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12 Years of Lies, Torture, Drones.... and Hope?
I began writing for TomDispatch during Barack Obama’s somewhat disappointing second presidential term, observed with horror Trump’s first time around, slogged through the Biden years, and now find myself reaching for a noun more resonant than “horror” to describe Trump 2.0.
Jan 13, 2026
“Tom, I got nothin’.” That’s all I wanted to say to Tom Engelhardt, the kindly and incisive editor of TomDispatch.com. He’d called to check in and see what I was planning for my next piece. I wanted to tell him, “I’m staring at starvation and genocide, the destruction of American democracy and the rule of law, along with the ongoing incineration of our planet. I’m a damp ball of grief, and I’ve got nothing useful to say about any of it.” Furthermore, I wanted to add, “Anything I could say about the present disaster has already been said comprehensively and better by someone else.” That “someone else” includes myriad excellent journalists who have departed (voluntarily or otherwise) from a mainstream media that has repeatedly acquiesced to Trump, succumbing to a malaise of self-censorship at flagship newspapers like the Washington Post and even the New York Times.
People with nothing to say would generally be wise to shut up. Unfortunately, the wisdom to choose to remain silent has never been my most salient characteristic, something even strangers seem to notice about me. Years ago, I was introduced to a woman at a party. Before I’d even opened my mouth, she said, “Oh, good, another short, pushy Jewish dyke from New York!” Must be something in the way I move.
In any case, having nothing for Tom this time around led me to think about all the times I have had something to say and how grateful I am to have had TomDispatch as a place to say it.
So, feeling stuck, I decided to examine my output over all these years. As it happens, there’s a lot of it, 98 pieces in all. I began during Barack Obama’s somewhat disappointing second presidential term, observed with horror Trump’s first time around, slogged through the Biden years, and now find myself reaching for a noun more resonant than “horror” to describe my reaction to the first year (and counting) of Trump 2.0.
It was far too much to read through in one sitting, but not surprisingly, a few general themes did emerge. Most of them had to do with the importance of working to discern—and tell—the truth about the world we live in.
Thinking about Epistemological Anarchy…
My first TomDispatch piece appeared in 2014. It marked the beginning of an oddly personal chronicle of a time that the poet W.H. Auden might once have called “a low dishonest decade.”
That’s the phrase Auden used to describe the period leading up to September 1, 1939, the day Adolf Hitler’s German army invaded Poland, marking the official beginning of World War II. I think we can fairly say that the Trump years, and even those preceding his first election, constitute a low, dishonest decade.
Of course, Trump himself is an avatar—a human embodiment—of the principle of dishonesty. Indeed, the Washington Post recorded more than 30,000 “false or misleading claims” he made during his first four years as president. This time around, most media outlets have given up counting, although several marked his first 100 days with reports on his 10 (or more) most egregious lies. The purpose of “flooding the zone with shit,” as right-wing podcaster and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon once put it, is not really to convince anyone that any particular lie is true but, as I wrote during Trump’s first term, to convince everyone that it’s impossible to know whether anything is true. As I argued then:
We are used to thinking of propaganda (a word whose Latin roots mean “towards action”) as intended to move people to think or act in a particular way. And indeed that kind of propaganda has long existed, as with, for example, wartime books, posters, and movies designed to inflame patriotism and hatred of the enemy. But there was a different quality to totalitarian propaganda. Its purpose was not just to create certainty (the enemy is evil incarnate), but a curious kind of doubt. ‘In fact,’ as Russian émigrée and New Yorker writer Masha Gessen has put it, "the purpose of totalitarian propaganda is to take away your ability to perceive reality.”
Back in 2019, I was writing about “totalitarian propaganda” in the past tense, speaking of 20th-century authoritarian regimes. But I was already worried about what Trump’s wild epistemological anarchy portended. “Eroding the very ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy has been,” I wrote, “however instinctively, the mode of the Trumpian moment as well, both the presidential one and that of so many right-wing conspiracy theorists now populating the online world.” For many Americans, it was no longer worth the effort to discern the truth. “When everybody lies, anything can indeed be true. And when everybody—or even a significant chunk of everybody—believes this, the effect can be profoundly anti-democratic.”
In fact, I suggested, “this popular belief that nobody really does or can know anything is the perfect soil for an authoritarian leader to take root.” Trump 2.0 has confirmed that intuition.
“September 1, 1939” was the title of W. H. Auden’s most famous poem, the one that began with a reflection on the previous “low, dishonest decade.” It also contained these lines about what he then imagined was to come:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
…And Memory Holes
That first article of mine was about the evil done by the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This was not a surprising topic for me, since I had recently published a book on the subject, specifically about institutionalized state torture as practiced by the United States during what came to be known as the “War on Terror.” It was pretty much all I was thinking about in those days.
In that piece, I pointed out that we had never gotten a full accounting of the torture committed in our names in Afghanistan, Iraq, and globally at CIA “black sites” (their secret torture arenas). I blamed that reality in significant part on President Barack Obama’s “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” and pointed out that not “one of the senior government officials responsible for activities that amounted to war crimes has been held accountable, nor were any of the actual torturers ever brought to court.” When, through a 2009 executive order, Obama finally closed those black sites, he argued that, “at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”
Of course, that “need to look forward” (not over one’s shoulder) effectively tossed the history of torture under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney into an Orwellian memory hole. And to this day, there has never been a full accounting of the Bush torture program. As a result, I pointed out then, “the structure for a torture system remains in place and unpunished,” which meant that the next time an administration chose to invoke and weaponize a public fear of dark, foreign others, we could well see torture’s resurgence.
Of course, that is indeed what happened under Donald Trump. Beginning with his first campaign speech in 2015, in which he inveighed against Mexican migrants as rapists bringing drugs and crime into this country, he has continually escalated his attacks on the foreign-born, particularly those from places he infamously called “shithole countries.” By his third campaign for the presidency in 2024, he (along with his running mate JD Vance) was routinely telling his followers that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were dining on other residents’ cats and dogs. In his second term, eschewing earlier euphemistic dog whistles, President Trump has been making it very clear that what distinguishes the migrants he characterizes as “garbage” (Somalis) from good migrants (“nice Scandinavians”) is their color.
As a result, this year I found myself reflecting again on the scourge of Trump’s vicious authoritarianism, writing that:
“t’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the hastily passed Patriot Act granted the federal government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one whose existence we now take for granted.
Honestly, though, I don’t think any of us could then have imagined a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) run by Kristi Noem. She’s the Trump appointee who posed in her DHS baseball cap and $50,000 Rolex watch in front of hundreds of half-naked prisoners like the ones she’d illegally dispatched to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran “Terrorist Confinement Center.” In ordering the deportation of immigrants to a penal institution well-known for torturing its inmates, Noem was reprising the Bush-era crime of “extraordinary rendition,” a practice that is, of course, illegal under US and international law.
Because of excellent reporting by outlets like the Guardian, we know that those men, now thankfully freed and repatriated to Venezuela, “suffered systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault.” We also know that the Trump administration tried to tip the whole episode into its capacious memory hole by successfully preventing CBS’"60 Minutes" from airing a segment on the abuse of US deportees at CECOT. (That segment ran briefly in Canada; however, and a full transcript of it is now available, courtesy of The Nation magazine.)
Extrajudicial Killings (Also Known as “Murder”)
Another theme I’ve returned to over the years is the US penchant for murder-at-a-distance. Indeed, our country pioneered what now appears to be a significant part of the future of warfare: remotely directed attacks on individual human beings. In 2016, I wrote about the increasing use of military drones and the implications for military ethics:
The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved—whether through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone—the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion we’ve had has focused more on the new instrument (drone technology) than on its purpose (assassination). It’s a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them.
I was still writing about the subject six years later. In 2022, TomDispatch published my piece about the push to develop LAWS (Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems). This US goal had first emerged in the previous century during the US war in Vietnam with the (expensive and largely unsuccessful) automated battlefield. Half a century later, such automation, including the use of so-called artificial intelligence to make kill decisions, is now available in cheap, easily replaceable drones. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the United States has over the years resisted any attempt to outlaw autonomous weapons. “The European Union, the UN, at least 50 signatory nations, and (according to polls), most of the world population believe that autonomous weapons systems should be outlawed,” I wrote in 2022. “The US, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Russia disagree, along with a few other outliers.” I hardly expect the second Trump administration to take a different position.
In fact, despite what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth might think, contemporary American soldiers probably don’t need to do pull-ups. They only need to sit down—in front of a screen—to cause mayhem globally.
Today, we take our ability to kill at a great distance for granted, as the Trump administration’s actions have demonstrated. We accept with disturbingly little question the now routine murders by drone of more than 100 people in small boats off the Venezuelan coast and in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Only when it emerged that one of those unpiloted aerial attacks on defenseless human beings included a “double-tap”—a second strike to kill two survivors floating in the water by their devastated boat—was there widespread objection, including from members of Congress.
Hope in Strange Times
Before the 2016 election, I wrote a piece about how the rest of us needed to learn to claim our victories. “In these dismal days,” I said, “of climate change, imperial decline, endless war, and in my city, a hapless football team, I seem to be experiencing a strange and unaccustomed emotion: hope.” How could that be, I asked. “Maybe it’s because, like my poor San Francisco 49ers, who have been ‘rebuilding’ for the last two decades, I’m fortunate enough to be able to play the long game.”
At that moment, however, I did find one thing especially encouraging: “We seem to have finally reached Peak Trump, and the reason why is important.” Or so I thought.
Calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers didn’t do it. Promising to bring back waterboarding and commit assorted other war crimes didn’t do it. Flirting with the white supremacist crowd and their little friend Pepe the Frog didn’t do it. But an 11-year-old audio tape of Trump bragging about grabbing women "by the pussy" seems to have been the drop of water that finally cracked the dam and sent even stalwart Republican leaders fleeing a flood of public revulsion.
Well, even Cassandra can get things wrong once in a while and I was certainly wrong about that one. Today, Trump no longer simply “flirts” with white supremacism. He’s all in. And I’d be surprised now if even a demonstrated association with Jeffrey Epstein’s many predatory crimes will be enough to bring him down. In any case, there’s a solid backbench of genuine fascists—Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, and of course Vice President JD Vance—to take over, should Trump take one nap too many and fall off his gilt-edged chair.
A few months after the 2016 election had disproved my Peak Trump theory, I wrote about waking up terrified, imagining what might be coming. “I’m an old dyke,” I said, “a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the occasional night terror.” I added, though, that while I might quake occasionally at two in the morning, “I’m too old and too stubborn to cede my country to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up just to see where the pieces come down.”
I wasn’t done then and nine years later and all that much older, I don’t consider myself done yet. As I put it at the time, “I’ve fought, and organized, and loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can’t shove me—or any of us—back in that bottle.”
I believed that then and I still do today. I’ve watched ordinary people insist on fighting back, organizing, and loving each other and this country for too long to give up now. They can’t shove all of us back in any genie’s bottle.
Auden concluded his poem with the following lines. Almost a century later, they still remain an apt response to our contemporary confrontation with fascism and our latest night terrors:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Maybe I still have something to say after all.
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We Shouldn't Have to Watch a Woman's Murder to Counter Government Lies
Right-wing leaders are trying to convince all of us that what we saw on video with our own eyes was not actually what we saw, and for far too many, it seems to be working.
Jan 13, 2026
None of us should have to watch videos of our fellow citizens and neighbors being killed to get factual information about what happened. Yet the way President Donald Trump and Kristi Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security, described the moment an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a 37-year-old mom and American citizen in broad daylight was so blatantly far off from what happened that I fear we will need to keep seeing for ourselves.
I never watch videos of people being killed on purpose. Yet, I clicked on a video of a woman in Minnesota in her SUV who seemed to be in a heated verbal exchange with an ICE agent. I saw her try to pull away from an agent who was reaching into her car, only to be shot at close range as she was trying to leave. It happened so quickly I hoped that she got away and the bullet did not hit her, but my hopes gave way to a nauseating pit in my stomach as her car veered off and hit a pole, the way one does when a driver falls asleep. Only, I knew she didn’t fall asleep because moments earlier, I saw an angry man in ICE uniform shoot at her. Her name was Renee Nicole Good, and she was an award-winning poet, wife, and mom of three, her youngest child only 6 years old.
Surely everyone would condemn this killing, I thought to myself. I immediately sought out comments sections on the internet and official accounts of various politicians hoping for a solidarity and decency that has eluded us since Donald Trump arrived on the political scene. I just knew that everyone—regardless of political party or support for Donald Trump—and perhaps even those in the current administration, would condemn this brazen murder by an ICE agent who was filmed losing his temper, shooting, and killing a woman as she tried to drive away. At the very least, I thought politicians who support ICE would call it a tragic accident. Admittedly, I especially thought this would be true when I learned that the victim was white, a citizen, and a mother—identities that have often provided cover from the deadliest encounters with those across law enforcement entities.
Instead, I read a statement on Instagram from The Department of Homeland Security that insinuated Renee Good was a rioter. They said that she used her Honda as a weapon and began to weave together a familiar narrative that amounts to: ICE was blameless, and the mom in her car was part of an organized movement that should be considered domestic terrorism. The comments were divided. Some people expressed their deepest sympathies and outrage that she was killed that way. But far too many others repeated the story from Homeland Security’s written statement and from Kristi Noem’s testimony. I’d seen comments like those before. “She should have complied” and “FAFO” (fuck around and find out).
We must fervently resist the attempts made by this current administration to gaslight and pacify us in the face of deadly injustice, and we must challenge those who seek to override the best of our humanity with their institutionalized and wildly funded cruelty.
In the past six years we've watched the American right-wing push narratives that encourage the general public to support police officers when they kill unarmed Black people and squash any suspicions of their wrongdoings. The same messages that were used to criminalize Philando Castile and paint Trayvon Martin as an aggressor, the same messages that were used to try and excuse away Breonna Taylor’s murder, are the talking points we are hearing now about what happened to Renee Good in Minnesota. And they are yielding the same divided responses, only this time in response to the killing of a white mom as we live out the cautions in the famous “First They Came” poem.
Right-wing leaders have spent years telling people that, to put it simply, there are good guys and bad guys and law enforcement officials, including ICE, are always the good guys and anyone opposing them are always the bad guys. They have also convinced too many that “bad guys” deserve to be executed on the spot, no trial necessary.
Now, most alarmingly, they are trying to convince all of us that what we saw on video with our own eyes was not actually what we saw, and for far too many, it seems to be working.
We must fervently resist the attempts made by this current administration to gaslight and pacify us in the face of deadly injustice, and we must challenge those who seek to override the best of our humanity with their institutionalized and wildly funded cruelty. It starts by recognizing the predictable playbook they have been using since George Floyd died crying for his mama and saying, “I can’t breathe.” We must work to restore these bipartisan basics:
- Shooting people is not an acceptable resolution to misbehavior and nonviolent confrontation;
- Trained professionals should know how to deescalate and remain calm, not shoot when they feel threatened (or more accurately, angry);
- Protests are not inherently riots and are a constitutional right;
- Rather than playing “good guys or bad guys,” we must acknowledge good actions vs. bad ones, legal actions vs. illegal ones, and use due process to determine guilt and consequences when things go wrong; and
- No matter what a government official or even the president says, what you see with your own eyes is more trustworthy than a story they concoct to spin events to serve their agendas.
Renee Nicole Good should still be alive to mother her children, love her wife, and write poems. We will not allow them to distract us from that with lies.
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Trump Is Attacking Our Ability to Find Out What Is Going On in Our Country
Erosion of the ability to accurately describe our reality hobbles every aspect of our collective decision-making. The current program of erosion is steady, deliberate, and already well underway.
Aug 28, 2025
Alarms are sounding across the political and ideological spectrums about America’s collapsing federal data structure. But what is the big deal? Why does access to data, specifically from the federal government, matter so much?
At the heart of all work in this space are three questions:
- What happened before?
- What is happening now?
- What might happen?
A society cannot make good decisions without knowing how prior decisions turned out, assessing the current situation, and developing reasonable predictions about possibilities under consideration.
Federal statistical work is how we find out what is going on with the 300 million people and 11 million businesses across the complex network of federal, state, and local systems that make up the world’s largest economy. Issues at that scale are too big for intuition or “common sense.” We need comprehensive information produced by rigorous, capable people who are not afraid to tell us the truth. We should be deeply and profoundly alarmed by the offer of anything less.
Each researcher approaches their work from a different direction with a different area of focus, which results in a wide range of conclusions on a variety of topics. But the common ground is the data.
Voters are beginning to understand the damage our economy and our society sustains when we turn our backs on the truth.
Reliable, comprehensive, nonpartisan federal datasets like the American Community Survey from the Census Bureau, historical data tables from Internal Revenue Service Statistics of Income, economic reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, scoring from the Joint Committee on Taxation, estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, and other quality federal data products provide a stable point of reference to which most agree to calibrate their work, even though there may be different policy perspectives. We know we are all standing on the same ground, and that the ground is reasonably solid.
Until now, these data have been produced by teams of dedicated experts who understand that their job is to collect and report the numbers as accurately as possible. Sometimes the best available methods are imperfect. Sometimes estimates need adjustment based on the latest information. Sometimes the team responsible for a particular report does not have the ideal amount of funding or enough staff. But the reports have always been created in good faith by extremely competent people. The current threats to that are inexcusable.
Erosion of the ability to accurately describe our reality hobbles every aspect of our collective decision-making. The current program of erosion is steady, deliberate, and already well underway.
Statistical agencies have been aggressively hollowed out in terms of both funding and staff and are notifying the research community to expect certain products to be released late or not at all. Important research programs are suspended indefinitely.
Information on entire subjects—such as race, gender, and climate—is no longer being collected and, in some cases, being excised wholesale from existing data. Legislators are arguing that publicly traded corporations should not have to disclose critical information about their activities. Careful, diligent staffers are losing their positions for doing their jobs and, if replaced at all, being replaced by people who think good data science begins and ends with typing a prompt into a chatbot.
Highly qualified leaders defending data integrity, privacy, and the mission of their agencies are being kicked to the curb in favor of individuals whose primary qualification appears to be willingness to produce reports that say whatever the current administration wants and suppress those that do not.
The ability to find out what is going on in our country is under attack. That is definitely a big deal, but the research community is not taking it lying down. The authoritarian playbook always includes attacking the truth, so this did not come as a surprise. As soon as the 2024 election results were called, data preservation coalitions got to work archiving existing data in multiple locations. The agency leaders are not going easily or quietly. And voters are beginning to understand the damage our economy and our society sustains when we turn our backs on the truth. American civil resistance has a proud history, and this assault on our public information is an opportunity for involved citizens to prevent authoritarianism from taking hold.
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