department of the Interior claim they want to install the permanent fence so the park can be closed during “heightened conditions.”

A demonstrator hold up flags at a rally for D.C. Democracy in Lafayette Park near the White House in Washington, Saturday, June 25, 2011. (AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez)

NPR ran the AP photo above by Luis Alvarez of a rally in Lafayette Park to show how close protesters were able to get to the White House without barriers in 2011. Trump wants to push them back, way back.

“What this fencing represents, to me, is the worst of what the new attitude toward politics represents,” Marty Pearl, 83, who brought a “Hate Won’t Make America Great” sign to the area, told NPR. “And that is imperialism, fascism, dictatorship, because what dictators do is isolate themselves from the people they rule. That is not, for me, the way democracies can possibly work.”

He’s right. Putting our political leaders more and more behind barriers and keeping them more and more distant from the people they serve diminishes our democracy. 

And Trump doesn’t want to stop with the fence.

In June, the Washington Post disclosed that Trump is secretly planting a monument to himself in Lafayette Square in the form of 47 maple trees as a nod to being the 47th president. 

Enough!

Postcript:

Clay Pearce · on Facebook

J͏u͏l͏y͏ ͏3͏0͏ ͏a͏t͏ ͏5͏:͏5͏6͏ ͏A͏M͏ · 

I felt a profound sense of sorrow as our plane descended into Washington, D.C., last Thursday. I hadn’t been to our nation’s capital since 2008.

As we drove to our hotel, a deep heaviness settled over me. We passed National Guard troops stationed on street corners and around monuments. It was deeply unsettling to see armed American soldiers patrolling the streets of our nation’s capital.

Passing the Labor Department, I saw two enormous, Stalin-esque banners of Trump and Teddy Roosevelt hanging from the building. I couldn’t help but wonder how we had reached a point where the president of the United States was being glorified on government buildings in a way that felt more like a personality cult than a democracy.

The next morning, we walked toward Dupont Circle and saw more armed troops, ICE agents, and Secret Service personnel patrolling the streets. When we headed toward the White House, police and military vehicles blocked the usual road.

We were directed to a small viewing area where we could barely see the White House through a sixteen-foot fence surrounding Lafayette Park.

Americans, Australians, Colombians, and people from around the world were gathered there, straining to catch a glimpse of the people’s house through the massive barrier.

I was horrified.

The White House belongs to the American people. Lafayette Square belongs to the American people. These are symbols of our democracy—not private property to be barricaded and hidden from the public.

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Kotek A Winner? Please, No.

A YouTube channel called Election Time recently ran an item showing Democrat Tina Kotek polling at 45% and Republican Christine Drazan at 44% in the governor’s race. 

And this isn’t the only outlet saying Kotek has the advantage. 

“While Oregon’s 40-year history of electing Democratic governors and the state’s strong distaste for Republican President Donald Trump suggest Drazan has a difficult road ahead of her,” the Oregon Capital Chronicle opined on May 26. And I recently heard a couple political analysts on OPB saying Kotek will likely win it all again. 

They can’t be serious. 

This is the “Tax Everything that moves Kotek” who just tried to pull a fast one on Oregonians by shifting a despised transportation tax measure to May in hopes reduced voter participation would doom it, but still saw more than 83% of voters across the political spectrum reject it. 

This is the leader of Oregon’s Democratic party that has fostered an  anti-business climate for decades, enabled horrendous K-12 school performance despite high per pupil spending, filled the state Supreme Court with liberal judges ever since the administration of Republican Victor Atiyeh, whose term ended in January 1987, and exploded the state budget since then, increasing it from $12.57 billion in 1987-1989 to $138.9 billion in 2025-2027.

It’s the party that gleefully accepted, and then stalled returning, a $500,000 contribution from a disgraced and bankrupt crypto company after the U.S. Attorney’s Office requested it return the money to the federal government. 

This is a party so beholden to unions, which represent just 15% of working Oregonians, that it enacted a law to pay striking public and private workers unemployment benefits, that has watched Oregon’s business reputation tank in national rankings, that tolerates underperforming K-12 schools while suspending the requirement that high school students must pass standardized proficiency exams (the “Essential Skills” requirement) to graduate, that has watched the projected cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement project swell from $4.8 billion to $14.4 billion, and potentially $17.7 billion.

Oregon is in trouble and continuing Democratic Party control isn’t the solution.   

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Detention Centers and Worse: It Can Happen Here

“Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act helped roughly triple the ICE budget, allocating $45 billion for building new immigration centers and hiring 10,000 new ICE agents. One dispiriting lesson of the imperial boomerang is that, once. bought and paid for, structures of intimidation and oppression tend to endure.” David Wallace-Wells, 1/25/2026

Update, 1/30/2026 – The Washington Post reported that local officials are raising logistical and humanitarian concerns in 23 towns where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to convert industrial buildings into detention centers that combined would hold up to 80,000 people. ICE has offered few details about its plan since The Washington Post first reported on it  in December 2025. One detention center the Department of Homeland Security wants to open would be a more than 1 million sq. ft. industrial warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia that would be retrofitted to hold 8,500 detainees and hundreds of staff, more than the city’s total population. The City Manager, Eric Taylor, has said the city does not have the water or sewer infrastructure to support the facility. Unaddressed is the question of why the government needs such huge detention facilities when it says it’s objective is to deport people.

Update, 2/12/2026 – It’s not just more detention centers coming down the pike. Wired reported that ICE and DHS have quietly carried out a months-long expansion, securing more than 150 new leases and office expansions across nearly every state, often in or near major metro areas. Many new facilities sit near schools, medical offices, and places of worship, with DHS pressing the GSA to bypass standard procurement rules and hide lease details under claims of “national security.”

Update, 2/21/2026 – Funding for the Department of Homeland Security expired has expired and Democrats have made   10 demands to rein in Trump’s surge of deportation forces into U.S. cities. One of those demands is “Compliance with Basic Detention Standards and Oversight of Facilities.” Think about it. Incarceration facilities are already legally required to be humane and hygienic., but as Radley Balko has reported on SubStack in The Unpopulist, there is a growing pile of reports from attorneys, journalists, human rights groups, judges, and others about shocking, inhumane conditions at facilities around the country.

Update, 3/7/2026 – So far, DHS has completed the purchase of 10 of the 23 detention center properties it initially pursued, spending more than $890 million, according to deed records or statements by local officials. Efforts to acquire 10 other properties — in Indiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia — have failed, according to statements by local officials or building owners.

In the years preceding his death in 1875, George Templeton Strong, a prominent Wall Street attorney, kept a voluminous journal of his life and times. In April 1865, near the end of the American civil war, he wrote, “These four years have reduced me to something like pauperism, But I am profoundly grateful for them nevertheless. They have given me — & my wife & my boys, — a country worth living in & living for, & to be proud of.”

I can’t say President Trump’s inhumane crackdown on immigrants and harassment and murder of American citizens in the past year have given me a country worth living in, living for and to be proud of.

Not while the Trump administration promotes hatred of “the other”. David Masciotra. David Masciotrar ecently wrote in the Washington Monthly, “Through (Elie) Wiesel’s story and the stories he told and created, two truths become inescapable. The first is that it is naïve, if not catastrophic, to underestimate the power of hatred. “

I doubt 7-year-old Diana Crespo, a second grader at Gresham’s Alder Elementary School, and 5-year-old Liam Ramos, the bunny-hatted child detained by immigration agents in Minneapolis, see America as a country worth living in and living for and to be proud of either. They are both being held at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s South Texas Family Residential Center in Texas.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has spread its detention center tentacles across the United States: 

Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) reported on January 29, 2026 that ICE is planning another detention center in Newport, Oregon as soon as May.

The Atlantic reported that the warehouses expected to be detention centers could become white elephants if there’s a change in ICE policies and the detainee population decreases. “If the goal is to not have endless illegal immigration, those centers will be obsolete in three to five years,” a longtime ICE official told me. “The amount of money going into them is abhorrent.”

The spread of these. detention centers reminds me of another brutal time.

Most of us know the names of a few Nazi concentration camps, like Dachau,  Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died. But they were part of a massive complex of more than 850 ghettos, concentration camps, forced-labor camps and extermination camps CNN has identified. They stretched from France and the Netherlands in the west to Estonia, Lithuania and Poland in the east that the Nazis established during the 12 years Adolf Hitler was in power. Their purpose — to  segregate  , oppress and persecute their opponents.

Like the ICE detention centers, the Nazi system started small and then metastasized like a cancer, according to the Wiener Holocaust Library. 

Initially there were so-called SA camps. (Sturmabteilung (SA), or “Brownshirts,” was the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing). After the Night of Long Knives in 1934, the SS and Heinrich Himmler shut down the SA camps and consolidated control of all camps in Germany. Himmler and the SS used Dachau, an original SS camp, as a blueprint  for all camps. From 1934 onwards, the SS developed and then operated the camp system, which lasted until Germany’s defeat in 1945.

The SS started building major camps, beginning with Sachsenhausen in 1936, then Buchenwald in 1937, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen in 1938 and Ravensbrück for women in 1939. Political prisoners were the first inmates. Then people with previous criminal convictions. Next were the  so-called “asocials”, such as Roma, homosexuals, prostitutes, the homeless and the “work-shy”. The mass imprisonment of Jews began in 1938 after the Anschluss and  Kristallnacht.

As the Second World War began in earnest, foreign citizens from newly occupied countries such as Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands began to be imprisoned , followed by Soviet prisoners of war (POW’s) after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Those who believe U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can and will be restrained under the Trump administration might want to stop and reconsider.

With an administration where cruelty is the point, it can happen here.

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Republican Lobbyist Shows “Scam PACs” are Alive and Well

There’s so much money sloshing around in American politics a lot of questionable activities get overlooked, like the sweet thing Virginia lobbyist Robert J. “Rob” Catron has going on. 

Robert J. “Rob” Catron

A native of South Florida and a graduate of Florida State University, Catron worked as Chief of Staff for Rep. Ed. Schrock, a conservative Virginia Republican, during 2001 – 2003. He later joined the Arlington, VA-based lobbying firm of Alcalde & Fay, where he’s now a Partner. According to the firm, he is “a proud veteran of the United States Army Reserve” and “has successfully managed or consulted on more than 50 winning political campaigns for federal, state and local offices”.

On December 4, 2023, Catron registered Ranger PAC, a political action committee, with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Based in Athens, Georgia, the PAC says its mission is to support the election of “highly accomplished conservative military veterans to Congress to defend the Constitution and get America squared away”.

The focus on veterans is an exploitation of the fact that although public trust in many institutions is in retreat, the public generally still has high confidence in veterans as effective leaders in civic life. 

Ranger PAC’s treasurer is Paul Kilgore, CEO of Professional Data Services Inc (PDS), a political financial consulting company in Athens he founded in 1999 that is a leading compliance firm in Republican politics. In 2024, Kilgore represented more than 157 Republican candidates.

From January 1, 2025 to November 30, 2025, Catron’s Ranger PAC raised $1,394,894.74, according to its filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). In the same period, it spent $1,353,836.73.

The problem is that, in a deliberate assault on trust, Catron’s Ranger PAC spent just $69,500, 5% of its total spending, on aspiring or serving politicians. That’s right, a measly 5%. The rest, 95%, went to fundraising and administrative expenses.

Although there’s no legal minimum percentage of money raised that a PAC must donate to candidates, legitimate PACs generally spend less than a quarter of their donations on fundraising, with many spending considerably less. 

Charity Navigator, an independent non-profit organization that evaluates U.S. charities on their financial health, accountability and transparency, encourages nonprofits to spend no more than 30% combined on administrative and fundraising costs. Organizations earning the highest scores spend less than 10 cents to raise $1 (a 10% ratio).

In Ranger PAC’s case, it added insult to injury: 5 the 19 politicians who received donations from January 1, 2025 to November 30, 2025 weren’t even veterans.[1]

The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates betrayals of public trust, calls PACs like Ranger PAC “Scam PACS”. They purport to raise money for political and social causes, but spend most of the money they raise from unsuspecting donors on fundraising, salaries and overhead.

In 2015, Politico reported, for example, that a PAC called the Black Republican PAC spent less than 1 percent of the $700,000 it raised on contributions to candidates or ads supporting them, according to government filings. 

The FBI warns: “Scam PACs are fraudulent political action committees designed to reroute political contributions for personal financial gain. This is a federal crime—and can be costly to victims who thought they were making legitimate campaign contributions.”

If most of the money Ranger PAC raised didn’t go to candidates, where did it go?

$19,641.81 went to Paul Kilgore’s Professional Data Services Inc for “PAC Compliance Consulting”. 

Most of the rest went primarily to enriching 10 firms involved in fundraising[2] , some of them with shadowy histories. 

The website for Better Mousetrap Digital, which Ranger PAC paid $25,291.33, says it “is the premier digital fundraising consulting firm for Republicans…with decades of experience spanning from state house campaigns to the White House”. 

Better Mousetrap Digital’s founder is Jack Daly. The company’s website doesn’t note that in December 2023, Daly was sentenced to 4 months’ imprisonment for conspiring to (i) commit mail fraud by defrauding thousands of conservative political donors out of money and (ii) lie to the Federal Election Commission (“FEC”). He was also ordered to pay a $20,000 fine, along with two separate payments of $69,978.37 for restitution and forfeiture.

Daly emerged from federal custody, nevertheless, to re-establish himself as a top Republican Party campaign fundraiser. NOTUS reported in Oct. 2025 that dozens of federal-level Republican political committees — including the Republican National Committee, numerous congressional committees and campaign operations tied to President Donald Trump — had together spent nearly $18 million on digital fundraising, donor lists and other services from Better Mousetrap Digital.

The FBI says it is actively looking for Scam PACs that only spend money on telemarketing and junk mail. It urges Americans targeted by a scam PAC to contact their local FBI office and ask to speak to an election crimes coordinator. 

Unfortunately, scam PACs have been around for a while.

“Since the tea party burst into the political landscape in 2009, the conservative movement has been plagued by an explosion of PACs that critics say exist mostly to pad the pockets of the consultants who run them,” Politico wrote in 2014. “They collect large piles of small checks that, taken together, add up to enough money to potentially sway a Senate race. But the PACs plow most of their cash back into payments to consulting firms for additional fundraising efforts.”

A POLITICO analysis of reports filed with the Federal Election Commission covering the 2014 cycle found 33 PACs that courted small donors with tea party-oriented email and direct-mail appeals raised $43 million, but spent only $3 million on ads and contributions to boost the long-shot candidates often touted in the appeals.

In 2016, two Democratic FEC commissioners, Ellen Weintraub and Ann M. Ravel, urged their colleagues to take action against scam PACs, but there’s been little follow-up. On January 31, 2025, President Trump sent a brief letter to Weintraub firing her “effective immediately” as a FEC Commissioner and Chair. Weintraub challenged her dismissal, but is no longer serving on the commission.  Ravel resigned from the FEC in February 2017. Weintraub has not been replaced, denying the FEC a quorum for votes.

During 2002 – 2018, Virginia political operative Scott B. Mackenzie served as treasurer of 12 PACs that spent 68% of the money they raised on fundraising, wages and administration. But he paid a price. In 2020, a Federal District Judge sentenced him to 12 months and one day in prison for making false statements to the FEC in relation to his association with the PACs. Mackenzie also had to pay $172,200 in restitution.

“If the Justice Department was seeking to send a message to others tempted to get into the ‘scam PAC’ game, that message came through loud and clear,” said Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer at the Akerman law. “These are not victimless crimes and people will go to prison for them.”

It looks like Catron hasn’t gotten that message, even though he’s been in trouble before. 

In June 2021, he was indicted by a Virginia Beach grand jury on 10 counts of making false statements and election fraud. He avoided prison when he pleaded no contest to three election-related charges. The charges stemmed from a petition scandal during a Republican congressman’s ultimately losing 2018 campaign for a second term in Congress representing a coastal Virginia district. Catron was accused of being involved in an effort to get a third-party spoiler candidate on the ballot with petitions using forged signatures.

Catron received a three-year suspended sentence and was ordered to pay court costs and fines after entering the plea to three counts of neglect of election duty. 

With his Ranger PAC antics, maybe it’s time to bring morally hollow Robert J. “Rob” Catron back to court.

[1] Recipients of Ranger PAC donations, January 1, 2025 – November 30, 2025

Donation RecipientDonation ($)Service
Matt Van Epps, Tennessee  10,000Army
Michael Whatley, N. Carolina  5,000Not a veteran
Ronny Jackson, Texas   8,500Navy
Derrick Van Orden, Wisconsin    5,000Navy
Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Iowa   5,000Army
Zach Nunn, Iowa      5,000Air Force
Gabe Evans, Colorado    5,000Army
Tom Barrett, Michigan    5,000Army
Stewart Whitson, Virginia   1,000Army
Dan Butierez, Arizona    1,000Not a veteran
Jen Kiggans, Virginia    5,000Navy
Ryan Zinke, Montana     5,000Navy
Pat Harrigan, N. Carolina   2,000Army
Nick Lalota, New York  1,000Navy
Ken Calvert, California    1,000Not a veteran
Warren Davidson, Ohio    1,000Army
Abraham Hamadeh, Arizona  2,000Army
Randy Fine, Florida    1,000Not a veteran
Jimmy Patronis, Florida   1,000Not a veteran 

[2] Recipient / percent of total disbursements / Total disbursement

DIRECT SUPPORT SERVICES   17.15%

$232,119.45

ONE VOICE SOLUTIONS   14.29%

$193,522.35

CONSOLIDATED MAILING SERVICES.  9.23%

$124,999.46

DRAGONFLY CONSULTING   9.1%

$123,200.00

FORTHRIGHT STRATEGY, INC.   7.78%

$105,323.46

LAUNCHPAD STRATEGIES, LLC.  3.9%

$52,765.05

TAILWINDS POLITICAL   3.89%

$52,686.42

NAMS-NORTH AMERICAN FULFILLMENT.  3.56%

$48,140.77

DIRECT SUPPORT SYSTEMS   3%

$40,677.94

BETTER MOUSETRAP DIGITAL    1.87%

$25,291.33

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Chocolate Milk: Richard Grenell on The Kennedy Center

A January 2, 2026 PBS NewsHour interview with Richard Grenell, President Trump’s choice to lead the now renamed Trump-Kennedy Center was a classic lesson in evasiveness. 

According to The New Yorker, Kennedy Center staff and others often liken Grenell to Grendel, the “powerful demon, a prowler through the dark” in Beowulf. In his PBS interview, he showed he has another talent.

Richard Grenell

Co-Anchor Amna Nawaz led off with a direct question, asking him to respond to a report that a number of artists had chosen to cancel or pull out of performances at the Center because of the president’s takeover of the Center’s board and the renaming of the Kennedy Center. 

“Chocolate milk,” Grenell replied. 

Well, not exactly. 

That’s how I characterize non-answers. 

Grenell might as well have said “chocolate milk” because his response completely ignored the question and immediately veered off into an allegation that NewsHour had consistently failed to cover the Center’s finances. 

“At the Trump-Kennedy Center, we have 19 unions. It’s incredibly expensive to go and put on performances,” he whined. “We cannot have unpopular programming that doesn’t pay the bills.”

“How about ticket sales at the Center.,” Nawas asked. ‘Are ticket sales down? Is that confirmed or not?”

Grenell’s response. “I find it to be outrageous that PBS is not reporting on the phenomenon that arts institutions have been having for decades. Since President Trump has arrived at the now Trump-Kennedy Center, we have raised more than $130 million, blowing away all other fund-raising, and that’s corporate donors who are coming back because they trust the programming.”

In other words, “Chocolate milk”.

And so it went, on and on.

Nawas said, “Viewership for the Kennedy Center Honors were down dramatically. Does that — as a steward of this institution, does all of this, the backlash, the headlines about artists pulling out, the fact that so few people paid attention to the Honors, does that worry you?”

Grenell: “If you go to CBS, they will tell you that the CBS Trump-Kennedy Center Honors this year tied for number one in its demographic.” In other words, it did well with a specific segment of the tv audience in that time period, not total viewers. 

In other words, “Chocolate milk”.

Politicians have long evaded media questions, but Trump and his minions have raised it to an art form, figuring there’s little or no downside these days to giving a word salad answer or sequeing to a completely unrelated topic.  

Donald Trump himself is the role model for his administration in this behavior.

His stream-of-consciousness speaking style, involving long seemingly unscripted statements that veer from topic to topic, is a practiced deceit allowing him to avoid directly answering questions. He has referred to his meandering speaking style as the purposeful “weave”. In his case, however, it could just as well be a rambling sign of muddled thinking and cognitive decline. 

 As Sir Walter Scott understood: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/ when first we practise to deceive!”

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The Destruction of American Diplomacy Is Underway

Piece by piece, President Donald Trump is dismantling America’s representation and reputation around the world.

With about 80 U.S. ambassador posts worldwide already vacant, the Trump administration has abruptly recalled nearly 30 career ambassadors at U.S. embassies around the world. They’ve been directed to vacate their posts by Jan. 15 or 16, 2026. Most of the affected ambassadors are at diplomatic posts in Africa, but the removals are also impacting posts in Europe,

Africa was hit the hardest, with about a dozen ambassadors or chiefs of mission recalled from Niger, Uganda, Senegal, Somalia, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritius, Nigeria, Gabon, Congo, Burundi, Cameroon, and Rwanda. In the Middle East, heads of mission were recalled from Egypt and Algeria. European chiefs of mission were also recalled from Slovakia, Montenegro, Armenia and North Macedonia.

A senior department official told the Journal the recall was part of a standard process to reassess ambassadors in any administration and that it’s the president’s right to ensure he has envoys in place who advance his foreign-policy agenda.

The damage done by the vacancies is compounded by the questionable quality of some of Trump’s ambassadors who are already confirmed .

For example, Herschel Walker, a former professional football player who ran unsuccessfully as the Republican party’s nominee in the 2022 U.S. Senate election in Georgia, is Trump’s s ambassador to the Bahamas. Then there’s Charles Kushner, a disbarred attorney who in 2005 was convicted of illegal campaign contributions,  tax evasion and witness tampering, and who happens to be the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Charles Kushner is Trump’s Ambassador to France and Monaco. And there’s Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump’s Ambassador to Greece. She’s a former Fox News personality and Donald Trump Jr.s ex- fiancée.

The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) , which represents the U.S. foreign service and career diplomats, said the recall represents “a steady erosion of norms, transparency, and professional independence in the Foreign Service.”

“Abrupt, unexplained recalls reflect the same pattern of institutional sabotage and politicization our survey data shows is already harming morale, effectiveness, and U.S. credibility abroad,” AFSA said.

The United States is going to pay a steep price for President Trump’s reckless moves undermining our country’s diplomatic authority.

Already Vacant U.S. Ambassador Posts

PostCurrent Ambassador
AfghanistanVACANT
AlbaniaVACANT
  
Angola and São Tomé & PríncipeVACANT
APECVACANT
ASEANVACANT
AustraliaVACANT
AzerbaijanVACANT
BarbadosVACANT
BelarusVACANT
BelizeVACANT
BoliviaVACANT
Bosnia and HerzegovinaVACANT
BrazilVACANT
BulgariaVACANT
BurmaVACANT*
CambodiaVACANT
Central African RepublicVACANT
ChadVACANT
EcuadorVACANT
El SalvadorVACANT
Eswatini (formerly Swaziland)VACANT
The GambiaVACANT
GeorgiaVACANT
GermanyVACANT
GhanaVACANT
GuineaVACANT
HaitiVACANT
HondurasVACANT
IAEAVACANT
IcelandVACANT
IndonesiaVACANT
IraqVACANT
JamaicaVACANT
KenyaVACANT
KosovoVACANT
LesothoVACANT
LiberiaVACANT
LibyaVACANT
MalawiVACANT
MauritaniaVACANT
MoldovaVACANT
MozambiqueVACANT
New Zealand, Cook Islands and NiueVACANT
NicaraguaVACANT
NorwayVACANT
OECDVACANT
OSCEVACANT
PakistanVACANT
ParaguayVACANT
QatarVACANT
RussiaVACANT
SamoaVACANT
Saudi ArabiaVACANT
SerbiaVACANT
SeychellesVACANT
SloveniaVACANT
Solomon IslandsVACANT
South KoreaVACANT
SudanVACANT
SyriaVACANT
TanzaniaVACANT
Timor-LesteVACANT
TogoVACANT
TongaVACANT
Trinidad and TobagoVACANT
UkraineVACANT
United Arab EmiratesVACANT
UN / Conf. on DisarmamentVACANT
UN / GenevaVACANT
UN / Human Rights CouncilVACANT
UN / ViennaVACANT
UNESCOVACANT
VenezuelaVACANT

Information taken from www.whitehouse.gov and foreign.senate.gov.

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Beyond the Pale: Trump Steps Over the Line in Anti-Immigrant Rant

How dare you, Donald Trump. 

“Go back to where you came from”, he said to the Somali immigrants in Minnesota, employing an insulting slur unacceptable in polite society. 

Last week Trump said on his social media channel, Truth Social, he’d send Somalis “back to where they came from.” Yesterday he said Somalis in the U.S. should “go back to where they came from and fix it.”

A person familiar with Trump’s plans told the Associated Press federal authorities are preparing a targeted immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota that would primarily focus on Somali immigrants living unlawfully in the U.S.

At a cabinet meeting yesterday, Trump said Somalis “contribute nothing.” 

“I don’t want them in our country,” a snarling Trump told reporters. “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”

I remember hearing that taunt directed at minorities by racist know-nothings in my youth in the 1950s, but I thought people had long ago been shamed from uttering it. 

Trump, however, seems to enjoy denigrating “the other”.

Trump’s own Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cites “Go back to where you came from,” as an example of unlawful workplace conduct, along with the use of “insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets”.

I suppose in some respects nobody should really be surprised by Trump’s insults. That’s his modus operandi. Demean and slander his opponents, particularly those he deems not “real” Americans.  And his supporters often embrace his scurrilous attacks.

He even goes after members of Congress with abandon. He has described Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, (D-Minn), who came to the United States from Somalia as a refugee and became a citizen 25 years ago, as “garbage.”

“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.” 

And Trump’s recent explicit use of hateful speech is not original or unprecedented. It was a feature, not a bug, of his campaigns for office. 

An analysis published by Presidential Studies Quarterly[1] , cited by the National Library of Medicine, concluded that “no other comparable candidate of either major US party has ever approached the level of negativity and vitriol toward racial/ethnic minorities that Trump did.” 

A Washington Post column today by George Will is headlined “A sickening moral slum of an administration”. 

Indeed.

  1. [1] Çinar I, Stokes S, Uribe A. Presidential rhetoric and populism. Presidential Studies Quarterly. 2020;50(2):240–263. doi: 10.1111/psq.12656. [DOI] [Google Scholar]