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Opinion
'Apparently, I’m an Idiot': A Trump Voter's Confession
With Trump, it’s only going to get worse. Much, much, much worse—unless we finally act to put an end to his lawless and sinister ways.
Mar 21, 2026
Unstable Tyrant Trump is running out of lies, fantasies, and promises to break. An NBC interview of a Pennsylvania woman next to a gas station signals the trend. The reporter asked her what she would say to President Trump. She answered: “You are a worthless pile of shit.” He then asked her how many times she voted for him. She replied: “Three times. That was my bad. Apparently, I’m an idiot.”
Indeed, dozens of vendors are busily selling stickers showing Dangerous Donald pointing to the gas pump’s prices and saying, “I did this!” Further infuriating people is wealthy Trump’s irresponsible response to rapidly rising gasoline prices: “If they rise, they rise.”
The cause, of course, is Trump waging illegal, unconstitutional wars. His Israeli-driven attack on Iran is like quicksand. His Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, wrote in his recent public resignation letter that: “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Iran is the tenth country Trump has militarily raided since Jan. 20, 2025. More MAGA supporters are increasingly angry about his broken promise, declared every day on his campaign trail, to “stop the endless wars” of his predecessors. They are also indignant over the illegal withholding of millions of pages of the Epstein files by his toady Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Moreover, the corrupt TRUMP DUMP is shredding our federal government and its critical, statutory obligations to protect the health, safety, and economic well-being of the American people and rescue communities devastated by climate violence and the real threats of contagious diseases. With his war on science, on facts, and on truth, Trump is pushing America into a contemporary DARK AGES.
His pathological hatred of wind power and solar energy and his crazed boosting of the toxic oil, gas, and coal companies (“beautiful, clean coal”) are relentless. Even in the Medieval Dark Ages, buildings were built to take advantage of passive solar energy.
Looming is the TRUMP SLUMP, starting with an approaching recession. The GDP is already in decline.
Inflationary consumer prices are rising. Unemployment is rising. By far most of the new jobs are coming from the healthcare sector, reacting to greater levels of illnesses and injuries brought about by Trump’s cutting enforcement against polluting corporate wrongdoers and cutting public health budgets and grants.
TRUMP’S SLUMP is also reflecting the damage done by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. This is tightening oil and gas supplies, helium, and nitrogen products needed by already hard-pressed American farmers trying to afford fertilizers.
Dizzy Trump doesn’t know where he is going. His master, Netanyahu, is pleased to push zig-zag Donald into the Middle East quicksand. Like with his past backing of the Bush/Cheney criminal invasion of Iraq, Netanyahu wants an invasion of Iran by U.S. soldiers who should not be forced to obey illegal orders. Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) has long been interpreted to require military personnel to disobey clearly illegal orders that violate the Constitution or US federal statutes. Note, there is no quicksand for Israel, and no Israeli soldiers are slated to invade Iranian soil. (See, “Israel’s Manipulation of Trump on Iran” by Robert Kuttner.)
Desperate Trump and diabolical Netanyahu are now moving to charge the American taxpayers, via an AIPAC-indentured bunch of ditto-head Senators and Representatives, for the cost of the illegal war on Iran. Trump wants a staggering $200 BILLION more tax dollars for the Pentagon, and no doubt a chunk will go to the genocidal Israeli regime. Trump refuses to pay for it by asking Congress to raise taxes on the undertaxed corporations, especially the war corporations profiting immensely. Instead, as is his cruel bent, he is creating more skyrocketing deficits that will be paid for by our children and grandchildren.
There is, however, rising opposition in Congress against this gross, lawless treachery, including some Republicans. Public opinion is sharply against Trump’s war government, and rising among Republican, Democratic, and independent voters. The Congressional GOP is reading the polls, which augur disaster in November, despite the feeble opposition by the Democratic Party leadership.
According to a March 9th Quinnipiac University Poll, fifty-three percent of voters oppose the U.S. military action against Iran, while 40 percent support it. Democrats (89 – 7 percent) and independents (60 – 31 percent) oppose the U.S. military action against Iran, while Republicans (85 – 11 percent) support it. Seventy-four percent of voters oppose sending U.S. ground troops into Iran, while 20 percent support it. Democrats (95 – 3 percent), independents (75 – 19 percent), and Republicans (52 – 37 percent) oppose sending U.S. ground troops into Iran.
All told, it will be the economy that will bring Trump down, setting the stage for his Impeachment and Removal from Office. This is how our Founders envisioned presidents who acted like monarchs being discharged. (See the Washington Post Letters to the Editor by Bruce Fein.)
However, the people should not rule out desperation by Trump and his violence-touting extremists. False flag episodes here and abroad are well within their horizons of political survival, especially in an Internet and AI era.
The sober sense of these realities by the American people is advanced by being prepared against being tricked and flummoxed by the Trumpsters and their accommodating mass media, such as Fox and Sinclair broadcasters.
In the immediate meantime, it is those elected “deciders,” the 535 Senators and Representatives, who you must push to exercise their Congressional duties. The good ones can be prone to panic, apart from those already immersed in political bigotry, mindless jingoism or being bribed. Contact your Senators and Representatives through their local offices. If you can, go visit them there.
Dangerous times invite courageous citizens. Remember, you greatly outnumber the destroyers of peace and democracy.
(See also “Understanding the U.S. and Israel’s Illegal War on Iran” by Craig Mokhiber.)
With Trump, it’s only going to get worse, much worse, here and abroad.
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No Bigger Hypocrisy in the World Than Israel Complaining About Iran's Lawbreaking
Israeli and US officials seem unaware that the crimes they now condemn are ones they themselves have long justified as legitimate military actions.
Mar 21, 2026
In recent days, Israel and the United States have expressed outrage over the deliberate and indiscriminate targeting of civilians and civilian residences and infrastructure in Israel and the Gulf by Iranian forces.
They have cited the illegality of such attacks, urged global condemnation, and demanded that human rights organizations speak out. Having spent years weakening the laws meant to protect civilians, they are now discovering that those same laws are too fragile to protect their own people.
Israeli and US officials seem unaware that the crimes they now condemn are ones they themselves have long justified as legitimate military actions.
Take cluster munitions. Following Iran’s reported use of these indiscriminate weapons on March 9 around Tel Aviv, Israeli officials condemned their use in populated areas. “The Iranian regime is firing cluster bombs at Israeli civilians. Their deliberate and repeated use against civilians shows that the Iranian terror regime is seeking to maximize civilian deaths and harm,” declared Israel’s foreign ministry, which provided an infographic explaining how the weapon—banned by 124 countries—is inherently indiscriminate. The Pentagon echoed the criticism, with Adm. Brad Cooper, the chief of US Central Command, condemning Iran’s use of “inherently indiscriminate” cluster munitions.
Yet in 2006 Israel fired more than four million cluster munitions into southern Lebanon, turning large swaths of the country into a no-go zone while insisting their use was a military necessity. Unexploded cluster munitions continue to terrorize Lebanese civilians, maiming and killing at least 400 people as they detonated years after the war. Israel reportedly resumed using cluster munitions in Lebanon in 2025 but would neither confirm nor deny doing so.
Israel’s vast use of these weapons in 2006 helped spur the 2010 Convention on Cluster Munitions, banning them as inherently indiscriminate. Yet Israel and the United States — along with Russia and Iran — have refused to ratify the treaty, insisting they may be used legitimately in wartime. In 2023 and 2024, the Biden administration shipped large quantities of cluster munitions to Ukraine despite warnings that unexploded ordnance would endanger civilians for decades to come. The consequences are now clear: having challenged the ban on these weapons, Israel now finds its own civilians under attack from them.
Iranian attacks on Israeli and Gulf civilian infrastructure — from residences to schools to water desalination plants — have drawn similar condemnations as unlawful attacks on civilians, even though such strikes have been preceded or followed by unlawful attacks on Iranian civilians and infrastructure. On March 8, the United Nations Security Council issued a resolution singling out Iranian attacks on civilians for condemnation, even though Israeli and US forces had also struck a girls’ school, civilian residences, and an Iranian water desalination plant, among other civilian sites. Even AIPAC chimed in, bemoaning that Iran was “killing civilians” in Bahrain following a strike that killed a young woman on March 9.
These condemnations ring hollow in the wake of Israel’s vast destruction of residential buildings, schools, universities, and agricultural lands in Gaza, leaving the territory buried under 61 billion tons of rubble and largely uninhabitable, and more than 75,000 people, the majority women and children, dead. For more than three years since its latest war in Gaza, Israel has defended its assault on Palestinian civilians as military necessity, blamed Hamas for “starting” the war, and rejected condemnations as products of bias and antisemitism.
Israeli and US officials have gone further still, at times rejecting very applicability of international law. “I don’t need international law,” asserted President Donald Trump earlier this year; adding “my own morality” is “the only thing that can stop me.”
For its part, Israel rejects the status of Palestine as occupied territory under the Geneva Conventions and the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force; both US and Israeli officials reject the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has suggested dispensing with international humanitarian law altogether, declaring that the United States should employ “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” and give “no quarter, no mercy to our enemies” – rhetoric that, when applied in an armed conflict, constitutes a war crime.
Such contempt for international law may seem convenient for states that believe their power shields them from consequences. But in a world where destructive force is widely distributed, weakening the rules meant to protect civilians invites others to do the same. The result is not greater security but a downward spiral in which every side claims necessity while civilians pay the price.
International humanitarian law was never meant to protect only one side’s people. It protects civilians precisely because it binds all parties equally. When powerful states defy those rules, they do more than harm their adversaries; they weaken the only framework that can protect their own civilians in return. If governments truly want to safeguard their people, the answer is not selective outrage but consistent compliance: uphold the law, apply it universally, and defend it even when it constrains your own actions.
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Beware Men Who Wage War to Prove They Are Men
The rabid hypermasculinity unleashed across Iran by the White House can be no surprise.
Mar 21, 2026
Seemingly endless recitations throughout history of what constitutes virtuous citizenship emphasize military life. A specifically masculine heritage of violence in the service of the nation oversees and delimits democracy and authority—a privileged area of social welfare in contrast to health, education, the environment, or poverty.
Much classical and modern political theory assumes and even endorses domestic violence, bellicose masculinity, and the notion that “real” politics is generated, discussed, and concluded between men. The idea that male virtue is tied to violence, whether in defense of faith, family, or the border, is immensely strong.
From individual duels to national campaigns, the “right” way to engage in violence has given rise to ideas of nobility. Masculine worth is supposedly incarnate in bloodshed and authoritarian leadership, embodied in the military as a righteous national embodiment of power, spirit, religiosity, and victory.
Raewyn Connell articulates the history of North Atlantic countries that conquered much of the world with contemporary ethnographic study of gender politics. She finds white male sexuality in Western Europe and North America is isomorphic with power: Men seek global dominance and desire, orchestrated to oppress women through hegemonic masculinity.
US masculine anxiety is repeating itself in a manner that may be totally predictable, but is no less disastrous for humanity, other animals, and the planet.
This encompasses overt sexism—rape, domestic violence, and obstacles to female career advancement—and more subtle domination, such as excluding women from social settings and sports teams, or the bourgeois media’s fascination with men. Ironically, women’s rights are often invoked to justify invasions that injure them. For example, the British used traditional limitations on women’s freedom and education to legitimize the colonization of India.
Everywhere you look, from diplomats to bombers to correspondents, war is an implicitly and explicitly masculine activity. This is rarely, if ever, recognized in mainstream media coverage and academic knowledge, or problematized as such.
That said, reactionary commentators, male and female alike, have gone out of their way to valorize the hypermasculinity that has been unleashed, beyond even normal limits, in the United States since 2001, laying claim to chivalry, dominance, and certainty.
Reactionary public commentators churn out press columns and viral videos, seizing the opportunities afforded by war to push a domestic agenda for male power, using international relations to denounce queerness and feminism.
Camille Paglia, Peggy Noonan and Ann Coulter endorse compulsory heterosexuality. Coulter called one deceased soldier “an American original—virtuous, pure, and masculine as only an American man can be” who “died bringing freedom and democracy to 28 million Afghans.” She insisted that “there is no other country in the world—certainly not in continental Europe—that could have produced such a man.”
In 2025, US Chief of Protocol Monica Crowley stated that “we are in an era of true masculinity thanks to the bold and muscular leadership of President Trump and our Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.” And Hegseth dutifully promises “maximum lethality, not lukewarm legality” in the assault on Iran.
But behind those loud voices lurks a figure long plagued by doubts, failures, and weaknesses—actually existing masculinity. Hence Niccolo Machiavelli in the 16th century proposing that men dressed in uniform and trained to fight lose any “habits they consider effeminate.”
Such anxiety has been common among imperial powers across history and geography, with numerous institutions dedicated to carrying forward errant masculine impulses or channeling them into military readiness: physical culture, “strenuous living,” social Darwinism, rational recreation, and French neoclassical romanticism among them.
Matthew Arnold famously wrote, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”; but a deep concern for military preparedness led him to warn that “disasters have been prepared on those playing fields as well as victories.” Pierre de Coubertin revived the ancient Olympics in 1896 as an international festival of male athletes and diplomats that could cultivate “man’s moral musculature,” redeeming French masculinity after the shocks of the Franco-Prussian conflict a quarter of a century earlier.
By the end of the 19th century, the United States had been at peace for three decades, ever since its bloody Civil War. As most veterans of that conflict passed away, there was public debate about whether American men were still capable of martial masculinity.
Wars in Cuba and the Philippines followed in quick succession. Hundreds of thousands were killed and wounded to expand US imperialism—part of a desperate, felt need to “build masterful male citizens.”
That has its modern corollaries. In 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy alerted Sports Illustrated readers to a “growing softness, our increasing lack of fitness.” Such trends supposedly constituted “a threat to our security” that must be addressed, per Ancient Greece’s Olympian quest to forge and maintain “a vigorous state.” After all, “struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America.”
Concerns about masculinity and domination of territory routinely underpin the allocation of government resources. Donald J. Trump’s National Youth Sports Strategy feared that “most young people are not moving enough,” detailing “surveillance systems” to monitor children. His 2025 “Presidential Fitness Test” for school pupils aimed to improve “our economy, military readiness, academic performance, and national morale” and “emphasize the importance” of “military readiness.”
The hypermasculinity unleashed across Iran by the current White House can come as no surprise. The fact that it is reinforced by a video of Hollywood explosions and outbursts makes this horror simultaneously banal and fatal, as propaganda and movies meet in male bodies: “machismo from film and television, crassly interspersed with real infrared kill-shot footage.”
US masculine anxiety is repeating itself in a manner that may be totally predictable, but is no less disastrous for humanity, other animals, and the planet.
It’s what those men do.
Not all men—the ones who need war to ensure that they are, in fact, men. To them, Hegseth and his cadre represent “less a symbol of toxic masculinity than a masculine tonic.”
Shall we join in? Thanks, but no thanks.
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Attacks on Transgender Americans Are Attacks on Health Care
This is not difficult: Gender-affirming care is health care, period, and decisions about that care belong to patients and their health care providers (and families in the case of minors), not politicians on an ideological crusade.
Mar 21, 2026
For some time now, right-wing forces have been attacking gender-affirming health care for transgender individuals, and especially for trans youth. Those attacks ratcheted up seriously in December, when the Trump administration proposed rules designed to ban gender-affirming care for young people, with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. flatly calling such care “malpractice.”
The medical community promptly and unequivocally disagreed, with American Academy of Pediatrics President Dr. Susan J. Kressly telling NPR, "These policies and proposals misconstrue the current medical consensus and fail to reflect the realities of pediatric care and the needs of children and families." AAP’s view represents the overwhelming consensus among medical, nursing and psychiatric organizations, but that has had no impact on the crusade by the administration as well as right-wing state officials to erase trans people and eliminate and even criminalize their health care.
The Trump administration’s push to erase trans people began early last year with a presidential executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The order declared, “Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.” Trump’s order oddly failed to acknowledge the existence of transgender men but effectively declared all transgender humans to be nonpersons according to the U.S. government. “It is the policy of the United States,” it read, “to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
That’s not a scientific statement but an ideological one. In fact, as Nathan Lents, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City explained to a reporter after the executive order was issued, “Biology doesn’t operate in binaries very often … Reducing sex to a binary really doesn’t make a lot of sense for how we actually live.”
Many cultures around the world, particularly indigenous cultures, have long recognized gender diversity. In Hawaii, where I live, native Hawaiian culture understood and respected māhū, the Hawaiian word for a person of dual male and female spirit. What administration officials and other right-wingers dismiss as “radical gender ideology” is in fact a factual, science-based understanding of a facet of human diversity that has been recognized by different cultures around the globe for millennia, starting long before either modern science or modern politics entered the picture.
Nevertheless, the president’s order and subsequent messages from the Department of Health and Human Services put intense pressure on hospitals and health care providers, many of whom responded by curtailing gender-affirming care, especially for minors. Those pausing or such care included major hospital systems such as Kaiser Permanente with its 40 hospitals. By late August, news outlets had counted at least 17 major hospital systems in at least nine states and the District of Columbia that had paused, discontinued, canceled or ended gender-affirming care for pediatric patients.
States—generally Republican-leaning states—have also piled on restrictions. Late last year, KFF reported that 27 states had passed laws limiting access to gender-affirming care for minors. Roughly half of the nation’s trans or nonbinary youth are estimated to live in these states. Half a dozen states, including Florida, Alabama and Idaho, have made it a felony to provide gender-affirming care for young people under 18. Though the Supreme Court upheld such bans last year, some of these state laws face legal challenges in state courts based on individual state constitutions.
On the other hand, a number of states—generally “blue states,” including New York and California—have passed laws protecting gender-affirming care, while a few others have such policies via executive orders. Recently, New York Attorney General Letitia James informed a major Manhattan hospital that its actions to curb gender-affirming care under federal pressure violated New York State law. Hospitals and other providers may find themselves more and more caught between conflicting state and federal requirements.
It’s important to remember that for those under 18, gender-affirming care almost never involves surgery, but typically focuses on social and psychological support. Medical interventions such as puberty blockers are sometimes used after puberty begins. Puberty blockers, which are entirely reversible (and which a White House executive order has dishonestly branded as “chemical mutilation”) pause puberty in order to buy the young person time to mature and consider their options before major and complex-to-reverse physical changes set in.
Opponents of gender-affirming care sometimes focus on a handful of patients who later changed their minds and regretted having this care. Nearly any medical procedure results in a few patients wishing they hadn’t done it, but research consistently shows that regret rates for gender-affirming care are quite low. For example, a 2024 review of 55 articles that looked at regret rates after various types of plastic surgery found that gender-affirming surgery had far lower regret rates than other surgeries, including breast augmentation or reconstruction, not to mention other major life decisions such as having children or getting a tattoo.
A later study of 150 youthful individuals (median age 18.6 years) who had had gender-affirming hormone therapy and/or surgery found that the most common emotions associated with these treatments “were satisfaction (88.0%) and confidence (86.7%).” Only one of the 150 wished they hadn’t had the treatments, leading the authors to conclude, “Individuals who accessed [gender-affirming care] as adolescents are largely satisfied with this care. Care-related satisfaction and regret are more nuanced than sometimes portrayed and should not be used to limit access.”
State attacks on transgender residents don’t stop with medical care. Kansas, for example, just summarily invalidated all driver’s licenses in which the driver had legally changed their gender to match their lived identity. Such policies can impact the health of those affected, both by adding new layers of stress and by interfering with their ability to drive to obtain care or just make a living.
All of these policies are based on a myth: That transgender identity is the product of some new, “woke,” “radical gender ideology” and that trans people are simply confused and have been propagandized into believing that they can change their gender.
Trans people know better. Take “Perry” (a pseudonym), a young friend of mine whom I wrote about last October for Defend Public Health. Perry, 17 when I met him and now turning 21, knew something was amiss from early in his childhood. “I always felt uncomfortable,” he told me. “I rebelled against every single authority most of my childhood.” His feelings clarified when he was about twelve. As he explained it, “I always felt like I wasn’t myself, like I was playing a role” -- the role assigned to the female anatomy he was born with.
Despite some parental unease, he eventually began living as a boy and instantly felt more comfortable and like his authentic self. Trans people like Perry know who they are and don’t need politicians dictating what care they can and can’t obtain.
Happily for Perry, he lives in Hawaii, a state that has not restricted gender-affirming care and is unlikely to. But Hawaii doesn’t yet have a shield law to protect providers (such a bill is now up for consideration in the state legislature), and can certainly be impacted by misguided federal policies, so he’s not completely out of danger.
This is not difficult: Gender-affirming care is health care, period, and decisions about that care belong to patients and their health care providers (and families in the case of minors), not politicians on an ideological crusade. We must fight back against these attacks and push our politicians to defend the rights of all, including transgender people, to get the care they need.
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