TRUMP V SLAUGHTER – A CRUCIAL SCOTUS DECISION THAT HANDS THE TRUMP REGIME THE KEY TO DICTATORIAL POWER

 

My thanks to Martin "Mick" Andersen for sharng this illustration

Anyone who still cares, even a little, about how the Trump Era is undermining democracy and turning the US into an authoritarian regime, with the aid and comfort of the six so-called “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court, need only read the brilliant dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in the case of Trump v Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, with which her liberal democratic colleagues, Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson both concurred.

In summary, this is the issue, which is now  a legal precedent, thanks to the six far-right justices and their apparent Project 2025 agenda: The Court’s majority decision in Trump v Slaughter has effectively handed Donald Trump the blueprint for authoritarian rule by dismantling any and all independent oversight over the Executive Branch, thus enabling the transformation of any office of the federal government into a patronage system based on personal loyalty to the supreme leader, rather than on constitutional duty and service to the people of the United States.

Hitler himself could not have come up with a better surrender of the judiciary to the whims of the Führer than Trump v Slaughter. And indeed, history tells us (if anybody bothers to read it, nowadays) that Hitler was unable to establish complete dictatorial control over power in Germany until he managed to compromise the judiciary. He did this by systematically dismantling the independence of Justice, and turning it into a vindictive tool of the Nazi state. This was achieved through a combination of purges, institutional restructuring, and ideological subversion, often carried out in the guise of legality. Sound familiar?

Trump is having an easier time of it, because in nearly every major decision that reverberates in increased Executive power, this Supreme Court has had Trump’s back. It began with a decision  that made him immune to prosecution even if he commits indictable crimes in office. This was the same sort of lenient appeasement that permitted him to run for president again in 2024, despite having been found guilty by a jury of his peers of thirty-four felonies, as well as having been indicted on numerous federal charges, which were forcibly dropped when he won a second term.

A 'friend' of the Court

In the specific case of Trump v Slaughter, what the majority of the Court (ahistorically and undemocratically) posits is that, as president, Trump has the executive authority to fire without cause anyone and everyone that he feels like firing in the federal bureaucracy. This includes what until now have been independent agencies that were not subject to political influence. In particular, it includes Justice Department employees, federal regulators, and inspectors general and their offices, whose job descriptions as such have always, logically, included independence from all political considerations. That is because one of the main specific jobs of these State bureaus is to keep administrations honest by holding them to standards that have historically foiled corruption and despotism.

In her scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed the Court’s decision for making President Donald Trump even more powerful than a king. “No Kings” has never had greater significance, since the Supreme Court decision on Trump v Slaughter is a slap in the face to the great majority of Americans who have been seeking to remind the nation through massive public demonstrations that the Founders’ main premise for rebellion was rejection of absolute monarchies and the abuses they encompassed. One of the main founding principles of the Republic was, then, the definitive rejection of kings and the embracing of representative democracy with three co-equal branches of government.

Instead, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has scrapped Humphrey’s Executor v United States—a precedent that empowered Congress to limit a president’s ability to fire officials at independent federal agencies—and has allowed Trump to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.

According to Sotomayor and her two liberal colleagues, “The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President…In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

Sotomayor warned that the Court’s majority decision has just made Trump even more powerful than the despotic English monarch against whom the US colonies revolted, since, back then, the British Parliament “often restricted the Crown’s ability to remove even high-level royal officers.”

Sotomayor argued that there was simply no way that the decision in Trump v Slaughter could be considered constitutional. So true was this, she wrote, that the country’s founding Framers had clearly “never intended to give the President the complete set of powers that the English Crown held, let alone more.”

In effect, this hijacked Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Rebecca Kelly Slaughter will surely be remembered historically not as a simple technical dispute over a president’s power to remove a specific federal employee, but rather, as the most consequential transfer of constitutional authority to the Executive in American history. By overturning nearly a century of precedent established in Humphrey's Executor v. United States, the Court’s conservative majority dramatically expanded presidential authority over independent federal agencies—institutions specifically designed by Congress, ironically enough, to restrain executive overreach.

In authoring the liberal democratic dissent, Justice Sotomayor fully recognized the gravity of what had occurred. Her warning was not procedural or technical. It was constitutional and structural.

Her central argument can be summarized simply: The Court has now given the president (this president and thus all presidents in the future) power over institutions deliberately designed to remain independent from the Oval Office.

Capturing the full force of the danger to which this situation exposes American democracy, she wrote: “The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before. It is a power, however, that neither the People, nor Congress, nor the Constitution bestowed upon him.”

These are some of the grave and direct consequences of the Court’s ill-advised but intentional decision on Trump v Slaughter:

1. The Court’s decision, in one fell swoop, gutted independent oversight of the Executive. The modern American administrative state was deliberately constructed so that certain institutions would remain insulated from direct presidential control. Not anymore. These bodies included bureaus like the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the  Federal Election Commission. The Court has now declared that the President can remove officials in many of these agencies at will. That means the agencies designed to check presidential misconduct now answer to the President himself. Those independent offices are now at the mercy of Trump’s cronyism and dishonest dealings, since anyone not toeing the Trump line will be gone. In simple, understandable terms, the referee is now subordinate to the player.

2. The Court’s decision in Trump v Slaughter has, overnight, undone Constitutional rule and institutionalized a “Loyalty State”. In her dissent, Sotomayor repeatedly emphasizes that independent agencies have existed until now precisely because certain government functions should not depend on partisan loyalty.

She writes: “For most of this Nation’s history, Congress and the President together have decided that some Government functions should operate at a distance from partisan politics.” The far-right majority of the hijacked Trump Supreme Court has unilaterally reversed that principle. And the practical implications are enormous. A president no longer needs competent administrators. He can simply surround himself with loyalists and sycophants. In other words, the Supreme Court, which is supposed to uphold American traditions and democratic institutions is, instead, adopting Trump’s cronyism and disregard for checks and balances as the new model for presidential empowerment.

This opens the door to systematic purging of career officials who demonstrate independence, and their replacement with individuals whose primary qualification is obedience to the head of state. This is not theoretical. It mirrors the logic of systems historically associated with authoritarian governance, including a patronage State, a one-party bureaucracy, and a personalized executive regime.

In short, the State bureaucracy ceases to serve in accordance with the Constitution and serves, instead, at the pleasure of the ruler.

3. The Court’s decision has also reversed traditional checks and balances. And that is institutionally grave. The entire US constitutional system was designed around one foundational assumption: namely, that power must check power.

Under this effective system, Congress creates institutions, the courts interpret the law, and independent agencies enforce statutory mandates insulated from political interference.

But this ruling kicks over the table on all of this, fundamentally altering the playing rules so that the game is fixed in favor of a single player. In more technical terms, the SCOTUS ruling embraces an extreme version of the so-called “unitary executive theory.” In other words, from now on, Congress can create all of the formerly independent institutions it wants, but, in the end, the Executive has been handed the authoritarian power to dominate them completely. This signifies a direct transfer by the Supreme Court of institutional sovereignty from Congress to the Executive.

In her dissent, Sotomayor warns that the Court has “distort[ed] the structure of Government to fit the majority’s theory of unitary, total executive control.”  And that phrase, “total executive control” is constitutionally devastating. Because once independent institutions are no longer independent, separation of powers implodes and all power is handed to one office.

4. In short, the Supreme Court decision creates fertile conditions for the establishment of de facto dictatorial power. History demonstrates that dictatorships do not usually begin with abolishing elections. They begin, instead, when leaders eliminate independent institutions capable of constraining them. This ruling creates precisely that possibility. A president can now systematically and summarily remove officials who investigate corruption, enforce campaign finance laws, regulate his or her corporate cronies, protect labor rights, prosecute regulatory violations, or resist compliance with unlawful executive orders.

The end result is that this MAGA Supreme Court, through this one ruling, has returned the country to the bad old days of boss rule and “machine politics”. Perhaps the best and most applicable example of this was the Tammany Hall machine run by William “Boss” Tweed in the second half of the nineteenth century in New York. This is the era of rampant corruption and violence so well depicted in Martin Scorsese’s now classic 2002 film Gangs of New York. Under "Boss" Tweed in the 1860s and 1870s, his Democratic Party doled out citizenship, municipal jobs, food, and housing to newly arrived, mostly Irish and Italian immigrants in exchange for unquestioned electoral loyalty. This structure funded massive graft, such as inflating the costs of the new New York County Courthouse by millions of dollars. It was graft so iconic that the building would be commonly known as “the Tweed Courthouse.”

William "Boss" Tweed

The Court has, then, now institutionalized the tools for the recreation of corrupt boss rule, since, thanks to Trump v Slaughter, it is, since that partisan ruling, the president, ironically, who controls the tools that were designed to restrain presidential abuse.

In classic political science terms, this is the very defining characteristic of authoritarian government: Not a formal dictatorship as such, but the intentional re-tooling of the rules, and of the law, so as to foster a functional dictatorship.

5. As devastatingly major as this ruling is, it is actually a complement to the Court’s earlier expansion of presidential immunity, which had basically given Trump impunity to do whatever he wanted and to go unchecked for as long as he and or his regime is in power. Trump v Slaughter, then, cannot be viewed in isolation. It must, rather, be viewed as part of a far-right Court agenda aimed at removing any and all guardrails against dictatorial presidential power.

In the earlier Trump v United States, the same Court granted presidents sweeping criminal immunity for official acts. Famously writing, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” Justice Sotomayor warned with unequivocal clarity, “The President is now a king above the law.”

But with Trump v. Slaughter, the Court has doubled down. The 2024 ruling shielded the President from indictment or punishment. The 2026 ruling gives the President power to neutralize institutions that might expose his wrongdoing in the first place.

Together these rulings have established a very dangerous Executive formula:

Immunity from consequences.
Control over investigators.
And, control over the bureaucracy through enforceable vows of loyalty, not to the Constitution, but to the authoritarian ruler.

That combination is the veritable architecture for unchecked executive rule, and it now has the Supreme Court stamp of approval on it.

So there you have it, the combined effects of Trump v United States and Trump v Slaughter have created the perfect storm by which  federal government can now be converted into Trump’s personal political machine. Historically, civil service reform in the United States—especially after the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act—has sought to end the “spoils system.” It had become a merit system in which government jobs were no longer being used as rewards for personal loyalty. This ruling fully revives that danger, and you can bet that Trump will put it to bad (the worst) use.

A president now has unprecedented constitutional authority to fill key governing structures with ideological loyalists whose allegiance is personal. Loyalty not to Congress, not to the law, not to the American people, but to the person of the president, the individual, not even to his branch of government.

That fundamentally and profoundly changes the democratic nature of the Republic.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor understood perfectly what was at stake in this nefarious decision. Her dissent is not simply a disagreement over administrative law. It is a warning to the American people that the Supreme Court has radically altered the constitutional structure of the United States. By allowing the president to dominate agencies created to remain independent, and as oversight for unbridled Executive power, the Court has enabled something profoundly dangerous: the conversion of our constitutional government into a personalized executive regime—in short, an autocracy.

As Donald Trump—in his delusional state of psychopathic fever—sought ever more seriously to be the most powerful despot in history, many of us said, “Never fear. There are checks and balances in the system that will never allow that to happen.” We were naïve. I was naïve. We did not count on a GOP dominance of Congress or on its total surrender to a tyrant. Nor did we count on a Supreme Court majority whose self-interested loyalty to a despot would prompt it to betray the Constitution and the integrity of American democracy, and to facilitate authoritarian rule.

In practical effect, the Supreme Court has ripped away the power of the institutions meant to investigate, restrain, and regulate presidential abuse and subordinated them to the president’s whim and will. The corrupt Supreme Court majority has, in a very real and tangible sense, betrayed the democratic history and traditions of the United States, and granted Trump all of the raw authority necessary to make his life-long wet dream of unchecked and unlimited personal power and impunity come true.

And we are all the worse for it.

 

SCOTUS AS AN ARCHITECT OF DEMOCRATIC DECLINE

 

The US Supreme Court this past week put yet another nail in the coffin of democracy with its conservative majority decision in the case of Louisiana v Callais—a decision that essentially guts hard-fought protection of minority voting rights as sanctioned in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed into law during the Civil Rights Era. As such, the Court has taken a major step toward bolstering white supremacy, a core goal of the Trump-hijacked GOP’s Project 2025, the overall aim of which is the destruction of democracy and the instituting of a far-right, single-party, autocratic oligarchy.

Combined with the nefarious 2010 Supreme Court decision in the case of Citizens United v Federal Election Commission—basically the “right” (according to SCOTUS) of corporations, lobbyists and billionaire oligarchs to buy politicians and laws—and we have the most anti-democratic “perfect storm” in post-World War II American history. Still more alarming, is the fact that the Supreme Court—once the guarantor of the common citizen’s civil and human rights—is showing ever more autocratic tendencies, and a penchant for ruling for rich over poor.

Suffice it to say that, in 2010, the Court upheld Citizens United by the nearest a nine-justice Court can get to a split decision. The decision was upheld by a five to four margin. This past week, the openly anti-democratic Louisiana v Callais decision was made by a six to three vote. Half of the six opinions disemboweling the Voting Rights Act were, of course, entered by Trump far-right appointees. A fourth was that of long-serving Clarence Thomas, whose Trump Era opinions and his wife’s political activism since 2020 have led many observers to define him as “a Trump sycophant”, while his alleged acceptance of numerous undeclared emoluments and favors from wealthy Republican backers have gained him a reputation as a friend of the oligarchy.

The dissenting opinions by the only three liberal members of the Court were particularly critical. They pointed to the clear and unprecedented damage the decision would do to voter and civil rights, and especially as regards the disenfranchising of black voters.

It is noteworthy that, like the repealing of Roe v Wade—another “Trump Court” decision that severely undermined civil rights (in this case the right of women to control their own bodies)—momentous rulings by the Court since Trump first took office in 2016 have all too often been in keeping with the autocrat-in-chief’s personal agenda and with the tenets of Project 2025 (the manifesto of the Trump-hijacked far-right GOP leadership). And the few times that this Supreme Court has deigned to rule against Trump’s most insane and fatuous proposals, the president has dubbed the justices “disloyal”—as if that branch of government owed fealty to the Executive—and often reminded the three Trump appointees that they owe their power to him. It gets harder and harder, then, to see the Supreme Court as the impartial arbiter that it once was—the non-political third leg of the stool supporting democracy, the branch that was there to keep the other two honest.

This was certainly not the case with the Citizens United decision. That initiative was bitterly opposed by the administration of that time, headed up by President Barack Obama. Obama described that ruling as “disastrous”, since it permitted special interests, corporations, and foreign entities to spend unlimited and undisclosed sums of money to influence US elections.  

Obama posited that Citizens United would cause "real harm" to democracy, because it would drown out the voices of average citizens. He wasn’t wrong. And he went as far as to call for a Constitutional amendment to overturn the ruling and restore power to Congress to regulate campaign financing. Despite his best efforts, however, Citizens United was allowed to stand. And Obama’s astute view of it is clearly on display today, with politicians being ranked, not by their records as to how well they have served the people, but by how many millions of dollars they manage to collect for their election and reelection campaigns.

Citizens United has thus practically guaranteed that politicians devote a great deal more of their time to campaigning and fund-raising than they spend doing the work of government and loyally serving their constituents. Never have there been more supine and less productive congressional sessions than under the two Trump terms, with the main action being the blocking by each party of the other’s initiatives, and the establishment of a climate in which healthy cross-aisle compromise is seen as unspeakable betrayal. 

Citizens United has also sounded the death knell for that part of the American Dream that sought to convince every schoolchild of my generation that they could one day be a representative, a senator, or even the president of the United States. Today, without the backing of some segment of the oligarchy, it is nearly impossible to get into office. The exceptions are few and noteworthy, and almost always well left of center (which, to an ever greater extent, is where democratic fervor remains alive and well). Citizens United has, then, been one of the most corrupting influences on today’s political scene.

The far-right majority decision in Louisiana v Callais further corrupts and represses democracy by attacking voter rights in the US, striking directly at the heart of democracy, by essentially returning the political system to its post-Reconstruction Era in which anti-black-vote “lynching” began to be accomplished more through gerrymandering and rigged legislation than at the end of a rope.

In practical terms, what the Court’s decision last week signifies is a direct and structural rollback of minority voting rights protections. In practical terms, this ruling tosses out decades of legal precedent aimed at fighting suppression of minority black votes and bolsters white supremacists’ goals aimed at returning African American political influence to its pre-Civil Rights Era insignificance.

The ruling is doing this in the following ways: It basically neutralizes Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). This was the primary safeguard against racial vote dilution in the United States. The decision doubles down on this by also imposing an essentially unworkable legal standard, referred to as “intent-based discrimination”, which, in short, renders challenges to discriminatory voting maps nearly impossible to articulate. In this way, the Court’s cleverly-nuanced decision basically authorizes minority vote dilution, while disingenuously claiming neutrality.

Louisiana v Callais contradicts more than sixty years of legal precedent and pro-democracy congressional action. This is, in essence, the Trump-majority Supreme Court rewriting historic Civil Rights Law from the bench, giving clear advantage to white supremacist and Republican sensibilities, while snatching the life out of mechanisms enacted to protect minority voter rights from dilution and marginalization.

But the ruling goes far beyond this by essentially gutting the entire Voting Rights Act. That is to say, it does monumental harm to voter rights by devastating one of the most major achievements of the Civil Rights Era, and the life’s work and sacrifices of such civil rights icons as Reverend Martin Luther King, Justice Thurgood Marshall, John Lewis, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, and many more.

The Court has, after sixty-one years of legal precedent, and mostly successful application—despite continuing efforts to suppress black voters—declared the all-important Section 2 of the law “unconstitutional”. Section 2 is the very backbone of that piece of legislation, a law designed, precisely, to regulate and enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. That 1870 amendment prohibits the federal government and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude". As the last Reconstruction Amendment, it aimed to enfranchise African American men, though its impact was severely limited for decades by discriminatory state laws, which will very likely now be re-enacted and updated in some form (mostly through blatant discriminatory gerrymandering) in many red states, and particularly in those of the former Confederacy.

This is not, by any means, a narrow ruling. It quite literally, and in practice, removes the only remaining nationwide tool to challenge racial gerrymandering, especially after racial gerrymandering already gained a leg up with decisions like Shelby County v Holder, which weakened federal preclearance tools to prevent states from discriminating against minority voters.

The Court appears to have purposely ensured that racial gerrymandering will be possible by introducing a so-called “intent standard”, which makes discrimination practically impossible to prove. This too is novel in that it erases long-standing results-based tests that determine “discriminatory effects” of redistricting, with a much more subjective requirement to “prove intentional discrimination.” In other words, the Court bases its decision on the theory of  non-racial party lines rather than on the factual discriminatory results of state election laws and redistricting. 

This matters because modern gerrymandering employs data-driven techniques (commonly known as  “cracking” and “packing”) that manage to dilute minority voting power with no need to use explicit racial language in the resulting voting rules. The “intent” twist means that courts will have no choice but to ignore blatantly discriminatory outcomes unless explicit racism is proven—something that will be nearly impossible to do.

The so-called “conservative” majority on the Court posits a theory of “colorblindness” that, in effect, actually enables inequality. In his defense of the ruling, Justice Alito argued that any use of race in districting violates equal protection for all voters. But civil rights defenders point out that what Alito fails to say is that, while the decision forbids the use of race to fix inequality, it effectively allows gerrymandered election maps that clearly produce racial inequality.

Constitutional experts are describing this aspect of the ruling as “weaponized neutrality”—meaning that it cavalierly ignores real disparities while at the same time further entrenching them. As such, what the Trump Supreme Court has done in practice with this ruling is to legalize minority voter discrimination that will be predictable, measurable, and intentional in effect, but deniable as a motive—thus providing a palpable victory for the white supremacist far-right.

In short, the decision proposes that race-conscious remedies are unconstitutional, but that race-correlated harm is perfectly permissible.

The arguments of the three liberal justices (Sotomayor, Brown Jackson and Kagan) make it clear that with this ill-advised and racially discriminatory ruling the Court is intentionally decimating a landmark civil rights law. They posit that the decision a) effectively dismantles fair protections for minority voters, abandoning the US Congress’s explicit mandate, and b) blithely ignores reality and US history. On this last point, the three liberal justices argue that Section 2 has existed precisely because, as history tells us, racial discrimination adapts and persists even in the absence of explicit intent.

The minority of three posits that the ruling actually invites race-based vote dilution. By eliminating effective enforcement, the Court seems to be intentionally opening the door to discriminatory maps nationwide. The liberal minority insists that the Constitution allows race-conscious remedies when necessary to ensure equal political participation, while the right-wing majority replaces such remedies with the non-reality-based theory that denies any ongoing inequality even exists.

As I have posited many times before, if a single person’s rights can be trampled with impunity, everyone’s rights are at risk. And whenever that happens, democracy has been breached, especially when that breach becomes part and parcel of institutional norms.

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens warned that with the Citizens United decision of 2010, the Court had created a situation in which “laws are being bought and sold.” In doing so, he was identifying a crisis of political equality. In her dissent on the Court’s decision in Louisiana v Callais last week, Justice Elena Kagan warned that SCOTUS was “dismantling the Voting Rights Act piece by piece.” What her admonition identifies is a direct crisis of voting power for minority segments of the population.

If you put the effects of these two nefarious Supreme Court decisions together, you simply no longer have a system where government is responsive to the people as equals. It has been replaced, under the supreme authority of the Court, with a system in which authoritarianism rules, democracy is crippled, and influence is bought and sold while the fair impact of minority votes is intentionally diluted to keep a despot and his cronies in power.

A 14-MONTH-LONG CAT-5 HURRICANE

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A FEW LIKELY CONSEQUENCES OF TRUMP’S WAR OF SELF-CONVENIENCE

 

Americans learned through Donald Trump’s Truth Social propaganda network this past weekend that we are at war with Iran. That’s right. Both the president and his “Secretary of War” (that’s how they like to dub the US Department of Defense) are referring to it as such. And in doing so they are tacitly admitting to yet another overt violation of the Constitution by this regime.

The fact is that the current autocratic American head of  State has long since decided to dispense with the Constitution, the rule of law, international law, and the US justice system. Trump has also decided basically to do away with Congress, saying repeatedly that “he doesn’t need Congress.” Of course, if he weren’t acting as a de facto ruler, whether he thinks he needs Congress or not isn’t the issue, but rather that the Constitution dictates that he must work with Congress as a co-equal power. Shamefully, the skimpy GOP majority in the Senate and House are letting him get away with trampling the Constitution, their authority, and their duty to the American people.

And so, the GOP has become complicit by omission (among other blatant constitutional violations), in permitting this president to launch an unauthorized war, which is both domestically and internationally illegal. A war which promises to have truly seismic consequences both domestically and worldwide. It is—as much as any war launched to date by Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin—a war of aggression that, among other things, is as illegal as Putin’s Ukraine invasion, in terms of specific not only US laws, but also international laws and the Charter of the UN, of which the US is a founder, signatory and member of the Security Council.

These violations are made even more flagrant by the fact that the US was involved in direct peace-related negotiations with the Iranian theocracy when Trump’s regime launched the surprise attack. Indeed, there was optimism last Friday from Oman Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi who had been tapped by Washington to mediate in US talks with Iran. In Washington to meet with US Vice President JD Vance, Albusaidi told the CBS News program Face the Nation that,  "If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem through these negotiations by agreeing (on) a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved any time before. If we can capture that and build on it, I think a deal is within our reach." He estimated that a finalized accord could be reached within three months.

Clearly, then, the Trump regime duped Iran—much in the same way that Putin had pretended to negotiate with Ukraine while regrouping and planning a major new offensive—by lulling it into thinking negotiations were advancing well, while never seriously entertaining a peaceful solution. It should be recalled that these latest negotiations were just reaching a semblance of the Iran Nuclear Accords finalized in 2015, after intensive negotiations between Iran, the European Union and the Obama administration. That pact was hailed as a major achievement that promised to bring Iran back into the concert of nations. But during his first week in office in 2016, Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of those accords in a move that was a slap in the face not only to Iran but also to US allies in Europe. As a result, that agreement collapsed.

The US airstrikes were as much a surprise for Americans—including Congress—as for the Iranians and the rest of the world, since in Trump’s State of the Union address a week ago, Iran got barely a mention, while negotiations were continuing. But on Saturday, just four days later, the first devastating air attacks were launched. Now, more than a thousand people have already been killed in this war that Congress never authorized.

Perhaps the Americans most taken by surprise were the at least 500,000 (some estimates say as many as a million) US nationals who currently reside in the Middle East. They had no advanced warning whatsoever from the US government. There was no evacuation plan in place, and there still isn’t. Some 300,000 of those Americans reside in numerous countries currently under alert as a result of Trump and Netanyahu’s obviously unplanned and ill-prepared attack.

The US “strategy” for getting those US citizens out of harm’s way became clear this week when Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued an advisory through consular offices urging Americans in the region to “get out now.” It was the kind of evacuation order issued for random weather phenomena—except with a lot less advanced notice. Basically, no advance warning. Nor was any suggestion made as to how hapless Americans at the mercy of their own government were supposed to accomplish that task. Consular advice to the stranded Americans is, basically, to get out however they can because they’re on their own.

Indeed, in most of the area where Americans reside, there is currently no air service, and the entire region presents a huge hole in the sky if you observe the map of international air routes. Advisories to maintain airspace closed are currently in effect for  Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Those are all areas where aviation advisories are warning operators not to fly until further notice due to the risk from missiles, air defense systems and interception activity.

Current validity for the advisory runs to March 6^th, but could easily expand as military operations develop. So this is the situation: Hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas have merely been left stranded,  and to their own devices by the US government, as autocrats Trump and Netanyahu wage their private war of convenience, with no knowledge of or concern for the probable results, which appear bleak indeed. This has the potential to make the much-maligned Afghanistan withdrawal—agreed to by Trump in his nefarious deal with the Taliban and inherited by President Joe Biden on whom the GOP would heap all the blame—look like a Saturday picnic in the park.

The ones who were quickest on their feet and the most savvy travelers probably figured out that the only alternative early on would be to head north any way they could and connect via Caucasia and  Afghanistan (an iffy choice at best), or to head south and grab an air link through Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But those routes are now under very heavy demand, and are also becoming vulnerable.  

So all of that rhetoric about Trump being the president who would “keep Americans safe”…well, not so much. And whether anyone realizes it or not, the Trump regime just put all Americans at greater risk at home and all around the world, as the potential for random attacks by Islamist sleeper-cell and lone-wolf extremists just burgeoned exponentially.

But these dire situations appear almost minor compared to the mind-bogglingly major potential consequences to the world order of this mindless and unauthorized act carried out by the Trump-Netanyahu “mutual admiration society”. First, it should be noted that while Iran was indeed at the center of the ever-ongoing power struggle among three Middle East superpowers—the other two being Israel and Saudi Arabia—it posed no imminent threat whatsoever to the United States.

Let me say that again. Despite Donald Trump’s recent bloviating about Iran’s possessing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and about how it was a minute away from having a nuclear weapon, there is absolutely no credible intelligence to suggest that either of these things was true. In fact, the “nuclear threat” argument flies in the face of what Trump told the nation just last June when the US, at the behest of Bibi Netanyahu, flew joint missions with Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities out of existence. It was Trump himself who assured Americans that, thanks to that devastating bombing mission, Iran’s nuclear enrichment and development capacity had been “totally obliterated.”

So does Trump now want us to believe that, after a scant eight months, Iran’s nuclear team went from being “totally obliterated” to getting back up and running and on the verge of boasting a home-grown nuke? Really? If so, the US should, perhaps, hire them instead of trying to bomb them out of existence because they would appear to be world-class miracle-workers.

This was, without a doubt, at least from the US point of view, a completely avoidable and, clearly, an inadvisable move on the part of Washington. And, as Washington was in the midst of negotiations with Iran—even if by its sham “diplomatic” team consisting of the president’s son-in-law and his old real estate buddy, neither of whom have any diplomatic credentials at all—Trump would also have been well-advised to tell Israel to stand down.

John Brennan, the highly-respected 25-year intelligence veteran, former CIA director, and former head of US counterterrorism under Barack Obama, says he believes the plan for these attacks on Iran “was all hatched by Netanyahu”. He indicates that, just as Netanyahu did last June, he managed to talk Trump into it.

Rubio appeared to confirm this theory, though he later denied it, when he told reporters that Israel was on the verge of attacking Iran and the Trump regime realized that, if that happened, Iran would strike back at not only Israel but also at US military targets in the region. As a result, Trump decided to preempt the Israeli attack, and that’s why the US is now at war.

What? In other words, what he was saying is that US foreign policy is a mere reaction to Israeli foreign policy? That is to say, Bibi Netanyahu is dictating US military actions abroad? If that’s the case, there is something very wrong with this picture.

But this isn’t just about that. This is also about both Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu trying by any means to stay out of court and out of prison. Trump, as usual, went off half-cocked and with no plan, no contingencies, and no regard for the consequences, simply because he needed yet another big diversion to take attention off of the bane on his regime—the Epstein files. It is not likely to be a coincidence that this military action—which has very real potential to spark a world war—comes just as revelations are emerging about a DOJ plot to cover up or completely destroy evidence of criminal behavior on Trump’s part linked to the Epstein Affair—including his alleged rape, assault and battery on a minor who was 14 at the time. 

As Trump’s defense team leader Pamela Bondi, who masquerades as attorney general, is coming under increasing pressure to comply with the law, and release the millions of still missing files, and as more and more obstruction allegations are accumulating against her, the president’s plausible deniability is on ever shakier ground. Among files that have seen the light of day, and which are being reported on by the independent media, this was all predicted by an unlikely observer: Jeffrey Epstein. In communications with far-right political idealogue Steve Bannon in December of 2018, Epstein held out the possibility that Trump would be fully capable of starting a war with Iran if threatened with revelations about his dark past. Specifically, Epstein speculated that if Trump felt cornered by political pressure, he would trigger a larger conflict, such as bombing Iran, to create a crisis and rally public support.

In separate exchanges with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and attorney Reid Weingarten, Epstein described Trump as “borderline insane.”

When Bannon seemed unconvinced that Trump would go so far, Epstein wrote back saying, “You guys need to understand that he is psychotic... if I go down, I'm taking everyone with me. Cornering a rat, never a good idea”.

From Bibi Netanyahu’s standpoint, the advantage is twofold. On the one hand, he was taking advantage of a passive moment in Iran as the government continued to negotiate. Strategically, he saw a chance to actively strengthen Israel’s position as a regional superpower while dealing a devastating blow to Iran’s regional power.

On the other hand, for Netanyahu as for Trump, this aggression and the initiation of a new conflict provides a great distraction at a time when the war on Gaza is losing momentum and when he is increasingly under pressure to negotiate an end to the hostilities. His personal vulnerability is the ghost of corruption charges that are still pending against him in the Israeli courts, in which he could end up not only losing his political power but also his freedom. It is a win-win short-term move for Netanyahu, and he very well knew that, given Trump’s situation, getting the US to go along was likely to be an easy lift. Turns out, he was right.

Meanwhile, the enormous collateral effects of this overnight initiation of a major conflict in the Middle East are not easy to summarize or predict, and I will be writing a great deal more about them as events develop. But here are some foreseeable consequences:

1.  The death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, marks a major geopolitical rupture. It promises to cause upheaval not only in Iran but throughout the Middle East. It will profoundly affect not only Iranian politics and geopolitics but will bring seismic effects in energy markets, global trade, shipping and Middle Eastern security as a whole, with the entire region suddenly becoming a potential war zone.

2.  Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are acting as if, with a few airstrikes, and the targeted executions of some key players in the theocracy and military, the US has freed the Iranian people from the cruel theocratic dictatorship that has ruled them up to now. If that was the plan, they obviously know nothing about Iran or that regime.

The theocracy has already reestablished its authority, choosing a new supreme leader, and is backed by the powerful and slavishly loyal IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), which is likely to be even more ruthless in crushing dissent, after killing thousands of people while Ali Khamenei was still alive. Underscoring this are reports that the new Ayatollah is  Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the US-slain leader. Mojtaba Khamenei is much more radical than his father, has close ties to the IRGC and is thought to have been in charge of much of the repression that the Iranian opposition has suffered in recent years.
US Middle East military experts like retired General Mark Hertling and security experts like Brennan are making it clear that no regime change will take place unless there are American boots on the ground. And then, only after major and prolonged fighting. Regime change, in other words, cannot be effected from the air and will likely involve the US in another forever-war in the Middle East.
Beyond all of this, the sad news for common everyday Iranians taking Trump at his word and hoping that this is the end of their theocratic nightmare, is that Trump has said publicly that he will be employing “the Venezuela template” in Iran. This is, of course, a contradiction in terms, since Iran and Venezuela are radically different countries and cultures. But on hearing the false hope that Trump is extending to them, Iranians need to look at what he did in Venezuela. He blasted strategic targets in the capital city of Caracas, snatched President Maduro and his wife and spirited them back to the US. Then, he blithely returned power directly to Maduro’s regime, in exchange for oil, while ignoring the winners of prior elections that Maduro had voided. Venezuela remained, and still remains, a dictatorship ruled by the same harsh de facto regime that was in charge before US intervention, with Maduro’s vice president simply moving to the presidential office.
Venezuelans were duped and Iranians will be duped as well. If Trump can strike a largely commercial (oil) compromise with Khamenei’s son—by making him an offer he can’t refuse—the regime will remain in power, and the Iranian people will be worse off than ever before.
Had the US really cared about the people of Iran rising up and shaking off the chains of the Islamic theocracy, it would long ago have been backing anti-regime guerrilla movements in that country with intelligence-sharing, training, money, arms and military advisors. Because without that kind of backing, no regime overthrow would ever be possible. But the US learned long ago to be careful what you wish for, since, short of setting up a US-backed puppet regime—something which history tells us never works in the long-run—there is no way to know what sort of government would follow this one, or whether it would align itself with the US which has a long history of unpopularity in Iran.

3.  Another contingency is that prolonged fighting could lead to a much weakened Iran that would slip into the sort of chaos some other Middle Eastern countries did following the Arab Spring. In that case, a power vacuum could form and government could become fragmented with the help of bad actors seeking to destabilize the area. That is the sort of action that might well be backed by far-right Israel, with Trump-backed Netanyahu taking advantage of a debilitated Iran to continue to bolster Israel’s military dominance in the region—the far-reaching consequences of which would be the further destabilization of the Middle Eastern region as a whole.

4.  A fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Hormuz Strait—a narrow neck of water that connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman. A significant share of liquefied natural gas (LNG) also moves through that strait. Iran, to a very large extent, currently controls that passage, and has, in the past, also used its Houthi allies in Yemen to aid it in that task. In the immediate term, disruptions to shipping traffic in the Hormuz Strait will cause oil and shipping, shipping insurance and container prices to spike. Experts indicate that sustained disruptions could fuel worldwide inflation and spark a corresponding worldwide recession, with the hardest-hit areas being Europe and Asia, but also with development progress in Southeast Asia and Africa being strangled.

5.  At least one expert in international law has described US worldwide actions under the Trump regime as “the great unraveling” of international law. Through his complete disregard for both international and domestic norms regarding the use of force, and with regard to the sovereignty and self-determination of nations—principles that have governed Western foreign policy since the end of World War II—Trump has basically instituted piracy as his regime’s foreign policy. In a US policy speech that Secretary Rubio made at a world security forum in Munich a few weeks ago, he faced off against criticism of the unprovoked US attack on Venezuela and on fishing boats in the Caribbean as actions unconstrained by law and “necessary leadership” in a fractured world order. This was huge, in that it signaled a US policy shift from the rules-based postwar order to one of might-makes-right, in which the US is simply doing what it does because it can, and because no one else can stop it.
Add to this a statement this week by the DOJ’s Hegseth, in which he said that the US would be applying “no stupid rules of engagement” in its unauthorized war on Iran, and America has just joined the Nazis in applying the same sort of Hitlerian policies that Germany pursued during World War II.
In other words, the Trump regime is bent on turning back the clock to a world where the most powerful regimes make up the rules as they go along and the rest of the nations are rendered vassal states.

Donald Trump was supposed to be “the president of peace”. At least that’s what he told us when he was trying to make Democrats out to be warmongers. But then again, if there is one thing that is consistent about Trump, it is his complete disconnection with truth and sincerity. Sometimes, it is hard not to see his attacks on Venezuela and Iran, his threats against Mexico, Canada and Greenland, and his verbal and economic aggression against our Western allies as anything but retribution against the world for not recognizing him as “a man of peace.” We know that, from his first day in office in 2016, he coveted every one of his predecessor Barack Obama’s virtues. What he couldn’t destroy with the stroke of a pen, he wanted to garner, without ever doing the hard work of earning the honors bestowed on others who did.

Don’t tell me I’m exaggerating. I saw with my own eyes, as did you, when he made a big deal out of accepting a made-up consolation “peace prize” created as a bespoke ego stroke by the FIFA world soccer entity. And when he whined about not getting this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, for all the made-up wars he’d “solved”, until winner, Venezuelan opposition political activist María Machado, offered him her medal to shut him up—and he became an even greater embarrassment than usual to the people of the United States by actually accepting it. And then, after his illegal invasion of her country, had the audacity to back the very regime that had repressed, cheated and jailed Machado.  

Could Donald Trump be that shallow and vindictive, you ask? Short answer: Yes. Definitely. The man has all the depth of a pancake griddle and the moral character of a wharf rat.

Many of the often salt-of-the-earth type people who bought Trump’s false promises and barefaced lies, and voted for him (twice), are the very same people whose families produce the military personnel who actually fight America’s wars. These relatives of military members voted for Trump in part because he promised to keep their sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters out of harm’s way.

It didn’t seem to matter to them that he had called America’s heroes “suckers and losers” or that Trump—a five-time draft-dodger from the Vietnam conscription era—had stood on the hallowed ground of Arlington Cemetery and asked, “What was in it for them? ” They simply bought his vow to be “the president of peace”, to bring the troops home, and end America’s forever-wars on Day One. They believed that he would use America’s Armed Forces for the purpose for which they were meant: to ensure US defense, not to go off to foreign lands to start forever-wars of aggression. They too have been duped.

In this latest action in Iran, after news of the first fatal American casualties was released, Trump confirmed that US service members have already died and that more will likely die or become casualties in the future, but added, “that’s what happens in war.” He said it as if he’d had nothing to do with it, when he had, in fact, personally and without Congressional authorization, lit the fuse for another forever-war that was completely avoidable. And in doing so, had painted targets on the backs of every US service member currently deployed in the Middle East. His Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shrugged the casualties off with yet another cliché, saying, “War is hell.”

“That’s what happens in war.” The subliminal message to MAGA supporters who voted for the “president of peace”? Soldiers get killed in wars. That’s a fact. Get over it.