Trump began his war on Iran during talks to prevent it. He said it gave him the element of surprise. His missile strikes killed much of the Iranian leadership, including some of the Iranians his team thought might govern the country after the bombing ended. One of his missiles hit a girls’ school, another hit the compound of Mahmood Ahmadinejad, one of the candidates Trump’s people had in mind to run Iran after they killed Ayatollah Ali Khameni, the Iranian religious leader who, austere as he was, preferred negotiation over confrontation.

NPR interviewed a Trump voter in Georgia who said he thought the President was doing “an A+ job.” When asked how his family was dealing with rising food prices, the man replied, “My wife and I fast.” What’s the cure for this mass mesmerism that induces people to be willing to suffer extreme deprivations in order to enhance the fortunes, political and financial, of their billionaire leader? Trump’s like Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, without the medical degree.

The economic war on Cuba, which has been going on in one form or another for more than six decades, has increasingly become a war waged on Cuban children. Since Trump and Biden reimposed and broadly extended the economic sanctions and embargo on Cuba that Obama had eased, Cuba’s infant mortality rate, which in 2008 was lower than that of the US, has risen by 148 percent. This is infanticide committed through a policy of economic strangulation.

One day, I got a call from Peter Bahouth, a former Greenpeace honcho whom Ted Turner had swiped to run his grant-making operation. Peter said, “Jeff, can you hold for a sec? My boss wants to talk to you.” I was going to say, “No,” to Ted Turner? I waited longer than “a sec,” more like two or three minutes. Billionaires must be busy managing their billions, I thought.  I was expecting to hear Ted’s southern drawl. Instead, it was Jane, who babbled on for about 20 seconds, thanking me for mentioning the foundation [it was new then] in a piece I’d written with Alex Cockburn for The Nation, and then hung up without allowing me to say as much as “Hello” or “Damn, you had the greatest hair in Klute!” 

Cole Allen had been sold too many promises that didn’t pan out. The promise of hope and change. The promise of restoring the “soul of America,” whatever that really means. The promise of nostalgia restored, a reified America from the land of promise and dreams. But it’s the little annoyances that can loom large: the rising insurance payments, crappy cell service and internet too slow to stream, the damn heat, the traffic that doesn’t move, the commercialization of everything, even church, the bad TV, and the worse movies, music that grates and irritates, rather than consoles and inspires.

Donald Trump’s few remaining defenders are now reduced to explaining his increasingly erratic behavior as a ploy, that like Hamlet (I mean, the Don can play Jesus on Truth Social, so why not Hamlet on Fox News?), he is merely putting on “an antic disposition,” and is only “mad North-by-Northwest.,” not mad “true north,” not truly insane, but only acting so, as part of some still obscure deep strategy. Yet imagine the state of imperial entropy the US must’ve reached that its $1 trillion war-making budget and 5,000 nuclear warheads no longer command respect or obedience from smaller, much less powerful nations, so that its leader must pretend to be deranged in order to frighten people into submission … and even then, they still resist.

+ If, in fact, the war is over (don’t count on it), then Iran wins by surviving two massive bombing campaigns by the US and Israel (both nuclear-armed states) in the last year. Iran wins even bigger by keeping the Islamic Republic in power under the control of a younger, more militant leadership with the Republican Guard largely intact. Iran’s victory grows larger when you consider that it keeps its nuclear research program and uranium stockpile. The victory becomes almost total when you factor in its ongoing control over the Strait of Hormuz and the fact that Trump was ready to call it quits in less than two months–not the 20 years it took to realize it had been defeated in Afghanistan.

Iran has no air defenses left. The US can bomb whatever it wants, whenever it wants. It can bomb military bases and government buildings. It can bomb schools and mosques. It can bomb power plants and sewage treatment systems. It can bomb fire stations and hospitals. It can bomb TV networks, radio stations and newspapers. It can bomb museums, schools and daycares. What it can’t bomb is a revolution into being. It can’t bomb a regime change into being. It can’t bomb new rights for women into being. It can’t bomb the Islamic faith out of the hearts of most Iranians. It can’t bomb Iranians into loving instead of hating the US. In fact, each new bomb does the opposite, bombing new hatreds into being. The blowback is immediate and will last for decades.

Perhaps Trump will now replace Joe Kent with Newt Gingrich, who is very, very strong on security. So strong that Newt, the Edward Teller of our tormented times, advised Trump to drop 12 nuclear bombs on Iran to blast out a canal by-passing the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, someone with the guts to start a nuclear holocaust to prevent one.

The Iran war is a war of choice. But that doesn’t tell us much, does it? All wars are wars of choice. The questions are: was it a necessary choice? Was it a good choice? Was it a rational choice? Were the consequences considered? Who made the choice and why? We still don’t know the answers to these questions.

Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons. Iran has none. If Iran were really planning a preemptive strike on Israel, that would pretty much invalidate the notion of nuclear deterrence. Let’s get rid of them all! On the other hand, would Trump and Israel have risked launching a preemptive attack on Iran if the Islamic Republic possessed its own nuclear arsenal? Unlikely. (It’s more likely Trump would have written love letters to the Ayatollah, ala his endearing correspondence with Kim Jong-Un.) I think it’s safe to conclude that Iran had no plans to preemptively attack Israel or the US.

Trump has done the world a service. He has abandoned pretense and clarified the true nature of American power. There is no longer any need to manufacture a case for war, to make an attack seem conform to international law and treaties or to demonstrate its righteousness by acting as part of an international coalition. Now America can do what it wants to whomever it wants solely because the people who run its government want to. This has, of course, almost always been the case behind the curtain of diplomatic niceties. But Trump has ripped those curtains down and now the world is seeing American power in the raw: brazen, arrogant and mindless of the consequences, which will be borne by others and if they complain, they might be whacked, too.

Iran has not attacked the US. Cuba has not attacked the US. Venezuela did not attack the US. Nigeria did not attack the US. Gaza did not attack the US. Libya did not attack the US. Iraq did not attack the US. Serbia did not attack the US. Haiti did not attack the US. Panama did not attack the US. Nicaragua did not attack the US. Grenada did not attack the US. East Timor did not attack the US. Chile did not attack the US. Cambodia did not attack the US. Laos did not attack the US. Vietnam did not attack the US.

let’s venerate the brave souls of the Twin Cities, who came together to protect their neighbors from an invading force of masked paramilitaries. Let’s study and replicate their strategies, but be wary that the “great blonde beast” of ICE still lurks, its coffers swollen with taxpayer loot, wounded and chastened, but not slain, and, like many wounded creatures, is perhaps now even more unpredictable and dangerous.

If the ranks of ICE had been filled by a draft, we wouldn’t be seeing this kind of mass brutality. Normal human beings would recoil from committing daily acts of violence against defenseless people and would question the psychological health of those giving them orders to do so, as we ultimately saw in Vietnam. But instead, ICE is populated by people who signed up for this, people who are eager to terrorize, abuse and inflict gratuitous brutality on others. Sadists, in other words.

Now that white people in the northern states are being shot, gassed, beaten and killed, there is an eruption of national outrage over the hyper-violence of CPB and ICE, as there well should be. But since 2010, there have been 364 people killed in encounters with Border Patrol, the means of death include shootings, car chases, beatings, asphyxiations and Taserings. And, as Todd Miller points out, “at least 10,000 people have died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border since the 1990s, a number that could be three to eight times higher.” The anger and indignation are a long time coming…

Trump left for the elite meet-and-greet at Davos in one of his manic phases. He’d just spent the previous two days trash-talking, bragging about his Venezuelan coup, boasting over pocketing the revenue from Venezuelan oil in offshore accounts, lobbing invasion threats against allies, brandishing new tariffs as if they were hypersonic weapons, badmouthing his rivals, trolling his political enemies, and serial-posting of memes depicting himself as the latest conquistador of the New World. The Re-Conquistador. 

It’s revolting, but hardly surprising, that a woman (Kristi Noem) who thought bragging about the time she shot her puppy in the head for disobeying a command and dumped its body in a gravel quarry would advance her political career, also thinks it’s entirely justified to shoot a mother of three in the head for “disobeying” confusing commands from her ICE agents.

Many of the people who have spent the last five years denouncing the killing of Ashli Babbitt for raiding the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election are celebrating the murder of Renee Nichole Good, a terrified mother killed by masked men from unmarked cars who chased her down a neighborhood street and shot her in the face.

The cocksure boast that the US will “run” Venezuela appears to be another Trumpian fantasy. It’s impossible to “run a country,” if you don’t have control of it, which the US doesn’t by any measure. The Maduro government remains in place and defiant, even with Maduro renditioned to New York City. Indeed, the attack appears to have only strengthened the resolve of the Venezuelan people, instead of inspiring the chimerical uprising Rubio led Trump to expect, much as Rumsfeld and Cheney deceived Bush into believing about Iraq.

A year into Trump’s mass purge of immigrants from the United States, it’s beyond debate that the people orchestrating and conducting the raids, round-ups and deportations have committed more grievous crimes than the vast majority of the people they’ve harassed, assaulted, arrested, jailed and sent into exile. They’ve committed crimes against the Constitution of the government they’re acting in the name of and they’ve used the force, often violent force, of the federal government against innocent people. They’ve lied to Congress and federal judges. They’ve systematically violated judicial orders. They’ve denied people the most fundamental right guaranteed to residents, regardless of legal status, in the US: the right to due process of law.

2025 will go down as the second or third hottest year on record. The last decade has been the hottest decade in human history.  Driven by drought and extreme winds, a massive fire burned its way across the LA Basin, incinerating more than 10,000 homes. The estimated damage ranges from $76 billion to $133 billion. Total losses to businesses and workers in income and wages totaled at least $297. The year saw two of the largest, most rapidly intensifying hurricanes in the history of the Atlantic Ocean. Floods in central Texas killed at least 137 people, while massive flooding driven by twin cyclones that tore across Sumatra and the southern Philippines killed at least 1,800 people and left more than a million people homeless. We are in the midst of the largest mass coral bleaching event in history, affecting 83% of the world’s extant coral reefs. The melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is accelerating. Its surface is fracturing, causing massive ice falls and rockslides that are warping the southern continent’s geology. A total collapse of the ice sheet, which now seems certain, would raise global sea levels by 12 feet. The Arctic Ocean is now expected to be “ice-free” in the summer by 2030, twenty years earlier than predicted just a few years ago. The Atlantic Current is slowing down and may be on the verge of collapse, which would likely destabilize rainfall patterns for much of the planet. Wildfires in Canada now burn year-round. There were 24,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this summer from June to August alone. Deaths from extreme heat in the US have increased by more than 50% since 2000. 

Donald Trump often doesn’t know what he’s talking about and no one else does either. But when he talks, people still listen, trying to make sense out of streams of nonsense. Like Homer’s sirens, it’s impossible to tune him out. He lures you, sentence fragment by sentence fragment,  into his maelstrom of mystification.

Reiner was a liberal Democrat to the core. Blinded by party loyalty, he became a hardboiled Russiagater and offered excuses for many inexcusable acts by HRC and Biden. But he was more passionate than most of the soulless post-Clinton suits who have run the party for the last three decades. Reiner was funny and had a sense of irony about himself, which few self-righteous Hollywood liberals seem to possess. I sensed that he genuinely cared about the poor and the marginalized and knew the system was rotten at its core and needed change, even if the only change he could envision was so incremental it was barely noticeable and easily erased once the Berserkers took power.

The double-tap strikes are appalling and illegal, but Hegseth is merely following the bloody path Barack Obama blazed. Obama’s drone assassination team even had a name for wounded survivors they would target for a second kill strike: squirters. According to David Shedd, Obama’s former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “We used double-taps all the time. You would get the initial signature off of a target that’s been hit and if you saw that they ‘squirted’ and were injured … you hit them again.” Shedd told Washington Post columnist Mark Thyssen: “There was often a second predator ready to go … that was fully expected to be used if you didn’t have a 100 percent coming out of the first hit — and maybe a third hit…It was done routinely.”

So it’s no surprise thatTrump did more than receive MBS with diplomatic niceties. He lavished praise on the smirking Prince with the eagerness if a supplicant, asserted his innocence with the fervency (if not articulateness) of a defense lawyer, throwing his own intelligence agencies under the bus, demeaned and ridiculed an American reporter for asking obvious and obligatory questions of the Prince and even went so far as to suggest that Khashoggi may have deserved to be killed on the orders of the man sitting across from him in the Oval Office. “Things happen,” Trump shrugged. 

After sweeping the elections last week, the Democrats agreed to a deal to end the shutdown that gave them almost nothing and could have been made weeks ago. It’s what they do. The Democrats weren’t going to “win” the shutdown, but they could’ve drawn blood from Trump and his cadre of cruelty in Congress. In the end, they surrendered and all of the bleeding was on their side, from largely self-inflicted wounds.

The bipartisan whitewashing of Dick Cheney is as much of a perversion of US history as Trump’s eliding any mention of the horrors of slavery, the internment of Japanese-Americans and the genocide against the indigenous population of the US from national parks and museums.

More than half of new ICE recruits failed an open-book test after taking a course on Immigration and the Fourth Amendment. This pervasive constitutional ignorance might seem like a grave disorder for a law enforcement agency, but under the current dispensation, it is likely a prerequisite for the position. The Trump administration doesn’t want its ICE agents hesitating to cuff a 6-year-old or tear gas a teacher trying to shield her student because it might violate some civil right or another. That would be wussy and woke.

We’re not afraid, we’re not trembling and our objective as journalists remains the same as it was in the 1990s when the first CounterPunch newsletter went to press: to question the received wisdom, call out political cant and cliches, expose injustices and follow the money wherever it leads and into whoever’s pockets it stuffs. As CounterPunch founder Ken Silverstein, still one of the best investigative journalists around, said: “We’re journalists, not ideologues. Everyone is fair game.”

Maria Greeley was on her way to work at the Beach Bar in Chicago, when she was accosted by three ICE agents. Fearing she might be targeted by ICE, Greeley, who is Latina, had her passport with her, proving she was an American citizen, born 44 years ago at the Masonic Hospital in Chicago. The Feds looked at Greeley’s passport and said it was fake because she didn’t “look like” her last name. Greeley explained that she was adopted by the Greeley family shortly after birth. “They said this [her passport] isn’t real, they kept telling me I’m lying, I’m a liar,” Maria Greeley told the Chicago Tribune. “I told them to look in the rest of my wallet, I have my credit cards, my insurance.” The agents still didn’t believe her and forced her hands behind her back and cuffed them together with zip ties. Then they interrogated her for more than an hour before releasing her, another American citizen subjected to federal cop abuse based solely on the color of her skin.

The fatal flaw in Donald Trump’s scheme to whitewash American history of its most depraved and embarrassing episodes is that his administration is committing new acts of barbarity and stupidity in real-time on an almost hourly basis. Consider the last week in Chicago and Portland.

When Ralph Nader campaigned on”cutting fat” from the Pentagon, he was referring to the budget, and big ticket weapons systems like SDI and the F-35, not the waistlines of generals.

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.