I gave up long ago on the utility of psychoanalyzing Trump. His pathologies seem so all-encompassing and theatrical as to defy interpretation, even by anti-analysts like RD Laing and Thomas Szasz. But watching Trump in quick succession at the Kirk memorial, the Tylenol press conference and the UN General Assembly, he seemed like a personality in the midst of physical and mental breakdown. Not a crackup, so much as a kind of psychological entropy that is finally beginning to splinter a subject that it’s pawed and scratched the surface of for decades.

Many of those righteously condemning the rise of “political violence” have supported two years of genocidal violence in Gaza and recently celebrated when the President of the US released a snuff film of a US Navy drone strike that killed 11 people in a small boat off the coast of Venezuela in violation of international and US law, as well as that most mysterious of all laws, the Law of the Sea. Our society, already among the most violent in the world, has been saturated in official violence done in our name since 9/11. In the last quarter-century of the forever wars, hundreds of thousands have been killed and maimed. These daily slaughters, many if not most of them rationalized by politicians and the pundits, have done more to twist the psyche of Americans than ideologies, video games or serotonin uplifters. And the ubiquitous presence of high-powered, military weaponry has provided the means for these bomb-shattered minds to go off on full-auto in their own perverted missions of retribution and revenge.

There is no legal justification for Trump’s military strike on an alleged “drug boat” off the coast of Venezuela. The boat, a simple speedboat, posed no threat to the US Navy vessels. The little boat could have easily been interdicted, searched for drugs and its occupants detained if any were found. No proof was offered that it was carrying drugs or was associated with the Tren de Aragua “narco-terrorist organization.” In any event, drug trafficking is not a capital offense, even when it’s been proven. Most countries would consider this an act of terrorism and mass murder under international law. Indeed, such a strike is also prohibited under US law.

ack in April, Jesús Escalona Mújicas was on his way to his job at a construction site when he was pulled over by federal immigration officers and Texas police in a joint raid near Bryant, Texas. Escalona Mújicas, a 48-year-old native of Venezuela, was pressed against his car as his hands were bent behind his back and cuffed. He was taken to a neaby gas station where he was interrogated. He was then arrested and thrown in the immigration detention jail (aka, “Processing Center”) in Conroe, Texas. The officers who arrested him claimed to have a deportation order for Escalona Mújicas based on the Alien Enemies Act, which Trump had recently invoked to speed up deportations of alleged gang members from central and south America. An agent told him: “the President does not want to see Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, or Venezuelans here.” Escalona Mújicas protested that he wasn’t a gang member and had a temporary work visa. But his denials were smugly dismissed by the arresting agents.

DC was a much rougher place and poorer, though more vibrant, city in the 70s and 80s than it is now that it’s been almost completely gentrified. I didn’t have a car, so I rode the Metro, took the bus, or walked everywhere. I went all over town at all hours, from Tenley Circle to Adams Morgan to Anacostia, often late at night going to clubs to hear bands, going to and from the libraries at Georgetown or Catholic because AU’s was so shitty, working at Blues Alley and a movie theater deep down Connecticut Avenue, and later giving talks and attending organizing meetings for the Freeze Campaign.

Just days after a federal appeals court upheld a ban on ICE using roving patrols and racial profiling to target immigrants, Trump’s secret police launched Operation Trojan Horse, a shock raid outside of a Home Dept in the Westlake area of Los Angeles. Posing as building contractors, ICE agents drove a yellow Penske van in front of a group of day laborers at 6:44 in the morning, asking in Spanish if any of them were looking for work. Then masked ICE agents, one of them wearing a cowboy hat, jumped out of the van and began grabbing people. In all, 16 men were arrested and taken into ICE custody in defiance of a federal appeals court.

This was the week the worms turned. Some of them, anyway: A super majority of Americans now oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza; Bari Weiss and Donald Trump admitted Palestinians are starving (if not that they are being starved or pointing the finger at who is starving them);  France, the UK and Canada announced they are ready to endorse Palestinian statehood next month at the UN; a majority of Senate Democrats voted to halt (offensive) weapons shipments to Israel; Israel’s two leading human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, finally concluded that Israel is committing genocide; Zohran Mamdani is leading the polls among Jewish voters in the NYC mayoral race; Barack Obama finally said something, though exactly what isn’t quite clear; Obama’s former fixer and hatchet man Rahm Emanuel put the blame “on Israel’s doorstep…where it belongs;” and the New York Times printed a column by acclaimed Holocaust scholar Omar Bartov explaining why Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

And why would the Israelis aggressively pursue holding the killers to account? The settlers are agents of the regime. Indeed, they are the leading edge, the shock forces, if you will, for the Netanyahu government’s evolving plan to annex the West Bank. These marauding gangs function more like paramilitaries than ad hoc mobs. They’ve been armed to the teeth by Netanyahu’s Kahanist National Security Minister Itamar Itamar Ben-Gvir with more than 120,000 weapons since October 7, 2023, many of them supplied by the US. Some of these armed settlers have now been deputized into police units. But they’re not there to keep law and order, but to sow chaos. The intent is to terrorize people into abandoning their fields, their villages and their homes.

George Retes was pulled over by ICE as he was driving near the violent raid on farm workers outside of Camarillo last Thursday. The ICE agents broke the windows of his car and pepper sprayed him, before taking him into custody. Retes is an American citizen and disabled US Army Veteran. He was held in federal lockup for four days , during which time his family and lawyer had no way of contacting him to find out where he was or inquire about his physical condition. He was released without charges on Sunday night. Is this what Thomas Homan meant when he told FoxNews that ICE can stop people based on their skin-color and “briefly” detain them without a warrant or probably cause until ICE is satisfied they’re American citizens?

While offering his “thoughts and prayers” for the families of those drowned in the Texas floods, JD Vance referred to the killer torrents that swept away more than 100 people, including dozens of children, as “an incomprehensible tragedy.”

“Incomprehensible?” Only if you ignore the fact that the Girls Camp was allowed to be built and continue operating in one of the most flood-prone valleys in the US, that the climate crisis is making these floods much more frequent and then in order to give more tax breaks to billionaires you gutted the staff of the National Weather Service that could have given these vulnerable children warning of the imminent danger that would claim their lives …If you don’t ignore these facts, this tragedy was both entirely predictable and avoidable.

+ Trump mega-bombed a mountain in Iran and called it peace. Unfortunately, he didn’t bomb what was beneath the mountain. If anything. If the objective was to destroy Iran’s nuclear research facilities, Trump’s Operation Midnight Hammer was a dud. The bombs exploded, craters were left behind, but Iran’s nuclear facilities were mainly left in tact, damaged but not crippled and certainly not, in Trump’s word, “obliterated.”

Using Israel’s logic for attacking Iran (to protect itself from (non-existent) Iranian nuclear weapons), every country in the Middle East (and beyond) would be justified in attacking Israel and destroying its (still undeclared) arsenal of 90 nuclear warheads. Trump’s assertion that if Iran developed a nuclear weapon, it would automatically use it against Tel Aviv, is preposterous, since Iran doesn’t want to be annihilated and surely would be  if it did so. Israel, on the other hand, could nuke Iran and get away with it, as the US did Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The last time a President deployed the National Guard to a state over the objections of the governor was in 1965, when LBJ sent them to protect Civil Rights marchers in Selma in defiance of Alabama Governor George Wallace. Now they’re being sent by Trump to California to crack down ON civil rights protesters.

Back in March, the Trump administration bragged about raiding a big Tren de Aragua gathering” in the Texas hill country outside of Austin. Forty-five people were taken into custody, including children. But they’ve said little about the big bust since. There’s a good reason:  the gathering wasn’t a meeting of gang leaders, but a birthday party for a five-year-old boy. None of the people taken into custody by ICE had a criminal record. None of those arrested have been charged with a crime in the two months since their detention.

White genocide? There were 27,621 murders in South Africa in 2023, more than 80 percent of them young, black males, who were poor or unemployed. During that same year, there were a total of 49 people (both white and black) killed on farms. For context, Israeli forces have killed more than 50 Palestinians every DAY in Gaza for the last 19 months. The population of South Africa is 63.1 million. Population of Gaza (pre-October 2023): 2.1 million.

Trump, ever in search of sadistic pleasures, wants his own CECOT-like prison to intern what he calls America’s “most vicious and violent criminals.” After prowling Alcatraz’s dark corridors, where men spent years in solitary confinement, in cramped cells that would turn anyone into a claustrophobic, not allowed to speak to each other or communicate with the outside world, you can see why this haunted rock with its chill history of retribution and psychological torture appeals to Trump’s debased instincts.

As a parable from the past to help us come to grips with our perilous present, you could do worse than screen Storm Warning, the 1951 noir that may be the most unlikely Klan movie ever made. It features Doris Day as the pregnant young wife who works in a bowling alley that just happens to serve as the local Klavern, but is clueless about everything going on around her; Ginger Rogers as her fashion model sibling who drops in for an unnaounced visit to check on little sister and exposes DD’s husband as a member of the KKK; and Ronald Reagan as the smalltown prosecutor who ends up pursuing the Klan for lynching a…reporter! Reagan and Rogers were two of Hollywood’s most prominent right-wingers. In fact, the film was shot during the time when Reagan, as president of SAG, was secretly snitching out members of the actors’ union he led to the Feds as suspected Reds. The theme of the Storm Warning isn’t that the KKK is racist or hates Jews (those details are taken as a given), but that it is…corrupt. A great film if you’re in the right state of mind. I watched it under the influence of a bottle of Côte du Rhone and Oregon’s most profitable agricultural product…You can find it on TCM and Criterion.

The problem with writing about Gaza is that words can’t explain what’s happening in Gaza. Neither can images, even the most gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. Because what needs to be explained is the inexplicable. What needs to be explicated is the silence in the face of horror. Israel has been brazenly upfront about its plans to […]

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America finally got its Pope, but not the reactionary, the Opus Dei wing was furiously lobbying for. And not an anti-abortion zealot like Cardinal Dolan, either. (Though his views on homosexuality and gender appear to be more orthodox than his predecessor’s.)  Instead, the Vatican’s smokestack spewed white in honor of Robert Prevost, a Chicagoan, whose attitude, at least, seems that of a Southsider (Indeed, the new Pope’s brother told WGN that Leo is a White Sox fan! They certainly need all the Divine intervention they can get.). For years, Prevost served as the head of the Augustinian Order, whose members, like the Franciscans, are instructed to lead simple lives and devote themselves to the ministration of the poor.

+ What if the remarkable string of federal court decisions against Trump’s policies (several rendered by his own appointees) isn’t evidence of an inept, blundering executive, but the intended result, where in the ultimate goal isn’t just to execute mass deportations, but to consolidate executive power by villifying and humiliating the federal judiciary as an impediment to the popular will. Indeed, this has long been the strategy advocated for years by Trump’s malevolent amanuensis Stephen Miller. 

American citizens are being routinely caught in Trump’s deportation dragnet, detained, jailed, and threatened with deportation, even a four-year-old with cancer and a pregnant mother who would have given birth to an American citizen. When ICE’s “mistakes” are revealed, usually through the presentation of a birth certificate days after the false arrest, the typical response has been to blame the victims. That’s if they haven’t already been deported. 

On the day Pope Francis released his encyclical on the fate of the Earth, I was struggling to climb a near vertical cliff on the Parajito Plateau of northern New Mexico. My fingers gripped tightly to handholds notched into the rocks hundreds of years ago by Ancestral Puebloans, the anodyne phrase now used by modern anthropologists to describe the people once known as the Anasazi. The day was a scorcher and the volcanic rocks were so hot they blistered my hands and knees. Even my guide, Elijah, a young member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, confessed that the heat radiating off the basalt had made him feel faint, although perhaps he was simply trying to make me feel less like a weather wimp.

Trump dreams of his own Kafkaesque penal colony, a place where he can ship the accused without the trouble of a trial, a place where the imprisoned have no chance to defend themselves and, in fact, may not know why they are condemned or how they can find their way out, if there is a way out. Trump’s Devil’s Island is the death-haunted country of El Salvador. If Trump is the crude Commandant, Nayib Buekele is his dutiful Officer, eager to perform any act of depravity to please his superior…for a price ($20,000 a person). The Travelers have been sent away from this prison state, denied any inspection of its torture chambers. 

The contradictions of life in late-capitalist America under Trump: Most Americans want the return of manufacturing jobs to the US, as long as they don’t have to work them. But they simultaneously support the mass deportation of those who are willing to work near the blast furnaces and on the assembly lines.

Trump and Rubio would have deported Tom Paine for writing seditious pamphlets as a “citizen of the world” and not the US. As it was, Paine died a pariah in the country he did so much to liberate, condemned as a heretic and Jacobin. Only six people attended his funeral in New York City, and the great radical essayist William Cobbett felt compelled to sail over to the States, dig up his bones, and take them back to the UK because the US had betrayed Paine’s vision for the country and its own revolution.

If the Trump team was going to “accidentally” include any reporter in their Yemen war planning–Goldberg, the former IDF prison guard–would be the one. It’s the equivalent of Christopher Hitchens being invited to the Bush White House to help plot airstrikes on Mosul and Fallujah. But if, as MAGA believes, the Chat group was covertly leaked by a “backdoor splinter group of the CIA,” they would have surely sent it to a reporter like Sy Hersh who would have published the entire Chat before the bombs began to fall…

On January 29, ICE pulled over Bernandino Randa Marinas on his way to work in Chicago. After handing his ID to an ICE agent, Bernandino was ordered to keep his hands on the steering wheel of his car and not to move. He was held this way for around 40 minutes before one of the ICE officers told him he was under arrest. When Bernando asked to see a warrant, the officer quickly flashed him his cell phone. But he was not shown a Notice to Appear, and at the time of his arrest, there were no pending proceedings against him. Bernandino has lived in the US for more than 20 years, has two children who are US citizens, and a third is due in May. He has no criminal history. 

Brad Sigmon was executed to exhibit the power of the state over its citizens. By choosing to be put to death by firing squad, Sigmon forced the State of South Carolina to put this power on full and grotesque display. There was no hiding behind the supposedly humane method of filling an IV with poison and injecting it into a vein through a needle and a tube. There was no illusion in this execution. Sigmon wasn’t put to sleep. He had his heart blown out of his chest in front of 14 witnesses.

Trump has been gifted more power than he has taken. But now that he has accumulated so much authority through the weakness and political negligence of his opponents, he is in a position to seize and consolidate an unprecedented amount of power by himself, leaving the country almost defenseless against his vindictive whims and authoritarian aspirations.

Last week our co-rulers made separate appearances at CPAC, a kind of Dionysian festival for the Cult of MAGA, where both of them were far from laconic about their plans to recreate the Republic in their own images. Taking Xenophon as my model, I’ve pulled some relevant quotations from our two Diarchs so that we’ll have a keener sense of exactly the kind of tyranny-by-two that is in store for us…

While contemplating the incipient collapse of our Republic from an inside job, I dipped back into the six-volume edition of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that Alexander Cockburn gave me as a Christmas present years ago. Gibbon’s prose style is ornate, featuring wide-ranging and winding sentences that often end abruptly, like a dagger plunging. It takes some pages–and there are entire mountain ranges of them–to get used to his baroque rhetorical rhythm. Still, once you do, the book really picks up steam and roars along through decade after decade of unrivaled imperial villainy, personal cupidity and political turpitude.

On Wednesday in the Oval Office, Trump was allegedly told by X Æ A-Xii, one of Elon Musk’s 12 (known) kids, to “Shut up” and “You’re not the president!” Perhaps as compensation for being dissed by a four-year-old (who also wiped streams of snot on the Resolute Desk), Trump proclaimed himself the head of the Kennedy Center, whose annual awards he’d boycotted during his prior term, and called Putin to let him know he could take as much of Ukraine as he could carry back to Moscow, as long as he left the rare earth minerals behind for Trump.

We’ve reached that terminal point of imperial decay when the highest ambition of most members of Congress is to be a sycophant (though few of them could spell or define the word without consulting ChatGTP.) It’s rather bracing to watch nearly the entire Congress stand mute as Trump and Musk usurp the key constitutional powers assigned to the House and the Senate and dismantle agencies and whole departments of government created and funded by acts of Congress. Or, as David Graeber wrote in The Utopia of Rules: “It’s not just that some people get to break the rules—it’s that loyalty to the organization is to some degree measured by one’s willingness to pretend this isn’t happening.”

Give Trump some credit. He has no interest in faking empathy, as Biden did so ineptly. In Trump’s playbook, empathy is a weakness, even amid tragedy. Instead, each disaster is an opportunity to go on the attack, to ascribe blame on his enemies, to aggrandize himself, and to find ways to profit from the carnage, financially and politically.