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Opinion
Truly Evil Trump Must Be Stopped—Now!
It is our responsibility, in whatever capacity we can, to stand up against this despotic act of pure immorality. Write. Phone. Shout. March. Trump has moved beyond indecency into the realm of insanity.
Apr 07, 2026
I don’t know how better to put this than to say President Donald Trump’s threat this morning to “wipe out a whole civilization” of Iran puts America into a new immoral universe.
He is directly threatening a war crime. And every one of us is complicit in it, in the sense that this threat comes from the president of the United States, threatening to utilize our nation’s military power to exterminate an entire people.
Regardless of whether Trump follows through on this threat, it needs to be repudiated immediately. No civilized nation threatens to wipe out another civilization. No people, through their head of state, threatens to exterminate another people. No human being vested with official power by human beings threatens to wipe out another part of humanity.
Those of us who are silent right now—whether we call ourselves Democrats or Republicans, whether we are in the military or are civilians, whether or not we hold public office, whether we like Donald Trump or detest him—must not remain silent.
It’s our responsibility as human beings to demand that Trump repudiate this threat to other human beings.
It is our responsibility as citizens of this nation to say unambiguously that what Trump is now threatening is truly evil. It’s our responsibility as human beings to demand that Trump repudiate this threat to other human beings. It is our responsibility to call on all other Americans, in whatever capacity, to stand up against this despotic act of pure immorality.
Write. Phone. Shout. March. Trump has moved beyond indecency into the realm of insanity. This must be stopped.
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The Duty to Grieve: On Dehumanization, War, and the Cost of Witnessing
Grief shared, grief felt, grief that moves us into the streets and into each other's arms, is the soil from which solidarity grows.
Apr 07, 2026
More than a month into a war with Iran, President Donald Trump finally addressed the nation (perhaps appropriately) on April Fool's Day. It was his first televised speech to justify a war to the American people that he had promised would never happen. During that brief 19-minute speech, which mostly repeated his arguably unstable and unverified posts on social media, he said nothing new, closing with: "We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong."
Where they belong. To the stone age. Where THEY belong. While speaking to the nation in an effort to help us see the reason for the costs we are incurring, Trump placed an entire people outside of modernity, outside of civilization, outside of the category of the fully human. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, rhymes about ignoring basic moral obligations to our fellow humans every chance he gets: "Maximum lethality, not tepid legality"; "Violent effect, not politically correct." While Iranian neighborhoods burned and children in schools were bombed by US weapons, Trump was having this exchange on Fox News:
"Do you have any insight as to how they are doing? Do they have drinking water? Do they have food? It's upsetting," Dana Perino asked.
"I do, but first, do you remember when we had lunch years ago in the base of Trump Tower when it was a brand new building?" Trump continued… "You have not changed," he told the Fox News host before turning his attention to her looks: "Now, I'm not allowed to say this—it's the end of my political career—but you may be even better looking, okay?"
When we are told, implicitly or explicitly, that the people of Iran or Gaza are not people in the way that we are people, the first act of resistance is to interrupt that narrative of dehumanization by allowing for the swelling of our own grief.
The performance was grotesque in its banality. We are no longer surprised. The ridiculous rhymes, the dangerous dehumanizing language, the slimy sexism—all of it has become the grammar of power and the grammar of war under Trump 2.0.
No clarity was offered about why we are at war with Iran. Not to Dana Perino, not to the American people who tuned in during prime time to watch the president talk. No articulation of what the goal is. No naming of the dead. Instead, our daily content about the war is a cacophonous chatter of stock-market updates, defense-contractor earnings, and abstract references to "success." The human beings on the other end of our weapons have been evacuated from the language entirely.
I know we are all feeling this on some level. Because as Dana Perino rightly noted, the starvation of people is upsetting—but also because of what this dehumanization is doing to all of us.
What we are witnessing is not thoughtless language. It is the operation of a very old logic—one that critical psychologist Thomas Teo calls subhumanism: a way of thinking, feeling, and being that makes certain people disposable. The philosopher Achille Mbembe gives this logic its political name: necropolitics, which is the power to decide who may live, who must die, and the creation of what he calls "death-worlds," where entire populations are reduced to a kind of living dead. When Trump threatens to bomb a country "back to the stone ages," he is exercising necropolitical power in its most obvious form on prime time television. He is not merely threatening destruction but declaring that the people who live there already belong to a time before civilization, and therefore their annihilation is not a devastating event. It is not even, really, an event at all.
This is how dehumanization works. Steadily, without blinking an eye, looking straight into the cameras, evacuating humanity from the people we intend to harm.
And this has become the norm, not an aberration. We might even be experiencing numbness in the face of its routine relentlessness. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas "bloodthirsty monsters," he was laying the groundwork for the immoral destruction of Gaza and the families within it—a destruction that has, at the time of this writing, caused unspeakable harm to entire communities, and that the United Nations has unequivocally identified as genocide. As David Livingstone Smith has documented in On Inhumanity, the language of monstrosity has a horrific lineage. For centuries, European Christians represented Jews as monstrous beings, a trajectory that culminated in the Holocaust. During Jim Crow, Black men were cast as subhuman predators enabling the horrors of lynchings—and then the same language is used to justify our inhuman incarceration policies. First the language changes. Then the unquestioned permissions to eliminate communities follow.
The language used around the war in Iran follows this same pattern. And it is not separate from what has happened—and continues to happen—in Gaza. The pattern enacts the same story over and over again: that some lives are disposable, that some deaths do not count, and that the proper response to their destruction is not grief—not the acknowledgment of our shared humanity and brokenhearted-ness—but a market update.
There is a concept in psychology called moral injury: the harm that comes from witnessing, participating in, or being forced to live inside systems that violate one's deepest commitments. It describes what happens to us—educators, clinicians, organizers, parents, ordinary citizens—as we watch atrocity become normalized. It names what we feel when the excruciating recognition of lives lost to senseless violence gets replaced by financial indicators, and we are expected to go on as though nothing has happened. This is the crisis many of us are living through right now. Not the crisis of war alone, but the crisis of witnessing. The demand is not simply that we tolerate violence. The demand is that we stop feeling it.
And yet, feeling persists. It persists because we know that we belong to each other, we are responsible for each other. And this is what motivates acts of incredibly courageous resistance.
The people of Iran have been resisting—through art, through protest, through organizing—often at devastating personal cost. The Women, Life, Freedom movement is among the most courageous uprisings of our time. Women refused to be silent even when the consequences included imprisonment and death. It was not Trump who advanced liberation in Iran. It was Iranian women, students, workers, artists. What the current war has done is undermine those very movements and murder the very people who have been fighting for their own freedom.
We must hold both of these realities at once: the machinery of dehumanization, and the stubborn, courageous insistence on humanity by those targeted by it. The moral injury is real. And so is the resistance. Both require us to refuse numbness and keep feeling.
Poet and scholar Audre Lorde wrote that to resist, to survive, requires feeling. To grieve is to insist that a life mattered. When we are told, implicitly or explicitly, that the people of Iran or Gaza are not people in the way that we are people, the first act of resistance is to interrupt that narrative of dehumanization by allowing for the swelling of our own grief. To insist that what has been done to them is a wound in the fabric of all of our humanity. You cannot organize on behalf of people whose deaths you have not allowed yourself to feel. You cannot resist a logic of disposability if you have internalized the numbness it requires.
And we owe each other the right to feel. In a culture that rewards numbness and calls it professionalism, that treats emotional response as naivety, that measures the success of a war by the Dow Jones—the most radical thing we can do is refuse to stop feeling. To insist that the people being bombed are people. To feel our hearts shatter when we think about the kids in the school who were annihilated by a bomb paid for by us, as taxpayers. To let that shatter us. To not move on.
And, importantly, this grief must be a shared grief. Isolation is a tool of the authoritarian. Our grief points us toward the injustices that we can no longer tolerate and enable. It allows us to trace the wounds—to feel where our humanity is being carved away by the witnessing of this brutality. So grieve in community. Grieve alongside the Iranian people. Grieve with our neighbors who are being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Grieve with our trans siblings. And let that shared grief become the foundation for what we do next, because grief that is felt together demands action.
Yes, we must march and allow for spaces where resistance can be joyful and defiant and absurd, because joy in the face of a regime that demands despair is its own form of refusal. And we must show up for our communities, organize alongside them, and hold the pain in our souls together as we feel the immeasurable loss of human lives. Grief shared, grief felt, grief that moves us into the streets and into each other's arms, is the soil from which solidarity grows and is the place where we refuse to let the necropolitical grammar of war, of subhumanism, become the grammar of our souls.
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The War on Iran Is a Local Issue
If it isn’t our job as citizens of towns, cities, villages, and indeed, the United States, to challenge those who profit from, clamor for, and send troops to war, then whose role is it?
Apr 07, 2026
The US-Israeli war on Iran is a Vermont state issue. Every dollar spent on bombs, missiles, and the machines that deliver them is a dollar taken away from healthcare, education, highways, public transit, food subsidies, and many more institutions and programs residents of Vermont and every other US state use.
This is true even during the current period, in which President Donald Trump and the US right-wing do almost everything they can to end those programs by cutting federal funding. Furthermore, the rising price of gasoline and other fossil fuels that everyone uses, no matter how far off the grid they might live, affects everybody’s ability to live. More money spent on fuel means less money spent on other items like food and clothing. Those who struggle to pay rent will find that struggle even greater should the price of these fuels continue to rise and not go down in any substantial way. I place my commentary in Vermont because that’s where I live. However, it is applicable to every state in the US.
This war was begun for reasons privy only to certain individuals in the US and Israeli governments. Most readers know that there was an agreement with Iran to prevent that nation’s nuclear power program from building nuclear weapons; that agreement was torn up by the first Donald Trump administration. Although the more recent talks were moving along and—according to most reports—going Washington’s way, the militaries of Israel and the United States launched a bloody and violent attack on Tehran, killing its political and spiritual leader. Israel’s involvement is part of its stated desire to annex much of the region known as West Asia or the Mideast into its expanding borders, creating a considerably larger Israel. Given that Israel is at best an ally of Washington and at worst a colony, a larger Israel would certainly benefit the designs Washington has (and has had) for the region.
Of course, just wishing for a giant Israeli garrison state is not the same as making one. That is where war and genocide come in. That is why Washington supports Israel’s ongoing attempts to destroy the idea of Palestine; it is also why Washington is intent on establishing military relations with the monarchies in West Asia. Once again, these endeavors cost a lot of public money and that money comes from taxes paid by US residents. So, when the Israeli-US alliance goes to war, against the Palestinian people, the Lebanese, or the nation of Iran, the amount of money taken from the US public’s money and transferred to the war industry and the military increases—a lot.
Each registered voter is being asked to give approximately $1,150.00 more to this ill-begotten and incredibly foolish war.
The US military and security apparatus were budgeted over $1 trillion for the current year. Now, after almost a month of war against Iran, the war hawks in Washington, Virginia, and wherever else they lurk want another $200 billion. According to the US Census Bureau, 174 million US citizens were registered to vote, 73.6% of those eligible in 2024. If one divides the sum of $200 billion desired by the war hawks by 174 million, this would mean that each registered voter is being asked to give approximately $1,150.00 more to this ill-begotten and incredibly foolish war. That amount is on top of the amount already being paid. Although $1,150.00 doesn’t buy much on the arms market, it represents a few weeks of groceries for many Vermonters even at today’s prices (prices which will continue to go up, especially if this war continues to expand.)
In the past few years, some Vermont towns have passed referendums or legislation calling for an end to some trading with Israel until it ends its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. Those who oppose these referendums and legislation use an argument that says local governments—state and municipal—should not be legislating about matters of foreign policy because it’s not in their purview. This argument belittles each individual and each government struggling to make ends meet in the face of increasing expenditures on wars and occupation. If it isn’t our job as citizens of towns, cities, villages, and indeed, the United States, to challenge those who profit from, clamor for, and send troops to war, then whose role is it? If it isn’t our role as citizens to oppose our money being used to illegally and violently occupy another land, then whose job is it?
The people of Vermont could make a bold statement by demanding their legislature make it known via a resolution that the majority of the people of Vermont oppose the war in Iran. They could make an even bolder challenge to the war machine by demanding Vermont’s National Guard forces be removed from battle, whether the Guard agrees or not; it is supposed to be the people’s militia, not the war industry’s.
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Incompetent Trump Is Driving Us Toward Global Political-Economic Collapse
Operation Epic Fury is only the most severe example of President Donald Trump's poor decision-making, which is likely to produce one mega-disaster after another.
Apr 07, 2026
On March 13, buried in The New York Times’ coverage of the US-Israel-Iran conflict was a headline that would have been easy to miss amid the din of war coverage: “As El Niño Simmers, Scientists Warn of Weather Extremes Starting in Late Summer.” Many readers may not even have noticed it, but that article noted that scientists at the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had raised their estimate for an El Niño event this summer from 60% to about 80%.
Admittedly, in this strange world of ours, that hardly seemed like an earth-shattering revelation. But if you had read the piece more closely, your alarm bells should instantly have gone off. Forecasters now predict that the coming El Niño—a warming of the Pacific Ocean that deeply affects global weather patterns—is likely to be as severe as the one in 2023-2024, which triggered severe flooding and prolonged heatwaves around the world. As the article noted, however, average world temperatures are now actually higher than they were at the height of that previous El Niño, thanks to global warming, and so it’s likely that we will face even more intense heatwaves and flooding this time around.
Consider that news alarming enough. Unfortunately, the bad news didn’t end there. The Times article went on to report that, since early last year, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workers, greatly diminishing the agency’s ability to respond to such impending weather disasters. And then there’s the dismal fact that Trump has overseen the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, which once sent humanitarian aid to disaster-struck countries.
And, sadly enough, it only gets worse from there. After all, we know that the Trump administration is doing everything it can to boost the production of fossil fuels—the consumption of which is the main driver of global warming—even as it also works to impede global action to slow the warming process. On January 7, for example, the president announced that the United States would withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the bedrock treaty upon which most international efforts to rein in that onrushing nightmare are based.
In other words, the rest of us will not only be deprived of emergency assistance during future climate disasters, but also lack timely information about oncoming hazardous weather patterns.
Likewise, on February 12, the administration repealed the scientific determination (called the “endangerment finding”) that gives the government the legal authority to combat climate change. And that’s not all: On March 15, the Times also reported that the administration was preparing to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the nation’s premier institution for studying global weather patterns—including the severe climate disturbances we can expect from the coming El Niño and higher world temperatures. In other words, the rest of us will not only be deprived of emergency assistance during future climate disasters, but also lack timely information about oncoming hazardous weather patterns.
As I consumed all of that—in the midst, of course, of President Trump’s ill-conceived war on Iran—it struck me that we need to brace ourselves for ever more calamitous outcomes from Donald Trump’s extreme leadership incompetence. In fact, his incompetence is likely to produce one mega-disaster after another, culminating perhaps in global political-economic collapse.
Trump’s Profound Incompetence
Donald Trump’s leadership incompetence has already been demonstrated in one bad move after another. His capricious imposition of ever-fluctuating tariffs on US imports, for example, has caused prolonged misery for farmers and many small and medium businesses that depend on predictable trade patterns. Likewise, his heavy-handed deployment of armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents to Minneapolis achieved little in the way of apprehending dangerous immigrants but caused widespread disorder and violence, while killing two nonviolent protesters. But the most severe example of his governing incompetence to date has been his handling of Operation Epic Fury, the war with Iran.
While devising an elaborate plan to destroy Iran’s conventional military capabilities and shatter the regime, the Trump team appears to have made no preparations to eliminate the Iranians’ extensive drone capabilities or their ability to disrupt oil production and transit in the Persian Gulf area, with far-reaching global consequences. As of this reporting, the critical Strait of Hormuz through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes every day (along with a substantial share of its liquefied natural gas [LNG] and chemical fertilizers) remains largely closed to commercial traffic. This has produced energy shortages in many countries that are heavily reliant on imported oil or LNG and, because oil is a globally-traded commodity, it has boosted gasoline prices in the United States, despite the fact that this country doesn’t import much Middle Eastern oil.
None of this should have been unexpected. The Iranians have, on numerous occasions, threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz in response to a US attack on their country, while their efforts to build up a vast stockpile of drones and missiles (and to hide them in remote underground sites) were well publicized.
Any intelligent war planner—of which there are many in the US military establishment—would have known of these realities and planned for them. Indeed, US planning to secure the Strait goes back to 1980, when President Jimmy Carter’s White House issued what became known as the “Carter Doctrine”—an assertion that any move by a hostile force to impede the oil flow in the Persian Gulf “will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” To enforce that edict, the Pentagon established the US Central Command (Centcom) and established a network of military bases throughout the Gulf region. Since its inception, Centcom has repeatedly stressed its ability to keep the Strait open in the face of any Iranian drive to block it.
Trump obviously ignored all such intelligence—collected over many years by top American officials—and started his war without the slightest apparent plan for keeping the Strait safe for energy shipping. Not only were US naval forces unprepared to escort oil tankers through it, but Trump failed to enlist US allies in such efforts—a glaring fault that only became obvious after the war began when he suddenly called upon them to do so (and chided them when they proved reluctant).
And consider all of this sheer, unadulterated incompetence, on a massive scale.
The Blows to Come
We have yet to witness all the consequences of Trump’s incompetence in undertaking the war against Iran. The shutdown of fertilizer exports from the Gulf is already causing the price of that critical commodity to rise around the world. In doing so, it threatens agricultural production as farmers balk at the higher costs—a trend likely to result in higher food costs everywhere, including the United States. That will, of course, result in increased hunger for those least able to afford the higher prices of food and rising inflation. The rise in food and energy prices could also diminish consumer spending and investor confidence, possibly leading to a global economic slowdown (or worse).
And don’t imagine that those are the only major shocks to the global system we can expect in the months ahead—shocks the Trump team is unlikely to address with competent leadership. At the January convocation of business and political elites in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum released its “Global Risks Report 2026,” identifying what experts believe are the greatest future threats to global stability and prosperity. According to those experts, the top risks include extreme weather events, state-based armed conflict, and a global economic downturn—real-time threats that Trump has already encountered and failed to address successfully. As those perils gain momentum in the months ahead, Trump’s incompetence will result in ever greater hardship and suffering.
The Adverse Effects of AI
That Davos Risk Report also identified another category of threats for which the Trump administration is woefully unprepared: “adverse outcomes of AI technologies.”
Beginning with AI’s impending impact on employment, the report cites one study suggesting that “AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years in the United States, potentially driving unemployment to 10-20%”—an enormous threat to social and political cohesion. At the same time, a massive buildup of computing data centers is putting extreme stress on local energy and water supplies across the US, introducing an added layer of popular unease and conflict.
Nowhere does Trump’s plan acknowledge the potential for catastrophic job losses from widespread AI utilization or the risk of AI going rogue and threatening the survival of humanity.
Hovering in the background of all this is the threat of “rogue AI”—the possibility that computer scientists at OpenAI, Anthropic, or one of the other leading AI firms will create a “superintelligent” version of AI capable of outperforming humans in most cognitive tasks and selecting its own objectives, independent of human wishes or instructions. Think of “Skynet,” the superintelligent AI in the Terminator movie series that chooses to eliminate humans by inciting a global nuclear war. While the Davos Risk Report doesn’t address the risk of advanced AI development directly, there is growing talk in the scientific community of just such an outcome, as vividly suggested, for example, by the 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that President Trump and his entourage are wholly unprepared to address the very idea of such a possibility. Rather than emphasize safety in the development of advanced AI models, Trump has called for their untrammeled evolution. In his major policy statement on AI, “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” he made his top objective overridingly clear: “It is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”
That means, as his plan explains, eliminating all barriers to the development of advanced AI models, including any legislative restrictions on their release and any local environmental impediments to the construction of mammoth AI-driven data centers nationwide. Nowhere does Trump’s plan acknowledge the potential for catastrophic job losses from widespread AI utilization or the risk of AI going rogue and threatening the survival of humanity. Rather than offering Americans the slightest protection from such potential calamities, he is ensuring that they will become more likely and that the rest of us will suffer the consequences.
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