Tag Archives: Trump

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Will Trump Abandon Ukrainian Refugees? Count on it, he says.

Remember when America welcomed Ukrainians with open arms and warm hearts when Russia initiated a brutal invasion of Ukraine in 2022?

So much for “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” when Donald Trump takes office again on January 20, 2025.

The United States under President Trump is expected to join Pakistan and Iran in forcefully returning foreigners who have arrived from war-torn countries. And with the fall of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, pressure is likely to grow to repatriate Syrians in the United States under TPS protection

The Costs of War Project is a nonpartisan research project based at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. It seeks to document the direct and indirect human and financial costs of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and related counterterrorism efforts. According to Costs of War, over one million Afghans were forcibly returned from Pakistan and Iran in 2023. Under the current Taliban regime, forced returns to Afghanistan are continuing, despite a non-return advisory from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

 “States have a legal and moral responsibility to allow those fleeing Afghanistan to seek safety, and to not forcibly return refugees,” the Refugee Agency says.

Various governments justify this trend of increasing returns to Afghanistan by arguing that active war has subsided since August 2021, when the U.S. initiated a chaotic withdrawal from the country, Costs of War asserts.

Trump has made it crystal clear he plans to repatriate Ukrainians who are in the United States under 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.

An ongoing Ukrainian refugee crisis began in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, with over 6 million refugees fleeing Ukraine across Europe. The United States announced on March 4, 2022, that Ukrainians would be provided Temporary Protected Status (TPS).  There are now approximately 50,205 Ukrainian refugees  in the United States protected by the TPS program. During the designated TPS period, TPS holders are not removable from the United States and not detainable by DHS based on their immigration status. TPS for Ukrainians was recently extended until April 19, 2025, only three months after Trump’s inauguration. 

The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025”, which Trump disavowed during the campaign when criticism of it erupted, has resurfaced as a policy driver since Trump’s election. It outlines a plan to end TPS, calling it a program that encourages illegal immigration. If confirmed, Trump’s pick for Secretary of the Department of Homeland  Security, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, would likely will lead the charge to terminate TPS designations and send Ukrainian refugees home to the continuing war and devastation.

Is this what the 76,744,608 people who voted for Trump this time around wanted?

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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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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. 

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Trump/Vance Threaten The Competence of the Federal Civil Service

Donald Trump has made it clear he wants to overhaul the federal civil service and erode merit system principles. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s pick for vice president, has said that if Trump wins re-election, he should “…fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” and “replace them with our people.”

At campaign events, Trump has promised to “obliterate the deep state,” what he believes is a network of non-elected government employees working under cover to bypass elected officials and further their own contrary agenda.

I’m sure it sounds straightforward, simple and appealing to Trump’s ideological followers who think career civil servants would work to stymie Trump’s conservative policies if he’s re-elected.

But firing all the federal government’s mid-level bureaucrats and replacing them with political appointees would be a disaster for America.

I know that because I’m a former mid-level federal bureaucrat. I know that much of the work in multiple government agencies by U.S. civil servants is highly specialized, complex, and essential for an efficient government that serves the people. 

Under the U.S. General Service (GS) pay scale, the GS-1 through GS-7 range generally marks entry-level positions, mid-level positions are in the GS-8 to GS-12 range and top-level positions (senior managers, high-level technical specialists, or physicians) are in the GS-13 to GS-15 range.

I served in that mid-level band. As a Foreign Affairs Officer with the National Marine Fisheries Service during part of my professional career, I worked with the Department of State on international fisheries negotiations, principally with Russia, Canada and Asian nations. In preparing for that job, I earned a bachelor’s degree in International Relations, a master’s degree in Political Science and a master’s degree in Marine Affairs. I had also written a proposal for the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea and worked for an international marine conservation non-profit in Canada.

Many others on my team had similar backgrounds. During my time in government I worked with a wide range of exceptional people with broad experience and academic backgrounds doing specialized work that advanced American interests. 

“Almost all Western democracies have a professional civil service that does not answer to whatever political party happens to be in power, but is immune from those sorts of partisan wranglings,” says Kenneth Baer, who served as a senior Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official. “They bring… a technical expertise, a sense of long history and perspective to the work that the government needs to do.”

Gutting the civil service and replacing experienced workers with political hacks, as Trump and Vance advocate, would be irresponsible.

Don’t let it happen.

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President Biden: Stay or Go?

Option 1: Everybody just throw up their hands in dismay and let the fur fly.

Option 2: Adopt a “Stand by your man” attitude. Treat the current controversy as much ado about nothing, just “one bad night”. It wouldn’t be the first time the party ignored obvious personal failures by prominent members. Regardless of the current sturm and drang over Biden’s well-being and mental stability, just hang in there and hope the furor will dissipate, relying on the American public’s inability to focus on anything for more than a few days (or minutes). Count on spineless, wishy-washy electeds, such as Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), to back off their calls for Biden to step aside. Ignore the fact that Biden, even if he hangs on, may not be well enough to lead for another four years even if he wins. 

Option 3: Keep up the practiced deception, despite the evidence. The Wall Street Journal reported today that aides, in order to protect the president from scrutiny (and keep their jobs and influence), kept a tight rein on his travel plans, news conferences, public appearances and meetings with donors. Ignore the fact that hordes of aides and elected Democrats have deceived the public and that most voters think Joe is just too damn old. Oliver Wiseman wrote today in The Free Press, “As Biden geared up for a second run, it was clear that any young, ambitious Democrat who dared to challenge him would be all but disowned by their party… In poll after poll, Democratic voters told the party they wanted someone other than Biden at the top of the ticket. But the party apparatus ignored them. Now look where we are.”

Option 4:  Convince Biden to step down before the convention, making Kamala Harris President. Anoint Harris as the nominee at the party’s convention, in the midst of riotous pro-Palestinian demonstrations  (Shades of the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, which lead to Hubert Humphrey’s loss to Richard Nixon in the general election) On June 27, the day of President Biden’s debate, Harris’ approval rating was 39.4 percent, while her disapproval rating was 49.4 percent.. ignore the fact that her approval numbers have actually fallen since the first presidential debate sparked calls for Biden to quit the race. According to FiveThirtyEight’s average, on June 27, the day of the debate, Harris’ approval rating was 39.4 percent, while her disapproval rating was 49.4  percent. On July 5, Harris’ approval rating stood at 37.1 percent and her disapproval rating was 51.2 percent, not a hopeful sign if she runs against Trump, whose approval numbers have actually been rising.

Option 5: Convince Biden to withdraw as the party’s nominee at the Democratic Convention and initiate an open convention, releasing the pledged delegates he has accumulated to date (3,894 of 3,937 committed so far). All those delegates could then vote for whomever they chose. That might, of course, run the risk of alienating minority voters who would resent the party automatically not elevating Kamala Harris (she wouldn’t even be assured of keeping the No. 2 job),  setting off chaos on the convention floor and leaving the party’s eventual nominee just weeks to make his/her case to voters before the Nov. 5 election.  

Option 6: Back to Option 1.

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Executives Warming to Trump Are Making a Mistake

In the 1930s, fashion entrepreneur Hugo Boss saw opportunity in Hitler’s rise. A German businessman and an early member of the Nazi Party, his clothing company used forced labor in German-occupied territories and prisoner-of-war camps to manufacture uniforms for the SS and the Wehrmacht.

The willingness of business interests to align themselves with dubious political leaders has a long history.

Some of America’s top business executives are carrying on the tradition today with their apparent willingness to reconnect with Donald Trump.

At a June 13 Business Roundtable meeting in Washington, D.C., about 80 CEOs met with Trump, including Apple’s Tim Cook, JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan and  Xerox CEO Steven Bandrowczak. 

The executives told the Wall Street Journal their willingness to listen to Trump stems from frustration with President Biden, a growing sense that Trump could win the presidency again and a desire to shape the Republican’s agenda before the election. 

This warming to Trump comes despite his legacy of inflammatory and divisive rhetoric, his role in the chaos of Jan. 6 and his relentless effort to undermine the 2020 election and overturn the legitimate results. This is also a man who  admired the Tiananmen Square massacre in China and told Xi Jinping that he had no problem with Xi putting ethnic/religious minorities into detention camps. 

Larry Diamond, an expert on democratic governance at the Hoover Institution, told CNN that Trump, clearly a damaged man, “has massive responsibility for creating the normative atmosphere in which extremism, hatred, racial bigotry and violent imagery have prospered and metastasized.”

“Looking back at it now, the most surprising thing about the Donald Trump presidency is that we survived it at all: the lies, the chaos, the ignorance, ugliness, recklessness and lawlessness,” Bill Press, a senior political contributor on CNN, wrote in The Hill. Press noted not only “how bad the Trump presidency was, but how dangerous, operating without any limits, a repeat Trump performance would be.”

Too many American business leaders seem ready to ignore that ominous warning. They are doing so at great risk to themselves and America.