THE MCCONNELL REBELLION - THE LAST STRAW?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS

 

For several days now there has been a justified controversy over Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s public appearance speaking from a podium with the slogan “one of ours, all of yours” emblazoned on it. Most people with any knowledge of history at all know, somewhere at the back of their minds, that the phrase is somehow linked to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, but most are not sure how.

MAGA Republicans have tried to give it a positive spin, of course, employing a broad range of fatuous arguments that completely ignore the nefarious nature of the slogan. Some have said, for instance, that any comparison of the slogan to Nazism is ludicrous, that it’s just a phrase about “solidarity”. Others have even claimed that it’s fake news, that the sign was AI and never really existed. All such claims are, clearly, nonsense, and an insult to our intelligence. We saw the inscription on the podium in pictures from all major news sources, and serious photographic repositories like Getty Images and Alamy also have pictures in their files of Noem speaking from the lectern with the slogan emblazoned on it.

It is quite probable that Kristi Noem actually had no knowledge of the origin of the phrase. She probably just liked the ruthless, Wild West sound of it, since she has repeatedly indicated that if anybody lays a finger on one of her ICE agents, all bets are off—never mind the rule of law. With this, I’m not trying to excuse Noem or the slogan. On the contrary, what I’m saying is that she is so monumentally ignorant in just about every field—except perhaps, how to stay on Trump’s right (far-right) side, and how to execute a puppy—that I am pretty certain she was clueless about this as well.

Remember, this is the same Secretary Kristi Noem who, when, while giving congressional testimony, she was asked by Senator Maggie Hassan if she could explain what habeas corpus was, had no idea what the senator was talking about. Now remember, we’re referring to the head of Homeland Security who should know—as knowledge crucial to her job description—at least the basic elements of the rule of  law as it relates to human and civil rights. Nevertheless, her jaw-dropping response was that habeas corpus was, “A constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their rights.”

That stunningly imbecilic answer—which obviously baffled and infuriated Senator Hassan—was not merely wrong. It was pretty much diametrically contrary to the meaning of habeas corpus, which is, in fact, a fundamental legal protection requiring the government to show a valid reason for holding someone in detention. Its purpose is, indeed, to protect against arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention, and is one of the legal guarantees that separate free societies from police states. And even in the military police state under which I lived in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, habeas corpus was still a legal lever that worked, and one we, as journalists, employed in seeking to find people who had “disappeared”.

But then, a police state is precisely what Secretary Noem is seeking to impose in the name of Donald Trump. So, hey, why bother learning what habeas corpus means?  Actually, why bother learning what any law means.

In point of fact, there hasn’t been a federal law passed in the history of the United States that Donald Trump won’t pardon violators for, as long as they are his minions and/or cronies—i.e., Roger Stone, yes, Michael Cohen, no; it all depends on how willing you are to suck up…and cover up.

Some fact-checkers (Snopes for one) have claimed there’s no credible evidence that the controversial slogan originated with the Nazis—although, come on, there’s not much room for interpretation of what it means, whether it originated with the SS or Al Capone. And suffice it to say that clarification is provided, in Noem’s case, for instance, by virtue of the fact that she and Team Trump defense attorney (also loosely referred to as the “Attorney General”) Pamela Bondi have twisted arms and held careers for ransom to ensure that fatal ICE victim Renee Good and her widow Becca are being investigated, instead of the rogue ICE agent, Jonathon Ross, who summarily executed her.

But there is a complicity in this sort of “fact-checking”, because while it may be true that “one of ours, all of yours” might not be, verbatim, a Nazi slogan, there was at least one Nazi motto (that bespoke a generalized SS and Gestapo policy), which fits this one to a tee.  The phrase I’m speaking of is  Jednoho nacistu – všichni Češi! Which translates from Czech as "For one Nazi – all Czechs!"

Here's the story behind the motto.

Heydrich (right) with  Himmler

After occupying the former Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Nazi government of Germany under Adolf Hitler set up what was called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, with headquarters in the Czech capital of Prague. It was a prized conquered possession for Hitler and he placed one of his right-hand men, Reinhard Heydrich, in charge. Heydrich was already the head of Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), and, as such, one of the main architects of the Holocaust. In his new dual role, he also became Reichsprotektor for that Nazi “protectorate”.

Heydrich was appointed after both Hitler and his chief lieutenant, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler agreed that their original choice, Konstantin von Neurath, was too soft on Czechs who promoted anti-German sentiment—you know, like the governor of Minnesota and mayor of Minneapolis whom the Trump regime is accusing of being too soft on citizens who promote anti-Trump and anti-ICE sentiment. And, just like that, they wanted somebody—rather like Noem now that I think about it—who would head up a real crackdown without flinching.

Heydrich was the “right” choice. The stated mission he was sent to Prague to carry out was the strengthening and enforcement of central government policies –much like Noem and ICE in their occupation of Democratic states and cities.

Heydrich was so certain of the effectiveness of his ruthless tactics that he allowed his driver to transport him from place to place in an open-roofed car. He saw it as a show of his confidence in the Nazi occupation forces and in his own effectiveness as regional strongman.  And, indeed, his reputation for brutality in establishing the omnipotence of the Führer earned him several chilling monikers—the Butcher of Prague, the Hangman, and the Blond Beast.

The Czech Resistance eventually decided enough was enough, and, in a major coup, codenamed Operation Anthropoid, after several months of careful planning, used Heydrich’s own arrogance against him, by throwing an anti-tank grenade at his open car. This was a Plan B move, since the Czech Resistance agent’s British-made Sten machine-gun jammed and Heydrich drew down on the Czech gunman with his Lugar service pistol. Although the grenade the agent threw failed to land inside the car, Heydrich was still severely injured by shrapnel, and succumbed a few days later to his wounds.

Hedyrich's car after the grenade attack

This was when Hitler breathed death into his sinister one-of-ours-all-of-yours policy in Czechoslovakia. In retaliation for the slaying of Heydrich, the Nazis arrested and interrogated some 13,000 Czechs, later executing 5,000. Many of these summary execution victims were civilians—men women and children—slaughtered in the atrocity known as the Lidice Massacre. The Nazis razed to the ground both the village of Lidice—wrongly signaled as participating in the plot to kill Heydrich—and the village of Ležáky (where the Nazis found a Resistance radio transmitter). Large numbers of innocent citizens from both places were among those executed.

Reminiscence of Nazism in the Trump regime isn’t some conspiracy theory invented by the government’s opponents. No, it is originating within the regime itself, starting with Trump and his rally cries about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” or his white-supremacy-centric calls for what he considers a “better class” of alien. Like when he asked rhetorically, “"Why can't we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let's have a few from Denmark.”

The white supremacy thread is not fake news. It runs through and through the fabric of this administration whose leader refers to the places black and brown people come from as “shithole countries”, and to their people as “vermin” and “garbage”. This regime has all but said out loud, If you’re not white, you’re not American, and even then, it’s open to ICE and DHS interpretation.

And right out in front of the Trump regime’s white nationalist parade, beating the drum for “purification”, is Kristi Noem and her lawless ICE paramilitary. Those of us who, from the outset, signaled the similarities between Trump and Hitler didn’t get it wrong. Reluctant Democrat Senator John Fetterman did when he said people had to stop comparing the two, because Hitler was the worst dictator in history and Trump wasn’t even close, nor was he a dictator.

Hitler wasn’t always a dictator either. He, like Trump, was just a would-be dictator first. But then, he did all of the same things that Trump is doing, from sidelining the legislature and intimidating justice to eventually declaring himself and the Reich the one and only supreme authority in Germany. (Trump recently said he “didn’t need international law”, because he was guided solely by his own “morality”). Hitler consolidated his power by creating a paramilitary loyal only to him, by imprisoning his opponents, and by invading other nations and turning them into vassal states. He also did it by creating concentration camps for peoples he considered “undesirable” to the Aryan race. And he did it too by ignoring the law and the consequences of his acts.

Does any of this sound familiar? Hitler’s regime was in power for 12 years. Trump’s is just getting started. Give it time...or not.

 

 

A STARK MEMORY OF THE PRESENT AND FUTURE

 

We said it  “could never happen in America." Our fathers and grandfathers fought and died in two world wars to make sure it never did.  Other tens of millions died in the name of peace, freedom and democracy.

But here we are, suffering from acute memory loss and a profound ignorance of history.

So it's a new day, my friends...but it’s the same old fascism.

And history repeats itself, because we stubbornly and obtusely refuse to learn from it.

REGIME REPRESSION

 

RENEE NICOLE GOOD – SAY HER NAME

 

In the same city and less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered five years ago by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin—sparking nationwide protests and giving rise to the Black Lives Matter movement—Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot to death at pointblank range last Wednesday by ICE agent Jonathon Ross, in another incident clearly born of abuse of police power.

While Chauvin ended up going to prison for second-degree murder—and remains there—it seems unlikely anything at all will happen to Ross. Not, at least, as long as Donald Trump is in power. MAGA spin is already casting Ross as a victim, immune from prosecution, and under federal protection.

While the Trump administration has, typically, circled its wagons and sought—through heinously fabricated off-the-cuff statements by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Vice-President JD Vance and the president’s own unsubstantiated tweets—to cast Ross as a victim and Good as a dangerous “domestic terrorist”, nothing could be further from the truth. And if the Trump regime were not so all-powerful (thanks to the moral decay and obsequious prioritizing of raw power over constitutionality that the Republican Party is engaged in) its patently false claims would be ludicrous. But, under the circumstances, they are not. They are, instead, abusive, outrageous, tragic and an insult to the intelligence of the great majority of Americans. Only Trump-or-die MAGA minions could be obtuse enough to support and repeat such lies, which it’s hard to presume that, in their heart of hearts, they could actually believe.

Terminology is a funny thing. Certain words and phrases can have completely distinct meanings for different people. As the old saying goes, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” But in Democratically-run cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, Charlotte, Minneapolis and elsewhere across the US, over the course of the past year, it is not at all hard to tell who is being terrorized and who is doing the terrorizing.

The Trump regime has been using US taxpayer dollars—using Americans’ own money against them, in other words—to send veritable invasion forces of ICE agents, Border Guards and National Guard troops into opposition-party cities to create the illusion of chaos in those places, and, clearly, to provoke an angry reaction from local governments and outraged citizens. To some of us, that seems a lot more like domestic terrorism than the peaceful protests that such aggressive and uncalled-for federal action has provoked.

Becca Good, Renee’s wife, has described Renee as “made of sunshine.”

“She literally sparkled,” Becca said. “I mean, she didn’t wear glitter, but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time.”

She said that Renee lived her life by authentic, deeply Christian values, not the least of which was her belief that every person, regardless of “where they came from or what they looked like,” deserved compassion and kindness. “Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole,” Becca said.

The Goods were new in town, but it was Renee’s Christian values that prompted her and Becca to stop for a few minutes on the way back from dropping off Renee’s six-year-old at school, and lending their support to fellow-residents protesting ICE’s presence in their neighborhood. Many of those peaceful protesters were people who had dropped their children off at the nearby elementary school and were upset that ICE had been deployed near their children’s school, since ICE has been known to make arrests at schools, churches and other normally off-limits locations for routine law enforcement actions.

“We had whistles,” Becca Good would say later. “They had guns.”

We only have video evidence of what happened from the time Renee’s car ended up crossed on the bias in the road in front of a spot where an ICE vehicle was stuck in the snow and agents had set up a sort of spontaneous roadblock.  In the video, Renee’s car is not blocking the road. She apparently signaled several vehicles to go around her and they had no problem doing so.

ICE agents reportedly first instructed her to leave. She appears in the video to be trying to do just that, backing up slowly to give her room to turn around. But then she is suddenly blocked in by another ICE vehicle, a Nissan pickup, carrying more agents. She signals it to go around as well, but instead, two agents in tactical gear descend from the truck.

It was then that masked agents moved to surround Renee’s SUV. One of them tried to yank open her door and said, “Get out of the car. Get out of the fucking car.” He didn’t tell her, as any even minimally trained police officer would have, to put the vehicle in park, turn off the engine and take the key out of the ignition. Had he done so, there may well have been a very different outcome.

It is today practically impossible not to have seen video footage of ICE agents who have occupied, unsolicited, numerous cities around the country, abusively smashing car windows, jerking people, without probable cause, from their vehicles onto the pavement, beating them up among several agents, pinning them to the ground and spiriting them away, un-Mirandized, to undisclosed locations. It is not hard to imagine, then, that anyone hearing the command to “get out of the fucking car” from a masked man with no identification might well panic.

I speculated at the time, after repeatedly seeing the videos of Renee’s death, that this had been the case. Indeed, Renee’s mother, Donna Ganger, told The Minnesota Star Tribune that the unsubstantiated description by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem of Renee as “a domestic terrorist” was “so stupid.” Ganger said that her daughter was “one of the kindest people I've ever known,” adding that, “she was probably terrified.”  

There was no altercation. There was indeed a discussion between one of the officers and Becca, who was obviously irritated that they were being bullied.

Becca Good, is standing on the street using her phone to film the interaction. She tells the ICE agent: “That's okay, we don't change our plates every morning just so you know. It will be the same plate when you come talk to us later.”

Apparently seeing anger in the agent she’s talking to, Becca adds: “You want to come at us? You want to come at us? I say go and get yourself some lunch, big boy.”

Renee’s own last words were,  “That's fine dude. I'm not mad at you.”

These women being cast as terrorists by the Trump regime—which, if the rule of law meant anything at all to them, wouldn’t even be commenting until a full and thorough investigation has been carried out (good luck with that!) appear to be anything but. They are a respectable same-sex couple with an aging dog in the back of their SUV, and they are coming back from dropping the driver’s six-year-old at elementary school.

Are they upset about the ICE paramilitary invading the streets of their newly adopted city and harassing anybody they wish, without due process or warrants? It seems so. But they have every reason to be upset and to peacefully protest, along with thousands of other Minneapolis neighbors. This is their home to which the federal government has sent a veritable invasion force, of masked, unidentified agents, given free rein to ignore basic human and civil rights.

It seems obvious to speculate that, seeing things escalating, and as a mother of three responsible for her family, Renee made a decision to go around the roadblock and flee the scene—or in other words, to flee from the imminent danger that was now perceptible as a masked agent ordered her to “get out of the fucking car.” In one of the video, you can see that she is turning her wheels to the right, in order to go around Ross and leave.

In the all of videos, including Ross’s own bodycam (which, given this Justice Department’s record for evidence-handling, we can’t be sure wasn’t doctored), it is clear that the shooter was never directly in front of the vehicle. He is standing to one side, and as Renee tries to leave—again, because that was what she was originally ordered to do—he appears to step into the side of the SUV, and to place his non-gun hand on the fender, before firing once, probably through the windshield, and then as the car passes him, firing twice more through the front side window, as if to make sure that he has killed the driver.

Three shots, all apparently aimed at Renee’s face. And then he can be heard to say, “Fucking bitch.” In what world is a trained, veteran agent and former soldier firing three pointblank shots into the face of an unarmed woman who is already passing him by consider “self-defense”? Especially when he punctuates the coup degras shot with the words, “fucking bitch.”

Let’s talk about Jonathon Ross’s experience, for a moment. This wasn’t one of the rookie MAGA recruits that the DHS has recently been scrounging up to flesh out the ranks of its rogue paramilitary. This was a guy with real, long-term experience in both military and police forces.

Ross was deployed to Iraq from 2004 to 2005, as a member of the  Indiana National Guard. He served as a machine-gunner on a gun truck, forming part of a combat patrol team. After he returned from Iraq in 2005, he went to college, two years later joining the Border Patrol near El Paso, Texas. He worked there from 2007 until 2015, serving as a field intelligence agent, whose job it was to gather and analyze information on drug cartels and on narcotics and human trafficking. He joined ICE as a deportation officer in 2015. In other words, this was no case of a rookie agent overreacting out of nerves and fear, and killing someone by mistake. This was a veteran agent and soldier employing deadly force to intentionally kill a citizen who had given him no reason to believe that she was an imminent threat to him or his fellow officers.

Much has been made of the fact that Ross was severely injured in another fairly recent vehicle stop in which he reached into a suspect’s car window as the suspect fled, and ended up being dragged for more than a block. His apologists are seeking to claim that he was suffering from PTSD as a result of that other incident. But if that was the case, why wasn’t he on modified assignment and being treated, instead of being back out on the street where he could be a danger to himself and others?

It should be noted that Ross walked away from the scene of Renee Good’s homicide unscathed, and that his fellow ICE agents refused to let a doctor on the scene who offered his help see the shooting victim. They said they had their own people and that they would be waiting for their medics.

Support for Renee Good’s survivors has been overwhelming. Neighbors started a Go Fund Me account to try and help her family defray the cost of her funeral and other out-of-pocket expenses arising from the tragedy. The goal was fifty thousand dollars. At last count, the donations came to 1.4 million. 

Kash Patel’s FBI claims to be carrying out a deadly force investigation of the incident. But with the president, DHS secretary and vice-president already having “tried” the case publicly and declared Ross innocent and immune, the FBI probe will, in all likelihood, be a scam. Meanwhile, the Trump regime has also declared this a federal case and has blocked the Minnesota authorities from investigating under state charges.

Renee was no stranger to sacrifice. Her father, Tim Ganger, told the Washington Post that, “She had a good life, but a hard life”. Despite that fact, she had managed to get a degree in English, pursuing her dream of being a writer. She was, indeed, an award-winning poet, and a hobby musician.

Renee’s mother summed up best what the people who knew her seem to agree on. According to Donna Ganger, “Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being.”

 

REMEMBRANCE

 

REGIME ENFORCERS

 

TRUMP ERA 3.0 – FULL PRE-WORLD WAR RETROGRADE

 

Just when you think Donald J. Trump can’t swing any further to the right of Genghis Kahn, he does. It is as if emulating his most-admired-dictator, Vladimir Putin, and bringing the US as close in character to czarist Russia as he can while he’s in power—it no longer makes sense to say “in office”—were a point of national pride with him.

And also just when you think, okay, this has to be the breaking point, the last straw, before even his own party moves to stop him, you find that it isn’t. Because Donald Trump’s is no longer the “Grand Old Party”, but rather, a new and completely different animal, a party feeding on the insanity of its chief, a party that has become unapologetically authoritarian and accommodating to its leader (or perhaps we should capitalize it, Leader, as in Führer ).

Meanwhile, the leadership of the opposition party continues to make the mistake of thinking it is involved in a boxing match under Marquis of Queensbury Rules. Like it or not, this is a barfight, where you are either punching it out down on the floor in the blood, the puke, the snot and the beer, or you are the loser. This is a brand new world, in which you may draw scattered cheers for “going high when they go low” but in which the choice to play it that way means that you will, ultimately, get your ass handed to you.

In short, the United States, a country with what was once one of the most stable and admirable systems of government on earth, has become a third-world-style, tin-pot dictatorship, which is now considered a rogue nation by most of the rest of the free world, and one that is no longer respected for its leadership, but merely feared for its military might, and for the unhinged madman who wields it.    

Donald J Trump is someone who, as president of the United States, has no concept of the consequences of his actions on either the domestic or world stage. There are several reasons for this beyond the complete lack of third-party talent or interest in restraining him that I just mentioned above:

First, he doesn’t care what the consequences are. He is oblivious to anything but how big of a splash what he does makes in the news cycle, and how much more power he is perceived to have because of it. He truly believes that, good news or bad, it doesn’t matter as long as they’re talking about you. He is a psychopath, in whose mind neither morality nor consequences exist.

Second, Trump is the most gobsmackingly ignorant man ever to sit in the Oval Office. He has repeatedly shown zero knowledge of even the most basic American, let alone world history. For example, in a July 4^th, 2019, speech commemorating the 1776 American Revolution,  he careened recklessly off-script referring to the Continental Army under the command of General George Washington in the following anachronistic terms. “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do.” (What a disappointment for those two Wright boys from Dayton, who could have sworn they were the ones who invented the airplane 127 years later). This was such a blatantly inconceivable gaffe that it left even his most loyal followers scratching their heads. He has also consistently confused World War I with World War II and vice versa.  He simply can’t keep them straight in his head and easily confuses who was on whose side in which war. (It’s hard, I image, to take any interest at all in who fought whom, since for him, they were all “suckers and losers”, the fools the men with the real power use as cannon fodder, while going all out for the spoils of war).

Third, most presidents have, not only professional, experienced cabinets—unlike Trump’s which is made up of some of his billionaire oligarch cronies and all of his favorite millionaire Fox News TV anchors—plus a broad cadre of top independent experts in every field imaginable, foreign and domestic, to judiciously advise them on every major policy decision they make (and still they frequently get it wrong). Trump doesn’t figure he needs a good cabinet—or any eggheaded academic experts. Or rather, to his mind, a good cabinet is one that will, quite literally, sing his praises, never contradict him, tell him he’s a genius, and say, “Wow, why didn’t I think of that, sir?” no matter how outrageous, harebrained or demented the president’s latest idea may be. In short, he doesn’t need “knowledgeable people”, because, like every other good malignant narcissist, he knows everything.  In his mind, there is nothing he can learn from anyone. Because he is all-knowing, all-seeing, all-comprehending. He is, in a word, God!   Or, as “the most powerful man on earth,” as close to being God as any mortal can get. So why ask an inferior anything before implementing that latest big idea you had while eating those last three Big Macs, guzzling Diet Coke and watching Fox and Friends?

In short, Donald Trump is a madman, who has been placed in charge of a nation with more fire-power and might than any other country on earth. And his insanity appears to be contagious, with the most “vulnerable” segment of the population being all ranking members of the Republican Party. A symptom of the contagion seems to be mass hypnosis, leading to zombie-like behavior in which the Republican Party appears to have become brain-dead and willing (or willed) to be a walking-dead army that surrounds and protects the zombie emperor no matter how deep into madness he ventures.

It was disastrous enough when the nation suffering the worst effects of this devastating sickness was the very same nation that was imprudent enough to re-elect Trump, despite having witnessed his raving insanity during a previous term—a term in which he was already pushing the limits of constitutionality and of the law, and a term that he ended by trying to overthrow one of the longest-standing democracies on earth. But now the zombie emperor is venturing out into the world at large to wreak havoc. And still, it appears no one is willing (or capable, in the case of the minority party) to stop him before he creates a worldwide catastrophe (not at all unlike another madman did in the lead-up to World War II).  

Nicolás Maduro

Someone has given Trump a term for his new adventure—the un-consulted, preemptive takeover of another sovereign nation, not to free it of its dictator and to re-establish democracy, but (and he is actually bragging about this) to steal its natural resources. His advisors have (erroneously) told him that it is the Monroe Doctrine—which, of course, he has re-dubbed, the Donroe Doctrine. What it is, in fact, is a retro bastardization of the Monroe Doctrine, disastrously imposed by certain administrations in both the pre-and-post war eras, as an excuse to intervene in the internal affairs of other sovereign countries in the Americas. But for the last 40 years, the US had seen the error of its ways, and sought to win hearts and minds rather than dominating neighboring nations by force. Something that, pre-World War II, was done as openly as Trump is doing it today. But which, up to the post-war 1980s, was done through spy versus spy subterfuge and by supporting far-right dictatorial regimes.

Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, and on the list goes of nations in which the US intervened in other sovereign nations’ internal affairs, not to establish the basis for democracy in those countries but simply—as Franklin Roosevelt is alleged to have said regarding Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, that the SOB in charge was “our sonuvabitch.” The most active time for these interventions was the 1960s and early 1970s, when the US directly or indirectly laid its heavy hand on the scale in other American nations every 13 months on average.

I will write more about US interventionism later, but in nearly all cases, the results of these interventions served only to sow chaos. But it is interesting to note that, in nearly every case, US intelligence (the CIA) assured Washington that, as stated in the 1968 National Intelligence Estimate, “In no case do insurgencies pose a serious short run threat…revolution seems unlikely in most Latin American countries within the next few years.” And in a great many of those cases, we now know the CIA got it dead wrong.

Back then it was done with at least the pretense of political ends, with the idea “promoting democracy”, and of ridding the world of communism—when, of course, the real goal could always be discovered by “following the money”. But in Trump’s “New Age” brand of imperialism, not even a pretense is being bothered with. The excuse is drugs, but the goal is US exploitation of other nations’ natural resources. The excuse is so lame and the goal so open—Trump can’t quit talking about how the US is going to go in and take Venezuela’s oil—that we might as well call a spade a spade. On the whim of a single madman, and with the backing of the most political industry on earth, the US has gone retro and re-embraced its “ugly American” profile—an era that led to chaos, war and violence throughout the Americas and to US actions consistently blowing up in our  face.

In one fell swoop Donald Trump has just unilaterally erased those four decades of progress in the self-determination of nations by seizing an entire country and openly declaring himself and his corporate friends the owners of its resources. And still his GOP zombie army closes ranks around him and cheers, with no regard whatsoever for the extremely long-tailed consequences of this reckless adventure. And they cheer despite the fact that they have just been trodden on and stripped of every shred of authority or dignity that they ever had as legislators. But then, what are they going to do. They are, after all, the walking dead.

This is Trump 3.0. Trump on steroids (and, apparently, fistfuls of aspirin). Trump gone completely off the rails. This is Trump being a mean kid with a magnifying glass. It’s Trump bullying everybody else in the sandbox (but not the big kids over there on the monkey bars).

Let’s talk about Nicolás Maduro. Maduro is a reprehensible authoritarian who has a great deal in common with America’s own reprehensible authoritarian. Until last weekend, he had been in power as president in Venezuela since 2013. Prior to that, he had been vice-president to Hugo Chávez, a military officer and politician who was amply elected by Venezuelans for three consecutive terms, but who, with that mandate, ran the country with an iron hand, repressing his opposition, censoring the press and developing an intelligence apparatus whose goal was to track and repress democratic development.

Assuming the presidency on Chávez’s death from cancer, Maduro ruled Venezuela by decree as of 2015, through special powers granted to him by his ruling party legislature. (Sound familiar)? He eventually stripped the legislature and Supreme Court of their power. This sparked a wave of protests, on  which Maduro unleashed a cruel crackdown.  

Since that time Maduro has headed an authoritarian regime characterized by election fraud, corruption, censorship, human rights abuse and such severe economic hardship that more than eight million Venezuelans have fled the country, taking refuge in other nations throughout the region and worldwide. Human Rights Watch estimates that the Maduro regime has carried out, not hundreds, but thousands of extrajudicial executions to cow his opposition into submission, while imprisonment without trial and institutionalized torture have been common practice.

In the country’s most recent elections, despite Maduro’s fraudulent machinations, the opposition, headed up by conservative politician María Corina Machado won 67% of the vote. But Maduro claimed fraud and remained in office as de facto leader. (Too bad about his leftist rhetoric because this is a dictator after Trump’s own heart).

María Corina Machado

This stunning win came despite the fact that Maduro jailed Machado until the elections were over. Her hand-picked surrogate was Edmundo González, who, despite being a pinch-hitter, pulled off a major election victory.

Trump’s intervention story could have been much more “heroic” had he at least tried to look more democratic, citing Maduro’s election fraud as yet another of his crimes, and, on overthrowing him, ensuring that Machado-González, the people’s choice, were immediately sworn in. My heart bleeds for the cheering Venezuelans who danced in the street both at home and abroad on learning that Maduro had been taken out by the US, only to hear their new dictator, Donald J. Trump, say that Machado was “a very nice lady” but not the right person for the job.

Edmundo González

Instead, Donald Trump has slapped Venezuelans in the face by chopping off the head of the Maduro government, but leaving his regime in power. It’s that Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice-president and oil minister, has shown a willingness to give Trump whatever he wants (read: oil) in exchange for remaining in power.  Democracy is messy. Trump disdains it at home, so why should he have to put up with it in a country that he has just conquered? Better to hang onto a regime that answers to no one and is willing to play ball. And democracy be damned.

Delcy Rodríguez - Trump's choice

A random thought that occurs to me is that if Maduro had not been the same sort of loudmouthed megalomaniac as the US president is, this never would have happened. Had he smooched Trump’s behind until his lips were chapped the way President Javier Milei did in Argentina, giving Trump anything and everything he wanted, he could have stayed on indefinitely as dictator, since, again, Trump doesn’t care what SOB is in charge, as long as it’s his SOB.

Meanwhile, Russia and China have just—incredibly—gained the moral high ground and are ra
iling against US imperialism in the UN Security Council. For Xi and Putin, the Venezuela invasion was an incredible year-end gift. They not only get to put on their white hats and play good guys to Trump’s villain, but they’ve looked on as the US has stripped itself of the moral capital to say a single word against Putin’s continued advances on Ukraine and the rest of Europe, or Xi’s plans to grab Taiwan and to keep setting up bases strategic to world domination on invented islands in the South China Sea.

Thanks to the fuse lit by Trump last weekend, the zone of peace that the Americas have been for the past forty years just evaporated, as Trump continues his saber-rattling in other Latin American nations and as those countries start to gird for battle in defense of their sovereignty. Back home in the USA, we citizens are merely spectators to this international drama, just as we are to the abuse of our civil rights and those of our neighbors on our own turf. It is a nightmare in which we watch our supposed representatives either bend to the will of the Executive, or wring their hands in the hope that they will win the next elections…if they ever take place.