We have had very good and productive conversations.

What do you figure? Sounds like something the head of the English department at a small liberal arts college in Maine or Ohio might say after a long staff meeting to discuss adding a book to the department’s required reading list.

Nope. It’s Donald Trump making one of his hundreds of nonsensical statements about the war on Iran he started. We have had very, very strong talks, Trump said three weeks into the war. They are begging us to make a deal.

By April 6, he said, They have made a proposal, and it’s a significant proposal. The very next day, Trump had yet another spin on the situation: A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.

All this was after he told the world he wouldn’t accept anything less than “unconditional surrender.” We haven’t been involved in a war since 1945 that ended in unconditional surrender. And man, we’ve started us some wars.

Now we’re told that today Trump held a two-hour meeting with his “national security team” in the Situation Room at the White House to discuss “a potential agreement with Iran.” Nobody knows what happened at the meeting, but he was able to make it through two hours! Wow! They must have had both his hands hooked up to an IV loaded with liquid Adderall.

A week ago, we learned that all that bombing by Israel and the U.S. failed to put even a small dent in Iran’s military preparedness. For all Trump’s talk of Iran’s navy being “at the bottom of the sea,” they still have something like 200 small attack boats capable of firing anti-ship missiles and laying mines. Seventy percent of Iran’s missiles and drones are still online. Only a small number of the missile sites Iran maintains along its 600 miles of coast on the Persian Gulf were destroyed, and it is almost certain that some of those have been rebuilt.

Big talk. That is the one thing Donald Trump has been good at. But all his big talk through its ups and downs and peace is at hand and we’re going to bomb them back to the stone age has brought us to the point where some sort of peace deal needs to be made so Iran will allow the Strait of Hormuz to reopen. We now have an actual deadline: July 9. Oil analysts at Brookings are predicting that on that date, all international emergency oil reserves will have run out and oil prices may skyrocket to $150 a barrel or above. Panic has set in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that’s what all the hurry-up is about.

The last thing in the world that big-talker Donald Trump wants is to look weak. But today, the New York Times published what might be called a short-list of what Iran and Trump’s two real estate hucksters, Witkoff and Kushner, have been talking about. We now have at least a fuzzy picture of what the end of Trump’s war is going to look like.

Witkoff and Kushner have managed to get Iran to agree that things should go back to the way they were the day before Trump started bombing the shit out of them. Wow! What an incredible accomplishment! The Strait of Hormuz – which was not part of our vocabulary previous to February 28 – will be reopened. There will be a new 60-day pause in hostilities. We’ve already been in a kind of rolling pause in hostilities, but let’s forget that for the moment and celebrate our new pause in hostilities, okay? And Iran will “pledge” to never develop a nuclear bomb. Or Trump will accept some kind of “deal” that Iran will agree to drop its nuclear ambitions for 20 years. Or all of Iran’s “nuclear dust” will be shipped out of the country. Something like that, anyway.

That’s what the White House says. Iran, however, is reading from a different “agreement.” They aren’t promising that the Strait will reopen without tolls; in fact, they say they’re talking to Oman about jointly controlling the Strait. They aren’t promising an end to their nuclear program. They aren’t giving up their enriched uranium.

When it comes to the nuke part, the “framework” gets really, really fuzzy. Trump has a red line, that the deal he makes won’t look anything like Obama’s nuclear deal, when Iran agreed to reduce its enriched uranium to 3 percent from 60 percent for 15 years in return for the U.S. releasing $1.7 billion of Iran’s own money that was being held in New York and Europe by sanctions.

So, why is the number $300 billion in the “framework?” Well, because Iran is demanding money to help it rebuild after Trump’s bombing, and Gulf states like the UAE and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are saying they’ll create some kind of “investment fund” that the U.S. will not contribute to but will help “manage” in some non-specified manner. Except it has leaked out that Witkoff and Kushner proposed that part of the “rebuilding” of Iran will involve real estate deals in Tehran they will participate in. But Donald Trump won’t be giving any money to the Ayatollah. Somebody else will.

Of course, if it’s a Trump “deal,” there will be a potential profit for himself and his grubby condo pals.

In the meantime, the U.S. and Iran have been trading drone and missile strikes along the Strait of Hormuz close to Bandar Abbas, because apparently, you can’t have a ceasefire without a little firing going on – not in the world Donald Trump lives in anyway.

The phrase turning over in the grave has been running through my mind a lot recently. I haven’t even attempted a list of former American political and military leaders who have been spinning in their graves as their ghosts watch this insane clown “president” attempt to manage a war that none of them would have even contemplated against the country of Iran.

The lies coming out of the Pentagon say that we have spent about $29 billion on the war against Iran. It’s amazing that the E-Ring of the Pentagon hasn’t collapsed into the Potomac River from the weight of the bullshit being slung around by Pete “Pushups and Tattoos R Us” Hegseth.

And on this day, when Trump finally got around to having a meeting with his “national security team” to discuss how to bring this disaster to a close, the number that’s being tossed around that will get Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz and allow the world to go back to importing 20 percent of its oil from the Gulf is $300 f-ing billion.

Through all this, there has been no talk at all from the Trump administration about how to ensure that this global economic disaster caused by a pause in the world’s oil supply never happens again. Europe is talking. Countries in the European Union get almost 50 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources like wind and solar. China is talking. Thirty-five percent of their electricity comes from renewable energy sources. Countries all over the world are working to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources for all kinds of reasons – they don’t want to depend on foreign sources such as oil producing nations for oil and gas, they want cleaner air, they want their kids and grandkids to grow up in a world where it’s not 100 degrees day after day, year after year.

But Trump and his posse of MAGA geniuses? They want the Strait of Hormuz reopened so they won’t get killed in the midterms by $5 and $6 gas and McDonald’s burgers you’ll have to take out a loan to buy. That’s their big plan. Get the oil flowing again, dudes! That’s the ticket!

Well, at least a judge has ordered Trump’s name to come off the Kennedy Center. There’s that. Trump wants his name on everything. Maybe Iran will agree to rename the Strait after him as a sop to his Mount Everest size ego. How does “The Strait of Just Resting His Eyes” sound?

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It’s beginning to add up, isn’t it? Let’s take Trump’s war on Iran: It doesn’t matter what he does, it doesn’t matter how he spins it, it doesn’t matter what happens next, it doesn’t matter what the eventual negotiated terms are, he has lost the war that he, and no one else, started. You can see him squirm in real time. Today at the meeting of his cabinet – more about this below – when he was asked where his negotiations with Iran stood, he said either Iran “gives us what we want or we’ll finish them off.”

He’s been making that threat almost daily since the beginning of March. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Iran still has its near-weapons grade uranium. Reports this week say that Iran maintains 70 percent of its missile stocks, 70 percent of its launchers, 70 percent of its drone capability, including manufacturing, and 70 percent of the missile sites along the Persian Gulf that overlook shipping lanes. The Pentagon has been forced to admit that we don’t have 70 percent of anything, including cruise missiles and anti-missile Patriot batteries.

Trump has had 11 cabinet meetings since taking office last year. You’ve seen the reports – they are usually praise fests that run two to three hours, with each cabinet member in turn hailing Trump’s greatness as they condemn his enemies such as presidents Biden and Obama. Today’s cabinet meeting was supposed to take place at Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Trump switched it at the last minute to the White House pleading “bad weather.” The meeting lasted all of one hour.

You know what I think? He couldn’t manage the travel. He spent the whole Memorial Day weekend in the White House. On Tuesday, Trump spent several hours at Walter Reed Medical Center for what was advertised as his “regular” medical checkup. It’s his third yearly checkup in 13 months. He’s a wreck. He falls asleep moments after he sits down, and it doesn’t matter where he is, or who is present. His chin hits his chest in the Oval Office with cabinet members, sports teams, school children, senators and members of the House and the entire White House press pool in attendance, cameras on. On Monday, he fell asleep at Arlington National Cemetery during the solemn ceremony to mark Memorial Day. He brags constantly about “acing” a test that measures cognitive health with simple questions such as identifying animals and drawing a clock. The test doesn’t measure intelligence. It measures how close you are to dementia. Doctors say that when a cognitive test is given repeatedly, it is being used to monitor dementia.

He looks like hell. His mouth droops. His makeup is badly misapplied. His hands are spackled with pancake makeup to conceal injection sites, sometimes both at once. On Monday, as he walked across the plaza at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he repeatedly slapped the side of his thigh with an open hand, as if he couldn’t control himself. When he stood at attention for the ceremony, he couldn’t keep still, his body rocking back and forth, his shoulders moving side to side.

Now he’s bragging about defeating members of his own Republican Party in primaries he turned into loyalty tests. He ran someone against Senator Bill Cassidy in Louisiana because Cassidy voted to convict him in his second impeachment trial. He supported serial adulterer and financial corruption wizard Ken Paxton against Senator John Cornyn in Texas…for what reason? Cornyn didn’t do anything that could be seen as disloyal. Trump just wanted to play dominance and submission in the Texas sandbox.

Trump’s primary victories were pure exercises of MAGA control. The far-right super minions of his base obediently turned out to punish whomever Trump pointed a finger at. Trump’s Republican primaries were like those hunting ranches where rich guys show up to shoot pheasants that are released from cages right in front of them. Look! A disloyal Senator! Shoot him!

Right in the middle of the highest inflation in years, skyrocketing gas prices, looming midterm elections that are getting further out of his control by the minute, what is Trump pushing? His absurd ballroom and his cash-for-criminals “weaponization” fund that will channel money to Jan. 6 insurrectionists and anyone whose pockets Trump wants to fill with payoffs. Neither project has popular support among voters, with both polling underwater, as Trump’s own poll numbers continue to fall.

We have reached the point where the question needs to be asked, what the hell is going on? Trump has the political instincts of a rattlesnake. When he strikes, he almost never misses. But his misses are outnumbering the deadly bites at this point. Even his victories against sitting senators and Representative Massie of Kentucky may turn out to be hollow. The Republican hold on the House is razor thin, and with Tom Tillis of North Carolina already off the reservation and Susan Collins behind in her reelection in Maine and Murkowski in Alaska an independent wild card, even the Republican hold on the Senate is in jeopardy.

Did Trump just figure he could snap his fingers and make things like ripping off the Treasury to the tune of a billion dollars for his ballroom that he had promised won’t cost taxpayers “a penny” would happen automatically? He’s diving off the high board into a shallow pool on both, with his chances of winning votes in Congress disappearing at the same rate his poll numbers are crashing.

The real question right now is how bad is the collapse of his physical and mental health? With no one in the White House and no one in Congress who is willing to risk telling him no about anything, how far down will his spiral go?

You know who is watching all this in real time: The Iranian leadership, whoever they are. Do you think they are going to make even minor concessions to Trump as they watch the same decline that we see?

Watch the Strait of Hormuz. That’s where to find the answers to questions on everyone’s minds, if not on their lips.

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When Pennsylvania passed some rudimentary cyber charter school funding reforms, the cybers squealed like impaled porkers. "This is terrible," they hollered. "We will have to lay people off! Some schools will close!"

CCA HQ. Really

So now it's six months later, and the Education Voters of PA have continued the hard work of filing and pursuing Right To Know requests (because although cyber charters pretend to be public schools and run on taxpayer dollars, they fight hard to avoid actual transparency and accountability). They've been checking to see how much cyber charters have had to scale back, now that they're in the grip of these new reforms. 

Apparently they're doing okay.

Ed Voters reports that PA Cyber has approved the following field trips since the reforms (and, presumably, the associated belt tightening) went into effect. (You can read the actual receipts here.)

$28,800 for a field trip to the Kalahari Resort, including 400 waterpark passes and meal vouchers that cost $62 per attendee,

$13,375.70 for 192 tickets ranging from $25 to $92 for a field trip to the Sight and Sound Theatre in Lancaster County. As a bonus, this is a theater that aims to present "powerful stories from the pages of Scripture and history."

$6,18.80 for parties at five different Urban Air locations, another sort of indoor adventure park

$5,088.00 for 125 students to enjoy two hours of snow tubing at the Seven Springs Mountain resort.

I’ve Lost the Rationale for Why We’re Doing What We’re Doing

Cuba? My first reaction when recent news brought this up was, “Um, okay, yes, communist government, oppressed people, past possible attacks on the U.S.” But to consider each of those: Communism? There isn’t much left of it in the world. Out of the three or four still claiming it there is China which is primarily a typical single-top-leader with a mix of some central planning and programs with a significant amount of free-market. There is North Korea which is a dictatorship. Even if you could describe Cuba as truly communist, so what? It’s not going to be leading a wave of other countries becoming communist. What do we care what form they take?

Oppressed people? That’s also true in countries all over the world that we don’t seem to care about. Even further, Viktor Orban in Hungary was transitioning the country to an oppressive authoritarian system and we supported him. Is it because Cuba is in our Western hemisphere? So is Peru where President Bukele is leading a harsh authoritarian rule, but we’re making deals with him to take the immigration rejects (to put it in terms that fit Trump’s attitude) that Trump wants to get rid of. And much of what the Cuban people suffer is simple poverty which the U.S. has played a big role in creating. We’ve had embargoes of varying degrees imposed on them since 1960, and of course much worse now since Trump has almost cut off their ability to import oil.

Attacks? They go both ways. The one that has just been refreshed after having long been dropped is a Cuban attack that shot down two U.S. planes over open water that killed four people. That was thirty years ago. A U.S. indictment of Raul Castro for that was just announced. Okay, if we can get Mr. Castro here, in his nineties, and try him, that might be justice. Does that require invading and capturing or killing other leadership in some hope of radical change? That didn’t work in Iran. The new leadership there is worse than the old, and the people didn’t rise up. The people of Cuba have had most of seven decades to rise up, so counting on that now seems unwise.

Attacks did go both ways. The worst was the bombing of a Cuban domestic flight killing 73 people, carried out by anti-communist exiles with connections to the U.S. The CIA later acknowledged knowing about it in advance, and the exiles have pretty much lived freely in the U.S. afterward.

If Trump invades and does…something, maybe insists they give the U.S. control of their sugar industry, does that make him look good? The strongest country in the world forcing one of the weakest to grant some concessions? Wow, what an accomplishment?

I thought with reading fresh material about the country and thinking through the situation and in writing this I’d have the reasons become clear. Other than the cynical assumption that it’s just for Trump, nope, no reason is clear. I end where I started.

So remind me again, why Cuba?

Photo: David Pospíšil, Pexels

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The post Remind Me. Why Cuba? appeared first on DCReport.org.

In recent years, I have commemorated Memorial Day with a photo of my grandfather and namesake, Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., giving his address to the graves of the dead lying in solemn rows at the Anzio-Nettuno American Cemetery in Italy, and I have quoted from his speech, apologizing to the soldiers who lost their lives there under his command. It was grandpa who taught me that if part of leadership in the Army is being responsible for the lives of the soldiers you command, the other part is accepting responsibility for their deaths.

Memorial Day is about memory and honor. We remember those who served, and we honor their passing.

This year I want to honor the two soldiers who died under my command when I was a second lieutenant in the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado in 1969 and 1970. Both were veterans of the war in Vietnam. They weren’t killed in Vietnam, however. They were killed in a different war that was going on in the United States when they returned, a drug war between those who were addicted to dangerous drugs such as heroin, those who provided the drugs, and those who turned their heads in denial.

After I arrived at my assignment at Fort Carson, it didn’t take me long to realize that the division had a problem with heroin addiction, largely caused by soldiers who came back to the U.S. from Vietnam addicted to the drug. I didn’t know how bad the problem was until one night I was driving home from the officer’s club. The road to my off-post trailer park went right past my company area, so I decided to stop off at my platoon’s barracks just to see what was going on. I found two of my soldiers nodding out from having shot up heroin.

I talked to some of the other soldiers. They knew the two were addicts. They said there was nothing they could do about it. Addiction was their problem to deal with. I was the platoon leader, so I decided to make it my problem. That week, I spoke to both soldiers I had found nodding out in the barracks. How could they afford their addictions? They were paid just over $100 a month. They wouldn’t tell me, but I nosed around for awhile and discovered that soldiers who were addicted were often used by dealers in the town of Colorado Springs to move drugs onto the post and deal small amounts to other soldiers. I didn’t know for a fact if my soldiers were part of this system, but it was very likely.

I told them I wanted to help them. What did I know about addiction? Nothing. They denied they were addicts, of course, and said they didn’t need my help.

Time passed, and several new guys were assigned to my platoon. I was told by the company commander that they were “problem soldiers,” and he wanted me to “handle them.” They were, in fact, problem soldiers from another unit in the division. They had recently returned from Vietnam and were angry about being drafted to serve in that war, angry at the way the war was fought, angry that they had to serve out the three or four months they had left on their enlistments rather than be dismissed from the Army after they had served in Vietnam, which would have indeed been a more rational way to handle returning veterans. They had been punished for shirking duties, for fighting in the barracks, for sleeping on guard duty, any number of minor offenses that added up to being “problem soldiers.”

I made a deal with them. I would ensure their remaining months in the Army were as painless as possible if they would pretend to play the game and stay out of trouble. That meant doing simple military crap like shining their boots, keeping their uniforms neat, making their beds in the morning, participating in regular details like mopping the barracks floors, latrine duty and the like.

They went along after one of them, a corporal whom they looked up to, agreed to my little program to guide their way out of the Army without getting arrested or being court martialed.

Then came the morning that I drove in to work and found that one of the guys in the platoon had not woken up for reveille. He had overdosed during the night. He was a veteran of Vietnam, and he was dead in a bunk in a barracks in Colorado. I had to call his mother and father and tell them of his death. It turned out that the Army had a system for cases such as this. The Quartermaster for Fort Carson ran the Office of Mortuary Affairs. They took charge of the body and the arrangements for shipping him home to his family.

A dead body in the barracks shook things up, to put it mildly. Some of the guys in the platoon pulled me aside and started talking. One of the cooks in the mess hall who had been in the Hells Angels, whom I had helped through a problem with his wife and child, told me that corporal from the “problem soldiers” group was dealing and had a civilian pistol that he managed to hide somewhere. I talked to him. I told him if he turned the pistol over to me, I’d forget it. He had only a few months left to serve. He denied everything. I tried to find his pistol, but he kept it somewhere out of the barracks in a place he could get to, and I never found it.

After the addicted soldier died, another of the addicts in the platoon came to me and said he wanted to turn himself in at the hospital for treatment, what we would now call “rehab,” but at that time didn’t have a name, at least not in the Army. I put him in my car and drove him to the hospital. In the emergency room, I told a doctor he was addicted to heroin and wanted to be detoxed and receive treatment. The doctor disappeared, and two MP’s showed up in the cubicle. They asked my soldier if he was the addict, and when he answered yes, they arrested him and took him out of the hospital to the stockade.

I went to the Provost Marshall and complained about my soldier’s arrest to no avail. I was told that all they needed for an arrest was an admission of drug use, which the soldier provided. He would detox in the stockade without medical assistance. They charged him with drug use and after a period of time ended up discharging him administratively “for the good of the service.”

I went to see the battalion and brigade commanders and told them of the heroin addiction in the unit and advised them that there was no way to handle it unless a treatment program was established for addicts. They dismissed me out of hand and told me to go back to my platoon and forget about it.

I was thinking about going to see the division commander, General Bernard Rogers, whom I had known at West Point when he was Commandant of Cadets. One morning I came into the company and discovered that the “problem soldier” corporal with the pistol had been killed the night before in downtown Colorado Springs in a drug deal that had gone wrong. He was shot in the stomach with a sawed-off shotgun.

My platoon was comprised of about 25 soldiers. I had lost eight percent of the platoon, two soldiers, in just four months. I had no way of knowing for sure, but I suspected that was a higher casualty rate than combat platoons were suffering in Vietnam.

I didn’t bother making an appointment to see General Rogers. I just showed up at his office. When his secretary told him I was there, he said for me to come in. He was wearing his uniform shirt. He was born in 1921, the same year as my father, so he was 49 years old. I was 22. I told him about the two guys in my platoon who had died because of heroin. I told him about the guy I had taken to the hospital to get detoxed and treated because of his addiction and how he had been arrested instead. I told him that his division probably had an addiction rate of between 10 and 15 percent. I told him that at the very least, he had to institute a drug treatment program similar to the way admitted alcoholics in the Army were detoxed and treated for problem drinking, usually after they had gotten a DUI.

Rogers told me that he couldn’t do such a thing because if Department of the Army discovered his unit’s drug problem, “my career would be over.” I told him that the lives of two soldiers in my platoon were over. He said he was sorry, but there was nothing he could do. I told him if he didn’t do something about establishing a drug treatment program, I would write a story in the Village Voice about the problems at Fort Carson. He warned me not to write the story, that if I did, my Army career would be over.

I wrote the story, and it did lead to the end of my Army career some months later, which is a story for another time.

On this Memorial Day, I remember the two soldiers who died under my command at Fort Carson, Colorado. I honor their service. They didn’t deserve to die the way they did. I’m sorry that I was unable to keep them alive.

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If it’s not already obvious, Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund is not just to put money in his own pocket. It’s to fund domestic terrorists to do his bidding. You might think that with a cult of millions of brainwashed MAGA morons, Trump wouldn’t need money to summon his fanatic Brownshirts. But you would be wrong.

Remember, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were facing decades in prison for their attack on the Capitol. The only reason they got out was because Trump “won” the 2024 election. He had the opportunity to pardon them before he left office, and he didn’t. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that he’ll have their back the next time they launch an attack on Washington, D.C.

Also, recall that during the four years Trump was out of office, he tried to summon his mob more than once, and no one came. It was so humiliating, Trump stopped putting out the call. It made him look weak.

They didn’t come because we had started throwing rioters and insurrectionists in prison. For the first time in American history, there were real consequences for mediocre racist white men lashing out in violence. It scared the shit out of the far-right. It made them really angry, but it also terrified them. They should remember that fear and hold onto it. We are coming for them.

In the meantime, Trump knows he’s going to lose the midterms, and the 2028 election will be another bloodbath for Republicans. A Democratic president with a Democratic Congress will come after him, and everything with his name illegally slapped on it. Trump and his bootlickers know the only way to stop that from happening is another coup. But his militias are not going to show up again without a hefty financial incentive. $1.8 billion ought to do it…

It’s a lot of money, and America’s far right is nothing if not greedy little shitbags.

The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for over 15 years, and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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With big rewards come even bigger risks, though. After January 6th, America said, “Hmmmm…maybe we should start holding violent, racist white Republicans accountable for their actions for the first time in all of American history.” The right lost its fucking mind because, as I discussed several times, we just don’t DO that here in the United States! But we did, and we as a country really have a taste for it now. Worse (for Trump), the regime has erased the taboo of charging political enemies with crimes.1 This surely will not backfire in any way whatsoever…

Staging a second violent coup? One backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from a regime of desperate fascists? If/when (emphasis on “when”) that fails, that won’t just leave a bad taste in the collective mouth of the country. It’s going to leave a burning desire to crush everyone involved and make sure that shit never fucking happens again.

It’s important to remember that Democrats, and the left in general, are already talking about Nuremberg II: Electric Chair Boogaloo. You don’t have to look very far to find Democrats, a lot of Democrats, openly talking nonstop about tribunals and prison and severe consequences.

I want you to think really hard: Were they doing this after Trump’s first time in office and the hundreds of crimes he committed?2 Did they do it after eight years of George W. Bush being a war criminal? Eight years of Ronald Reagan committing more crimes than Nixon? Have Democrats talked like this ever in your entire life? No. No, they have not.

There are plenty of Democrats, I’m looking at you, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who won’t have the stomach to pull the trigger on Nuremberg II, but an awful lot of elected officials are agitating for it, and huge swathes of the base are salivating over the prospect, something else that is unusual. This is really mainstream stuff here. There’s a real appetite for it.

When the far right inevitably takes up arms again and tries to overthrow the government a second time, there will be more than enough public support for burning the far right to the ground. It’s not clear that the fascists really understand this.

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They live in a propaganda bubble that tells them they are the “real” America. The majority. The “will of the people.” But they are a very distinct minority, and the violent extremists are small enough to be snuffed out through concerted effort. We’ve done it before, and it took them decades to recover. And let’s be honest, the only reason the far right recovered is because we didn’t follow the money back to the wannabe oligarchs funding them.

Do you honestly think we’re going to stop with just the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers and the other militias this time?

Trump and his regime have been screaming about a “global leftist conspiracy” for several months now and, say it with me, every Republican accusation is a confession. Always. They’re telling us what they’ve been doing. We’ve all seen it. We’ve seen how America’s far right is funded by foreign governments and works directly with extremist groups overseas. We know that fascist American billionaires pour money into a massive network to fund extremism at home and abroad.

Once the second coup fails, and it will, we will have a mandate to burn the entire network to ashes and arrest everyone involved, no matter how rich they are. Follow the money, cut the heads off the hydra, and destroy it all. Musk, Koch, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation (what’s left of it), Turning Point, the entire right-wing media system fueling the violence, all of it is part of the machine built for the express purpose of toppling American democracy and instigating domestic terrorism. All of it has to go.

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Trump’s next coup is the last bite at the apple. The far right is taking its shot, and it’s going to miss. I would be more worried if I thought they were any good at this. Have you looked at these fucking idiots, though? Trump has filled his government with some of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Rapists, junkies, drunks, imbeciles, losers, and those are the highlights! There are a handful of smart people, but they’re not going to be leading the coup. Trump will entrust it to dimwits like Pete Hegseth, who can’t lead a Girl Scout troop on a field trip.

After decades of quietly corrupting our democracy and stealing power and rigging elections, the far right bet it all on an 80-year-old pedophile with severe dementia who only cares about his own aggrandizement. Probably not the savviest move they could have made. Can’t say I feel an ounce of pity for them, though.

When the history books are written about this time in American history, they will write about Trump pretty much the same way they write about Hitler: A charismatic fascist leader who rose to power on a wave of racial animosity and fake populism and then led a resurgent far right to absolute destruction through his own erratic behavior and inability to think beyond his own personal obsessions and grievances.

It would be hilarious if the miserable piece of shit wasn’t hurting so many people in the process. The least we can do is make sure all of his enablers and violent followers pay for all of it and send the clearest message possible to right-wing extremists: The days of America giving far-right terrorism and crime a pass are over. Their violence will be met with a bullet, a noose, or a small prison cell for life. No more coddling for domestic terrorists when they’re angry, racist white men. They get treated like the danger to the public they’ve always been.

And they can all thank Donald Trump for Making America Safe Again.

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There are 161 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.