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Opinion
Ex-Presidents, What More Do You Need to See Before Calling for Trump's Impeachment?
Just what are you waiting for? What are your escapist excuses?
Jan 10, 2026
The staggering cowardliness by four ex-presidents vis-à-vis Tyrant Trump’s wrecking of America cannot escape history’s verdict. However, there is still an opportunity for vigorous redemption by George W. Bush—whose life-saving AIDS Medicine Program in Africa was shut down by President Donald Trump—Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, if they have any self-respect for their patriotic duty.
As of now, these former presidents are living lives of luxury and personal pursuits. They are at the apex of the "contented classes" (see my column “Trump and the Contented Classes”, November 14, 2025) who have chosen to be bystanders to Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, and the doling out of Trump’s corporatist welfare giveaways.
Imagine, if you will, what would happen if these four wealthy politicians, who still have most of their voters liking them, decided to band together and take on Trump full throttle. Privately, they believe and want Trump to be impeached (for the third time in the House) and convicted in the Senate. This time, on many impeachable actions that Trump himself boasts about, claiming, “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President.”
Right off, they can upend the public discourse that Trump dominates daily with phony personal accusations, stunningly unrebutted by the feeble Democratic Party leaders. This counterattack with vivid, accurate words will further increase the majority of people who want Trump “Fired.” Just from their own observations of Trump’s vicious, cruel destruction of large parts of our government and civil service, which benefits and protects the populace, should jolt the former presidents into action.
Send these four politicians, who are friendly with one another, petitions, letters, emails, satiric cartoons, or whatever communications that might redeem them from the further condemnation of history.
Next, the bipartisan Band of Four can raise tens of millions of dollars instantly to form “Save Our Republic” advocacy groups in every congressional district. The heat on both parties in Congress would immediately rise to make them start the Impeachment Drive. Congressional Republicans’ fear of losing big in the 2026 elections, as their polls are plummeting, will motivate some to support impeachment. Congressional Republicans abandoned President Richard Nixon in 1974, forcing his resignation with Impeachment on his political horizon.
Events can move very fast. First, Trump is the most powerful contributor to his own Impeachment. Day after day, this illegal closer of long-established social safety nets and services is alienating tens of millions of frightened and angry Americans.
Daily, Trump is breaking his many campaign promises. His exaggerated predictions are wrong. Remember his frequent promise to stop “these endless wars,” his assurance that he would not impair government health insurance programs (tell that to the millions soon to lose, due to Trump, their Medicaid coverage), his promise of lifting people into prosperity (he opposes any increase in the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour) and he has signed GOP legislation to strip tens of millions of Americans from the SNAP food support and take away the Obama subsidies for Obamacare. Many Trump voters are among the vast number of people experiencing his treachery, where they live and raise their families, will lose out here. The catalytic opportunities of these four ex-presidents and their skilled operating teams are endless.
Further, this Band of Presidents, discovering their patriotic duty, will recharge the Democratic Party leaders or lead to the immediate replacement of those who simply do not want or know how to throw back the English language against this Bully-in-Chief, this abuser of women, this stunning racist, this chronic liar about serious matters, this inciter of violence including violence against members of Congress, this invader of cities with increasingly violent, law breaking storm-troopers turning a former Border Patrol force into a vast recruitment program for police state operators.
Trump uses the word “Impeachment” frequently against judges who rule against him, and even mentions it in relation to it being applied to him. Tragically, Democratic Party leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have made talk of Impeachment a taboo, arguing the time is not yet ripe. How many more abuses of power do they need to galvanize the Democrats in the House and Senate against the most blatantly impeachable president by far in American history? He keeps adding to his list—recently, he has become a Pirate and killer on the High Seas, an unconstitutional war maker on Iran and Venezuela, openly threatening to illegally seize the Panama Canal, Greenland, and the overthrow of the Cuban government.
Constitutional scholar Obama can ask dozens of constitutional law professors the question: “Would any of the 56 delegates who signed our US Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the 39 drafters who signed our US Constitution in 1787, being told about Monarch King Donald Trump, oppose his immediate Impeachment and Removal—the only tool left he doesn’t control?” Not one, would be their studied response.
Trump, a serial draft dodger, pushes through another $150 billion to the Pentagon above what the generals requested while starving well-being programs of nutrition for our children and elderly, and cutting services, by staff reductions, for American veterans, and strip-mining our preparedness for climate violence and likely pandemics.
He promised law and order during the election and then betrayed it right after his inauguration, pardoning 1,500 convicted, imprisoned criminals, 600 of them violent, emptying their prison cells and calling them “patriots” for what they did to Congress on January 6, 2021.
MR. EX-PRESIDENTS, JUST WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? WHAT ARE YOUR ESCAPIST EXCUSES? Call your friends who are ranking members of the GOP-controlled Committees of Congress and tell them to hold prompt SHADOW HEARINGS to educate the public through witnesses about the TRUMP DUMP, impeachable, illegal, and unconstitutional government. The media would welcome the opportunity to cover such hearings. Congressman Jamie Raskin thought this was “a good idea” before being admonished by his frightened Democratic leaders to bide his time and remain silent.
As more of Trump’s iron boots drop on people’s livelihoods, their freedoms, their worry for their children and grandchildren, their antipathy to more aggressive wars against non-threatening countries, and their demands at town meetings and mass marches for action against Trump’s self-enriching despotism, the disgraceful, craven cowardliness of our former presidential leaders will intensify. Unless they wake up to the challenge. With the mainstream media attacked regularly and being sued by Trump’s coercive, illegal extortion, the action by the Band of Four will bolster press freedom, press coverage, and their own redemption.
Send these four politicians, who are friendly with one another, petitions, letters, emails, satiric cartoons, or whatever communications that might redeem them from the further condemnation of history.
Rest assured, with Trump in the disgraced White House, THINGS ARE ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE, MUCH WORSE! For that is the predictable behavior from the past year and from his dangerously unstable, arrogant, vengeful, and egomaniacal personality.
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The FEMA Workers Fired on New Year’s Eve Won’t Be There for the Next Hurricane
You can’t save lives and rebuild communities while gutting FEMA’s workforce and keeping the agency under incompetent and overtly political control.
Jan 10, 2026
While Americans were preparing to ring in the new year, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Federal Emergency Management Agency Chief Karen Evans were firing dozens of disaster response workers. The employees who lost their jobs on New Year’s Eve weren’t bureaucrats shuffling papers in Washington—they were members of FEMA’s Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery teams who deploy when hurricanes flatten communities, when floods trap families in their homes, and when wildfires consume entire towns.
This wasn’t a budget decision. This was sabotage.
I spent years at FEMA and working disaster response, and I know what it takes to save lives when disaster strikes. You need trained personnel who can mobilize immediately; who know how to coordinate search and rescue operations; who understand the complex logistics of getting food, water, and shelter to people who’ve lost everything. You can’t save lives and rebuild communities while gutting FEMA’s workforce and keeping the agency under incompetent and overtly political control. These New Year’s Eve firings guarantee that when the next disaster hits, Americans may very well pay the price with their lives.
The timing tells you everything about this administration’s priorities. FEMA’s workforce has already been traumatized by DOGE, endured a revolving door of unqualified political leadership, witnessed retaliation against staffers who speak out, and heard President Donald Trump himself threaten to destroy the agency. Most recently, senior FEMA leaders were tasked with an agency-wide “workforce capacity planning exercise,” with the stated goal of cutting 50% of FEMA’s workforce (a target the administration claims was included in error). Now they’re watching their colleagues get fired on a holiday while the nation faces a looming crisis.
Every day that FEMA remains under Noem’s control, every firing of trained disaster workers, every delayed disaster declaration brings us closer to a preventable catastrophe.
Nearly 200 FEMA employees warned that this combination of political obstruction and resource depletion risks another Katrina-level catastrophe. They’re not exaggerating. I fear that we’re on a course to painfully relearn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. Those who watched that disaster unravel in real time remember that it was a bad time for emergency management. FEMA was underfunded, it wasn’t a respected agency, and we saw the result: a bungled response to a major disaster that failed Americans when they needed help most. And now, we’re watching it happen again, in real time, and this time the warnings are coming from inside the agency itself.
The pattern under Noem’s leadership at DHS has been consistent: political interference that kills. When catastrophic flooding struck Texas, her bureaucratic approval requirements delayed Urban Search and Rescue deployment for more than 72 hours while Americans feared for their lives. Disaster declarations are being weaponized along partisan lines, with Democratic states denied relief at alarming rates while Republican states receive swift approvals, turning emergency management into political retaliation.
The administration’s contempt for professional emergency management extends beyond Noem’s obstruction. Trump appointed Gregg Phillips—a conspiracy theorist and election denier with zero emergency management experience—to lead FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, one of the agency’s most critical offices. Karen Evans, whose reputation for eliminating programs and slashing staff preceded her appointment as FEMA chief, is now overseeing the systematic dismantling of disaster response capabilities. A leaked report exposed plans to gut FEMA and slash the workforce in half. When the White House faced criticism, they didn’t abandon the plan. They just canceled the public meeting and stopped talking about it.
FEMA’s placement under DHS has enabled Noem to impose political interference and red tape that directly endangers American lives. Last month, Sabotaging Our Safety sent a letter to the FEMA Review Council with a straightforward solution: Make FEMA an independent, cabinet-level agency. Give the FEMA administrator a direct seat at the table with the president so the agency can respond to disasters without political obstruction from DHS leadership. This isn’t a radical proposal. It’s the only way to ensure that when Americans need help, they get it based on need rather than which party controls their state government.
This administration’s actions will cost lives. Every day that FEMA remains under Noem’s control, every firing of trained disaster workers, every delayed disaster declaration brings us closer to a preventable catastrophe. Our leadership must decide whether protecting FEMA’s capacity to respond to disasters matters more than political expediency. The agency that stands between American communities and disaster is being dismantled piece by piece, and we’re running out of time to stop it.
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Published 250 Years Ago Today, Thomas Paine's Common Sense Must Inspire Us Again
With a document that speaks powerfully to our current crisis, Paine emboldened his fellow citizens-to-be to turn their colonial rebellion into a world-historic revolutionary war for independence and inspired them to establish a democratic republic.
Jan 10, 2026
Common Sense by Thomas Paine is the most influential work of political literature in American history.
Self-published on January 10, 1776, Common Sense instantly became a sensation, spreading like wildfire across the colonies. Within a few weeks, it had sold more copies than any book in the history of the colonies.
Paine’s arguments persuaded thousands-upon-thousands of people throughout the 13 colonies to demand more than reform, to support complete independence from England and join the revolutionary cause.
Less than six months after Common Sense was first published in Philadelphia, the Declaration of Independence was signed in the same city, establishing a new country defined, in contrast to its European predecessors, by its commitment to equality, liberty and the consent of the governed—just as Paine advocated in Common Sense (and, unlike the founding fathers, Paine did not hesitate to advocate for democracy).
Paine showed Americans... that they could govern themselves without kings and overlords, and that they could set an example to the world of what a nation of citizens, not subjects, could accomplish. The relevance of these passages for our troubled times cannot be overstated.
Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia from England in late 1774. Paine quickly fell in love with America and its people. Struck by the country’s startling contradictions, magnificent possibilities, and wonderful energies, and moved by the spirit and determination of its people to resist British authority, he committed himself to the American cause. In the Spring of 1775, he called for the abolition of slavery, a position he saw as consistent with—and central to—the rebellion.
Paine published Common Sense on January 10, 1776, a pamphlet of fewer than 50 pages, that changed the course of world history. In its pages, he harnessed Americans’ shared but as-of-yet unstated thoughts, expressing them in words such as “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth” and “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Paine emboldened his fellow citizens-to-be to turn their colonial rebellion into a world-historic revolutionary war for independence, and inspired them to establish a democratic republic. Paine defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.
In Common Sense, Paine showed Americans that they were in fact Americans, not British colonists, that they could govern themselves without kings and overlords, and that they could set an example to the world of what a nation of citizens, not subjects, could accomplish. The relevance of these passages for our troubled times cannot be overstated.
Paine appreciated the ethnic and religious diversity that already prevailed and projected the nation-to-be as a refuge for those seeking freedom. (Indeed, many passages in Common Sense speak directly to the crises enveloping America today.)
Crucially, Paine portrayed America not as thirteen separate entities, but as a singular nation-state: “Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honour… Our strength is continental not provincial.” And he proposed a charter—a constitution encompassing a Bill of Rights—both to bind the prospective states into a union and to guarantee that liberty, equality, and democracy would prevail. Most emphatically, he argued for “freedom of conscience” and, to assure it, the separation of Church and State: “As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government, to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith….”
In the spring of that year, 120,000 copies of Common Sense were sold. 500,000 by the end of the Revolutionary War. (Throughout Paine took no royalties, using the funds to buy mittens for General Washington’s troops). Plus, newspapers throughout the colonies excerpted it and working people read it aloud in taverns, cafes, and farm fields. Soon, town councils north and south were petitioning the Second Continental Congress to declare INDEPENDENCE! America turned Paine into a radical, and he turned Americans into democratic revolutionaries.
Today, we honor Common Sense on the 250th Anniversary of its publication, and we honor its author, Tom Paine, one of the authors of our country
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The Nation Responds to a 'Truly Terrifying' Week
2026 began with the emergence of a new American colonial empire abroad and the deadly escalation of Trump’s cruel, racist anti-immigrant program at home.
Jan 10, 2026
“Truly terrifying.” That was how National Nurses United executive director Puneet Maharaj described this week in a group text exchange in the aftermath of the brazen murder of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Custom Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis on January 7. A day later there was another shooting, some 1,700 miles away in Portland, Oregon, of Luis David Nico Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras by border patrol agents. And just a week after Keith Porter was shot and killed while celebrating on New Year’s Eve by an off-duty ICE agent in Northridge, California, a Los Angeles suburb.
All three acts of violence capped a year in which the draconian anti-immigrant drive launched by President Donald Trump and campaign architect Stephen Miller has terrorized immigrant communities and sparked protests across the nation. A year in which at least 32 people have also died in ICE custody, the agency’s most deadly year in decades, according to the Detention Watch Network. Some were long-time residents, some recent abductees in ICE raids. “They died of seizure and heart failure, stroke, respiratory failure, tuberculosis or suicide,” or reported neglect, notes the Guardian.
The shootings reflect the broad portrait of US residents–Good, a white, 37-year old mother of three; Porter, a Black 43-year-old father of two; Moncada and Zambrano-Contreras, Venezuelan. And, in familiar tones, the Trump administration has been quick to demonize all four.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem rushed to defend shooter Ross insisting it was an “act of domestic terrorism” by Good. Vice President JD Vance called Ross a “deranged leftist.” Moncada and Zambrano-Contreras were immediately labeled as affiliated with the Tren De Aragua gang, though Portland officials voiced distrust in ICE characterizations. A DHS spokesperson claimed Porter was an “active shooter” and the off-duty agent was “protecting his community,” contentions that infuriated Porter’s friends.
It was a solemn beginning to the new year, an exclamation point on the past 12 months.
The administration wants to control the Good investigation even as Minnesota officials say the federal government is impeding a state investigation. Vance claims agent Ross has “absolute immunity,” a point refuted by Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Tribe on MSNow with Lawrence O’Donnell. “State laws of assault continue to apply, even to a federal officer,” he noted. Outraged Minnesotans are calling for state prosecution as was done, with a conviction, for the police officer who killed George Floyd a short distance from where Good was murdered. Gov. Tim Walz says he wants the state to do a “full investigation.”
Porter’s friends are pushing for justice for Porter. Los Angeles County is “reviewing Porter’s killing,” though, the Los Angeles Times adds, “it sometimes takes years for the agency to determine if a deadly use of force constitutes a crime.” While Los Angeles is a “sanctuary city,” the LA Police Department is notorious for supporting and defending ICE and other federal immigration agents and constraining community protesters instead.
Venezuela, of course, was the other high-profile calamity of the week. Trump’s January 3 military invasion of Venezuela, kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Up to 100 people, including civilians were killed, Venezuelan officials report. The US also bombed a medical warehouse, science labs, and an apartment complex, along with other sites in Caracas.
The long-planned assault followed months of extrajudicial bombings of boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific that have executed at least 115 people since September—like the invasion, in violation of international and US law, and without congressional authorization.
It was a solemn beginning to the new year, an exclamation point on the past 12 months. The Trump administration has carried out the most sustained assault on constitutional norms, dispatching of troops to threaten Americans in numerous cities, weaponization of the Justice Department and programs to punish political enemies and entire Democratic-run states, shredding of decades of healthcare standards that have saved millions of lives, and so much more.
It’s hard to even get more appalled. But the convergence of the emergence of a new American colonial empire abroad with the deadly escalation of Trump’s cruel, racist anti-immigrant program, is what made the week “truly terrifying.”
Many people on social media searched for analogs in recent US history. For this aging lefty who lived through and participated in frequent protests against the Vietnam war, President Ronald Reagan’s sponsoring of military coups and mercenary armies in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, I dredged up one comparison.
On April 28, 1970, President Richard Nixon invaded Cambodia with combat troops, an enormous widening of the Southeast Asia war he had pledged to end. A week later on May 4, following days of protests, the Ohio National Guard fired 67 rounds in 13 seconds at student protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and wounding nine more. I huddled around the radio listening to the accounts on Pacifica’s KPFA-FM with three roommates, thinking the world had dramatically changed in our lives. Then I rushed off to join a raucous protest at Sonoma State University where I was enrolled.
Trump’s stranglehold on Republican members of Congress is weakening.
Many parallels to that time with this moment exist. There had been years of rallies and marches protesting Nixon and President Lyndon Johnson’s war before him. Nixon was elected promising a secret plan to conclude the long Vietnam War while covertly sabotaging a long-delayed Johnson plan to initiate new peace talks. Trump campaigned as a “peace” advocate, pledging to end “forever wars,” and begging for a Nobel Peace Prize before launching the most unchecked expansion of US colonialism in more than a century.
The arrogant Nixon was, arguably, the most lawless president in US history to that point, before being finally forced to resign. Trump has proven to be far worse, engaging in monarchical dictates and policies, running roughshod over Congress, defying the courts, staging an insurrection at the US Capitol attempting to overturn the 2020 election, and now scheming how to subvert the 2026 and 2028 elections.
On the two arenas of the past week, Trump and his cabal are promising more. Trump has openly threatened to expand military operations to Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, and Greenland. “I don’t need international law,” Trump told the New York Times. He will only be constrained, he said, by his “own morality.”
Vance has intensified his increasingly desperate rhetoric to defend the murder of Good; the administration recognizes they have lost public support, as millions have viewed the damning video evidence. Going on the attack, as Trump always requires when challenged, Vance boasts the administration has doubled its Gestapo-style police force to over 22,000, and plans to send ICE agents “door to door,” in coming months, mimicking the odious practices of past dictatorships. Trump has also threatened, again, to invoke the Insurrection Act to send the military to American cities to combat protesters.
Both Nixon and Trump met massive opposition. Anti-Vietnam War marches mushroomed, with over half a million people joining a November 1969 march on Washington. I remember driving overnight from Los Angeles to San Francisco to march with 250,000 others across the city that same day. The repeated mobilizations, augmenting battlefield defeats in Vietnam, ultimately coerced the US to end its war.
Trump has faced similar growing resistance. Up to 8 million Americans joined “No Kings” rallies and marches in June and October last year. And in the two days since the Minneapolis murder, thousands have turned out in spontaneous protests in many cities and smaller communities including Asheville, North Carolina, Boston, Buffalo, Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Colorado Springs. Colorado, Columbus, Ohio, Dallas, Dayton, Ohio, Denver, Durham, North Carolina, Los Angeles, Merrimack, New Hampshire, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Providence, Rhode Island, Seattle, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and repeatedly in Minneapolis.
Trump’s stranglehold on Republican members of Congress is weakening. Trump lost two significant votes in Congress on January 7. Overriding House GOP leaders, 17 Republicans joined Democrats in the House to pass legislation to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for three years as millions of Americans are facing calamitous increases in healthcare coverage due to GOP obstruction in the fall.
In the Senate, five Republicans joined in a “rare bipartisan rebuke of the White House” to set up a War Powers Resolution vote to require congressional approval for Trump’s militarism in Venezuela and elsewhere. Incensed by the defiance, Trump called for the defeat of the five Republicans. Both actions face a difficult outcome, but the votes are significant. It shows Republicans are worried about the approaching midterm elections in November, following sweeping losses last year.
A wounded Trump, inclined to step up his callous attacks and lawlessness, is “truly terrifying” as National Nurse United’s Maharaj noted. Responding, NNU lobbied for the ACA subsidy vote, condemned the Venezuela invasion and Good’s murder, and had members at the San Francisco protests. Nurses are among the rapidly expanding mass movement needed to protect democracy, human rights, and all who live here.
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