THE SLAYING OF ALEX PRETTI—A CATALYST FOR HEIGHTENED CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

 

I’ve been researching everything I could find on fatal Trump regime repression victim Alex Pretti ever since he was summarily executed on a Minneapolis street a week ago. As a result, I have been able to speculate about a few things with reasonable factual certainty.

Alex Pretti

Alex Pretti didn’t have a death wish. He had a busy, fulfilling life, and he had the highest of principles. He wasn’t a “dangerous assassin” or a “domestic terrorist”, or “an insurrectionist”, terms with which the Trump regime has sought to slander him and sully his memory, after its paramilitary agents murdered him. He was, rather, a patriot, a man exercising his First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly, and freedom of expression, and freedom of dissent, a law-abiding American fed up with the regime’s invasion of his state and city—and don’t tell me it’s not an invasion when the number of paramilitary agents the Trump regime has deployed add up, in military terms, to four battalions of combat-armed, masked and ready paramilitary troops, with carte blanche orders permitting them to act with impunity and beyond the law. (Former South Bend mayor and federal transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, an Afghanistan combat veteran, described the Trump paramilitary as “more heavily armed than we were” on Afghan War combat patrol missions).

Pretti was a real American, someone who believed in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the rule of law. And he didn’t just talk the talk, he walked the walk, standing up in peaceful protest against what are clearly daily abuses of power, perpetrated by the regime against immigrants and American citizens alike. He was, at the time of his summary execution, standing firm to protect his city and state against what is clearly federal government abuse.

Alex wasn’t himself a veteran, but he was indeed a caregiver for veterans, and by all reports (all not tainted by Trump regime and MAGA World lies), an excellent and much-beloved one. He was not only a talented ICU nurse at the VA hospital in Minneapolis, but also a medical research assistant. Alex, 37 at the time of his slaying, has been described multiple times since his untimely death as someone who dedicated his life to healing and to helping others. He was, indeed, helping someone else—a woman protestor being brutalized by a masked paramilitary agent—when he was summarily executed, face-down, on the ground, after being maced, kicked and beaten by more than a half-dozen paramilitary operatives taking part in the siege of Minneapolis. Again, don’t try to tell me that this is not a state of siege, since the regime has even given it its own military invasion codename: Operation Metro Surge.

An outdoorsman and trekking enthusiast in his spare time, Alex Pretti was a veritable poster boy for American rugged individualism. And in his adherence to individual rights, he was, among other things, a supporter of the Second Amendment, a gun-owner, and a conceal-and-carry licensee in a staunchly open-carry state.

So respected was Pretti among veterans that Military.com was prompted to publish a piece about his slaying. In it, the site posted a statement by Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, Chief of Infectious Diseases at the VA hospital where Alex worked, and a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. Miltary.com said Dr. Drekonja described Pretti as an outstanding nurse, deeply committed to patient care.

"He wanted to help people," said Drekonja. “He was always asking what he could do to help.”

Noem

This, then, was the dangerous “domestic terrorist” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Assistant Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Donald Trump were bloviating about. This is the mad-dog killer that then-Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino said was there “to massacre” federal agents. As school shooting survivor and gun-control activist Emma Gonzalez so eloquently put it, “I call bullshit.” And so does anyone else who has seen the videos of a public execution and knows how to look at them without their MAGA 1D glasses on.

Noem had the same story earlier this month when another Minnesota resident, Renee Good, was slain by an ICE operative, Jonathon Ross, claiming the unarmed 37-year-old mother of three, who had just taken her six-year-old son to school, was “a domestic terrorist” who tried to run officers over with her SUV. That was also a claim contradicted by video footage that showed Good trying to go around officers to escape from a clearly dangerous and menacing situation, with a masked agent jerking on her door handle and telling her to “get out of the fucking car.”

Alex and Renee - martyrs for democracy

According to reports culled from an independent autopsy ordered by Chicago attorneys for Good’s family, she received three slugs from Ross’s pistol, as the videos of the homicide showed. As seen in the videos, the vehicle was already clearing Ross to leave the scene—as ICE agents had originally ordered Good to do. The autopsy shows that Renee received one direct hit to her left arm and another to her left breast. Autopsy results suggest neither of those wounds would have killed her. It was the third shot that executed her, entering her head at the left temple and exiting the right side of her skull. Forensics experts reportedly discovered a fourth injury as well, a flesh wound where a slug had just grazed the victim.

So far no evidence has been released as to the order of the gunshots. If the one to the head was first, Renee was already mortally wounded when she received the other two. But if the other two came first, then this was a coup de grace shot that caused her death following those first two non-lethal wounds.

Alex Pretti’s summary execution took place at the corner of 26^th Street and Nicollet Avenue in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis. According to eyewitnesses, someone whom federal agents were pursuing had run into a doughnut shop in the 2600-block of Nicolette near that corner, and employees had locked the door to keep paramilitary members from entering. A chaotic scene ensued in which protestors and paramilitary agents had gathered near that location. Pretti was attempting to direct local traffic around the throng, an attitude that, according to those who knew him, was typical, lending a hand wherever he could to keep people safe.

It was shortly afterward that Alex observed how a Border Patrol agent was brutalizing two women, one of whom he pushed hard in the chest twice and threw to the ground. The agent was about to mace the fallen woman when Alex stepped between them to protect the woman. With one hand, he was holding up a smartphone, apparently recording the incident, while with the other, he was trying to block the agent from spraying mace into his own face.

Alex’s last act, before being completely overpowered, was still to help someone else. He turned from the menacing agent, wrapped his arms around the woman on the ground, and tried to help her to her feet. But as they were attempting to stand up, the paramilitary agent again shoved Alex hard, so that both he and the woman, still embracing, fell back to the ground. And as they did, their assailant jerked Alex backwards onto the street.

At that point, several more agents joined the first border guard, pinning Alex down, while macing, beating and kicking him. The first agent, taking advantage of Alex’s being immobilized by the others, was beating him around the face and head with the mace canister that he was still holding. At one point, the number of agents beating and restraining Alex, who was on the ground and by now defenseless, numbered eight.

While Alex Pretti was a legal gun-owner, as I said before, with a valid conceal and carry permit—which, in the state of Minnesota, afforded him the right to be armed anywhere except where specifically prohibited (federal buildings, courthouses, etc., where there are “no firearms beyond this point” signs posted)—multiple videos from different angles show that he never once touched his weapon during the entire life-threatening encounter that, indeed, resulted in his death. There is even specific footage demonstrating that he was using both of his hands to try and protect his face and head from the savage beating that he was taking. In fact, the paramilitary agents appear never to have known that Alex was armed until they had him subdued and saw the gun during the process of cuffing him.

It's only at that point that, in one video, you can clearly hear an agent saying what sounds like, “the gun, the gun, get the gun.” It is then that an agent in a dark stocking cap pulls his own pistol. It is also at about that moment that another agent appears to disarm Alex—who, again, is already completely defenseless on the ground and surrounded by a gang of agents—and leave the scene with Alex’s 9mm pistol. It’s only after Alex is disarmed and completely helpless that the first shot rings out. Agents step back, apparently in surprise. Alex is motionless on the pavement. And a split second later, at least nine more shots are fired at Alex’s already inert body.

General strike and protest in Minneapolis

That is precisely what the video evidence shows happened. That is what those of us who were paying attention saw. The rest—and especially the complete “domestic-terrorist-insurrectionist-assassin” fantasy cooked up by the Trump regime—is spin, designed to change the narrative and turn Alex from a patriot, good Samaritan and victim into the perpetrator of his own killing.

 As I say, I have been researching and thinking about all of this for a week now. There are inevitable conclusions to which thinking deeply about the deaths of Renee and Alex—and about everything else that has been happening in the US over the course of the past year (and decade)—logically lead.

To start with, it may seem like stating the obvious. To me it does, at least. But then again, I’m amazed at how many people are still asking if we “might be on the verge” of an authoritarian regime. News flash: We are there!

What is happening daily in the United States under the Trump regime is the very definition of a police state. To wit, a state whose government institutions exercise extreme control over civil society and individual liberties.  It is a state in which the lines between the law and the exercise of executive political power are blurred, and in which the Executive wields unrestricted power over deployment of internal security and police forces. Police states are characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian, or at least illiberal regimes (meaning those contrary to a liberal democratic system, in which human and civil rights, and due process and the rule of law are rigorously upheld).

Solidarity protest in New York

I would personally argue that the US is already living under an authoritarian regime, in which constitutional rights and the rule of law have effectively been suspended. But failing my own definition, there can be no objective doubt that America is now fully submersed in an illiberal regime, in which the vast majority of power is concentrated in the hands of a single madman and his cronies.

I shouldn’t have to qualify this last statement considering how clearly obvious it is to anyone who isn’t bending over backward to be disingenuous. But here are a few observations to back that statement up.

Trump is an illiberal executive who defies the Constitution, due process and the rule of law on a daily basis. He simply does not accept the fact that the law applies to everyone. For him, the power of the presidency is absolute.

That becomes fatally dangerous considering that Trump now has what has basically become a personal army of more than 40,000 sworn paramilitary agents. That is the total of operative (non-clerical) personnel in ICE and the Border Patrol combined. The way he has managed to take personal control of this legally-ignorant, ill-trained, but superbly armed paramilitary force has been by taking advantage of the fact that both forces are under the command of the Department of Homeland Security—a cabinet secretariat that has been accumulating an inordinate amount of power ever since it was formed, with the sweeping powers of the so-called Patriot Act behind it, at the end of 2002, following the Nine-Eleven Islamist terror attack on New York City and Washington DC in 2001, which took more than 3,000 lives.

Since both paramilitary groups are under the direct orders of DHS, it was simply a matter of putting someone eminently unqualified for the job and slavishly loyal to Trumpism in charge. Kristi Noem was the perfect choice in Trump’s view, because it was clear that she was almost completely ignorant of the law, and willing to do whatever the president told her to do, as well as to spin, lie and cover up all of the constitutional and legal abuses that Trump’s paramilitary committed.

Trump also managed to get his usurped GOP and a handful of so-called “moderate” Democrats to vastly increase funding for his quasi-private army, handing a base budget estimated at more than 30 billion dollars to the combined ICE-CBP forces, but with 75 billion in additional emergency funds approved over the course of the next four years.

By comparison, the FBI—prior to the Era of Trump, the country’s premier law-enforcement organization—has a total personnel roster of 38,000, only about 13,500 of which are operative agents. And it must make do with a complete yearly budget of 10.1 billion dollars, as well as with a Trump “hand-picked” director (Kash Patel) with zero law enforcement, let alone FBI, background. Patel is, basically, just another ad hoc personality in the clown car known as “the Trump Cabinet”.

Bondi

Trump, as an illiberal head of state, is making use of his loyal paramilitary, in combination with a weaponized Department of Justice—where his nominal attorney general, Pamela Bondi—is, like Noem, a ringer, a Trump shill, with questionable ties to him and his organization dating back to well before he was president, and when her ethics were apparently just as “flexible” as they are now. For instance, in 2013, while she was attorney general of Florida, she came under scrutiny for accepting a “campaign donation” from a Donald Trump non-profit for her second-term run. This aroused suspicion since her office was in possession of 22 fraud complaints against Trump University, which had shut down in 2011 amidst growing scandal and legal claims in Florida, New York, Texas and elsewhere. Only the New York class action lawsuits eventually prompted Trump to settle with victims of the fraud for 25 million dollars. Despite the name, the fake school was never an accredited institution of higher learning.       

In 2016,  Bondi endorsed Trump in the GOP’s Florida presidential primary, saying she had been friends with him for many years. The Trump donation to her PAC was still haunting both her and Trump at the time. The IRS eventually fined Trump for the contribution that he made through one of his organization’s non-profits, stating that it violated non-profit contribution rules. The IRS also ordered Trump to reimburse the non-profit for the money he had donated to Bondi. Neither Bondi nor her PAC was criminally charged, but a New York state court ordered the Trump organization to close down the non-profit foundation involved and ordered Trump to pay a two million-dollar fine for having misused it.

Trump would eventually appoint Bondi to his defense team against his first impeachment inquiry and trial in 2019, with her specific mission being “to attack the process.” She would then remain part of Trump’s defense team to face burgeoning allegations and charges arising against his multiple felonious actions.

It was in that role that she helped formulate accusations of wrongdoing against President Joe Biden and his son Hunter so as to take attention off of her client.  She would later act as one of the principal purveyors of Trump Big Beautiful Lie about the 2020 election’s having been stolen from him—a lie fully revealed in more than sixty court actions that MAGA lost and in the refusal of even the MAGA-leaning Supreme Court to hear the case. And it would be she, once again, sitting in the counsel’s seat at his defense table in his trial for election fraud in Fulton County, Georgia, a case that dissolved along with two federal cases against Trump when he was, incredibly, re-elected to the presidency in 2024, despite his, by then, being a 34-count convicted felon in yet another case.

So just as he picked Noem and Patel for their ignorance and loyalty, he chose Bondi for her legal expertise and her willingness to use it in his favor and against the people of the United States—in particular, against anyone against whom he had ever held a grudge. Pamela Bondi remains, then, the head of the “Trump defense team”, even as she masquerades as US Attorney General.  

Miller

In that, Bondi has something in common with Assistant Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a clever political operative and the indisputable eminence grise behind Trump’s push to destroy American democracy and to turn the US into a dictatorial police state. The chaos that the regime is creating with its paramilitary invasion of opposition cities all over the US is no accident. It is part of a strategic plan by Miller and the Project 2025 crowd to wreak such havoc as to create the illusion of a nation out of control. To what end is a simple question to answer. So as to invoke the long dormant Insurrection Act, declare martial law, and nullify
the midterm elections slated for November—elections in which all indications point to a humiliating rout for the MAGA-usurped GOP in Congress, despite the Republican push to gerrymander the results in their favor.

Trump has long sold himself as a “grassroots leader”. But over the course of his five years of Grover-Cleveland-presidency, he has demonstrated to ample segments of the public that he is an authoritarian and an elitist. The greatest flaw in his sinister plot against US democracy is that he is one of the most indiscreet public figures who ever lived. He is consistently and stunningly saying the quiet part out loud. And it has become clear that his immigration policy is designed to play to a white nationalist mentality and to some of the worst racial extremist movements in the country. He has said aloud that he wants “a better class of immigrants”, specifically enumerating white ethnicities that he would welcome, and referring to black and brown immigrants as people from “shithole countries”, who are “poisoning the blood” of America.

It is incomprehensible to me that he fared better in the 2024 election with black and brown citizens than he had in either the 2016 or 2020 election cycles. But in the past year, as non-whites, both citizens and immigrants alike, have found themselves on the receiving end of the full lawless force of Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol paramilitary. They have seen law-abiding neighbors who were part of their communities hauled away without warrants while their children were in school. Some, despite their legal status in the country or their citizenship have been dragged out of their cars and brutalized without cause. Still others have had their doors kicked in without court orders and members of their household hauled away to parts unknown. Their families have been torn apart and their friends have disappeared. It’s easy to guess that many of the non-whites who inexplicably voted for Trump in the last election will be suffering serious buyer’s remorse in the midterms.       

In terms of Trump’s growing toxicity, the writing is on the wall in polling that shows some 45 percent of potential voters identifying as Independents, and some 60 to 70 percent of Independents ranking Trump “under water” by ample margins regarding the main planks of his presidential campaign platform—immigration enforcement, inflation, the economy, and foreign relations.

Meanwhile, grassroots resistance is winning. More and more people are joining the massive demonstrations in solidarity with occupied Minnesota, following the murders of two American citizens by members of the Trump paramilitary. Despite brutal Arctic weather in much of the country, protestors have turned out by the thousands and tens of thousands, to oppose the destruction of our democracy and the violation of our civil rights, since if the regime can violate the constitutional rights of a single person, then everyone’s rights are vulnerable.

As Republicans begin to sense that Trump’s growing toxicity makes him more of a liability than an asset in their election campaign, hairline fractures are starting to appear in the almost monolithic party support Trump has enjoyed up to now—the blind support that has allowed Trump to accumulate unprecedented de facto power and to daily violate the Constitution and the law.

Solidarity protest in Chicago

They are seeing a dim future for the GOP as massive protests are spontaneously taking shape on the streets of cities around the country in solidarity with those in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, where whole neighborhoods look like war zones, with demonstrators facing off, in peaceful civil disobedience, with heavily armed and masked paramilitary agents. In huge numbers, neighbors have taken to the street in solidarity in Orlando, Grand Rapids, Green Bay, Phoenix, Salt Lake, Milwaukee, New York, Tampa, Colorado Springs, Boise, Chicago, Omaha, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and elsewhere around the country. Even in tiny Traverse City, Michigan, 2,000 people braved below-zero temperatures to turn out in protest.

This is the miscalculation of a bully-megalomaniac like Donald Trump. If you bully individuals, you might get away with it. But if you try to bully whole democratic communities, the backlash will be devastating.

This is what democracy looks like!     

 

HERE’S A THOUGHT: WHAT ABOUT THE NORWAY LETTER?

 

Imagine for a moment that Donald Trump isn’t doing something insane every minute of every day. (Wouldn’t that be nice)? Forget that he’s violating the Constitution a mile a minute, ignoring judges and court decisions, covering up and—by omission or commission—encouraging the murders and abductions of Americans and immigrants alike. Forget his rambling, disconnected, word salad speeches. Forget his habitual lies, his paranoia, his psychosis, his lack of any sign of human empathy or remorse, his pathological quest for absolute power, his psychopathic criminality and felonious behavior.

Forget all of the things for which he should clearly be impeached and/or declared incompetent and removed from office, and with regard to which Republicans continue to pretend they are “business as usual”. Forget all that and let’s just look for a second at the lunatic missive Donald Trump recently sent to his Norwegian counterpart, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

In a letter that was syntactically and grammatically childish and totally unpresidential—obviously the president’s own puerile words penned or dictated with no adult supervision in the room—Trump, addressing the PM by his first name (as if it were going to be a “friendly” letter, which it wasn’t), basically whined about not getting a Nobel Peace Prize. As ever, in his inimitably childish style, he not only lodged his complaint but threatened retribution. The message was, basically, I didn’t get the peace prize I wanted, so now, I’ll show you! You don’t reward me for peace? Okay. I’ll give you aggression instead. And it’s all your fault!

Actually, not even that made any sense whatsoever. The fact is that the Norwegian government plays no direct role in selecting Nobel Prize laureates. Winners are chosen independently by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The only involvement the government has is through the parliament, which selects the five people who will sit on the Nobel Committee. But neither the administration nor the legislature exercises any influence at all on the selection process. So before throwing his little hissy fit, Trump, who has been fishing for a peace prize (on what basis, your guess is as good as mine) since 2016, didn’t even bother to bone up on how the Nobel selection process actually works—and neither, obviously, did any of his very apparently useless staff. 

Below is the actual text of the letter (which, I’m convinced, my fourth-grade grammar school teacher would have graded with a D-minus and told him to do it over in accordance with accepted rules for formal letter-writing):

Dear Jonas:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.

Thank you!

President DJT

Okay. It’s a short letter but there’s a lot to unpack. First, Trump’s claim of having stopped eight wars is, to say the very least, highly disputed. Trump exaggerates everything. He even used to admit to “hyperbole” in talking to the public. (Some might call it “lying”). While it’s true that the US weighing in on certain violent situations in recent geopolitics has influenced at least temporarily different outcomes, “ending eight wars” is a gross exaggeration—one clearly designed to foster his baseless claim to Nobel laureate status.

Here, by way of example, are a few of the disputes Trump claims to have solved:

 - The big one, Israel and Hamas. While the current so-called ceasefire might be considered a major step toward halting a brutal war, Israel continues to attack Palestinian civilians and Hamas is threatening to end the tenuous truce unless the Netanyahu government discontinues its lethal strikes and lifts restrictions on the entrance of humanitarian aid, which it has limited to the point of constituting a war crime. Netanyahu has made it clear that any second stage in the deal brokered by the US will not include reconstruction of the devastated Gaza Strip, but will rather be strictly about “disarming Hamas and demilitarizing” the war zone. While the US-brokered truce is largely holding, it is hardly a smashing success. Some 71,000 Palestinias, mostly civilians and many children, have been slaughtered since these latest hostilities began, and 480 of those fatal Palestinian casualties have occurred since Trump claimed to have “ended the war” in October of last year.  The decades-long path to a permanent end to the war, which will only conclude when there is a viable two-state solution, promises to be arduous, if achievable at all, and won’t be possible without deployment of an international peacekeeping force, the dismantling of Hamas, and withdrawal of Israel from Palestinian territory.

 - Israel and Iran. Trump gets credited for ending what was, indeed, a 12-day war. But it wasn’t exactly through award-winning peace negotiations that he did it. Back in June, Israel launched attacks on Iran, targeting its nuclear facilities and its military leaders. Netanyahu then called on Trump to do the same but with more devastating weapons that Israel didn’t have. The Netanyahu government played it as a “mutual interest” move, saying that the aim was to keep the Iranians from building a nuclear weapon. Iran’s political leaders denied that the government had been engaged in the creation of atomic arms. The Trump regime negotiated a ceasefire, but not before calling in powerful US airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear energy facilities at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz. While Arizona State University’s McCain Institute indicates that there wasn’t “any real end in sight before President Trump got involved and gave them an ultimatum,” Lawrence Haas, senior US policy fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, has a different take. Haas says that while the US was instrumental in cobbling together a ceasefire, that truce is barely more than a temporary respite from a continuing “day-to-day cold war.”

 - Egypt and Ethiopia. Mediation efforts, which do not directly involve the United States, have stalled in what is best described as heightened tensions, but not a war. At the center of the controversy is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile River, inaugurated last September. The decade-old project has long fostered friction among three countries in the region, Ethiopia,  Egypt and Sudan. Egypt opposed it out of hand, since that country’s agriculture relies almost entirely on the river for irrigation. Sudan says that the Renaissance Dam threatens its own dams and has generated fears of flooding. During his first term Trump’s administration tried to broker a deal among the three African nations but didn’t manage to get them to agree. So, not a war and no agreement, despite the Great Prevaricator’s assertions to the contrary.

 - India and Pakistan. An incident involving the slaying of tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir brought India and Pakistan closer to the brink of war than they had been in many years. But they eventually managed to negotiate a ceasefire. Trump claims he brokered that truce for which he offered trade concessions. Pakistan, just in case, thanked Trump, after the US president starting claiming a diplomatic victory. But India has flatly denied that the US was ever involved, and has stated specifically that there was never any conversation between US and Indian leaders regarding trade concessions in connection with the ceasefire. The Indian government has underscored this by saying that the negotiations and the truce were completely bilateral.  Nor did the tensions ever spill over into full-blown war.

 - Serbia and Kosovo. The 1998–1999 Kosovo War was an armed conflict between Serbian/Yugoslav forces and the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). It resulted in more than 10,000 fatalities and the wholesale displacement of Albanians. NATO intervened in March 1999, with a bombing campaign that forced Serbian withdrawal and established a UN-administered, largely autonomous Kosovo. While the Trump regime lists an alleged Serbia-Kosovo conflict as one of the “wars” Trump has solved, the fact is that there has been zero threat of war between these neighbors in recent years. Furthermore, Trump has made no significant contribution to improving their bilateral relations. Tensions have been a constant since Kosovo, a former province of Serbia, declared independence in 2008. But those tensions have never reached the point of full armed conflict. And if anyone should get credit for peace in the region, it is NATO-led Peacekeepers, deployed there for decades, and the 100 nations that have recognized Kosovo as a free nation. No war, then, and you can’t stop a war that doesn’t exist. It’s true that, during his first term, Trump negotiated “a concept” of a deal between the two countries, but most of what was tentatively agreed to never reached fruition. So, sorry, Mr. President, but no cigar. 

 - Rwanda and Congo. Trump has indeed played a key role in peace efforts between these African neighbors, but the effort wasn’t his alone, and the conflict is far from over. In the past year, mineral-rich Eastern Congo has seen the re-emergence of the M23 rebel group, which claims to be protecting territorial interests. They also claim that some personnel in the Congolese Army were participants in the horrific 1994 Rwanda Genocide. Rwanda backs M23. Last June, Congolese and Rwandan foreign ministers signed a peace deal at the White House. But M23 has made it clear that it won’t abide by an agreement from which it was excluded. Only days after the agreement was signed at the White House,  rebels seized a city in Eastern Congo. Qatar has also sought to cobble together a ceasefire deal between M23 and Congo, but both parties to the deal continue to accuse each other of violations. So, does saying you stopped a war count if the war continues?

 - Armenia and Azerbaijan. It is true that Trump last August hosted a meeting of leaders of these two countries, where they signed their intention to end a territorial conflict that has lasted since the 1990s. They also committed to an eventual peace treaty. Foreign ministers from the two nations initialed the White House agreement, but their parliaments have yet to ratify it and their leaders have failed to sign it. So is a peace deal no one has formally agreed to a peace deal, or just an expression of good intentions? What has, however, actually kept the two working toward normalizing ties is a 2020 Russian-brokered truce. But that hasn’t kept Azerbaijani forces from launching blitz attacks to regain territory lost to Armenia. So again, has Trump singlehandedly stopped that war, and has that war actually ended? Not so much.

But again, let’s put all that “peace hyperbole” aside and just talk about the letter itself.

Go back, if you will, and re-read this self-indulgent, unhinged, hysterical and demented letter, and ask yourself, honestly, in your heart of hearts, for yourself and no one else, no matter what your political leanings might be, if this sort of behavior would be tolerated from any president but Donald Trump. Although it is laughable to even entertain such an idea, imagine the outcry from Republicans if this letter were signed by Barrack Obama or Joe Biden. In fact, imagine the outcry from Democrats, who would immediately be asking themselves if their governing party’s president had completely lost his mind.

In the case of Obama it is unimaginable. Never has there been a more mentally acute president. But even on his worst day, at the end of his term, when Joe Biden was sometimes vague and seemed at a loss, it is equally unimaginable that any such letter would ever have made it off his desk and into circulation. First because, even in his worst senior moment, it would never have occurred to Biden to write or dictate such a letter, and second, because he had a real staff made up of real professionals, not a perverse and acquiescent cabinet of grotesque puppets, who never question the chief, not even when he is about to make a complete ass of himself and the country (which occurs just about every day).

From a technical viewpoint, the letter is schoolboy childish in its content and style. It is littered with the same strange capitalizations and random punctuations that Trump uses in his social media posts. But that is nothing compared to the content. These are the words of a US president—remember, when he writes to another government chief, he is writing in the name of the US as a whole, not, as he signed it, in that of DJT—which reveal gross ignorance of history, international law, and self-determination of nations. But that’s not the worst of it. He even seems totally confused about whom he is talking to.

There appears to be a complete non sequitur between the first line and the second. He first, mistakenly, takes Norway to task for not granting him the Nobel Peace Prize, and then launches right into his justification for wanting to annex Greenland (at least he didn’t call it Iceland this time), saying that Denmark can’t protect it from Russia and China. There appears to be a tacit admission in this that Trump has absolutely no idea whom he’s talking to.

This begs the question, can Donald Trump be so abjectly ignorant of geography and geopolitics that he actually believes that Norway and Denmark are the same country? Or, worse still, could he have slipped so deeply into dementia or insanity that he just wandered from one subject to the other without realizing one had nothing to do with the other? Even the strange and disconnected “Thank you” at the end of the letter seems totally improper and out of place. Thank you for what? For listening to his diatribe?

This letter in itself is disturbing and should scare every American out of his or her wits. Even more so when it becomes clear that this missive was never vetted, never checked, apparently never seen—or at least not seen by anyone sane. That is a sobering thought, because it means that while the assistant chief of staff and secretary of state are busy brutalizing Americans and stirring up trouble abroad, Donald Trump is on the loose, demented, unhindered and without supervision in his role as the most powerful head of state on earth.

Praying folks should be saying, “God help us.”

If there was ever clear cause to invoke the 25^th Amendment, this letter is it.

 

SAY HIS NAME

 

THE MCCONNELL REBELLION - THE LAST STRAW?

 

“I do not need the Senate. These people work for me. They're placeholders until I decide they're not useful anymore.”

This was the “private” statement by Donald Trump that reached the ears of some key Republican senators. They reportedly had a recording of it. And it apparently set off alarm bells with some of the most senior ones.

There is a sensation in Washington that a few of the less obtuse—or less compromised—of the Republican old guard are starting, very late in life, to realize that, while Trump demands loyalty, it is seldom if ever a two-way street. Once he has gotten those who (according to him) work for him to humiliate themselves, crawl to him, give up all autonomy, betray their own values and those of their country, ignore the Constitution, and justify the unjustifiable beyond the law and beyond all reason, if he no longer sees them as useful, they are discarded (read: primaried).

Of course, all they had to do was ask any of the myriad executives who ever did business with Donald Trump and got stiffed—an extremely high percentage—to know this was his modus operandi. I mean, Trump is a simple man to understand. The main rule is, if there is a choice between right and wrong, he will always choose wrong. But all too many politicians live life from poll to poll. They are only thinking about surviving until their next election and, hopefully, keeping their seat, that sacred place from which they are open for business to every perk and deal imaginable.

In the continuing era of Trump, however, even that looks like an iffy strategy, since, no matter how they may lie to the public, most senior GOP politicians are savvy. They know the score and know the reality and they are watching Trump’s popularity plummet with almost everyone withdrawing—independents, swing states, swing voters, and generally pissed-off consumers—and they know that his most brainwashed and most blindly loyal base just isn’t big enough to get them reelected, especially if the boss decides to endorse someone else, or at least not to campaign actively for them. So, what’s the upside of continuing to let the president run rough-shod over their co-equal powers?

Independent media outlets are excitedly reporting on this incipient split between the Senate GOP and Trump, no matter what sort of evasive falsehoods politicians are telling the mainstream media. And I’m not talking about—and I mean no disrespect, because I am, myself, a maverick—citizen journalists reporting from the makeshift basement studios in their homes. These are major independent voices, like conservative veteran commentator George Will (who seems to have developed permanent party heartburn ever since Trump usurped the GOP in 2016), Lawrence O’Donnell, and Rachel Maddow on her independent social media channels.

These are people with impeccable sources in Washington and elsewhere, people with access that no one else has, and, in the case of Will, decades of insider knowledge of the Republican Party and its top operators. In other words, when Will goes on record, it’s not with a story so thin as to be a mirage. On the contrary, what he says into the mic and the camera or types on his screen is the scoop, the tip of the iceberg. But you can bet there is a whole lot more as yet unconfirmed that he is probing beneath the surface. So, here's the story these and other independent journalists were covering this week.

To a man and woman, these stellar reporters, whose fingers have long been on the pulse of the nation, prefaced their reports by indicating that what they were about to tell viewers was not political theory or another headline fighting for attention. These are, they said, documented events from a 48 hour window that has effectively blown apart the Republican party's power structure as we've known it.

According to detailed reporting by these and other independent journalists, Wednesday morning shortly before 8am, several of the most powerful Republicans in the country walked into the office of Mitch McConnell—whose Senate career spans more than four decades—for what was supposed to be a routine meeting. They walked out less than an hour later and had reached an agreement to claw back the power that the Republican-controlled Senate has been relinquishing to the president. They were determined to take concrete institutional steps to limit the power of an administration that has become increasingly authoritarian by the day.

Within two hours the handful of influential Republicans had contacted and convinced more than a dozen other senators to stand with them against the president’s burgeoning unilateral power. And just like that, the GOP was deep into an internal crisis of its own making, with the battle lines being drawn between Senate institutionalists and Trump loyalists.

In historical terms, this marks the most serious internal Republican revolt since the Nixon administration and the Watergate scandal. As these independent commentators point out, this isn't a fight over ideology. This is about senior Republicans with institutional traditions that stretch far beyond the Trump Era and the personality cult loyalties that it has bred, quietly concluding that Donald Trump is off the rails and out of control.

It wasn’t just the arrogant quote with which I opened this essay that triggered the meeting of senior senators. It was also an increasingly “boss-employee” relationship that Trump seems determined to apply in dealing with the upper house of Congress. That same morning, at a quarter past two, Trump had reportedly called Senate Majority Leader John Thune. He wasn’t calling in the wee hours of the morning to negotiate emergency powers legislation. He was calling to demand that Thune organize an immediate vote on the Emergency Powers Act.

The draft legislation in question was no small thing. It was no less than a radical re-write of American governance. Among other things, it was designed, in the name of supposed “efficient national security”, to permit the president to completely sideline the Senate when it came to confirming (or rejecting) all cabinet and Armed Forces leadership appointments—something that would give an already inordinately powerful executive unprecedented power as both president and commander-in-chief.

Like an all-powerful boss talking to an employee who was either bound to listen or bound to lose his job, Trump wasn’t asking Thune, he was telling him, and the president punctuated his demand with a threat: Pass the emergency Powers Act by Friday, “or I’ll primary every one of  you.”

By 6am, the reported recording of Trump saying, “I do not need the Senate. These people work for me. They're placeholders until I decide they're not useful anymore,” had made the rounds of the senior party leadership, and by less than two hours later, it had become the elephant in the room during the  meeting in McConnell’s office, which was reportedly attended by Majority Leader Thune and none other than Secretary of State Marco Rubio, among others, including Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. 

But this sort of behavior on Trump’s part is nothing new, and if a handful of Republicans—fearing for their own political power and nothing else (there is no noble cause here; this is political survival mode)—are now finally being jolted awake and deciding to rebel, it may be way too little and, perhaps, too late. For nearly a decade, Senate Republicans’ performance has been one of supine cowardly appeasement of a megalomaniacal despot. Instead of standing up to Trump, instead of risking all for the nation and for democracy, they have cringed in fear and compliantly watched as those who did have the courage to call Trump out—Cheney, Kinzinger, Romney, Gonzalez, Herrera Beutler, Katko, Meijer, Newhouse, Rice, Upton, Valadao, etc.—were all turned into political non-persons by the MAGA machine. Worse still are the cases of Bill Cassidy and Kevin McCarthy who provided Trump with his every desire short of carnal relations, and still ended up sidelined and barred from Trump’s inner circle.

According to Rachel Maddow, “When that recording hit the encrypted group chats of senior Republicans, the reaction wasn't the usual silence. It wasn't compliance. It was fury. For the first time, the institution felt a knife at its throat. And for the first time, it decided to strike back.”

I’m not so sure. In most cases I’m thinking it’s the blade at their own throats, not that of the institution that is motivating them.

Perhaps in the case of McConnell it is purely institutional, if also a bit of a Hail Mary, before he closes out his career and goes home to live out his last days and die. Maybe it’s atonement for his past cowardice, since, more than anyone else, McConnell had it in his hands, and had the standing, to seek the impeachment and political trial of Trump when he tried to overthrow the government and steal the election in January of 2021. That was precisely when his decisive leadership was needed. Instead, he punted.

He admitted that Trump was to blame for it all, admitted that the president had violated the constitutional order and encouraged sedition. But he said the Senate would leave it to Justice—and the next (Democratic) administration—to deal with it. That day, he was the key to Trump’s never being able to hold public office again, and he clutched, demurred, chickened out.

That was also the day when Lindsey Graham declared that he was done with Trump, that Trump had crossed the line and had to go for good. But as soon as it was clear that Trump was going for a comeback, Graham—whose political backbone, if it ever existed as anything but a lunar reflection of the light from a great Republican politician, died and was buried with American hero and Trump foe, Senator John McCain—was again doing Trump’s every bidding. He  has followed him around grinning, cheering and panting like his lapdog ever since.

Now, Lindsey Graham is one of the 17 Republican rebels joining McConnell and friends. Trump is reported to have called Graham when he found out and said, “You’re dead to me.” To which Graham allegedly responded, “Then I’m dead.”

We shall see, but it’s really hard to trust a man with the spine of a jellyfish and the ethics of a pickpocket.

Still, in a Senate split of 53 Republicans to 47 Democrats, the rebellion of even a dozen GOP senators, if their resolve holds, is devastating to MAGA.   

Perhaps as Maddow and Will say, inside that 47-minute meeting in McConnell's office, the reality finally set in. And that reality was that loyalty to Trump was no guarantee for immunity from harm. The rules had changed. The fear senior congressional leaders felt in the past was from having watched the political demise of the GOP politicians I mentioned before. In all cases, Trump and his MAGA associates made sure that their ostracism was, as Maddow describes it, “brutal, public, and unmistakable, to keep the rest in line.”

There’s even a name for it in political science: authoritarian co-option. The idea encompassed by that term is to convince those who band together that doing so will carry a higher penalty than standing alone and keeping their mouths shut.

It’s a tactic often used in military training. I recall being a rebellious youth in my first week of basic combat training at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. We had a tough DI—think of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket, and you get the picture—and just about everybody in my platoon was beat at the end of that first week. The DI kept getting us up earlier and earlier. We were stressed and exhausted, unaccustomed as most of us were to intense training. So, remembering my Spartacus, I went all Norma Rae and organized a “slave revolt.” When the sarge came in banging on a garbage can and calling us maggots at 4am, we would all remain in our bunks. If we didn’t move, what was he going to do, fight us all? He was just a man, after all, and there were 40 of us. 

Obviously, 4am came, the DI arrived with his garbage pail alarm clock, and I could hear him going from bed to bed, cursing and shouting, rocking bunks and kicking footlockers across the room. I kept my eyes shut and thought, “I can’t let him scare me. I owe it to the other guys to stick together with them.”

Suddenly the barracks was quiet, and then the DI was leaning over me in my lower bunk so close that the brim of his campaign hat was touching my face. In a low, menacing voice, he said, “And how ‘bout you, Sleepin’ Beauty? What’s your major fucking problem.”

I opened my eyes and, trying my best to lie at attention, I said, “We’re not starting training this early today, Drill Sergeant. We’re exhausted and need to sleep.”

He straightened up and looming over me said, “Who the fuck’s we, maggot?” I glanced past him and saw that all of the others were standing tall in their skivvies by their bunks. And then the DI had me by the throat, jerked me from the bunk, and tossed me onto my hands and knees on the linoleum floor before giving me a swift kick in the ass with his paratroop boot.

I spent the morning low-crawling around the company streets in my underwear under the watchful eye of a corporal assigned to the task, and the afternoon and evening doing the dirtiest KP jobs there were, including cleaning out the mess hall’s grave-size grease trap.

“Brutal, public, and unmistakable”…and add “humiliating.” And it worked. We each remained silent, passive and alone, except when the authority ordered us to act together.

Says Maddow, “Fear becomes discipline. Silence becomes survival.
But this week, that calculation collapsed. For the first time, the cost of submission outweighed the risk of resistance…The senators in that room understood something immediately. Passing the Emergency Powers Expansion Act wouldn't protect their careers. It would erase them. They wouldn't be preserving their seats.
They'd be voting themselves into irrelevance.”

If independent analysts are right, rebelling senators have finally realized that, if they don’t stop Trump now, there may soon be no US Senate as such. Congress could become a rubber stamp legislature for the justification of executive decrees. And then the hollow fear of losing Trump’s waning base in elections would be overridden by the legislature’s own demise.

And the reality is that, thanks to Trump’s plummeting popularity, polling shows GOP candidates down by crucial margins in vital states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Montana.

Meanwhile, federal agents occupying Minnesota have just summarily executed another citizen, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse. Say his name: Alex Jeffrey Pretti. Aso, rhetoric surrounding Trump’s so-called Board of Peace and his justification of it to “replace the UN” continues to raise hackles worldwide. Moreover, his continuing threats to invade a NATO country’s sovereign territory—the name of which he seems to have trouble recalling—is pushing national security to the limits and the fallout from the Greenland debacle has pushed the national security establishment to its breaking point.

There is reason to believe that, while part of his aggression at home and abroad is simply an outgrowth of Trump’s megalomania and psychopathy, it also plays to his complete lack of a moral compass, and that it is not beyond him to start simultaneous civil and international wars in order to take the world’s sights off of his close connection to one of the most prolific pedophiles in the history of the world.

George Will points out that our former European allies in NATO—now potential rivals in Greenland (not Iceland, Mr. President)—this week held an emergency meeting. The subject: To determine the current stability status of the US. Never before has this happened. US stability was never an issue before the Era of Trump. The US was, in fact, the cornerstone of the NATO alliance for eight decades. Trump has destroyed that overnight, and even if and when the Trump Era ends, it will take decades of stability for the US to ever be trusted again.

Will explains that NATO is now quietly withholding intelligence from the US, for the obvious reason that its leadership isn’t trustworthy. And that puts US security at much heightened risk.

Will concludes that weakness in Congress, and especially in the Senate has always been a choice regarding Trump, not an inevitability. And he indicates that this unprecedented rebellion could end up halting Trump’s reign of terror. I hope and pray his analysis is sound and that rebelling GOP politicians stand firm. But excuse me if I don’t hold my breath.

Says Will, “(R)ight now the Republican Senate is in open revolt, not against Democrats, not against the media, but against Trump himself. And at the center of this rebellion is a war powers resolution that threatens to do something Trump fears more than bad headlines. It threatens to legally limit his ability to use military force as a personal political weapon.”

This is important, because Trump never plays his cards close to his vest. It’s all out there to see. On the home front, his prolonged full-scale invasions of Democrat-led American cities and states is clearly designed to sow chaos, and, if he’s lucky, an incipient civil war. Anything to justify invoking the Insurrection Act and the declaration of martial law, as a means of taking the midterm elections, which the GOP stands to lose, off the table. Americans have trouble believing that could ever happen in the USA. But if Republicans fail to get a leash on the monster they have sicked on democracy, it will.

The strategy, if you can call it that, for trying to rustle up conflicts abroad is, in my opinion, multi-faceted. The elements include a childish tantrum over not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, envy over what he sees as his friend Vladimir Putin’s strongman status, a desire to show the world who’s boss, and a burning need to create a diversion to direct attention away from the Epstein Files.

So, does the Senate still control foreign policy, or has it been abandoned to the whims of a madman? And are members of Congress still representatives of the people, or are they the submissive vassals of a demented tyrant?

Those are questions the rebelling senators need to ask themselves when their resolve starts to falter. Whether their cause is the noble idea of restoring democracy, or if they are simply trying to save their own asses, they need to know that whether Trump’s dictatorial reign ebbs or if he is allowed to double down and finish destroying American democracy, and, perhaps the world order, all depends on what they do with the decision they signed onto this past week.

If there was ever a time to assert themselves, and the Congress they represent, now is the time.