A 14-MONTH-LONG CAT-5 HURRICANE

 

Donald J. Trump has done more during the first fourteen months of his second term as president to undermine, and indeed, destroy the reputation, standing and integrity of the United States than any other phenomenon in American history.

I make this statement advisedly, because the US Civil War was indeed the greatest tragedy in American history. But it was also one of the nation’s greatest triumphs, reuniting the country as one, ending the scourge of slavery, reestablishing the rule of law, and, despite decades of hardships and challenges that were to follow, moving the country gradually toward ever greater equality and social order. Donald Trump has, on the contrary, even backtracked on much of that progress, by systematically seeking to turn the clock back to a pre-Civil Rights Era racist mentality—floating the elements of “manifest destiny” and of replacement-theory politics—and to a time when women were considered second-class citizens.

America's domestic essence and international reputation have been founded, historically, not on “power”, but on strength, the international strength of representing Western democratic ideals and of standing against aggression, and the domestic values of upholding free and fair elections, the strict rule of law, and the stability of peaceful transfers of power from one administration to the next.

While Trump’s first term in office tested all of these healthy and honorable traditions and principles to the limit, the liberal democratic system managed to endure. And the system prevailed despite scant effort on the part of the Republican Party, corrupted and hijacked by the Trump phenomenon, which, even after the fact, purged the most honorable of its members, who had demonstrated their devotion to political rectitude, and to the values of nation over political affiliation.

Incomprehensibly re-elected, however, by a slim popular margin in 2024, Trump has taken his second term as a mandate to completely dismantle the constitutional system that he repeatedly assaulted without final success during his first four years from 2016 to 2020. I have often compared Trump to “a bull in a china shop” when it comes to the Constitution, civil rights, the rule of law, and plain common decency. But in his second term, this metaphor has fallen short. The past fourteen and a half months have indeed been more like a prolonged and unabated category five hurricane in terms of the devastation wrought by Trump in the areas of constitutionality, democratic health, ethical traditions, civil rights, American culture, and the international standing of the United States on the domestic and global stage.

Since Day One of his second term starting on January 20^th, 2025, Trump has, with the aid of his unqualified but sycophantic picks for key posts in the Department of Justice, intelligence and law enforcement, systematically weaponized federal power against any and all opposition to his absolute power, not merely blurring, but basically obliterating the once sharp line between democracy and political retribution. He has underscored this corruption of American justice by making public attacks on judges, juries and the courts—including the Supreme Court—thus diluting confidence in American judicial independence, once the cornerstone of America’s credibility both at home and abroad.

The impact of this is a fast-growing perception of the US as an increasingly authoritarian regime in which once democratic institutions now serve power rather than constraining it.

Along these lines, a hallmark of this second term to date has been the gross use of government agencies for political ends. Immigration enforcement—something nearly all sides agree must improve, but which the majority of Americans agree must be carried out within the confines of the rule of law—has been particularly affected, expanding in ways that are blatantly illegal, unconstitutional, patently violent, and in frank violation of civil rights granted to citizens and foreigners alike under the Constitution.

“Immigration concerns” have also been used by the second Trump administration as an excuse to literally invade major cities and states governed by his political opponents, creating a personal army of thousands of federally-immune government agents as a shock force to attempt to intimidate dissent based on states’ rights. Congressional criticism—even among a handful of members of Congress from Trump’s own party—point to widespread concern over the Trump regime’s lawlessness and complete indifference to civil rights.

Trump has also openly pressured or publicly discredited both intelligence and law enforcement agencies whenever their findings point to credible reports of wrongdoing on his part or on the part of his friends and cronies, or when such findings conflict with his political or personal goals. Hundreds of law enforcement and  intelligence agents—three hundred in the FBI alone—many of them highly experienced experts in investigation, counter-terrorism, espionage, etc., have been unceremoniously sacked because of previously having been involved in probes into the Epstein files, or in Jack Smith’s inquiry into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and into his attempts to manipulate and overturn the 2020 elections. And more than three thousand prosecutors, investigators and staffers have been forced out of the DOJ for similar reasons.

This last, the savaging of the DOJ and federal law enforcement, has significantly weakened America’s ability to defend itself against its enemies, both foreign and domestic. And Trump has doubled down on debilitating the US by replacing some key officials in this area with individuals who have no qualified experience whatsoever. The naming of Kash Patel to head the FBI is a blatant enough example of placing highly trained agents under the command of a clueless sycophant—as was the stint of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

But an even greater and almost ludicrous example of this sort of surreally sycophantic restaffing of the State is that of Thomas Fugate III, appointed to head the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3)—a division of the Department of Homeland Security charged with combating domestic terrorism and targeted violence.

The man Fugate replaced was Bill Braniff. Braniff was an Army veteran with more than two decades of national security experience. Prior to heading up CP3 during the second half of the Biden administration and the first three months of the Trump regime, Braniff had been director of the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism—in other words, a consummate professional and expert. On leaving DHS, Braniff joined the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at the American University.

Fugate, for his part, prior to his appointment as the head of CP3, was working in 2022 as a cashier in a supermarket, then later was a staffer in the far-right Heritage Foundation. His only other qualification for the DHS appointment was apparently his being a self-described “Trumplican”, and having volunteered as a GOP campaign organizer.

All of this undermines the United States’ reputation as a neutral rule-of-law state, and aligns it with the sort of governments—Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary, for instance, as well as tinpot dictatorships in third world nations—that the US has historically criticized and condemned.

In line with all of this, both in his first term, and, to an even greater extent, in his second, Trump has normalized hate speech, while systematically dismantling through State action most of the  progress made since the Civil Rights Era in terms of diversity, equality and inclusion—positive values in modern civilized society but perceived by the Trump regime as negative terms that undermine MAGA’s most cherished white-supremacist principles (manifest destiny and the myth of “reverse racism”).  Trump’s rhetoric, on the whole, is reckless, disdainful and inflammatory. But it is particularly contemptuous when it comes to immigrants, political opponents, and international institutions.

Add to that his most recent attack on the Supreme Court for refusing to allow his regime to decide who, born on US soil, can be a citizen and who can’t. The Fourteenth Amendment clearly states that if you are born in the US, you are an American citizen, period. And that was the interpretation, even of the three far-right justices Trump named to the Court during his first term. Trump is now calling the three of them “stupid”, and has suggested that if they are on  the Court thanks to him, they should be grateful and always rule in his favor, no matter how outlandish the request might be. Someone should probably tell him, perhaps, that justices are bound to rule in accordance with the law,  not in harmony with the president. But then, who’s going to tell him? His lapdog sycophants in the DOJ?

Trump’s effect on political and social rhetoric has been so all-pervasive that he has managed to normalize language once considered a violation of democratic norms. He has persuaded his most loyal followers that it is now okay to employ the racial slurs they had been inhibited from using in good company by liberal democratic norms in the post-Civil Right Era. He has made it okay in certain circles to sneer at political correctness, to insult those one considers different, or as representative of “the others”, to reject, offend and ostracize people who failed to fit the framework of MAGA, and so on.

A recent example that pretty much says it all was Trump’s comment on the death last month of Robert Mueller. When learning of Mueller’s death at eighty-one, Trump could think of nothing more proper to say than, “Good. I’m glad he’s dead.”

It is worthwhile recalling who Robert Mueller was and why that makes Trump’s vile statement all the more egregious. Even as far back as the late sixties, before he had reached his mid-twenties, Robert Mueller was heroically serving his country. Born into privilege like Donald Trump, Mueller, much to the contrary of Trump—who comes from a long line of service-shirkers, and describes America’s dead heroes as “suckers and losers”—joined the Marines after receiving a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a post-graduate degree in international relations from New York University.

It is worthwhile remembering that there was still obligatory conscription during that war and that Donald Trump was eligible for it, but managed to acquire four temporary deferments from serving, and finally, a fifth permanent rejection which alleged he had bone spurs in his heels that rendered him physically inept.

After completing Officer Candidate School and being commissioned as a second lieutenant, Mueller went to the Army’s Ranger School. Marine officers frequently trained with the Rangers for experience leading long-range reconnaissance patrols—often search-and-destroy missions with a high casualty rate. He was placed with a Marine combat company in South Vietnam near enemy lines

It was on this first tour as a young second lieutenant that Mueller won a Bronze Star for valor. It was on December 11, 1968, while leading a Marine rifle platoon on patrol in Quang Tri Province that Mueller and his men fell victims to an ambush by Vietcong armed with grenade-launchers, machine guns, mortars and small arms. The citation issued with his Bronze Star said that he  “personally led a fire team across the fire-swept area terrain to recover a mortally wounded Marine,” while it commended his “courage, aggressive initiative and unwavering devotion to duty at great personal risk.” Four months later, he would win a Purple Heart for taking an AK-47 assault rifle slug through the thigh while leading his platoon on a mission to rescue US soldiers pinned down under  another lethal Vietcong attack.

After leaving Vietnam, Mueller attended the University of Virginia where he completed his law degree by 1973. Three years later, he was already a federal prosecutor in San Francisco. And in a meteoric rise of a few short years was chief prosecutor for the criminal division of the Northern District of California.

By 1982, at age thirty-seven, Mueller was in Boston prosecuting fraud, corruption, money-laundering and terrorism cases. Mueller joined the Justice Department in Washington in 1989, and within a year, would be chief of the criminal division, where he would grapple with managing a hundred US Attorney offices and some two thousand federal prosecutors, while serving as a nexus with the FBI.

Ironically enough, Mueller’s immediate superior at the Justice Department was William Barr, with whom he would cross paths again three decades later, when Barr was Trump’s attorney general and Mueller was a special prosecutor investigating Russian interference in Trump’s election.

Mueller would also oversee prosecution of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, whose power stemmed in large part from his long-term relationship with the CIA—one of those dictators immorally supported by the US in its so-called war on communism in Latin America. Mueller was investigating Noriega as a kingpin in cocaine trafficking to the US. He would also head up the investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland that killed two hundred fifty-nine people on board and eleven people on the ground. The FBI had probed the case unsuccessfully for two years, when Mueller used his authority as head of the criminal division to break through the agency’s barriers to multi-agency investigations and brought in the CIA, Britain’s MI5 and the Scottish police and got them all to share their information. As a result, Mueller made use of a tip from Scottish authorities to put the FBI on the trail of a Libyan intelligence officer who had used his cover as security chief for the Libyan flag-carrier airline to plant the bomb on the Pan Am plane. The bomber,  Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was indicted in 1991, but it would take until 2001 to convict him.

That, 2001, was, paradoxically, the same year that George W. Bush, following the nine-eleven Twin Towers attack, would appoint Mueller to head the FBI. Mueller would serve in that post for the next twelve years. And over the course of that time, he would turn the agency into one of the most effective counter-terror organizations on earth. His tenure would make him the second-longest-serving FBI director in history, only outdistanced by FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover.

After his retirement from the FBI, Mueller would again volunteer to serve his country at a time when Washington was known as “the murder capital of the USA”. President Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder, who had worked under Mueller at the DOJ, said Mueller called him “out of the blue” and asked if he needed a murder prosecutor. Holder asked Mueller if he wasn’t maybe “over-qualified” for a line prosecutor’s post, but then said, “When can you start?”

Over the next three years, Mueller successfully investigated and brought down dozens of killers, helping significantly reduce the murder rate in the nation’s capital. During that time, he always answered his own phone, with a simple,  “Mueller, homicide.”

This is the American hero about whom the current president could think of nothing better to say than, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” And adding, “He can no longer hurt innocent people!” In typical style, the “innocent people” Trump referred to was only one person: him. It was Trump’s own DOJ that appointed Mueller as special counsel to investigate alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Mueller, as always, did his job thoroughly and effectively. The report that he handed to Attorney General Bill Barr at the end of his probe concluded that while Trump himself had committed no crime, there was indeed evidence that Russian intelligence had interfered in the elections.

Barr, at Trump’s behest, smoothed this over by suppressing the report and providing an interpretation in which he dispelled any reports of collusion between Russia and the Trump camp. But Trump never forgave Mueller for carrying out an honest and impartial investigation, instead of engaging in a pro-Trump cover-up. In this second term, Trump has gone to great pains to ensure that there is no one impartial and effective in key positions in the government, surrounding himself with sycophants who are willing to break the law and the Constitution to protect his interests.

In conclusion of this point, Trump’s vile rhetoric and disdain for diversity, equality and inclusion—and the language that goes with it—has  not merely emboldened his cultist followers to take his lead. It has also emboldened other authoritarian leaders worldwide, who cite the United States as no longer having moral authority to criticize repression or abuses against their own citizens. Therefore, the US has lost its ability to influence other nations through values rather than force.

Worse still, Trump has single-handedly trashed America’s reputation as a reliable ally. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this, since the full trust in us of our allies has been among America’s greatest strategic assets since World War II.

Starting already in his first term, Trump’s disparaging remarks regarding our closest Western allies, his cozy relations with perceived enemies of the West and dictators in general, his loose-lipped handling of shared intelligence and his transactional (extortive) brand of “diplomacy”  badly weakened long-standing partnerships including NATO. And in the first year and three months of his second term, the eighty-year-old Western NATO alliance has been stretched to the breaking point. America’s erstwhile allies are now reluctant to share intelligence with Washington and are studying contingencies for NATO without the US, and, perhaps even, NATO with the US as its enemy and as a clear and present threat.

Even if Americans manage to topple the Trump regime, the damage he has done to our world standing will surely take decades to heal. And that will only happen if a Trump-free Washington has the humility to act proactively to get the West back on board with us.

Trump’s illegal war in Iran has only underscored this disconnect, with Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatening to pull out of NATO because the alliance has refused to aid and abet the Trump regime in its war of aggression against Iran—a supreme crime against humanity under international law. Moreover, Trump’s lawless action has caused Iran to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, effectively blocking worldwide delivery of a fifth of the world’s oil.

And now Trump’s regime is telling our one-time allies that the oil  blockade is not his problem. That it will be up to them to re-open Hormuz, since he seems to have grown bored with his war and is planning to end it soon. This is tantamount to tossing a live grenade into the midst of a group of friendly acquaintances and then running away.

Trump’s abrupt unilateral military actions without allied consultation and in violation of international law and the UN Charter have, in short, underscored uncertainty about US decision-making. Escalatory actions like airstrikes or other military interventions are being perceived as authoritarian and impulsive rather than strategic, and, as such, an imminent threat to world peace and prosperity.

Allies are, then increasingly hedging their bets. They are building independent capabilities or turning to regional arrangements, because they understand that if the Trump phenomenon could happen twice in a decade in the US, with Congress doing nothing to rein in the chaos, then any prior commitments the US has ever agreed to are now untenable.

These fears among our allies are further underscored by the economic and institutional unpredictability that is rampant under the Trump regime. Especially worthy of worldwide concern is how Trump has abandoned every economic and trade norm ever upheld by the US. The perception is of a demented leadership that is completely unpredictable and that, at any time, can turn on its allies and trading partners like a mad dog or—more aptly, perhaps, like a psychopath. Suddenly, our long-standing trading partners are witnessing erratic policy shifts, onerous trade tariffs, economic coercion, and apparently intentional creation of instability.

Add to this the undermining of normally independent domestic agencies, such as the Federal Reserve and regulatory agencies, and the US is garnering worldwide concern about its capriciously politicized economic management. In the end, what this means is that global investors are beginning to treat the US like a marginal and volatile State, rather than as the once foundational system in the worldwide economy.

In global economics and diplomacy this is sometimes referred to as the “concentration effect”. What this means is that the Trump regime is not just seen as damaging because of its severity, but also because of the concentration of its effects. Multiple institutional norms are being challenged simultaneously, and the assault on them is not part of a structured national policy, but the whims of a single despotic leader who is going internally unchallenged. And the messaging in this sense is continuous and global, since Trump is, perhaps, the most globally mediatic world leader in history—with the possible exception of Adolf Hitler.  

The end-result is that each action by the Trump unipersonal regime has the global effect of reinforcing the perception that the United States is no longer internally stable or externally reliable.   

Many will argue that the US has faced crises before and has always prevailed “because we are the greatest nation on earth.” But I submit—as do many other political analysts—that this time it is different.

Never before has a crisis emerged so directly from the presidency. Never before have the co-equal branches of government simply sat on their hands and watched a president wreak havoc. (For instance, Watergate was a major leadership crisis, but in that case, Richard Nixon’s own party demanded his resignation en lieu of impeachment and removal). Never, more than Trump, has a president and his administration targeted so many democratic pillars simultaneously, nor have the other branches permitted the Executive to get away with it. Never has the abuse of authority been so blatant or as consistent over time, and never have the abuse and its consequences been so domestically and internationally blatant, unbridled and visible in real time.

Seen in this light, the first fourteen months of the second stage of the Trump regime have been uniquely, historically and, perhaps, permanently damaging to the reputation, standing and integrity of the United States—more so than any other phenomenon in the nation’s history.

The eight million Americans who turned out at more than three thousand No Kings demonstrations across the country and the world recently gives me hope for the future. Still, I can’t help but ask myself daily: When are we going to quit pretending that this is business as usual, and demand, by the tens of millions, that our representatives remove this criminal tyrant from office and take back our nation?

GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY OF A RECURRENT NIGHTMARE

 

First Junta of the National Reorganization Process (left to right) Massera, Videla, Agosti

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’etat that preceded a nearly eight-year nightmare known as “El Proceso” (National Reorganization Process) in Argentina. This date, March 24^th, 1976, is an important one for me since I, along with my superiors and colleagues at the Buenos Aires Herald lived those times first-hand, and up close and personal.

I’m commemorating this historic anniversary in the best way possible. I’m in Buenos Aires, and attended a special ceremony of the Argentine branch of PEN Club international—an esteemed organization of writers and journalists worldwide—to honor my friend, mentor and former boss, Robert J. Cox. Although none of us at the Herald back in those times would have bet a plug nickel on our chances for getting far into middle age, let alone entertaining any chance of seeing old age, incredibly, Bob is now a very lucid and active ninety-two-year-old, and I’ve reached the ripe old age of seventy-six. No one is more pleasantly surprised than the two of us.

Cox speaking at PEN Buenos Aires

The honor bestowed on Bob Cox at the PEN was for “defense of free expression and human rights.” It is well-deserved. And it wasn’t the first international award that he has received for his courage and professionalism in those dark days. Few newspaper editors in history have risked as much as Bob and the Herald did during that bloody military regime.

Recalling that first day of the new regime in particular, my memories are vivid. We had been expecting  a military uprising for several days before it happened. In fact, given Argentina’s history, which for  nearly half a century by that time, had been characterized by pendulum swings between shaky democracies and spontaneous coups, we found it rather amazing that it hadn’t happened sooner, since the country had, quite literally, descended into chaos.

Already for two years by then—coincidentally, my first two years as a newsman at the Herald—the left and right of Peronism, following the death of the movement’s iconic leader, General Juan Domingo Perón, had been busy trying to kill each other off.  Perón had sought to model his last wife, Isabel Martínez, after his late wife, Eva Duarte de Perón—who had been just as iconic as Perón himself and, depending on which side of the political spectrum you came from, was both the most revered and most hated woman in Argentine history. It didn’t take, of course. Isabel was no Eva. Evita was unique and an incredible if short-lived populist firebrand.

José "El Brujo" López Rega

Isabel was utterly incompetent, and even before Perón returned from nearly eighteen years of exile in Spain to once again become the constitutional president of the Argentine Republic, she had fallen under the spell of Perón’s private secretary, José López Rega, a Rasputin-like character known as “El Brujo” (the Sorcerer), who had convinced Isabel that he could imbue her with the living spirit of Eva Perón.

Instead, he merely manipulated Isabel, who had succeeded Perón as president, and, through her, ran the country. This is a totally subjective description, however, since from  an objective viewpoint, Isabel Perón was completely incapable of governing the country, and  what López Rega “ran”, was Argentina into the ground. By the time of the coup, hyperinflation had reached seven hundred percent a year. Prices literally changed by the hour. And seeing the writing on the wall, López Rega had already fled the country eight months before the coup took place.

He would manage to live in hiding abroad for a decade, until his arrest in the United States in 1986 and his extradition to Argentina which, by then, was living under a stable democracy. He would die in prison in Argentina, awaiting trial for his many crimes.

López Rega’s shadow-government was basically a criminal association. He headed up a clandestine paramilitary organization known as the Argentine Anti-Communist alliance, or Triple-A. A retired Federal Police corporal—who would promote himself to police commissioner-general —López Rega had no tools for governing and, instead, surrounded himself (and Isabel) with people who were just as lawless, ineffective and bloodthirsty as he was. The Peronist left and mafia-style Peronist labor unions were vying with him for control of power, as the country was descending into economic and political chaos.  With, as I say, prices changing by the hour, the government of Isabel Perón was constantly signing compulsory monopoly-money-style pay hikes, decreed under Peronist union pressure by both Congress and the Casa Rosada (government house) in a futile attempt to help workers keep pace with rampant inflation. It was, in a word, utter pandemonium.

Meanwhile, it was López Rega’s Triple-A that would initiate what, under the military, would later on be known as Argentina’s Dirty War. By the time that bloodbath was over nearly a decade later, thirty thousand people in Argentina would be “missing” and/or murdered. But López Rega’s brief but ruthless chapter in this history would account for more than six hundred of those disappearances and deaths.

The only reason the last truly Peronist government tottered on for as long as it did was thanks to a political maneuver in which Senate President Italo Luder bundled Isabel off to the country in Córdoba Province “for health reasons,” took temporary control of the government and, in one of his first acts, declared a “state of siege”, a modified form of martial law in which, under the terms of Luder’s proclamation, the country’s military was given a free hand to “annihilate subversion.” It was actually a carte blanche to kill or jail everybody the far-right had ever felt like getting rid of.

There’s a problem—I mean other than the obvious one—of giving the military free rein to do as it pleases, beyond the bounds of the Constitution and the rule of law. And that is that in a situation in which an administration rules by force rather than by law, it is the military that outguns everyone else. Inevitably, then, there came a time when the Armed Forces decided to cut out the middleman (or woman, as it were) and take over government themselves. That’s precisely what happened on March 24^th, 1976.

There was word before the coup took place of unusual activity on the military bases surrounding Buenos Aires and near other major cities. Hours before the coup took place, we knew that armored vehicles were rolling toward the Capital.

Cox at the Herald, circa 1976

Funny story. Bob, as editor, had inherited a Government House correspondent who was more of a bureaucrat than a journalist. It didn’t cost much to keep him there and it saved having to send somebody to pick up daily government press releases, which were of little use anyway, except to get the “official story”. The guy’s name was Goyena. He was a descendant of Pedro Goyena, a 19^th-century legal expert, journalist and politician. 

Goyena would come in at the end of his day, say hello to everyone in the newsroom, go to Bob’s office, wish him a good evening and drop off the government handouts. Then he would bid us all goodnight and leave. He was the bearer of the official story and was otherwise clueless about and completely uninterested in what was actually going on in the country.

So, on the night of the coup, Goyena breezes in, looking dapper as always in his three-piece suit. We are all hard at work gathering information, reading cables, talking to contacts, etc. A real hive of frenzied activity as the coup approached.

Just as Goyen is reaching Bob, who is standing in the doorway of his office reading a wire service cable, I ask him to tell me what’s going on at Government House. He turns and answers, “Nothing, chief. Not even a fly is stirring.”

Bob and I both stared at him in disbelief, our mouths hanging open, wondering how a man could sit in the press room at the center of government all day and not have a clue what was going on.

Oblivious, Goyena hands Bob the press releases as usual, smiles, bids us all good night, and is gone. Bob and I just stood there looking at each other and shaking our heads. Right after that, I sent a sixty-point banner headline to the shop that read: TANKS ROLL TOWARD BUENOS AIRES.

March 24, 1976, Buenos Aires, Casa Rosada

But I mention this because Goyena’s reaction to the impending coup wasn’t all that atypical. Quite a large segment of the population was content to bury their heads in the sand, and act like nothing was wrong, that it was just business as usual, and no business of theirs. Years later, Cox would write in an editorial that perhaps the hardest job of a good journalist was attempting to tell readers things they didn’t want to hear about subjects they preferred to ignore. It was a brilliant analysis of reality under martial law in Argentina.  And I think it’s an apt analysis of what’s happening in far too large a segment of the population today in my native United States, where authoritarianism is alive and well once more.

When I left the paper well after midnight the night of the coup—I didn’t have a car yet then—there was no public transport and the streets downtown were full of Army trucks  and swarming with armed troops. I had to walk many blocks to find a renegade cab, trying my best to dodge the checkpoints that had been set up. I saw soldiers standing guard over long rows of mostly men who were face-first up against walls, legs back and spread, being patted down and their IDs checked by NCOs and platoon officers. Some of them were unceremoniously loaded up on trucks and driven away. Most of the troops armed with FAL assault rifles were conscripts—nervous, frightened young guys, barely more than boys. It was a dangerous climate, I finally caught a cab with a nervous, suspicious driver, about twenty blocks from the Herald and was able to safely reach my midtown apartment in the wee hours of the morning.  I took an immediately dim view of where this was heading.

This scene and many more from those times have been replaying vividly in my head recently as I’ve watched news footage of federal agents and paramilitary thugs acting with impunity and outside of the law in major opposition cities throughout the US. It is chilling to think that the horror I experienced and reported on in Argentina fifty years ago is today taking place in real time in a country once considered the greatest democracy on earth—my country.

The Herald’s response in the beginning was the same as that of most of the rest of the country, except for the far-left fringe. The lawlessness and bedlam of the Isabel Perón/López Rega regime had been so all-pervasive that having the patriarchal power of the Armed Forces step in and “make things right” seemed like the only quick solution.

Still, Bob Cox in his editorials, and we in the news coverage at the Herald were very careful not to praise the military. We took the attitude that the National Reorganization Process should be just that. That is should basically “take out the trash” and start over with a clean and pluralistic democratic society. We wanted to believe that it was a caretaker regime that would reestablish constitutional order. This would quickly be proven an erroneous assessment.

But I recall that, in one very early editorial—I think the first one after the military arrested members of the Peronist regime and took over—Bob talked about the former government’s having died of its own accord and that now all that was left to do was to remove the corpse. It was a powerful analogy that underscored the very real gravity of the situation.

Bob and Dan, 2026, fifty years after.

I think perhaps because of his thinking of Economy Minister and “Chicago boy” José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz (Dr. Joe in Herald lexicon) as a serious and internationally respected economist, and of his own friend and attorney Walter Klein, who seconded the minister, as an honest and decent human being, Bob was at first willing to give the regime the benefit of the doubt. He wanted to trust that their intentions were honorable.

However, it didn’t take long for Bob to realize that while the head of the Junta, General Jorge Rafael Videla, was disseminating the message that the last thing the military wanted was to rule indefinitely—that they were just there to reestablish constitutional order and make the country safe for democracy again—the new regime was, in fact, simply doubling down on the brutal tactics of the former one. And they were doing so with much greater military efficiency and non-partisan ruthlessness. The Triple A hadn’t disappeared. It had merely been absorbed, placed under “new management”, as well as being vastly expanded under the military regime.

Bob very soon started employing a tactic (almost a ruse) to keep the Herald on a tightrope above the fray. On the one hand, he praised the new regime’s economic initiatives under Minister Martínez de Hoz and Walter Klein as Economic Coordination Secretary. On the other he was sharply critical of continuing clandestine paramilitary activity including an ever-mounting tally of disappearances and murders.

I recall when he first met Videla, only shortly after the coup. I asked Bob what impression he’d had. They were already calling Videla “The Pink Panther” behind his back because of his striking resemblance to the cartoon character. Bob said he reminded him more of a rabbit with its ears laid back so you might want to pet its head. That perception was short-lived, however.

At first Videla tried to get Bob to believe that disappearances, murders and torture being reported to us were simply a big mistake. Videla’s consistent message was, “We give specific orders, but can’t always control how they are carried out.” But no one who had ever been in the military, which both Bob and I had—I in the US Army, and he in the British Navy—could be very easily convinced by that argument.

After the same horrific things not only kept happening but also increased by leaps and bounds, the next time Bob was in a meeting with the general, and Videla reiterated the lies about not being able to control the plainclothes paramilitary’s action, Bob caught the president off guard by responding that in the beginning he was willing to accept that excuse, but that since then, the government had done nothing to rein that sort of behavior in, and, on the contrary, state violence was expanding exponentially. Videla’s excuses, Bob insisted, were no longer valid or believable.

As a result, there began to be a much frostier relationship between the paper and the regime, and Bob’s editorials reflected that. This was true not just of the Army, which was the dominant force, but also of the Navy. I recall once, after Bob wrote an editorial about the increasing role of the Navy in repression, he was summoned to the office of Junta member Admiral Emilio Massera. Bob arrived promptly for the appointment in the early evening, his busiest time of day at the paper. Massera kept him cooling his heels there for more than an hour. When Bob asked the Admiral’s aide to remind Massera that he was waiting, Bob was told to be patient, that the admiral knew he was there.

Eventually, Bob made it clear that if the Admiral wasn’t going to see him soon, he would have to leave because he had work to do. After a brief consultation, the aide said the Admiral would see him now. When Bob was ushered into the enormous inner office, Massera was seated at a table with a number of other men, who seemed annoyed at the interruption. With little or no prelude, Massera turned to Bob and said, “I don’t want to appear in your newspaper anymore, Cox. I don’t want you to even mention my name.”

Bob started to protest that since Massera was one of the three most powerful men in the country, that request would be impossible to fulfil. Massera repeated, “not even a mention, Cox.” And Bob was ushered out. Of course, Bob being Bob and the Herald being the Herald, he came back to the paper and immediately wrote an editorial about Massera.

News editor Andrew Graham-Yooll announced he was leaving shortly after the coup. I have a feeling that the disappearance of his friend, novelist Haroldo Conti, was a factor. It was shortly after Conti was snatched—and subsequently murdered—that Andrew got word that he was on a list for execution. Very likely the same task list Conti had been on. He had long been receiving telephone threats and finally decided to take them seriously, packing up his family and moving to London. Andrew would later write that when he told Cox he was leaving, Bob had said, “You can’t! I need you.” But then apologized for having been insensitive to Graham-Yooll’s plight.

Andrew would continue and even intensify his campaign against the regime from Fleet Street. But he would no longer be at the Herald for the duration of the dictatorship. Bob, almost immediately after that, promoted me to a news editor post and had me overseeing both the International Desk (known at the Herald as the “the Night Desk”) and the City Desk, but brought in a Herald alumnus, Andrew McLeod, who had been living in Brazil, to actually run the Night Desk post that I’d been filling since 1974, and take the day-to-day pressure of that job off of me to free me up for local news coverage, where Andrew’s absence had left a gaping hole. It was during this period, from 1976 until Bob’s forced exile toward the end of 1979, that our friendly boss-employee status was transformed into an intensive working relationship and a clearcut friendship.

It was self-affirming that Bob was putting his trust in me. Although, in reality, he had little choice. That became clear to me when he one day said, “Since Andrew is gone, The Telegraph is looking for someone to be their Buenos Aires stringer. I thought of you.”

I accepted, and it was from that point on that I took an ever-increasing role in reporting what was happening in Argentina to the world. And every new free-lance contact I made as a  correspondent was thanks to Bob. Former Herald reporter David Hume, who was leaving Argentina after receiving credible death threats, handed his ABC Radio News string over to me, as well as The London Daily Express for which he had been free-lancing. When McGraw-Hill World News moved their Buenos Aires full-time correspondent Ernie McCrary to Río, Bob and I took over that Buenos Aires string together as well, until Bob found he didn’t have the time for it and left it to me entirely. McGraw-Hill had fifty specialized publications (including Business Week), and I found myself writing regularly for four or five of them that were interested in certain aspects of the regime.

Bob wrote for several very major international publications, and once left me on call for them while he was on vacation in Europe. That was how I ended up covering an important international story for Newsweek, when an Army task unit sought to arrest People’s Revolutionary Army chief Mario Santucho, a move that ended up in a gunbattle in which both the leader of the Army unit and Santucho died. Suddenly, without realizing how it was happening, I’d become the international free-lance correspondent I’d always dreamed of  being, and I had Bob to thank for it. That made me work all the harder to be a good writer and reporter, because I was grateful and didn’t want to let Bob down. He was, in a very real sense, my mentor. And remains so to this day.

Meanwhile, my job at the Herald was ever more demanding, and I found myself leading the same kind of fast-pace life that I’d always observed in Bob and Andrew, playing international correspondent during the day and working at the paper all night, catching a few hours of sleep whenever I could. Despite the tragedy of those dangerous times, it ended up being the most exhilarating chapter of my life, and I’ve never found anything to match it since, in terms of self-fulfillment. We were actually accomplishing something. We were writing a piece of history, day by day, on which no one else was reporting as thoroughly as we were.

Far too many others weren’t lucky enough to make it through that entire period unscathed.  At least a hundred journalists would perish. Many other journalists, academics, actors, writers, artists and intellectuals in general would go missing. And by the end of the first year of the Proceso, Videla’s interior minister, General Albano Harguindeguy, was making it clear that the Proceso was there to stay. The ballot boxes, he said, were well stored, and that’s how they would remain until the military decided it was time to get them out again.

That turned out to be nearly eight years after the coup. And the only the only thing that accelerated the regime’s demise—despite growing popular dissent—was the military’s attempt to remain in power by carrying out the military occupation of the Falkland Islands, known in Argentina as La Malvinas. There had been a diplomatic dispute between Argentina and Britain for a century and a half over those South Atlantic islands, and the Proceso reasoned that taking them over militarily would cause Argentines to rally round the flag and give the faltering regime a new lease on life. What they never counted on, oddly enough, was a British military response that would lead to a bloody and tragic ten-week war.

In other words, the Falklands/Malvinas were where the military regime went to die. In a very real sense, the tragedy of that war nevertheless led to a true celebration of democracy following some of the darkest years in Argentina’s history.

Neither dead nor alive...'disappeared'

Throughout the long, dark years of the Proceso,  foreign correspondents, prompted by Cox and the Herald, would ask Videla repeatedly, “What about the missing?” But it would be in answer to a renowned local journalist, José Ignacio “Nacho” López,  that General Videla would, in 1979, finally provide a response to that question that was as cynical as it was chilling, and as definitive as “disappearance” itself. Videla would tell López, “They are an unknown, they have no entity, they are neither alive nor dead. They are ‘disappeared’.”

 The golden anniversary we mark today should be a tribute to the thirty thousand missing and dead. It should be in remembrance of brave human rights activists who struggled and died, of intellectuals murdered because the regime felt ideas posed a threat to its existence, of third world priests, seminarians and nuns executed for the “crime” of serving the poor and destitute. And it should be a tribute as well to my friend and mentor Robert Cox for ensuring that the Herald reported in English what other local media were silencing in Spanish. And a tribute to him as well for inspiring those of us who stayed and carried on the fight for truth for the next three years after he himself was forced into exile. 

In the end, however, this fiftieth anniversary of the Proceso should be a time of reflection for Americans like me, because the similarities to what happened back then are striking within the context of what is happening in the US today, where a two-and-a-half-century democracy, once considered the greatest democracy on earth, is fast-descending into despotism and chaos.

I can truly say that I’ve seen this movie before, and I know how it ends. No day better than today to renew my commitment to telling people my experience, telling them what I have been part of, and what I have lived through, in the hope that they wake up before having to see that same nightmare through to the bitter end. 

 

YOU KNOW HOW ATROCIOUS IT’S GETTING WHEN…

 Never thought I would hear the words "Ann Coulter hit the nail on the head" come out of my mouth. But when a far-right ideologue calls out Trump for human rights violations, you know how bad the situation is getting.

From US Democratic Socialists:

Right-winger Ann Coulter nails Trump with a question that makes him squirm: Suppose Iran dispatched operatives to Mexico, where, from the Texas border, they fired a missile at an American base and, unintentionally but carelessly, demolished a nearby American school, killing 175 people.

Then, what if they then blew up fuel depots, showering a chemical rain on residents? Then struck homes, schools and clinics, as Iran's leader warned that death, fire and fury would so pulverize America that it could never be rebuilt?

In that case, President Trump and all of us would howl at outrageous attacks on innocent civilians. And we'd be right.

– Ann Coulter

Every MAGA supporter who hasn't burned their hat yet should reflect on this.

 

TRUMP’S WAR OF IMBECILITY

 

Last week, chickenhawk warlords Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth were using the word “war” every other sentence, repeating over and over their confession to launching an unlawful war on Iran.  Now Trump is referring to it as “a short excursion”.

Before the markets tanked and gas prices shot up (the only two things he had going for him in the economy), Trump was talking about an Iran war that would end only in “unconditional surrender”. It’s a term he must have heard in a movie, because it is clear he has no idea what it means. The last time the US demanded or accepted unconditional surrender was at the end of World War II, when both Germany and Japan were on their knees and had no choice but to accept the terms of surrender as written by the Allies, and then only after a devastating war that cost the world 60 million lives and unquantifiable treasure. Judging from his most recent acts, Trump seems keen on repeating that experience.

But Trump is really in no condition to be discussing any sort of surrender on Iran’s part. Even though the US and Israel can admittedly inflict devastating damage on an Iran that was still sitting at the negotiating table when it was treacherously attacked, as things stand right now, Iran has the upper hand. For one thing, for the past half century, Iran has controlled the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil is shipped. Under new management since the first US-Israeli airstrikes in this phase of hostilities killed the reigning Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, Iran's new leadership has promised an "energy war", which, between that regime’s drone and missile strikes on the energy infrastructure of neighboring US Middle East allies, and its concentrated defense of Hormuz, has the potential to bring not only the US economy, but also economies worldwide to their knees.

Furthermore, it should be remembered that the overriding trait of the Trump regime, from the president down, is supreme and arrogant ignorance. In recent days Trump has boasted that “no other president had the guts to attack Iran.” In real-world terms, the fact is that no president before Trump was stupid enough to attack Iran directly. If Trump thought attacking Iran was going to be a weekend walkover like the performative invasion he carried out as a prelude in Venezuela, he has another think coming. The same is true if he committed the crass miscalculation of thinking that the Iranian theocracy would bow down, deal with him, and hand over the oil in order to stay in power the way the Maduro regime, minus Maduro, did in Venezuela. Iran is a whole other animal.

Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world in terms of both territory and population (92 million people). It is also home to one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations, dating back to the seventh century BC. Throughout its long history, Iran has lived through every sort of invasion and revolution imaginable and has learned from every one of those experiences.

Beyond the Trump regime’s unsubstantiated claims that Iran had missiles that could reach the US, or that it was about five minutes from inventing a nuclear warhead, Trump has used regime change as an excuse for targeting that country, pretending concern for the severely repressed and harshly governed Iranian people. After the first devastating airstrike—in which one of the first US hits was on an elementary school, where nearly 170 people, mostly little girls ages seven to twelve  were slaughtered—Trump began calling on Iranians to rise up and overthrow their repressors. But in neither of his terms as president has Trump lifted a finger to help Iranians make that any sort of real possibility. And indeed, free-thinking Iranians have every incentive (though not the means) to want to break the chains of what is truly a murderous regime.

If the US—indeed, if Trump— had actually been interested in a humanitarian-based regime change, Washington would long ago have been providing intelligence, training, arms and funding to Iranian pro-democratic revolutionaries. Instead, Trump has started an impromptu war that promises to make the lives of Iranians even worse than before in every aspect, and on the sole say-so of his Middle East puppet-master, Bibi Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s goal: Middle East hegemony for Israel, even at the risk of starting a world war. Trump’s goal: Oil…and a major distraction from the persistent Epstein files, which have Trump worried about more than “just” being perceived as a pedophile. Those are the goals. And the people be damned. Indeed, the world be damned.

Heading up the post-ayatollah’s regime is Ali Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba. The 56-year-old heir to the Khamenei regime isn’t an ayatollah, which is a religious rank he has never attained. He is, instead, an enforcer—by all accounts, the man behind the murders of thousands of Iranian protestors seeking a democratic opening in recent popular uprisings, which the Trump regime has basically ignored, except as a prop to justify the president’s own ends. Khamenei is inextricably linked to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. If we compare the IRGC to something more familiar historically, this would be like Hitler's SS—or perhaps, on a lesser, more pedestrian scale, Trump's ICE in the US.  As soon as Mojtaba Khamenei was named Iran’s new leader, the IRGC pledged allegiance to him. Iran-watchers say there is a dual message behind this: It means that the IRGC is loyal to Khamenei as long as he is loyal to them. In other words, as long as their interests are the same—maintaining the regime and opposing the United States—Mojtaba commands the IRGC and, conversely, the IRGC is where all of the new leader’s power lies. As I say, they are inextricably linked.

There is a theory among analysts that, had the US simply waited out the 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei until he died of natural causes, there might well have been a greater chance for a semi-democratic opening in Iran, with political moderates demanding greater autonomy after the ayatollah’s 36-year reign. Clearly, that was nothing that concerned Trump. With his foolhardy “excursion” into an illegal and illegitimate war of aggression, we’ll never know, because a huge wave of nationalist fervor has now coalesced in the face of foreign attack, and by submersing the country in war, Trump has not only not weakened the regime, but has strengthened it.

Now on a war footing, the all-powerful IRGC is bound to tighten its grip, and the ayatollah’s son, motivated by Islamist radicalism, raw nationalism, and now, a thirst for vengeance, will take a hardline stance both in terms of war strategy and on any eventual negotiations. In other words, Iran will very likely be unwilling to negotiate, unless it can do it from a position of strength and getting major concessions.

Trump stupidly and ill-advisedly thought that he could bend Iran’s will with an air-war and no boots on the ground. He didn’t even listen to the warnings of his sycophantic chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, when he reportedly tried to admonish the president that going to war with Iran was a losing proposition. Trump obtusely thought it was a military decision and that he was qualified to make it. It wasn’t and he wasn’t. It was always “about the economy, stupid.” And in the process, Trump has painted a terrorist target on the backs of every American living anywhere in the world, including the United States.

Perhaps that is why, after all the “unconditional surrender” bluster, Trump is now saying, “We’ve already won!” He is clearly realizing, at least at the back of his mind—despite his pernicious narcissism’s preventing him from admitting it—that he has made a terrible mistake, one that, at the very least, could cost him the midterms, and at worst, could get him impeached (again), while sweeping the US and the rest of the world into a global conflict. In Trumpspeak, “We’ve already won,” means, “I need an off-ramp quick.”

In watered-down assessments, on-the-fence politicians and Big Media commentators alike are choosing to use the euphemistic term “war of choice” to describe American military action taking place in Iran on the sole say-so of one man: de facto US dictator Donald J. Trump. Let’s be clear. It is not a “war of choice”. It is a war of aggression. Every bit as much so as Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but unjustifiable to an even greater degree, since Iran is not a neighbor of the US, nor was it seeking to join an alliance against the US. It was, then, not at all within the fast-fading US superpower’s immediate sphere of influence. Or in other words, though these lawless acts by both Putin and Trump are equally illegitimate, even as rank imperialism goes, Trump’s un-consulted, unauthorized and unhinged war of imperialistic aggression on Iran is even a greater stretch than Putin’s illegal war of aggression on Ukraine.

Although (or perhaps because) the Trump regime is a lawless centralized government that refuses to obey the law on principle—be it constitutional, federal, state or international law—it is still worthwhile noting what international norms dictate regarding wars of aggression, since these rules are the gold standard for international peace and justice set following World War II. And the fact is that international law unequivocally prohibits wars of aggression, deeming them the "supreme international crime."

More specifically, such wars contravene the UN Charter and are classified as a violation of international peace, as well as a crime against humanity. Under international law, those crimes trigger individual criminal responsibility and State accountability. That is to say, American critics accusing Trump of starting “a private war” (and I include myself here) are missing an important point. Namely, that if a despot like Trump starts wars of aggression, it’s not enough for Congress to shrug and say, “This is Trump’s war. He didn’t ask us, so he owns it.” Under international law, if the other branches of government permit Trump, by omission, to pursue wars of aggression, the US as a whole becomes accountable, and therefore subject to any international consequences that may occur. That is to say, everyone participating in this illegal war on Trump’s say-so is responding to unlawful orders.

Growing numbers of traditional European allies are warning the US that they are taking an entirely defensive stance with regard to the war. Some have made it clear that they will not allow the US to launch new attacks from their territories, even when there are American bases on their soil, while others are indicating that they will defend their own assets in the Middle East, but will not allow themselves to be dragged into a war that they weren’t even consulted about, and that is illegal from the get-go.

While European governments have so far shown their shock and displeasure, they have, nevertheless, tiptoed around the unhinged US authoritarian leader as best they can, while holding emergency meetings to talk more about a coordinated response to the new reality that caught them on their back foot, and left them scrambling. It is obviously not business as usual for our Western allies. Who among them would ever have thought that they would one day have to be having the kind of discussions about the US that they used to only apply to the Soviets and then to Putin? But in the Era of Trump, everything is, as the saying goes, ass over teakettle.

US allies in the Middle East, meanwhile, have been much more outspoken in their criticism. Countries in the Persian Gulf region that have shown restraint in their relations with Iran up to now, have become targets of Iranian attack through no fault of their own. They are angered by the fact that the US-Israeli joint attacks on Iran have made them targets by mere association. And they are complaining to Washington that they weren’t even warned in advance so that they could prepare for the veritable deluge of surprise drone and missile strikes being rained down on their territories without permitting them to mount an adequate response.

Gulf-state officials say that the US has also focused entirely on defending US and Israeli troops while leaving the sitting-duck neighboring countries to fend for themselves. At least one Gulf-state official said that in his country, the stock of interceptors is “rapidly depleting.” Gulf officials are stonewalling when questioned by the international media, but reports point to surprise and anger in government circles in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which all feel betrayed by the Trump regime. Bottom of Form

While official reactions by the Gulf nations have been less than forthcoming, some public figures have made clear their view that Trump has allowed Israeli Premier Bibi Netanyahu to buffalo him into a needless Middle East war. The country most upset by this would appear to be Saudi Arabia, which is also one of the most anti-Israel nations in the region.

Saudi Prince and former intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal told CNN last week, “This is Netanyahu's war. He somehow convinced the president (Trump) to support his views.”

As such, in the world view, the US has become a rogue state that is unpredictable for allies and enemies alike. And both are hedging their bets. 

Perhaps that will be the epitaph for the Era of Trump when its history is written. The time when America went from being the leading nation in worldwide stability and security, to being a loose cannon bent on worldwide chaos and destruction.