THE STATE OF THE UNION BOYCOTT

 

When Donald Trump stands before Congress this evening to deliver his so-called State of the Union Address, it will be with some notable absences in the official audience. And it will also be with the haunting presence (unless the regime finds a way to bar them) of some of the survivors of the Epstein Affair, to which Trump’s name has been so intimately linked—some of the same survivors on whom his administration has literally turned its back and victimized even further.

The boycott includes no few high-profile Democrats, and is a reflection of not merely their frustration, but also of the ever deepening divide between MAGA World authoritarianism, and the erstwhile system of American democracy that has been severely undermined in the five years of the Era of Trump, and particularly in this past year of utter lawlessness under the regime. What it also implies is that the opposition is feeling the power to be gained from Trump’s faltering popularity—especially among independents suffering from buyer’s remorse. According to multiple polls, Trump’s approval is pretty much circumscribed to his most blindly loyal MAGA base. And the gap is widening as his behavior turns daily ever more insane.

This is important, because senators and representatives all too often forget that their power is not their own, but is derived from the people. And in the grueling events of this past year, if democracy has begun to claw back some of the power usurped by the Trump regime and his hijacked GOP, it has been reclaimed, not by senators and representatives, but by the people of the United States, through their grassroots action, their incredible courage, their ultimate sacrifices, and their resounding rejection of the Trump crime organization’s authoritarian designs.

The protest promises to hurt Trump in what he considers the worst way: by taking the focus off of him and what will certainly be, as usual, one of his lengthy, wild rants, which, by now, have become a tiresome, insulting noise to anyone but his cheerleaders, enablers and sycophants, and putting it on his opponents.

Among key lawmakers refusing to attend the speech are senators Adam Schiff, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Chris Murphy, Tina Smith and Chris Van Hollen. House members who will give it a pass are Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, Becca Balint of Vermont, Greg Casar and Veronica Escobar of Texas,  Pramila Jayapal of Washington State, Delia Ramirez of Illinois and Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey. All of these members of Congress are taking part in the boycott on general principles and in support of America’s ailing democracy.

Other lawmakers have also said that they will boycott Trump’s speech in support of specific causes. Maryland Representative Kweisi Mfume is protesting Trump’s record on both of the main issues he ran on—the economy and immigration enforcement.  Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley says she is boycotting the State of the Union to draw attention to the trauma affecting children abused by Trump’s violent immigration enforcement policy. And Maine Representative Chellie Pingree confirmed that she will be joining other Democrats at an anti-authoritarian rally instead of sitting through Donald Trump’s State of the Union rant.

Parallel to lawmakers’ individual protests, the MeidasTouch Network—a pro-democracy independent journalism medium that just surpassed six million followers and 9 billion views—is joining ranks with the MoveOn Civic Action group to organize a parallel event billed as the People’s State of the Union. The event is expected to be hosted by media personalities Joy Reid and Katie Phang. Many of the lawmakers skipping Trump’s event will be taking part as speakers in the People’s State of the Union, headed up by Senator Schiff. Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee has said that her boycott is specifically linked to this event.

 Another parallel event is being called the “State of the Swamp”.  It is organized by DEFIANCE.org, the Portland Frog Brigade, and COURIER. Lawmakers taking part in that event will include Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and representatives Jason Crow of Colorado, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Dan Goldman of New York, Eric Swalwell of California and Eugene Vidman of Virginia.

This is being described as a “live rebuttal” of the Trump State of the Union Address, and speakers are also expected to feature civic leaders, journalists, and cultural figures, including Robert De Niro, Mark Ruffalo, Stacey Abrams, Jim Acosta, and Miles Taylor.

Other Democrats have said that they will boycott the State of the Union Address but without joining specific protests. These include Illinois Representatives Sean Casten and Eric Sorensen. Sorensen said, “While I will watch the State of the Union elsewhere, I will not attend in person.” He made his reason for not attending clear: “My respect for the office of the President of the United States cannot abide the disrespect that Donald Trump shows to that office every day.”

The corporate mainstream media has given the idea of the boycott mixed reviews. Fox Trump State Media, of course,  is defending attendance and playing protests as a “disruption” of what passes in their world for “democracy.”  CNN, which is now owned by Warner Brothers and to an ever greater extent expresses the stances of that firm’s shareholders rather than those of the professional journalists and commentators who work for the network, is tending toward a wishy-washy “let’s play nice” take. If there is one thing I have learned in half a century of journalism, it is that when objectivity is taken to mean impartiality rather than fact-based reporting, the essence of news as a vehicle of awakening people to reality is lost.  And CNN has increasingly lost its way as an honest news medium.

In general, some mainstream commentators and political pundits have criticized the boycott as inappropriate or counterproductive, arguing that lawmakers should attend and challenge Trump from within. Clearly, however, with the Trump-hijacked GOP heading up both chambers of Congress, challenging Trump from within frequently turns out to be a fool’s errand. And then there is the question of how you define “within”. The Trump authoritarianism problem is no exclusive to Congress. It is a threat to the American people as a whole. And more and more, we are seeing that people are waking up and taking action without waiting for Congress to decide to do something about it.

While some traditional media like The New York Times have limited themselves to describing the climate leading to the boycott, in which there is deep-seated polarization and plummeting popularity ratings for the performance of the Trump government, The Washington Post—which is being kept on a tight leash by owner Jeff Bezos, who now tells the editorial board what it can and can’t print and who just fired 300 journalists—stuck to analyzing polling information and pointing out that low approval and anti-authoritarian public sentiment are driving the protest context. USA Today indicates that heightened political stakes and protest strategies are surrounding the Trump speech boycott. 

Fox, as I said earlier, is framing this as must-do engagement, as opposed to a boycott strategy. They seem to be trying to make the point that members of Congress have a duty to attend. This coincides what many Republicans—both politicians and at a grassroots level—who are insisting on saying that, even if people oppose Donald Trump, they have “a patriotic duty” to “respect the office” of the president.

Okay, I’m game. Let’s talk about that. Let me just start by saying that when Donald Trump starts respecting the office of the president and all that it is supposed to stand for, so will I. But I don’t figure I should hold my breath. In Trump’s five years in office, and especially over the course of this past nightmare year, he has not once behaved in a way worthy of a president. He has defied the courts, trashed the rule of law, repeatedly violated the Bill of Rights, used the Justice Department to make good on his own personal vendettas, released hundreds and hundreds of felons into society while sending out his thugs to abduct people who have formed a useful part of society, sought to take away the right to birth-right citizenship, had his attorney general cover up a criminal pedophile ring, threatened and sued senators, representatives, journalists, political opponents, members of the judiciary, comedians, and just about anyone else you can think of, and has gotten away with running for and winning the presidency with the backing of a scant third of registered voters,  despite being a convicted 34-count felon, while vastly increasing his own wealth and that of family and friends.

Donald Trump has disrespected not only his office, but also the two other co-equal branches of government. He has wiped his feet on the Constitution and the law, violently infringed on states’ rights, trucked with dictators and shunned our closest democratic allies, committed unjustified acts of war completely bypassing Congress, and has lied repeatedly, consistently, yes, even constantly to the courts, to Congress and, above all, to the American people. He has basically turned the US government—as the New York Daily News so aptly put it— into, “the most powerful crime syndicate in history.”

So tell me again, why on earth I should “respect the office of the president” as long as it is being usurped by a vile authoritarian and the head of what is clearly a criminal organization, in that it acts consistently beyond the limits of the law, and under the assumption that the rules simply do not apply to him. A would-be despot with a raging Napoleon complex. A narcissist with well-documented psychopathic tendencies. As long as Donald Trump is president, the office of the president has, in my book, ceased to exist as such and has been replaced with something very much akin to what ensued in Germany when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor at the end of January 1933, and, by February 27, had swiftly dismantled the country’s democracy, burned the Reichstag (legislature), and used the fire as an excuse to declare a state of emergency and to push through a so-called Enabling Act that, as of March 1933, permitted him and his cabinet to dictate laws without parliamentary intervention.

Trump needed no fire in the Capitol—although he held his violent insurrection there of January 6, 2021, after legitimately losing the 2020 election. All he needed was a complicit and acquiescent majority in both houses of Congress that, up to now, has let him get away with every sort of lawlessness imaginable—let him, in fact, get away with murder.

Supporters of the boycott frame it as what it is: a principled stand against what we see as the normalization of rhetoric and behavior that we find not only misleading but also pernicious for the Republic and devastating for democracy. 

Many of those who are now suddenly taking the “they-go-low-we-go-high” attitude toward tonight’s State of the Union Address are, oddly enough, some of the same ones who have accused Democrats and Independents of sitting on their hands and letting Trump and the hijacked GOP carry the United States to hell in a handbasket. They are some of the very ones who have accused the opposition of inaction in the face of tyranny.

It is hypocritical, then, to now shake one’s head, cluck one’s tongue and claim that opposition politicians’ taking part in unprecedented grassroots activism—there have never before been parallel (shadow) events like the ones scheduled for tonight’s State of the Union—is somehow improper.

It appears to me that what is improper—and dangerous—is to continue to labor under the delusion that the Era of Trump is anything like “business as usual” or that it is “just another sunny day” in US democracy.  It is not. And we can’t continue to be passive spectators in the clear and present dismantling of two and a half centuries of American freedom, democracy and justice. This is where patriots are separated from hangers-on. It is where the rubber meets the road. This is where Americans—be they politicians or common everyday citizens and residents—must choose to be part of the solution or part of the problem. This is where we must choose to hold leaders accountable, or become the victims of their despotism. And if we choose freedom and democracy, then we must be willing, from each of our own little corners, to shine a light on the dark designs of a tyrannical regime and to oppose its war on democracy with every tool at our disposal.

Democracy can survive, but only if we are willing to get behind it and oppose its enemies. Democracy dies in darkness and making ourselves beacons in any way we can is the only way to uphold it. That is why this boycott—led, I am proud to say, by independent journalists and democratic activists—is so important. That is why it is so vital in unmasking the truth and drawing attention to abnormality. It is why this protest, and other events like it being organized around the country, are a matter of life and death for the Nation as we once knew it.

 

EPSTEIN – THE WHOLE ENCHILADA

 

As the tip of the Epstein iceberg is gradually being revealed, something appears to become clearer and clearer. The Epstein files aren’t a distraction. They aren’t just a thorn in the side of Donald Trump. They aren’t even “just” a horrific chronicle of the suffering of the hundreds of victims of the worst sex-trafficker in memory. They are, rather, the core evidence of perhaps the deepest-reaching conspiracy and the worst elite network of corruption and perversion in history. An international conspiracy with direct ties to some of the most powerful and corrupt men on earth.

The Epstein files aren’t an isolated debility in the Trump regime. They are looking more and more like the key to everything in an international network of power, money and corruption, in which the currency that binds its members is the stolen innocence of children, and in which, it seems, just about everyone gets dirty in order to “keep each other honest” and loyal to the cult.

What we are witnessing is the slow-motion revelation of an international clandestine organization, the secret lodge of the rich and powerful, an underground society that reflects, perhaps more than any other, the hegemony of the One Percent elite. Considering that the name of the current president of the United States—himself one of the billionaire oligarchs—is mentioned directly or indirectly some 38,000 times in some 5,300 of the Epstein Files released to date—only perhaps half of the total—is it any wonder that key figures involved in carrying out the investigation have been purged by Donald Trump’s DOJ (headed up by the same defense team that was with him fending off the multiple federal felony indictments against him until he quashed (but didn’t disprove) them by managing to rise to office again, despite being a 34-count convicted felon? Or does it come as a surprise that many other DOJ legal professionals have resigned in protest due to regime interference in their probes?

It is not surprising either that only the most naïve of observers actually believe that Epstein committed suicide. Independent public opinion polls underscore just how few people believe the suicide story. One such poll published by Yahoo News showed that only 16% of those polled bought suicide as Epstein’s cause of death. The same poll showed that 39% were unsure what to believe, but 45% firmly believed the convicted sex-offender was murdered to keep him from talking.

It is interesting to note that despite ample evidence that Epstein was a serial rapist, child-sex predator and trafficker, and perhaps the most elite and prolific pimp in history, he was never convicted (due to his untimely death) on federal charges surrounding these crimes—charges on which he was indicted during Trump’s first term, when there was still some semblance of a working DOJ. He was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York awaiting trial at the time of his mysterious demise, which happened on August 10, 2019, again, during Donald Trump’s first term as president, a little more than a month after Epstein’s arrest and indictment.

It is hard not to speculate, since Epstein’s sex-trafficking enterprise was very apparently based on catering to the perversions of very wealthy men, that he would have been unwilling to take his secrets to the grave if he wasn’t promised a mere slap on the wrist for the federal rap, the way he had been when he was convicted on ridiculously reduced plea-bargained state charges—procuring a minor for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute —in Florida in 2008, while he was already reported to be the head of a vast sexual slavery network. After all, his entire sex empire—in which as many as 1200 girls and young women were duped, exploited, raped and enslaved—orbited around what was basically a protection racket, in which Epstein’s currency was the minors he trafficked, and his silence was his collateral. His supposed suicide is, then, a hard sell.

And the speculation grows when naked light is shined on the hard facts surrounding his death. Despite the claim that he was under 24-hour surveillance while in custody at the MCC—a high-security pre-trial detention center run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons—at the time of his supposed suicide, two cameras that should have been surveilling his cell failed to operate. This meant that the suicide story was only witness-corroborated by the two guards who were reported to have found him “hanging off the side of his bed” at 6:30am. They claimed to have performed CPR and then arranged for Epstein to be taken to a hospital where he was declared deceased. The violations of what were reported to be strict normal security procedures have greatly reduced the suicide story’s ability to pass the smell test.

And Jeffrey Epstein’s death has not been the only one that the case surrounds.

Virginia Giuffre - They called it suicide.

Perhaps the second most prominent one was the death last year of Virginia Guiffre. She was a key witness in the cases against Epstein and his enabler, Ghislaine Maxwell.  But Virginia was so much more, as founder of a highly active victim advocacy group known as SOAR (Speak Out, Act, Reclaim).

A long-time victim of child sexual abuse who, by age 14 had long fallen into the hands of her first trafficker, Virginia eventually ended up at 17 working at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago “spa”. She got that job through her father, a Mar-a-Lago employee, whom she later accused of sexually molesting her from age seven. It was there that she was poached by Ghislaine Maxwell as a personal masseuse for Jeffrey Epstein. She said that, at the time, she had confided to Maxwell and Epstein about her troubled young life to date and that it had been “the worst thing” she could do, because it allowed them to play on her vulnerabilities. From that point on she described her life as consisting of “being passed around like a plate of fruit.”

An underage Virginia with then-Prince Andrew
and trafficker/enabler Ghislaine Maxwell

A key accuser of both Epstein and Britain’s former Prince Andrew, to whom (among others) she was trafficked as a minor, Viginia was found dead at her home in Australia last year at age 41, in the midst of the Trump regime’s desperate attempts to cover up the Epstein files, and renewed international probes into their content. The death was ruled suicide, but suspicion continues to swirl around that ruling.

Three years before Epstein’s own death, Wendy Leigh, a biographer who was researching Epstein for a book, was found dead beneath the balcony of her home in London. A year later, in 2017, Leigh Skye Patrick, a woman identified as a former Epstein sex slave, was found dead of a drug overdose. Carolyn Adriano, another woman who identified herself as having been trafficked by Epstein in her youth, died the same way in 2023.  

Thomas Bowers

In 2019, the same year of Epstein’s death, Thomas Bowers, a former Deutsche Bank executive who managed Epstein's accounts, was found hanged in his California home. It is worthwhile recalling that there is reason to believe that Epstein was a powerful financier who, besides trafficking young girls to the rich and powerful, was also an apparent power broker in the world of high finance. It is also worth remembering that, for more than two decades, Deutsche Bank was the primary lender to Donald Trump’s organization, providing Trump with more than two billion dollars in loans despite his history of bankruptcies and red flags. Thomas Bowers was one of the officers who signed off on those loans. It wasn’t until after the January Sixth Insurrection that Trump fostered in 2021, that the bank cut all future public ties with the Trump organization, even though it was still holding more than 300 million dollars in outstanding loans with the then-former president.

In 2020, a year after Epstein’s death, Steve Bing, a film producer and investor with ties to Epstein, died after allegedly jumping from his apartment building.

Just three years after Epstein himself died in custody, one of his former associates met a similar end. Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent and suspected Epstein recruiter, was found dead in his cell in France, where he was awaiting trial on charges of rape and sex-trafficking. The cause of death, like that of Epstein, was “hanging”.

Mark Middleton

That same year (2022), Mark Middleton, a known Epstein associate and an advisor to former US President Bill Clinton, was found in Arkansas, not just hanged, but also shot. Oddly enough, that death was also ruled a suicide.

Even Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, at the time expressed suspicion regarding the Epstein suicide story. But he would later walk these suspicions back, saying that he guessed the child sex-traffic kingpin’s death was merely “a perfect storm of screw-ups.” That said, however, the guards handling Epstein’s surveillance at the time of his death were later quietly charged with multiple federal counts of falsifying records. Meanwhile, amid accusations of negligence and Senate calls for prison reform, Barr also fired the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Epstein’s death led to dismissal of all trafficking-related charges against him. Focus was placed instead on the lower-profile figure of Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite and daughter of publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell. Ghislaine was convicted on five sex-trafficking counts and sentenced to prison for 20 years.

Maxwell has been smart enough to keep her mouth shut—it’s obviously healthier that way—while moving from a high security to a country club prison, and kowtowing to Trump for a possible presidential pardon. She is now saying the quiet part out loud, namely that she’ll testify that Trump is innocent of any involvement, either as a client (john) or partner in crime in Epstein’s trafficking of underage girls if he agrees to pardon her.  This is obviously transactional and raises a lot of obvious questions about Trump’s possible involvement with the sex-ring.

Ghislaine Maxwell with Trump

That kind of transactional proposal wouldn’t even be up for consideration under a normal, law-abiding administration, but under the Trump regime, anything is possible, as witnessed by the 1500 convicted felons he pardoned for their part in the January Sixth Insurrection of 2021, or the pardons he issued to his cronies in the effort to defraud American voters in the 2020 election.

Conservative writer and syndicated columnist George Will has provided, in my opinion, the best description so far of Donald Trump and his cabinet. He calls it, “a sickening moral slum of an administration.” We were “treated” once again this week to yet another disgusting performance by one of the two most immoral and unethical Trump sycophants in the government. I’m talking about Pamela Bondi, the person loosely known as the attorney general of the United States, but who, for the past year, has continued along with her assistant attorney general Todd Blanche, to head up the Trump criminal defense team, the same job they were doing before Trump invited them to become key figures in the criminal association that passes for the US administration.

Will: A sickening moral slum

I make no apology for calling this regime a criminal association. From its very beginning in January of 2025, the president and his cohorts have not even maintained the pretense of lawfulness that they did—with different, somewhat more ethical players—during his first term. This time around, Trump and his henchmen (and women) have blatantly and grossly violated the Constitution and broken federal law again, and again, and again. Both domestic and foreign policy under Trump 2.0 are based on an apparent standing order to simply break the law “and let them sue.” And this criminal organization has been able to make this method work, up to now, because the corrupt Republican Party leadership has allowed itself to be infiltrated and usurped, turning a blind eye and deaf ears toward the worse violations of the rule of law, and of the Bill of Rights, in the history of the Republic.

Normally, this sort of criminal behavior, even if espoused by the ruling party, would have been halted in its tracks by an unbiased Supreme Court. But in the Era of Trump, that once august pantheon of American law, has also been infected with Trump’s authoritarian designs. It now seems clear that this was Trump’s strategy—and his stroke of luck—when three seats out of nine on the Court came up for renewal on his watch during his first term, and he and his party made sure that the candidates chosen and approved were representatives of the radical far right, thus narrowing to just three the liberal democratic members of that body. This played perfectly into his autocratic strategy for a second no-holds-barred regime he hoped to establish in 2020—when American voters were wise enough to hand him a resounding defeat—and which he managed to procure in 2024—when American voters were not.

Analysts of all stripes warned that a second Trump term (in which he would have nothing to lose) would be disastrous for American democracy and the rule of law. We weren’t wrong. And the devastating results are on full display.

So this week, the so-called “attorney general” Pamela Bondi, (I used the term advisedly because her job description is to “enforce laws related to consumer protection, civil rights, and criminal justice”—or in other words, to be the officer in charge of ensuring the rule of law, none of which she is doing), was called before the House Judiciary Committee to testify on her purposely botched handling of the Epstein Files, which she was bound by law to turn over in full and unredacted to Congress more than 50 days ago. A law that she has blithely defied.

Faux Attorney General Pamela Bondi

But typical of the Trump regime and of Bondi’s sycophantic conduct up to now, instead of answering opposition politicians’ questions fully and professionally, she went off on a defensive tangent and staged a grotesquely obsequious vindication of her boss, and of her own involvement in what is clearly shaping up as a massive cover-up. Her entire appearance before the committee was performative, and the performance was aimed at an audience of one.

The ranking member of the committee—whose chairman is another unapologetic Trump sycophant, Republican Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio—Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, was witheringly honest in his opening remarks, saying that Bondi was “running a massive Epstein cover-up right out of the Department of Justice.”

Raskin pointed to Bondi’s failure to release millions of files that she is legally obliged to disclose under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump signed into law in November after reversing his opposition to the bill, apparently due to his plummeting ratings in opinion polls, where even his own MAGA base is demanding transparency and justice.

Rep. Jamie Raskin

The lawmaker also slammed the DOJ for redacting the names of alleged Epstein co-conspirators and enablers, while failing to black out information and even underage images specifically identifying Epstein’s victims. Summarizing Bondi’s intent, Raskin said, “So you ignored the law, and even with over 100,000 employees at your disposal, you acted with some mixture of staggering incompetence, cold indifference and jaded cruelty towards more than a thousand victims, raped, abused and trafficked. This performance screams cover-up.”

Bondi’s lack of decorum would have been astounding had she not been mimicking her own boss’s way of talking to people. Failing all known protocol, she addressed the ranking member simply as “Raskin” and said that he was “a washed-up loser lawyer…not even a lawyer.” It was a phrase right out of the Trump lexicon.

She also clashed with New York Democrat Jerry Nadler and with Washington Democrat Pramila Jayapal.

Rep. Jerry Nadler

It was in her clash with Nadler that she revealed the callous nature of her Trump-defensive stance. Nadler said he only had one question for her: “How many of Epstein’s co-conspirators have you indicted? How many perpetrators are you even investigating?”

Bondi wagged an admonishing finger like a mother correcting a child, and sputtered, “First, you showed a…I find it…”

And Nadler repeated his simple question: “How many have you indicted?”

Bondi snapped, “I…excuse me! I’m going to answer the question!”

To which Nadler replied, “Answer my question.”

A defiant Bondi said, “No! I’m going to answer the question the way I want to answer the question. Your theatrics are ridiculous.”

“No,” said Nadler, “You’re going to answer the question the way I asked it.”

A flustered Bondi appealed to fellow sycophant and committee chairman Jim Jordan for help, but Nadler repeated the question again: “How many have you indicted?”

Then she launched into a windy diatribe (and complete non sequitur), first about how “transparent” Donald Trump was, and then about how nobody had asked Merrick Garland about Epstein, and finally waded into a totally unrelated and unsolicited stock market report: “This administration released over 3 million pages of documents, over 3 million,” she said—conveniently obviating the other estimated millions of documents she is still hiding in violation of the law. “And Donald Trump signed that law to release all of those documents.” (Which Bondi didn’t do). “He is the most transparent president in the nation’s history. And none of them — none of them — asked Merrick Garland over the last four years one word about Jeffrey Epstein. How ironic is that? You know why? Because Donald Trump…the Dow…the Dow right now is over…the Dow is over 50,000…” This sudden change of subject caused opposition committee members to laugh. “I don’t know why you’re laughing,” she snapped. “You’re a great stock trader, as I hear, Raskin. The Dow is over 50,000 right now, the S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.”

I think the significance of this pronouncement may have been lost on many people. But what she was basically saying was, if business is booming, who cares what happened with a thousand-plus Epstein victims? Who cares how tight Trump’s ties were to Epstein? Who cares that Trump called Epstein “a great guy” who shared his taste for women “on the younger side”? Who cares that many of the gazillionaires named along with Trump in the Epstein files are some of the ones most benefiting from a bullish stock market? Who cares, as long as the oligarchy is getting richer and richer? Who cares about some little nobodies who have it tough in their teen years?

Lummis thought:
Who cares? What's the big deal?

This generalized GOP attitude was reflected by another woman this past week, namely Wyoming Republican representative Cynthia Lummis. As the tireless efforts of California Democrat Ro Khanna and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie began to bear fruit, and started revealing the horrors of the files Bondi has been obstructing, Lummis stated in an interview with reporter Pablo Manríquez, “I’ve not been one of the members who has glommed on to this as an issue. I’ve sort of intentionally deferred to others to find out about it. But nine-year-old victims …Wow!”

Lummis admitted that “initially, my reaction to all this was, ‘I don’t care. I don’t know what the big deal is.’ But now I see what the big deal is, and it was worth investigating. And the members of Congress that have been pushing this were not wrong. So that’s really my only reaction.”

While it seems like way too little, way too late—she seems to have been fine with it when it was about girls 14 to 18 being raped and trafficked—at least she appears to have had something of an awakening, which is more than can be said for the vast majority of GOP politicians who still “don’t care and don’t know what the big deal is.” And so, we find ourselves wandering into that “sickening moral slum” George Will talks about, in which at least half the politicians in the country are apparently fine with the sexual slavery and trafficking of minors as long as it is carried out and consumed by their colleagues, friends and donors.

Bondi also bristled when Pramila Jayapal asked the Epstein victims present for the proceedings to stand and asked them to raise their hands if they had still never been able to talk to anyone at the DOJ. All of the women raised their hands.

Rep. Pramila Jayaypal

Jayapal then said, “Attorney General Bondi, you apologized to the survivors in your opening statement for what they went through at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein. Will you turn to them now and apologize for what your Department of Justice has put them through with the un…absolutely unacceptable release of the Epstein files and their information?”

Again Bondi sought to deflect: “Congresswoman, you sat before… Merrick Garland sat in this chair twice….”

“Attorney General Bondi…” Jayapal interrupted her.

And when Bondi persisted, Jayapal reclaimed her time. Jim Jordan tried to rescue Bondi saying that she should be able to answer the question as she wished, but Jayapal said no, that it was her time and she was waiting for an answer to her specific question on which Bondi was deflecting. Even as Jordan was telling Jayapal her time was up, she continued, accusing Bondi of an enormous cover-up and again appealing to her to, at least, on a “human level”, turn to the victims and apologize for what the DOJ has done to them on her watch.

Bondi continued to evade all questions, clashing with others including New York Democrat Daniel Goldman and Texas Democrat Gene Wu, at one point saying that those who impeached Trump twice and failed to get a Senate conviction should be apologizing instead of criticizing Trump. “You sit here and you attack the president,” she said, “and I am not going to have it. I’m not going to put up with it.” It was an odd, almost sad thing for her to say since it made her ridiculous, as if she thought she somehow had authority over the committee, when she was the one who had been called in to explain her disastrous performance as attorney general.

Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie

That was when Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie broke in and  lashed out at Bondi saying that the redaction issues she was being questioned about were a  “massive failure” on her part. He focused particularly on the blacking out of the name of Les Wexner, the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret, reminding her that Wexner was “a co-conspirator named in an FBI document.”

Wexner - alleged co-conspirator's name redacted

Bondi said that redaction was corrected “within 40 minutes.” Massie shot back, “(within) 40 minutes of me catching you red-handed.”

“Red-handed,” Bondi scoffed before accusing Massie of having “Trump derangement syndrome.”

In the coming days, I will be writing a lot more on the far-reaching influences of Jeffrey Epstein and his incredibly diverse empire, the core of which consisted of having something dark and ugly on a vast array of powerful men.

But for now, this is my conclusion regarding the role of Pamela Bondi. As attorney general of the United States, Bondi is in possession of the power to be an independent guarantor of the rule of law. But in a way, she is as controlled by the Epstein crime empire as any of Epstein’s other enslaved victims, because she has chosen to do Donald Trump’s bidding, and to let him subordinate her to his secret life. Trump, then, has “trafficked” Bondi to Epstein and his billionaire johns, making her the chief protector of men who, in many cases, have committed horrendous sex crimes, for which she would normally have the power to prosecute and put them away for the rest of their lives.

Instead, she has left the attorney general’s post vacant and has abandoned her duty to the American people, in order to protect the “dirty little secrets” of some of the most powerful men on earth, becoming their shill, and, instead of ensuring that justice is done, has sought to ensure that it will not. As such, there is only one big difference between Bondi and Ghislaine Maxwell. Both are enablers, both the keepers of terrible secrets, both the willing victimizers of hundreds upon hundreds of minor girls, both willingly doing the bidding of powerful men and, as women and as human beings, treacherously seeking to lead their victims to believe that they have their best interests in mind, while leading them to victimization.

But the big difference that I just mentioned is that Ghislaine, monster that she is, acted within the criminal organization of a very powerful man. Bondi’s crime is much worse, since she has made use of the awesome power of the Executive to not only protect the guilty, but also to convert the erstwhile autonomous department in charge of guaranteeing Americans’ rights and demanding that justice be served into a criminal enterprise whose aim is to do just the opposite, and has done so of her own volition, and in the name of her handler, Donald J. Trump.   

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!