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Opinion
The Trumpian Nightmare Must End Before It Gets Worse
A fascist monster who demonizes migrants, exacts revenge on his perceived foes, actively destroys the rule of law, and whose real agenda is not “America First” but rather “Trump First” is in charge of today’s United States.
May 14, 2025
We are nearly four months into the Trump administration, but sometimes it feels like the orange man has been president forever. This is because Donald Trump’s second term is a nightmare that keeps getting worse and worse.
First, you have the chaos that Trump has unleashed around the world with his uninformed and simplistic views on international trade and trade policy and threats to Greenland, Canada, Panama, and Mexico; then his all-out assault on civil society and the very fundamental principles of U.S. democracy; and then the daily and exhausting bullshit that comes out of his ignorant mouth, which he uses as a diversion to distract citizens and the media alike from his actions.
But it is the horrible combination of lawlessness and incompetence, fear and cruelty of Trump 2.0 that creates the feeling that time has stopped. Time flies when things are good and we are having fun. But if we are in distress and pain, time slows down.
Trump is waging a war on the poor, seeks to destroy the environment, abuses power in order to target his enemies, and tears families apart with his mass deportation agenda precisely because he has a passion for cruelty.
Trump’s politics are repellant. They are straight out of the fascist playbook. They are dressed in fear and hate, cruelty and vengeance, with lies and corruption being both cause and effect of his leadership style.
Trump is using fear as a political tool with citizens, Congress, courts, business, universities, and the news industry. He uses denigrating and dehumanizing language to promote hate in order to create a divided United States.
Trump's anti-immigrant policies are rooted in racism and, sure enough, want to make eugenics great again. Offering special immigration status to white Afrikaners, on a refugee program that has essentially been suspended for all other groups, speaks volumes of who the orange man is and what he stands for.
But Trump’s signature is cruelty. Indeed, in Gaza, Trump did not see immense human suffering, let alone a genocide in the making, but “underdeveloped real estate,” as Robert Kutner so astutely observed. Trump is waging a war on the poor, seeks to destroy the environment, abuses power in order to target his enemies, and tears families apart with his mass deportation agenda precisely because he has a passion for cruelty.
Umberto Eco claimed that “there was only one Nazism.” But the great Italian scholar and best-selling author went on to add that “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.”
To be sure, a fascist monster who demonizes migrants, exacts revenge on his perceived foes, actively destroys the rule of law, and whose real agenda is not “America First” but rather “Trump First” is in charge of today’s United States.
I have no idea how the Trumpian nightmare is going to end. But it will surely get worse as time goes by if Americans do not rise up against the orange man’s fascist regime.
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Don’t Be Scared of Impeachment–This One’s an Easy Call
Impeachment is a slam-dunk signal to a representative’s constituents that they are upholding their oath to the Constitution and the American people.
May 14, 2025
When I joined the Air Force, I took the oath every serviceperson takes: to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter. Every member of Congress takes this same oath.
At his inauguration, President Donald Trump swore a much shorter oath: to faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has since actively rejected his responsibility to the Constitution, ignoring Supreme Court rulings, violating the emoluments clause, stripping people of due process, and engaging in nakedly corrupt self-enrichment. We are in a constitutional crisis, in every sense of the word.
None of Trump’s unconstitutional actions are disputed. My responsibility as a citizen is the same as the responsibility of our duly elected officials in the Senate and the House: to remove this blatantly unfit president from office. If Trump isn’t sure he needs to uphold the Constitution, he should not be leading our democracy. Simple.
Trump is a blatantly corrupt tyrant laying waste to the Constitution. Democrats know it. Republicans know it. The American people know it. The remedy is clear: impeachment.
Democrats have made it clear that they believe Trump has committed impeachable offenses. They tell us endlessly, in all forms of social media, public speeches, and fundraising texts, about the bribery and the violation of rights and the usurpation of the power of the purse. They all pledge to do something about it.
That something must be impeachment.
Impeachment is the legal remedy for the unconstitutional actions of this president, enshrined in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution. They understood the danger a tyrant would pose to our republic, and provided impeachment as the clear, constitutional method to remove “a president who mistakes himself for a monarch.” Impeachment and removal of a tyrant is the fundamental responsibility of duly elected members of the House of Representatives.
I am taking my oath seriously. In April I started the grassroots Citizens’ Impeachment with former Senate staffer Gabe Garbowit. We started out as Operation Anti-King, and recruited citizens from every congressional district and sent more than 600 emails to ask their representatives if they would support impeachment. Fifteen representatives said yes.
One of those Representatives is also taking their oath seriously: Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) has gone on to introduce articles of impeachment under Rule IX, requiring the House to vote on impeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for his undisputed high crimes and misdemeanors. That vote happens this week.
It’s a simple question: Is this impeachable conduct or not? Any representative who answers “yes” to that question and intends to uphold their oath of office should stand firmly behind impeachment. This includes voting to move forward the articles of impeachment introduced by Rep. Thanedar.
Reportedly, some Democrats aren’t thrilled at the opportunity for an up-and-down vote on impeachment, but they should be. A majority of likely voters support impeachment, including a majority of Independents (55%). Democratic likely voters are particularly enthusiastic, with 64% strongly supporting impeachment and another 16% supporting impeachment somewhat. Impeachment is a slam-dunk signal to a Democratic representative’s constituents that they are upholding their oath to the Constitution and the American people.
Trump is not invincible. His coalition is starting to crack over the obvious incompetence and corruption, and he has the lowest approval rating of any president in the past 80 years at this point in their term. If Congress refuses to uphold their own oath to support and defend the Constitution by removing him from office, there isn’t anything left to hold back this rogue president from a full power grab.
Voters also have a huge part to play here. We need to insist that every duly elected representative—Democrat and Republican alike—uphold their oath of office and move forward articles of impeachment this week. The more our elected officials hear from their constituents, the harder it is to ignore us and the constitutional crisis. Citizens’ Impeachment has instructions and scripts to help you tell your representative to support impeachment and move forward H. Res 353, Impeaching Donald John Trump.
The Citizens’ Impeachment movement came together very quickly—from two passionate and determined people to thousands of active volunteers in less than two months—because we recognize two things. The first is that impeachment is the only way to remove a tyrant as laid out in the Constitution. And the second is that the power of people coming together, to tell our elected representatives what we want to see them do, to pressure them into committing to this path publicly, is how we can get them to act.
Trump is a blatantly corrupt tyrant laying waste to the Constitution. Democrats know it. Republicans know it. The American people know it. The remedy is clear: impeachment. This week, representatives have the opportunity to align themselves with the American people, uphold their oath, and support and defend the Constitution. We will see how many of them take it.
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Trump Is Trying to Spook States out of Suing Big Oil—Why They Shouldn’t Back Down
Given the shakiness of the administration’s lawsuits, what really matters is whether state and local officials have the courage to stand strong against Trump’s mafia-style threats.
May 14, 2025
As U.S. President Donald Trump continues to threaten any institutions that could check his administration’s ongoing drive toward authoritarianism, there’s been a stark contrast in responses to his mob boss-style attacks. Some targets—like Harvard, which vowed to fight Trump’s assault on universities, or the law firm Perkins Coie, which recently scored a judicial win holding Trump’s actions against the firm unconstitutional—have seen their stature in their respective fields skyrocket,. Others—like Columbia University or the law firm Paul Weiss, which both immediately folded at the first sign of aggression from Trump—have been publicly, and perhaps permanently, tarred as feckless cowards.
This contrast between courage and gutlessness appeared once again earlier this month in response to Trump’s latest dictatorial salvo: an all-out assault on behalf of the fossil fuel industry against state and local efforts to hold Big Oil companies accountable for deceiving the public about climate change.
Right now, 1 in 4 Americans live in a jurisdiction that is fighting to put Big Oil companies on trial for their climate lies and make them pay for the catastrophic damage they knew decades ago that their products would cause. The fossil fuel industry concedes that it faces “massive monetary liability” in these cases, and has been growing more and more desperate to stop plaintiff communities from having their day in court. In the last few years Big Oil has asked the Supreme Court to block these cases on five separate occasions. Recently, industry front groups tied to Leonard Leo ran a pressure campaign pushing the court to take up the issue.
Making polluters pay for climate damages is widely supported—and far more popular than Trump ever has been.
But the court has denied Big Oil every time, and so fossil fuel companies have had to shift to Plan B: asking the man they spent hundreds of millions of dollars electing to fulfill his end of the quid pro quo. The Wall Street Journal reported that oil executives asked Trump during a White House meeting for legal help against the cases, and their lobbyists are pushing congressional Republicans to include legal protections for the fossil fuel industry “in a coming Trump-endorsed bill.”
In his typical oligarchical style, Trump has gone all in to protect his corporate backers. On April 8 Trump issued an executive order directing the attorney general to “take all appropriate action” to stop states that have “sued energy companies for supposed ‘climate change’ harm.” And this month the Department of Justice filed a series of lawsuits attempting to prevent Hawaii and Michigan from pursuing climate litigation.
We’ve become so inured to the extreme misconduct of this administration that it’s often hard for any new scandal to stand out. But it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the staggering corruption of this new broadside on the rule of law.
Trump is taking unprecedented action on behalf of an industry that understood decades ago that their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, “great irreversible harm,” “more violent weather—more storms, more droughts, more deluges,” and “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” Instead of warning consumers about this existential threat, they waged a massive disinformation campaign to prevent the public from understanding the dangers of climate change. They made trillions of dollars from this deception, leaving regular Americans to pay the price.
And regular Americans certainly have been paying that price. They’ve been paying in higher insurance costs driven by the “violent weather” that Big Oil companies knew their products would cause. They’ve been paying in homes, businesses, and livelihoods lost in climate-driven “deluges.” And in far too many cases they’ve been paying with their own “suffering and death.” That is why many of the communities hit hardest by these disasters have sued—under the same long-established state laws used to hold Big Tobacco and opioid profiteers accountable—to force the companies responsible for global warming to contribute at least something to the often devastating climate costs that right now are falling entirely on the shoulders of regular Americans.
Trump, of course, doesn’t care about regular Americans experiencing, in his words, “supposed ‘climate change’ harm.” His concern is limited entirely to his Big Oil donors, who are terrified of having to defend their climate lies to a jury composed of the people they screwed over.
Unfortunately for Big Oil, we live in a federalist system of government that does not allow a president to unilaterally block a state from pursuing valid state-law claims in state courts. Indeed, legal experts seem to agree the suits filed by the administration against Hawaii and Michigan are “shockingly flimsy.”
That doesn’t mean Trump’s legal maneuvering isn’t a potent weapon, however. As we’ve seen with Trump’s assault on universities and law firms, the goal of these attacks is not winning in the courtroom. It’s all about intimidation—which means that what really matters is whether state and local officials have the courage to stand strong against Trump’s mafia-style threats.
Some leaders are demonstrating that they have that backbone. On May 1, Hawaii ignored the DOJ’s specious lawsuit and became the 10th state to sue Big Oil. As Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez said, “The state of Hawaiʻi will not be deterred from moving forward with our climate deception lawsuit. My department will vigorously oppose this gross federal overreach.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel had a similar response: “Donald Trump has made clear he will answer any and every beck and call from his Big Oil campaign donors… I remain undeterred in my intention to file this lawsuit the president and his Big Oil donors so fear.”
Sadly, not all local leaders have demonstrated such courage. Shortly after the DOJ announced its suits against Hawaii and Michigan, Puerto Rico voluntarily dropped its 2024 case that sought to make fossil fuel companies pay to help protect the commonwealth’s infrastructure against stronger storms, sea-level rise, and other damages fueled by climate change. The Leonard Leo-linked Alliance for Consumers, which days earlier called on Puerto Rico’s governor to help kill the case, crowed that the dismissal would allow consumers to “take comfort in knowing the things you buy for your family will still be there, at the store, when you need them”—an Orwellian message for the millions of Puerto Ricans who were unable to access basic goods for months following the climate-driven catastrophe of Hurricane Maria.
A spokesperson said the commonwealth dropped its case, which was brought under a previous administration, because Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón wanted to “be aligned with the policies of President Trump,” which is “to support the burning of fossil fuels [and] the protection of oil companies.” As a result, her constituents will be condemned to a future of escalating climate disasters that they—and not the polluters most responsible—will have to pay for.
But maybe the contrast between Puerto Rico’s humiliating supplication and Hawaii and Michigan’s courageous stands can help inspire other local and state jurisdictions to refuse to bend to Trump’s future threats. After all, making polluters pay for climate damages is widely supported—and far more popular than Trump ever has been.
When the history books are written about this lawless moment, the collaborators—the Columbias, the Paul Weisses, the González-Colóns—will not like how posterity remembers their cowardice. But leaders who rise to the occasion, who refuse to surrender to Trump’s protection racket, and who continue fighting to make polluters pay will be able to take pride in their place on the right side of history.
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Trump Is Escalating His Rendition of Democracy
Despite repeated legal setbacks demanding an end to these autocratic practices, the Trump administration continues its assault on the rule of law.
May 14, 2025
For all the autocratic abuses that characterize U.S. President Donald Trump’s second tenure, nothing more parallels the historic pattern of dictatorships than the kidnapping of disfavored individuals by armed agents of the state. Then concealing them in detention facilities, including as a prelude for some to be renditioned to horrific prisons in foreign countries. All while trampling on constitutional protections of legal due process, often ignoring court orders to stop it.
"The one power you cannot give the executive is the power to arbitrarily imprison people who oppose the regime,” says Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “Today it may be an El Salvadorian immigrant or a foreign student, but tomorrow it is you or me. The slope to despotism can be slippery and quick.”
“In fascist states, individual rights had no autonomous existence,” writes Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism. “The State of Law vanished, along with the principles of due process” for “guaranteed equitable treatment by the courts and state agencies. A suspect acquitted in a German court of law could be rearrested by agents of the regime at the courthouse door and put in a concentration camp without any further legal procedure.”
For some of those snatched off the streets, at home, from their car with children in the back, or in a courtroom, the ultimate destination is a foreign hellhole.
Despite repeated legal setbacks demanding an end to these autocratic practices, the Trump administration continues to escalate the assault on the rule of law. Recent incidents illustrate the rising danger.
Federal agents have begun targeting judges and elected officials. In late April, the FBI arrested sitting state court Judge Hannah Dugan in Milwaukee on charges of obstructing immigration agents for allowing an undocumented immigrant who had properly appeared for a hearing to evade the federal officers who were waiting outside her courtroom.
Judge Dugan was handcuffed behind her back, her ankles later shackled, and publicly paraded outside. FBI director Kash Patel celebrated the arrest by posting a photo on X in a display obviously intended to intimidate other judges, as over 150 former state and federal judges emphasized in a letter. Attorney General Pam Bondi doubled down proclaiming, “nobody is above the law,” apparently omitting her boss, Donald Trump.
Then, on May 9, federal agents arrested Newark, New Jersey Mayor Ras Baraka for alleged “trespassing” when he, Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) and LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), arrived to inspect a New Jersey Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility that Baraka says has operated in violation of city and state certification of occupancy, inspections, and permits laws. A Department of Homeland Security official menaced that arrests are “definitely on the table" for the Congress members, despite their oversight rights at federal facilities, claiming they were “body-slamming” an ICE agent.
Persecution of judges and elected officials and warnings by Trump prosecutors to other critics are designed to silence resistance, as experienced in other dictatorial regimes. In Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat quotes Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset reflecting on Franco’s murderous regime. “The threat in my mind of an eventual violence, coercion, or sanction that other people are going to exercise against me” bred conformity.
These steps coincide with the seizure of undocumented persons, foreign students, and even U.S. citizens by ICE and other federal agents. They are then hastily transferred to detention facilities in preparation for deportation or rendition abroad, typically without evidence, barring rights of due process, depriving them of contact with family or legal counsel, in open defiance of court orders.
Due process is mandated by the Constitution’s Fifth and 14th Amendments stating no “person,” not just citizens, can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property” without legal protection under law. Separately, the Constitution declares a right of habeas corpus, the ability to go to court to ensure a person is not improperly charged or unjustly imprisoned, as former Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann explained on MSNBC.
In its crusade for mass deportations and renditions, the administration is “actively looking” at formal suspension of habeas corpus, says Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff and its most fanatical architect of immigration policy. Georgetown University Law Center professor Steve Vladeck notes that "Miller doesn’t deign to mention that the near-universal consensus is that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the president are per se unconstitutional.”
Habeas corpus has been postponed just four times in U.S. history—during the Civil War, in response to the post-Reconstruction KKK terror campaign in the South, amid an insurrection against the U.S. 1905 occupation of the Philippines, and after the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack in Hawaii.
For some of those snatched off the streets, at home, from their car with children in the back, or in a courtroom, the ultimate destination is a foreign hellhole. By early May, Trump had already deported 152,000 people, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
More than 200 were dispatched to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, in flagrant disregard of court rulings. One of them is Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Trump has doggedly rejected a unanimous Supreme Court order he “facilitate” his return despite the administration’s admission he was deported by mistake.
Further, Trump has expelled hundreds of others to countries not their own, including to Costa Rica, Panama, and the Guantánamo Bay prison in occupied Cuba. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made it clear he is scouring for more rendition locations. “We are working with other countries to say… will you do this as a favor to us?... And the further away from America, the better.”
One plan near fruition this month, until blocked by a court order, involved expelling Filipino, Laotian, Vietnamese, and Mexican migrants to detention centers in Libya, which Amnesty International has depicted as a “hellscape.” Most, said Human Rights Watch, are “controlled by abusive, unaccountable armed groups. Such violations include severe overcrowding, beatings, torture, lack of food and water, forced labor, sexual assault and rape, and exploitation of children.”
Global Precedents of Fascist Practices
Beatings, torture, and starvation in CECOT and Libyan camps are chilling reminders of the most brutal end game of death camps by fascist dictatorships from Hitler’s Nazi Germany to Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile, and others. “The global history of (concentration) camps shows that most internees die from disease, overwork, or starvation rather than from execution,” notes Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
Within days of being appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler established models other authoritarian regimes would follow. Hermann Göring, second only to Hitler, was granted “extraordinary police powers” to brutally assault and round up political adversaries “with increasing ruthlessness,” writes Peter Fritzsche in Hitler’s First Hundred Days.
Soon, after a fire ravaged the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, the Nazis enacted emergency legislation to fully unleash dictatorial powers, to ratchet up arrests, press censorship, and repression. Similarly, Trump has invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and is scheming to use the 1792 Insurrection Act and other emergency laws to legitimize autocratic moves, despite not meeting the constitutional requirements for either.
Fortunately, many Americans are aware of the history and what is at stake, tens of millions have protested in the streets, and Trump has failed to complete neutralization of the courts and political opposition, not for lack of trying.
By late March 1933, the Nazis had opened their first of many concentration camps, Dachau, near Munich, initially to incarcerate communists, socialists, then social democrats, gay men, gypsies, others labeled “asocials,” and eventually Jews. Notes Fritzsche, the Nazis, aided by friendly press coverage, successfully painted opponents as the “enemies from within” and racist and antisemitic dehumanization of their enemies as “subhuman”—a practice Trump has also employed.
“What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison,” states the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The major purpose of the earliest concentration camps during the 1930s was to imprison and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”
Fortunately, many Americans are aware of the history and what is at stake, tens of millions have protested in the streets, and Trump has failed to complete neutralization of the courts and political opposition, not for lack of trying.
Victories have been won. One notable example is the court ordered freedom for Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk released from a Louisiana detention center after she was frighteningly seized by masked federal agents on the street for the “crime” of writing an op-ed protesting the Israeli-U.S. war in Gaza. The job for all of us is to build on that, and to never stop the pressure.
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