Tag Archives: Donald Trump

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Dear Trumpers: Is This What You Voted For?

Presidential candidates say a lot of things during the heat of a campaign. Voters have to separate the wheat from the chaff to figure out what among all the proposals are likely to actually be pursued. President-elect Donald Trump has taken things further by revealing his most controversial proposals AFTER the election, saving voters from having to consider whether they make any sense or should influence their vote.

As Tina Brown said today in Fresh Hell, “In Trump Season Two, deranged masculinity is all the rage.” Consider the following items Trump has put forward since the election:

  • Greenland: Trump has refused to rule out the use of force or economic coercion as a means for America to take control of Greenland,  an autonomous territory of Denmark in the polar zone with self-government and its own parliament, a population of approximately 56,600 inhabitants and an official language, Greenlandic, that is spoken by the majority, although a small proportion of the population considers itself bilingual and uses Danish as a parallel language. “Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale,,” said Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Egede.  “… he (Trump) seems to sincerely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker ones. Trump has long insisted that the United States should seize smaller countries’ natural resources, and that American allies should be paying us protection money, as if they were shopkeepers and America were a mob boss,” Jonathan Chait wrote in The Atlantic.
  • The Panama Canal: Trump has refused to rule out the use of military or economic coercion to force Panama to give up control of the Panama Canal that America built more than a century ago. Construction of the canal, an artificial 82-kilometer waterway in Panama that connects the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean, was officially completed on April 1, 1914 and officially opened to commercial traffic on  August 15, 1914.  On Sept. 7, 1977, President Carter submitted two treaties to the U.S. Senate. The first, called the Neutrality Treaty, stated that the United States could use its military to defend the Panama Canal against any threat to its neutrality, thus allowing perpetual U.S. usage of the Canal. The second, called The Panama Canal Treaty, stated that the Panama Canal Zone would cease to exist on October 1, 1979, and the Canal itself would be turned over to the Panamanians on December 31, 1999. These two treaties were signed on September 7, 1977.  Carter signed the implementation legislation into law on September 27, 1979. When pressed on whether he might order the military to force Panama to give up the canal, or to do the same with Greenland, Trump recently said: “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two.”
  • The Gulf of Mexico: “We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” Trump said at a recent news conference. “ … What a beautiful name, and it’s appropriate.” That The body of water has been depicted with that name for more than four centuries.Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has already proposed a bill that would federally fund the required changes to maps.
  • Making Canada Part of the United States: Trump has threatened to use “economic force” to join Canada and the United States together, implying that the United States would pare back its purchases of Canadian products to force such a move. He has posted maps on social media showing Canada as part of the United States and posted “many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State.” He has also said, “If Canada merged with the U.S., there would be no Tariffs, taxes would go way down, and they would be TOTALLY SECURE from the threat of the Russian and Chinese Ships that are constantly surrounding them,” he added. “Together, what a great Nation it would be!!!” Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded on X, “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.”
  • Wind energy: Trump has said he wants the US to move away from wind energy. “We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built,” he said. In 2023, wind power generated 10% of the United States’ electricity. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that by 2050, wind power could meet 35% of the country’s electricity demand, unless its growth is stymied by political action. Maybe all this is nonsense, theater of the absurd. Maybe it’s designed to dominate the news cycle, control the narrative, a practice Trump employs with abandon and one which drives out competing coverage of important issues.
  • Lawsuit: And if the above aren’t enough of a contribution to chaos, Trump is pursuing a lawsuit against Ann Selzer, a veteran pollster who predicted Kamala Harris would win Iowa, for fraud, and The Des Moines Register. It’s not enough that he won, I guess.

As Heather Cox Richardson observed in her Jan. 8 Letters from an American, “things that matter deeply to the American people are going largely unnoticed”.[1] Maybe all this is nonsense, theater of the absurd. Maybe it’s designed to dominate the news cycle, control the narrative, a practice Trump employs with abandon and one which drives out competing coverage of important issues. If that’s the case, Trump is succeeding, pushing aside other important issues as his inauguration draws nearer.

In the meantime, it’s discouraging to see some commentators suggest ignoring Trumps bluster. On Jan. 8, Joe Klein, a former Time magazine columnist, wrote a message on his Substack blog saying essentially, “Don’t worry. Be happy”:

“I’ll not fall for the bait. I watched Trump’s press conference. I will take him seriously, but not literally. He’s negotiating. He’s sending messages. And I don’t think the messages are all that terrible. He is haggling for better rates for American ships in the Canal (and perhaps a MAGA project of widening that too-skinny thing). He’s sending a larger message to the Chinese: we’re watching every move you make, especially in the western hemisphere. He is haggling with Denmark: Greenland wants independence, at least a majority of its minuscule (57,000) population does and we’re a more plausible big brother than you. He is poking Canada, provocatively, for better trade deals and more defense spending. He is sending us a message, too: I’m Back and More Vehement Than Ever. All of which conveys three things: confidence, the appearance of strength and a certain crafty craziness.”

Reed Galen, president of JoinTheUnion.us, a pro-democracy coalition, took a different tack in The Guardian, saying we need to be more wary of Trump’s outbursts and threats:

“The guy’s been a troll for nearly 80 years,” Galen said. “The problem is now he happens to be a troll who is about to run, again, the most powerful nation that humanity has ever known. He wants to do this because he wants outrage. He wants, to the extent that he thinks he can induce it, fear or panic. Chaos is the coin of his realm and it always will be because things being out of control is the only way he’s in control.”


[1] According to Richardson, MAGA representatives have been introducing a slew of measures to the new Congress, many of which incorporate the plans of Project 2025 into legislation. They call for turning over immigration to the states, privatizing veterans’ healthcare, and repealing the 1993 National Voting Rights Act, the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Bills call for withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization; increasing oil and gas production on federal lands; abolishing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA); allowing states to spend federal education money on private school vouchers; and removing the protection of transgender rights from schools.
Other measures would revoke security clearances for “certain former members of the intelligence community,” introduce a constitutional amendment to cap the Supreme Court at nine justices, and cut off federal funding to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (the office that successfully charged Trump with election interference) and the Fulton County (GA) District Attorney’s Office (the office that has charged Trump with criminal conspiracy).
And MAGA Republicans have proposed a bill to impose a national abortion ban, along with a bill urging Congress to support a consortium of antiabortion doctors for women because, the bill says, “health care should emphasize the whole woman, including her physical, mental, and spiritual wellness,” and “health care for women should also address the needs of men, families, and communities.”
 
 




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Peak Cringe: A Melania Trump Documentary Is Coming

In today’s political culture, supplicants don’t bother with subtle appeals for favors; they just pay up.

Talk about obsequiousness. 

On Sunday, Amazon announced that its Prime Video streaming service would release a “behind the scenes” documentary about Melania Trump’s life that will be shown in theaters and stream on Amazon Prime later this year. To top it off, Melania Trump will be the film’s executive producer, ensuring it will be a hagiography. 

Adding insult to injury, Amazon has agreed to pay $40 million to Trump for the documentary, according to Puck News, and it will be directed by Hollywood director and producer Brett Ratner,   accused in 2017  by six women, including actress Olivia Munn, of sexual misconduct, according the Los Angeles Times. 

Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos, who is also the owner of the Washington Post, said it was “excited to share this truly unique story.” 

In May 2025, the New Yorker ran a story noting that just before Christmas, Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, his fiancé, dined with Donald Trump and Melania at Mar-a-Lago. During the meal, according to the Wall Street Journal, Melania told Bezos and Sánchez about a documentary project she was developing based on her own life. Two weeks later, Amazon licensed the film for forty million dollars, nearly three times more than the company had ever spent on a documentary. As much as twenty-eight million dollars of the licensing fee will go directly to the First Lady.

Talk about trying to curry favor with Donald Trump, a famously self-absorbed impulsive, vindictive politician. As Semafor Business said, “An open-air bazaar has replaced a black market of influence-peddling. It’s unsettling to reporters who are used to having to dig around for evidence of pay-to-play.”

If a First Lady documentary is worth doing, others have a considerably stronger claim.

Betty Ford, President Gerald Ford’s wife,  Ford was noted for raising breast cancer awareness following her 1974 mastectomy and was a passionate supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She also was involved in HIV/AIDS causes and served as the first chair of the board of directors of the Betty Ford Center, which provides treatment services for people with substance use disorders.  

Nancy Reagan, wife of President Ronald Reagan, was an accomplished former actress and a passionate advocate for decreasing drug and alcohol abuse, initiating a campaign to “just say no” to drugs.

Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin Roosevelt, was, in her time,  one of the world’s most widely admired and powerful women. During her husband’s presidency she was aggressive advocate of liberal causes, defending the rights of defense of the rights of Blacks and the poor and wrote a widely read daily syndicated newspaper column. After his presidency, she was appointed a delegate to the United Nations,  where she served as chairman of the Commission on Human Rights (1946–51) and played a key role in the drafting and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

There’s even an interesting story to tell about President Woodrow Wilson’s second wife, Edith Wilson. For all intents and purposes she conspired to serve as the “acting president”  for an astonishing 17 months after her  husband suffered a paralyzing stroke in the fall of 1919

First Lady Dolley Madison, the wife of President James Madison, is often credited with saving the portrait of George Washington and other White House treasures when the British attacked the Capitol in 1814. Hillary Clinton, wife of President Bill Clinton, went on to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, a New York Senator and a Democratic candidate for the presidency. Rosalynn Carter, wife of President Jimmy Carter,  was committed to the improvement of mental health care and after her husbands term in office became a strong participant in efforts that, as she said, would result in “good for others” including Habitat for Humanity.

Can you think of one thing that distinguishes Melania Trump, the “I really Don’t Care. Do You?” First Lady, and her life enough to justify a boot-licking Amazon documentary?

I didn’t think so.

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Donald J. Trump’s Dec.16, 2024 Press Conference: Falsehoods, Distortion, Fakery and Deceit

“Nuttiness may be subjective, but truthfulness is not”

Bill Scher, Politics Editor, Washington Monthly

On Dec. 16, Donald J. Trump held his first press conference since his Nov. 5, 2024 election. Wishing to be of service to those of you who were too busy or not inclined to tune in, I reviewed the entire deluge of Trump’s rambling thoughts:

  • “We had no wars when I left office and now the whole world is blowing up.“

Truth: When Trump left office in early 2021, US troops were still deployed in combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. About  200,000  US troops were deployed overseas, including 6,000 – 7,000 American troops spread across Africa, with the largest numbers concentrated in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa,  about 50,000 troops at roughly two dozen bases across Japan and about 2,000 Marines in  northern Australia 

  • “Lot of people don’t realize, but we did 571 miles of wall (on the Mexican border).  I built much more than I said I was going to build.”

Truth: Early in his 2016 election campaign, Trump pledged to build a wall along the entire 2000-mile length of the border with Mexico. He later clarified he’d build a wall covering half of that distance. In his State of the Union address in February 2020, he pledged to build “substantially more than 500 miles” by January 2021.

Various types of fencing totaling 654 miles, running through California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, were already in place before Trump became president in 2017.  At the end of Trump’s first term, the Trump administration said it completed more than 400 miles of border wall, but only 80 miles of new wall barriers were actually built where there were none before. The vast majority of the construction replaced existing structures at the border that had been built by previous US administrations.

  • “We’re also going to create clean coal. Clean coal is something that has really taken over. …we’re going to be doing a lot of clean coal for the people of West Virginia and others, Wyoming.”

Truth: The idea of “clean coal” is generally considered not viable, as current technology cannot fully mitigate the environmental impacts of burning coal, making it essentially a marketing term with little practical application; while some technologies can reduce emissions, the process remains too expensive and energy-intensive to be considered truly “clean” on a large scale, with many experts stating that “clean coal” is a myth

  • “So we’re looking to save maybe $2 trillion and it’ll have no impact. Actually. It’ll make life better, but it’ll have no impact on people.  We will never cut social security or things like that. It’s just waste, fraud and abuse.” 

Fact: This would certainly run counter to Trump’s actions in his first term, during which he added $8 trillion to the national debt,  despite having promised to run budget surpluses.  The federal government is now burning through $6.8 trillion annually and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says Trump’s proposed policies would add an estimated $7.7 trillion to debt over the next decade. Cutting $2 trillion in one year would be impossible, as well, given that Trump has already said he’s not going to touch Social Security or Medicare., the two largest government programs, and interest payments, which account for 13% of federal spending, can’t be cut either (Unless the government plans to default on the national debt). Discretionary spending accounts for only about 25% of total expenditures, but that includes defense, which Congress has no inclination to cut.

  • “We’ll immediately restore the sovereign borders of the United States and stop illegal immigration.”

Truth: Over the past 30 years, the Border Patrol’s budget has grown more than sevenfold, the number of agents stationed along the southwest border has quadrupled, the border wall has been strengthened and lengthened, and increasing amounts of technology have been used to deter illegal migrants, but they have kept coming, more and more of them from countries other than Mexico. Also complicating the situation, a substantial number of the illegal immigrant population in the United States came legally on work visas and stayed after they expired.  The government has been terrible at finding and deporting these people. 

  • “We had no problems, we had no inflation. We had no inflation. We had at less than 1%. A perfect number.”

Truth: The Consumer Price Index rose 7.8% during Trump’s first term. The CPI rose an average of 1.9% each year of the Trump presidency according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was about the same as the average under Obama (1.8%) and below the average of 2.4% during George W. Bush’s years.

  • Trump responding to a question, “Do you believe there’s a connection between vaccines and autism? Do you believe there’s a link?” Trump: We’re looking to find out. …There’s something wrong. And we’re going to find out about it.”

Truth: Many studies have looked at whether there is a relationship between vaccines and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD.), but to date, the studies continue to show that vaccines are not associated with ASD, according to the federal Centers for Disease control and Prevention. 

Two studies, referred to as the Wakefield Studies, have frequently been cited by those claiming that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Both studies are considered critically flawed. In the first study, published in 1998, Wakefield’s hypothesis was that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine  caused a series of events that include the development of autism. The study was subsequently retracted; in scientific terms, this means that the paper is not part of the scientific record because it was found to be based on scientific misconduct. In this case, the studies were deemed fraudulent and data misrepresented. The second study, published in 2002, which examined the relationship between measles virus and autism, was also critically flawed. Meanwhile, several studies have been performed that disprove the notion that MMR causes autism.

  •  Trump responding to a question – “Do you think schools should mandate vaccines?” Trump – “I don’t like mandates. I’m not a big mandate person.”

Truth: Mandating vaccinations of schoolchildren saves lives. Schools and broader communities rely on high immunization rates to keep vaccine-preventable diseases from spreading. When more children are immunized, the risk for everybody declines, particularly for people with weakened immune systems and chronic medical conditions like lung, heart, liver, kidney disease or diabetes. The more parents who decline to vaccinate their children, the greater the risk that infection will spread in the community.

  • “Europe doesn’t use pesticides, and yet they have a better mortality rate than we do.”

Truth: Pesticides are still widely used in Europe, with the agricultural sector relying on significant volumes of chemical pesticides to maintain crop yields, although the EU has regulations in place to limit their use and is actively working to reduce pesticide reliance because widespread pesticide use is major source of pollution, according to the European Environment Agency.

  • ” They’re still counting the vote in California.“

Truth: California did take longer to count votes in the recent federal elections than other states, but the California Secretary of State had certified the 2024 election results prior to Trump’s news conference.  

  • “We got the biggest tax cuts in history.”

Truth: Trump’s tax cut s in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was not the largest in history, either in percentage of gross domestic product or in inflation-adjusted dollars.  When the Congressional Budget Office reviewed tax cuts enacted between 1981 and 2023, it found that two other tax cut bills were bigger – former President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 package and legislation signed by former President Barack Obama that extended earlier tax cuts enacted during former President George W. Bush’s administration. Reagan’s 1981 tax cut was the largest in U.S. history, reducing revenues by $19 trillion over a decade. 

  • The US took in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs “from China” during Trump’s first term and “no other president took in 10 cents, not 10 cents.”  before he was president.

Truth: First, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics the revenue from tariffs on Chinese imports come from the importers, not China. Importing businesses pay the tariffs and then have to decide whether to bear some of the costs or pass any portion of the cost on to consumers through higher prices.

Second, according to the Institute, Americans have been paying tariffs on imports from China for decades., going as far back as the late 19th and early 20th centuries and more recently during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. 

And we’re going to have four more years of this.

Admoniti estis.

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Contempt of Congress: Donald Trump’s Cabal of Co-Conspirators

Nancy Rommelmann, an American writer, recently attributed Hunter Biden’s failures to “entitlement and soul rot” and said his situation was a classic case of a boy who has never reached adulthood. “I can think of few things worse than never growing up,” Rommelmann wrote. 

Donald Trump, who holds everlasting grudges, enjoys humiliating people and acts like a schoolyard bully, has never grown up either. He’s a man-child. His childish, and mean-spirited attitudes are reflected in many of his selections of key people to exercise influence in his administration. 

How else to explain his apparent determination to ensure loyalty among his key advisors by creating a kakistocracy, a state governed by its least suitable or competent citizens.

if Trump gets all his key nominees for leadership positions, including what journalist Tina Brown calls his “cast of crazies” who need to be confirmed by the Senate, our democracy will be severely diminished. 

Kash Patel, Trump’s choice for FBI Director, wants to go after the media.  “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” Patel said last year. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” Writing in Bulwark of Trump’s choice off Patel to lead the FBI, Jonathan Last said   “… the actual incoming president of the United States has signaled that he’s going to fire the director of the FBI for [reasons] and replace him with a psychopath.” And Patel was hardly admired in Tump’s first term. During Trump’s first term, Attorney General William Barr and CIA Director Gina Haspel thought so little of him that they threatened to resign if Patel was imposed on them as deputy FBI or CIA Director, respectively.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated to be Health and Human Services Secretary, is a much-ridiculed conspiracy theorist, vaccine skeptic and dumper of a bear carcass in New York’s Central Park. “There’s no telling how far an anti-vaxxer & fringe conspiracy theorist like RFK Jr. could set America back in terms of public health, reproductive rights, research, & more,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA).

 “Kennedy has few good things to say about almost any technological invention,” Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic. “”He has voiced histrionic fears about nuclear reactors, said that Wi-Fi can cause “leaky brain,” suggested that chemicals in the water supply might make kids transgender, wondered aloud if Prozac might contribute to school shootings, and posted support for the so-called chemtrails conspiracy, which holds that the government uses the contrails, or condensation trails, of jetliners to spread toxic chemicals.”

Secretary of Education nominee Linda McMahon, is another problematic case. “McMahon’s only mission is to eliminate the Department of Education and take away taxpayer dollars from public schools, where 90% of students – and 95% of students with disabilities – learn, and give them to unaccountable and discriminatory private schools,” says National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle.

At one point, professional wrestling mogul McMahon said she didn’t know her claim she had earned a degree in education from East Carolina University was false. When Connecticut’s Hartford Courant newspaper reported that her degree was actually in French. McMahon said she thought her degree was in education because she did a semester of student-teaching and had a certificate to teach. 

Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, who has never worked in the intelligence community, has been criticized for making laudatory comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said Gabbard was “parroting fake Russian propaganda.” She has also spoken favorably of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has carried out a brutal war against his country’s people. In 2015, Gabbard was widely criticized by members of her own party when she urged the Obama administration to halt its support for  Syria’s opposition movement against Assad and in 2017 she made an unannounced trip to Syria in 2017 to meet Assad, despite the fact the U.S. had severed diplomatic relations with Syria.

Russ Vought, Trump’s nominee for Office of Management and Budget Director, was a co-author of Project 2025, the controversial Heritage Foundation blueprint for Trump’s hoped-for second term. Which Trump vigorously disavowed during his campaign.  Vought supports a a broad expansion of presidential power, including giving Trump the ability to fire thousands of federal workers.

Mehmet Oz, a snake oil salesman with a history of and outright quackery and championing pseudo-scientific treatments, has been proposed as leader of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which provide health care to America’s most vulnerable.

Pete Hegseth, a co-host of Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends Weekend”, whom Trump has nominated to serve as Secretary of Defense, has questioned the role of women in combat and advocated pardoning service members charged with war crimes. And The New Yorker ‘s Jane Mayer just reported, “A whistle-blower report and other documents suggest that Trump’s nominee to run the Pentagon was forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job.”

In Hegseth’s case, there’s speculation that Trump continues to support him in the face of opposition because it takes some of the heat and media attention off other unqualified candidates, particularly Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy Jr.

Nominee for U.S. ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has a lot of baggage, too. In a Truth Social post, Trump praised Charles Kushner as a “tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker, who will be a strong advocate representing our Country & its interests.” Trump pardoned Charles Kushner during his first term for a 2005 federal conviction on 18 counts of assisting in the filing of false tax returns, retaliating against a cooperating witness (his own sister) and making false statements to the Federal -Election Commission (FEC).

The retaliation charge was related to a beyond -the-pale admission by Charles Kushner that he had paid a private investigator $25,000 to have a prostitute seduce his sister’s husband, covertly film them having sex and have the videotape mailed to the cooperating witness.

Even with all these severely challenged nominees, it’s no sure thing that Trump’s -proposed appointees, what television host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel has described as a “clown car”, will be held in check by the Senate’s reluctance to challenge him or by an aghast public. 

All of it is enough to drive a concerned citizen to existential despair. 

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Post-Election Political Fundraising is Scamming Donors

In politics, the grifting never stops.

Team Scalise (House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s fundraising committee) just sent me an e-mail citing the importance of Republican efforts to replace recently-resigned Rep. Matt Gaetz with another committed Republican:

                               *** SPECIAL ELECTION FOR MATT GAETZ’S SEAT *** 

It’s official – the special election in Florida’s First Congressional District was just declared and voting starts in January! Every House race is critical but with our Conservative House Majority hanging on by a THREAD, this might be the most important special election of the century. Our Pro-Trump Republican trifecta could be COMPLETELY DESTROYED if Democrats manage to win key races like this.

That’s why we are PLEADING for your help right now. Majority Leader Scalise set a goal of raising one million dollars to help fill Matt Gaetz’s seat with an America First Patriot, win every other special election, AND deliver President Trump’s agenda.

Of course, the message urges me to “DONATE NOW”. Most recipients of the message likely assume any donation they make will go to the campaign to elect a strong Republican to replace Gaetz. Not so.

Work your way through the entireTeam Scalise message and you discover that each individual contribution will be allocated to SCALISE FOR CONGRESS, which shall receive up to $3,300 per election (for a total of $6,600). 

Other politicians are in on the donations scam too.

President-elect Donald Trump has selected Pete Hegseth, a military veteran and Fox News contributor, to lead the Department of Defense. His nomination has generated considerable controversy because he has no managerial experience running a large institution like the Pentagon, has taken conservative positions on a number of hot issues and is enmeshed in an allegation of sexual assault. 

But Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) is still with him. Jackson just sent me an email:

The WOKE Democrats’ petition to IMPEACH Pete Hegseth has reached MILLIONS OF  SIGNATURES.

If we let Pete Hegseth FALL to the WOKE MOB – they’ll have everything they need to go after President Trump, and eventually YOU.

So, today we’re calling on 3,000,000 PATRIOTS to go on the record and say: 
I STAND WITH PETE HEGSETH.
I STAND WITH PETE HEGSETH

Of course, if you click on “I STAND WITH PETE HEGSETH” you get a plea for a contribution.

Bear with me now. 

The site explains: “Contributions go to Team Ronny (“JFC”), a joint fundraising committee composed of TEXANS FOR RONNY JACKSON (the “Campaign Committee”), TEXAS RED (the “LPAC”), RONNY JACKSON LEGAL EXPENSE TRUST (the “LDF”), and the National Republican Congressional Congressional Campaign Committee (the” NRCC” (each, a “Committee,” and, collectively, the “Committees”).”

But here’s the trick. The first $6,600 of any contributions will go to TEXANS FOR RONNY JACKSON (the “Campaign Committee”), PO Box 53058, Amarillo, TX 79159. 

In other words, Rep. Ronny Jackson has first dibs on any contributions made by people who want to “Stand with Pete Hegseth”. Way to go, Ronny. 

Then there’s this email urging me to rally behind Hegseth:

STAND WITH PETE HEGSETH!

The Radical Left’s petition to DESTROY Pete Hegseth has reached MILLIONS OF SIGNATURES. The Woke Mob will do whatever they can to REMOVE Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense from President Trump’s Cabinet. If Pete is gone we can say GOODBYE to America as we know it. An overwhelming and immediate response is needed right here, right now, or we’ll lose Pete Hegseth FOREVER.

Will you stand with Pete Hegseth?

Doing nothing is not an option.

PLEASE SIGN YOUR NAME NOW (and Donate to continue our MAGA Momentum)

The group behind the email urging me to rally behind Hegseth is the GOD, FAMILY, COUNTRY PAC. out of Arlington, Va.  No address. Just a PO box number.

According to Open Secrets, a research and government transparency group tracking money in politics, the PAC (political action committee) raised a total of $5,567 for 2024 campaigns. It spent $4,210. 

But almost all of that spending, $4,194, went toward fundraising costs: $203 to “fundraising fees” and $3,991 to “fundraising consulting.” The fees went to Better Mousetrap Digital, a major digital fundraising company for Republicans, and WinRed Technical Services, a “conduit” that centralizes donations to Republican-affiliated candidates and committees. The recipient of the “fundraising consulting” spending isn’t identified. The money likely went to the people who set up the PAC.

The only human being identified as associated with the PAC is Mr. Jason Young, listed as its Treasurer. But don’t try to reach him if you have any questions. He can’t be found.

Katie Elizabeth Britt, a Republican serving as the junior United States senator from Alabama, is in on the game, too.

As a Senate candidate, Britt publicly aligned herself with former President Donald Trump and gave credence to Trump’s false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Trump officially endorsed her, calling her a “fearless America First warrior”. She won the general election in November 2022 and took office in 2023. 

Britt sent me a message urging me to fill out a “MAGA Priority Survey” and, of course, included a plea, “Will you rush support now to show your support to the growing MAGA movement as we head into a critical year ahead?”

In. light, subdued print below the plea her message says, “Your contribution will benefit Britt for Alabama Inc., Trump National Committee JFC, and 1 other.” Click through to the fine print and the first option for the donation is “Britt for Alabama Inc. AL-SEN”. 

I wonder how many more grifters are out there. And how many people have been and continue to be scammed by them.

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Trump’s Immigrant Solution: Manzanar Redux?

During World War II, President Roosevelt authorized the military to forcibly relocate people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast to inland camps. 

Manzanar War Relocation Center near Lone Pine, Calif.; it operated from March 1942 to Nov. 1945. Some 10,000 people were confined there during this time. Resistance to the incarceration at Manzanar soon led to a prison uprising that the Army put down by shooting 11 prisoners, killing two.

In April 1942, officials posted Civil Exclusion Orders No. 25 and No. 26 on telephone poles and store windows throughout Multnomah County. A few weeks later, Civilian Exclusion Order No. 49 was posted in Hood River. The orders gave Japanese-Americans only a few days to put their affairs in order before they had to report for evacuation.

On May 5, 1942, Japanese-Americans in Military Area No. 1 reported to the Portland  Assembly Center, leaving their pets, possessions, and lives behind. The center—built on the site of the Pacific International Livestock Exposition—was surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, and military guards armed with machine guns. The center had a peak population of 3,676.

Those living in Military Area No 2, including the Japanese Americans in Hood River, were sent by train to the Pinedale Assembly Center in California’s San Joaquin Valley, a temporary location until later transfer to permanent internment camps. 

Now President-elect Trump and his coterie of illegal immigration hardliners want to use the military again and put arrested immigrants in the country illegally in camps run by the Homeland Security Department. 

Will he follow through with his threats?  Count on it.

“Trump 1.0 was a test for the system, but it was also a trial for an inexperienced leader who had the inclination of a wrecking ball but often lacked the capacity or the cadres to follow through,” Susan B. Glasser wrote in the Nov. 21 New Yorker.  “Trump 2.0 is about an all-out attack on that system by a leader who fears neither Congress nor the courts nor the voters whom he will never have to face again.”

During the Republican primary campaign, The New York Times reported that  Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging )enters” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.

 Earlier this month, Tom Fitton, who runs a conservative group, Judicial Watch, wrote that Trump’s administration would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to address illegal immigration “through a mass deportation program.”  Trump responded on his social media platform, Truth Social, reposting Mr. Fitton’s post with the comment, “TRUE!!!”

On Monday, Trump confirmed that he planned to declare a national emergency to carry out his promise to use the military in his mass deportations. 

Trump has also threatened to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – which allows presidents to deport citizens of an “enemy nation” without the typical proceedings – as part of his mass deportation plans. 

Thomas Homan, a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 25 and Trump’s proposed Border Czar, told Fox Business Network, “They’ll be used to do non-enforcement duties such as transportation, whether it’s on ground or air, infrastructure, building, intelligence.” Horman has also said transportation and supply assets from the Department of Defense, including military planes, could be used.  

Stephen Miller, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, has also floated the idea of “deputising” the National Guard  to carry out large-scale raids and detentions. The military could also be dispatched to the southern border with “an impedance and denial mission,” Miller has said. 

“You reassert the fundamental constitutional principle that you don’t have the right to enter into our sovereign territory, to even request an asylum claim,” Miller said  at the Conservative Political Action Conference  (CPAC) earlier this year. “The military has the right to establish a fortress position on the border to say no one can cross here at all.”

No matter how Trump plans to use the military, the move is likely to bring an avalanche of legal challenges.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said on Monday that under US law, presidents may declare a national emergency and exert emergency powers only in specific situations. “And ‘use the military for deportations’ isn’t one of those specific things,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote on social media.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, issued the following statement: on Nov. 18:

“We are crystal clear that the next Trump administration will do everything in its power to make mass deportation raids a reality. As we ready litigation and create firewalls for freedom across blue states, we must also sound the alarm that what’s on the horizon will change the very nature of American life for tens of millions of Americans.”

In 1983, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians reported that the internment program was a “grave injustice” driven by “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which offered a formal apology to surviving victims.

It’s hard to believe all this current Trump-inspired turmoil is what the 76,744,608 people who voted for Trump this time around wanted.

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Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Invective Signals Trouble for Those With Temporary Protected Status

Photo: American Friends Service Committee

UPDATE 02/02/2025: The New York Times reported today that the Trump administration has ended Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., for more than 300,000 Venezuelans in the United States, leaving the population vulnerable to potential deportation in the coming months, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times. “The Trump administration’s attempt to undo the Biden administration’s T.P.S. extension is plainly illegal,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, who helps lead the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the U.C.L.A. School of Law. “The T.P.S. statute makes clear that terminations can only occur at the end of an extension; it does not permit do-overs.”

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President-elect Donald Trump has made it crystal clear. 

America’s “immigration crisis” is a “massive invasion” spreading “misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land” and the nation’s cities are being “flooded” by the “greatest invasion in history” of undesirables from “every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East,” Trump bellowed at the Republican National Convention in July 2024.

One action Trump plans to take in response to the “invasion” is to cut back on the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. Set up in 1990, the program gave the federal government the ability to grant work permits and deferrals from deportation to nationals of any designated nation going through or recovering from natural or man-made disasters.

If you recall the uproar over unfounded claims that Haitians who live and work legally in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbor’s cats and dogs, those Haitians are TPS holders. In an interview with NewsNation, Trump said the influx of migrants in Springfield “just doesn’t work” and “you have to remove the people; we cannot destroy our country.”

To say the least, the fate of those in Oregon with TPS will be precarious, too, under the upcoming Trump administration.

I asked Oregon’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Advancement how many people in Oregon are here under the Temporary Protected Status program, but they never responded. But I located a report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) on the TPS topic. According to the CRS, as of March 31, 2024, there were an estimated 2,705 individuals with TPS in Oregon, fewer than the 9,500 in Washington, but more than the 510 in New Mexico. The current number in many states is likely higher now because the number of TPS individuals in the United States has increased by about 150,000 since March. 

TPS offers qualifying individuals already in the U.S. work authorization and a temporary legal status to remain in the country if their home country is determined unsafe. TPS offers up to 18 months of relief to qualifying individuals based on the status of that country. For example, the TPS program is scheduled to end in March 2025 for El Salvador and in April 2025 for Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela. 

TPS designations can be terminated prior to expiration with 60 days notice. TPS status can also be extended by the Department of Homeland Security. For example, on Oct. 17, 2024, the department extended through Aug. 3, 2025, the validity of certain Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) issued to Temporary Protected Status (TPS) beneficiaries under the designation of Haiti.

Since 1990, successive Republican and Democratic administrations have largely automatically renewed certain key TPS designations

The impact of Trump’s plans on current TPS holders could be calamitous. That’s partly because the number of people in the United States under TPS exploded under President Biden.

In 2020, TPS protected about 330,000 people from 10 countries who would otherwise be subjected to disease, violence, starvation, the aftermath of natural disasters, and other life-threatening conditions. The largest group of TPS recipients was from El Salvador (195,000 people) followed by Honduras (57,000 people) and Haiti (50,000 people).

Other countries with TPS holders included Nepal (8,950 people), Syria (7,000 people), Nicaragua (2,550 people), Yemen (1,250 people), Sudan (1,040 people), Somalia (500 people), South Sudan (84 people), Guinea (930 people), and Sierra Leone (1,180 people). 

With President Biden’s term winding down, there are now over 1 million immigrants in the United States under TPS status. Qualifying individuals include people from 16 countries, with Venezuelans, Haitians and Salvadoreans the largest groups of TPS beneficiaries.[1]

Under the Biden administration, new TPS designations have been issued for six countries (Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Myanmar [also known as Burma], Ukraine, and Venezuela), and extended for ten others (El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen). The government has also granted or extended a similar protection, deferred enforced departure (DED), for people from Hong Kong and Liberia, with an estimated 3,900 and 2,800 covered respectively.

If a TPS designation ends, beneficiaries return to the immigration status that the person held prior to receiving TPS, unless that status has expired or the person has successfully acquired a new immigration status.

 If the Trump administration is aggressive in ending the TPS program, its beneficiaries in Oregon and elsewhere would return to being undocumented at the end of a TPS designation and become subject to removal. 

“It’s possible that some people in his administration will recognize that stripping employment authorization for more than a million people, many of whom have lived in this country for decades, is not good policy” and economically disastrous, Attorney Ahilan T. Arulanantham, a teacher at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, recently told PBS News. “But nothing in Trump’s history suggests that they would care about such considerations.”

[1] Countries Currently Designated for TPS. Select the country link for additional specific country information.

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On the Cusp of Chaos: Trump’s Deportation Purge

“The American people have given Donald Trump ultimate power,” says Paul Glastris, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, “They’re going to get the Trump agenda, good and hard.”

America’s “immigration crisis” is a “massive invasion” spreading “misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land” and the nation’s cities are being “flooded” by the “greatest invasion in history” of undesirables from “every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East,” Donald Trump bellowed at the Republican National Convention in July 2024. “They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. We have to stop the invasion into our country that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.”

Did you miss Trump describing migrants as “vermin” who would “poison the blood of the country”? How about when he said in 2023 that some South American countries were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” and “mental institutions” to send the patients to the United States as migrants.

You likely didn’t miss Trump’s solution? “Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history” the Republican platform said in “one of a series of bold promises that we will swiftly implement” Trump promised.  Huddled masses, yearning to breathe free? Not in Trump country. Deport ’em all.

Easier said than done.

First, let’s talk about numbers.

In 2021, when Joe Biden took office, the figures thrown around for the number of undocumented/illegal/unauthorized/ (whatever word you choose) immigrants in the United States varied by a million or so. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) put the number at 11.2 million. The Center for Migration Studies said there were approximately 10.3 million.

Curiously, much of the media coverage of the immigration situation today continues to use the 11 million figure, despite the upsurge in border crossings. That may be a sign of lazy reporting, purposefully misleading numbers for ideological reasons, different collections methods or confusion over how to count migrants.

Trump’s numbers have been all over the map. In March 2024, he said 15 million migrants had crossed into the United States border over just the past two years. In August, he said 10 million had come across the border since Biden took office. In later election rallies, he cited a 20 million crossings figure during Biden’s tenure as president. .And in his one televised debate with Kamala Harris he claimed 21 million migrants were crossing the border every single month.

One number often used to track migrants is “encounters” with migrants, including people who tried to cross into the US illegally and people who tried to enter legally but were deemed inadmissible.  According to the Border Patrol, since Biden became president in January 2021, there have been more than 10 million encounters, about 8 million of those at the southwest land border with Mexico, up from 2.4 million encounters during the Trump administration. The number is not, however, a reliable count of people who stay in the US. Some are sent back and some are counted multiple times from multiple attempts to cross the border. The encounters number also, obviously, do not count those who manage to slip across the border and escape undetected.

Compounding the numbers problem, the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump wants to “revoke deportation protections from millions of immigrants, including tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated after the fall of Kabul and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians allowed in after the Russian invasion.”

Whatever the accurate number, it’s one hell of a lot of people, about equal to the entire population of Georgia.

How exactly does Trump plan to deport them all?

Is he going to demand that the military, the FBI, the Border Patrol, local police, the whole shebang of law enforcement, round them up and put them in detention centers?

On Nov. 18, The New York Times reported Trump had confirmed that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military in some form to assist in his plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

The Times said Trump used his social media platform, Truth Social, to respond to a post made earlier in November by Tom Fitton, who runs the conservative group Judicial Watch, and who wrote that Mr. Trump’s administration would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to address illegal immigration “through a mass deportation program.” At around 4 a.m. on the 18th, Mr. Trump reposted Mr. Fitton’s post with the comment, “TRUE!!!”

Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, told the Times earlier in 2024 said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries. The Homeland Security Department would run the facilities, Miller said.

Is he going to commandeer railroad lines, planes and riverboats to ferry them to the Mexican border?

How’s Trump going to pay for this massive deportation program? The American Immigration Council, an admittedly pro- immigrant group, says the cost of deporting 13 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally could cost $968 billion over a little more than a decade.

Then there are the courts. Do Trump’ and his henchmen expect the American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant advocacy groups to forego court battles if Trump again tests the bounds of his legal authority. The ACLU’s website already promises, “Starting on day one, we’re ready to fight for our civil liberties and civil rights in the courts, in Congress, and in our communities. We did it during his first term – filing 434 legal actions against Trump while he was in office – and we’ll do it again.”

Of course, no matter what Trump wants to do, not all countries will be willing to accept the return of their citizens. Trump faced that problem in his first term.

In a 2016 speech in Phoenix, Trump said, “There are at least 23 countries that refuse to take their people back after they’ve been ordered to leave the United States, including large numbers of violent criminals. They won’t take them back. So we say, ‘Okay, we’ll keep them.’ “Not going to happen with me, not going to happen with me.”

Not so fast, Mr. Trump. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) defines any country that fails to cooperate with the U.S. immigration removal process as “recalcitrant”. According to ICE, “Uncooperative countries significantly exacerbate the challenges presented to ICE by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678 (2001). In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that: With narrow exceptions, noncitizens with final orders of removal — including noncitizens determined to pose threats to the community or considered flight risks — may not be detained by ICE beyond a presumptively reasonable period of six months if there is no “significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future”.

The Trump administration may also encounter enforcement resistance from so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions across the country, which include: Alameda, Berkeley, Fremont, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco (county and city), San Mateo County, Santa Ana, Santa Clara County, and Watsonville in California; Boulder and Denver in Colorado; King County, Seattle, and Walla Walla County in Washington; Portland in Oregon; and even Washington, D.C. The Los Angeles City Council has already voted to prohibit city resources from being used for federal immigration enforcement.

“Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken,” Trump said at the Republican Convention. “By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.” But not all employers will likely be cooperative in immigrant sweeps. The Pew Research Center estimated that unauthorized immigrants represented about 4.8% of the U.S. workforce in 2022.  About two-thirds of U.S. crop-farm workers are foreign-born, for example, and 42% aren’t legally authorized to work in the country,  About two-thirds of U.S. crop-farm workers are foreign-born, and 42% aren’t legally authorized to work in the country, according to a Labor Department report.

“Implementing Trump’s (deportation) plan would be a logistical nightmare and social tragedy, with consequences reverberating beyond the deportees and into the lives of over 20 million people living in mixed-status households, including 5.5 million U.S.-born children suddenly missing one or both parents,” the Center asserts.

Then, no matter how individuals voted, there’s the question of how Americans across the board are going to respond to Trump’s draconian deportation program once it hits their neighborhood. I expect there will be a backlash. I couldn’t put it better than Yascha Benjamin Mounk, Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. In a post-election podcast conversation with American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, Mounk said:

“When you have very lax policies and high levels of illegal immigration, people say, “clamp down, we want to close the border,” and the moment you start doing the things you actually need to do to clamp down, they start to say, “well, hang on a second, I didn’t want this kid to die. I didn’t want those kids to be separated from their parents. I didn’t want this particular member of the community, who’s been here for 25 years and who seems like a very good and reasonable person, to suddenly be taken and sent back to where they came from.” And so I think even on that issue, which was a winning issue of Trump’s and which he clearly has a popular mandate…he may quite quickly lose public support, nevertheless.”

Well put.

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Bynum vs. Chavez-DeRemer/ Tis a Quandary

Chavez-DeRemer vs. Bynum

Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Democratic challenger Janelle Bynum are at each other’s throats in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District race

At recent debates on KOIN TV in Portland and KTVZ in Bend, each candidate asserted that their opponent couldn’t be trusted. Bynum worked hard to tie Chavez-DeRemer to  Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and the conservative Republicans in the House. Chavez-DeRemer, in turn, attacked Bynum for supporting Measure 110, the drug decriminalization measure later amended by House Bill 4002 in the face of public backlash against the measure. 

No question, Bynum is a flaming liberal. In September, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries showed up in Portland to bolster her campaign. Par for the course, he accused Chavez-DeRemer of being aligned with extreme MAGA Republicans and Donald Trump., who Democrats portray as an imminent threat to democracy.

In contrast, Chavez-DeRemer works hard to portray herself as a moderate. She was ranked the 29th most bipartisan House member, and the most bipartisan Oregon member of the House, in an analysis released in May 2024 by the Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. But she has endorsed Trump’s return to the White House, has praised the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and has voted for a number of bills critics claim support the MAGA agenda.

The high-profile race is being run in a swing district created when the Legislature changed the district’s boundaries in 2021so it included a presumably more Democratic Bend. The race is now one of just a few that could decide who controls the U.S. House of Representatives.

So what to do if you are in the middle?

If Trump wins the White House, a vote for Chavez-DeRemer increases the likelihood that the House will stay in Republican hands. The Democrats now have a majority in the Senate but current thinking is that the Republicans have a high probability of retaking control with a net gain of two seats or by winning the presidential election along with a net gain of one seat. 

A particularly endangered Democrat is Senator Jon Tester of Montana, who trails his Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy, a wealthy Republican businessman. Polls suggest he’s toast because of the changing demographics of the state.  Republicans are also expected to flip West Virginia — where Joe Manchin is retiring- in the face of competition from Republican Governor Jim Justice . 

Of course, Democrats are still hopeful they can hold onto critical Senate seats in states like Ohio and Arizona and there are signs of weakness in Republican  Senator Ted Cruz’ s  race against Democratic challenger Colin Allred.

But if Trump wins, and the Republicans can hold on to the House and retake the Senate, that clean sweep would give Trump and his MAGA allies an opportunity to govern with impunity. If that’s not what you want, your best choice might be to vote for Bynum , even if you lean conservative, to increase the likelihood the Democrats will at least control the House and be in a position to block the more unpalatable elements of Trump’s MAGA agenda.

Tricky, isn’t it?

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Donald Trump. Meet Lonesome Rhodes.

Andy Griffith in “A Face in the Crowd”

The blistering movie A Face in the Crowd deliciously exposes how Americans are seduced by people who swindle us. “This parable about a small-town con man who attains the power to sway the nation to his whims is America: our fanaticism, whimsy, and desire for elusive authenticity at the expense of our souls,” April Wolfe wrote in a spot-on review of the 1957 movie.

Andy Griffith, in his first film role, long before he played Andy Taylor, the low-key widowed sheriff of Mayberry, plays a charismatic hayseed who rises to popularity in a television show and, with an exaggerated sense of his new persuasive power, goes berserk. 

Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, investigative reporters for The New York Times, recently wrote a lengthy, perceptive and revealing inside story of how the producers of “The Apprentice” crafted a TV version of Donald Trump — measured, thoughtful and endlessly wealthy — that ultimately fueled his path to the White House.

The story meticulously exposed how the producers of The Apprentice turned Trump from a slightly garish, smug New York real estate schmuck with a history of business failures who worked out of a musty, messy office into business royalty, an astute, self-made billionaire.

“The facts never really mattered,” the New York Times story noted. “Drama mattered. Comedy mattered. Entertainment value mattered. Mr. (Mark) Burnett (the show’s executive producer) liked to call it “dramality.” And Mr. Trump was dramatic, occasionally funny, and always entertaining.”

So when he came down the escalator in June 2015, staging the announcement of his candidacy for president, he was a new man, remade by reality television.

Since producing The Apprentice, Burnett has made other successful shows, including “Shark Tank” and “The Voice”, but as Patrick Radden Keefe  wrote in The New Yorker in 2018, “…his chief legacy is to have cast a serially bankrupt carnival barker in the role of a man who might plausibly become the leader of the free world. “I don’t think any of us could have known what this would become,” Katherine Walker, a producer on the first five seasons of “The Apprentice,” told Keefe. “But Donald would not be President had it not been for that show.”

The New York Times story agreed. 

But Burnett and his associates kept their opinion of Trump to themselves, giving him free reign to elevate his prominence based on lies.

Commenters on the Times story savaged Burnett and his associates for foisting Trump on the American public. 

“Mark Burnett created this mess the country is in,” one commenter posted in the paper’s online comments section. “The dumbing-down of America is from all reality TV and especially this egocentric reality “star” turned president. It’s all a complete disgrace that has ruined the fabric of our country.”

“You couldn’t print what I think of these garbage people,” another commented. ”Between Burnett’s greed… and all these enablers, they tipped over the first Domino to end what is left of our Democracy.” 

“He was always a 2-bit husband, father and criminal,” wrote another. “Then, the megalomaniac and pathological narcissist gets a gig on probably one of the most scripted and controlled shows ever produced and becomes a 2-bit actor. Ratings and fakery will take you a long way in TV.” 

“He’s a phony who starred in a show that presented him as a wildly successful businessman while his real business “empire” was failing with numerous bankruptcies despite his $400 million inheritance,” said another. “His political success is also a product of the same fake narrative coupled with a vast army of low information voters who enjoy his racist tinged insult comic act.”

But Burnett and his cronies weren’t the only ones willing to hide the reality of Trump from the public.  Hangers-on who rode Trump’s coattails to the White House and then stayed on in Trump’s administration were guilty, too.

They were perfectly willing to advance an empty vessel of a man created by television, just like the admirers of Chance, a simple gardener whose TV-informed utterances are mistaken for profundity in Peter Sellers’ 1979 movie, Being There.

The essential difference between Chance and Trump is in their relative naïveté.. Chance is a picture of childlike innocence thrown out among vultures. Trump is no innocent. Nor are the hangers-on who have attached themselves to his star like remora, fishes noted for attaching themselves to sharks for food and locomotion.

The remora men (they are mostly men) who have attached themselves to Trump, likely knowing full well of his destructive narcissism, includes key campaign advisors Roger Stone, Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Brad Parscale, and Hope Hicks, his Chiefs of Staff, Reince Priebus, John Kelly and Mark Meadows, as well as cabinet members including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao and Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.

Then, of course, there were the Republican members of Congress who derided Trump and his incendiary rhetoric in private and gave him rapturous praise in public. I recall reading a story about how, after Trump left a private meeting with key members of Congress when he was president, they could be heard laughing at him.

They have all been in a position to tell the truth to the American people, to the mob Trump has spawned, but they have chosen not to. They are as guilty as Burnett, more-so because they had an obligation to the country.

They all have displayed the same self-serving weakness as the men and women who were well aware of President Biden’s declining mental and physical state, kept it from the public and still backed him in his ego-driven selfish run for another term. “Taken together, this is all a troubling portrait — of unelected staffers trying to shield the public from Biden’s declining mental health so they can preserve their access to power and ability to make policy,” Philip Klein wrote in the National Review.  

We deserve better.