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Opinion
Trump, Epstein, and the GOP’s Planned Rape Culture
The question is not why they hid the list. The question is why they need it at all when the ledger is already written in their laws.
Jul 15, 2025
By the time the U.S. Justice Department released its memo in July 2025, the faithful were already starting to turn. There was no “client list,” no smoking gun, no perverted cabal of global elites laid bare for public vengeance. What they got instead was a cold government document and a half-mumbled shrug from President Donald Trump, who barely remembered the man everyone else had turned into a folk demon. “Are people still talking about this guy, this creep?” he asked, blinking like he’d just wandered out of a golf simulator.
The betrayal was almost elegant. For years, Trump’s people had promised the black book. Attorney General Pam Bondi said it was on her desk. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel practically branded his political future with it. Counselor to the President of the United Staes Alina Habba promised flight logs and names. And then the punchline: nothing. Or rather, a truckload of documents scrubbed clean and a memo telling the public to move on. The frenzy turned inward. MAGA loyalists melted down on camera. Laura Loomer called for a special counsel. Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino stopped showing up for work. Right-wing media turned on itself like rats in a pressure cooker.
But the Epstein file was never the point. The real story was not buried in a locked safe or hidden by the FBI. It was out in the open. It is still out in the open. The political movement that once pledged to drain the swamp has spent its second tour of duty building a legal and bureaucratic fortress around some of the oldest crimes in the book. Modern conservatism has come to rely not just on outrage but on inertia, and nowhere is that more visible than in its handling of child sexual abuse.
We are not talking about a secret ring or coded pizza menus. We are talking about a system that tolerates child marriage in over half the states. A system that forces raped minors to carry pregnancies to term. A system that slashes funding for shelters and trauma counseling. A system that lets rape kits pile up in warehouse back rooms while politicians pose in front of billboards about protecting kids.
This is not a moral failure or a bureaucratic oversight. It is an architecture. It is built from votes, funded by budgets, signed into law by men who say they fear God but fear losing donors more. The Epstein affair may have collapsed in a cloud of whimpering and spin, but what it revealed is far more corrosive than any one man’s crimes. The question is not why they hid the list. The question is why they need it at all when the ledger is already written in their laws.
Legalized Child Marriage as Institutional Abuse
As of mid-2025, child marriage remains legal in 37 U.S. states. In most of these jurisdictions, statutory exceptions allow minors to marry with parental consent or judicial approval. Some states permit marriage for individuals as young as 15. Others lack any explicit minimum age when certain conditions are met. These legal frameworks persist despite growing evidence of their links to coercion, abuse, and lifelong harm.
Missouri serves as a prominent example. Until recently, it permitted minors aged 15 to marry with parental consent. Testimony from survivors has revealed how this legal permission facilitated predatory relationships cloaked in legitimacy. In one case, a girl was married off to a man nearly a decade older, and the marriage became a vehicle for sustained sexual and psychological abuse. Former child brides in Missouri have since called for a statutory minimum age of 18 with no exceptions. Legislative efforts to enact such reforms have repeatedly stalled.
Tennessee offers a more recent and pointed illustration. In 2022, Republican lawmakers introduced legislation that would have created a new category of marriage not subject to age restrictions. The bill failed under public pressure, but it signaled a continued willingness by some conservative legislators to bypass modern child protection norms. Even when confronted with documentation of exploitation, physical violence, and long-term trauma, these lawmakers often frame the issue around religious liberty and parental authority.
The Epstein affair was never going to end in justice. It was a mirror. What it reflected was not a single man’s sins but a political order that treats predation as a price of stability.
The prevailing rhetoric in these debates centers on traditional family values. Proponents argue that restricting child marriage infringes on the rights of families to make decisions without state interference. In some cases, advocates for maintaining the status quo invoke Christian theological justifications or present marriage as a preferable alternative to state custody. These arguments shift the legal focus away from the vulnerability of the minor and toward the autonomy of adults, particularly parents and religious leaders.
This legal tolerance undermines the enforcement of statutory rape laws. When marriage can be used as a legal shield, older adults who would otherwise face criminal prosecution gain immunity by securing parental consent or exploiting permissive judicial channels. In practice, the marriage license functions as retroactive permission for sexual contact with a minor. Law enforcement agencies are often reluctant to investigate allegations within a legally recognized marriage, even when age discrepancies raise clear concerns.
The persistence of child marriage statutes in conservative-controlled states is not simply a relic of outdated law. It reflects a policy choice. The choice is to preserve adult control over minors, particularly in contexts that reinforce patriarchal and religious hierarchies. In doing so, the state becomes an active participant in the erasure of consent. Legal recognition of these unions confers legitimacy on relationships that, in other contexts, would be subject to prosecution. The result is a bifurcated legal system where a child’s age and rights are contingent on the adult interests surrounding her.
Forced Birth Laws and the Abandonment of Minor Victims
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, state legislatures moved swiftly to implement abortion bans. As of July 2025, 10 states enforce prohibitions with no exceptions for rape or incest. These laws apply equally to adults and minors. In doing so, they erase the distinction between consensual and coerced sexual activity and impose state control over the bodies of children.
The consequences are observable. In Ohio, a 10-year-old girl became pregnant after being raped by a 27-year-old man. Because Ohio law prohibited abortion past six weeks and included no exception for rape, the girl traveled to Indiana to terminate the pregnancy. The physician who provided the abortion was targeted by state officials and subjected to professional disciplinary action. The child’s identity was shielded, but her case became a national flashpoint. No changes were made to Ohio’s statute in response.
In Mississippi, a 13-year-old girl gave birth after being raped by a stranger. Her family, unable to afford travel or secure an out-of-state appointment, watched as the pregnancy advanced. Though state law permitted abortion in cases of rape, it required police reporting and formal certification by the authorities. The procedural burden, combined with lack of local providers, rendered the exception functionally inaccessible. The pregnancy was carried to term. No support infrastructure was provided beyond birth.
In Texas, multiple cases have emerged involving girls under 14 who were raped by family members or acquaintances. One minor received abortion pills through informal networks. Another did not. In that case, the pregnancy continued until birth. In both situations, school staff, health workers, and shelter employees described an atmosphere of legal ambiguity and fear. Providers worried about prosecution for aiding what could be construed as an illegal abortion. Parents feared legal action or custody loss if they sought help out of state.
These laws are not merely restrictive. They are designed to inhibit access through a combination of legal uncertainty, bureaucratic obstruction, and geographic isolation. Requirements for parental consent and judicial bypass impose additional delays. In conservative jurisdictions, judges often refuse bypass requests outright. Clinics have closed. Providers have left. In many counties, no legal abortion services exist. For minors with limited mobility, no resources, and histories of abuse, these constraints function as a full prohibition.
Psychological consequences are profound. Research conducted by trauma specialists indicates that forced pregnancy following sexual assault exacerbates the risk of suicidal ideation, self-injury, and long-term mental illness. Minors compelled to remain pregnant often experience acute dissociation and chronic anxiety. Social workers report increased incidents of runaway behavior, substance use, and refusal to attend school. The medical literature consistently describes these outcomes as preventable harm.
The political response to these outcomes has been largely nonreactive. Elected officials in affected states have declined to revisit statutory language. When presented with specific cases, responses are limited to procedural defenses or deflections. Conservative media outlets often ignore these incidents altogether or question their veracity. State agencies rarely publish disaggregated data on minor pregnancies resulting from assault. In legislative hearings, victims are not called to testify.
This absence of acknowledgment is not accidental. The architecture of forced birth laws depends on abstraction. It requires a conceptual fetus without context, a generic moral narrative without victims. The insertion of real children into that framework exposes its contradictions. In response, the system silences or discredits those who do not fit the script.
The effect is the systematic abandonment of minor victims. The state declines to intervene in the act of abuse, imposes control over the outcome, and then withdraws when support is needed. In doing so, it transforms rape from a crime to a reproductive event and reclassifies children as bearers of state policy. The result is not a deviation from conservative thought. It is one of its clearest expressions.
The Systematic Dismantling of Survivor Support
In early 2025, the Trump administration released a proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2026 that included significant funding reductions for agencies and programs supporting survivors of domestic and sexual violence. The Office on Violence Against Women removed all open funding opportunities from its website. This move came amid a broader effort to eliminate what the administration referred to as “woke” or ideologically driven programs. Internal Department of Justice (DOJ) memoranda confirmed that existing grant language was being revised to align with White House policy preferences, with particular scrutiny directed toward anything referencing diversity, equity, or inclusion (DEI).
The proposed budget eliminated the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. That agency had previously overseen funding for rape prevention and domestic violence education through the DELTA and RPE programs. These initiatives provided critical infrastructure for community-based interventions, including education campaigns, prevention training, and partnerships with local law enforcement. Their elimination removed a core pillar of upstream support.
At the same time, DOJ grant freezes disrupted downstream services. Nonprofit organizations across the country reported immediate and severe impacts. In Ohio, the Hope and Healing Survivor Resource Center announced potential layoffs of its court advocates and a reduction in emergency shelter capacity. In Washington D.C., House of Ruth stated it was experiencing multiple levels of new scrutiny when seeking reimbursement for already-approved expenditures. Organizations were directed to pause hiring and halt finalization of pending grant applications. Many could not meet payroll obligations for March.
Survivors of violence were displaced not by explicit prohibition but by the withdrawal of every practical means of assistance.
In Philadelphia, Women Against Abuse reported difficulties accessing funding for its LGBTQ-specific services. In Washington state, the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center prepared to end its legal advocacy program entirely. In both cases, staff warned that client wait times for crisis response had doubled within a single quarter. Administrators noted that many of their clients were minors or undocumented women who lacked other options. Reductions in services were expected to increase reliance on emergency departments and law enforcement, systems ill-equipped to handle trauma recovery or long-term safety planning.
The effects extended to rural programs as well. In smaller counties, shelters funded primarily through DOJ block grants began closing intake lists. Survivors were told to wait or relocate. Legal assistance for restraining orders and custody cases became difficult to obtain. Mobile crisis units were discontinued. Hospital advocates who had previously accompanied victims during forensic exams were no longer available. Each removed position created a compounding absence in systems already operating at capacity.
The budget’s emphasis on eliminating federal programs associated with DEI goals shaped the targeting of these cuts. While many victim services agencies did not explicitly advertise such language, internal reviewers flagged any mention of racial disparities, LGBTQ outreach, or culturally specific programming as potentially noncompliant with revised priorities. A senior DOJ official, speaking anonymously, stated that the Office on Violence Against Women had been instructed to avoid “risk exposure” by minimizing support for identity-based initiatives.
Although the Violence Against Women Act had been reauthorized in 2022 with bipartisan support, its implementation now faced procedural obstruction. Staff who had expanded under the prior administration were informed they might be subject to termination. A memo from the Office of Management and Budget described plans for agency-wide attrition. Staff with less than three years of tenure were given no assurances. Departments were instructed to prepare for reduced grant-making capacity over the following two fiscal cycles.
The dismantling of support systems was neither sudden nor undocumented. It unfolded through administrative erasure, funding attrition, and legal recalibration. Survivors of violence were displaced not by explicit prohibition but by the withdrawal of every practical means of assistance. Those left behind were often the least able to navigate the resulting gaps. For these individuals, the state offered no replacement. Instead, it imposed a bureaucratic silence where aid had once existed. The outcome was a deliberate contraction of the public obligation to protect.
Forensic Neglect and the Rape Kit Crisis
Despite the adoption of sexual assault kit tracking systems in over 30 states, the United States continues to face a persistent national backlog. Tens of thousands of kits remain untested in police storage facilities, hospital evidence rooms, and crime labs. Many of these kits have been stored for years without analysis. Others were never submitted for processing due to departmental triage, lost documentation, or discretionary decisions by investigating officers. While some states have mandated timelines for submission and testing, enforcement mechanisms remain weak, and compliance is inconsistent.
The Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, a federal program designed to support evidence processing and data coordination, has received limited attention under the current administration. Although the initiative has produced measurable results in jurisdictions that prioritized its implementation, recent Justice Department actions suggest a deprioritization of forensic reform. The DOJ has declined to expand funding, and the program has not featured in recent public safety messaging. Internal budget documents indicate that grants for kit testing were not included in the administration’s revised funding priorities for fiscal year 2026.
As a result, survivors often experience long delays in receiving updates about their cases. Some discover years later that their evidence was never tested. Others are notified only after investigations are closed due to expired statutes of limitation. Communication is sporadic and mediated by agencies with limited resources and unclear protocols. Victims who attempt to inquire directly are frequently redirected or denied information outright. In some states, survivors have been required to submit formal public records requests to learn whether their kits were processed.
These delays compromise prosecutions. When evidence is eventually tested, witnesses may be unreachable, suspects may no longer be within the jurisdiction, and memory degradation may weaken the reliability of victim testimony. Prosecutors, facing caseload pressures and limited bandwidth, often decline to pursue cases that were mishandled in their early stages. Defense attorneys use the lag in testing to undermine credibility or introduce procedural challenges. The net effect is a collapse in accountability long before any trial begins.
The failures of evidence handling disproportionately affect marginalized populations. In rural areas, law enforcement agencies lack personnel and funding to maintain evidence integrity or pursue cold cases. In urban centers, kits from Black, Indigenous, and Latina victims are more likely to go untested. Multiple studies have found that law enforcement officers are more likely to doubt the credibility of victims from low-income neighborhoods, undocumented communities, or those with previous contact with social services. These judgments influence whether evidence is submitted for analysis and whether cases receive investigative follow-up.
The forensic crisis is compounded by data gaps. Many states do not track the number of untested kits in private hospitals or non-mandated reporting facilities. Others exclude kits from the backlog if they were collected before a specific year. The result is an undercounting that obscures the true scope of institutional failure. Federal authorities have not established a national registry or auditing mechanism to standardize reporting. This lack of oversight permits continued neglect without consequence.
Efforts to reform the system remain fragmented. Some jurisdictions have implemented notification protocols to alert survivors when their kits are tested or their cases reopened. Others have passed legislation requiring mandatory submission timelines. These efforts, however, rely on sustained funding and political will. In the current policy environment, neither can be assumed.
The accumulation of untested rape kits reflects more than a bureaucratic shortfall. It reveals a hierarchy of value embedded in forensic practice. Victims whose experiences align with prosecutorial priorities receive attention. Those who fall outside those norms are left in limbo. The backlog is not only a logistical failure. It is a measure of who is deemed worthy of pursuit.
The Performance of Protection and the Reality of Harm
In the contemporary conservative lexicon, few terms have gained as much political traction as “groomer.” Once associated narrowly with criminal prosecutions of adults who built relationships with children for the purpose of sexual exploitation, the term has been repurposed as a generalized insult. It now targets a wide array of perceived ideological enemies, from public school teachers to LGBTQ advocates to librarians. In its current usage, “groomer” does not denote a specific criminal act. It signifies dissent from cultural orthodoxy. It functions rhetorically rather than descriptively.
This shift is not accidental. The term has become a central instrument in the conservative culture war arsenal. It is applied liberally to any policy, institution, or public figure that departs from a narrow conception of sexual and gender norms. The invocation of grooming no longer requires evidence. It requires proximity to subjects deemed socially suspect. Teachers who support inclusive sex education, therapists who serve queer youth, and public health professionals working with at-risk adolescents are all subject to the accusation. The result is not the exposure of exploitation. It is the expansion of suspicion.
The logic underpinning this rhetorical turn is strategic. By collapsing the distinction between ideological disagreement and criminal intent, the conservative movement recasts public discourse as a permanent battlefield of moral danger. In this framework, policy is secondary. What matters is posture. The capacity to signal vigilance becomes more important than the provision of safety. The accusation becomes the protection. The spectacle replaces the intervention.
By focusing public energy on the symbolic boundaries of morality, policymakers insulate themselves from accountability for structural abandonment.
This performance obscures the absence of actual safeguards for children. While conservative figures warn of drag queens and inclusive curricula, they vote against background check expansions for youth workers. They resist efforts to create national child abuse registries that include religious institutions. They block legislation to raise the minimum age of marriage. They eliminate funding for school counselors and after-school programs. They cut budgets for child protective services and reduce oversight of private adoption and foster care networks.
There is no contradiction here. The performance is the policy. Protection is not measured in outcomes. It is measured in volume. The louder the accusation, the less scrutiny is applied to legislative choices. Policy failure is neutralized by narrative substitution. When a child is raped and forced to give birth, the story is not told. When a teacher reads a picture book about diverse families, the story is told at volume. One incident is silent law. The other is national scandal.
The political value of outrage lies in its ability to redirect attention. Material neglect becomes invisible behind symbolic noise. The passage of laws criminalizing drag performances near schools draws headlines. The failure to fund rape crisis centers does not. By focusing public energy on the symbolic boundaries of morality, policymakers insulate themselves from accountability for structural abandonment. The child becomes a rhetorical device. She exists in theory rather than in law.
This asymmetry is visible in legislative activity. Since 2022, Republican-controlled legislatures have introduced hundreds of bills targeting LGBTQ speech, education content, and library access. Fewer than 10 bills have addressed forensic backlog reform. Even fewer have advanced. Proposed federal legislation to protect minors from online exploitation has repeatedly failed due to concerns about regulation of private companies. At the same time, multiple states have attempted to prosecute school staff for discussing gender identity under “grooming” statutes. The alignment is clear. Threats are defined ideologically. Interventions are reserved for performance.
Media infrastructure amplifies this distortion. Conservative news outlets and online influencers produce continuous content warning of threats posed by social workers, librarians, and drag performers. The framing consistently positions adults who support youth autonomy as predators. At the same time, actual cases of child sexual abuse in religious, athletic, and political institutions are downplayed or reframed. The function of this narrative is not to inform. It is to sustain a moral panic that legitimizes surveillance and censorship while diverting attention from systemic failures.
This process also redefines harm. Under the current paradigm, harm is not measured by suffering or injury. It is measured by deviation from normative identity. A child exposed to age-appropriate information about gender is framed as endangered. A child raped and forced to carry a pregnancy is not framed at all. She exists outside the moral narrative. Her pain is illegible because it does not confirm the ideological premise. She does not symbolize anything useful. She is inconvenient.
This redefinition produces policy that protects ideology rather than people. It enshrines the fiction that surveillance and restriction produce safety. It displaces accountability by substituting criminalization for care. The result is a system in which the primary targets of protective legislation are not predators but professionals. Teachers, counselors, and medical providers are monitored more closely than the men marrying minors or the judges enabling child pregnancies. The apparatus of protection becomes an apparatus of control.
This structure is not malfunctioning. It is performing as designed. The emphasis on symbolic enforcement over material assistance ensures that power remains centered. Actual protections would require redistribution. They would require funding, oversight, and transparency. They would require confronting the institutions most closely aligned with conservative authority: churches, courts, families. That confrontation is not forthcoming. Instead, the state protects the ideology of protection while abandoning the child.
The cumulative effect is institutionalized harm. Systems nominally built to safeguard children instead categorize them. They are either politically useful or they are not. Those who conform to the narrative of victimhood receive visibility without assistance. Those who contradict it receive neither. The performance of protection absorbs public attention. The reality of harm proceeds without interruption.
This disconnect is not unique to recent years. It has precedent in every era of moral panic. What is distinct in the current moment is the speed and reach of narrative enforcement. Digital media enables rapid mobilization around symbolic events. Legislation follows quickly. Meanwhile, data on actual abuse, assault, and neglect remains underreported and underanalyzed. The disparity between visible outrage and invisible harm grows wider. The system becomes harder to map and easier to perform.
The result is a hollow institution of child protection. It possesses language without infrastructure, law without care, and policy without contact. It functions as a mirror reflecting ideology back to its authors. The child at the center of the performance is not protected. She is used. The system that claims to speak for her leaves her undocumented, unsupported, and unacknowledged. This is not a gap in the system. It is the system.
A Coherent System, Not a Series of Failures
This is not the result of a broken machine. It is the machine.
Child marriage laws that legalize statutory rape. Forced birth mandates that turn trauma into state policy. Rape crisis centers shuttered by budget design. Evidence kits rotting in closets. Drag queens banned from libraries while judges greenlight the weddings of 15-year-olds to grown men. None of this happens by accident. The patterns are too consistent, the outcomes too aligned. This is not a case of good intentions gone astray or bureaucratic confusion. It is a deliberate configuration of legal tools designed to shield abusers and discipline the abused.
The architecture holds. What looks like hypocrisy from the outside is strategy from within. It is not a contradiction to scream about “protecting children” while erasing them from legislation, data, and policy. It is not a glitch that the same people who ban books on puberty also block efforts to process rape kits. It is not ironic that the man whose administration claimed to be exposing Epstein’s secrets ended up presiding over their burial. It is structural.
The Epstein file was never about closure. It was about control. It served as a pressure valve, a vessel for all the anxiety and suspicion the base could not voice elsewhere. But when the promised reckoning finally came, it was blank pages and black ink. No fireworks. No arrests. Just a memo and a shrug. The silence that followed was not empty. It was full of meaning.
Because while they waited for the names to drop, the rest of the machine kept humming. Pregnant children were denied care. Shelters lost funding. Backlogs grew. Survivors disappeared into legal limbo. And the same men who had built their brand on outrage offered nothing but slogans and deflection. The spectacle of protection kept playing. But behind the curtain, the laws were doing exactly what they were designed to do.
It is easy to mock the true believers who spent years convinced that justice was one release away. But they were right about one thing. There is a network. It is not secret. It is written into the statutes and reinforced by the budgets. It lives in the votes cast to stall reforms and the speeches given to demonize victims. The rot is not hidden. It is codified.
The question now is not whether the system will be exposed. It already has been. The question is whether people are willing to see what has been made plainly visible. To understand that the policy scaffolding of modern conservatism is not a malfunctioning child safety program. It is a functioning disciplinary regime. Its purpose is not to protect the vulnerable. It is to sort them. To elevate the compliant and erase the inconvenient.
The Epstein affair was never going to end in justice. It was a mirror. What it reflected was not a single man’s sins but a political order that treats predation as a price of stability. The client list doesn’t need to be released. The clients wrote the laws. The machine is working.
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Trump Is Testing the Limits of Our Democracy—Will We Hold Firm?
The way we all react to these tests—from the disappearing of U.S. citizens to the threatening of judges—will determine Trump’s and the GOP’s next steps. So, what do we do?
Jul 15, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to strip Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship is a “test.”
Kids do it all the time. Throw a tantrum in the store demanding cookies and if the parents don’t remove them from the store right away, every visit will see the tantrums escalate. Testing the boundaries. When the test succeeds, the boundaries get moved and a new boundary gets tested, on and on until finally the child’s behavior is so egregious he’s stopped. Or he always gets away with everything and grows up to be Donald Trump.
We learn this early.
We’ve seen a series of these tests coming from the Trump administration, following the very specific and consistently repeated pattern that history tells us played out in the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, el Sisi, and pretty much every other person who took over a democracy and then, step-by-step turned it into a dictatorship.
Trump started testing racism as a political weapon when he came down the elevator at Trump Tower and spoke about “Mexican murderers and rapists” in front of what media reports said was a crowd he’d hired for $50 per person from a company that provides extras to movie and TV production companies.
While his initial goal was reportedly to get NBC to renew “Apprentice” and pay him more than Gwen Stefani, his racism test work out shockingly well; suddenly he was a serious contender for the party that had inherited the KKK vote when Democrats abandoned the South with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the 1960s.
If he can do it to Rosie—if there isn’t furious pushback (and so far, there isn’t) against this latest test—he can do it to me or you.
Another test was whether the exaggerations, distortions, and outright lies that he and his family had used to hustle real estate could work in politics.
He quickly discovered that GOP base voters—after decades of having uncritically (slavishly, even) swallowed lies about trickle-down economics, “evil union bosses,” and the “importance of small government”—were more than happy to embrace or ignore, as the occasion demanded, his prevarications.
From there, Trump tested exactly how gullible his most fervent supporters—and the media that fed them a daily diet of very profitable outrage and hate—would buy into a lie so audacious, so in defiance of both the law and common sense, so outside the bounds of normal patriotism, that they could be whipped into a murderous frenzy and kill three police officers while trying to overthrow the government of the United States of America.
The nation and our press reacted as if he’d failed that test, but when he was able to cow enough senators to avoid being convicted in his impeachment trial, he knew he’d won.
Now he’s again testing how far he can go.
George Retes is a 25-year-old Hispanic natural-born American citizen and disabled Army veteran working as a security guard at a legal marijuana operation in California. When it was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), he got in his car and tried to drive away to avoid getting in the middle of what he saw as trouble.
Masked agents chased him down, smashed the window of his car and pepper-sprayed him in the face, dragged him out of his car, and disappeared him.
Testing.
Will Democrats make a stink? Will the media make it more than a one-day story? Will any Republicans break rank and stand against his excesses? Was it even mentioned on any of the Sunday shows? How far can he go next time?
So far, Trump thinks he’s winning these tests. The outrages are coming so fast and furious that it’s becoming impossible to keep track of them, just like in Germany in 1933 and Chile in 1973.
Retes wasn’t the only U.S. citizen who’s been arrested or detained by ICE; they’ve gone after a mayor, a member of Congress, and even assaulted a United States senator.
A 71-year-old grandmother was assaulted and handcuffed by masked agents. Axios documents others; as the CNN headline on the story about other U.S. citizens being snatched notes: “‘We Are Not Safe in America Today:’ These American Citizens Say They Were Detained by ICE.”
Testing.
After years of hysteria on the billionaire-owned sewer of Fox “News” about our nation’s first Black president deploying “FEMA Camps” to detain white conservatives, Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others in Las Vegas, ranting that Federal Emergency Management Agency Camps set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were “a dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin’ down doors and... confiscating guns.”
He murdered those innocent concertgoers, he said, to “wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” saying, “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”
Now those detention facilities conservatives feared has come into being, as Republicans in Congress just funded concentration camps like “Alligator Auschwitz” in multiple states across America.
Visiting congress members claim inmates are packed over 30 to a cage, with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) reporting her horror when she was shown that “they get their drinking water, and they brush their teeth, where they poop, in the same unit.”
Testing.
We recently learned via CBS News from a whistleblower and now-released texts that Trump’s former lawyer and now-nominee for a lifetime federal judgeship, Emil Bove, then working in the Justice Department, advised the administration officials to tell federal courts “fuck you” when they ordered the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvadoran hellhole concentration camp.
But now—as it was in South Korea when their president tried to end democracy there last year and people poured into the streets and forced the government to act—it’s apparently going to be pretty much exclusively up to us.
For months, the administration appears to have followed his obviously unconstitutional and illegal advice. Republicans want him on the federal bench anyway.
Testing.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia—who Trump official Erez Reuveni said had been deported “in error”—described how he was treated in that El Salvadoran concentration camp, telling his attorneys and the court that he’d been repeatedly beaten, then forced to kneel from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am “with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion.”
He had committed no crime and was deported in open violation of a federal judge who demanded the plane either not take off or return before landing in El Salvador. The Trump administration simply and contemptibly ignored the court’s order.
Testing.
In a White House visit, Trump told the El Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele (who refers to himself as “the world’s coolest dictator”), that he wants to send American citizens to that country’s torture centers.
“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” Trump said as the two men laughed. “You’ve got to build about five more places.”
Testing.
Meanwhile, ICE detention facilities are also holding U.S. citizens like Andrea Velez, 32, who was snatched by masked agents during a raid in Los Angeles. As LA’s ABC News affiliate Channel 7 reported:
Velez, a marketing designer and Cal Poly Pomona graduate, was arrested Tuesday morning after her family dropped her off at work. According to her attorneys, Velez's sister and mother saw her being approached and grabbed by masked men with guns, so they called the Los Angeles Police Department to report a kidnapping.
Police responded to the scene near Ninth and Spring streets and realized the kidnapping call was actually a federal immigration-enforcement operation.
She’s out of the detention facility now, but on $5000 bond; ICE apparently has plans for her future.
Testing.
And now Trump is telling us he wants to strip a natural-born U.S. citizen comedienne—who’s made jokes about him that pissed him off—of her U.S. citizenship, “Because,” he says, “of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.”
If he can do it to Rosie—if there isn’t furious pushback (and so far, there isn’t) against this latest test—he can do it to me or you.
Hitler gained the chancellorship of Germany in January 1933; by July of that same year, a mere six months later, he’d revoked the citizenship of thousands for the crimes of being “socialists,” “communists,” Jews, or journalists and commentators who’d written or spoken ill of him. Trump appears to be just a bit behind him on that timeline.
Testing.
Trump wants NPR and PBS defunded as soon as possible, having issued an Executive Order to that effect, and has ordered his Federal Communications Commission to launch investigations that could strip major TV networks of their broadcast licenses if they continue to report on him and his activities in ways that offend him. He shut down the Voice Of America, ending America’s promotion of democracy across the world. He kicked The Associated Press out of the White House press pool.
Testing.
Trump has declared large strips of land along the southern border to be federalized territory and put the American military in charge of policing the area, in clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. That law prohibits the military from performing any sort of police function against civilians.
Testing.
When students spoke out on campus against Trump ally and longtime Kushner family friend Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s murderous assault of Gaza and support for settlers stealing West Bank land from Palestinians, armed and masked federal agents began arresting those students, imprisoning them for their First Amendment-protected speech.
Then Trump went after their universities, bringing several to heel just as Orbán has in Hungary and Putin has in Russia.
Testing.
Yesterday, six Republicans on the Supreme Court said that Trump could wholesale mass- fire employees of the Department of Education, essentially shutting down an agency created and funded by Congress in defiance of the constitutional requirement that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissent, flaming in extreme alarm at her colleagues:
This decision] hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out... The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.
Or maybe the six Republican justices on the court are just scared? After all, judges across the country are being threatened, having pizzas delivered to their homes in the middle of the night by way of saying, “We know where you live.” This after U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’ son, Daniel Anderl, was fatally shot at their New Jersey home by a gunman disguised as a pizza delivery driver. Her husband was also shot, but survived.
A few months ago, after one of Trump’s rants against judges who rule against him, Judge Salas told the press:
Hundreds of pizzas have been delivered to judges all over this country in the last few months. And in the last few weeks—judges’ children. And now Daniel’s name was being weaponized to bring fear to judges and their children. You’re saying to those judges—“You want to end up like Judge Salas? You want to end up like Judge Salas’ son?”
Testing.
What’s next? Will we see Americans who’ve spoken poorly of Trump on social media arrested like both Orbán and Putin do?
Will more students end up on the ground or in jail?
Will more judges be charged with the crime of running their own courtrooms in ways Trump and ICE dislike?
More mayors arrested?
More Democratic Senators taken to the ground and handcuffed?
Will Americans start being disappeared in numbers that can’t be ignored? Deported to El Salvador and South Sudan?
Will journalists be destroyed by massive libel suits or imprisoned for what they write?
Will more judges bend to Trump’s will because they’re either terrified or, like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, have apparently become radicalized by Fox “News” or other right-wing propaganda outlets?
The way we all react to these tests will determine Trump’s and the GOP’s next steps. So, what do we do?
Former President Barack Obama says Democrats need to “toughen up.” While true, it would have been nice to hear “tough” words of outrage, warning, and leadership from him and former Vice President Kamala Harris over the past six months. And former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
But now—as it was in South Korea when their president tried to end democracy there last year and people poured into the streets and forced the government to act—it’s apparently going to be pretty much exclusively up to us.
See you on July 17—this Thursday—for some “good trouble.”
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Trump Planning to Destroy Planet
When it comes to climate change, the fact that Donald Trump is distinctly a terrorist first-class should be a daily part of the headlines in our world.
Jul 15, 2025
Yes, he’s done quite a job so far and, in a way, it couldn’t be simpler to describe. Somehow he’s managed to take the greatest looming threat to humanity and put it (excuse the all-too-appropriate image) on the back burner. I’m thinking, of course, about climate change.
My guess is that you haven’t read much about it recently, despite the fact that a significant part of this country, including the city I live in, set new heat records for June. And Europe followed suit soon after with a heat hell all its own in which, at one point, the temperature in part of Spain hit an all-time record 114.8°F. And oh yes, part of Portugal hit 115.9°F as both countries recorded their hottest June ever. Facing that reality, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said (again all too appropriately), “Extreme heat is no longer a rare event—it has become the new normal.” The new normal, indeed! He couldn’t have been more on target!
And why am I not surprised by all this? Well, because whether you’re in the United States or Europe (or so many other places on this planet) these days, if you’ve been paying any attention at all, you’ve noticed that June is indeed the new July, and that, thanks to the ever increasing amounts of greenhouse gases that continue to flow into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, heatwaves have grown more frequent and more intense. After all, we’re now on a planet where, without a doubt, heat is at an all-time-record high. After all, 2024, was the hottest year in history and the last 10 years, the hottest decade ever known. Worse yet, in the age of Donald Trump, this is clearly just the beginning, not the end (though somewhere down the line, of course, it could indeed prove to be exactly that).
An Ongoing Act of Global Terrorism
While this old man is online constantly reading publications ranging from The Washington Post to the British Guardian, he still reads the paper New York Times. And if that isn’t old-fashioned of me, what is? Can you even believe it? And its first section of news, normally 20-odd pages long, does regularly tell me something about how climate change is (and isn’t) covered in the age of Donald Trump. Let me give you one example: On June 21, that paper’s superb environmental reporter Somini Sengupta had a piece covering the droughts that, amid the rising heat, are now circling this planet in a major fashion from Brazil to China, the U.S. to Russia. And yes, she indicated clearly in her piece that such droughts, bad as they may always have been from time to time, are becoming significantly worse thanks to the overheating of this planet from fossil fuel use. (As she put it: “Droughts are part of the natural weather cycle but are exacerbated in many parts of the world by the burning of fossil fuels, which is warming the world and exacerbating extreme weather.”)
The next day that piece appeared in the paper newspaper I read—a day when, as always, the front page was filled with Donald Trump—and where was it placed? Yep, on page 24.
And on the very day I happened to be writing this sentence, Trump was the headline figure in, or key, to 3 of the 6 front-page Times stories, including ones headlined “The Supreme Court’s Term Yields Triumphs for Trump” and “Trump’s Deal with El Salvador Guts MS-13 Fight.” On the other hand, you had to turn to page eight to read “Heat Overcoming Europe Turns Dangerous, and There’s More to Come” in which the eighth and 24th paragraphs quote experts mentioning climate change. I don’t mean to indicate that the Times never puts a climate piece on the front page. It does, but not daily like Donald Trump. Not faintly. He is invariably the page-one story of our present American world, day after day after day. Whatever he may do (or not do), he remains the story of the moment (any moment). And for the man who eternally wants to be the center of attention, consider that, after a fashion, his greatest achievement. Yet, at 79 years old, he, like this almost 81-year-old, will, in due course, leave this country and this planet behind forever. But the climate mess he’s now helping intensify in such a significant way won’t leave with him. Not for a second. Not in any foreseeable future.
Consider it an irony that the administration that wants to deny atomic weaponry to Iran on the grounds that a nuclear war would be a planetary disaster seems perfectly willing to encourage a slow-motion version of the same in the form of climate change.
In short, despite everything else he’s doing in and to this world of ours, there’s nothing more devastating (not even his bombing of Iran) than his urge to ignore anything associated with climate change, while putting fossil fuels back at the very center of our all-American world. Yes, he can no longer simply stop solar and wind power from growing rapidly on this planet of ours, but he can certainly try. And simply refusing to do anything to help is—or at least should be—considered an ongoing act of global terrorism.
And don’t think it’s just that either. For example, Trump administration cuts to the National Weather Service have already ensured that, when truly bad weather hits (and hits and hits), as it’s been doing this year, whether you’re talking about stunning flash flooding or tornadoes, there will be, as the Guardian‘s Eric Holthaus reports, ever fewer staff members committed to informing and warning Americans about what’s coming or helping them once it’s hit. Meanwhile, cuts to the government’s greenhouse gas monitoring network will ensure that we’ll know less about the effects of climate change in this country.
To put it bluntly, when it comes to climate change, the fact that Donald Trump is distinctly a terrorist first-class should be a daily part of the headlines in our world (though, if he has his way, it may not be “our” world for long). We’re talking about the president who is already doing everything he can to cut back on clean energy and ensure that this country produces more “clean, beautiful” coal, not to speak of oil and natural gas, and so send ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, Republicans in the House and Senate, bowing to Trump, have only recently passed a “big, beautiful bill” that would “quickly remove $7,500 consumer tax credits for buying electric cars,” among so many other things, while negating much of what the Biden administration did do in relation to climate change (even as it, too, let the American production of oil rise to record levels).
A Drill, Baby, Drill Presidency
Of course, given a president who once labeled climate change a “Chinese hoax” and “one of the greatest scams of all time,” who could be faintly surprised that his administration seems remarkably intent on sending ever more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere? And sadly, if that reality, which was all too clear from his first term in office, had been the focus of the news last year, perhaps he wouldn’t have been voted back into the White House by 1.6% more Americans than opted for former Vice President Kamala Harris who, to give her full (dis)credit, didn’t run a campaign taking out after him in any significant fashion on the issue of climate change and planetary suicide.
So here we are distinctly in Donald Trump’s world and what a world it’s already proving to be. We’re talking, of course, about the fellow who quite literally ran his 2024 presidential campaign on the phrase “drill, baby, drill.” In a sense, he couldn’t have been blunter or, in his own fashion, more honest than that. Still, it pains me even to imagine that, for the next three and a half years, he will indeed be in control of U.S. environmental policy. After all, we’re talking about the guy whose (now wildly ill-named) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “plans to repeal limits on greenhouse gas emissions and other airborne pollutants from the nation’s fossil fuel-fired power plants.” Brilliant, right? And the fellow now running the EPA, Lee Zeldin, couldn’t have been more blunt about it: “Rest assured President Trump is the biggest supporter of clean, beautiful coal. EPA is helping pave the way for American energy dominance because energy development underpins economic development, which in turn strengthens national security.”
Clean, beautiful coal. Doesn’t that take the air out of the room? Or perhaps I mean, shouldn’t it? Because, sadly enough, in this Trumpian world of ours, all too few people are paying all that much attention. And yet it’s the slow-motion way that we humans have discovered to destroy this planet and ourselves. Consider it an irony that the administration that wants to deny atomic weaponry to Iran on the grounds that a nuclear war would be a planetary disaster seems perfectly willing to encourage a slow-motion version of the same in the form of climate change. After all, to take but one example, only recently it opened up millions of acres of previously protected Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling.
While President Trump and his officials essentially try to devastate this planet, a kind of self-censorship on the subject remains in operation and not just in the media, but among all the rest of us, too.
It’s not that there are no strong articles in the mainstream world about what’s happening. Check out, for instance, this article by Simmone Shah of Time Magazine on the increasing number of heat domes on this planet of ours. Or if you look away from the mainstream and, for instance, check out the work of Mark Hertzgaard at The Nation magazine considering the climate-change costs of war or environmentalist Bill McKibben at his substack writing on how Trump and crew want to create an all too literal hell on Earth, you would certainly have a stronger sense of what’s truly happening on this planet right now.
For a moment, just imagine the reaction in this country and in the media if Donald Trump suddenly started openly talking about actually using atomic weaponry. And yet, in a slow-motion fashion, that’s exactly what his officials and the president himself are doing in relation to climate change and it all continues to be eerily normalized and largely ignored amid the continuing chaos of this Trumpian moment.
Who, for instance, could imagine this headline anywhere in the media: Trump Planning to Destroy Planet. Or perhaps: American President Attempting to Create a Literal Hell on Earth. Or even how about a milder: End of World as We’ve Known It Now Underway. Or… well, you’re undoubtedly just as capable as I am of imagining more such headlines.
Instead, we increasingly live in a world where, while President Trump and his officials essentially try to devastate this planet, a kind of self-censorship on the subject remains in operation and not just in the media, but among all the rest of us, too. We lead our lives largely not imagining that our world is slowly going down the drain—or do I mean up in flames?
And in some grim sense, that reality (or perhaps irreality would be the better term) may prove to be—I was about to write “in retrospect,” but perhaps there will be no “retrospect”—Donald Trump’s greatest “triumph.” He is indeed in the process of doing in, if not us, then our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and clearly couldn’t give less of a damn about it. (If anything, it leaves him feeling distinctly on top of the world.)
Of all the wars we shouldn’t be fighting on this planet of ours from Ukraine to Gaza, Iran to Sudan, there is indeed one that we all should be fighting, including the president of the United States, and that’s the war against our destruction of this planet (as humanity has known it all these endless thousands of years) in a planetary heat hell.
If only.
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Trump’s Tariffs on Brazil Are About Power and Profit
For the sake of protecting himself, oligarchs, and authoritarians, Trump is willing to make life for the average Brazilian significantly worse.
Jul 15, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump has announced new 50% tariffs on Brazilian imports, set to take effect this August. Trump has said these tariffs are a response to the “witch hunt” against disgraced former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, on trial for his role in supporting a coup d’état.
Beyond threatening democracy and sovereignty, these tariffs are about a core of Trump’s brand: personal loyalty, elite self-preservation, and corruption. As with Trump’s overall foreign policy, whether toward Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Venezuela, Qatar, or others, his posture toward Brazil is driven not by principle but by self-interest, through private business interests, campaign donors, family friends, and alliances with authoritarian strongmen.
Bolsonaro is currently facing multiple criminal investigations, including for orchestrating a failed coup attempt on January 8, 2023, Brazil’s version of the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Bolsonaro and his acolytes, including former cabinet members and generals, allegedly would have killed leading officials, including President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The trial is led by Moraes himself and has been widely televised, and is a key turning point for the nation’s path forward to democracy, or in a return to oligarchy and fascism.
Despite being a conservative himself, Moraes has become a far-right boogeyman, reviled by figures like Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump. Now, with Brazil’s judiciary closing in on Bolsonaro and his allies, Trump appears willing to mobilize U.S. economic warfare to derail the legal process and protect one of his own.
By casting Bolsonaro as a victim of judicial persecution, Trump reinforces his own narrative that any kind of accountability is political persecution, protecting himself and his allies from prosecution.
Perhaps no foreign political family is as close to Trumpworld as the Bolsonaros. Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair’s son and political heir—likely his replacement in the next presidential election—maintains a friendship with Donald Trump Jr., and has made a lot of efforts to ingratiate himself with MAGA; learning English, making frequent trips to Washington and Florida (and living in the U.S.), and now sporting a Trump hat.
His recent visit to Washington during his father’s trial was part of a broader pressure campaign, backed by right-wing U.S. politicians and Bolsonaro-linked operatives. He has been pushing for the Trump administration to take measures against Lula and his government. This is economic warfare for personal and political gain.
Among the other most vocal allies are Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), Bolsonaro confidant Paulo Figueiredo, and lawyer Martin De Luca.
After leaving office, Jair Bolsonaro fled to Orlando, Florida, where he lived for several months on a tourist visa while under active criminal investigation. Instead of facing consequences, he was embraced by Florida’s MAGA elite. Calls from Democratic lawmakers, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), for his visa to be revoked were ignored.
Salazar has also used her seat in Congress to target Brazil’s judiciary. In 2024, she publicly called on the U.S. State Department to revoke the visas of Brazilian Supreme Court justices, including Moraes, after they had pursued legal action against Elon Musk’s Twitter for boosting misinformation and failing to appoint legal representatives.
Salazar is deeply financially tied to this fight. Salazar receives significant campaign funding from real estate developers, private equity funds, medical PACs, and conservative pro-Israel donors, many of whom also benefit from Bolsonaro’s lax regulatory approach, support of Israel (while Lula recognizes Palestinian statehood), and are hostile to Lula’s redistributive economic policies. They have bought her loyalty.
Meanwhile, Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Brasil has become a launchpad for exporting Trumpism into Latin America. Jair and Eduardo Bolsonaro have headlined several CPAC Brasil events, alongside U.S. operatives like Steve Bannon, Jason Miller, and Matt Schlapp. Bannon once publicly praised the January 8 attackers as “freedom fighters.” The Bolsonaros have also spoken at CPAC in the United States. Both Miller and Bannon were also allegedly implicated in helping organize the January 8 insurrection and promoting election misinformation in Brazil. Miller’s social media platform, Gettr, was promoted by Bolsonaro allies as a free-speech refuge after platform bans.
Paulo Figueiredo, one of Bolsonaro’s closest allies in the U.S., was an early investor in the Trump Hotel project in Rio de Janeiro. He was one of Trump’s earliest backers in 2016, especially in the business community. The deal collapsed in 2016 amid widespread corruption investigations. Figueiredo, the grandson of a former Brazilian dictator, has repeatedly praised Trump as a business icon and maintains contact with his circle, playing a key role in these recent policy developments in the second Trump term.
Another key figure, Martin De Luca of the Kobre & Kim law firm (with an office in São Paulo), acts as a legal bridge between the Trumps and Bolsonaros. He has defended Bolsonaro-linked commentators against deplatforming and advised both Trump Media and Jair Bolsonaro directly. He has been a key lobbyist for these tariffs and broader sanctions against Lula and his government, and provides close support to the Bolsonaro camp.
At the heart of this tariff attack is also Lula’s broader leftist financial and economic policy. His finance minister, Fernando Haddad, has introduced ambitious reforms aimed at reducing inequality: wealth and real estate taxes that favor the poor and middle class against the rich, corporate regulation, labor reform, and taxes on the financial system. They are all meant to inject balance into a system that has been controlled by an elite class, which has dictated Brazil’s policies for a very long time. These proposals have been fiercely opposed by Bolsonaro’s base: the big banks, media conglomerates, agribusiness, evangelicals, and the ultra-wealthy, and by Trump-aligned investors in the U.S.
Bolsonaro’s allies are openly lobbying a foreign power to impose economic pain on their own country to preserve elite impunity. By casting Bolsonaro as a victim of judicial persecution, Trump reinforces his own narrative that any kind of accountability is political persecution, protecting himself and his allies from prosecution.
This move is not only a threat to Brazil’s judiciary and democracy, but a direct attack on the country’s sovereignty, echoing Cold War-era tactics where the United States used its economic, military, and geopolitical power to punish Latin American nations (like Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia, and so many others) for pursuing leftist or redistributive policies deemed contrary to the interests of its elite ruling class.
For the sake of protecting himself, oligarchs, and authoritarians, Trump is willing to make life for the average Brazilian significantly worse, while continuing to wage war on the poor at home through his destructive economic agenda.
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