Donald Trump would like nothing better than to pretend that this country was not founded on the backs of slaves. The latest evidence of this came early this week when it was reported that the administration has ordered the removal of references to slavery from multiple national parks in an effort to “scrub them of corrosive ideology,” according to the Washington Post.

Trump’s executive order, signed on March 27, directs the Department of the Interior “to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

To that end, the Department of the Interior has ordered that the famous photograph, taken in 1863 of the back of an enslaved man known as Peter Gordon, showing the scars of whippings he had been administered by his slave owner, be taken down in any park where it is displayed.

As if he didn’t exist as person, as if his scars are not there in the photo, as if the fact of his enslavement did not happen.

The Interior Department has ordered the removal or alteration of 30 signs at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia that refer to racial discrimination and violence by white people against slaves. Harpers Ferry was where the abolitionist John Brown led a raid encouraging slaves to revolt and seek freedom.

The Trump administration wants to excise the names of the nine slaves owned by President George Washington when he lived in “The President’s House,” his residence in Philadelphia, the ruins of which lie within Independence National Park where the founders signed the Declaration of Independence. Trump wants the evidence that Washington owned the nine slaves while he lived there erased, as if they did not exist.

It would seem a little difficult to run a park dedicated to ending slavery without mentioning slavery itself, wouldn’t you say? Trump’s executive order gives away the game by using the word “corrosive” to describe the thing they want to do away with. They don’t want the word “slavery” mentioned because it’s nasty; it reminds us of a chapter in our history – the founding chapter, as it happens – that included the enslavement of human beings within certain of the states of the Union that considered the institution of slavery essential for their existence.

This is like turning backflips in order to avoid looking at one’s own body: if you throw your head back and look for the ground so you can spot your landing, you’re not looking at yourself.

We’ve been turning backflips for our entire history, but especially in the 160 years since the end of the Civil War. We were never taught that slaves built the Capitol and the White House. In southern states, students were never taught that slaves built their state capitols and most of the courthouses standing in the central squares of county seats. Just go on your class trip to Washington and take the tour of the Capitol and look at all the marble and the statues in the rotundas and ignore the fact that slaves carried that limestone and marble, and slaves laid the stones and the slabs, and some of the statues of the great men – they are all men, every single statue – were slave owners.

The truth of the intent behind Trump’s executive order is its utterly disgusting racism. It seeks to absolve the governing establishment that founded the country and has run it ever since of the enduring legacy of slavery. Trump dictates that the history of the country be taught to make it seem that we have an “unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.” He says that he wants to restore America’s “rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.”

George Washington commanded the Revolutionary Army and defeated the British to establish the independence of the 13 colonies from foreign rule and was our first president. He was a great man.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and along with James Madison had a hand in forcing the Constitution to include the Bill of Rights and was our third president. He was a great man.

Both men are regarded as “founders” of this country, and both men were slave owners.

Thomas Jefferson owned 600 slaves during his lifetime. On any given day, more than 200 slaves worked at his home and plantation, Monticello. Jefferson fathered six children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. The only slaves freed in his will when he died all had the last name “Hemings.”

Because I am a 6^th great grandson of Jefferson, the descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson are my cousins. We – and by “we” I mean myself and my children and my sisters and my brother before he died – are descended from a slave owner, and we are blood relatives of the descendants of a slave, Sally Hemings. We are also related to Sally Hemings because she was the daughter of John Wayles, the owner of a nearby plantation, who was also the father of Martha Wayles, who married Thomas Jefferson and gave birth to Martha Wayles Jefferson and Maria Jefferson, his two white daughters.

I realize that is a lot to take in, but those relationships – between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, between Sally Hemings and Martha Jefferson’s father, and between Jefferson and his children with Sally Hemings – are complicated but they are real, and they are part of our history.

Beyond the story of Jefferson and Hemings is the story of all the other slaves in this country and all their descendants. The figures are difficult to distill from census records, but some experts believe that as many as 90 percent of Black Americans are descended from enslaved people. A Pew Research Study done in 2022 found that 57 percent of Black adults say that they are descended from slaves. Because the Black population in this country is 42 million, one hell of a lot of Black Americans are descendants of enslaved people.

Don’t they have the same right to be proud of their family history that every other American does? That is the question that Donald Trump doesn’t want to hear the answer to. He believes their history is “corrosive,” that it lessens the rest of American history because it includes facts he doesn’t want taught in schools or displayed at parks or displayed in museums.

The problem Donald Trump and his white supremacists have is blood. Our blood is mixed. The descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave owners are related. We come from the same families. The history of our families is the history of this country. You cannot erase DNA from museums and public parks. Our DNA is everywhere. It is on the bricks and sawn boards of Monticello. It is on the stone walls and marble floors of the Capitol building and the White House and the state Capitols in the South. It is in the dirt that was farmed for corn and wheat and cotton on plantations in the South. Slave DNA is even in the north on Long Island, for example, where Sylvester Manor plantation on Shelter Island used slaves to grow food that was shipped to the island of Barbados to feed slaves who worked on sugar plantations.

Slavery and its descendants are everywhere in this country. All you have to do is look around. History is in our bodies and in our land. It cannot be denied because it is alive in all of us.

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Suddenly, the watchword about Donald Trump and the nation, about the world’s wars, about how we treat each other seems to be “defiant.”

We’re choosing to reject more civil communications, entreaties for treaties, and — in different ways — ruing culture wars raging only because we choose to keep them hot. And we’re losing our words of condemnation for all of it because of numbness from a constant fire hose of self-centered defiance.

If you’re part of Team Trump, “defiance” seems to mean moving now to crush dissent. If you’re a critic, “defiance” is raising a fist in the face of someone trying to dictate how to think.

The truth seems to be that we’re hanging onto impatient explanation that if one side keeps being jerky, the other side will simply relent over time because of pace and persistence. We’re seeing those sentiments playing out in Israel’s choices to ignore virtually global advice to end the war in Gaza, defiantly sending ground troops into Gaza City for what must turn into another bloody offensive. We’re seeing it in a recalcitrant Russia that would rather thumb its nose defiantly in the face of Western powers than halt its attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets.

And we’re seeing it in our continued high-decibel defiance about trying to keep our own political talk from descending further into the very political violence that we insist, loudly, that we want to avoid. Not only is this seemingly stubborn attitude ill-chosen, but this belligerent trend seems a deliberate choice for the Trump administration and for frustrated critics.

Targeting Dissent

Even if you see yourself as outside the partisan fray, it is impossible not to see continued defiance of law in the unauthorized deployments of military units to U.S. city streets and the many excesses of a deportation campaign turned obsessively cruel, defiance of national and international laws in the arbitrariness of the tariffs and in the decisions to cut health and food support for tax cuts for the wealthy.

If sinking one alleged Venezuelan drug boat on international waters is legally hazy, this administration doubles down with a second. Defiance demands it.

Away from law, Trump seems to believe that he defiantly can rewrite history to erase slavery or turn the Jan. 6, 2021 revolt into a patriotic event or can wave a wand to eliminate America’s insistence on finding groups or identities to hate by saying they simply do not exist.

The drive to “go after” those with dissenting political views in the name of supporting “free speech” is not only illogical, but anti-democratic. The Trump administration wants to defy the Constitution, our two centuries of balance of powers, even the cultural wars of pluralism.

Amazingly, Attorney General Pam Bondi was forced to back down from a statement that “hate speech” is not “free speech,” using a social media post to say she meant threats of violence — this week in the tumult that has followed the slaying of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. In fact, there is no Constitutional distinction between hate speech and free speech, but the law does make threats distinct as a form of action rather than opinion.

Nevertheless, Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Vice President JD Vance and various White House staff were threatening to investigate and punish anyone with published remarks glorifying, celebrating or condoning the death — a campaign of defiance, not law wrongly conflates language about political violence with anything that rebuts right-wing partisanship. Bondi went further, killing a DOJ study that had concluded that violence was far more likely to come from right-wing extremists than those from the left.

Beyond what they say, it is not clear what Bondi and Justice intend to do or what will constitute legally supportable action to quash opinion, or how they will identify dissent.

‘Hate in Your Heart’

In no case is one government agency, especially one dominated by one individual, elected as the hall monitor for distasteful or noxious speech. Donald Trump is making clear he sees no need for legal distinctions. For Trump, “hate speech” is anything he doesn’t like personally.

Amid calls to lower political temperatures, Trump defiantly showed he would verbally attack reporters asking him questions that he finds embarrassing or not sufficiently highlighting his achievements.  He told one reporter whose question he disliked that the journalist had “hate in his heart” for Trump. He told an Australian journalist that his question would put the U.S. relationship with his nation at risk.

A $15-billion Trump lawsuit against The New York Times charging defamation and libel for reporting, editorials, even books by Times reporters about himself was absurdly broad and never actually challenged any factual newspaper report — just a lack of adoring coverage, not the job of my former employer. Among other things, he challenged the Times’ endorsement of his opponent, Kamala Harris.

Team Trump’s pressure on ABC and its broadcasters to pull late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel for making basically the same point as Utah Gov. Spencer Cox — that the suspect from the Charlie Kirk killing was from a family steeped in MAGA thinking until a year ago — is “defiance” raised to an extreme. The only surprise is the ease with which the undercutting won approval.

To avoid its own public defiance, Great Britain went out of its way to plan a Trump presidential visit to Windsor Castle that would simply avoid a route for protesters. Weirdly, it was comforting to see that protesters had gone ahead and projected Trump and Jeffrey Epstein against the castle walls.

Photo by Luis Quintero via Pexels

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Coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, both for its contribution to the standard pollutants like particulates and sulfur, but also because it emits more carbon per unit of energy produces than natural gas or petroleum. Thus, it’s good environmental news that, in the last couple of decades, US coal has declined to just 9% of total US primary energy consumption. The US Energy Information Administration reports: “In terms of coal’s total primary energy content, annual U.S. coal consumption peaked in 2005 at about 22.80 quads and production peaked in 1998 at about 24.05 quads.”

(For the curious, “primary” energy consumption refers to the original source of the energy. “Electricity” is not included, because electricity needs to be generated from something else like a natural gas power plant or a solar panel–electricity is not a primary source of energy by itself.)

(For those still more curious, NGPL refers to “Natural Gas Plant Liquids,” which are hydrocarbons like propane, which are separated from natural gas at processing plants.)

(For the additionally curious, the “renewable” energy category here includes hydropower, wind, solar, and biofuels like ethanol and wood. Of the 9% of total US energy consumption that traces to renewable energy in 2023, about three-fifths is biomass, like ethanol and wood. Not quite one-third of the 9% of US energy consumption from renewable energy in 2023 traces to wind and solar.)

But there was a time a half-century ago, when promoting coal use was a primary energy policy for the US government. Karen Clay, Akshaya Jha, Joshua Lewis, and Edson Severnini provide the background as part of their overall history in “Carbon Rollercoaster: A Historical Analysis of Decarbonization in the United States,” in the Summer 20205 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (where I work as Managing Editor). 

If you flash back to a half-century ago, you may know that in 1973, the members of OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, embargoed oil exports to the United States and any other countries that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War.  As Clay, Jha, Lewis and Severnini write: “The real price of imported oil rose dramatically, from $10.67 per barrel in 1972 (in 2007 US dollars) to $36.05 in 1974 (Seiferlein 2007, p. 171). Turbulence in the Middle East kept prices high. Unrest in Iran and the Iran-Iraq War caused further disruption, driving oil prices to $62.71 per barrel in 1980.”

In response, one policy goal of the time was to shift US energy use away from oil. The authors report:

Various regulations passed during and after the crisis reinforced the continued use of coal in electricity and other sectors. The first major piece of legislation was the Energy Supply and Environmental Coordination Act of 1974, which required that, if feasible, electric power plants burning oil and natural gas would have to convert to coal (Meltz 1975). This law was then largely superseded by the Fuel Use Act of 1978. Edward Lublin, Acting Deputy Assistant General Counsel for Coal Regulations in the Department of Energy, wrote: “The Fuel Use Act prohibits new facilities and allows DOE to prohibit existing facilities, from using petroleum or natural gas as a primary energy source unless DOE determines to grant to such facility an exemption from the Fuel Use Act’s prohibitions (Lublin 1981, p. 355).” This pro-coal legislation was often justified in terms of energy independence, given the abundant US reserves of coal. The legislation covered both electric utilities and major industrial fuel-burning installations …

The Three Mile Island nuclear powerplant meltdown happened in March 1979. Thus, an additional policy goal at this time was to shift away from nuclear. The authors write:

After Three Mile Island, no new nuclear power plant construction was authorized until 2012. Because nuclear plants displaced coal-fired electricity generation—one gigawatt-hour of nuclear generation resulted in a roughly 0.8 gigawatt-hour decrease in coal-fired generation historically (Adler, Jha, and Severnini 2020)—the nuclear upheaval kept coal consumption higher than it would otherwise have been.

One additional step was that the anti-pollution efforts of the original Clean Air Act had the useful effect of reducing “conventional” pollutants like ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and others. However, reducing carbon emissions was not yet on the policy agenda. Reducing these other pollutants had a tradeoff that coal was burned with lower efficiency–which meant that more carbon was emitted.

[E]fforts to cut local air pollution often increased carbon emissions. The 1970 Clean Air Act and subsequent amendments in 1977 coincided with less efficiency in converting coal to electricity sold and higher carbon emissions … The aggregate implications of this shift from 1970 to 1990 are meaningful: annual total carbon emissions in 1990 from coal-fired generation was 1,607 million tons, but would have been 1,415 million tons if the same amount of coal-fired electricity had been generated at 1970 levels of carbon emissions per gigawatt-hour. Similarly, the aggregate kilowatt hours of electricity sold per ton of coal burned decreased from 2,529 in 1970 to 2,065 in 1990. Thus, regulation increased coal consumption and carbon emissions.

Putting all of these together, “By 2005, coal consumption was five times what it had been in 1960.”

One of my complaints about the world, which I’m confident will never really be addressed, is that those who advocated for policies that turned out to have undesireable tradeoffs pretty much never acknowledge that reality. The US economy doesn’t really start getting off coal until the fracking revolution greatly expanded the supply of natural gas (as shown by the light blue area in the figure above). But what if it had been possible to move to natural gas sooner? Or France reacted to the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 by building nuclear power plants, which means that France’s carbon emissions have been quite low since then. Perhaps the worst thing about the US stepping away from nuclear is that several decades went by without intensive research on how to make the technology safer. What if solar and wind technology could have been accelerated as well? The carbon from the additional coal that was burned from, say, 1975 to 2005 is still in the atmosphere now, and will remain there for a very long time.

The post 50 Years Ago: When the US Encouraged Coal Use first appeared on Conversable Economist.

This is it. This is Germany in the 1930s and what you do will be recorded in the history books. Your children and grandchildren will look back and ask what you did. Will you be able to look them in the face?

Fascism thrives on fear. It wilts under scrutiny. Never look away. Never stop fighting. Hold them accountable and make them pay for every cruel thing they do. It’s the only way we get through this. Support this newsletter for just $5 a month or $50 a year and we’ll get through together.

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I haven’t written about the regime’s push for trans genocide lately, and shame on me for that. I know there are “consultants” out there telling Democrats to stay away from trans rights as an issue, and frankly, those consultants can fuck off.

While they’re smugly citing test audiences and polling, Republicans are whipping themselves into a murderous frenzy.

As part of this escalating campaign, the Trump regime has been exploring whether or not it can ban trans people from owning guns. The conceit here is that trans people are “mentally ill” and shouldn’t be allowed to be armed. They’re a danger to the community, you see.

First, that’s garbage because being trans is not a form of mental illness. This is well established, and I am not going to lay out the evidence for that any more than I feel the need to prove fucking gravity exists. I do not debate reality with liars and Nazis. It lends credibility to them, and they deserve nothing but the back of my hand across their face.

Second, claiming the regime wants to take guns away from the mentally ill would sound less like bullshit if headlines like this didn’t exist:

Right. So…fuck off with THAT story.

Each step is right out of the genocide playbook. It’s important to understand that the person who shot Charlie Kirk wasn’t even transgender. He was in a relationship with a transgender woman who had absolutely nothing to do with the murder. She didn’t even know until after and immediately cooperated with the police because she was appalled by the killing.

That doesn’t matter to the right, who continue to sprint down the road to mass murder. Because that IS the intent here. The fascist fucks were never subtle about it. The only thing keeping the press from speaking the truth is their cowardice. Even as the smoke from the mass crematoriums blackens the sky, the New York Fucking Times and Washington Post will find a million excuses not to name the crime for what it is.

This is why it is vital we stand and defend the trans community. As I’ve explained before, it doesn’t matter if you have a personal stake in this or not. I do not know a single trans person in the real world. I don’t care what they do and why would I? It’s none of my fucking business. Do you care about what some rando in Kansas or Maine is doing with their lives? What clothes they wear or what genitalia they have? No. No, you do not. And they don’t give a shit about you, either.

The only reason the right obsesses about trans people is because they’re the perfect group to start the genocide ball rolling. Small, poorly understood, and certainly not rolling in money to mount large-scale legal and media fights.

But the death and horror will not end with the trans community. It never ends with one group. There’s always another that needs to be purged and then another and then another after that.

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The regime is quietly building concentration camps in red states. Do you honestly believe only immigrants are going to fill them? Why do you think Republicans are starting to talk about “institutionalizing” trans people now? Where do you think they’ll be going?

At the same time, the right is already deep into normalizing hatred of the homeless. The rich and powerful have despised them forever. The unhoused represent a visceral reminder of the greed and inhumanity of the wealthy. It’s even worse today. Let’s do some quick math to see why.

There are around 770,000 homeless people in America. To house them all would cost around $11 to $30 billion a year. Let’s settle on the high end: $30 billion.

Now let’s look a the five richest people in the country:

• Elon Musk $428 billion

• Larry Ellison $276 billion

• Mark Zuckerberg $253 billion

• Jeff Bezos $241 billion

• Larry Page $179 billion

That totals up to $1.377 Trillion. With a “T.” There are about 902 billionaires living in the United States with a combined wealth of $5.7 Trillion (still with a “T”). Just those 902 people alone could end homelessness in America with the loose change in their bank accounts. The interest they earn on their money alone wildly exceeds the amount needed to keep children, veterans, the mentally ill, the sick, and the poor off the streets.

They can do the math, too. So every homeless person they see is a reminder of what a filthy piece of shit they, personally, are. And so, they have their puppets in the regime waging war on the very people their policies have put out of their homes and left to rot.

And since we’re working our way up to Final Solutions, why not just kill them all, right? Just ask Brian Kilmeade of Fox News:

Yeah, he feels just awful about it. So much so that three or six months from now, if he even waits that long, Kilmeade will go right back to demanding the homeless be executed for the crime of being homeless.

But, again, it won’t just be the trans community and the homeless. The first time an autistic person hurts someone, they’ll pick up the rallying cry that autistic people are dangerous and should be “institutionalized.” For the protection of society, of course. It’s not their fault that they were injured by vaccines, RFK Jr. will say. Very sad. Tragedy, really. But we have to do what’s best for he public.1

We’ll eventually circle back to targeting Muslims. Very dangerous. Terrorism is a national security threat, don’t you know? Maybe the Chinese when tensions with China reach a breaking point. Black people commit an awful lot of crime, and you know, someone has to pick those crops now that the migrants are gone. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, and what better way to keep them busy than to put them back into the fields? And weren’t they happier in the fields back before the War of Northern Aggression, anyway?

I know! Crazy! Hysterical rantings of a stupid liberal drunk on Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Except that’s what you said last year, and now the regime is openly talking about wiping out the entire trans community. That’s almost three million people. And they’re “joking” about killing the homeless. And they’re calling the left sick and deranged animals that have to be put down. And they keep building concentration camps. And and and.

It’s all the language and steps towards genocide, and they’re working up the courage to start the killing. Just because they’re planning to start with trans people and you’re not one of them doesn’t mean a fucking thing. You’re on that list. EVERYONE is on the list. Literally no one is safe when the wheels of genocide start to turn.

Even loyal members of the Nazi Republican Party can find themselves in a camp with a tattoo on their arm if they say the wrong thing or express the wrong opinion. Maybe their neighbor informed on them because they were jealous. Maybe their coworker wanted their promotion. It doesn’t matter. Evidence isn’t necessary, just vibes and the need to keep feeding the machine new victims.

But right now, the regime is targeting the trans community. They’re the levees holding back the flood of state violence against the rest of us. We’re already failing the immigrant community, and if we allow the trans community to fall, they WILL come for every group on their extensive list of people to eradicate to “make America white, male, Christian, and heterosexual again.”

Stop the machine now. Before the regime fills the mass graves of Stephen Miller’s dreams.

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 46 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

ABC just announced that Jimmy Kimmel Live will be suspended “indefinitely” over comments he made on Monday night about the killing of right-wing Christ figure, Charlie Kirk. Kimmel made the apparently fatal suggestion that Kirk’s killer might be among Trump’s MAGA base. “The MAGA Gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel told his audience on Monday. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”

Kimmel’s remarks on his television show were made with his vocal chords, forming sounds we normally refer to as “speech.” The First Amendment is supposed to protect remarks like Kimmel’s, even if people in power consider his words objectionable or even offensive.

Kimmel’s suspension, effective tonight, comes on the heels of the cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” by CBS in July, a move that was widely seen as capitulating to criticism by Donald Trump of Colbert’s show, which frequently features a monologue that makes fun of Trump. The parent company of CBS, Paramount Global, was involved in a merger with Skydance Media that needed the approval of the Federal Communications Commission. CBS had just agreed to settle a spurious defamation suit by Trump for $16 million. Colbert, during his nightly monologue, called the settlement “a big fat bribe.” Exactly three days later, CBS announced the cancellation of Colbert’s show, effective at the end of his current contract in May.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr went on the podcast of right-wing provocateur Benny Johnson this afternoon to denounce Kimmel’s remarks on Monday as “the sickest conduct possible.”

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Carr’s statement was a clear threat to revoke the broadcast licenses of stations that air the Kimmel show.

Podcaster Benny Johnson was one of six arch-conservative “influencers” who were being secretly paid by the Russian state media company RT to produce and distribute video content that was “consistent with” a secret Kremlin program to influence U.S. politics to be more supportive of Russia’s war against Ukraine, according to a Department of Justice federal indictment of the RT employees who had arranged the $10 million in payments to the American “influencers” involved in the scheme, including podcaster Johnson.

Benny Johnson wasn’t indicted for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Russian front-group to produce propaganda, but Jimmy Kimmel had his show suspended because he decided to exercise his right of free speech in criticizing right-wing Republicans for engaging in hypocrisy over the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Shortly after the cancellation of Colbert’s show was announced, Trump went on Truth Social and posted this threat: “Next up will be an even less talented Jimmy Kimmel, and then, a weak, and very insecure, Jimmy Fallon. The only real question is, who will go first?”

Jimmy Kimmel’s show was first, suspended indefinitely. Jimmy Fallon is under direct threat by Trump and his autocratic FCC.

This is the way Putin runs Russia. Threaten newspapers and broadcasters that they will be shut down unless they take the Kremlin’s line. How is what happened with CBS and ABC any different? Trump forced CBS to pay him $16 million to get the FCC to approve the merger of its parent company with a company run by Trump supporter Larry Ellison’s son, David Ellison, whom his father backed in his establishment of Skydance Media and its merger with Paramount.

In Russia, people like Larry and David Ellison are called oligarchs. Now we have American oligarchs, who like those in Russia enjoy special privileges and support by the regime so long as they play Trump’s game and fill his coffers with pay-offs and political support.

Donald Trump is going after anyone he doesn’t like or is insufficiently supportive of him and his political party. He blackmailed CBS with a spurious lawsuit and threatened to cancel its merger by denying FCC approval. He threatened the broadcast licenses of ABC affiliates that air the Jimmy Kimmel show. He filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times, threatening to bankrupt both media organizations.

Nobody is safe with this fascist regime in power. Free speech is dead so long as Putin’s best friend is in the White House.

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Talk about an embarrassment of riches! I could start quoting at the very beginning of the 85-page lawsuit Trump filed in Florida yesterday against the New York Times and Penguin Random House Publishers’ book, “Lucky Loser,” by Ross Buettner and Suzanne Craig and two other Times writers and not stop all the way to the lawyers’ signatures. In fact, here’s just one jewel from one of the last pages of the lawsuit: “The value of President Trump’s one-of-a-kind, unprecedented personal brand alone is reasonably estimated to be worth at over $100,000,000,000.”

If you have the same trouble I do with all those zeroes, here’s how much that is: One hundred billion dollars.

Donald Trump is President of the United States, “the most powerful man in the world,” as he might describe himself. According to his own calculations – not Forbes magazine, not the Times, not the Wall Street Journal…himself – he’s worth more than any rich guy on the planet, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison included. Upon reading that Trump had filed the lawsuit, the first question I had was, why bother?

Silly me. It’s not a lawsuit. It’s an 85-page tantrum. Do you want to know how much of a tantrum it is? Trump spends page after page whining and complaining that the Times published an article in September of 2024 titled, “The Star-Making Machine That Created ‘Donald Trump’.” Why, you might ask, is Trump so upset with that particular article? Well, in it, the authors say that Mark Burnett, the producer of “The Apprentice,” the television reality show Trump starred in, “discovered” Donald Trump.

That’s it. As close as I can determine from reading the entire lawsuit, that’s the single word that set Trump off. He spends line after line, paragraph after paragraph, page after page “proving” that he was a really, really big deal long before Burnett came along and offered him millions to go on TV, so how could Burnett have “discovered” him, when he was right there ruling over New York City all along?

As proof of Trump’s genius, here is just one claim in the suit: “President Trump built much of New York City’s famed skyline, owning and operating many of the key New York landmarks.” This, after claiming that the Trump name is “synonymous with worldwide excellence, luxury, and opulence” and “the highest standards of class, quality, and consumer satisfaction.”

How, Trump whines, could the New York Times have written that Donald Trump had to be “discovered” as if he was just some schmuck who showed up for a casting call, when he was famed around the world for building the New York skyline? And how could the Times have reported that Donald Trump was “discovered” and made a star by Mark Burnett when the Times itself, as far back as 1986, “wrote of ‘big time real estate entrepreneurs such as Donald Trump,’ while another newspaper included the phrase ‘the nation’s firmament of big developers—the Donald Trumps.’”

Think about that for a minute. The year 1986 was 39 years ago. How many paralegals or law firm associates did it take to dig up that quote from the Times so Trump’s lawyers could throw it in there to “prove” that the New York Times knew he was a big deal 39 years ago? That’s what Trump uses to prove “actual malice,” that they knew or should have known that Trump was a rock star long before the Times says he was “discovered” by Burnett. Here is how the lawsuit puts it: “Clearly indicating Defendants’ actual malice, the Book and the First Article center on the absurd, fanciful, and false story that President Trump somehow owes his public persona and celebrity status to Burnett and other NBC executives.”

What appears to have driven him over the edge was a quote from the Times article published in 2024: “Mr. Trump had mostly luck to credit for being discovered, at age 57, by Mark Burnett, then the hottest name in the hottest new television genre.”

See that? They used the word “luck,” when as the lawsuit puts it, “NBC and all of the producers are indebted to President Trump for making ‘The Apprentice’ a smash hit in a way that no other celebrity could have accomplished. The Book and the First Article revolve around this false, malicious, and defamatory premise that Burnett and NBC ‘discovered’ and made President Trump, despite the authors’ admission that before ‘The Apprentice,’ President Trump was already charismatic and famous.”

Because of course he was. Trump has sued a newspaper, a publisher, and four writers not for defamation, but for insufficient adulation. All the way through the lawsuit, Trump insistently corrects what he considers the record. He complains about a judge who said Mar a Lago is worth $18 million, when according to Trump, it is “worth 100 times that amount.” Mar a Lago has “ten times the acreage of Palm Beach’s most expensive home.” Even Robin Leach featured the place on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” way back in the 1980’s, yet another reason Mark Burnett could not have “discovered” Donald Trump, because Robin Leach had already done it.

I waded through page after page of this, Trump alternately bragging about how rich he is, what a business genius he is, how successful he was winning the election of 2016 and then winning again in 2020, only to have it “stolen” from him, and winning yet again in 2024, even recounting the moment he came down the “golden escalator” in 2015, the punch line in jokes on late night television for ten years, but here treated like the rolling back of the stone on Calvary Hill.

Then I came to this: “President Trump coined the iconic catchphrase ‘You’re Fired!’”

That sealed the deal for me. How could anyone have written anything less than a pean to Trump’s sheer genius, when he was the first man on earth to tell someone they were fired?

He wants $15 billion for all the damage that has been done to…what, exactly? He’s the president. The Times reported today that Trump and his sons have turned a couple of crypto deals and a license to sell AI chips to the Emirates into a couple billion just in the last month or two. He’s been in office only 9 months. They’re working on converting his $800 million palace in the sky into Air Force One, that he will be taking with him when he leaves office. He’s gold-leafing, at taxpayer’s expense, everything at the White House but the grass on the South Lawn. His two older sons are making so much money there is gold plated snot running from their noses. How much do you figure he’ll make from being President of the United States by January of 2027? A hundred billion? What does the man have to complain about?

He's on track to make himself the wealthiest man in the world, but his delicate ego can’t take it that the New York Times and its writers said that Mark Burnett “discovered” him. Hand that man the crying towel. His makeup is running.

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