What about Trump’s promise of no more forever wars?

 

US and Iranian negotiators met in Geneva earlier this week in what mediators described as the most serious and constructive talks in years. Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, spoke publicly of “unprecedented openness,” signaling that both sides were exploring creative formulations rather than repeating entrenched positions. 

Discussions showed flexibility on nuclear limits and sanctions relief, and mediators indicated that a principles agreement could have been reached within days, with detailed verification mechanisms to follow within months.

These were not hollow gestures. Real diplomatic capital was being spent. Iranian officials floated proposals designed to meet US political realities – including potential access to energy sectors and economic cooperation. 

These were gestures calibrated to allow Donald Trump to present any deal as tougher and more advantageous than the 2015 agreement he withdrew the US from in May 2018. Tehran appeared to understand the optics Washington required, even if contentious issues such as ballistic missiles and regional proxy networks remained outside the immediate framework. Then, in the middle of these talks, the bridge was shattered.

Sensing how close the negotiations were — and how imminent military escalation had become — Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, made an emergency dash to Washington in a last-ditch effort to preserve the diplomatic track.

In an unusually public move for a mediator, he appeared on CBS to outline just how far the talks had progressed. He described a deal that would eliminate Iranian stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, down-blend existing material inside Iran, and allow full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — with the possibility of US inspectors participating alongside them. 

Iran, he suggested, would enrich only for civilian purposes. A principles agreement, he indicated, could be signed within days. It was a remarkable disclosure — effectively revealing the contours of a near-breakthrough in an attempt to prevent imminent war.

But rather than allowing diplomacy to conclude, the US and Israel have launched coordinated strikes across Iran. Explosions were reported in Tehran and other cities. Trump announced “major combat operations,”, framing them as necessary to eliminate nuclear and missile threats while urging Iranians to seize the moment and overthrow their leadership. Iran responded with missile and drone attacks targeting US bases and allied states across the region.

What is most striking is not merely that diplomacy failed, but that it failed amid visible progress. Mediators were openly discussing a viable framework; both sides had demonstrated flexibility – a pathway to constrain nuclear escalation appeared tangible. Choosing military escalation at that moment undermines the premise that negotiation is a genuine alternative to war. It signals that even active diplomacy offers no guarantee of restraint. Peace was not naïve. It was plausible.

Iran’s approach in Geneva was strategic, not submissive. Proposals involving economic incentives – including energy cooperation – were not unilateral concessions but calculated compromises designed to structure a politically survivable agreement in Washington. The core objective was clear: constrain Iran’s nuclear program through enforceable limits and intrusive verification, thereby addressing the very proliferation risks that sanctions and threats of force were meant to prevent.

Talks had moved beyond rhetorical posturing toward concrete proposals. For the first time in years, there was credible movement toward stabilizing the nuclear issue. By attacking during that negotiation window, Washington and its allies have not only derailed a diplomatic opening but have cast doubt on the durability of American commitments to negotiated solutions. The message to Tehran – and to other adversaries weighing diplomacy – is stark: even when talks appear to work, they can be overtaken by force.

Iran is not Iraq or Libya

Advocates of escalation often invoke Iraq in 2003 or Libya in 2011 as precedents for rapid regime collapse under pressure. Those analogies are misleading. Iraq and Libya were highly personalized systems, overly dependent on narrow patronage networks and individual rulers. Remove the center, and the structure imploded.

Iran is structurally different. It is not a dynastic dictatorship but an ideologically entrenched state with layered institutions, doctrinal legitimacy and a deeply embedded security apparatus, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Its authority is intertwined with religious, political and strategic narratives cultivated over decades. It has endured sanctions, regional isolation and sustained external pressure without fracturing.

Even a previous US-Israeli campaign in 2025 that lasted 12 days failed to eliminate Tehran’s retaliatory capacity. Far from collapsing, the state absorbed pressure and responded. Hitting such a system with maximum force does not guarantee implosion; it may instead consolidate internal cohesion and reinforce narratives of external aggression that the leadership has long leveraged.

The mirage of regime change

Rhetoric surrounding the strikes has already shifted from tactical objectives to the language of regime change. US and Israeli leaders framed military action not solely as neutralizing missile or nuclear capabilities, but as an opportunity for Iranians to overthrow their government. That calculus – regime change by force – is historically fraught with risk.

The Iraq invasion should be a cautionary tale. The US spent more than a decade cultivating multiple Iraqi opposition groups – yet dismantling the centralized state apparatus still produced chaos, insurgency and fragmentation. The vacuum gave rise to extremist organizations such as IS, drawing the US into years of renewed conflict.

Approaching Iran with similar assumptions ignores both its institutional resilience and the complexity of regional geopolitics. Sectarian divisions, entrenched alliances and proxy networks mean that destabilization in Tehran would not remain contained. It could rapidly spill across borders and harden into prolonged confrontation.

A region wired for escalation

Iran has invested heavily in asymmetric capabilities precisely to deter and complicate external intervention. Its missile, drone and naval systems are embedded along the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint for global energy — and linked into a network of regional allies and militias.

In the current escalation, Tehran has already launched retaliatory missile and drone strikes against US military bases and allied territories in the Gulf, hitting locations in Iraq, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (including Abu Dhabi), Kuwait and Qatar in direct response to US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s cities, including Tehran, Qom and Isfahan. 

Explosions have been reported in Bahrain and the UAE, with at least one confirmed fatality in Abu Dhabi, and several bases housing US personnel have been struck or targeted, underscoring how the conflict has already spread beyond Iran’s borders

A full-scale regional war is now more likely than it was a week ago. Miscalculation could draw multiple states into conflict, inflame sectarian fault lines and disrupt global energy markets. What might have remained a contained nuclear dispute now risks expanding into a wider geopolitical confrontation.

What about Trump’s promise of no more forever wars?

Trump built his political brand opposing “endless wars” and criticizing the Iraq invasion. “America First” promised strategic restraint, hard bargaining and an aversion to open-ended intervention. Escalating militarily at the very moment diplomacy was advancing sits uneasily with that doctrine and revives questions about the true objectives of US strategy in the Middle East.

If a workable nuclear framework was genuinely emerging, abandoning it in favor of escalation invites a deeper question: does sustained tension serve certain strategic preferences more comfortably than durable peace?

Trump’s Mar-a-Lago address announcing the strikes carried unmistakable echoes of George W. Bush before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Military action was framed as reluctant yet necessary – a pre-emptive move to eliminate gathering threats and secure peace through strength. The rhetoric of patience exhausted and danger confronted before it fully materializes closely mirrors the language Bush used to justify the march into Baghdad.

The parallel extends beyond tone. Bush cast the Iraq war as liberation as well as disarmament, promising Iraqis freedom from dictatorship. Trump similarly urged Iranians to reclaim their country, implicitly linking force to regime change. In Iraq, that fusion of shock and salvation produced not swift democratic renewal but prolonged instability. The assumption that military force can reorder political systems from the outside has already been tested – and its costs remain visible.

The central challenge now facing the US is not simply Iran’s military capability. It is credibility. Abandoning negotiations mid-course signals that diplomacy can be overridden by force even when progress is visible. That perception will resonate far beyond Tehran.

Peace was never guaranteed. It was limited and imperfect, focused primarily on nuclear constraints rather than human rights or regional proxy networks. But it was plausible – and closer than many assumed. Breaking the bridge while building it does more than halt a single agreement – it risks convincing both sides that negotiation itself is futile.

In that world, trust erodes, deterrence hardens and aggression – not agreement – becomes the default language of international power. What we are witnessing is yet another clear indication that the rules-based order has been consigned to the history books. 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bamo Nouri is an Honorary Research Fellow, Department of International Politics, at City, St George’s, University of London. CounterPunch

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Without Congress' Approval, Trump Launches an Illegal War Against Iran

 

Donald Trump announced in the early hours of Saturday morning that the US has launched a massive military operation aimed at toppling the Iranian government as blasts were reported in Tehran, including near the offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Israel, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is taking part in the assault. Unnamed Israeli security sources told Channel 12 that Israel and the Trump administration are “going all in” against Iran as Trump instructed Iranians to “stay sheltered,” warning that “bombs will be dropping everywhere.” People were seen seeking cover in Tehran as the US and Israeli bombs began to fall.

The assault, dubbed “Operation Epic Fury” by the Pentagon, comes days after the US and Iran took part in talks in Geneva, which Trump’s envoys characterized as “positive.” In announcing military action on Saturday, Trump said falsely that the Iranian government has “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions.”

The US and Israeli attacks—which both nations characterized as “preemptive”—are plainly illegal under international law, which prohibits the threat or use of force except in response to an armed attack. The Trump administration is also violating US law, which gives Congress the sole power to declare war.

“The term ‘preemptive’ is pure propaganda,” wrote Drop Site journalist Jeremy Scahill. “The US once again used the veneer of negotiations as a cover to bomb Iran. Tehran had just offered terms that went far beyond the 2015 nuclear deal. What was preempted was diplomacy. The same propaganda tactics used in the 2003 Iraq war.”

Trump, who ditched the 2015 nuclear deal during his first White House term, repeatedly made clear in his remarks Saturday that he does not intend the new assault on Iran to be limited in scope like his bombings of Iranian nuclear sites last year. 

In the weeks leading up to Saturday’s attack, the Trump administration carried out a massive military buildup in the Middle East even as the president publicly claimed he was open to a diplomatic resolution.

“We may have casualties,” the US president said of American troops. “That often happens in war. But we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future.” Trump also urged the Iranian armed forces to surrender or “face certain death” as the US fired Tomahawk cruise missiles and other munitions at Iran.

The Iranian government’s immediate response to Saturday’s onslaught was a pledge of “crushing retaliation” and a wave of drone and missile attacks on Israel. The Associated Press reported that “hours after the strikes on Iran, explosions rocked northern Israel as the country worked to intercept incoming Iranian missiles.”

Iran’s foreign minister later informed his Iraqi counterpart that Iran would be targeting US military installations in the region in retaliation for Saturday’s attacks.

A spokesperson for the Iranian military declared that “we will teach Israel and America a lesson they have never experienced in their history. Any base that helps America and Israel will be the target of the Iranian armed forces,” the official added.

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

"If you’ve studied history — and you know I have — that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up"

Steve Bannon told an audience: “And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms … some in this room are going to prison – myself included.”

Now, it looks like Trump and the people around him are seriously considering declaring an emergency to let them seize control of this November’s elections, according to reporting yesterday in The Washington Post: “Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”

Donald Trump and the lickspittles and criminals he’s surrounded himself with are in a panic. If Democrats take the House and/or Senate in this November’s elections, they’ll have the power of subpoena so the regime’s crimes and corruption will be laid out for everybody to see. Some could even go to prison, including Trump himself.

He’s been basically screaming, “Do something!!!” at Republicans for the past year. It started publicly with his demanding that Texas and then other Red states further gerrymander their elections to reduce the number of Democrats in the House.

In Red states they’re purging voters in Blue cities from the rolls like there’s no tomorrow, and the GOP is trying to recruit “election observers” to challenge signatures on mail-in ballots on an industrial level. As reporter Greg Palast pointed out, this is how Trump took the White House in 2024; if it hadn’t been for over 4 million (mostly Black) fully qualified US citizens being purged or having their ballots rejected after technical challenges, Kamala Harris would be our president today.

But given how badly Trump’s doing in the polls today, even all these efforts don’t look like they’ll be enough to keep the House and Senate in Republican hands. So now Trump toadies like Jerome Corsi (the creator of the Birther movement and the Swift Boat slurs, who’s been a guest on my program multiple times) have an idea: just imitate what Putin, Orbán, Hitler, and other dictators have done to hang onto power when they get unpopular: declare an emergency and use it to rig the election.

Yesterday, The Washington Post detailed how MAGA-aligned activists are now openly discussing manufacturing or exaggerating a national emergency to justify Trump’s agents in the federal government to interfere in this November’s elections.

These aren’t fringe anonymous trolls on some obscure message board; they’re people operating in proximity to the president of the United States. Corsi arguably destroyed John Kerry’s chances in 2004 and lit the Birther fuse that catapulted Trump into political fame. And they’re floating the idea that if normal democratic processes don’t produce the “right” outcome, they could help create a fake crisis to seize control of the election nationally.

If you’ve studied history — and you know I have — that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up. Because this isn’t new, creative, or even uniquely American: it’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

In 1933, Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, went up in flames at the hands of a mentally ill Dutch communist who was probably maneuvered into the act by the Nazis. Adolf Hitler declared it “proof” of an existential communist threat. Civil liberties were suspended overnight. Gone in the blink of an eye were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble as Hitler’s goons began to round up his political opponents and throw them into his new concentration camp at Dachau.

Elections were technically still held, but under conditions so distorted they no longer qualified as free or fair in any meaningful sense, and the so-called “temporary” emergency became Hitler’s legal bridge to a permanent dictatorship.

Similarly, in Turkey in 2016, elements of the military tried to pull off a coup against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan while he was out of town. Erdoğan declared a national state of emergency and then kept it in place permanently. Tens of thousands of protestors were arrested. Judges and teachers were purged from their jobs, and media outlets were closed down for being “fake news.”

While emergency rule was in effect, Turkey held an election that transformed its parliamentary democracy into a hyper-presidential system tailored to give virtually all federal power to Erdoğan himself. It was the end of democracy in Turkey.

Vladimir Putin’s rise offers another variation. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings killed hundreds of Russians and the Kremlin blamed Chechen terrorists. The attacks propelled Putin, then a relatively unknown prime minister, into the presidency on a wave of fear and fury.

Putin then declared a state of emergency that expanded his police powers, gave him tighter media control, and let him seize control of the elections process. In the years since then, elections in Russia have become ritual rather than reality. The ballots are printed every few years, and the votes are counted, but the outcome is never in doubt.

Viktor Orbán in Hungary shows yet another model. He declared a “state of crisis” over migration by Syrian refugees in 2015 and kept renewing it long after migration levels collapsed. During the COVID pandemic, he got the parliament to give him the authority to rule by decree on an indefinite basis; it’s still in effect.

As a result, elections still happen (there’s one coming up), but the media landscape was completely taken over by Orbán-friendly billionaires (see CBS, WaPo, LA Times, Fox “News,” Sinclair, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, and 1,500 rightwing radio stations). Orbán didn’t need to cancel Hungary’s elections; he simply reshaped the legal and political environment in which they happened.

There’s a common thread in all of this. The crisis wannabe dictators inevitably declare — real, exaggerated, or cynically manipulated — become the justification for seizing extraordinary powers. Those powers narrow dissent, intimidate opponents, and functionally rig the elections.

That’s why this shocking new reporting in The Washington Post is so alarming. When political actors like Corsi begin talking openly about declaring an emergency to override or interfere with elections, they’re not blowing smoke: they’re testing a classic dictator’s narrative.

They’re trying to figure out — and will learn from the national reaction to this Post reporting — whether they can persuade the public that normal election processes are too dangerous to trust. After all, in each of the cases I listed above, the machinery of democracy was used to hollow out democracy itself.

And they may not even have to manufacture an emergency: if Trump can sufficiently provoke Iran, they may activate their proxy network around the world and in the United States, and we could be facing a genuine crisis on the order of 9/11. This is one of the few ways to make sense of today’s massive military buildup in the Middle East.

The danger here isn’t just a fabricated catastrophe or a retaliatory strike by Iran, although those are pretty damn severe. It’s the normalization of the idea that if the electorate appears likely to choose “wrongly,” an emergency can justify changing the rules of democracy.

History shows us, over and over again, that when a nation loses its democracy to an aspiring autocrat, the language and strategy used is always the same. “The nation is under threat.” “The moment is an emergency.” “Normal rules must be suspended — just temporarily — to save the country.” And in every case, “temporary” turned out to be the most dangerous word of all.

We’re now at that moment where influential figures are publicly contemplating that path, and the lesson from history isn’t subtle. The real emergency, in a constitutional republic, begins when leaders like Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan and Trump — and their toadies like Corsi, Bondi, Noem, and Gabbard — decide that elections themselves are the problem.

Multiple observers have noted that this plan is grossly unconstitutional. But so were Trump’s tariffs (which also used IEEPA emergency authority as their rationale), and the Supreme Court let him run with them for almost a year before stopping him.

Similarly, ICE goons kicking in people’s front doors and smashing their car windows to drag them off without a judicial warrant is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, but Trump’s agents continued to do it every day. Something being against the law or the Constitution has never stopped our convicted felon/rapist/insurrectionist president in the past.

This plot will only be stopped if it’s widely reported and an outraged public rises up in opposition. Call (202-224-3121) your elected representatives — Democratic and Republican — and let them know you’re onto this plot and won’t tolerate it. And that if they have any fidelity left to the Constitution and American values, they won’t either.

-Thom Hartmann

 

Epstein discussed seeding a “super-race of humans with his DNA”

 

It’s well known that Jeffrey Epstein was a super-wealthy pedophile with an extraordinary network of powerful friends: tech billionaires, politicians and academics. But few people know that he was also a transhumanist — someone who believes that we should use advanced technologies to reengineer the human organism, thus creating a new “posthuman” species to rule the world.

Transhumanism, despite the idealistic ring that “humanism” brings to its name, is a radical version of eugenics. In the 20th century, eugenicists argued that if selective breeding can create new subspecies of domesticated animals, like the many varieties of dogs that roam our houses, then it can also create new varieties of optimized human beings. Transhumanism goes a step further, by aiming to create an entirely new species — posthumans, whom transhumanists imagine as being superior to humanity as we know it.

The contemporary transhumanist movement is deeply problematic for a variety of reasons. In addition to promoting a form of eugenics — which would be bad enough — one finds toxic attitudes like sexism, racism, ableism, classism, elitism, misogyny and xenophobia everywhere one looks within the community.

As I previously reported in Truthdig, one of the most influential transhumanists, Nick Bostrom, once wrote an email to fellow transhumanists in which he declared that “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and then wrote the N-word.

It turns out that, in addition to the transhumanist project being mostly pseudoscientific, this movement also has far more extensive connections to Epstein than previously known. Some prominent transhumanists appeared to be close friends with Epstein, even defending him in private emails against the media reporting on his pedophilia.

Epstein funded transhumanist organizations like Humanity+ and the Singularity Institute and discussed “designer babies” with other transhumanists like bitcoin investor Bryan Bishop. He claims to have known Ray Kurzweil, and was buddies with Kurzweil’s close associate, Peter Diamandis, his fellow co-founder of the Singularity University.

Emails also show correspondences between Epstein and leading transhumanists like Aubrey de Grey and Ben Goertzel, as well as meetings with Bryan Johnson and Eliezer Yudkowsky. Some of these men, such as de Grey and Johnson, have themselves been accused of sexual misconduct.

One area where Epstein’s transhumanist predilections were apparent is in cryonics, an unproven technique that aims to resurrect dead people who’ve been cryogenically frozen after death. It is very popular among transhumanists, many of whom have signed up with the cryonics company Alcor to have their corpses frozen, including Peter Thiel and Goertzel.

Epstein reportedly spoke with fellow transhumanists about cryogenically freezing his body — specifically his head and penis. 

When the technology becomes available in the future, as cryonics enthusiasts expect it will, companies like Alcor will unfreeze the cryogenized corpses in their warehouse to either be joined with new physical bodies or to be scanned and “uploaded” to a computer, where one could then live forever as a disembodied digital mind. 

Even better than being resurrected, though, is never dying in the first place. This is what Johnson, a millionaire transhumanist, is trying to do through an elaborate regime of health interventions, including taking more than 100 supplements each day and measuring his nocturnal erections. “If you’re not having robust boners at night,” Johnson claims, “you’re 70% more likely to die prematurely.” In 2017, a mutual acquaintance introduced Epstein to Johnson, noting that both have shared interests in transhumanism. This resulted in a Zoom meeting between the two.

The following year, Epstein made contact with another prominent transhumanist: the longevity researcher de Grey, who wrote to Epstein: “Jeff, great to e-meet you — have we met before? Anyway, let’s see if there are ways we can work together. I bet there are” (slightly edited for clarity). The two appear to have met over Skype in late 2018. 

However, if personal immortality is not attainable, there’s another option: achieving a kind of vicarious immortality by passing one’s genes on to the next generation. In fact, Epstein discussed seeding a “super-race of humans with his DNA.” Despite the pervasive typos and grammatical errors in his emails, Epstein clearly saw himself as a genius. By spreading his genes throughout the population, he imagined spawning a new demographic of descendants who shared his supposed brilliance.

The alleged plan was to use his ranch in New Mexico, dubbed the Zorro Ranch, to impregnate up to 20 women at a time. According to Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist who met Epstein once and refused an offer for funding, Epstein hosted dinner parties with influential academics, including “attractive women,” “to screen candidates to bear Mr. Epstein’s children.” 

So far as we know, this plan was never implemented, though The Guardian reports that New Mexico “Attorney General Raúl Torrez has ordered that the criminal investigation into allegations of illegal activity at Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch be reopened.”

Like Epstein, Elon Musk seems to be trying to seed a superior race of humans through his sperm. As the bioethicist Xavier Symons writes, “We do not know exactly how many children Elon Musk has fathered, but there are at least fourteen. Those close to Musk say the number is much higher than what is publicly known.” Symons continues: “He would appear to see himself as a founding figure in an imperial dynasty.” He imagined spawning a new demographic of descendants who shared his supposed brilliance.

Epstein also expressed interest in biohacking, which involves genetically modifying one’s DNA using biotechnology for the purposes of “human enhancement.” Transhumanism and biohacking are closely related…  

Emile P. Torres, Truthdig, for the complete article:

Jeffrey Epstein: The Transhumanist Pedophile Who Hoped to Live Forever

Trump Administration’s New Healthcare Plans Could Slap Families With $31,000 Deductibles

The Trump administration is proposing new regulations for healthcare plans purchased through Affordable Care Act exchanges that, on the surface, could offer patients lower monthly premiums. 

However, the New York Times reported on Thursday that these plans would make up for the lower premiums by charging deductibles as high as $15,000 for individuals and $31,000 for families, meaning that people on these plans would have to pay significant up-front costs should they get sick before getting any benefit from having insurance.

For perspective, the Times noted that these deductibles would be “eight times the average for someone with job-based insurance.” Health experts who spoke with the Times were blunt about these plans’ prospects for success. “Nobody wants that product,” Harvard health economist Amitabh Chandra said. “It’s going to be a really cheap product that nobody wants.”

Dr. Joseph Betancourt, president of the Commonwealth Fund, told the Times that the plans being mulled by the administration would push greater assumption of risk onto patients and away from insurers. “There’s no doubt that we have an affordability crisis,” he said. “As we move forward to shifting more of the burden to patients, there’s a chance to really exacerbate the crisis.”

Katherine Hempstead, senior policy adviser for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told the Times that the cheaper Trump plans are “normalizing hardship, and... normalizing catastrophe” by creating a form of health insurance that offers even less coverage than the cheapest plans available on the exchanges.

The high-deductible plans are being pushed by Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz, who made headlines earlier this year by saying the goal of the Trump administration’s healthcare policy was to have Americans be healthy enough so they could stay at work for at least an extra year before retiring.

“If we can get the average person... to work one more year in their whole lifetime, just stay in your workplace for one more year,” Oz said during an interview on Fox Business, “that is worth about $3 trillion to the US GDP.”

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is widely expected to seek the presidency in 2028, pounced on the report about the high-deductible plans. “[Trump’s] economic agenda is simple,” Newsom wrote in a social media post, “force hard working families to pay more and give billionaires a tax break.”

Johanna Maska, a former aide to President Barack Obama, expressed disbelief that this was Republicans’ long-promised replacement plan for the ACA. “A $31,000 deductible is unacceptable,” she wrote. “This is the Republican long awaited plan? This is not healthcare that helps Americans.”

-Brad Reed, Common Dreams

“Send Them Back” Is the Oldest Racial Taunt in History, and Now It’s Being Amplified by Trump

 

Donald Trump didn’t merely criticize his political opponents this week, both at the SOTU and from his office yesterday morning. He went on a racist rant that would have embarrassed a talk radio shock jock (if it didn’t get them fired), much less a head of state.

After Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib shouted “shame” and “liar” during his State of the Union and walked out in protest, Trump took to social media to sneer that they had “the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people” and were “LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick” who “look like they should be institutionalized.”

He labeled them “Low IQ” — his favorite slur for women, Black, and Hispanic people — and suggested they be sent back “from where they came.” He lumped in Robert De Niro as “Trump Deranged,” “demented,” and possibly “criminal” for criticizing him.

This is the president of the United States talking. This may have been normal politics in the old Confederacy — which Trump is trying to revive with his base naming and statues and purging Black history from museums and monuments — but it shouldn’t be normal today.

This is an elderly man — whose father was busted in a Klan rally and who himself was busted in the 1970s for refusing to rent to Black people — now occupying the Oval Office and responding to dissent with language that sounds like it was scraped from the darkest, most disgusting corners of the internet.

When Trump tells elected racial-minority members of Congress to “go back where they came from” — US citizens who’ve sworn an oath to defend the Constitution — and trash-talks well-known and respected public figures like De Niro this way, he’s using the oldest dictator’s trick in the book: he’s trying to dehumanize them.

And when he says they should be sent overseas “as fast as possible,” he’s invoking one of the ugliest refrains in American history, the taunt racists have hurled at people of color for generations to tell them they don’t really belong in our nation.

Ilhan Omar came to this country as a refugee and went through the arduous and lengthy process to become a US citizen. Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit. Yet Trump’s first racist instinct when confronted by two outspoken women of color is to question their right to be here at all.

That’s not an accident; it’s an ancient political strategy rooted in dividing people and turning them against each other. He wants his followers to hate them, and then to act on that hate, making them fearful and putting their lives at risk.

He knows his followers tried to kill Obama, Biden, Pence, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and actually killed a state legislator in Minnesota and her husband, a federal judge’s son, and others. He knows that by painting Tlaib, Omar, and De Niro as alien, unhinged, and dangerous, he can activate that part of his base that regularly acts on grievance and fear with violence.

This is Blackshirt and Brownshirt politics for the 21st century. It’s pure, unadulterated hate, and should be beneath any elected official. But, of course, this is Donald Trump, for whom there’s no floor beneath which he and his Republican lickspittles can’t sink.

He called his long, boring, rambling, lie-filled State of the Union speech an “important and beautiful event” and accused them of ruining it with their protests. But democracy isn’t a pageant like his old Miss Teen USA contests (that are accused of feeding the Epstein machine). It’s not a royal court where subjects must sit quietly while the monarch speaks (or walks into their dressing rooms while they’re naked).

Members of Congress are not props. They’re co-equal representatives of We the People. If they believe a president or anybody else is lying or has harmed their constituents (and Trump’s ICE goons murdered two of Omar’s constituents in cold blood), they have every right to say so, to do it loudly, and to suffer the consequences like removal or censure if they come.

The Founders and Framers of the Constitution didn’t design a system to protect a president’s feelings. They designed one to protect liberty. Trump’s attack on Robert De Niro follows the same playbook. De Niro criticized his fascist-like behavior and Trump responded by calling him “sick and demented” with an “extremely Low IQ,” hinting that some of what he said was “seriously CRIMINAL.”

“Criminal.” For speech. In America! That word should chill to the bone anyone who cares about the First Amendment and our most basic freedoms. When Trump toys with the idea that criticism of him could be prosecuted, he’s not joking any more than Putin did in the months before he started arresting protestors. He’s testing the boundaries of what his followers in Congress and what’s left of our system of justice will accept.

And then, almost as an afterthought, Trump boasted that “America is now Bigger, Better, Richer, and Stronger than ever before.” “Richer” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Yes, the top sliver of this country is now, as a result of 45 years of Republican tax cuts, staggeringly wealthy. Billionaires saw their fortunes explode with the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts. Corporate profits have soared because of Republican deregulation and the destruction of our union movement.

But for working families staring down sky-high rents, unaffordable health care, crushing student loans, stagnant wages, and grocery bills that don’t match their paychecks, Republicans bragging about unprecedented riches among their Epstein-billionaire donor class rings hollow.

We’re living through an affordability crisis caused by Republican policies. More than half of Americans are one emergency away from financial ruin. Young people wonder if they’ll ever own a home. Parents juggle two or three jobs and still fall behind. If this is what Trump’s “richer than ever” looks like, it’s a prosperity reserved for a gilded few while the rest of us tread water.

Any president with a moral compass would acknowledge that reality. He’d understand that leadership requires more than chest thumping and name calling. The office carries a responsibility to elevate the national conversation, not drag it into the gutter. It requires the maturity to accept that in a diverse republic, people will disagree, sometimes loudly, sometimes angrily, and that’s a sign of a healthy democracy.

That diversity is not a flaw in the American experiment: it’s its genius. A democracy that includes Somali refugees turned lawmakers, Palestinian American women from Detroit, Hollywood actors, rural conservatives, urban progressives, people of every color and creed, is a democracy that reflects the real America. And, apparently, the America that Republicans once embraced but today the GOP now hates.

A clash of perspectives and approaches is how we fine-tune our ideas and correct mistakes. It’s how we prevent a concentration of power from calcifying into naked tyranny.

When Trump calls dissenters “lunatics” and tells them to “go back where they came from,” he’s attacking that very foundational American principle. He’s signaling that only certain voices — specifically those of wealthy white Christian men — are legitimate. That they’re only “real” Americans who count.

History teaches us where that road leads, and it doesn’t end in strength. It ends in repression, decay, and the ultimate destruction of the republic itself, which is most likely why Putin probably encourages Trump in this sort of thing during their regular phone conversations.

The bigger picture here is about more than one bizarre, racist, hateful rant among many. It’s about the playbook that authoritarians across the world have used for generations to fracture democracies from within.

When people are anxious about their jobs, their bills, and their futures, an aspiring strongman doesn’t calm those fears with honest solutions; he redirects them. He points at the “other” and says, “There’s your problem!” The immigrant. The Muslim woman in Congress. The Black lawmaker. The outspoken actor.

He tells us to be afraid of each other, so we won’t question how Reagan Revolution Republican policies of the past 45 years are crushing working people.

Trump’s words matter because they’re not just insults. They’re signals. When a president calls political opponents “lunatics,” suggests they should be “institutionalized,” or tells American citizens to “go back where they came from,” he’s normalizing hate and exclusion, the “othering” of his opponents.

That poison seeps into public life and erodes the traditional American shared understanding that no matter how fierce our disagreements, we’re all equal citizens under the law. Democracy can’t survive if we start treating dissent as treason and diversity as a threat, which is exactly why Trump is doing this. Like his mentor Putin, whose picture he just hung in the White House along with Washington and Jackson, he hates democracy and has said as much over and over again.

America is strongest when it refuses that dictator’s trap, when it expands the circle of American belonging instead of narrowing it. The real danger to our country isn’t Omar’s loud protest or De Niro’s sharp criticism. It’s America being stuck with a leader who lives and breathes hate, fear, and division, who wants us to see our neighbors as our enemies, and a party that’s so terrified of him that they back everything he does and says, no matter how grotesque.

That sort of fear-stoking and poisonous hatred doesn’t make America bigger or better. It makes us smaller, angrier, and — as Trump and Putin want — easier to divide and thus control.

-Thom Hartmann

The war “won’t end until the Russians agree to stop fighting"

Four years ago, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin launched a “special military operation” involving dozens of missiles strikes on Ukrainian cities before dawn. In 1994, in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, Russia, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, agreed not to use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up the Soviet stockpile of nuclear weapons left in Ukraine after the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991. At the time, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. Russia violated that agreement when it invaded in 2014 after Ukrainians threw out Russia-backed oligarch Viktor Yanukovych.

Putin had been eyeing Ukraine’s industrialized region since at least summer 2016, when Russian operatives told then-candidate Donald J. Trump that they would help Trump win the White House if he would look the other way when Russia installed Yanukovych to govern a new “autonomous” republic there. Two days before he invaded in 2022, Putin recognized “new republics” in Ukraine and then, in his announcement of his invasion, claimed he had to protect the people there from “persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime.” He called for “demilitarization” of Ukraine, demanding that soldiers lay down their weapons and saying that any bloodshed would be on their hands.

Putin called for the murder of Ukrainian leaders in the executive branch and parliament and intended to seize or kill those involved in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which sought to turn the country away from Russia and toward a democratic government within Europe, and which itself prompted a Russian invasion. Putin planned for his troops to seize Ukraine’s electric, heating, and financial systems so the people would have to do as he wished. The operation was intended to be lightning fast.

But rather than collapsing, Ukrainians held firm. The day after Russia invaded, Zelensky and his cabinet recorded a video in Kyiv. “We are all here,” he said. “Our soldiers are here. The citizens are here, and we are here. We will defend our independence…. Glory to Ukraine!” When the United States offered the next day to transport Zelensky outside the country, where he could lead a government in exile, he responded: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

During his first term, Trump had weakened the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that stood against Russian aggression, but once President Joe Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked quietly to strengthen NATO and ties with other allies and partners. They rallied the G7 (the world’s seven wealthiest liberal democracies), the European Union, and others to supply Ukraine with weapons and humanitarian assistance. Under Biden, the U.S. led the international response, providing about $50 billion in military aid and about $53 billion in humanitarian aid, as well as coordinating aid from allies and partners.

The U.S. and allies and partners also united behind extraordinary economic sanctions, including, on February 26, 2022, the exclusion of Russian banks from SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. SWIFT is a Belgian-based network that enables banks to transfer payments across international borders, and its ban on Russian banks isolated Russia’s economy.

Over the next three years, Ukraine’s stand against Russia boosted the morale of those defending their own countries against invaders and, in turn, captured the imagination of people around the world hoping to stem the rise of authoritarianism. Ukraine’s society transformed to bring the power of civilians as well as soldiers behind the war effort. The Ukraine army grew to be the largest in Europe, with a million people, even as Russian attacks killed civilians as well as soldiers and destroyed hospitals, infrastructure, and the energy sector. Ukraine became the global leader in drone technology, while Russia’s economy faltered and its front lines dug in.

Last year, foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum wrote: “The only way Putin wins now is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war…by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine…and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either.”

Indeed, while Americans supported Ukraine, Trump never wavered from his support for Russia. Although a bipartisan majority in Congress would have passed more funding for Ukraine, after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, Trump loyalist House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refused to bring Ukraine funding to the floor for a vote.

Then, in December 2023, MAGA Republican lawmakers said they would not pass a new measure to fund Ukraine’s assistance without measures strengthening the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Senators wrote the measure they demanded, only to have Trump urge his congressional supporters to kill it in order to keep the issue of immigration alive for the 2024 election.

By the time Congress finally passed a measure appropriating $60 billion in aid for Ukraine in April 2024, the lack of funding for six months had helped shift the war in Russia’s favor.

Once Trump was back in the White House, the U.S. position changed dramatically. As a team from the Wall Street Journal later explained, even before Trump took the oath of office, Putin was reaching out to Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real-estate developer with no experience in diplomacy, to negotiate over Ukraine. In February, Witkoff went to Moscow to meet with Putin without a translator and without being briefed by the CIA.

On February 12, 2025, the day after Witkoff returned, Trump talked to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out from the “highly productive” call parroting Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine. Two days later, Vice President J.D. Vance used the Munich Security Conference to attack Europe and its democratic values while declining to acknowledge the threat of Russian aggression, indicating that the U.S. would no longer stand with Ukraine. Days later, a readout of a call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov suggested that Russia was in dire need of relief from economic sanctions.

Then, on February 28, 2025, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance ambushed Ukraine president Zelensky in an Oval Office meeting that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia. The American leaders spouted Russian propaganda, trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire on Russia’s terms and signing over rights to Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals, while accusing him of being “ungrateful” for U.S. support. Zelensky didn’t take the bait, and Trump ended up furiously defending Putin before walking out. Shortly after, Zelensky and his team were asked to leave the White House.

In August, Trump met Putin, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, on U.S. soil, greeting him in Alaska on a literal red carpet and clapping as Putin walked to greet him, before taking him alone into the presidential limousine to drive to the meeting site. Trump has placed a photograph from that meeting on display in the White House.

Putin’s attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine have increased dramatically since Trump took office, even as Witkoff has been negotiating officially for an end to the war and quietly over deals on oil, gas, and perhaps minerals. In April the U.S. appeared to back a plan that essentially gave Russia all it wanted, including the Ukrainian land it had invaded. Since then, the administration’s ongoing “negotiations” with Russia resulted in demands of major concessions from Ukraine but none from Russia. Those talks are ongoing, now with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner involved, although as recently as last week, Russia had not wavered from its demands for Ukraine’s territory.

Today, landmark buildings across the world that were lit up in blue and yellow to show support for Ukraine included the Council of the European Union and European Commission buildings in Brussels, Belgium; Canada’s Parliament and the Office of the Prime Minister in Ottawa; the Freedom Monument in Riga, Latvia; The Colosseum in Rome, Italy; the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France; the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany; the Tower of Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, Denmark; Sebitseom in Seoul, South Korea; and the Empire State Building in New York City, New York. European leaders vowed to “stand firm” with Ukraine, and the United Nations General Assembly voiced support for Ukraine, passing a resolution saying it was committed to “the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.” The U.S. abstained.

The sudden switch of the U.S. away from its traditional allies in favor of Russia has dramatically reordered the globe. With the U.S. stepping back, Russia has provoked European countries by sabotaging their infrastructure and sending drones over their airspace. Applebaum recently told Il Foglio that Trump’s stance has shocked Europeans into a determination to shed its former reliance on the U.S. and to be self-sufficient in terms of defense, to develop its own technology companies, to build a stronger industrial sector, and to integrate financial markets more fully. As U.S. funding for Ukraine has all but disappeared, Europe is stepping up, although as Nick Paton Walsh of CNN noted today, not as fast as it needs to in order to stop Russia’s aggression.

At the end of its fourth year of war, Russia is weakened enough that the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assesses today that “Putin’s mismanagement of the war and Ukraine’s resistance now confront Putin with challenging, uncomfortable, and unpopular decisions about the war’s force generation requirements and the Russian economy.” The need for more money and more men to fight will be unpopular in the midst of an unpopular war in which Russia has recently been losing territory, and the ISW assesses that Kremlin officials are already trying to mitigate domestic backlash.

In her interview with Applebaum in Il Foglio, Paola Peduzzi noted that “[t]he Ukrainians have suffered the most from America’s distortion, because we measure the transatlantic divorce in money and they in black bags: since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Ukrainian civilian deaths have increased by 31 percent compared to 2024, and by 70 percent compared to 2023.”

Applebaum told Peduzzi that Russia is not winning the war but said the war “won’t end until the Russians agree to stop fighting, and they haven’t yet, nor have they ever said they want to. So, the war can’t end: the Ukrainians are defending their land and can’t stop, even if they wanted to.”

“Ukrainians have changed the way they wage war; they no longer ask when it will end, but only how,” Peduzzi wrote. She concluded: “Ukrainians are saving us all, and unlike us, they don’t even ask us to say thank you.”

—Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American

Notes:

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-documents-report-volume5.pdf (p. vi, 99).

https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl (pp. 139–140).

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/24/world/russia-ukraine-putin

https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/breaking-putin-bombs-kyiv-declares-war-blasts-rock-major-cities/

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2022/02/russia-launches-heavy-attack-deep-ukraine-deep-ukraine-putin-warns-world-not-interfere/362368/

https://www.axios.com/2022/02/24/putin-delares-war-on-ukraine

https://www.businessinsider.com/putins-suit-war-declaration-ukraine-possibly-pre-taped-2022-2

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/europe/ukraine-zelensky-evacuation-intl/index.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/president-zelenskyy-posts-defiant-selfie-video-from-ukraine-s-capital-134062661977

https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_departments/Parliamentary_Library/Research/FlagPost/2022/March/Exclusion_of_Russia_from_SWIFT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/06/republicans-ukraine-funding

https://www.iris-france.org/en/185973-what-lessons-can-we-draw-from-the-vote-on-the-ukraine-aid-bill-that-has-just-been-passed-in-the-united-states/

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/28/tass-oval-office-trump-zelenskyy-00206739

https://apnews.com/article/trump-zelenskyy-vance-transcript-oval-office-80685f5727628c64065da81525f8f0cf

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/putins-three-years-of-humiliation/681810/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/14/jd-vance-stuns-munich-conference-with-blistering-attack-on-europes-leaders

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-be-reintegrated-into-world-economy-if-war-ukraine-ends-orban-says-2025-02-14/

https://www.wsj.com/world/putin-witkoff-russia-envoy-04da229d

https://www.axios.com/2025/04/22/trump-russia-ukraine-peace-plan-crimea-donbas

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgk2mlv2k1ro

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/trump-putin-white-house-photo

https://www.ilfoglio.it/esteri/2026/02/24/news/il-mondo-salvato-dagli-ucraini-conversazione-con-anne-applebaum-8692925/

https://understandingwar.org/research/cognitive-warfare/putins-internet-crackdown-is-rooted-in-weakness-and-a-need-to-demand-greater-war-sacrifices/

https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-23-2026/

https://aje.news/s8q2yx

https://www.kten.com/news/us-abstains-in-un-vote-voicing-support-for-ukraine/article_bc210157-cb0b-58bd-9432-10027fdcd053.html

https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20220227003300315

https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1997596/

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5458252-alaska-summit-trump-putin-disaster/

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5455928-trump-putin-alaska-summit/

Bluesky:

u24.gov.ua/post/3mfn7qrozw22w