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A protester holds a poster opposing US President Donald Trump during a demonstration by opposition political groups and activists across the street from the Diet, Japan's House of Representatives, in central Tokyo on April 8, 2026 to oppose revisions to the Constitution and to protest attacks by the United States and Israel on Iran.
(Photo by Andrew Cabellero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)
Insane, Bloodthirsty Trump Must Be Removed From Power
It will take at least a generation for this nation to heal from the damage Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his GOP toadies have done.
Apr 08, 2026
Well, 8 PM ET came and went, to paraphrase TS Eliot, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” In the latest episode of Trump’s reality show presidency, he decided he’ll give Iran “another two weeks” (we’ll get to that in a minute) to open the Strait of Hormuz because something something Pakistan something.
Some are suggesting it was a predictable TACO — “Trump Always Chickens Out” — while others, including at least one retired general who was on MSNOW yesterday, say sources tell them that the commanders at CENTCOM simply and bluntly refused to carry out his and Whiskey Pete’s orders to commit massive war crimes.
In either case, it shouldn’t surprise us that Trump has backed down. Throughout his entire life, this nepo-baby has only been good at two things beyond inheriting and squandering his father’s money.
The first has been manipulating the press to get publicity for himself, a skill he fine-tuned in the 1980s (as I detail in The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink) and has been on display throughout this Iran debacle (and the entire past decade).
He started with the New York tabloids and talk shows, then graduated to a national stage when he began accusing Barack Obama of having been born in Kenya. Now he does it daily from the White House and his tacky golf motel in Florida.
You could argue that he came by this skill honestly, driven by his being raised by a psychopathic father and a distant, sickly mother. He never felt loved, and never learned how to love, turning all his efforts into getting attention — which he translated into approval and love — from others. His deep sense of being unloved and unworthiness underlies and drives much of his own psychopathy.
And his literal hate for anybody — particularly women — who doesn’t completely defer to him shows up almost daily in press conferences and on his helicopter and plane trips when he slaps down mostly-women reporters with epithets like “piggy” and “you’re stupid” for having had the temerity to ask him a non-flattering question or one that may reveal his criminality or ignorance.
His other, second skill was learned: NBC spent literally millions of dollars teaching Trump how to be a reality show host, which is the other role he’s playing now.
There can be little doubt that this cruel narcissist got pleasure and a deep satisfaction from telling people less powerful than him, “You’re fired,” but it was NBC’s producers and media consultants who taught him how to raise expectations, heighten tension, drag out a tease, and the importance of always rebooting the show at least every two weeks, lest the public forget the storyline and move on.
His perverse delight in turning others’ lives upside-down by firing them, first experienced in real time on The Apprentice set, now translates into the callous way he jettisons anybody in his orbit he doesn’t consider appropriately obsequious; Pam Bondi is just the most recent in a long list of people he went out of his way to humiliate.
His cabinet meetings similarly reflect his lessons learned doing TV for NBC when he’d gather people around a table in the boardroom TV set the network had to create because his actual offices in New York were so shabby. He’d go around the table giving each contestant an opportunity to not only make a case for their business idea but also to slather him with praise and adoration.
Above all, both of these trainings taught him the importance of dominating the news cycle with the tease, which is what we’ve been seeing this past week in particular.
When he was just a pathetic, always-failing hustler in the Big City he’d wake up every morning asking himself what he could do or say that’d get him on Page One or Page Six of The New York Post; now his question is how to dominate every night’s coverage of the evening news. Or every news show, all day, if possible.
Threatening genocide certainly pulled that one off:
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
That insane message should have immediately provoked articles of impeachment from any and every congressional Republican with even a fragment of loyalty to our Constitution, the rule of law, and humanity itself. Instead, we got a very revealing, deafening silence.
The problem with suggesting genocide — and the reason why no other American president has been stupid and reckless enough to try this in our entire history — is that America making such a threat establishes for every despot in the world that mass killing is now okay again. International law and the Geneva Conventions don’t mean a thing; when you’re a star, they let you do it.
Trump thinks he’s living inside a reality show, one of the few things he knows how to do well. Sociopaths and psychopaths, after all, don’t see other humans as real people like them with actual hopes, dreams, and feelings. They think they’re the only “real” person in the world, and only their emotions matter. Everybody else is simply a prop on the set, here to facilitate their whims.
His limited mental capacity and inability to feel empathy prevent him from understanding the consequences of the things he’s done, from his illegal tariffs to his war-crime bombing of little boats in the Caribbean, to his joining accused war criminal Netanyahu in attacking a country that represented no threat whatsoever to America (and was on the verge of giving him a better deal than they had Obama).
He’ll never understand; he’s simply not capable of it. Any more than he could understand the damage he did to the women he assaulted or the little girls who claim he raped them, the small-business contractors he stiffed, the customers he conned with his multiple grifts — from his fake university to the worthless merchandise he hawks to his crypto scams — or the victims of the MAGA cult he fashioned around himself to bleed dry financially and then discard when the votes and dollars were in.
But America and the world will pay the price, and it won’t be paid easily or quickly. It’ll take at least a generation for this nation to heal from the damage Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his GOP toadies have done.
We got a two-week reprieve. We must use it to impeach this man and remove him from office, as over 85 lawmakers have already publicly called for.
An Urgent Message From Our Co-Founder
Dear Common Dreams reader, The U.S. is on a fast track to authoritarianism like nothing I've ever seen. Meanwhile, corporate news outlets are utterly capitulating to Trump, twisting their coverage to avoid drawing his ire while lining up to stuff cash in his pockets. That's why I believe that Common Dreams is doing the best and most consequential reporting that we've ever done. Our small but mighty team is a progressive reporting powerhouse, covering the news every day that the corporate media never will. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. And to ignite change for the common good. Now here's the key piece that I want all our readers to understand: None of this would be possible without your financial support. That's not just some fundraising cliche. It's the absolute and literal truth. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. Will you donate now to help power the nonprofit, independent reporting of Common Dreams? Thank you for being a vital member of our community. Together, we can keep independent journalism alive when it’s needed most. - Craig Brown, Co-founder |
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Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
Well, 8 PM ET came and went, to paraphrase TS Eliot, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” In the latest episode of Trump’s reality show presidency, he decided he’ll give Iran “another two weeks” (we’ll get to that in a minute) to open the Strait of Hormuz because something something Pakistan something.
Some are suggesting it was a predictable TACO — “Trump Always Chickens Out” — while others, including at least one retired general who was on MSNOW yesterday, say sources tell them that the commanders at CENTCOM simply and bluntly refused to carry out his and Whiskey Pete’s orders to commit massive war crimes.
In either case, it shouldn’t surprise us that Trump has backed down. Throughout his entire life, this nepo-baby has only been good at two things beyond inheriting and squandering his father’s money.
The first has been manipulating the press to get publicity for himself, a skill he fine-tuned in the 1980s (as I detail in The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink) and has been on display throughout this Iran debacle (and the entire past decade).
He started with the New York tabloids and talk shows, then graduated to a national stage when he began accusing Barack Obama of having been born in Kenya. Now he does it daily from the White House and his tacky golf motel in Florida.
You could argue that he came by this skill honestly, driven by his being raised by a psychopathic father and a distant, sickly mother. He never felt loved, and never learned how to love, turning all his efforts into getting attention — which he translated into approval and love — from others. His deep sense of being unloved and unworthiness underlies and drives much of his own psychopathy.
And his literal hate for anybody — particularly women — who doesn’t completely defer to him shows up almost daily in press conferences and on his helicopter and plane trips when he slaps down mostly-women reporters with epithets like “piggy” and “you’re stupid” for having had the temerity to ask him a non-flattering question or one that may reveal his criminality or ignorance.
His other, second skill was learned: NBC spent literally millions of dollars teaching Trump how to be a reality show host, which is the other role he’s playing now.
There can be little doubt that this cruel narcissist got pleasure and a deep satisfaction from telling people less powerful than him, “You’re fired,” but it was NBC’s producers and media consultants who taught him how to raise expectations, heighten tension, drag out a tease, and the importance of always rebooting the show at least every two weeks, lest the public forget the storyline and move on.
His perverse delight in turning others’ lives upside-down by firing them, first experienced in real time on The Apprentice set, now translates into the callous way he jettisons anybody in his orbit he doesn’t consider appropriately obsequious; Pam Bondi is just the most recent in a long list of people he went out of his way to humiliate.
His cabinet meetings similarly reflect his lessons learned doing TV for NBC when he’d gather people around a table in the boardroom TV set the network had to create because his actual offices in New York were so shabby. He’d go around the table giving each contestant an opportunity to not only make a case for their business idea but also to slather him with praise and adoration.
Above all, both of these trainings taught him the importance of dominating the news cycle with the tease, which is what we’ve been seeing this past week in particular.
When he was just a pathetic, always-failing hustler in the Big City he’d wake up every morning asking himself what he could do or say that’d get him on Page One or Page Six of The New York Post; now his question is how to dominate every night’s coverage of the evening news. Or every news show, all day, if possible.
Threatening genocide certainly pulled that one off:
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
That insane message should have immediately provoked articles of impeachment from any and every congressional Republican with even a fragment of loyalty to our Constitution, the rule of law, and humanity itself. Instead, we got a very revealing, deafening silence.
The problem with suggesting genocide — and the reason why no other American president has been stupid and reckless enough to try this in our entire history — is that America making such a threat establishes for every despot in the world that mass killing is now okay again. International law and the Geneva Conventions don’t mean a thing; when you’re a star, they let you do it.
Trump thinks he’s living inside a reality show, one of the few things he knows how to do well. Sociopaths and psychopaths, after all, don’t see other humans as real people like them with actual hopes, dreams, and feelings. They think they’re the only “real” person in the world, and only their emotions matter. Everybody else is simply a prop on the set, here to facilitate their whims.
His limited mental capacity and inability to feel empathy prevent him from understanding the consequences of the things he’s done, from his illegal tariffs to his war-crime bombing of little boats in the Caribbean, to his joining accused war criminal Netanyahu in attacking a country that represented no threat whatsoever to America (and was on the verge of giving him a better deal than they had Obama).
He’ll never understand; he’s simply not capable of it. Any more than he could understand the damage he did to the women he assaulted or the little girls who claim he raped them, the small-business contractors he stiffed, the customers he conned with his multiple grifts — from his fake university to the worthless merchandise he hawks to his crypto scams — or the victims of the MAGA cult he fashioned around himself to bleed dry financially and then discard when the votes and dollars were in.
But America and the world will pay the price, and it won’t be paid easily or quickly. It’ll take at least a generation for this nation to heal from the damage Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his GOP toadies have done.
We got a two-week reprieve. We must use it to impeach this man and remove him from office, as over 85 lawmakers have already publicly called for.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
Well, 8 PM ET came and went, to paraphrase TS Eliot, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” In the latest episode of Trump’s reality show presidency, he decided he’ll give Iran “another two weeks” (we’ll get to that in a minute) to open the Strait of Hormuz because something something Pakistan something.
Some are suggesting it was a predictable TACO — “Trump Always Chickens Out” — while others, including at least one retired general who was on MSNOW yesterday, say sources tell them that the commanders at CENTCOM simply and bluntly refused to carry out his and Whiskey Pete’s orders to commit massive war crimes.
In either case, it shouldn’t surprise us that Trump has backed down. Throughout his entire life, this nepo-baby has only been good at two things beyond inheriting and squandering his father’s money.
The first has been manipulating the press to get publicity for himself, a skill he fine-tuned in the 1980s (as I detail in The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink) and has been on display throughout this Iran debacle (and the entire past decade).
He started with the New York tabloids and talk shows, then graduated to a national stage when he began accusing Barack Obama of having been born in Kenya. Now he does it daily from the White House and his tacky golf motel in Florida.
You could argue that he came by this skill honestly, driven by his being raised by a psychopathic father and a distant, sickly mother. He never felt loved, and never learned how to love, turning all his efforts into getting attention — which he translated into approval and love — from others. His deep sense of being unloved and unworthiness underlies and drives much of his own psychopathy.
And his literal hate for anybody — particularly women — who doesn’t completely defer to him shows up almost daily in press conferences and on his helicopter and plane trips when he slaps down mostly-women reporters with epithets like “piggy” and “you’re stupid” for having had the temerity to ask him a non-flattering question or one that may reveal his criminality or ignorance.
His other, second skill was learned: NBC spent literally millions of dollars teaching Trump how to be a reality show host, which is the other role he’s playing now.
There can be little doubt that this cruel narcissist got pleasure and a deep satisfaction from telling people less powerful than him, “You’re fired,” but it was NBC’s producers and media consultants who taught him how to raise expectations, heighten tension, drag out a tease, and the importance of always rebooting the show at least every two weeks, lest the public forget the storyline and move on.
His perverse delight in turning others’ lives upside-down by firing them, first experienced in real time on The Apprentice set, now translates into the callous way he jettisons anybody in his orbit he doesn’t consider appropriately obsequious; Pam Bondi is just the most recent in a long list of people he went out of his way to humiliate.
His cabinet meetings similarly reflect his lessons learned doing TV for NBC when he’d gather people around a table in the boardroom TV set the network had to create because his actual offices in New York were so shabby. He’d go around the table giving each contestant an opportunity to not only make a case for their business idea but also to slather him with praise and adoration.
Above all, both of these trainings taught him the importance of dominating the news cycle with the tease, which is what we’ve been seeing this past week in particular.
When he was just a pathetic, always-failing hustler in the Big City he’d wake up every morning asking himself what he could do or say that’d get him on Page One or Page Six of The New York Post; now his question is how to dominate every night’s coverage of the evening news. Or every news show, all day, if possible.
Threatening genocide certainly pulled that one off:
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
That insane message should have immediately provoked articles of impeachment from any and every congressional Republican with even a fragment of loyalty to our Constitution, the rule of law, and humanity itself. Instead, we got a very revealing, deafening silence.
The problem with suggesting genocide — and the reason why no other American president has been stupid and reckless enough to try this in our entire history — is that America making such a threat establishes for every despot in the world that mass killing is now okay again. International law and the Geneva Conventions don’t mean a thing; when you’re a star, they let you do it.
Trump thinks he’s living inside a reality show, one of the few things he knows how to do well. Sociopaths and psychopaths, after all, don’t see other humans as real people like them with actual hopes, dreams, and feelings. They think they’re the only “real” person in the world, and only their emotions matter. Everybody else is simply a prop on the set, here to facilitate their whims.
His limited mental capacity and inability to feel empathy prevent him from understanding the consequences of the things he’s done, from his illegal tariffs to his war-crime bombing of little boats in the Caribbean, to his joining accused war criminal Netanyahu in attacking a country that represented no threat whatsoever to America (and was on the verge of giving him a better deal than they had Obama).
He’ll never understand; he’s simply not capable of it. Any more than he could understand the damage he did to the women he assaulted or the little girls who claim he raped them, the small-business contractors he stiffed, the customers he conned with his multiple grifts — from his fake university to the worthless merchandise he hawks to his crypto scams — or the victims of the MAGA cult he fashioned around himself to bleed dry financially and then discard when the votes and dollars were in.
But America and the world will pay the price, and it won’t be paid easily or quickly. It’ll take at least a generation for this nation to heal from the damage Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his GOP toadies have done.
We got a two-week reprieve. We must use it to impeach this man and remove him from office, as over 85 lawmakers have already publicly called for.
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