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.

In Chicago yesterday, a federal case for interfering with law enforcement officers fell apart in spectacular, embarrassing, even career-ending fashion for prosecutors who work for Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Way back last year, when Stephen Miller and that little Nazi in the Gestapo leather trench coat Greg Bovino were running around Minneapolis and Chicago with squads of jack-booted and masked ICE agents arresting anyone with brown skin who spoke English with an accent, the Department of Justice was desperate to arrest someone, anyone, for getting in the way of their anti-immigrant terror tactics.

Trump’s jackbooted thugs arrested six people outside the Broadview ICE detention facility in Chicago for standing in the way of a police car during a protest against the squads of ICE agents rampaging through immigrant neighborhoods. The charge was conspiracy to impede a federal officer, a felony punishable by seven years in prison. The intent of the case was to intimidate other protesters who were indeed trying to prevent ICE from running roughshod over the rights of people’s neighbors whose only crime – and it wasn’t really even a federal crime – was being suspected of not having proper immigration documents.

The problem was, prosecutors had to get a grand jury to agree with them and indict the protesters. The grand jurors, citizens who lived in Chicago and probably saw the news about the ICE and Border Patrol agents who rappelled out of a helicopter onto the roof of a Chicago apartment building and went through busting down doors and terrorizing residents without presenting warrants, turned out to be not so eager to charge their fellow citizens for protesting against this kind of government-sponsored terrorism.

One grand juror resigned from duty on the jury to protest the way federal prosecutors were trying to shove indictments down their throats, and other grand jurors complained to prosecutors about the case and said they had already made up their minds not to indict. So the chief U.S. Attorney handling the case dismissed the problematical grand jurors, and in the process, communicated with at least one grand juror outside of the grand jury room, meanwhile telling the grand jurors who remained, listen, we know the case seems weak, but it’s stronger than it looks, you just have to trust me. This is known as “vouching,” another big no-no for prosecutors.

When they finally got the felony charges they wanted, defense attorneys smelled a rat and told the judge overseeing the case that they wanted to see the grand jury transcripts. Judge April Perry ordered the government to bring the grand jury transcripts to court and was in the process of reviewing the transcripts when she discovered the transcripts contained redactions. She ordered the office of the Chicago U.S. attorney to bring the unredacted transcripts to court. Instead, the U.S. attorney dropped the felony indictments, making the judge’s transcript order moot.

The government can bring a misdemeanor case to court without a grand jury indictment, so that is what they did. A misdemeanor charge of interfering with law enforcement is still a major federal crime punishable by a year in prison. Defense lawyers renewed their request to see the grand jury transcripts. Judge Perry got the full, unredacted grand jury transcripts earlier this week and ordered all the assistant U.S. attorneys involved in the case to show up at a hearing in her courtroom yesterday.

She reviewed the grand jury transcripts in a closed-door hearing, taking testimony from two of the assistant U.S. attorneys involved in bringing the case to the grand jury. In the afternoon, she held a hearing in open court and required U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros to answer questions about the improper manner the grand jury indictments were handled.

“I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. Attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” Judge Perry said.

Boutros responded by dropping the misdemeanor charges, telling the judge he had been unaware of the prosecutorial misconduct, including dismissing grand jurors after the first grand jury presented a “no bill,” refusing to bring a felony indictment. “No one acted with the intent to mislead your honor, and I think that they were following your order to give the law,” Boutros whined. “I will tell your honor that as upset as you are, and have been — I, too, had not seen conduct like that, and it upset me — which is why we did dismiss that indictment.”

Boutros continued to criticize the defendants, calling their behavior at the protest “unacceptable in a civilized society.”

But Judge Perry would have none of that from Boutros. “You are significantly undercutting your mea culpa here by standing behind the charges and continuing to vilify these particular defendants,” Perry said.

After the case was dismissed, a lawyer for one of the defendants, Christopher Parente, told reporters that not only had prosecutors redacted 30 lines of the grand jury transcripts in an attempt to conceal their misconduct, they had withheld entire pages from the transcripts and had not informed the judge of their omissions.

“We have a Department of Justice that hides behind the grand jury in selling these indictments against Mr. Comey, against Don Lemon, against Brian Straw and the rest of the Broadview Six, saying, ‘Hey, it’s not us, we have a grand jury, a fair and impartial grand jury,’” Parente said. “Shame.”

Parente told reporters if Trump’s “weaponization” fund is eventually approved by Congress, his clients in the Broadview Six case would consider applying for restitution due to prosecutors’ misconduct that cost them eight months of their lives and thousands in legal fees.

There’s one for the ages. At exactly the same time Todd Blanche was asking Congress to provide $1.8 billion in funds to recompense people who have been targeted by a corrupt DOJ, lawyers he controls were standing in a federal court in Chicago apologizing for lying to grand jurors, bringing fake indictments, and misleading the judge overseeing the case.

What was it the hippies used to say? What goes around, comes around? Todd Blanche should read the history of the Chicago Seven case: Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and five of their friends were indicted for leading protests during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when police rioted and ran roughshod over the rights of people whose only crime was trying to stop a war. The jury found all seven not guilty of conspiracy.

Yay, Chicago!

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Every crime boss has the same problem: what do you do with your ill-gotten gains? You can’t take money that you’ve made from cocaine deals or prostitution or protection rackets or loan sharking or book making and just spend it. A lot of money from crimes is in cash, so it’s got to be laundered before it can be spent. There’s an entirely separate area of crime that developed over the years: money laundering. The more money criminals took in, the more of it needed to be cleaned up so it could be spent.

This has traditionally involved coming up with corrupt ways to use money gained from crimes to create or invest in legitimate businesses. But that’s hard. A big-time criminal can’t take cash that came from drug deals and walk into a real estate office and say, hey, I want to buy that store on the next block, and hand over cash. State laws and registries are involved when you want to buy real estate. The state wants to see where money came from, and where it’s going. Banks have to report cash transactions over $10,000. That’s why it’s difficult to use cash to buy expensive jewelry. The store, or the jeweler, has to deposit the cash spent to buy the necklace or bracelet. Banks have to report cash deposits. The IRS wants to know who spent that amount of cash on a million-dollar ring or necklace.

Donald Trump has had IRS problems for most of his adult life. This has not been because the money he reported as income was suspect – at least we don’t think that was the nature of his problems. Trump’s IRS trouble had to do with being audited for the deductions he claimed in order to reduce his taxable income to a level where he paid, during the years 2016 and 2017, a grand total of $750 each year in federal income taxes. Remember each time he ran for president, he said that he couldn’t release his tax returns because he was being audited?

Well, that’s not going to happen anymore. Yesterday there was an announcement of an utterly corrupt agreement reached by the Department of Justice to settle Trump’s lawsuit that sought $10 billion in damages because his tax returns had been leaked. Trump dropped his lawsuit in return for the establishment of a $1.8 billion slush fund that will be used to pay off people who claim that they were targets of the Biden administration “weaponization” of the DOJ. Individuals convicted of committing crimes on January 6, 2021 in the attack on the Capital will be eligible to make claims on money from the fund, apparently including those who committed crimes of violence against police officers.

I love that word, “weaponization.” In another context – that would be the context in the general vicinity of sanity – weaponization could be used to accurately describe the purpose of the DOJ, which in past years used the law as a weapon to go after criminals. “Weaponization” as used by Trump and his MAGA allies supposedly describes being illegitimately targeted for prosecution. They’re saying that they didn’t do anything wrong, so they shouldn’t have been prosecuted, tried, found guilty, and in some instances, sentenced to terms in prison. Trump has claimed repeatedly – and I mean repeatedly – that he was targeted by the Biden DOJ. He was a victim of “weaponization” when he was indicted for stealing secret documents and storing them insecurely at Mar a Lago and elsewhere, and he was victimized when he was indicted for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

In fact, the law says it is illegal to do what he was accused of doing, so the indictments brought by the DOJ and the Special Counsel did use the law as a weapon by claiming that he had broken said laws.

Around and around and around we go with these words that would be familiar to any gangster accused of a crime. The infamous New York crime boss John Gotti, nicknamed for years the “Teflon Don” because juries kept finding him not guilty, was a “victim” of the FBI which wiretapped his social clubs. The DOJ “weaponized” its procedures and the courts to “get” him. It’s what you say when you’re guilty as hell.

Today in an addendum to the corrupt “settlement” of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, the director of which he appointed and who reports to him, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Donald Trump’s personal attorney, announced that the IRS is “forever barred and precluded” from auditing or investigating Trump and his family and “related or affiliated individuals” for anything they did before the date of the settlement, which is today.

So, there it is, everything Trump and his family and anyone associated with the Trump Organization, and presumably anyone who did business with Trump and his companies which provided him with income, is off the hook for any crimes they committed.

This is the dream of crime bosses everywhere. You spend a lifetime skirting the edges of the law, breaking the law, achieving wealth from the crimes you have committed, and you don’t have to pay another lawyer another dime to keep you free from the long arm of the law. You can take your money and spend it any way you want, because it’s now legitimate, every cent of it.

Trump has now been able to “weaponize” the federal government by turning its law enforcement arm, the Department of Justice, into his own personal law firm that has served as his defense attorney, currently headed up by his former defense attorney. Today, it was reported that Trump has endorsed Ken Paxton, the hugely corrupt Attorney General of Texas, in his primary campaign against incumbent Senator John Cornyn. This represents yet another instance of Donald Trump weaponizing the Republican Party and using it against his political opponents. He used the Republican Party against Representative Tom Massie today in his primary race in Kentucky. He used the Republican Party to punish Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana for voting to convict him in his impeachment trial in 2021. He has used his Republican Party to drive Marjorie Taylor Greene from office for betraying the MAGA movement. And on and on.

Donald Trump is a crime boss the likes of which this country has never seen. Insulated from prosecution by the Supreme Court, Trump engaged in more than 3,700 stock trades in the first quarter of this year in companies that have benefited from decisions he has made in defense contracts and other government business. The total of the profits he has made is unknown, but documents he is required to file with the Office of Government Ethics reveal that the profits are between $220 million and $750 million. These profits pale in comparison to what he has gleaned from the billions he has taken out of his crypto businesses such as Liberty Financial run by his sons, and payoffs from Gulf states.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that Donald Trump has pretty much ceased functioning as the president of the United States and begun acting as the boss of the Trump crime family. Even his order to attack the country of Iran has returned profits from his investments in tech stocks that produce parts for weapons systems deployed against Iran. He made some of the stock trades just before his order to attack became public knowledge.

The only difference between crime boss Donald Trump and crime boss John Gotti is that Gotti didn’t put his name on the social clubs he frequented, the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy and the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, Queens.

Trump, on the other hand, is putting his name on everything he can in Washington D.C., from the Kennedy Center to the Institute for Peace. How long before he renames the big obelisk on the Mall as the “Donald Trump Washington Monument?”

When he starts making tourists pay him money to visit it, I’d bet.

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That wasn’t a supersonic jet crashing through the sound barrier you just heard. It was Trump’s billion dollar “ask” for his ballroom blowing up. It’s gone, done, finito. Ain’t gonna happen. Over the weekend, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that the money for Trump’s ballroom didn’t fit within the Senate’s rules for the filibuster-proof reconciliation bill appropriation for immigration. What the hell the ballroom was doing in the immigration bill in the first place wasn’t addressed in the ruling. The ruling prompted a not insignificant explosion from Trump, who demanded that Majority Leader John Thune fire the parliamentarian, which hasn’t happened. Republicans are said to be looking for another way to fund the ballroom, but as the days tick by and the midterm elections approach and the cost of living keeps going up for everything from beef to gas to potato chips, fewer Republicans are expressing much enthusiasm for Trump’s gold plated dream that not a single ordinary citizen will ever see the inside of.

Today, Senators meeting for lunch to discuss the immigration bill faced another problem. Democrats are expected to propose an amendment that would make an issue of Trump’s $1.8 billion “weaponization” fund. Republicans will probably be able to shoot down the amendment, but the issue is not dead.

Also today, two police officers who defended the Capitol during the Jan. 1, 2021 insurrection filed suit in federal court to block the administration of Trump’s plan to commit legal theft from the taxpayers. Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges and former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn called the Trump plan to lavish money on Capital rioters “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century” and a “slush fund,” which it obviously is.

The money for the “weaponization” fund is supposed to come out of the Judgement Fund, money which is appropriated by the Congress to pay legal claims from lawsuits filed against the government. The problem the Trump “weaponization” fund faces is that it will be administered not by the DOJ but by a third party, a special commission with four members appointed by the Attorney General and one member appointed by Congress. The president would be empowered to remove any of the commissioners, even the one appointed by Congress, without cause.

In other words, “weaponization” money from the Judgement Fund will not need to be ordered by a court to be paid to people who have sued the government and won a judgement, which appears to violate the terms of the appropriations law written by Congress establishing the Judgement Fund.

As the cops who were injured by January 6 insurrectionists said, it’s a slush fund to pay off Trump’s pals, plain and simple, with no rules that need to be followed. Trump’s “commissioners,” whoever they are, will be able to pay any amount of money to any person who makes an application claiming the law had been “weaponized” against them, even if they voluntarily pleaded guilty to charges against them, as many of those convicted of January 6 offenses did. Plea agreements in such cases usually involved reduced charges and lesser sentences, often drawing no jail time. But all such plea agreements normally bar the signers from appealing the conviction or attempting to recover restitution from the government.

The case of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who was convicted of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians during the 2016 campaign, is instructive. Flynn pleaded guilty to “willfully and knowingly making false and fictitious statements to the FBI.” There then ensued a multi-year clusterfuck as Flynn sought leniency for cooperating with the FBI. His pleadings included a deal for his son not to be charged for crimes he had committed. Flynn also filed for delays in sentencing, his lawyer claiming that there was “information implicating the president” that made the sentencing a “national security issue.”

On and on the Flynn filings went. He fired his original attorneys and hired Sidney “Kraken” Powell, who lost her license to practice due to her outrageous behavior during the phony 2020 election lawsuits she filed. Powell convinced Flynn to withdraw his guilty plea. Flynn was pardoned by Trump in November of 2020 before he left office. He sued the Department of Justice in 2023 for $50 million and settled his case after Trump took office again in 2026 for $1.2 million.

That money came from the DOJ Judgement Fund. Flynn had sued for malicious prosecution, so the agreement he reached with the DOJ to drop the suit and take the $1.2 million payment had to be approved by the judge overseeing his lawsuit.

Exactly ZERO of the insurrectionists convicted of offenses committed on January 6 would come under anything even approximating Flynn’s situation. None have moved to change their pleas after pleading guilty as Flynn did. None have filed lawsuits claiming malicious prosecution, so the government has not lost any lawsuits in court with a judge ordering the government to pay the plaintiffs from the Judgement Fund.

None of this has even a hint of following the law as it has been applied in the past when money from the Judgement Fund has been paid out to plaintiffs who have sued the government, as was mandated when Congress appropriated money for the Judgement Fund.

What Trump wants to do with his “weaponization” fund is steal money from taxes paid by citizens to pay off his friends who attempted to overturn his election loss in 2020 and get them ready for anything he wants them to do in either 2026 or 2028…or in the coming years, for that matter.

There will be lawsuits against Trump’s “weaponization” fund, but Reuters is reporting that legal experts say that it will be difficult to find people with legal standing to file suit against the fund. Either or both houses of Congress could sue to stop payments, but that isn’t going to happen with Republicans running Congress.

That might change in 2027 if Democrats take over either the House or Senate or both. Until then, we have a gangster in the White House and he’s going to steal all the money he can to give it away to fellow criminals and build monuments to himself. That’s where we are, folks.

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