The most remarkable realization about Donald J. Trump’s rise to becoming America’s elected dictator is that it all came out of his MOUTH. Understanding that politics has become a performative exercise, Trump discovered that he could win the battle of words without having a record of achievement or any trusted experience in the business, government, or civic arena.

His lies sugarcoated his failed businesses. He wildly exaggerated his wealth (asserting that the Trump brand was worth $11 billion). He tried to explain away his numerous corporate bankruptcies as a business strategy, and blamed everyone for his commercial collapses—the banks, the workers, the students (Trump University, anyone?)—the government. This failed gambling casino czar never admitted he was ever wrong, ever sorry, and boasted he knew more than anyone because he was “right about everything.”

His MOUTH went into high gear during his introductory presidential debates with 16 Republican challengers during the 2016 GOP primaries. In retrospect, it is astonishing to see how, using his snarling mouth, he wrested control from those on the stage from the outset, targeting immigrants as invaders, criminals, rapists, and destroyers of America. Without rebuttals, he would repeat over and over again his sweeping bigotry.

Then Trump would move on to repeat how foreign countries have taken advantage of the US in trade, ignoring our Empire’s bleeding poorer nations, brain-draining their skilled people, and allowing giant US corporations to export millions of jobs to take advantage of serf labor and corruptible dictatorial regimes. He ignored the way the US-facilitated, corporate-driven trade deals pulled down worker and environmental protections in the US and devastated American workers and communities.

So many of Trump’s epithets fit him perfectly. So, throwing them back on him repeatedly rings the truth bell.

No matter, the MOUTH opened wider, slandering specific people, including selected politicians, judges, authors, reporters and editors, professors, and anyone who dared criticize his daily fabrications.

The MOUTH got major coverage in the mainstream media, including publishing his CAPITAL LETTERS OF CONDEMNATION, and because his targets were not given the right of reply, many people were inclined to believe him. This accelerated and entrenched his violent politics of intimidation. Again and again, he had the media field to himself, which deterred many of his critics from giving him a taste of his own medicine.

Trump—by far the most impeachable of presidents and the least negatively branded by his opponents—must wonder about his luck. Consider, he is a convicted felon; a chronic liar; a serial law violator; a repeated sexual abuser of women; a crooked extortionist; a hugely corrupt user of the White House to enrich the Trumpsters; a shatterer of the social safety net for tens of millions of Americans; a slasher of safeguards and scientific research against catastrophic climate violence and pandemics, leaving America rapidly defenseless; and a crazed suppressor of solar energy and wind power while boosting the omnicidal oil, gas, and coal industries. Moreover, he pathologically breaks his promises and pledges, presiding over record waste, shutdowns, and censorship, ushering in the DARK AGES for America.

His dictatorial rule—“Nothing can stop me”—dishonors the American Revolution and violates the Constitution’s defenses against one-man rule. He epitomizes “big government” against the people, suppressing free speech; piling up huge deficits; advocating mass arbitrary arrests; and shutting down the enforcement of laws to protect the health, safety, and economic well-being of Americans, endangering them in both red and blue states.

A deficit-funded tax cutter for the already under-taxed rich, the powerful, and big corporations, he illegally takes tax revenue from necessities of the people and loads deficits on the backs of the next generation while starving the IRS budget and undermining the collection of taxes due. He spends or refuses to spend at his whim, flouting the exclusive appropriations authority of Congress. He is “a fascist to his core,” said his former chief of staff, retired general John Kelly, and a full-blown RACIST in what he says, does, and portends.

It should be easy to label Trump “America’s Number One Outlaw,” given all these dangerous, deranged delusions. He is openly and visibly wrecking and weakening our country rapidly with his entrenched dictatorship and his masked storm troopers who are on the rampage in large US cities.

He has hollowed out the federal government’s critical civil service except for the omnivorous military-industrial complex with its bloated budget that is devouring our best lifesaving programs abroad and at home, and fueling his Empire’s illegal military raids abroad.

Now he is starting to plan the subversion of our elections come November with fake ads and the attempted seizure of voter rolls and people’s personal identification data. Conducting elections is reserved exclusively to the states under our Constitution. Trump’s present obsession is rigging the midterm elections through selective voter suppression, especially as his poll numbers drop.

So, what can be done about Trump’s hyperactive MOUTH and his assault on our democracy? Fact-checking, as was done by a leading fact-checker for the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler. He now concedes that fact-checking did not deter Trump. In Trump’s first term, Kessler documented more than 30,000 false or misleading claims. He gave up this reporting last year and left the Post, concluding that Trump’s fabrications over reality—lies about serious matters such as claiming the unemployment rate was 42% when it was 4.9%, or asserting that there was widespread voter fraud in 2020—were not slowing down the FAKER IN CHIEF and his ditto-head network. However, setting the record straight has its own value in reasserting a truthful society.

There is another part of the MOUTH—the tsunami of invectives hurled at named public figures and his private victims. He calls prosecutors and judges “deranged” and “traitors.” Other opponents are described as “lunatics,” “communists,” “crooked,” “crazy,” “lying,” “corrupt,” “murderers,” and “low IQ.” The latter is mainly reserved for African Americans. Lately, he has gone berserk, instantly libeling the two innocent American citizens shot and killed in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents as “domestic terrorists.”

Then there are his disparaging nicknames of critics—that are too numerous to mention. Trump’s bullying expletives are relayed by the mainstream media to the broad public, which helped make Trump the Supreme Foul-Mouth Soliloquist. For years, to their detriment, the Democrats and other critics did not respond in kind and with frequency, with the truth on their side.

They could have defined him with memorable depictions such as Tyrant Trump, Dictator Donald, Crooked Donald, Deranged Donald, Lying Donald, Crazy Donald, Dangerous Donald, Corrupt Donald, Lunatic Donald, Cruel Trump, and Terrorist Trump. These on-point adjectives would have unsettled the thin-skinned Prevaricator-In-Chief, making him rethink what his daily false salvos are provoking in return. No more free rides would sober up his MOUTH. Hearing his own unsettling, repeated false salvos may make Trump decide to stop the daily froth from his MOUTH.

So many of Trump’s epithets fit him perfectly. So, throwing them back on him repeatedly rings the truth bell. It so happens that bullies, including Trump, stop their smears when they realize what they have provoked in return. Attending a Washington Nationals baseball game in his first term, the crowd started chanting “Lock Him Up,” a phrase he goaded his base to use for months against his political opponents. Trump and his followers lost their enthusiasm for this chant when he started getting a taste of his own medicine from anti-Trump crowds.

Since Minneapolis, some Democrats in Congress are describing Trump as “deranged,” and after the animal caricature of the Obamas, more Democrats are ending a much-delayed labeling of Trump as a many-sided RACIST. Because the Democrats have had a low expectation level for Trump and hitherto have satisfied themselves with derision, he has gotten away with the lies about his alleged successful economic policies, with enough voters—seeing no strong responders—to have him squeak through the 2024 election.

The one word Trump cannot stand to hear is a power neither he nor his toady six Injustices on the Supreme Court can control—IMPEACHMENT. We’re starting to hear it more these days from the Democrats, despite the political foolish leaders Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who are willing to remain silent on this one last resort against monarchy put exclusively in the hands of Congress by our far-seeing Founders. A majority of voters now appreciate the insights of our Founders. With Trump, IT IS ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE, MUCH WORSE. In the coming weeks, the polls should show over 60% of Americans want Trump Impeached.

Leave it to Trump to dictate ever more crazed, distracting actions to save himself.

As with the GOP revolt in 1974 against former President Richard Nixon for transgressions far, far less than Trump’s daily crimes and constitutional usurpation, so too today’s congressional GOP may well move to protect their own sinking fortunes this November by unloading the baggage of the Trump Dump.

A mere 15 years ago, during an epoch that now seems as distant as the Paleozoic era, an American president attempted to use military power to prevent a dictator from slaughtering his own citizens. Barack Obama billed the action in Libya as a humanitarian intervention, citing the new United Nations doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” or R2P. The president hoped to avert a massacre by Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi rather than, as usual, coming in afterwards to count the dead and try to bring the malefactors to justice.

Obama intervened like a global police officer, following the letter of the (international) law. Eager to be seen as a “good cop,” the president even promised to “lead from behind.” It’s impossible to know if the US-led action did indeed prevent massive war crimes. However, the disastrous aftermath of that Libyan campaign—the summary execution of Qaddafi and a civil war that would kill tens of thousands—was yet more evidence that Washington’s attempts to police the world are quixotic at best.

Public support for the Libyan action was decidedly mixed, with criticism of the president coming from all sides of the political spectrum. On the left, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich thundered that “we have moved from President Bush’s doctrine of preventive war to President Obama’s assertion of the right to go to war without even the pretext of a threat to our nation.” Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation complained that Obama was too scrupulous in his adherence to the principles of R2P, which might only raise the bar for future US interventions.

Ah, the good old days, when the left and the right both took international law seriously enough to argue over how a US president should engage with it!

That’s exactly the kind of police officer that Donald Trump aspires to be, wielding power not on behalf of principle but in the service of personal gain and autocratic control.

Donald J. Trump has shown no such scruples. He considers international law nothing more than a trifling impediment by which the weak try to drag down the strong. He boasts that he didn’t even bother to consult the UN when pursuing his trumped-up peace plans and creating his laughably ill-named “Board of Peace.” He certainly didn’t consider international law recently when he bombed Nigeria, seized Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, and threatened to annex Greenland. He may be the first American president to treat international law as if it were as fictional as intergalactic law.

By contrast, the only principle that Trump now invokes in his foreign policy is the infamous law of the jungle. He believes that power—its threat and its exercise—is all that matters for apex predators like the United States (and himself). The rest is just the chittering of potential prey.

“My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” the amoral Trump told the New York Times in a recent (and terrifying) interview. “I don’t need international law.”

Global cop, then, would not seem to be a suitable aspiration for the likes of Donald Trump. Unlike Obama, he’s not interested in making sure that laws are observed and miscreants punished. Instead, Trump practically fawns over the miscreants: Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. The duties of policing the planet—both the adherence to law and the expenditure of resources—simply don’t appeal to him.

“We’re spending tremendous amounts of money for decades policing the world, and that shouldn’t be the priority,” Trump said back in 2018. “We want to police ourselves and we want to rebuild our country.”

That was the old Trump. The new Trump looks at things quite differently.

How Real Cops Operate

Maybe when you hear the expression “world’s policeman,” you think of Officer Clemmons on the once-popular children’s TV show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: a genial upholder of community morals, but on a global scale.

Or maybe you’re like former NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen who, in 2023, pined for an upright world policeman with superpowers and lofty principles. “We desperately need a US president who is able and willing to lead the free world and counter autocrats like President Putin,” he wrote. “The world needs such a policeman if freedom and prosperity are to prevail against the forces of oppression, and the only capable, reliable, and desirable candidate for the position is the United States.”

Donald Trump doesn’t want either of those jobs.

But let’s face it, that’s not how a large number of police officers actually operate. In 2025, police across the United States killed 98 unarmed people, the majority people of color. The misconduct of more than 1,000 dirty cops in Chicago—ranging from false arrests to the use of excessive force—cost that city nearly $300 million in court judgments between 2019 and 2022 alone, a pattern repeated at different magnitudes across the country and still ongoing, given the recent killings by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis.

Elsewhere in the world, the police suppress dissent and fill prisons at the behest of dictators from Russia and North Korea to Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.

In democracies, the police break laws, often with impunity; in autocracies, they follow unjust laws while systemically violating human rights.

A globocop embracing that kind of outlaw justice would disregard international law, make a mockery of institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, and attempt to establish alternative bodies that privilege the powerful. That’s exactly the kind of police officer that Donald Trump aspires to be, wielding power not on behalf of principle but in the service of personal gain and autocratic control.

The United States has long been tempted to play good cop-bad cop with the world. President Trump is simply taking things to the next distinctly psychopathic level.

Upholding the Law?

The first American president to dream of raising his country to the status of world policeman was Teddy Roosevelt. As a former police commissioner of New York City, he ardently believed that the federal government needed to use its constabulary power to intervene in society to maintain order, including suppressing labor unrest.

At the international level, like Trump, Roosevelt articulated his vision as a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In a 1904 address to Congress, he laid out his vision this way:

Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.

Roosevelt believed that the United States—and other major powers—had to step in to right wrongs in the absence of robust international institutions. He proposed a global “League of Peace” to prevent wars and end conflicts. In the meantime, according to his problematic take on “civilized” behavior, Roosevelt justified US interventions not only in the Western Hemisphere but also farther afield. In fact, Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for his mediation of the Russo-Japanese War where, in a secret agreement, he gave Japan control of Korea in exchange for US control over the Philippines.

Trump has borrowed much from Roosevelt in his approach to global affairs, now aptly known as the Donroe Doctrine. The “League of Peace” has become Trump’s “Board of Peace.” Roosevelt’s interventions in the Western Hemisphere to keep out European powers have become selective moves to push out the Chinese and (less so) the Russians in Venezuela and elsewhere. Roosevelt’s “civilizing mission” has become an equally abhorrent commitment by the Trump administration to advancing the interests of white people, as in the preferential treatment of white South Africans when it comes to immigration to this country. Like Roosevelt, Trump considered a “spheres of influence” swap with Russia, exchanging Ukraine for Venezuela, before ultimately rejecting the deal.

By now, all of America’s historical justifications for acting as the world’s policeman have fallen away, including the assertion of self-determination (Woodrow Wilson), the mobilization against fascism (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), the crusade against communism (Harry Truman et al), and all talk of global democracy and human rights (the post-Cold War-era presidents). Trump has instead quite openly embraced Teddy Roosevelt, big stick and all, along with Roosevelt’s tendency to link the suppression of conflict at home and abroad. In Donald Trump’s world, federal immigration agents killing protesters Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and Special Forces kidnapping Nicolás Maduro are two sides of the same impulse: the use of constabulary force to extinguish dissent and maintain a pyramidic order nationally and hemispherically, with Donald Trump on top of it all.

Like Roosevelt, Trump showed no regard for the principles of sovereignty in his intervention in Venezuela. Roosevelt didn’t think Filipinos were civilized enough for self-government and Trump, by insisting that Greenlanders must submit to US control, repeats the colonialist pattern. Trump’s major innovation: Speak loudly and carry that big stick.

The trajectory of the world order over the last 75 years has been in the direction of safeguards for weaker nations and controls on the exercise of power by stronger nations. An elaborate system of international agreements governing human rights has been designed to protect individuals and groups from the predations of states and corporations.

Trump wants to reverse that trajectory, just as he wants to roll back all the gains social movements have made within the United States, from civil rights and feminism to the victories of the LGBTQ community.

In TrumpWorld, those with the guns make the rules. They take Crimea, Gaza, and Greenland—at gunpoint, if necessary.

Profiting Off Policing

Corrupt cops have long been involved in protection rackets, shaking down gambling establishments, prostitutes, and drug dealers. Trump, a shady businessman at heart, thrills to that side of the globocop business. All of his “peace deals” cut him or his cronies in on a piece of the action.

Take, for instance, last year’s deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It includes a “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” that connects Azerbaijan with its enclave of Nakhichevan. In addition to naming rights, Trump negotiated as part of the agreement a TRIPP Development Company to construct the corridor, with the United States owning 74% of its shares for the first 49 years.

There’s no word yet on who the members of the US-Armenian steering committee will be for that project. If Gaza is any indication, however, it will be yet one more goodie to be distributed to friends and CEOs through Trump’s patronage system. The Gaza peace deal established a Board of Peace whose executive committee is dominated by Trump cronies, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, diplomatic emissaries Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, billionaire businessman Marc Rowan, and Trump security advisor Robert Gabriel.

For all of us who found fault with the “good cop” approach of Obama in Libya—and there was much fault to be found—it’s once again time to get a taste of America as the “bad cop.”

An even more audacious profit-seeking deal was his recent multipoint proposal to end the war in Ukraine. In it, Witkoff and his Russian counterpart imagined a scenario in which US businesses would profit by gaining access to frozen Russian funds for the reconstruction of Ukraine, while also making billions from restarting business relations with Russia. Again, it’s not difficult to imagine who would profit from such arrangements. After all, Jared Kushner, architect of the Abrahamic Accords that normalized diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, became a billionaire thanks to contacts in and investments from the Gulf States.

Trump is all about extraction. If he has his way, the Venezuelan operation will net billions of dollars in oil revenues for major US companies. Similarly, his obsession with Greenland is driven, at least in part, by his lust for the reputed mineral wealth that lies beneath that giant island’s snow and ice. The United States is dependent on imports of critical minerals, many now controlled by China. Like a cop who eyes the riches generated by someone else’s protection racket, Trump is desperate to muscle in to grab some of the profits.

Perhaps the most vulgar expression of his desire to run a global protection racket is that Board of Peace of his. Countries that want to have permanent seats on it have to pony up a billion dollars apiece. Warmongers like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are welcome as members as long as they’re willing to fork over the money. On the other hand, Canada has been banned from it because, in a speech at Davos, its prime minister, Mark Carney, tried to rally the globe’s middle powers against the United States and other rule-breaking great powers.

Originally established to administer the Gaza peace deal, the board seems to have much greater ambitions. As its “president for life,” Trump has promised to cooperate with the United Nations. But the board’s membership, with the United States first among unequals, suggests a rival body with no interest in abiding by international law. Think of it as the UN’s evil twin and its creation as a signal that the United States has officially gone rogue cop.

The Future of US Foreign Policy

Not everyone in the MAGAverse is happy with America as a globocop.

Some isolationist remnants of the Republican Party have criticized the operations in Venezuela, though not enough to make a difference in Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once Trump’s greatest congressional advocate, parted ways with the president on a number of issues, including the Venezuela intervention, and decided to step down early from her position rather than face his political vengefulness.

Trump has insisted that, the attacks on Venezuela’s sovereignty notwithstanding, the United States is not at war with that country. He ruled out any alternative interpretations of MAGA doctrine. “MAGA is me,” he said. “MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

Trump has made some noises about a spheres-of-influence approach with his Donroe Doctrine, prioritizing US control over the Western Hemisphere. He has been happy to reward Russia for its “policing” of neighboring Ukraine, and he’s been ambiguous at best about coming to the defense of Taiwan, should China threaten it. Indeed, he has been more than happy to delegate such responsibilities to others, whether it’s Israel in the Middle East or acting president Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela. In a complex world as full of nukes and conventional missiles as the United States is of handguns, globocops need their deputies.

However, neither isolationism nor the idea of global spheres of influence has truly captured Trump’s imagination. In the first year of his second term, he has instead driven a stake through the very idea of isolationism by launching military operations in Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria. Nor has he shown any deep interest in confining his ambitions to the Western Hemisphere. Instead, he has continued to build the Pentagon budget to counter China, while fancying himself a peacemaker across the Global South. Wherever his critics continue to dance beyond his grasp, as in Cuba and Iran, and wherever valuable resources can be extracted for personal and political gain, as in Greenland and the Congo, Trump will try to press any military advantage he might have.

For all of us who found fault with the “good cop” approach of Obama in Libya—and there was much fault to be found—it’s once again time to get a taste of America as the “bad cop.” So far, Trump’s targets have been weak (Venezuela) or easy to attack (Iran, after Israel destroyed its air defenses). The grave danger is that, encouraged by such “successes,” Trump may move on to larger targets like China or the 60% of American citizens who oppose his policies.

Cops, protected by their badges and their guns, think they’re invincible. Taken to court over their crimes and corruption, they suddenly discover that they’re not in fact above the law. Trump is now turning the United States into a “bad cop.” Let’s hope that he learns a lesson about the limits of his power before he goes apocalyptically rogue.

The Trump administration’s total blockade on oil imports to Cuba is jeopardizing the lives of millions across the island. It is resulting in severe blackouts that are disrupting food production, hospitals, schools, public transport, and tourism.

Despite this, the people of Cuba remain defiant. As Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel remarks: “The collapse lies in the imperial mindset, but not in the mindset of the Cubans. I know we are going to live through difficult times, but we will overcome them together with creative resilience.”

Cuba Is Not A Threat—Trump Is

President Donald Trump alleges that Cuba poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat” for two reasons. First, its relationship with “hostile countries” and “transnational terrorist groups,” including Russia, China, Iran, and Hamas. Second, Trump alleges that Cuba’s “communist ideas, policies, and practices” are a threat to the region and endanger the lives of its citizens.

Neither of these is the real reason, however. In January 2026, Trump praised Canada’s trade deal with China as “a good thing.” He told reporters, “If you can get a deal with China, you should do that.” While Trump did threaten retaliatory tariffs against Canada a few days later, his own administration has boasted about the “historic agreement” it reached with China on trade. Trump himself raves about his “extremely good” relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He even invited Xi to join his Board of Peace.

For Trump, colonialism is not solely about exploitation and systematic theft—it is a means of reshaping the world in his self-obsessed image.

Likewise, Trump purports to have a good relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump has described Putin as a “genius” and a “strong leader,” and their relationship as “very, very good.” He even praised Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. During a radio interview, Trump said: “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine—of Ukraine—Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. He used the word ‘independent’ and ‘we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.” Despite his war crimes, Trump also invited Putin to be part of the Board of Peace.

Clearly, Trump has no issue forming close relationships with “hostile countries.”

Concerns about destabilizing the region or harms to the Cuban people are also false flags. The Trump administration has issued illegal military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed at least 130 people; violated international law by invading Venezuela and kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro; threatened several nations in the region including Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Greenland, Canada, as well as Cuba and Venezuela. Compared to Cuba, the Trump administration is, in orders of magnitude, a significantly greater threat to regional stability.

Moreover, Trump does not care whatsoever about the well-being of Cubans. If he did, he would not have undone President Barack Obama’s attempts at normalizing US-Cuba relations. If he cared, then his administration would not have paused a humanitarian program that allowed Cubans to enter the US and remain here legally for two years. Rather than protecting a group that has overwhelmingly supported him, the Trump administration is mass deporting Cubans back to the very country it is now economically asphyxiating.

This vile disregard, however, is not surprising—Trump does not care about global stability. He does not care about American citizens. And he especially does not care about the peoples of Asian, African, Caribbean, and Latin American countries.

No, Trump’s blatant act of global terrorism against Cuba is not about national security, communism, or saving lives. This act of deprived cruelty masquerading as foreign policy is about narcissism, private interest, and personal grievances.

Donald Trump: Where Narcissism Meets Colonialism

According to a US official, Trump believes that successfully ending the Castro era would cement his legacy by accomplishing what presidents since John F. Kennedy have failed to do. This is among his chief motivations.

Whether it’s adding his name to the Kennedy Center, building the “Arch de Trump,” or whining about the Nobel Peace Prize he thinks he deserves, Trump is obsessed with himself and his legacy. At Turning Point USA’s 2025 AmericaFest Conference, conservative commentator Jesse Watters recounts asking Trump about why his “big, beautiful ballroom” is so extravagant—“four times the size of the White House.” Watters told the audience, “[Trump] said, ‘Jesse, it’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself—because no one else will.’”

For Trump, colonialism is not solely about exploitation and systematic theft—it is a means of reshaping the world in his self-obsessed image. In his mind, colonized lands are monuments to his greatness and ego; another property upon which he can stamp his name and expand his golden empire; further proof that only he can bring peace and order to the world.

Trump’s narcissism is why he labelled himself the “Acting President of Venezuela” after his administration kidnapped Maduro—a blatant violation of international law reduced to self-aggrandizement.

This is why he posted a video of an ethnically cleansed “Trump Gaza” filled with palm trees, luxury buildings, and, of course, a towering golden statue of himself. Mass displacement and genocide are simply steppingstones in his pursuit of more self-praise.

Cuba will be no different. He will torture Cuba in the hopes of forcing them to submit to his will and cement his legacy. To force them to “make a deal, before it is too late.” For Trump, all this cruelty is business as usual. As he puts it, “Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.”

Marco Rubio’s Childhood Fantasy

That said, Trump’s is not the only ego at play here. Reportedly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is deliberately blocking negotiations between high-level officials from Havana and Washington. This, despite both Trump and Díaz-Canel insisting that they are open to talks.

Rubio has long since advocated for total regime change in Cuba. In his memoir American Son, Rubio writes about the profound impact his Castro-hating grandfather and President Ronald Reagan’s militant anti-communism had on his political beliefs. He writes that, as a child, “I boasted I would someday lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba.” When applying to law school, his personal essay expressed his “intention to use [his] law degree one day to help construct a new legal and political system for a free Cuba.”

We were too late to stop Trump’s illegal invasion of Venezuela; but we can still save Cuba. From Argentina to Canada, we must unite.

Throughout his life, Rubio has expressed the same sentiment: For Cuba to be free, the Castro regime must end and be replaced with a new political system. For Rubio, Díaz-Canel is no different than Castro. As he sees it, “The dictatorship of Díaz-Canel follows the same tactics as the Castro regime, censoring and repressing members of the opposition.” As such, there can be no negotiations: “Every concession made to the [Díaz-Canel] regime is a betrayal of those who are fighting for freedom on the island.” Thus, Rubio opposed Obama’s attempts at normalizing relations with Cuba, warned against President Joe Biden recommitting to the “failed Obama Administration policy of rewarding Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel,” and is now actively blocking negotiations between the two nations. For Rubio, there is only one way forward. The current regime must end, and the era of President Rubio must begin—an illicit inauguration that Trump has already endorsed.

Beyond his own twisted personal desires, many of Rubio’s constituents and backers are also anti-Castro and anti-communist. As journalists Ryan Grim, Noah Kulwin, and José Luis Granados Ceja with Drop Site News write, “If Trump successfully lands a deal with the Cuban government that Rubio would have to sign off on, Rubio would be left to either betray his life’s cause and that of his backers in Miami, or resign in protest.”

The stakes are much higher and far more personal for Rubio than Trump. But in the end, neither care about Cuba nor its people. For Trump, regime change in Cuba will cement his legacy. For Rubio, it will mark the culmination of his childhood dream. In their equation, they win and Cuba—like Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, Guam, and so many nations before it—loses its independence and freedom.

America vs. Trump

Now is the time for nations across the Americas and the Caribbean to band together against Trump’s vile Donroe Doctrine. President Claudia Sheinbaum should be praised for her efforts to aid Cuba, but this is not a fight Mexico can win alone. Nor should it have to; this impacts all of us.

Let’s be clear: Regardless of current US relationships, no country is safe from Trump’s colonial aggression and narcissistic whims. Whether it’s betraying the Kurds in Syria or threatening NATO allies, Trump will do whatever it takes to satisfy his own ambitions. Trump’s allies in the region, like Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader and Argentine President Javier Milei, would do well to remember this.

We were too late to stop Trump’s illegal invasion of Venezuela; but we can still save Cuba. From Argentina to Canada, we must unite. We cannot allow ourselves to be at the mercy of Trump’s delusions of grandeur. We must act now to save Cuba.

“While there is broad support across the political spectrum for removing criminal aliens...”

Screech! My connection to the words I’m reading grinds to a sudden halt, an inner alarm goes off, I look away from my computer screen and briefly clutch my soul. Oh God...

The words are from a Forbes article highly critical of Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s deporter-in-chief. I was mostly in sync with it as I read. Indeed, the above sentence continues, pointing out that “the vast majority of individuals in the country without legal status have not committed serious crimes.”

Yeah, absolutely. So what’s my problem here? It amounts to this: A false, unchallenged assumption quietly emerged, manifested in the word “aliens.” Do we support the rights of aliens or do we just want them (and their children) dragged out of the United States, especially if they’re non-white? Apparently, this is the context of the major debate of the moment. Who belongs here? What remains unquestioned in the article is the significance of an imaginary line, known as the border, without which there would be no such thing as aliens. The line separates “us” from the rest of the world and severely trivializes the scope of the debate.

My call in this moment is for humanity, especially those who define themselves as Americans, to stand up not just to Trump and Miller and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but to the false reality of nationalism itself.

But a planet divided into nations is just the way things are, right? This is certainly not questioned politically. But my scream in this moment is for the media, mainstream or otherwise, to look beyond the assumed certainty of nationalism, however discomforting that may seem, and acknowledge that the human race has no “aliens.”

The larger reality here—understood by anyone with a brain—is that this is one planet. One planet! We are a collective whole. All of us are connected. I do not write these words with naïveté. Knowing this is simply the starting point, as we continue to evolve. I’m not downplaying the need we all feel for security, just eliminating the word “national” from the phrase.

As Karabi Acharya writes: “In fact, over half of all national borders were created in the 20th century. The creation of borders is for the most part a sad history marked by conflict, colonialism, and war. Borders create unnecessary and harmful barriers not just between people and resources but also ideas.”

Yeah, war—in the nuclear age. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently moved its metaphorical Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, as close to the zero hour as it’s ever been. The possibility of nuclear war plus the continuing reality of climate change ought to push all of us beyond the borders of our minds. These matters will only be solved collectively: trans-nationally. And we must solve them.

Acharya goes on:

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is a moral imperative to be open to new ideas from around the world and to question the origins of old ideas we take for granted. Global learning provides an important inflection point to question the morality of how and who decides what knowledge others see and share.

Not only have borders been historical constructs of wealth and power; they unfairly reflect whose ideas have mattered, what languages have been preferred. As places throughout history have been colonized, people were told that their own traditions don't matter and what’s important, what is to be prioritized, are the norms and concepts of the colonizers. Part of the process of setting up borders includes erasing not only people but other knowledge traditions.

I understand that national governments need borders to continue to exist, at least as they understand themselves. The world’s governments—in particular, the American government—need the help of we the people. My call in this moment is for humanity, especially those who define themselves as Americans, to stand up not just to Trump and Miller and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but to the false reality of nationalism itself. How do we open the borders of this planet? How do we start acknowledging, and healing, the consequences of two-plus millennia of colonial land theft? How do we start valuing—and learning from—those who are different from us?

What if we began opening our borders? What if we began governing nonviolently... with respect and awe for our world and its occupants? Perhaps we’d start freeing ourselves from the suicidal hell we’re caught in today. We’d definitely start pushing the hands of the Doomsday Clock backwards.

President Donald Trump hailed "historic" the agreement signed in Washington on December 4, 2025, between President Félix Tshisekedi of Congo and Rwanda's President Paul Kagame. Brokered by the US administration, this Washington Accord was supposed to end the devastating conflict in Congo that has taken millions of lives over the past three decades.

Alongside this deal, a Strategic Partnership Agreement was signed between the US and Congo. The agreement gives the US preferential access to Congolese mineral reserves, requires Congo to amend its laws and potentially its Constitution, and gives Washington a level of control over the management of mining resources through the establishment of a joint mechanism involving the two governments.

In October 2025, analyzing the pre-accord signed in June 2025 and a Regional Economic Integration Framework between Rwanda and Congo negotiated in the following months, the Oakland Institute released Shafted: The Scramble for Critical Minerals in the DRC. The report raised serious concerns about US maneuvers to control Congolese critical minerals under the guise of bringing peace to the region.

The Partnership Agreement signed in December makes these concerns legitimate. The Congolese people have been sidelined, with an agreement focused on extraction and exploitation of critical minerals and a peace deal that shockingly overlooks the need for justice and for holding perpetrators accountable. Soon after the signing of the deal, the US mining firms were already striking deals, while promises of peace and security remain wishful thinking with Rwanda and its proxy M23 continuing to occupy large swaths of land in mineral-rich eastern Congo. As a matter of fact, fighting has continued to rage with a fresh offensive launched by Rwanda and M23 in the days that followed the agreement, resulting in thousands of people killed and the capture of the strategic city of Uvira.

The lawyers and human rights defenders who have filed the case are urging the mobilization of Congolese people to preserve the sovereignty of their nation and calling on the international community to support their action and defend international law at a time it is under unprecedented threat.

While the prospect of peace remains uncertain, the government of Congo has not waited to take significant steps in the implementation of the agreement. Mid-January, it provided Washington with a shortlist of state-owned assets—including manganese, copper-cobalt, gold, and lithium projects—available to US investors. A major deal was announced soon after with US government-backed Orion Critical Mineral Consortium acquiring 40% of Glencore’s DRC copper and cobalt.

Congolese may legitimately wonder whether they are being fooled by the deal, seeing their mineral resources offered to the “peacemaker” whereas Rwanda, undeterred, continues its aggression and the extraction of Congolese minerals in Eastern Congo. This has led some to act.

On January 21, 2026, a collective of Congolese lawyers and human rights defenders filed a petition at the Constitutional Court of the Congo to challenge the constitutionality of the agreement. The lawyers argue that the partnership violates the Constitution since amendment of laws or the Constitution requires a democratic review and approval by the Congolese parliament or citizens through referendum. Specifically, it contravenes Article 214 of the Congo's Constitution, which sets out the ratification process for international agreements that involve amending national laws. The petition also contends that the agreement violates Articles 9 and 217, which uphold the principle of Congo’s sovereignty over natural resources, and Article 12, which upholds the principle of equality before the law.

According to Attorney Jean-Marie Kalonji, one of the plaintiffs: "By filing this case with the Constitutional Court, we are assuming our responsibility as Congolese citizens to protect the sovereignty of our country and safeguard our patrimony for future generations." The lawyers and human rights defenders who have filed the case are urging the mobilization of Congolese people to preserve the sovereignty of their nation and calling on the international community to support their action and defend international law at a time it is under unprecedented threat.

This legal challenge has major significance for Congo, a country that has large reserves of several critical minerals, such as copper and cobalt, and a long history of mineral extraction plagued by corruption, embezzlement, and predatory wars. The country’s mineral wealth has hardly benefited its people—still lagging behind most countries in terms of human development indicators such as access to health, education, and other standards of living. It is therefore totally legitimate for citizens to stand up for their basic rights and ensure that mining operations actually benefit the population.

Beyond Congo, this legal action has implications for other mineral-rich countries as global competition for the control of critical minerals intensifies and projections indicate steep increases in demand as well as shortfalls to be expected for some key minerals such as copper and lithium as early as the 2030s. Whereas China dominates both extraction and refinery activites, the US and other industrialized countries have set the supply of critical minerals as a vital priority for so-called green technologies as well as defense.

The 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned that mining has “severe environmental impacts” with “often […] few if any redistributive benefits for communities in regions where extraction takes place,” and instead of local development, the extraction of strategic minerals is often linked to violence, human rights abuses, and conflict. This legal challenge in the Congo highlights the stakes for millions of people around the world, including many Indigenous communities, who find their lands targeted by big powers for mineral extraction. It is essential that their rights are recognized and that they have a say in the future of their land—which is intertwined with their own future.

Ted Gioia has a popular Substack called “The Honest Broker.” Although, as an author, his books tend to focus on music and popular culture, he writes eloquently about a wide range of topics and offers insightful commentary about the global forced march toward technocratic lifestyle and governance that we’re now immersed in. In one posting, “25 Propositions about the New Romanticism,” Gioia posits that there is a new movement afoot mimicking (or, better, reflecting) the Romantic Period of the 18th century. This movement coincided with the first industrial revolution and, as a counterweight to that trend, saw a great shift toward impulses to re-enchant the world via poetry, art, and music, and reconnecting to nature. Gioia writes:

More than two years ago, I predicted the rise of a New Romanticism—a movement to counter the intense rationalization and expanding technological control of society. Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution—and people started resisting the forces of progress. Companies grew more powerful, promising productivity and prosperity. But Blake called them “dark Satanic mills” and Luddites started burning down factories—a drastic and futile step, almost the equivalent of throwing away your smartphone. Even as science and technology produced amazing results, dysfunctional behaviors sprang up everywhere. The pathbreaking literary works from the late 1700s reveal the dark side of the pervasive techno-optimism—Goethe’s novel about Werther’s suicide, the Marquis de Sade’s nasty stories, and all those gloomy Gothic novels. What happened to the Enlightenment? As the new century dawned, the creative class (as we would call it today) increasingly attacked rationalist currents that had somehow morphed into violent, intrusive forces in their lives—an 180° shift in the culture. For Blake and others, the name Newton became a term of abuse. Artists, especially poets and musicians, took the lead in this revolt. They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments—embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation.

He goes on to posit that we’re poised for a return to that modality and points out that the notion of a New Romanticism has spread “like a wildfire,” citing influencers such as Ross Barkan, Santiago Ramos, and Kate Alexandra. Gioia sees what he describes as cultural trends at the leading edge of this transformation citing popular TV series such as Pluribus and Yellowstone. But is this really happening or has Gioia just stumbled on a pocket of cultural resistance and pushback against technocracy that’s primarily a pocket of unified self-expression rather than something representing deep and substantive cultural and societal change?

The Technocratic Takeover: Alive and Well

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: robots and AI are taking over our culture, our politics, our way of life, and our relationships to each other as social beings. They’re becoming the advance guard for a new and unprecedented technocratic form of governance—the apotheosis of Western scientific materialism. Further, these new forms of governance are being carried out by unelected Big Tech overlords operating behind the scenes and in the backrooms of a mediated society well out of public view.

The tech takeover is such a massive appropriation of our social, political, and cultural life—and indeed our own biological substrate—that stoic acceptance might not be the way to go this time around.

I certainly hope that Gioia is right about a major cultural rejection of technocracy. There are indeed hopeful signs. The fundamental human values that make societies work and cohere have gotten steadily shunted aside by the technocracy takeover of culture and education—essentially becoming a new value system. This behind-the-scenes power shift has been amplified and compounded by an over-emphasis in education on STEM, corporate modalities, neo-Darwinian utilitarianism, and the continuing erosion of the humanities that began decades ago. So yes, without a doubt, we need to get “back to the garden” and return to a wider and deeper set of the kind of core values that ultimately hold societies together. Without positive shared values, societies become rudderless and fall into a kind of benighted chaos. All we need to do is look around.

All of that said, in his Substack post, Gioia missed an important component of this transition—if indeed it is coming to pass (and we can only hope). Throwing off technocracy and emerging from our involuntary digital cages also means reconnecting with the natural world, a fundamental human relationship that’s now increasingly mediated by digital devices. The need for this reconnection, this existential about-face, was a key aspect of the romanticism of the 18th century. In literature, for example, the Romantic poets were rather obsessed with it as poet Robert Bly points out in his stellar book News of the Universe (I highly recommend it.) In allowing our daily life to be shifted into an increasingly claustrophobic and self-reinforcing digital cage, we have abandoned not only our connection to the natural world but also to each other. Connecting to nature also lets us tap into the mystery of the universe, which despite human folly remains nonetheless fully intact even if absurdly rationalized by scientific reductionism. Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein were both scientists who could appreciate this. We need more like them.

The Robot Wars: No Longer Sci-Fi

In the 80s and 90s, science fiction movies and literature commonly offered themes of “robot wars” where humans were pitted against the dominance of an ugly dystopian society. Will this be our future courtesy of Elon Musk and his cohorts? Or, alternatively, will there be a mass uprising against AI and the vast AI-based robotic machinery that’s taking over both the means of production and the means of information? We humans are known for our adaptability and stoicism in difficult situations such as world wars and major disasters. That stoicism and sense of “accepting what can’t be changed” seems to be part of our psychological and perhaps even biological makeup. But the tech takeover is such a massive appropriation of our social, political, and cultural life—and indeed our own biological substrate—that stoic acceptance might not be the way to go this time around.

In the next few years, it most certainly will have finally dawned on the mass of humanity, especially in advanced Western nations, that something is badly amiss. Many will realize at a visceral level that their everyday lives are trapped in a claustrophobia-inducing closed-circuit technocratic system and control grid that robs them of autonomy and freedom while purporting to do the opposite.

I totally agree that a new romanticism is a very necessary sea change at this strange time in human history but am perhaps a bit less optimistic that it will happen—at least over the next few years. The forces of technocracy seem too powerful at the moment to be countered because so many of the necessities of everyday life depend on our attachment to this digital realm. This includes paying bills, financial maintenance, government-related necessities such as getting a license renewed, and so much more. Further, technological dependency keeps getting ratcheted up by the self-appointed masters of the universe represented by Big Tech’s unchallenged and ever-growing power. That said, I sincerely hope I’m wrong about this and Gioia is right. Time will tell.

Laura Dogu, newly appointed US envoy to Venezuela, is described by the Los Angeles Times as an appropriate choice because she “navigated crises” in Nicaragua and Honduras during periods of “social and political volatility.” What the LA Times fails to add is that it was precisely Dogu’s job to create crisis and volatility in both countries.

In Latin America she is widely regarded, for good reason, as the “US ambassador of interventions and coups.”

The LA Times appears entirely relaxed about a US diplomat’s job being to meddle in the internal politics of a country whose president the US has just kidnapped in an operation resulting in the murder over 100 people and involving the bombing of key public buildings and health facilities.

Dogu enters the fray “leveraging her experience with authoritarian regimes” and her “deep Latin American expertise.” The LA Times implies that her job is likely to be proactive, looking for ways to ease out the Chavista government and replace it with one more to Washington’s liking, even if that takes a while.

Nicaragua

Signaling that this is the case, the LA Times reporter asked right-wing opposition figures from Nicaragua for their opinions of Dogu, presumably on the basis that she is charged with working with similar quislings in her new role. Predictably, they praised her, admitting to having had clandestine meetings with her when she was based in the country and noting her public support for opposition groups.

Dogu was US ambassador in Managua from 2015 until October 2018, a period coinciding with the preparations and then the coup attempt that began in April 2018 and was defeated in July. At the start of her term, she had relatively cordial relations with the government. That changed after President Daniel Ortega was reelected in 2016 with an increased popular mandate. It became clear to Washington that electoral means to oust the Sandinistas lacked sufficient public support.

Instead, as the State Department admitted, the US concentrated their efforts on “civil society” groups led by opposition figures, “limiting their contact” with the elected government. It later emerged that, in the run-up to the April 2018 insurrection, millions of dollars were spent promoting such groups.

When the coup attempt fizzled, President Ortega explicitly identified Laura Dogu, as Washington’s representative, of being “the leader and financier of this conspiracy, the destruction, the fires, the torture, the disrespect for human dignity, the desecration of corpses, and other acts carried out with cruelty against all Nicaraguans marked by the great sin of being Sandinistas.” Within three months, Washington replaced her.

Honduras

In Honduras, Xiomara Castro of the progressive Libre Party became president in January 2022. Laura Dogu arrived in Tegucigalpa as US ambassador just three months later.

The Center for Political and Economic Research (CEPR) catalogued some of her egregious interferences including with energy and tax reforms, creation of a Constitutional Tribunal, replacement of the attorney general, and the building of a prison.

By 2023, Dogu was already drawing criticism from the Honduran foreign minister, who asked her to “stop commenting on internal Honduran matters.” He criticized her again for similar reasons, in December 2024, after she held a series of meetings with NGOs critical of the government.

In August 2024, President Castro complained about Dogu, after the US diplomat criticized Honduran officials for meeting with their counterparts in Caracas. The ambassador characterized this meeting as “sitting next to a drug trafficker."

Then after a conflict with Dogu over Honduras’s extradition treaty with the US in September 2024 and a spate of rumors about the president’s family, Castro warned that a coup attempt was underway. Dogu concluded her term in Honduras before the presidential elections at the end of 2025, where the US did, in fact, decisively interfere.

Venezuela

The LA Times ingenuously commented that Dogu was “an unusual pick signaling a strategic shift in US policy.” It was neither. US policy remains regime change, but the tactics have shifted in response to the successful and unified resistance of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Venezuelan analyst Francisco Rodriguez noted: “Laura Dogu presented credentials as diplomatic representative of the US to the government of [acting President] Delcy Rodríguez today, that would count as an act of formal recognition.”

As for Dogu being “an unusual pick,” her record, as shown above, suggests a continuation of business as usual. CEPR put it bluntly: “Dogu’s appointment suggests that the administration sought someone with experience in aggressively interfering in a host country’s domestic affairs.”

There is nothing unusual about that. Between 1898 and 1994, the US perpetrated coups and government changes in Latin America at least 41 times. Dogu now presides over just another such attempt. The only reasons Washington itself hasn’t suffered a coup, Latin Americans quip, is because there is no US embassy there.

Far from breaking with the past, Dogu actually invokes it: “We never left the Cold War in Latin America,” she said.

Dogu recently tweeted: “Today I met with Delcy Rodríguez and Jorge Rodríguez to reiterate the three phases that @SecRubio has outlined regarding Venezuela: stabilization, economic recovery and reconciliation, and transition.”

The comment drew an immediate repudiation from the aforementioned Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela’s National Assembly. The failure by Dogu to refer to him and acting President Delcy Rodríguez by their formal titles is a disrespectful snub. He characterized her remarks as “diplomatic blackmail” and a “colonial roadmap.” The Venezuelan leadership may have a gun held to their heads, but they continue to respond militantly.

For now, Dogu is concentrating on the “stabilization and economic recovery” phases of the Rubio dictate. The more contentious third phase will be “transition.”

In a telling pivot from its previous myth-making that the “opposition [is] more unified than ever,” the LA Times now admits that Dogu is just the right official to be foisted on Venezuela because of her experience navigating “fragmented opposition movements.” The opposition to the Chavista government has long been fractious despite hundreds of millions of dollars pumped into “democracy promotion” by the US.

Contrary to the myths in the corporate press, María Corina Machado and her hand-picked surrogate Edmundo González Urrutia may not be the people’s choice in Venezuela. No lesser authority than Donald Trump himself commented that Machado “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”

If the claims that the opposition won the July 2024 presidential by a 70% landslide were credible, why didn’t González present his evidence when summoned by Venezuela’s supreme court? Failing to do so left no constitutional basis for him to be declared the winner.

But that was the whole point of the Washington’s interference in backing an astroturf opposition with more traction inside the Beltway than in Caracas. The US objective was not to win the contest but to delegitimize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The deadly sanctions—illegal unilateral coercive measures—were explicitly designed as collective punishment to erode Maduro’s authority with his compatriots.

And when that failed and the Bolivarian Revolution prevailed, Washington escalated further, culminating in the January 3 kidnapping of a constitutional head of state. That military action formed part of its hybrid war, accompanied by sustained demonization of Maduro before the US public.

Conclusion

Laura Dogu’s appointment ultimately signals not innovation but continuity: a recalibration of tactics in pursuit of the same objective that has defined US policy toward the Bolivarian Revolution for decades—regime change through pressure, attrition, and delegitimization. Whether branded as “stabilization,” “economic recovery,” or “transition,” the underlying premise remains that Venezuela’s political future should be shaped in Washington, not Caracas.

Yet the record in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Venezuela itself suggests that external coercion has limits. Dogu’s mission will test not only Venezuela’s resilience but also the durability of the unremitting US strategy of Latin American interventions.

Donald Trump hasn’t forgotten about the Insurrection Act, and neither should you. In the face of plummeting poll numbers and public outcry over the deaths of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, Trump may appear to be retreating from his threats to deploy the military to Minneapolis and other blue state cities, but any retreat is likely to prove temporary and tactical rather than a reversal of policy.

Throughout his career, Trump has been guided by the “lessons” he learned as a young real estate hustler from his odious one-time mentor and fixer Roy Cohn: Never retreat, apologize, or admit wrongdoing, and always remain on the offensive. In keeping with Cohn’s teachings, Trump has made threats to invoke the Insurrection Act dating to June 2020, when he vowed to use it to quell mass demonstrations related to the murder of George Floyd. He was reportedly restrained at the time by former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and other “grown-ups” in his first administration.

This time around, there are no grown-ups in the building.

Since retaking the White House, Trump has doubled down on this threat. On the first day of his second term, he issued a presidential proclamation declaring a state of emergency at the southern border that directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security head Kristi Noem to develop plans, including using the Insurrection Act, to combat the now-familiar fantasy “invasion” of “cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, and unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries.” The proclamation laid the groundwork for Trump’s mass-deportation program and for giving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol the largest budgets of any police agencies in the country.

Invoking the Insurrection Act would be the biggest gambit of all, likely resulting in a historic showdown before the Supreme Court.

Trump again threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act last June, in response to protests in Los Angeles, and then again in October over demonstrations in Chicago. Although he stopped short in both instances, he has ramped up the rhetoric to new heights in reaction to the growing resistance movement in Minneapolis. Taking to Truth Social on January 15, he warned:

If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State.

Despite removing Border Patrol “commander at large” Greg Bovino from Minneapolis on January 26 in a gesture some observers saw as a modest measure of conciliation, the threats have escalated.

On January 27, Trump received a letter from the House Freedom Caucus, urging him to use ”all tools necessary,” including the Insurrection Act, “to maintain order in the face of unlawful obstructions and assemblages that prevent the enforcement of the laws of the United States.” Bolstered by the endorsement, Trump returned to Truth Social three days later to denounce Pretti as an “Agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist.” And in another Truth Social screed on January 31, he pledged to “guard, and very powerfully so, any and all Federal Buildings that are being attacked by these highly paid Lunatics, Agitators, and Insurrectionists.” In a veiled reference to Pretti, he added that anyone caught “punching or kicking the headlights of our cars” or throwing bricks or rocks “at our vehicles, or at our Patriot Warriors […] will suffer an equal, or more, consequence.”

Whether Trump ultimately pulls the Insurrection Act trigger may depend on how he applies another of Roy Cohn’s lessons: Use the legal system to crush critics and opponents. Trump’s affinity for litigation is legendary. He has been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits, including several defamation actions taken against major media outlets like the New York Times, ABC, and CBS. In his second term, he has transformed the Department of Justice into his personal law firm, imposing sanctions on liberal law firms and elite universities by executive orders, and launching prosecutions against former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, and scores of rank-and-file anti-ICE protesters across the country. Even when the gambits fail, as they have with Comey and James, they send the chilling message that no one who defies or offends the president is safe.

Invoking the Insurrection Act would be the biggest gambit of all, likely resulting in a historic showdown before the Supreme Court. Trump has enjoyed extraordinary success in his Supreme Court cases, and with three of his nominees on the bench, he has reason to be optimistic about any final confrontation. Still, the outcome of any such move is uncertain.

In December, the court dealt Trump a surprising setback with an interim “shadow-docket” ruling (Trump v. Illinois) that blocked him from deploying National Guard troops in and around Chicago. The ruling was widely praised by liberal legal commentators, who saw it as a hopeful sign that the nation’s highest judicial body was willing to stand up to Trump’s incessant power grabs, at least on the use of the military for domestic law-enforcement purposes.

Unfortunately, the decision was temporary—all interim orders are—and narrow. It was also a split decision, with Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissenting.

At issue in the case was the administration’s interpretation of a vague phrase in a statute that empowers the president to federalize members of the Guard if he is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.” The administration argued the phrase referred to the inability of federal civilian law enforcement to maintain order during protests. The majority ruled instead that the phrase referred to the regular military, and that because Trump had not attempted to deploy the military and shown that it was unable to maintain order, he had not met the statute’s requirements.

As Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in a concurring opinion, the decision said nothing about the president’s authority to invoke the Insurrection Act. Rather, Kavanaugh suggested, it opened the door for Trump to proceed. “One apparent ramification of the court’s opinion is that it could cause the president to use the US military more than the National Guard to protect federal personnel and property in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote.

To be sure, any invocation of the Insurrection Act would face legal challenges over whether the country is facing an actual rebellion, and the extent to which the military, if activated, is subject to the same constitutional restraints as civilian law enforcement. The challenges could succeed at the district court level, but from there, all bets would be off. The mad king would no doubt follow the advice of his erstwhile mentor, refuse to retreat, and ask his friends on the Supreme Court to intervene and allow his attacks to continue.

On the evening of January 8, a friend and I parked our car in Minneapolis' Powderhorn neighborhood where Renee Good—a white, unarmed mother of three—was murdered by a federal agent. We proceeded on foot because mourners had cordoned off several blocks of Portland Avenue into a mostly quiet commons where people, instead of passing by, wandered and conversed. We walked for perhaps 1,000 feet among strangers, and we discovered a crime scene that had been transformed, overnight, into a place of pilgrimage.

Traveling south, we passed through two barricades. At the first, two young men stood behind a section of mobile fence that usually indicates a detour at a construction site. A traffic sign hanging on the fence was overwritten with a red spray-painted message: Fuck ICE. The men calmly waved their arms to alert oncoming traffic that this was a turning point.

Two white tents stood behind the second barricade, composed of wooden pallets, traffic cones, and plastic trash bins. Beneath these tents, volunteers distributed bottles of water and food from foil trays. They chatted amiably and laughed with one another. Further north, fires burned in a pair of steel barrels, one near and one far, lighting hands and faces within the outer dark.

Beyond the second blaze and across 33rd Street, we joined a broken circle of those holding vigil. With phones aglow, people recorded the flickering candles. They circled the profusion of frozen flowers. Mostly, they stood in silence with their arms around friends and loved ones.

If I tell my spouse I'm horrified that a masked gunman, on government payroll, killed a nonviolent protester, and I do nothing else, then have I chosen to accept it?

On the way back to our car—two middle-aged white men with homes in neighborhoods full of unlocked doors—we dodged black puddles, shuffled across patches of ice, and I thought of "A Hanging," George Orwell's masterwork on the numbing agents of distance and privilege.

In the essay, Orwell, who worked as an Imperial Police Officer from 1922 to 1927, describes how the hanging of a Burmese prisoner by British jailers is disrupted by unexpected empathies. A dog sprints toward the prisoner and licks his face; the prisoner uses a few of his final steps to avoid a puddle and keep his feet dry. Close enough to notice these tiny bursts of vitality, the narrator begins to feel sorrow over the particularity of the man's existence and how any single death leaves us all "with one mind less, one world less."

Then, when his noose is fixed, the prisoner begins to chant the name of his god from the gallows. And that is too much, too near, an intolerable call to attention for the jailers, warders, and magistrates standing yards away. So, the superintendent snaps the order, the prisoner is "vanished," and the rope begins "twisting on itself".

What happens next, though, is what allows the essay to transcend time, space, and experience—what makes it so awfully personal. Clearly shaken, the superintendent leads Orwell and his colleagues out of the gallows yard, past other men waiting to be hung. Upon entering the central yard, they find some reprieve: Convicts, not yet condemned, eating their breakfast—a "jolly scene, after the hanging."

The overseers begin to joke about past executions, and by the time they exit the prison gates, everyone is laughing. The further they flee, the better they feel. At last, they retrieve a bottle of whiskey from the superintendent's car and put the matter fully behind them. How far behind? With a final sentence, Orwell reminds us: "The dead man was a hundred yards away."

Throughout the essay, Orwell demonstrates how it's easier to be someone standing by than to be someone standing beside. It's easier to look on from afar than to see what is near. It's more comfortable to understand our choices vaguely, as the instruments of an order that is beyond our control, rather than specifically, as forces that inflict pain on strangers. In the end, it is preferable to regard violence inflicted on other people as if it were weather visiting some faraway place.

As we walked away from the streetlight where Renee Good's car came to a stop—one mind less, one world less—my own mind began to churn. What level of acceptance have distance and privilege inspired in me? If I tell my spouse I'm horrified that a masked gunman, on government payroll, killed a nonviolent protester, and I do nothing else, then have I chosen to accept it? What if I attend this vigil and nothing more, how many yards from the execution will I be? Far enough to put it behind me?

Today, Orwell's implicit critique of imperial insensitivity could be read as a tremor that presaged the earthquake of Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, an explicit indictment of Americans' privileged addiction to normalcy and of our willingness to accept mass murder, in Gaza and so many other places, as a normal outcome of American life.

"Perhaps [what] it comes to, in the end, is some pathetic adherence to the idea that certain peoples simply need to be crushed," El Akkad writes. "But whoever subscribes to this idea should at least have the spine to embrace it. To look upon the body of the little girl hanging from the wall, limbs severed by the force of the blast, and say: I'm fine with this, I am this."

A block from where Renee Good's bullet-torn body lay 36 hours earlier, I could sense in myself this shameful fear that my own normalcy might be discontinued. I could already feel that unconscious scheming to which I, like so many Americans, am accustomed. How much do I have to circumscribe my role and responsibilities to feel like I am fine with this? How far do I have to walk before I begin to feel that her body doesn't exist?

This model is simple. It requires us to put our bodies on the line and to ask ourselves what, precisely, are we giving up to alleviate the suffering of others?

As we passed back through the penultimate barricade, a man called out to us. With one hand, he lifted the topmost cup from a small Styrofoam tower. With the other, he depressed a black air pot. Then, he passed the steaming cup into my freezing hands, and the aroma of chai spices entered my lungs. "Somali tea," he smiled. "Black tea with milk."

Awakened, I lifted my eyes again to the sudden solidarity that kept Portland Avenue from returning to normal. The convivial spirit of confrontation reminded me of experiences I'd had in Guatemala 20 years earlier, living and volunteering among people who instinctively placed their bodies on the line without regard for the precious barriers of privilege. The conversion of a crime scene—by people who appreciate the consequences of vanishing bodies better than me—into a sanctuary for insubordinate grief felt powerfully abnormal. These people were breaking routines and beginning to engage in actual resistance.

"Th[e] work of leaving," El Akkad writes, "of aiming to challenge power on the field where it maintains the least glaring asymmetry, demands one answer the question: What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else's suffering?"

"A Hanging" showcases the usual answer offered by people, like me, who are either enriched by empire or not harmed by its enrichment. That answer is nothing. Of course, our obligation—in the past, in the future, and certainly now—is to ask and answer this question differently.

Presently, thousands of Minneapolitans are modeling this transformation by standing watch on street corners armed with nothing but whistles, by organizing direct action that results in the arrest of protesters by the busload, by providing food and shelter to migrants targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and by actively and publicly grieving each new murder, every loss of human life.

This model is simple. It requires us to put our bodies on the line and to ask ourselves what, precisely, are we giving up to alleviate the suffering of others? It requires us to keep stepping forward and to continue asking: Are we risking something valuable enough to register in the conscience of strangers? Are we risking enough to register as a nonviolent threat to the architects of unconscionable violence? It requires us to persist, further and further beyond the fortified walls of our comfort zones, until our answers to these questions are overwhelmingly affirmative.

This model is also a map. It shows us how to leave the open space of privilege and move toward the center of the proverbial prison where a long line of people wait to be murdered with our money. And yet, if we follow this map, then freedom may be our reward.

If we follow, then we will be free to help ourselves and others. We will be free to express, with our whole body, what we were only willing to say to close friends or trusted colleagues in the past. We will be free to say: No, I am not this. I am changed.

Notice to Donald Trump and his MAGA myrmidons: It’s too late by centuries to turn the United States of American “back” into the ethnically homogenous nation for white people which it never was. And that’s nothing to be disappointed about.

Most Americans aren’t swallowing your so-called jokes depicting African-Americans as apes, your white supremacist lies about Haitians “eating the pets,” your slanders of law-abiding farmworkers as the “worst of the worst,” your creepy wails about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America, your demand we exclude refugees who come from what you term “sh**-hole countries.”

Fear and hatred are all you offer, and relief from an imaginary conspiracy of Jews and elites which you claim are plotting to “replace” white Americans with invaders from abroad.

The reality: Americans have always been a polyglot people of multiple races and ethnicities. We did not become a multi-national, multi-ethnic people because of a scheme to open our borders. Rather, our nation and its leaders—through ambition to expand the United States—incorporated other peoples into the American mix from our earliest days. Our true history is one of diversity, even if equity and inclusion have been aspirational.

If the Anglo-Saxon whites who first colonized North America wanted it to be an exclusive homeland for white people, they should not have brought half a million enchained Africans to American shores. By the time the Constitution was adopted, the result was that one in five residents of the new nation were enslaved or free Black people.

If whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for Anglo-Saxon white people, President Thomas Jefferson should not have made the Louisiana Purchase, bringing people of French, Spanish and African ancestry and still more Native American tribal nations into the territory of the United States.

If Anglo-Saxon whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for white people, pro-slavery forces should not have launched the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 to seize almost half of what had been Mexico, and incorporate its Mexican population into the enlarged United States.

If Anglo-Saxon whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for white people, we shouldn’t have employed tens of thousands of Chinese immigrant workers to build the Transcontinental Railroad, man the mines, and perform the other dangerous and dirty work that helped build the West.

And for that matter, if Anglo-Saxon whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for “pure-bred” white people, they should not have encouraged the immigration of millions of Europeans who, at the turn of the Twentieth Century, weren’t really regarded as “white”: Irish, Italians, Poles and Slavs, eastern European Jews and others—“the wretched refuse of [Europe’s] teeming shores”—to work the mills and mines, the factories and farms of America.

Today desperate, hopeful and hardworking immigrants come from the lands south of our border, from India, from China, from the Dominican Republic. Many are fleeing horrific gang violence, persecution, or the impacts of climate change on their native lands. Undocumented immigrants—the so-called “invaders”—commonly do work native-born Americans won’t do.

Those without documentation provide most of the farm labor force. Trump’s own Labor Department has acknowledged that “agricultural work requires a distinct set of skills and is among the most physically demanding and hazardous occupations in the U.S. labor market.” “Such jobs are still not viewed as viable alternatives for many [U.S.-born] workers.”

Similarly, the labor of undocumented immigrants is critical to the meatpacking industry, food processing, construction, and elder care. Immigrants are not “replacing” American citizens—they are filling needs and struggling for a good life for themselves and their children. That’s what immigrants have always done.

It’s too late, Mr. Trump, for your sleazy appeals to racial hatred. Most Americans know that seeking to degrade others because of their race or ethnicity is deeply wrong—a violation of the values of fairness and decency we struggle to live up to, but seldom spurn entirely.

Our nation and the world have real problems—climate change, shrinking opportunity, inequality and poverty, violence and unnecessary suffering. But it has become clear to more and more Americans that your program of meanness, malice, and spleen are not the solution. It is time for you to get out of the way.

For decades, American leaders have described economic sanctions as the “peaceful alternative” to war—the space between diplomacy and bombs. Sanctions, we are told, are restraint.

But what happens when economic pressure shuts down power grids? When oil flows are deliberately constricted? When hospitals lose electricity, water systems falter, airports close, and entire populations endure 24-hour blackouts?

At what point does economic coercion stop being diplomacy and begin resembling siege?

Cuba today offers a sobering case study. Severe fuel shortages have led to prolonged blackouts, aviation fuel depletion, transportation paralysis, and mounting strain on hospitals and water systems. The United Nations has warned that without restored energy flows, the country risks systemic collapse. The Trump administration’s recent emergency measures—including secondary tariffs aimed at countries supplying oil to Cuba—mark a structural shift. The pressure is no longer confined to bilateral embargo. It now reaches third countries and energy supply chains.

Sanctions are often described as the alternative to war. But when structured to constrict energy lifelines and induce systemic deprivation, they can become war by other means.

This is not a narrow trade dispute. It is energy denial.

And energy is the backbone of civilian life.

The United States may have legitimate national security concerns regarding Cuba—allegations of intelligence cooperation with rival powers, human rights violations, regional instability. Those concerns deserve serious evaluation. But the constitutional question remains: When economic measures are structured in ways that foreseeably disrupt essential civilian infrastructure, should they remain insulated from the congressional scrutiny required for military hostilities?

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was enacted in the shadow of Vietnam. Its purpose was simple: to ensure that decisions that risk war reflect the “collective judgment” of both Congress and the President. If US armed forces are introduced into hostilities, the president must report to Congress within 48 hours. Within 60 days, Congress must authorize the action—or it must end.

The resolution was designed to prevent unilateral executive entanglement in war.

But it was written for a world of tanks and troops.

It does not contemplate 21st-century economic statecraft—where power grids can be destabilized without a single soldier crossing a border, and where sanctions regimes can function, in practice, like blockades.

Modern sanctions are not limited to asset freezes or visa bans. Increasingly, they target energy flows, banking systems, insurance markets, and shipping networks. They employ secondary penalties—punishing third countries that engage in prohibited commerce. They leverage emergency declarations that can persist for years, even decades.

When economic measures constrict oil—the fuel that powers electricity generation, water purification, hospitals, refrigeration, aviation, and transportation—their societal impact can mirror the effects of siege warfare.

Yet constitutionally, they are treated as routine foreign commerce regulation.

That gap is no longer sustainable.

Economic power is national power. When wielded coercively at scale, it can destabilize regions, accelerate migration crises, and generate humanitarian consequences that reverberate far beyond the intended target. It can entrench ruling elites rather than dislodge them. It can undermine US credibility. And it can blur the line between pressure and punishment.

Congress must modernize the War Powers Resolution to reflect this reality.

The reform need not prohibit sanctions. Nor should it weaken legitimate national security tools. But it should establish guardrails.

At minimum, Congress should require that when emergency-based economic measures:

• Target essential civilian infrastructure such as energy or water systems;
• Impose extraterritorial penalties on third countries;
• Produce measurable humanitarian strain; and
• Are explicitly intended to compel regime-level political change;

the president must submit a formal report to Congress within 48 hours—just as required when troops are introduced into hostilities.

And within 60 days, Congress should vote to authorize, modify, or terminate those measures.

This would not equate sanctions with war. It would not declare economic pressure unconstitutional. It would simply restore shared judgment in situations where economic instruments produce effects historically associated with warfare.

Emergency powers were designed for extraordinary threats—not for structural permanence. When emergency authorities become normalized, oversight attenuates. The longer a “national emergency” persists, the less it resembles an emergency.

If sanctions are genuinely necessary to protect US security, Congress should be willing to stand behind them. If they are not, Congress should have the institutional responsibility to recalibrate them.

Democratic accountability strengthens national power; it does not weaken it.

Cuba’s current trajectory underscores the urgency. Prolonged blackouts and energy scarcity do not fall neatly on government officials alone. They cascade through hospitals, schools, food storage, transportation, and tourism. They shape migration patterns and regional stability. They can generate humanitarian crises that require international response.

History offers caution. Decades of sanctions in Cuba have not produced regime change. Studies of sanctions more broadly show limited success in transforming consolidated political systems. More often, sanctions harden elites, shift burdens onto civilians, and narrow diplomatic space.

That does not mean sanctions have no role. It means they must be evaluated not only for intent, but for effect.

Strength is not measured solely by the ability to impose pressure. It is measured by the wisdom to calibrate it.

The United States is most credible when it demonstrates that its power operates within constitutional boundaries. Updating the War Powers Resolution to address large-scale economic coercion would signal that democratic oversight keeps pace with modern instruments of statecraft.

To the Trump administration: Emergency authority carries immense responsibility. Energy denial that risks humanitarian collapse may not ultimately advance US security interests. Recalibration—maintaining targeted pressure while preventing civilian infrastructure breakdown—reflects prudence, not weakness.

To Congress: Your war powers are not limited to bullets and bombs. They extend to the conditions that make conflict more likely. Modernize the law.

To scholars, institutions, and civil society: Engage respectfully, but firmly. Present data. Highlight humanitarian indicators. Encourage constitutional balance. The debate should not be partisan. It should be structural.

Sanctions are often described as the alternative to war. But when structured to constrict energy lifelines and induce systemic deprivation, they can become war by other means.

The War Powers Resolution was born of a constitutional reckoning. Half a century later, economic statecraft demands another.

History will not ask whether America had power. It will ask whether it used that power wisely—and whether it subjected that power to the discipline of democracy.

For months now, Democrats have expressed frustration with their party’s inability to oppose Trump 2.0 and the failure to construct an alternative. In October 2025, the Pew Research Foundation found that

• Two-thirds of Democrats say they are frustrated with the Democratic Party. Fewer than half of Republicans (40%) say the same of the GOP.
• Three-in-ten Democrats also say their own party makes them feel angry. Just 19% of Republicans say the same of their own party.
• Half of Democrats say their party makes them feel hopeful, compared with 69% of Republicans who say the same of the GOP.
• Just 29% of Democrats say the Democratic Party makes them feel proud; 52% of Republicans say their party evokes feelings of pride.

The Pew research builds on earlier research from the AP-NORC. In an open-ended question (meaning that respondents are free to volunteer anything), roughly 15% of Democrats described their party using words like "weak," or "apathetic," while an additional 10% believe it is broadly "ineffective" or "disorganized." Only 2 in 10 (20%) Democrats use positive words to describe their party. The most popular positive adjectives are “empathetic” and “inclusive.”

There are certainly Democrats on Capitol Hill who express frustration with their party for not doing enough to oppose President Donald Trump and put forth an alternative. Though he is not technically a Democrat (he is an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats), Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is a regular critic of the Democratic Party. Over the last few months, Sanders has been joined by others. The Washington Post reported back in September 2025 that Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has come to join those dissatisfied with the Democratic response to Trump:

During more than two decades in Congress, Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland has earned a reputation as a mainstream policy wonk and loyal lieutenant to Democratic leaders. So, it came as something of a shock this month when Van Hollen derided top Democrats for failing to endorse New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist. “Many Democratic members of the Senate and the House representing New York have stayed on the sidelines” in the race, even as Mamdani has captured the public’s imagination by focusing on “ensuring that people can afford to live in the place where they work,” Van Hollen told a cheering crowd of party activists in Des Moines. “That kind of spineless politics is what people are sick of.”

Democrat rank and file were frustrated by their party’s breaking ranks in the Senate on the government shutdown in November. To many Democrats, including a number of Democrats on Capitol Hill, their party ended the shutdown without winning anything. MS described the situation as:

By breaking ranks, the eight Democrats effectively stripped their caucus of leverage to force an extension of the healthcare tax credits—and decided on their own, how the party’s shutdown strategy would end. It came as a shock to most Democrats.

Disgruntled Democrats have not had many opportunities to express their frustration with their party. There have not been any real Democratic primaries. All of this changed in dramatic form with the Democratic primary February 5 for New Jersey’s vacant 11th District (the former incumbent Mikie Sherrill was elected New Jersey governor). It is certainly fair to say that the 11th District is a Democratic one, but it is not one where you would expect a progressive to do well. It is mostly affluent suburbs where many commute to work in New York City.

In a result that shocked the Democratic establishment in both New Jersey and Washington, DC, Analilia Mejia, director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, and the political director for Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, won a tightly contested multi-candidate field including former Congressman Tom Malinowski who had the backing of New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim. Also in the race was Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way and Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill.

In her campaign, Mejia spent far less than her opponents and lacked endorsement by county Democratic officials. She compensated for this by building an impressive get-out-the-vote operation and by emphasizing her opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Mejia’s campaign was also helped by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which spent over $2 million in negative advertising attacking Malinowski. Many of the ads attacked him for a vote connected to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) funding; the group had made it clear they felt Malinowski’s openness to conditioning aid to Israel was not sufficiently supportive of Israel. AIPAC’s involvement in the race certainly hurt Malinowski, but I doubt whether it was decisive. Mejia’s win was the result of her longtime organizing in New Jersey and fact that her campaign’s message fit the mood of the electorate.

New York Times columnist Michele Goldberg recounts her conversation with a longtime New Jersey pollster:

But the longtime New Jersey pollster Patrick Murray told me he wasn’t surprised, because “this is an incredibly angry Democratic electorate.” New Jersey suburbanites, he argues, didn’t suddenly turn into democratic socialists. But they think the Democratic establishment has been feckless, and they want representatives who won’t consult a focus group before battling the president. “The underlying message,” he said, is that Democratic voters believe their party “should be on a war footing with Donald Trump.”

Mejia still must win a special general election in April before she can take her seat in Congress. However, given the district’s partisan tilt, it seems like a pretty safe bet.

The special primary election in New Jersey's 11th Congressional District was the first real chance Democrats have had to express their disapproval of the party leadership. It will certainly not be the last opportunity for restive Democrats to express their frustrations with their party. Based on what happened in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, status-quo Democrats have much to be worried about. On February 11, Axios reported on a conversation with Sen. Sanders:

Asked in a phone interview where else he thinks the left can win upset victories, Sanders pointed to a "Fighting Oligarchy" rally he is doing on Friday with Nida Allam, who is challenging Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-NC). "That might be another area where progressives can win a strong victory," he said. Brad Lander, the former New York City comptroller challenging Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), also has "a strong chance to win," Sanders said.

Mejia’s win in New Jersey may well be the harbinger of more wins for the left wing of the Democratic Party as Democrats look to send a message to their leadership on Capitol Hill. The Democratic leadership in Washington, DC has yet to come to terms with how frustrated and angry ordinary Democrats are not only with Trump but with their leadership as well.

Trump is lying about ICE arrests. He said his deportation machine would go after only the “worst of the worst.”

According to newly leaked data from the Department of Homeland Security, less than 14 percent of the 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in the past year have either been charged with or convicted of violent crimes.

The vast majority of immigrants jailed by ICE have no criminal record at all. A few have previously been charged with or convicted of nonviolent offenses, such as overstaying their visas or permission to be in the country.

(In the past, alleged violations of U.S. immigration laws were normally adjudicated by Justice Department immigration judges in civil — not criminal — proceedings.)

A large proportion of the people ICE has arrested are now in jail — some 73,000 — and being held without bail. They’re in what the Department of Homeland Security calls “detention facilities.”

Many lack adequate medical attention.

The Times reported this morning that a New Jersey woman, Leqaa Kordia, who has been held at the Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, for nearly a year, suffered a seizure after she fell and hit her head. She was involved in an pro-Palestinian demonstration at Columbia University in 2024 and detained for overstaying her visa, but has never been charged with a crime. A judge has twice ruled that she is not a threat to the United States.

Meanwhile, a federal judge has ordered an external monitor to oversee California’s largest immigration detention center, California City Detention Facility, citing “shockingly deficient” medical care, including cases where detainees were denied medication for serious conditions.

A 2025 U.S. Senate investigation uncovered dozens of cases of medical neglect, with instances of detainees left without care for days and others being forced to compete for clean water.

Reports from early 2026 indicate that even children in family detention centers face poor conditions, including being returned to custody after hospitalization for severe illness without receiving necessary medication.

People held in detention facilities are deprived of the most basic means of communication to connect with their lawyers and the rest of the outside world, including phones, mail, and email. Some have been split off from the rest of their families, held hundreds if not thousands of miles away from their loved ones. Some of them are children.

Many are in the United States legally, awaiting determinations about their status as refugees fleeing violence or retribution in their home countries. Or they have green cards that would normally allow them to remain in the United States. Others have been in the United States for decades as law-abiding members of their communities.

They are hardly the “worst of the worst.” Many are like our parents or grandparents or great-grandparents who came to the United States seeking better lives. We are a nation of immigrants. While this doesn’t excuse being here without proper documentation, it doesn’t justify the draconian and inhumane measures being utilized by the Trump regime.

These leaked data from the Department of Homeland Security have not received the news coverage they deserve.

Moreover, these data pertain only to ICE. They don’t include arrests by Border Patrol agents deployed by the Trump administration to places far away from the U.S.-Mexico border, such as Chicago and Minneapolis, where Border Patrol agents have undertaken aggressive and sweeping arrest operations, targeting day laborers at Home Depot parking lots and stopping people — including U.S. citizens — to question them about their immigration status.

This is a moral blight on America, a crime against humanity. As Americans, we are complicit.

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon is under federal indictment for participating in a Minnesota protest group’s obstruction of a church service. He is scheduled to be arraigned Friday. News of his prosecution took me back more than five decades to when I was a young university professor in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). At that time, President Mobutu Sese Seko’s government threatened to arrest me for my alleged involvement in student disruptions.

In both cases, increasingly authoritarian governments decided to clamp down on independent observers—journalists or others—who sympathized with community activists. To do so, they distorted what actually happened to serve their political interests. Yet, I suspect that the last person President Donald Trump wants to be compared to is a corrupt, fallen, disgraced African dictator.

In December 1970, my university screeched to a halt as the entire student body boycotted classes. With support from Zairian professors and staff, the students called for the replacement of the Protestant missionary rector, criticized for incompetence and racism. From afar, I sympathized with their position. One day, with the university offering no information on the conflict, I accepted an invitation to hop onto a student bus. As a curious political scientist, I hoped to learn more about what my students were thinking. Arriving at a dormitory, I found myself enveloped in a crowd slowly moving forward. Suddenly, I found myself standing before a mock coffin for the rector emblazoned, “Rest in Peace.” Reaching for humor, I tossed a vine I had picked up onto the coffin. Then I walked away, seeing no opportunity for discussion.

Encountering one of my best students on campus a day or two later, I asked him what was happening with his movement. We discussed the students’ perspective and actions. I posed questions in the style of a neutral reporter or scholar. At a certain point, he reiterated the students’ expressed belief that the rector had discouraged his better qualified, potential replacement. Out of sympathy with the student demands and wanting to equalize our exchange, I shared relevant information I had, which appeared to confirm their suspicion. In doing so, I later realized, I yielded to an impulse that deserved more scrutiny.

Whether or not Lemon is convicted, the Trump administration’s approach of pursuing individuals who can be loosely linked to disruptive demonstrations is likely to continue.

Soon, I was surprised to learn that the rector’s supporters in the university were spreading exaggerated and false versions of my involvement in the protests. I was said to have knelt before the coffin, worked to replace a Protestant rector with a Jewish one, and actively participated in students’ subsequent siege, including minor violence, of university trustees’ meeting in a private home. Declassified State Department records show that Mobutu, his minister of the interior, and the American ambassador believed these baseless reports. I was ordered to fly with my family 800 miles to the capital and report to the minister. Over 10 anxious days, I finally managed to persuade the minister that my case should be “closed.”

Last month, Don Lemon live streamed a community protest group’s disruption of a religious service in a St. Paul, Minnesota church. In the context of community resistance to Immigration and Custom Enforcement abuses, the group had discovered that one of the pastors was an important ICE official. Lemon and eight others were charged under the federal FACE Act with conspiring “to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate” (including chants, yelling, and physical obstruction) multiple persons in the free exercise of religion—causing termination of the service, parishioners’ flight, emergency planning, and children’s fears.

Lemon himself was accused of certain “overt acts“ in and around the church:

• Reporting on parishioners' responses to the mayhem, including a young man crying and congregants departing, he called them understandable since the “whole point [of the operation is to disrupt;”
• Physically obstructing, along with two other protesters, the pastor on three sides while peppering him with questions and ignoring his request to leave immediately; and
• Physically obstructing some parishioners attempting to leave.

Some MAGA activists condemned Lemon and the others for “storming” the church and committing an anti-Christian hate crime.

Yet, a detailed examination of Lemon’s hour-long live-stream video of the event shows a far different reality. He is mainly observing and interviewing—as I was in the Congo—plus publicly reporting on what he sees. Inside the church, he tells parishioners and viewers several times that he is “chronicling and reporting” and “not part of the activists.” He interviews protesters, the pastor, and parishioners, generally seeking their views in a neutral way. Sometimes his questioning cites protesters’ grievances, but he generally does not insist upon them. It is also clear from the video that he and nearby protesters are not obstructing the pastor, nor are they preventing parishioners from leaving the church.

Like me, Lemon indicates sympathy with the protesters, invoking the history of the US civil rights movement. At one point he tells viewers—but not others—that he supports the disruption because “you have to make people uncomfortable in these times [when ICE is committing abuses during operations against illegal immigrants].” “I believe…, he declares, "everyone has to be willing to sacrifice something.” Only once though does he seem to depart from neutrality with a parishioner. After an interchange in which he states ICE’s excesses are powering protests and his interlocutor maintains ICE is keeping America safe, he asks the latter, “Do you really believe that?” Then, as the man starts to walk away, Lemon persists by trying to present him with “facts” that immigrants have lower crime rates than natives and most detainees were not convicted of crimes.

Lemon also presents an alternative to the conflict: He suggests to both the pastor and a parishioner that they move from confrontation to calm discussion with the protesters, for that might reveal areas of agreement.

These are however minor chords in Lemon’s overall conventional reporting style. We might consider whether, in an age of flagging journalist legitimacy, a reporter’s acknowledgement of his personal perspective amid an effort to tell a story objectively can enhance audience trust.

Either way, Lemon’s remarks did not transform him into a member of the group besieging the church any more than my two encounters with student protesters made me into a member of the group besieging the trustees.

Together these cases warn that repressive governments may go after a variety of observers sympathizing with militant protesters by purveying false or distorted reports of their actions. Whether or not Lemon is convicted, the Trump administration’s approach of pursuing individuals who can be loosely linked to disruptive demonstrations is likely to continue. Worryingly, the head of the FBI has announced investigations of “paid protest campaigns” throughout the country including “organizers, protesters, and funding sources that drive illicit activities.”

I teach 12th-grade English at an urban high school in upstate New York. The poverty rate here is high. And violent crime is a common occurrence. When people ask what I’ve learned from doing this job for 18 years, I tell them I’ve come to see how hard it is to be a Black or brown person in America. And the president is making that even harder, which in turn makes my job as an urban educator harder.

February 6, on his Truth Social platform, Donald Trump posted a 62-second clip of Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces imposed over the bodies of apes. As word of this got around school on Friday, multiple students of color came to me. They wanted to know—needed to know—if Trump’s “Truth” was real. I gave it to ‘em straight. Yes, the Commander-in-Chief had trafficked in one of the oldest, most-painful tropes against African Americans. These students weren’t angry. They were frustrated. They’d been stripped of their dignity by their own president. Friday was a very difficult day at my school.

Regarding the post, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, "Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

This Trumpian brand of race-baiting is nothing new. You might remember Trump’s opening salvo to the citizenry was Birtherism. To enter political life by asserting Barack Obama was born in Kenya, Trump signaled an alliance with those who despised Obama because of his skin color. Trump’s depraved conspiracy was meant to make us see Obama—a self-made, sophisticated Black man—as a savage, running around some mud-hut village in loin cloth and war paint. It wasn’t a dog whistle. It was a bullhorn.

In the end, Biff Tannen always crashes his car into manure. And that’s what’s going to happen to Trump.

Do I think Trump hates Black people? No, I think Trump thrives on division, and racial division is a provocateur every time. I harken back to what then-VP Kamala Harris said about Trump on the debate stage in 2024, “It's a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people."

Whether it’s race or some other subject, Trump never misses a chance to pit the electorate against itself. Anything from Rob Reiner to the Superbowl halftime show, it’s all fodder for a good fight. Our country has never been more divided. Don’t believe me? Scroll through Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), etc. The knives are out. The name calling is ugly. And it’s all about Trump. As long as Trump controls the bully pulpit, we have no hope for unity. He’ll never stop fanning the flames.

This, I suppose, is the Shakespearean flaw of a president (and a person) who must be the center of attention at all times, even if it’s manufactured attention. You might remember, in his pre-political life, Trump routinely planted stories about himself in the New York papers and tabloid magazines, using the alias John Barron to brag about “Trump’s” celebrity connections and romantic relationships.

Maybe Trump suffers from what columnist Maureen Dowd called “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” While I’m certain that’s true, or sort of true, Trump targets migrants, women, and his perceived opponents with equal cruelty. Trump’s ascension to the top of our federal government is akin to Biff Tannen winning Lorraine at the end of Back to the Future. “What’re you lookin’ at, butthead?” Who’d root for that? Apparently 77 million Americans would.

The thing about bullies, even powerful ones like Trump: Deep down, they’re cowards who lack accountability. A few hours after Ms. Leavitt claimed the public didn’t care about Trump’s post, the administration changed its story: “A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.” Pinning this on a make-pretend staffer? It simply doesn’t get more Biff Tannen than that.

John F. Kennedy once said, “A rising tide lifts all ships,” meaning when something good happens to the system, everyone benefits. So what’s the net result of a president who tells lies, violates the law, uses the Oval Office to enrich himself and his family, orders the Justice Department to punish his enemies? Who “benefits” inside that system?

As a teacher of 12th graders, I wish we hadn’t heaped such a seismic amount of chaos upon the next generation. But I’m also optimistic. I believe these young people will guide our broken country out of the darkness, perhaps fueled by the dignity-stripping frustration they felt when they realized Trump’s “Truth” was real.

In the end, Biff Tannen always crashes his car into manure. And that’s what’s going to happen to Trump. History will regard the Trump Era as malignantly divisive, and Trump as nothing but a two-bit bully. Bullies never win. They don’t know how to win.

Needless to say, if anyone else, from a CEO to a cashier, had posted the Obamas as apes on their social media, they’d be out of a job before breakfast.

Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, Trump was asked if he’d apologize for his “racist” post. The president replied, "No, I didn't make a mistake."

US President Donald Trump has a long history of trashing athletes. So when he aimed his viciousness at US Olympians participating at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, perhaps it should not have been a surprise. The response from US athletes has been fierce and firm: They will not be intimidated by the petulant president.

When a journalist asked US freestyle skier Hunter Hess what it was like to represent the US in this particular political moment, Hess replied: “It’s a little hard. There’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren’t. Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the US.” The Olympian added that he had “mixed feelings” about representing the US.

In response, Trump hopped on Truth Social to attack the athlete, mangling the US skier’s actual words along the way. “U.S. Olympic Skier, Hunter Hess, a real Loser, says he doesn’t represent his country in the current Winter Olympics,” Trump punched out with his chubby little posting thumbs. “If that’s the case, he shouldn’t have tried out for the Team, and it’s too bad he’s on it. Very hard to root for someone like this.”

Not only did Trump misrepresent what Hess conveyed, but he cued his MAGA ghouls and powerful supporters that it was time to unleash their vitriol. Right-wing boxer wannabe Jake Paul posted: “Wow pls shut the fuck up. From all true Americans. If you don’t want to represent this country go live somewhere else.” US Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) piled on, “Any person who goes to the Olympics to represent the United States and then says they don’t want to represent the United States should be immediately stripped of their Olympic uniform.”

The IOC just can’t seem to grasp the obvious reality that their thin veneer of institutional "neutrality" tends to benefit the already powerful at the expense of courageous upstarts.

To say this does not exactly embrace the goodwill that the Olympics are supposed to stand for is to make an enormous understatement. Trump wouldn’t recognize the Olympic spirit if it came up and kissed him on the cankle.

Meanwhile, Olympians have stood up in support of Hess and other athletes who are willing to embrace the political complexity of the moment. Chloe Kim, the superstar snowboarder from the United States, said, “It’s important in moments like these for us to unite and kind of stand up for one another with what’s going on.” She added, “I’m really proud to represent the United States. The US has given my family so much opportunity, but I also think we are allowed to voice our opinions on what’s going on.”

Eileen Gu, the two-time gold-medal-winning freestyle skier who herself experienced scorn and abuse when she decided to represent China, rather than the United States, at the 2022 Winter Olympics, said: “I’m sorry that the headline that is eclipsing the Olympics has to be something so unrelated to the spirit of the Games. It really runs contrary to everything the Olympics should be.”

After winning a silver medal in cross-country skiing, Ben Ogden said, “I choose to believe that I live in a country where people can express their opinions without backlash.” He added: “Certainly not... without backlash from the president. And that was really disappointing to see, but I hope it doesn’t continue like that.” Fellow US cross-country skier Zak Ketterson also pushed back: “I think it’s pretty childish to come at somebody for exercising their free speech, right, and considering that side of the political spectrum always champions free speech, it’s a little, I think, surprising to see them so triggered.”

US curler Rich Ruohonen, who is also an attorney from Minnesota, leaned on the law, noting, “We have a constitution, and it allows us freedom of speech.” He added: “What’s happening in Minnesota is wrong. There’s no shades of grey. It’s clear.” This follows fellow Minnesotan Kelly Pannek, a member of the US women’s hockey team, who said she drew inspiration from activists in her home state: “I think people have been asking a lot of us what it’s like to represent our state and our country. I think what I’m most proud to represent is the tens of thousands of people that show up on some of the coldest days of the year to stand [at protests] and fight for what they believe in.”

Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee has remained conspicuously quiet. Rather than standing up for Olympic athletes and their free speech rights, the self-proclaimed “supreme authority” of the games has sat silent.

When asked about Trump’s behavior at a Milan Cortina 2026 press conference, IOC spokesman Mark Adams said, “I am not going to add to the discourse because I don’t think it’s very helpful to heat up any discourse like that.” So much for the IOC’s slogan “putting athletes first.” According to the IOC’s most recently available tax documents, Mr. Adams makes $528,615 in reportable compensation (and another $100,838 in additional compensation from the IOC and related organizations), but apparently that isn’t enough to inspire him to do his job right.

Perhaps the IOC is too busy clamping down on Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych for wearing a helmet commemorating athletes from his country who were killed in the war with Russia. Or maybe they are still admiring their handiwork from when they forced the Haitian delegation at the Milano Cortina Olympics to remove the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture—the former slave who led a revolution that created the world’s first Black republic in Haiti in 1804—from their uniforms, arguing that Louverture’s image violated Olympic rules barring political symbolism.

The IOC just can’t seem to grasp the obvious reality that their thin veneer of institutional "neutrality" tends to benefit the already powerful at the expense of courageous upstarts. In sitting silent in the face of Trump’s attacks on athletes, the IOC is facilitating the slide toward authoritarianism. With the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics on the horizon, it’s time for the IOC to wake up from its bumbling slumber.

Trump’s attacks on star US athletes is part of a larger pattern. After all, this was the grump who attacked Megan Rapinoe during the 2019 World Cup, tweeting, “Megan should never disrespect our Country, the White House, or our Flag, especially since so much has been done for her & the team.” Six years later, Trump is at it again. Rapinoe refused to back down. May these athletes continue to show the collective courage to do the same, to stand up to power.

For months, we have warned of a drive by President Donald Trump and his administration to undermine the 2026 election. It is unprecedented, outlandish. Now Trump himself is blaring his intent—and over the past week, the public issue has exploded. The fight for a free and fair vote is taking shape, especially after House Republicans on Wednesday night passed the euphemistically named SAVE Act.

Make no mistake: The SAVE Act would stop millions of American citizens from voting. It would be the most restrictive voting bill ever passed by Congress. It is Trump’s power grab in legislative garb.

Effectively, the bill would require Americans to produce a passport or birth certificate to register and thus to vote. Brennan Center research shows that 21 million people lack ready access to these documents. Half of all Americans don’t have a passport, for example. and millions of married women who have changed their names might need to jump through extra hoops to vote.

With passage in the House (not for the first time), it will be up to senators to block it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) declared it “dead on arrival.” But this time around, a mobilized outside drive is pushing lawmakers to restrict voting. “It must be done or democracy is dead,” instructed Elon Musk. The SAVE Act will not expire quietly, surrounded by loved ones. It’s on all of us to stand up and speak out, once again.

Each time Trump declares that his goal is to “nationalize” the election—not for the greater good, but for his own political interests—the stakes become clearer.

And now we see how it fits into the broader strategy.

In recent days, Trump has repeatedly demanded that Republicans “nationalize” the elections on behalf of his political party. Each time his aides try to clean up his remarks, he doubles down. “A state is an agent for the federal government in elections,” he wrongly insisted.

Constitutionally, that’s upside-down land. The Constitution is unambiguous: States run elections. Presidents have no role.

Congress, appropriately, can enact national legislation. It should use that power to pass national standards to protect the freedom to vote, not restrict it.

Then there’s the appalling abuse of federal law enforcement. We still do not know why Kash Patel’s FBI raided election offices in Fulton County, Georgia nearly two weeks ago. A judge has ordered that the underlying legal papers, secret until now, be released. ProPublica reports the raid may be linked to agitation by a “conservative researcher” who has peddled discredited conspiracy theories.

Intelligence chief-gadfly Tulsi Gabbard showed up at the Atlanta raid. FOMO? Amid Justice Department ducking and a denial by Trump, Gabbard wrote to Congress that in fact the president ordered her to go even though her office plays no part in elections. Now it turns out that Gabbard last year obtained voting machines in Puerto Rico. And Trump’s allies in 2020 claimed that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, long dead, had masterminded a plot.

This is comic opera stuff. But it’s deadly serious, too—certainly for the public servants in Fulton County. It all aims to send a message to intimidate election officials around the country. If you preside over an election and we don’t like the result, we may come after you.

Steve Bannon, the Trump strategist who served prison time for defying a congressional subpoena, declared on Tuesday, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again.” When we see how politicized and aggressive immigration forces have become, that threat becomes more than a podcaster’s bombast.

Here, the law is clear: That would be a federal crime. My colleague Sean Morales-Doyle explains: “Can the president send troops or ICE agents to polling places? No—both federal and state laws explicitly prohibit the federal government from carrying out these implied threats.” It’s a federal crime to intimidate voters, too.

In coming months, if we see abuses of power like this, what can we all do to ensure that voters have their voice?

So far, we and others have staved off Trump’s worst impulses. After Trump signed an executive order last year purporting to unilaterally rewrite election rules, we sued the administration, and we won. And as the Trump administration continues to sue states for sensitive voter information, courts in California, Michigan, and Oregon have reaffirmed states’ right to refuse.

State and local governments, too, must be ready to act to protect the polls.

And voters will need to know that, despite all the noise and drama, we can make sure the 2026 elections are free, fair, secure, and, yes, uneventful. It may require voting early or by mail, for example.

In an election year, voting rights advocates often ponder whether pointing to threats risks demobilizing citizens. At some point, warning about voter suppression can accidentally dampen participation.

Not this year, it seems. Each time Trump declares that his goal is to “nationalize” the election—not for the greater good, but for his own political interests—the stakes become clearer. When he wrongly insists American elections are “rigged,” as he did over the weekend, it’s more than bluster. He’s saying the quiet part out loud.

In 2026, the right to vote will demand a fight to vote.

On February 5, with the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, the only bilateral arms control treaty left between the United States and Russia, we are guaranteed to find ourselves ever closer to the edge of a perilous precipice. The renewed arms race that seems likely to take place could plunge the world, once and for all, into the nuclear abyss. This crisis is neither sudden nor surprising, but the predictable culmination of a truth that has haunted us for nearly 80 years: Humanity has long been living on borrowed time.

In such a context, you might think that our collective survival instinct has proven remarkably poor, which is, at least to a certain extent, understandable. After all, if we had allowed ourselves to feel the full weight of the nuclear threat we’ve faced all these years, we might indeed have collapsed under it. Instead, we continue to drift forward with a sense of muted dread, unwilling (or simply unable) to respond to the nuclear nightmare. In a world already armed with thousands of omnicidal weapons, such fatalism—part suicidal nihilism and part homicidal complacency—becomes a form of violence in its own right.

Given such indifference, we risk not only our own lives but also the lives of all those who would come after us. As Jonathan Schell observed decades ago, both genocide and nuclear war are distinct from other forms of mass atrocity in that they serve as “crimes against the future.” And as Robert Jay Lifton once warned, what makes nuclear war so singularly horrifying is that it would constitute “genocide in its terminal form,” a destruction so absolute as to render the Earth unlivable and irrevocably reverse the very process of creation.

Yet for many, the absence of such a nuclear holocaust, 80 years after the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is taken as proof that such a catastrophe is, in fact, unthinkable and will never happen. These days, to invoke the specter of annihilation is to be dismissed as alarmist, while to argue for the abolition of such weaponry is considered naïve. As it happens, though, the opposite is true. It’s the height of naïveté to believe that a global system built on the supposed security of nuclear weapons can endure indefinitely.

Nuclear weapons are human creations, and what is made by us can be dismantled by us.

That much should be obvious by now. In truth, we’ve clung to the faith that rational heads will prevail for far too long. Such thinking has sustained a minimalist global nonproliferation regime aimed at preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons to so-called terrorist states like Iraq, Libya, and North Korea (which now indeed has a nuclear arsenal). Yet, today, it should be all too clear that the states with nuclear weapons are, and have long been, the true rogue states.

A nuclear-armed Israel has, after all, been committing genocide in Gaza and has bombed many of its neighbors. Russia continues to devastate Ukraine, which relinquished its nuclear arsenal in 1994, and its leader, Vladimir Putin, has threatened to use nuclear weapons there. And a Washington led by a brazen authoritarian deranged by power, who has declared that he doesn’t “need international law,” has stripped away the fragile façade of a rules-based global order.

Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the leaders of the seven other nuclear-armed states possess the unilateral capacity to destroy the world, a power no country should be allowed to wield. Yet even now, there is still time to avert catastrophe. But to chart a reasonable path forward, it’s necessary to look back eight decades and ask why the world failed to ban the bomb at a moment when the dangerous future we now inhabit was already clearly foreseeable.

Every City Is Hiroshima

With Hiroshima and Nagasaki still smoldering ruins, people everywhere confronted a rupture so profound that it seemed to inaugurate a new historical era, one that might well be the last. As news of the atomic bombings spread, a grim consensus took shape that technological “progress” had outpaced political and moral restraint. Journalist Norman Cousins captured the zeitgeist when he wrote that “modern man is obsolete, a self-made anachronism becoming more incongruous by the minute.” Human beings had clearly fashioned themselves into vengeful gods, and the specter of Armageddon was no longer a matter of theology but a creation of modern civilization.

In the United States, of course, a majority of Americans greeted the initial reports of the atomic bombings of those two Japanese cities in a celebratory fashion, convinced that such unprecedented weapons would bring a swift, victorious end to a brutal war. For many, that relief was inseparable from a lingering desire for retribution. In announcing the first atomic attack, President Harry Truman himself declared that the Japanese “have been repaid many fold” for their strike on Pearl Harbor, which inaugurated the official American entry into World War II. Yet triumph quickly gave way to a more somber reckoning.

As the scale of devastation came into fuller view, the psychological fallout radiated far beyond Japan. The New York Herald Tribune captured a growing unease when it editorialized that “one forgets the effect on Japan or on the course of the war as one senses the foundations of one’s own universe trembling a little… it is as if we had put our hands upon the levers of a power too strange, too terrible, too unpredictable in all its possible consequences for any rejoicing over the immediate consequences of its employment.”

Some critics of the bombings would soon begin to frame their concerns in explicitly moral terms, posing the question: Who had we become? Historian Lewis Mumford, for example, argued that the attacks represented the culmination of a society unmoored from any ethical foundations and nothing short of “the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased to worship life and obey the laws of life.” Religious leaders voiced similar concern. The Christian Century magazine typically condemned the bombings as “a crime against God and humanity which strikes at the very basis of moral existence.”

As the apocalyptic imagination took hold, others turned to a more self-interested but no less urgent question: What will happen to us? Newspapers across the country began running stories on what a Hiroshima-sized bomb would do to their downtowns. Yet Philip Morrison, one of the few scientists to witness both the initial Trinity Test of the atomic bomb and Hiroshima after the bombing, warned that even such terrifying projections underestimated the danger.

Deaths in the hundreds of thousands were, he insisted, far too optimistic. “The bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or twos. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands.” And given the effect of radiation, those who made “remarkable escapes,” the “lucky” ones, would die all the same. Imagining a prospective strike on New York City, he wrote of the survivors who “died in the hospitals of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and Saint Louis in the three weeks following the bombing. They died of unstoppable internal hemorrhages… of slow oozing of the blood into the flesh.” Ultimately, he concluded, “If the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together… there is only one sure future. The cities of men on Earth will perish.”

One World or None

Morrison wrote that account as part of a broader effort, led by former Manhattan Project scientists who had helped create the bomb, to alert the public to the newfound danger they themselves had helped unleash. That campaign culminated in the January 1946 book One World or None (and a short film). The scientists had largely come to believe that, if the public had their consciousness raised about the implications of the bomb, a task for which they felt uniquely responsible and equipped, then public opinion might shift in ways that could make policies capable of averting catastrophe politically possible.

Scientists like Niels Bohr began calling on their colleagues to face “the great task lying ahead,” while urging them to be “prepared to assist in any way… in bringing about an outcome of the present crisis of humanity worthy of the ideals for which science through the ages has stood.” Accepting such newfound social responsibility felt unavoidable, even if so many of those scientists wished to simply return to their prewar pursuits in the insulated university laboratories they once inhabited.

The opportunity to ban the bomb before the arms race took off was squandered not because the public failed to recognize the threat, but because the government refused to heed the will of its people.

As physicist Joseph Rotblat observed, among the many forms of collateral damage inflicted by the bomb was the destruction of “the ivory towers in which scientists had been sheltering.” In the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that rupture propelled them into public life on an unprecedented scale. The once-firm boundary between science and politics began to blur as formerly quiet and aloof researchers spoke to the press, delivered public lectures, published widely circulated articles, and lobbied members of Congress in an effort to secure some control over atomic energy.

Among them was J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the bomb was created, who warned that, “if atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world… then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima,” a statement that left some officials perplexed. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, who had known Oppenheimer as both the director of Los Alamos and someone who had directly sanctioned the bombings, recalled that “he seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent,” adding, “the guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.”

Yet the scientists pressed ahead in their frantic effort to avert future catastrophe by preventing a nuclear arms race. They insisted that there was no doubt the Soviet Union and other powers would acquire the weapon, that any hope of a prolonged atomic monopoly was delusional, and that espionage was incidental to such a reality, since the fundamental scientific principles needed to build an atomic bomb had been established by 1940. And with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the secret that a functioning bomb was possible was obviously out.

They argued that there would be no effective defense against a devastating atomic attack and that the US, as a highly urbanized society, was uniquely vulnerable to such “city killer” weapons. With vast, exposed coastlines, they warned that such a bomb, not yet capable of being delivered by a missile, could simply be smuggled into one of the nation’s ports and lie dormant there for years. For the scientists, the implications were unmistakable. The age of national sovereignty had ended. The world had become too dangerous for national chauvinism, which, if humanity were to survive, had to give way to a new architecture of international cooperation.

Teaching Us to Love the Bomb

Such activism had its intended effects. Many Americans became more fearful and wanted arms control. By late 1945, a majority of the public consistently supported some form of international control over such weaponry and the abolition of the manufacturing of them. And for a brief moment, such a possibility seemed within reach. The first resolution passed by the new United Nations in January 1946 called for exactly that. The publication of John Hersey’s Hiroshima first as a full issue of the New Yorker and then as a book, with its intense portrayal of life and death in that Japanese city, further shifted public sentiment toward abolition.

Yet as such hopes crystallized at the United Nations, the two global superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were already preparing for a future nuclear war. Washington continued to expand its stockpile of atomic weaponry, while Moscow accelerated its work creating such weaponry, detonating its initial atomic test four years after the world first met that terrifying new weapon. That Soviet test, followed by the Korean War, helped extinguish the early promise of an international response to such weaponry, a collapse aided by deliberate efforts in Washington to ensure that the United States grew its atomic arsenal.

In that effort, former Secretary of War Henry Stimson was coaxed out of retirement by President Truman’s advisers who urged him to write one final, “definitive” account defending the bombings to neutralize growing opposition. As Harvard president and government-aligned scientist James Conant explained to Stimson, officials in Washington feared that they were losing the ideological battle. They were particularly concerned that mounting anti-nuclear sentiment would prove persuasive “among the type of person that goes into teaching,” shaping a generation less inclined to regard their decision as morally legitimate.

Stimson’s article, published in Harper’s Magazine in February 1947, helped cement the official narrative: that the bomb was a last resort rooted in military necessity that saved half a million American lives and required neither regret nor moral examination. In that way, the opportunity to ban the bomb before the arms race took off was squandered not because the public failed to recognize the threat, but because the government refused to heed the will of its people. Instead, it sought to secure power through nuclear weapons, driven by a paranoid fear of Moscow that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. What followed were decades of preemptive escalation, the continued spread of such weaponry globally, and, at its height, a global arsenal of more than 60,000 nuclear warheads by 1985.

Forty years later, in a world where nine countries—the US, Russia, China, France, Great Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—already have nuclear weapons (more than 12,000 of them), there can be little doubt that, as things are now going, there will be both more countries and more weapons to come.

Such a global arms race must, however, be ended before it ends the human race. The question is no longer what is politically possible, but what is virtually guaranteed if we refuse to pursue the “impossible.” Nuclear weapons are human creations, and what is made by us can be dismantled by us. Whether that happens in time is, of course, the question that now should confront everyone, everywhere, and one that history, if there is anyone around to write or to read it, will not excuse us for failing to answer.

On Wednesday, Washington, DC will witness two historic moments, both carrying the banner “peace.”

After 15 weeks, the 2,300-mile Walk for Peace, led by a group of Theravada Buddhist monks, will reach its conclusion at the National Mall. Meanwhile, just under two kilometers away at the White House, President Donald Trump will meet internationally wanted war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the prospect of imminent military escalation in Iran and Gaza.

On Tuesday, February 10, both Netanyahu and monk and spiritual leader, Venerable Bhikkhu Panakkara, invoked peace when explaining their respective journeys to the capital. Before boarded Wing of Zion, Israel’s state aircraft, Netanyahu told press, “I will present Trump with principles for negotiations with Iran that are important not only to Israel but to everyone who wants peace and security,” adding, “In my opinion, these are important principles for everyone who wants peace and security in the Middle East.” At the same hour in Washington, Venerable Bhikkhu Panakkara addressed the thousands gathered outside the National Cathedral, offering a different vision: “We are not walking… to bring you any peace. Rather, we raise the awareness of peace so that you can unlock that box and free it, let peace bloom and flourish among all of us, throughout this nation and the world.”

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, will gather near the Lincoln Memorial to witness and honor the end of the monks’ spiritual trek from the Huong Dao Vipassana Bhavana Center in Fort Worth, Texas. At least hundreds more, will gather to protest the arrival of Netanyahu.

For all that separates these events in character and intent, each carries a vision of humanity and America, a reflection of alternate futures for the country and the world.

The monks will walk from the Peace Monument near the Capitol down to the Memorial. It will likely be a continuation of the exchanges that have marked their journey: flowers, bows, clasped hands, and smiles. They arrive after bearing unusually cold winter months, following an ascetic tradition of eating just one meal per day and sleeping beneath trees.

Nearby, Trump and Netanyahu will be fortified away from protesters, protected by gates, barricades, drones, and agents, meeting in richly adorned rooms, exercising a power over the future of the Middle East that is both absolute and unpredictable. Netanyahu is reportedly expected to insist that to secure Phase II of the “ceasefire” Peace Plan that never was, Israel must escalate its ongoing genocidal attacks against the entirely displaced civilian population in Gaza. He is also anticipated to lobby for terms, particularly regarding ballistic missile programs, that could deliberately undermine a US-Iran deal—a predictable objective of the Israeli government.

Trump, who proclaims “peace through strength” as the White House doctrine, may be dangerously receptive to Netanyahu’s vision. Almost notoriously, he has sought to brand himself with peace—relentlessly chasing the Nobel Peace Prize, styling himself the self-proclaimed “peace president” at rallies, staging photo ops, making self-aggrandizing speeches, and founding the so-called Board of Peace, which he will soon celebrate at the newly renamed Donald Trump Institute of Peace in DC (formerly the US Institute of Peace). Peace has become a banner he claims, brands, and projects onto his political identity.

But while he may assert himself as the peace president, who has “ended eight wars,” he remains the president who in very recent months, has initiated sheer terror and chaos. He has kidnapped other Presidents, deployed the National Guard, and unleashed violent immigration agents on American cities; he has embraced systematic family separations of immigrants and migrants, celebrated patterned executions in the Caribbean, defunded healthcare and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for millions in favor of building out a military-grade Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget and a fantasy golden dome, wields tariffs and economic coercion as erratic weapons of global power, seeks to colonize and ethnically cleanse Gaza to fulfill his son-in-laws Rivera vision, escalates regime-change operations around the globe, and more recently has manufactured a humanitarian crisis in Cuba. He is also the once-close ally, confidant, and facilitator of Jeffrey Epstein, and, like Epstein, a sexual predator.

Here, in DC today, two very different notions of peace converge.

In the White House, some of the world’s most dangerous, most criminal, and cruel men convene with the fate of millions in their hands, scheming war and exercising it through greed, supremacist ideology, and a state apparatus that shields them from accountability. Their peace is loud, flashy, and enforced. It slaps itself on trophies and buildings. It holds ceremonies of the utmost excess. It is severed from justice and empathy. It requires death. It requires war. It is ever attached to “security.”

There is also a peace carried to mark the end of a long, deliberate walk across the city. This peace, marked on a white flag, is humble and steady, disciplined and tempered—peace as practice, not strategy, not spectacle, but ethic. A testament to humanity’s highest aspirations. People from across the country join it, of every origin, faith, and language, observing in reverence and quiet joy. They honor the hope and tradition the monks have devoted themselves to, a practice rooted in mindfulness, compassion, and self-restraint. Along the way, they may hear again what Venerable Bhikkhu Panakkara has repeated throughout the journey: “Today is going to be my peaceful day.” For the last time, the monks offer those who witness the chance to share in this intentional presence.

For all that separates these events in character and intent, each carries a vision of humanity and America, a reflection of alternate futures for the country and the world. Today in the nation’s capital, history is being made—among those who claim power and peace, and those who live it.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University; her Wikipedia biography describes her as “a scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders.” With these credentials, she has written an opinion piece in the New York Times telling us that dictators and would-be dictators generally make their economies worse and lead a precarious existence. Their efforts often “backfire,” as she puts it.

While this theory might seem like comforting evidence that history “proves” that dictators will get their comeuppance, it is actually a counsel of passively sitting on our hands and waiting out the authoritarian leader: either to await his death, or hang on till he’s ousted from power by his own miscarrying plans. If history proves anything, it’s that patient optimism is not a virtue.

Ben-Ghiat's area of expertise is Benito Mussolini and the fascist era in Italy, and she uses him as an example of a dictator getting what’s coming to him. After surrounding himself with sycophants and employing consistently disastrous military strategies, Mussolini was deposed in 1943 by the Fascist Grand Council: “He spent his last years as the head of the Nazi puppet state the Republic of Salò, his phone tapped by the Germans. He was killed by anti-Fascist partisans in April 1945.”

His demise—being strung up like a side of beef at a Milan filling station—may have been poetic justice, but wasn’t the cost just a little too high? He ruled Italy for 21 years until he was deposed, and by the time of his death, much of the country was in ruins. Italian campaign veteran and Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin described the landscape as “ghostlike,” recalling walls standing in the moonlight surrounded by rubble, with empty, "single unblinking" windows looking out like eyes. That’s what tends to happen when a dictator’s plans backfire – he pulls the whole country down with him.

The author’s more contemporary example is Vladimir Putin. At the beginning of 2022, she says, Putin had it all, including gold toilet seats in his Crimean palace. But according to Ben-Ghiat, he invaded Ukraine to shore up his waning popularity, a move that did not work out as planned. The Russian dead have piled up, Russia has become more dependent on China, and the economy has sputtered under the burden of the war.

If the cultural constellation provides a measure of both elite and popular support, the dictator can endure for years.

But so what? Putin has been in power for 25 years, and shows no sign of going anywhere soon. Perhaps some faction in the army or the FSB might “terminate him with extreme prejudice” (as the phrase in Apocalypse Now termed an assassination), because they would be the only ones with the firepower to do so, but I suspect Putin’s likely successors would not transform Russia into another Denmark. And Ben-Ghiat undermines her own thesis by reminding us that Donald Trump shows every sign of being willing to bail Putin out of his international difficulties.

Unfortunately, dictatorial systems tend to be more durable than she thinks. How many times in the last four decades have we heard that the Iranian regime is on the point of collapse? Even a usually savvy observer of international relations like Lawrence Freedman has flatly claimed “the regime is doomed.” Perhaps in the long run Freedman will be proved right, but the people in Iran have to live in the short run.

And sometimes the long run is very long. North Korea, possibly the most repressive regime on the planet, has been run as a family business by the Kim dynasty for 78 years. With a per capita GDP that is less than one-sixtieth (note: not one-sixth, one sixtieth!) of South Korea’s, it is the most spectacular example in the world of how dictatorships ruin economies. It also experiences periodic famines. Famine is the single biggest marker for the total failure of a governing system; historically, the one thing any regime wanted to avoid was bread riots in the big cities. Ask the shades of Louis XVI or Tsar Nicholas about it.

Yet, if the regime is repressive enough, as North Korea’s is, it can use lack of food as a regime stabilizer. The army, the secret police, and the regime’s vocal supporters get food as a reward; access to enough calories to survive becomes the reward for loyalty. The rest, as in North Korea or China during the Great Leap Forward, can subsist on grass, wood shavings, and potato peels, and will be too physically debilitated to overthrow the system, even if a comprehensive system of surveillance and informers did not exist.

Donald Trump certainly does not have a hold on the United States like that of Kim Jong-un on North Korea, or Putin on Russia. But even in a “mild” dictatorship, the odds are high that living standards for the average person will decline, free speech will be stifled, and culture will stagnate into regime propaganda and kitsch. Social trust, already in steady decline in the United States since the 1960s, will crater to the levels of Somalia or Yemen.

Without social trust, the economy cannot be entrepreneurial and innovative (as opposed to crony-ridden and subsisting on government favoritism), and our civil society cannot be vibrant and voluntaristic with so many informers about. Art and intellectual activity will wither; our public universities, once the best in the world, will decline to the level of Bob Jones U. or Trump’s own fake university.

I believe that Ben-Ghiat fundamentally errs in emphasizing the dictator, rather than the political and social culture that allows a dictator to reach the top, and that can sustain him in power despite his disastrous mistakes. If the cultural constellation provides a measure of both elite and popular support, the dictator can endure for years.

There is a solid American base of popular backing for fascism, and Trump’s departure from the scene will not cause these people to come to their senses as if by magic.

As in all dictatorships, Trump has a circle of elite supporters. Only in this case, the extent of their international influence is orders of magnitude greater than any previous group of oligarchs. Our American class of billionaires, deci-billionaires, and centi-billionaires dearly loves Trump for the fact that the bribes they render unto him are smaller than the taxes they would have to pay in normal circumstances.

As a bonus, the billionaires receive no-bid contracts; the return on their investment is so great that the public groveling they must periodically perform is well worth it. These malefactors of great wealth will stand like a praetorian guard to protect the privileges they have received under Trump. Any attempt to return America to a functioning representative democracy under the rule of law cannot succeed over the long term unless there is a firm reckoning with our billionaire class.

Finally, dictators must have at least some popular support. Trump’s opponents must contend with the uncomfortable fact that in three consecutive presidential elections, the number of Americans who voted for him grew each time. There is a solid American base of popular backing for fascism, and Trump’s departure from the scene will not cause these people to come to their senses as if by magic.

Ben-Ghiat is trafficking in platitudes by saying that dictators make decisions that are terrible for their countries. That is the nature of dictators and the sycophants who fawn over them; competent and moral people are systematically weeded out of the governmental apparatus and replaced by yes-men. As Hannah Arendt observed 75 years ago:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

None of this is to say that Trump and his goons cannot be levered out of power. But there is no basis for us to complacently wait for his mistakes to cause the scales to fall from the eyes of his supporters in a miraculous fashion. Making America a decent society will require a tough-mindedness and unflinching determination that Merrick Garland so conspicuously lacked when he had the chance. We must not fail the next chance.