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Opinion
Join the Citizens' Movement to Impeach Tyrant Trump
He is a dangerously unstable, egomaniacal, eruptive personality, wielding the most lethal powers of anyone on Earth. He needs to go.
Apr 11, 2026
This week two events (1) the citizens’ “Expert Legal Symposium,” and (2) Rep. John Larson’s introduction on April 6, 2026 of House Resolution 1155 “Impeaching Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors in violation of his constitutional oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” may spark the rise of citizen movement to impeach President Donald Trump. Already a majority want him out!
Rep. Larson (D-Conn.) is a mainstream Democrat serving his 14th term of office. The 13 articles in his H. Res 1155, drafted with constitutional law specialist Bruce Fein, portray the violations of the most lawless president in American history. Trump’s dictatorship is rapidly intensifying (though his support is dropping in the polls). Trump regularly boasts that “I can do whatever I want as president,” “Nothing can stop me,” and “This is only the beginning.”
Chronically lying Tyrant Trump is an open, clear, and present danger to our Republic. He is driven by a fact-deprived, perilous, megalomaniacal, and vengeful personality.
The citizens’ symposium, first of its kind held inside the House of Representatives, gathered experts and advocates for Trump’s removal from office to provide the legal case, highlighting three planks. They were:
- President Trump’s usurpation of the congressional war power;
- The credible fear that President Trump will obstruct, interfere with, or invoke the Insurrection Act to outright cancel the 2026 midterm elections; and
- Trump’s “industrial scale bribery and extortion.”
Audience questions following each panel expanded on the presentations. You can see the entire four-and-a-half hours on C-SPAN: https://www.c-span.org/program/public-affairs-event/activists-lawyers-and-others-discuss-possibility-of-additional-trump-impeachment-proceedings/677013.
Participants at the symposium exhibited a strong sense of urgency, not just from Trump’s escalating war crimes but from the lassitude of Congress, whose bipartisan leadership never considered canceling their two-week recess to address the burgeoning violent outlawry pouring from the White House, most prominently illegally blowing apart Iran and indirectly Lebanon.
The event was co-sponsored by Essential Information, RootsAction, and Free Speech for People with participants from Public Citizen and the Cato Institute.
The Republican Trump lapdogs continue to betray, with historic cowardliness, the people of America.
FOR TRUMP, IT IS ONLY GOING TO RAPIDLY GET WORSE, MUCH WORSE. The strongest critics of Trump can’t keep up with his onslaught, understating his foreign and domestic crimes. He is a dangerously unstable, egomaniacal, eruptive personality, wielding the most lethal powers of anyone on Earth.
Not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, which he craves, by asserting falsely that he had ended eight wars since January 2025, Trump told the dumbfounded prime minister of Norway, “your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize” so he no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of Peace.” That was Trump’s signal that he was going to be engaging in wars. What’s the street language here—a head case in the White House.
Trump constantly creates or fails to address catastrophes. Recall, his calling the climate crisis “a hoax,” that Covid-19 is just like getting a cold, losing valuable time in 2020, costing many American lives. Trump stereotypes journalists as “deranged and demented,” as he extorts millions of dollars from television networks via grossly malicious lawsuits.
The question is why 77.3 million voters support a man few would want as a friend, co-worker, or neighbor, much less a boss with the power of life, death, deprivation, and tyranny over them.
Having pardoned over 690 convicted violent criminals and additional fraudsters, he lets it be known that his loyal, extremist supporters can do what he wants and expect to be pardoned.
Credit Trump with teaching us how weak our democratic institutions are to thwart the US fascist dictatorship emerging from the 2024 election. He taught us, with luminous exceptions, that the media, the academic world, the legal profession, the labor unions, the retired military (brass who despise Trump and his norm-busting secretary of defense), and the civic community, among other constituencies, have not risen to the urgent need to counter tyrant Trump. He has issued one illegal executive order after another and then transgressed beyond those dictates in fits of fearsome rage.
He also reminds us that there has been a price to pay for pushing aside civic education, teaching civic history, skills, and providing students with “learning by doing” in their community or neighborhood. Decade after decade of vocational and rote teaching for multiple-choice testing ignores critical norms of moral restraint and accountability. No wonder they atrophy.
Two examples illustrate how low our standards have fallen. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, a former governor of New Hampshire, had to resign after a press report that he accepted a vicuna coat as a gift from a textile industrialist friend. Later, in 1984, Sen. Gary Hart, competing for the Democratic presidential nomination against Vice President Walter Mondale, was photographed with a young lady—not his wife—on a small sailboat off Miami (he denied an affair). The norms of that time pushed him to quit the race.
Fast forward. Any one of Trump’s many vile transgressions would have stopped anyone from being a candidate, much less getting elected President. He is a daily chronic liar about serious matters and his business and political record as well as about people he dislikes; he is a convicted felon (and was under four criminal indictments); a draft dodger; a mocker of people with disabilities; serial adulterer; he consorted with pedophiles; he is an intense racist and brutal misogynist; and a business crook who cheats workers, consumers, and creditors. He openly committed many violations of federal statutes in his first term, when he also defied over 125 congressional subpoenas (Nixon was about to be impeached for defying two in 1973-1974); and he is an inciter of violence at his rallies and in his remarks. The list goes on.
The question is why 77.3 million voters support a man few would want as a friend, co-worker, or neighbor, much less a boss with the power of life, death, deprivation, and tyranny over them. That question is best answered by the so-called leaders of the Democratic Party, who, instead of landsliding this loser, this crusher of decency and truth, lost both the popular and electoral college presidential vote.
A mere switch of 240,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2024 would have sent Trump back to golfing at Mar-a-Lago. That could have been achieved had the Democrats really championed raising the stagnant federal minimum wage to $15 per hour instead of the $7.25 per hour still today (that would help 25 million workers) and cracking down on corporate greedhounds stealing from consumers and lobbying against raising the Social Security benefits, frozen since 1971, paid for by raising the limit of Social Security taxes on higher income people (over 60 million people benefiting).
(For many more vote-getting compacts shunted aside by the dominant corporate Democrats and their corporate-conflicted consultants, see winningamerica.net).
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Trump to the Nation: Money for Guns, Not Butter
The federal government cannot pay for both war and education, health, and housing, according to the president. He promised the opposite on the campaign trail. We are supposed to forget that.
Apr 11, 2026
President Donald Trump says the quiet part out loud. He is plain as day when it comes to policy preferences to line the pockets of his donor class. You can’t blame him alone for supporting the military-industrial complex, sometimes called the Blob, the enforcer of economic imperialism.
There’s a bipartisan history of like-minded presidential administrations and Congress critters funding war spending on the taxpayers' dime since the Cold War. It ended with the fall of the former Soviet Union. Still, the corporate gravy train for war contractors keeps on rolling.
Meanwhile, the federal government cannot pay for guns (war) and butter (education, health, and housing), according to the president, at the White House during an Easter luncheon. He promised the opposite on the campaign trail. We are supposed to forget that.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
As citizens of an empire in decline, the American population is facing in part a battle with the Blob over federal assistance.
You heard it there. State funding can replace the budget duties of the federal government, since the role of Uncle Sam is to finance war primarily, according to the president. What's wrong with this picture?
The federal government can and does run budget shortfalls. The federal debt and deficit are proof of that. Such borrowing requires willing lenders.
State governments can do no such borrowing. One need not be an economist to see a budgetary outcome. Sharp funding cuts to education, health, and housing assistance that help the US working class living in blue, red, and purple states.
Federal assistance to cool and heat homes? Cut. Federal assistance for nutrition? Cut.
Federal assistance for disease control? Cut. Federal assistance to address wage theft and help small businesses? Cut.
Apparently, the unprovoked US-Israel war on Iran, a violation of international law, is an example of guard duty for the country. Tell that to the survivors of Israeli bombings of residential neighborhoods in South Lebanon and US strikes against hospitals and schools in Iran. Israel is the top recipient of US military assistance, year after year.
Trump's 2027 budget proposal calls for a Pentagon funding increase of $445 billion, 15 times the annual price tag for Obamacare subsidies. US war corporations such as Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX Corporation welcome the increased federal funding. The Blob has quite an appetite.
It would feast larger in part from shifting federal assistance away from providing fresh produce to poor women and children. The proposed budget from Trump for assistance to Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) would create more hunger among them.
“The science-based increase to WIC’s fruit and vegetable benefits has led to meaningful improvements in how families eat," according to a statement from Georgia Machell, head of the National WIC Association, "Young children now consume an additional one-fourth cup of fruits and vegetables per day, and parents report being better able to afford a healthier, more varied diet. The proposed cuts would reverse that progress, reducing benefits to levels that would meet just 19% of the recommended intake for children and 12% for breastfeeding mothers, short of what families need to support healthy growth and development."
It's what the war corporations demand and get the old-fashioned way, the economic playbook since WWII. That is war spending as an economic stimulus policy. Congress and the White House receive campaign contributions from war corporations to make that policy happen.
Despite overwhelming US public opposition to the current war of choice, the president is doubling down on his more guns, less butter approach to the federal budget. Meanwhile there is a global economic crisis due to the unprovoked US-Israel war on Iran. The economics and politics of this are fraught with a harmful prognosis, from higher energy and fertilizer prices to use of nuclear weapons.
How the US public responds is key to their best interests and that of global humanity. As citizens of an empire in decline, the American population is facing in part a battle with the Blob over federal assistance. To say that much hangs in the balance is a mighty understatement.
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Trump and Hegseth: Modern Ahabs Harming Whales for Oil
In the war for oil, they are obviously not interested in hearing about collateral damage, including the approximately 50 Rice's whales left in the Gulf of Mexico.
Apr 11, 2026
Nicknamed the “God Squad” for its power to rule whether economic or national security interests outweigh the possibility of wiping out an animal species, the Endangered Species Committee has granted two exemptions to the Endangered Species Act since it was created by Congress in 1978. It is composed of the secretaries of the Interior, Agriculture, and the Army, and the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Council of Economic Advisers.
The last time the committee granted an exemption was in 1992 when it allowed logging in sensitive areas for the northern spotted owl. Public outcry and litigation ultimately led to that requested exemption being withdrawn.
Last month, the committee was convened at the request of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. As gasoline prices in the US have soared past $4 a gallon and diesel fuel past $5 during President Donald Trump’s reckless war on Iran, Hegseth told the committee it was “a critical matter of national security” that fossil fuel extraction in the Gulf of Mexico be prioritized over any species at risk of extinction.
Never mind that one of those species is the Rice’s whale, which NOAA itself acknowledges is one of the rarest in the world. The whale exists only in the Gulf, with perhaps 50 or so left.That obviously means nothing to Trump and Hegseth, who are both so maddened that they have become modern Ahabs chasing a Moby Dick. In his right-wing Christian crusade, Hegseth openly prays for every bullet and missile to “find its mark” in war. In the war for oil, he obviously is not interested in hearing about collateral damage, saying: “Disruptions to Gulf oil production doesn’t hurt just us, it benefits our adversaries. We cannot allow our own rules to weaken our standing and strengthen those who wish to harm us. When development in the Gulf is chilled, we are prevented from producing the energy we need as a country and as a department.”
Fifty whales by themselves don’t stand a chance against the rhetoric of keeping gas under $5 a gallon.
Rice’s whale is hardly the only creature that could be decimated with ramped-up oil production. According to NOAA, the gulf is also a habitat for the endangered sperm whale; the endangered hawksbill, leatherback, and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles; and the endangered pillar coral. There is also a host of other animals listed as “threatened,” such as loggerhead and green sea turtles, Nassau grouper, the giant manta ray, and queen conch.The committee, chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, unanimously granted the exemption, based on Hegseth’s “findings.” Typical of Trump’s government, there is no description of those so-called findings. Burgum did not explain why this country’s pursuit of petroleum justifies further endangering endangered species. All Burgum said in a statement was that oil production in the Gulf “must not be disrupted or held hostage by ongoing litigation.”
The truth is that there is no evidence that the Endangered Species Act has “chilled” oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, let alone held it hostage. During the same week that Burgum’s committee granted that exemption, the Interior Department that Burgum leads announced that 2025 was the best year ever for the production of offshore oil. It is likely we will see a record-breaking output from the Gulf this year.
In fact, any argument that we need to risk eradicating more wildlife for oil was blown away by Trump himself. During last week’s address to the nation regarding his attack on Iran, he told Americans not to fret because “under my leadership, we are the No. 1 producer of oil and gas on the planet.” He said, “We don’t need” oil from the Middle East. He boasted, “We’re now totally independent of the Middle East.”
Even under current protections, wildlife is constantly being sacrificed for oil and gas. The biggest recent single hit to the Rice’s whale’s population was likely the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. NOAA estimated the population of Rice’s whales may have plummeted 22%, as nearly half its habitat in the eastern Gulf was exposed to oil. The spill, according to NOAA, also killed up to 200,000 adult, juvenile, and hatchling turtles, and the deaths of dolphins, on top of the whales, became the largest cetacean mortality event ever recorded in the Gulf.
Even though Rice’s whales dive during the day as deep as 400 feet to feed, studies cited by NOAA have found that they spend the night within 50 feet of the surface where the hard-to-see creatures can be struck by vessels. NOAA’s website reports that the top threats to the remaining population are vessel strikes and the noise from vessels and energy pollution and says, “For Rice’s whales to recover, we must address existing and emerging threats to the species and their habitat.”
Yet even NOAA yielded to Hegseth’s demand for an exemption.
NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs promised that despite the exemption, oil and gas activities would still include “various protective measures for the Rice’s Whale.” Given Trump’s crippling of the Environmental Protection Agency and rollbacks of regulations under the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, Jacobs’ statement is about as comforting as the statement from the American Petroleum Institute praising the exemption, claiming with a straight face that the oil and gas industry “has a long track record of protecting wildlife while developing offshore energy responsibly.”
There is reason to be optimistic that, like the ultimate withdrawal of the 1992 spotted owl exemption, this one for the Gulf of Mexico will eventually be blocked by litigation and public protest. The day before Burgum convened the Endangered Species Committee, a federal judge in California invalidated several Endangered Species Act rollbacks concocted during the first Trump administration that allowed agencies to increasingly ignore the harm of projects to wildlife.
The judge, Jon Tigar, said the administration made “serious” errors in an “arbitrary and capricious” effort to gut the Endangered Species Act. Let us hope that the courts continue to find yet more errors with the exemption for the Gulf of Mexico. Fifty whales by themselves don’t stand a chance against the rhetoric of keeping gas under $5 a gallon. The Trump administration is today’s Ahab lunging over its ship with a harpoon. This time, the whale really could be killed in the hunt for oil.
This piece was originally published by MS Now. It is shared here with permission of the author.
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A To-Do List for Congress: End the War, Stop Weapons to Israel, Impeach Trump
We live in a flawed but still functioning democracy. The American people are solidly, sensibly against this stupid war, and need to make sure their lawmakers get the message.
Apr 11, 2026
Reasonable people wonder if it was a coincidence the escalation (and now fragile ceasefire) of the massively unpopular, senseless, illegal US-Israeli war of aggression on Iran occurred while Congress was away from Capitol Hill for two weeks. Maybe so, but speculation aside, it soon won’t matter, as Congress returns to Washington to resume legislative business Tuesday, April 14.
In the wake of President Donald Trump’s monstrous nuclear threat to obliterate Iran’s civilization, calls for his removal from office are rising, understandably. Doing so via the 25th Amendment, which would require Vice President JD Vance and the spineless supine sycophants in the Cabinet to certify Trump unfit for office, is the longest of long shots, though US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a former Constitutional law professor and ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, notes the amendment mentions the ability for Congress to establish its own mechanism to remove an incompetent chief executive.
While that seems remote, the more familiar route would be impeachment by the House of Representatives, followed by a trial by the Senate, and removal from office. Trump is of course familiar with this as he was impeached twice by the House, but not convicted by the Senate. US Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) recently filed Articles of Impeachment, and for what it’s worth, the betting platform Kalshi put the likelihood of it succeeding at 27%, higher than it had been, but still low.
Anyone who wants to rein in this traitorous regime should press in any way possible, including calling for the 25th Amendment and impeachment, but should not expect those to bear fruit anytime soon.
Political calculations aside, any and all attempts are welcome to stop this awful war, to end the needless death and suffering of Iranians, Lebanese, Israelis, Americans, and people in the Gulf states, and to alleviate the shock to the global economy.
However, Congress will soon be forced to vote on Iran War Powers Resolutions (WPRs) to declare its opposition to the war on Iran, and Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) to prevent transfers of US bombs and bulldozers to Israel.
On War Powers, recent votes were close, and almost entirely partisan; with only a few exceptions, Republicans in both houses of Congress voted against, and Democrats voted for, rebuking the administration and reclaiming its clear constitutional authority over the grave matter of taking the country to war. The House might muster the votes to pass an Iran War Powers Resolution, sponsored by US Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), though the Senate is unlikely to do so. While it would not end the war immediately, a House vote in favor of the WPR would be important in representing the clear will of the American people, and clarify the president has no legal authority for its war of choice.
The votes on Joint Resolutions of Disapproval on bombs and bulldozers to Israel, brought forward by US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), with cosponsors Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), will be interesting, to put it mildly. The Trump administration, as it has often done, bypassed the usual congressional notification on these weapons transfers, spuriously claiming a national emergency. The “emergency” is Israel may be running low on bombs to drop on the people of Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Israel is also running low on interceptor missiles, but this JRD is only about the delivery of 12,000 half-ton bombs. The Caterpillar bulldozers have long been used in demolitions of Palestinian homes, to make room for expanding Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, mostly in the West Bank.
The political dynamics of these JRD votes will be relatively simple. Expect all Republicans to vote no, with the possible exception of Rand Paul (R-Ky.). On the Democratic side, while the most recent JRD votes on other weapons sales to Israel last July garnered (for the first time), majority support among Senate Democrats, they still lost decisively. The difficulty for certain Democratic Senators such as Cory Booker (NJ), Chuck Schumer (NY), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla (both of California) and others who are rightly slamming Trump’s unauthorized war on Iran, is they never vote to prevent weapons transfers to Israel. Their constituents, facing increased economic hardship caused by this foolish war, which as The New York Times reported Trump was all too easily persuaded to wage by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will certainly be unhappy with this contradiction.
Going forward, if the administration comes to Congress with a war funding request for up to $200 billion (on top of its unprecedented proposal for $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon’s “regular” budget), possibly dressed up with sweeteners such as farm aid (necessary as farmers are hurting not just from increased fuel and fertilizer costs from the war, but also from Trump’s tariffs), said senators will be challenged to adopt Sen. Van Hollen’s position of “hell no,” not another dime for the Iran war.
Political calculations aside, any and all attempts are welcome to stop this awful war, to end the needless death and suffering of Iranians, Lebanese, Israelis, Americans, and people in the Gulf states, and to alleviate the shock to the global economy.
We live in a flawed but still functioning democracy. The American people are solidly, sensibly against this stupid war, and need to make sure their lawmakers get the message—Congress, do your job, and stop this madness, by any and all means at your disposal.
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