Why Is He Using the Communist Trump Card?

He's run out of other cards.

Robert Reich for Inequality.org

The cover of “Is This Tomorrow,” an anti-communist comic
book published in 1947, suggests the chaos and ruin
that would follow a communist takeover of the United
States. The publications reflected a fevered politics that
prevailed after World War II and through the 1950s.
(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he’s now talking about the “communist menace.”

He can’t talk about the economy, because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. He can’t talk about foreign policy, because his war in Iran has been a debacle, his tariffs are an utter failure, and he obviously hasn’t settled the war in Ukraine on “Day 1.” He can’t talk about immigration, because his raids and mass deportations have become so unpopular.

So, facing the midterm elections, what’s left?

He’s resorting to the oldest of right-wing tropes — accusing Democrats (especially a rising generation of new, young, vigorous Democratic politicians) of being commies.

He kicked off America’s 250th anniversary celebrations on Friday with a speech at Mount Rushmore extolling American culture and warning of a resurgence of the “communist menace.” With the granite faces of four of his predecessors behind him, Trump took aim at what he called “radicals” and “extremists.”

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

Oh, please.

For years, Trump has been trying to scare Americans about progressive Dems who advocate Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for them (all of which the rising young Democrats are advocating).

But he hasn’t gotten anywhere because these initiatives are supported by most Americans.

So now he’s throwing the commie label at the wall and seeing if it sticks.

Communism was the scare word used by right-wingers after World Wars I and II to crack the whip on the left. It provoked witch hunts and ruined careers.

It made former Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy a one-man bomb squad in the early 1950s, when he rid
iculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers,” and forced American citizens to “name names.”

McCarthyism was a by-product of the Republican Party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal. The GOP had portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism,” and the Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets.”

Southern segregationist Democrats joined in the red-baiting. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who filibustered to block anti-lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions’ advocacy for civil rights as the work of “northern communists.” 

Tax the Corporations Cashing in on War

The least war profiteers can do is pay taxes

By Meghan Schneider, Cass DiPaola

Our dependence on fossil fuels does more than pollute our air. It destabilizes the world and empowers the ultra-wealthy to profit off of that volatility, leaving working families to pay the price.

This dynamic has been on full display since Donald Trump’s attack on Iran.

Trump’s invasion of one of the world’s most oil-rich regions jolted energy markets, sending gas prices soaring to the highest level in either of his terms. In 2024 he campaigned on cutting them in half. Instead, Americans are now on track to pay roughly $720 more for gasoline this year.

The full cost to working families will be much steeper as high gas prices drive up prices on consumer goods across the board. We’re already seeing that ripple effect take hold, as the U.S. Postal Service has proposed a temporary 8 percent fuel surcharge on package deliveries to offset rising transportation costs tied directly to the war-driven spike in oil prices.

At the same time, the oil and gas companies that invested at least $75 million in Trump’s reelection are cashing in on this instability. A recent Financial Times analysis estimates that U.S. oil companies could collect an additional $63 billion in revenue this year if crude prices remain at these wartime levels. In March alone, the industry is expected to generate $5 billion in extra cash flow.

This type of windfall isn’t a fluke. We’ve seen this pattern for decades.

Oil has a way of appearing in the background of every chapter of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and beyond. Iran nationalized its oil industry in the 1950s and a CIA-backed coup followed. Iraq, sitting on some of the world’s largest reserves, was invaded in 2003. And earlier this year, the U.S. invaded Venezuela and immediately began plans for a taxpayer-backed oil industry takeover.

Trump is actively destroying The Moral Basis of Civilization

Civilized societies do not accept that the powerful should be able to attack the weak

Robert Reich

“We are just getting started,” Trump’s secretary of “war,” Pete Hegseth, said yesterday, adding that the attacks on Iran will escalate, with “death and destruction all day long.”

So far more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran, according to human rights monitors, including 180 children, most of them schoolgirls aged 7 to 12 years old who were killed when a missile directly hit their school.

Wars can be morally justifiable if they are necessary to protect a nation’s people, but Trump has failed to make the case that this war is necessary. His allegation that Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon has been rejected by the International Atomic Energy Agency and much of the intelligence community.

As I have noted before, the moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.

Donald Trump could have been exposed and stopped long ago

Trump's mental illness has been obvious for years

Dr. Bandy X. Lee

Donald Trump is in trouble now, fading and challenged as all autocrats eventually are, but still likely to take more steps that will keep government under his control, that will allow him to invoke the Insurrection Act, martial law, or even more unthinkable acts. 

He is still the mafia don who has instilled false but serious fear into many. As I have said since the very beginning, he will never relent, never admit to any wrong, and never give up power, unless he is stopped from without. 

However, the situation could get so difficult for him, with his cognitive abilities and now his physical as well as his mental health declining—as I pointed out from the very beginning—as to make him ever more dangerous. 

Nearly eight years ago I was invited to write an article for the Guardian, headlined "Trump is now dangerous - that makes his mental health a matter of public interest". In that article, I wrote:

There is another pattern by which he is dangerous. His cognitive function, or his ability to process knowledge and thoughts, has begun to be widely questioned. Many have noted a distinct decline in his outward ability to form complete sentences, to stay with a thought, to use complex words and not to make loose associations. This is dangerous because of the critical importance of decision-making capacity in the office that he holds. Cognitive decline can result from any number of causes—psychiatric, neurological, medical, or medication-induced—and therefore needs to be investigated. Likewise, we do not know whether psychiatric symptoms are due to a mental disorder, medication, or a physical condition, which only a thorough examination can reveal.

Of course, his cognitive state is much worse now, precipitously declining at a rate far greater than is attributable to normal aging.

A few days after the Guardian article, CBC published an article headlined "Psychiatrist's new warning that Trump's mental state 'is a national and international security risk."with the headline:

It featured this information:

the National Coalition of Concerned Mental Health Experts [precursor to the World Mental Health Coalition], led by Dr. Bandy Lee—a forensic psychiatrist with an expertise in violence at the Yale School of Medicine—issued a statement calling for an emergency evaluation into Trump’s behaviour and mental health. Last month and again this week, psychiatrists led by Lee met with members of Congress to express their concerns about Trump’s fitness for office.

Fast forward to earlier this year, and in April 2025 an article that contained an interview with me headlined "Psychiatrist calls Trump's mental unfitness a 'Public Health Emergency'."

In it I said the following:

Donald Trump is the most dangerous man in the world, and this is the most dangerous moment ever—not because he is the worst but because we allowed his pathology to magnify over time…. Given his instability and fragility, his decisions will be unpredictable, irrational, and changeable…. The end goal of pathology is destruction and death, which is why we treat it. This is also how I was able to predict the destructiveness of his first presidency—which in my opinion included the eventual 1.2 million American deaths from Covid-19, the propagation of political violence, the exacerbation of economic inequality, the destruction of the climate, the replacement of international collaboration with transactional combativeness, a renewed and accelerated nuclear arms race, and a global emboldening of brutal dictators that laid the groundwork for the intensity of wars in Ukraine and Gaza. I also believed that there was a large possibility he would be reelected and bring a sledgehammer to this country, as he is doing now.

The previous year, on November 4, 2024, the day before the election, MindsiteNews also published an article highlighting myself and the World Mental Health Coalition headlined "Mental health experts continue their 'Duty to Warn' about Trump's mental unfitness up to the 11th hour."

It stated the following:

The group of psychiatrists and doctors that first warned about the “unmistakable” signs of Donald Trump’s mental instability in the first year of his presidency has continued its effort to sound the alarm right up to the last day before the momentous election that could return him to office.

Simultaneously, we posted on the World Mental Health Coalition web site, our “Statement on Cognitive Concerns in the Presidential Election,” signed by fifty of the most eminent neuropsychiatrists, neurologists, and geriatricians in the nation:

We are a group of medical and mental health professionals with expertise in aging, mental fitness, and how these relate to the capacity for leadership and ensuring our national security. We feel an obligation to express concerns about the manifestations of poor cognitive function in former President Donald J. Trump.

While we cannot make a formal diagnosis without direct examination, his repeated public behaviors and speeches demonstrate strong evidence of significant cognitive decline, aligned with common signs of an early dementia, and include:

o Deterioration in language skills, such as simpler vocabulary, incomplete and incoherent sentences, grammatical errors, and paraphasias (substituting words)

o Impaired memory/recall, such as confabulation, where memory gaps are filled with false or fabricated details

o Tangential thinking, where speech often drifts to unrelated topics in an erratic manner

o Inappropriate or vague statements that lack connection to reality

o Perseveration, where thoughts or ideas are repeated without a relevant trigger

o Rigidity in thinking, evidenced by an inability to adapt or revise opinions, often manifesting as “doubling down”

o Amplification of maladaptive personality traits, such as paranoid (invented threats), narcissistic (excessive focus on self), or antisocial (criminal and dangerous) personality traits

o Disinhibition in speech, such as the frequent use of vulgar, profane language or hate speech

o Disinhibition in behavior, such as impulsive decision making or aggression and violence

We believe these observable and repeated behaviors warrant public awareness of their implications. The multiple signs and symptoms we have observed in Mr. Trump comprise critical information for America’s 2024 presidential voters. We submit this informed opinion by fifty (50) nationally renowned professionals in the interest of public trust and safety.

Voters should consider these facts.

Now, at the end of an immensely destructive year, I hope it will be clear to the public why mental health experts felt the need to come forth and to speak up in unprecedented ways, why we felt such extraordinary obligation, with the special knowledge we have, and how mental health—or its lack—formed the foundation for what we see today, no matter what it initially looked like on the outside (the distinction should now be clear between just another political ideology and mental pathology). 

The failure to intervene with a mental health problem with the mental health resources that we have—so as to prevent vast, unnecessary suffering, destruction, and deaths—is a legacy that will stay with us for generations, if we survive this period at all.

Dr. Lee is a forensic and social psychiatrist who became known to the public through her 2017 Yale conference and book that emphasized the importance of fit leadership. In 2019, she organized a major National Press Club Conference on the theme of, “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.” In 2024, she followed up with another major Conference, “The More Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.” She published another book on fit leadership that has been recently expanded, in addition to a volume on how unfitness in a leader spreads and two critical statements on fit leadership. Dr. Lee warned that journalists and intellectuals are the first to be suppressed in times of unfit leadership, and it is happening here; she continues, however, to be interviewed or covered abroad, such as in France, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and Canada (with notable articles in Dutch, Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Slovakian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Persian, Hindi, and Korean). She authored the internationally-acclaimed textbook, Violence; over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters; and 17 scholarly books and journal special issues, in addition to over 300 opinion editorials. Dr. Lee is also a master of divinity, currently developing a new curriculum for public education on “One World or None.”

Trump expounds on NATO, peace and his greatness. WTF?

Trump, on his Truth Social, today: 

So give us Greenland and shut up.

Trump takes his "national security" policies to a truly bizarre level

Make America Weak

David R. Lurie

Trump during his press event at Mar-a-Lago (Tasos Katopodis/Getty) where he announced his plan for a "Golden Fleet" of giant, high-tech battleships at a time when drones are rendering large warships obsolete

The new White House “National Security Strategy” announced that the Trump regime will treat the democratically elected governments of most Western European nations as adversaries of the United States, and unveiled a plan to join longtime adversaries in seeking to undermine NATO and the European Union.

While such a course of action would gravely damage the US, it is of a piece with Trump’s assaults on the nation he was elected to lead.

As the first year of Trump’s would-be dictatorship concludes, it’s clear that the president considers the rules-based democratic and economic order a barrier to his goal of establishing an autocracy. Given his dictatorial ambitions, it makes perfect sense for his regime to cozy up to strongmen while treating America’s principal democratic allies as enemies.

The future of the United States, and likely of many of our allies, will depend on whether Trump’s systematic assaults on democratic nations and institutions here and abroad are successful.

Weakening allies, strengthening adversaries

Trump’s “National Security Strategy” declares that the US will focus on “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” That amounts to a declaration that America will promote regime change in countries that remain governed by pro-democracy parties that support the existence of the EU and NATO.

In attempting to justify this bizarre remaking of US foreign policy, the “Strategy” complains that the leading democracies of Europe — which collectively represent one of the largest and most prosperous economic zones in the world — are in a state of crisis. It even declares they are at risk of “civilizational erasure,” purportedly because they — perish the thought — continue to permit immigration.

In place of our longstanding and prosperous European allies, the “Strategy” indicates Trump will attempt to build a new core of allies, comprised largely of those European nations that have elected highly nationalist (and in many cases, pro-Russian) governments, such as Hungary. It also implies Trumpers will try to use their newly reconstituted core of pro-Russian European allies as a mechanism for weakening both the EU and NATO, despite the fact that the US is the leader of the latter alliance and has long promoted the former.

In fact, the plan set forth in the “Strategy” document is already being implemented.

For example, Vice President JD Vance and then-Trump acolyte Elon Musk openly meddled in German politics earlier this year by encouraging citizens of that country to vote for the neo-fascist (and pro-Russian) AfD party.

And Trumpers not only valorize the authoritarian regime of Hungarian prime minister (and Trump stooge) Victor Orban, but have used Orban’s actions as models for their assaults on media, educational, and cultural institutions within the US.

Furthermore, Trump is now pressuring Ukraine — over the objections of European democracies — to accept “peace” terms that include surrendering territory in Donetsk that constitutes that nation’s bulwark against Russian invasion of the entire country. 

A Ukraine vulnerable to a complete invasion by Russia will, inevitably, also mean a Europe vulnerable to attack, particularly if Trump withdraws the bulk of US forces from the continent (which he’s already started doing).

Consistent with Trump’s now overt plan to effectively switch sides in Europe, his “peace” envoy Steve Witkoff declared that Russia — which nightly bombs Ukrainian in relentless terror attacks — “remains fully committed to achieving peace in Ukraine.” Meanwhile, Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a Turning Point USA audience over the weekend that the “deep state,” EU, and NATO are “undermin[ing] President Trump’s efforts towards peace” and scheming to “pull the US military into a direct conflict with Russia.”

If this increasingly explicit scheme to gut longstanding alliances with European democracies “succeeds,” it will not only be potentially catastrophic for Europe, but also for the US — the principal economic and political beneficiary of the post-war international order that Trump and his cronies are assaulting. Indeed, the Trump “Strategy” is entirely consistent with the goals of both Putin’s Russia and China’s authoritarian regime, both of which have long viewed the weakening of the Western alliance as a key part of their effort to displace the US as the leading power in the world.

Accordingly, Trump’s “Strategy” for weakening our allies in Europe is effectively a blueprint for weakening the United States.

The war within

Except you can't come back. Says ICE: "Self-deportation through
the CBP Home app is the best gift that an illegal alien can give
themselves and their families this holiday season. It’s a fast, free,
 and easy process: Just download the app, fill out your
information, and DHS will take care of the rest – including
arranging and paying for your travel back home."
This is real, not a joke.

Trump is the first president of any party to make it the US policy to gravely weaken the country’s standing in the world. 

Yet, as the first year of the his second term comes to a close, it has become clear that his efforts to sabotage America’s economic, political, and defense relationships with major democracies abroad are part and parcel of “policies” he’s been pursuing at home — all calculated to make our nation more susceptible to autocracy.

For instance, Trump’s scheme to culturally cleanse the US of the foreign born is succeeding, but at the great expense of the nation.

While he campaigned on a purported plan to “secure the border,” Trump and his acolytes have since made clear that their actual ambition was to gut nearly the entire post-war immigration system.

The scheme has been remarkably “successful” in that — for the first time in decades — Trump has engineered net negative emigration. The problem is that this comes at a grave cost. For decades, immigrants have been a crucial economic engine for the US, allowing our economy to grow and be far more resilient than virtually any peer country.

While Trumpers like Vance celebrate the expulsion of immigrants, contending it “frees up” homes and jobs for those who remain, the reality is that an aging US — one with fewer productive workers — will inevitably become less prosperous. The Trump regime, however, is more concerned about increasing the white and “native born” population for the sake of remaking of the nation. As Vance put it at the recent Turning Point gathering, his movement wants an America in which “you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s assault on trade has empowered America’s adversaries and competitors. He sold his unilaterally imposed tariff “policies” as a means of increasing prosperity at home, and of harming China, the US’s principal economic rival. But in fact, the direct opposite occurred.

The greatest beneficiary of Trump’s moves to hobble the participation of American companies in international markets has been China, which managed to offset many of its declines in exports to the US by increasing exports to other nations, many of them aggrieved by Trump’s actions. In addition, as Trump’s tariff scheme has begun to unravel due to growing inflation and retaliation, he’s rapidly made the US into a supplicant of China — the very nation he initially claimed he would bring to heel.

Trump and his emissaries have been reduced to begging President Xi to resume purchases of soybeans and other agricultural goods that China contracted to buy from other countries at a massive cost to American farmers. They’ve also been pleading for China to resume selling rare earth elements to the US, since limiting the availability of them, as China has been doing, could cripple many industries.

It’s now all but certain that Trump and his cronies will leave America’s role in the international markets that fueled our nation’s growth greatly impaired and diminished. But they are entirely willing to do such damage to our country, apparently because they believe a more inwardly focused (and less prosperous) America will serve their autocratic goals.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Trump is engaged in a comprehensive assault on the rule of law, once again to advance his dictatorial ends.

The rule of law is not merely an abstraction — it’s an asset that has been critical to America’s status as the center of international business and finance since the end of World War II. The expectation that contracts will be honored and that markets will be regulated in a predictable and largely corruption-free manner has given America a massive competitive advantage over autocratic nations. It has also made the US the preferred site for financial transactions and investments of most every kind, with incalculable economic benefits for the American people.

But Trump views such laws and rules as impediments to his personal power and has set out to undermine them in increasingly overt ways.

Trump’s Department of Justice has effectively stopped prosecuting whole categories of financial corruption. The president has also made a mockery of the nation’s legal system by openly selling pardons, especially to financial fraudsters with whom he appears to have a particular affinity. This activity amounts to an advertisement that the Trump regime is abandoning America’s commitment to adhere to the rule of law.

A glaring example of the administration’s replacement of ordered and regulated markets with a shadowy world of influence peddling is Trumpers’ exploitation of cryptocurrency markets, which Trump’s family and cronies have employed to accumulate what reportedly amounts to billions of dollars in wealth in just a matter of months. 

But for the president, the appearance that government actions are for sale to the highest bidders is a feature, not a bug.

Trump has transformed some of the nation’s largest publicly traded companies into mechanisms for him to extract personal and political benefits. For instance, he recently announced that he plans to meddle in the contest for the sale of Warner Brothers in favor of Paramount, a company now controlled by the Trump-supporting Ellison family, in part to ensure that CNN is transformed into a clone of Fox News.

This is not the first time Trump has interfered in markets to extract personal pecuniary and political benefits — he did the same thing in connection with the acquisition of Paramount by an entity controlled by the Ellisons.

Trump clearly relishes the prospect of replacing the infrastructure of regulatory and law enforcement agencies that have long insulated US financial markets from direct political meddling with an openly corrupt and authoritarian system in which the interests of Trump himself determine winners and losers. But when the rule of law in a country is displaced by arbitrary and unpredictable authoritarian rule, as happened in Putin’s Russia, the results are predictable: investors and companies flee to more stable environs as the economy declines.

The president and his cronies are, however, more than willing to make the US pay a high price for their aggrandizement.

High stakes

A year in to Trump 2.0, it’s clear that Trumpers do, indeed, have a strategy — one intended to weaken America at home and abroad.

A fully Trumped America will be a diminished nation, having squandered the assets of democracy, the rule of law, and a dynamic and growing economy — along with democratic allies — that have actually made America great, all so Trump can obtain the dictatorial control he craves.

In recent weeks, we have seen indications that the majority of the American people are beginning to recognize the depth of the threat Trump poses to the United States, let alone the world. But as his popularity diminishes and his political power becomes more contested, he’s likely to become more reckless and more determined to harm the nation he was elected to lead. Americans, therefore, must be prepared to defend their country with only greater vigilance and vigor.

Who’s the Last Person in the World to Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?

The person who’s been waging illegal wars

Robert Reich

Trump recently had his name engraved on the U.S. Institute of Peace — now renamed the “Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace.” The White House confirmed the renaming, calling it “a powerful reminder of what strong leadership can accomplish for global stability.”

Actually, it’s a reminder of what a strong malignant narcissist can accomplish when untethered from reality.

Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, the world football league, awarded Trump the first (and likely last) annual FIFA Peace Prize — along with a hagiographic video of Trump and “peace.”

What FIFA has to do with peace is anyone’s guess, but Infantino is evidently trying to curry favor with Trump. (Infantino, by the way, oversaw the 2020 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, defending and minimizing Qatar’s miserable human rights record. He also played a key role in selecting Saudi Arabia to host the 2034 FIFA World Cup, notwithstanding the Saudi murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.)

Both Trump’s absurd renaming of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the equally absurd FIFA award are parts of Trump’s campaign to get the Nobel Peace Prize — something he has coveted since Barack Obama was awarded it in 2009 (anything Obama got credited with, Trump wants to discredit or match).

Russia’s Most Dangerous Weapon is Donald Trump’s Mind

How did the United States Come to Back a Vicious Dictator against All Its Allies?

Dr. Bandy X. Lee

The disintegration of Donald Trump’s mind—now obvious for everyone to see—is metaphorical of the disintegration of our society. Unfitness means that there is no one in charge of the government; there is no one home. Rather, the appearance of someone being home makes him a prime target for nefarious forces to do their mischief.

I warned in The Psychology of Trump Contagion, published before the 2024 presidential election:

Sometimes the greatest threat to national security is someone who can be leveraged and compromised—so as to parrot our enemies’ propaganda, to destroy American democracy from within, and to assist their rise in global dominance.

One of these enemies is Vladimir Putin. Russian forces launched 704 total missiles and drones against Ukraine overnight on December 5 to 6, 2025, heavily targeting railway and energy infrastructure in this proxy U.S.-Russia war. The goal is to freeze our fellow pro-democracy Europeans, so as to force them into submission as winter approaches.

So, how did the U.S. come to aid and comfort a hostile opponent bent on reestablishing the Soviet Union? Astute political commentator Thom Hartmann makes a critical observation from the Epstein emails:

The child victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes are apparently not the only ones who’ve paid the price for Donald Trump’s long relationship with that notorious pedophile.

Epstein’s “partying” with Trump has apparently also led to thousands of civilian deaths abroad, the collapse of America’s credibility around the world, and a serious threat to the future of democracy in Europe….

In Epstein’s emails, he boasts of offering to advise Russia’s senior-most officials about how to manipulate Trump: “I think you might suggest to putin that [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] lavrov can get insight on [Trump by] talking to me…”

Consider Trump’s secretive and beta-submissive behavior toward Vladimir Putin, especially in Helsinki when he trashed our intelligence agencies and sucked up to Putin, and more recently with his red carpet in Alaska, and it’s impossible to ignore what this newest Epstein revelation implies.

If Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is a direct or indirect result of things Trump did with Epstein, it’s naked treachery. Consider the pattern:… the Russian military targets … are not accidents of war. They’re the deliberate targeting of civilians, children, doctors, classrooms, apartment buildings, homes, and hospitals….

And all of this—the horror of what’s happening in plain sight that’s the clear result of Trump’s repeated and pathetic kowtowing to Putin—appears, from the Epstein emails, that it may be getting so much worse over the past 10 months because Putin took Epstein’s advice and threatened Donald Trump with exposure.

We still don’t know what was said in that room in Helsinki because Trump covered it up, making sure we’d never know. He ordered his American interpreter to move away from his private conversation with Putin, and afterward seized and destroyed her notes.

Similarly and more recently, in Alaska, Trump dismissed his aides and rode with Putin privately in his car where they engaged in another lengthy, secretive conversation.

That’s the behavior of a man with something to hide, who’s terrified by some horrible secret….

Putin's puppet sells out Ukraine

Just another day

Donald Trump, master deal-maker

Reason enough, he reckons

Trump wants to eliminate mail-in voting even though that's how HE votes

Flurry of false claims and advice from his master Vlad trigger King Donald's rant on voting

Jon Queally for Common Dreams

Guaranteed: Trump's got a vanity plate

In his latest full-frontal assault on democratic access and voting rights, Donald Trump August 18 said he will lead an effort to ban both mail-in ballots and voting machines for next year's mid-term elections—a vow met with immediate rebuke from progressive critics.

"I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly 'Inaccurate,' Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election," Trump wrote in a social media post infested with lies and falsehoods.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Trump falsely claimed that no other country in the world uses mail-in voting—a blatant lie, according to International IDEA, which monitors democratic trends worldwide, at least 34 nations allow for in-country postal voting of some kind. The group notes that over 100 countries allow out-of-country postal voting for citizens living or stationed overseas during an election.

Trump has repeated his false claim—over and over again—that he won the 2020 election, which he actually lost, in part due to fraud related to mail-in ballots, though the lie has been debunked ad nauseam. 

He also fails to note that mail-in ballots were very much in use nationwide in 2024, with an estimated 30% of voters casting a mail-in ballot as opposed to in-person during the election in which Trump returned to the White House and Republicans took back the US Senate and retained the US House of Representatives.

Russia celebrates its partnership with Trump to conquer Ukraine

Doncha just love what King Donald has done to the Oval Office.

The Onion

Trump's federalized crime-fighting in DC posts biggest accomplishment

Rounding Up Food Delivery Bikes in DC

Sarah Rumpf

A photo posted by an editor at Reason that appeared to show officers with multiple federal agencies loading mopeds into a truck sparked backlash Monday as a waste of tax dollars and distraction from higher priority issues in Washington, D.C.

Natalię Dowzicky, Reason’s managing editor of video and podcasts, shared a photo Monday afternoon that she identified as happening “in Dupont Circle, right outside of the @reason office.”

In the photo, several law enforcement officers can be seen, including one with a D.C. Metropolitan Police uniform and several with “HSI,” or Homeland Security Investigations, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 

In the back of a truck that appeared to have a government logo on the door, multiple mopeds or motorized bikes could be seen.

Dowzicky posted several follow-up tweets noting that the timing of the bike roundup was “even more ridiculous given the security that should be at the White House for world leaders,” happening “[l]iterally while European leaders were 6 blocks away and probably needed security of some sort,” referring to Trump’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders to discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Several others, including some of Dowzicky’s colleagues at Reason, posted reactions to the photo, with someincluding  additional criticism of Trump deploying federal agents in D.C. 

Mediaite is pleased to make its original content available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License for non-commercial reproduction with credit to the source site.

Whaddya expect? Trump doesn't seem to know Alaska is part of the US

"Putin got one hell of a photo op out of Trump"

Trump once again proves that he is a Russian asset

Brad Reed for Common Dreams

Earlier today, Donald Trump tried to put his best spin on a Friday summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin that yielded neither a cease-fire agreement nor a comprehensive peace deal to end the war in Ukraine.

Writing on his Truth Social page, the president took a victory lap over the summit despite coming home completely empty-handed when he flew back from Alaska on Friday night.

"A great and very successful day in Alaska!" Trump began. "The meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia went very well, as did a late night phone call with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and various European Leaders, including the highly respected Secretary General of NATO."

Trump then pivoted to saying that he was fine with not obtaining a cease-fire agreement, even though he said just days before that he'd impose "severe consequences" on Russia if it did not agree to one.

"It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Cease-fire Agreement, which often times do not hold up," Trump said. 

"President Zelenskyy will be coming to DC, the Oval Office, on Monday afternoon. If all works out, we will then schedule a meeting with President Putin. Potentially, millions of people's lives will be saved."

While Trump did his best to put a happy face on the summit, many critics contended it was nothing short of a debacle for the US president.

Writing in The New Yorker, Susan Glasser argued that the entire summit with Putin was a "self-own of embarrassing proportions," given that he literally rolled out the red carpet for his Russian counterpart and did not achieve any success in bringing the war to a close.

Why Trump blames decisions on others

A narcissist with a strategy

Geoff Beattie, Edge Hill University

It was US president Harry S. Truman who, in the years just after the second world war, kept a little wooden sign on his desk which read: “The buck stops here!”. It emphasized his willingness to accept ultimate responsibility for his decisions and actions as president, even the ones that didn’t quite work out.

This phrase has since become emblematic of presidential accountability and leadership. Truman wasn’t interested in trying to pass the buck, not as a man and certainly not as president.

Interestingly, the sign was made in the Federal Reformatory (prison) at El Reno, Oklahoma, suggesting an implicit moral dimension to this issue of responsibility and accountability. We’re all accountable for our actions, whoever we are, but the president above all.

But how things seem to have changed with Donald Trump in the White House.

Trump continually takes personal credit for any perceived successes as president – fixing global tariffs, Nato members paying more, the Middle East (even taking credit for things that were completed before he took office). But he makes sure that any failures are immediately attributed elsewhere.

He frequently positions himself as surprised or “blindsided” by unpopular decisions, which are always somebody else’s doing, somebody else’s fault. Subordinates are held responsible. He is not averse to pointing the finger directly at them, and often in public, high-profile settings.

That great loyal Trump supporter, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, for example, has recently been in the firing line for being personally responsible for pausing the delivery of missile shipments to Ukraine. 

US defense officials had apparently become concerned that weapons stockpiles were becoming low, as they needed to divert arms to Israel to help in the war with Iran.

But the pause in supplying some weapons to Ukraine announced by the Pentagon on July 2 was a hugely unpopular decision that resonated around the world. Hegseth was blamed.

Some have suggested that having loyalists such as Hegseth in critical positions like secretary of defense is highly strategic, and not just for the more obvious reasons. You could argue that having loyal supporters with delegated but overlapping authority is highly advantageous when it comes to the blame game.

Trump can publicly distance himself when things go wrong (as he did here), claim a degree of surprise, and swiftly change course. That way he is publicly reasserting his role as leader without admitting fault.

Read his own words: Trump's brain is gone

The guy with the nuclear launch codes

Stephen Robinson

Donald Trump’s recent interviews with Time and The Atlantic revealed a president who is completely unhinged and incoherent. Sadly, that’s not news. 

But what stood out is that Trump is consistently confused and disconnected from reality even on issues that are supposedly in his wheelhouse.

Trump has always been an ignoramus who masks his intellectual shortcomings with bombast and declarations of his own brilliance, but his rambling nonsensical responses in these latest interviews should set off alarms — especially in light of all the media attention and scrutiny Joe Biden received after his disastrous debate performance or when Special Counsel Robert Hur described him as “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

Trump, who turns 79 in June, is the oldest person ever elected president. His repetitive speech patterns, frequent use of empty phrases, and overall rambling discourse are too often graded on a curve.

White House officials and pandering Republicans might boast about Trump’s boundless energy in a manner that would shame North Korean state media, but the Time and Atlantic interviews tell a very different story.