Thomas, Reagan, Trump

 

People feel like there’s a darkness that’s spread across America in the 15 months since Trump took office a second time. It’s being noticed all over the world, from the Pope to the leaders of our (formerly) allied nations and is being embraced by dictators like Putin and MBS.

The most corrupt Supreme Court justice in history, Clarence Thomas, who’s taken millions from billionaires and then voted to promote their interests, inadvertently helped us all see clearly the source of this depravity that’s permeated so much of our government at all levels. Last week he gave a speech at the University of Texas, Austin, and blamed the ills of the world (and America) on the rise of “progressivism.”

Thomas blamed progressivism for everything from the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to racial segregation and the eugenics movement that Hitler borrowed from America and Britain to excuse his Final Solution.

In fact, Thomas is following an old tradition that was explained a century ago when arch-conservative propagandist Joseph Goebbels famously said, “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” It’s the foundation of the modern saying, “Every accusation is a confession.”

My father fancied himself a conservative back when I was a kid during the Eisenhower and Kennedy era, but in his mind that simply meant that one doesn’t radically or rapidly change society without first thinking through the consequences in detail and then, when you do decide to make changes to the rules of society, you move forward in measured increments. Conservatively.

At least that’s how Dad explained it to me, and how both Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his then-VP Richard Nixon explained it in their own ways.

Eisenhower, writing to his brother in 1954, warned that any party that tried to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, or other social programs would “disappear,” noting that only “a tiny splinter group” believed such a rollback was even possible. Nixon, two decades later, was just as blunt about the need for pragmatic, incremental governance, famously observing in a 1971 message to Congress that “we are all Keynesians now.”

In other words, the conservatism of that era wasn’t about blowing up the New Deal with its programs of Social Security, the minimum wage, labor protections, funding scientific research and education, etc.; it was about tending it carefully, changing it cautiously, and conserving what worked.

Today’s modern conservative movement, though, isn’t conservative at all, and hasn’t been since the Reagan Revolution: it’s reactionary and, through the two Trump presidencies and the Project 2025 embrace of Orbánism and Putinism, has now become fully fascistic.

It all began in a big way when, in 1954, the Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” decision with Brown v Board of Education, mandating that Black children must participate in racially integrated classrooms.

Petro-billionaire Fred Koch, who’d made his initial fortune in the Soviet Union, was offended and threw major funding into the virulently anticommunist John Birch Society, which was running billboards across America calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren over the Brown decision.

While that impeachment never happened, the movement grew (my dad introduced me to the JBS when I was 13, saying, “You should hear what the crazies are saying”) and soon JBS’ morbidly rich funders decided that paying taxes to fund programs that would benefit “poor people” (aka Black people) was also an abomination just as bad as white kids having to sit with Black kids in public school classrooms.

In 1980, Reagan rode that racist message (along with sabotaging Jimmy Carter by cutting a deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages until after the election) to the White House with millions in dark money support from those same petro-billionaires.

Reagan’s first official campaign stop had been to speak at an all-white county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in 1964. The subject of his speech was “states’ rights,” which everybody knew was code for “let the Southern states continue their segregation programs.”

On the 1980 campaign trail, Reagan told the story of the “strapping young buck” in line at the supermarket upsetting all the hard-working white people when he whipped out his food stamps to pay for his “steak and beer”; it was the male complement to Reagan’s Black “welfare queen” myth. Cut off his food stamps, the logic went, and he’ll be forced to look for gainful employment…even if there were no jobs within miles and white employers wouldn’t then hire Black people.

But Reagan didn’t just talk about stopping affirmative action: he took steps to push America back to the white supremacist 1950s. As The Washington Post noted:

“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began to roll back civil rights protections and legally designated targets for affirmative action hires, thus bringing the politics of reverse discrimination to the White House. Under the now familiar banner of ‘Let’s Make America Great Again,’ Reagan campaigned vigorously against affirmative action in 1980, promising voters he would overturn policies that mandated, in his view, ‘federal guidelines or quotas which require race, ethnicity, or sex . . . to be the principle factor in hiring or education.’”

Clarence Thomas, of course, worked for Reagan back then, doing everything he could to sabotage affirmative action programs. He began hanging out with billionaires in a classic example of, “I’ve got mine, screw you.”

Once the petro-billionaire’s agenda — gut social programs and regulations that protect working class people and children, all to pay for over $38 trillion in tax cuts for themselves — got rolling, other billionaires from other industries jumped on board, funding think tanks, publications, radio and TV stations and networks, universities, and a massive legal effort to pack the courts with Clarence Thomas-type judges and justices.

Because the New Deal — which they were explicitly trying to repeal, root and branch — was so popular, they had to bullshit the American people with an intensity and ferocity that America hadn’t seen since the “Horse and Sparrow” days of the last Gilded Age:

— Tax cuts for billionaires would “trickle down” to workers.
— Unions hurt and rip off their members.
— Regulations stunt economic growth and thus kill jobs.
— Social Security is going broke.
— “Free Trade” will “lift all boats.”
— For-profit schools and prisons do a better job.
— America can’t afford a national healthcare system.
— Corporations are “persons” and should have rights under the Bill of Rights.
— Giving millions to a politician or president isn’t bribery; it’s “free speech.”
— When young people get free college, they don’t value it.
— More CO2 is good for plants and climate change is a hoax.
— Government isn’t the solution to our problems; it is the problem itself.
— Corporate monopolies “increase efficiency” and are thus a good thing.

Once the system got up and running it began to run on autopilot, fueled into hyperdrive by Clarence Thomas’ deciding vote in Citizens United (at the same time he was taking big bucks from the same billionaires the decision freed to bribe judges and politicians). It was spread across America by Limbaugh and an Australian billionaire who made his initial fortune complaining about Black American GIs “raping” white Australian women when US troops were stationed there during WWII.

And now we have a low-IQ nepo-baby psychopath sitting in the White House because he promised a roomful of petro-billionaires and Elon Musk that he’d cut their taxes, kill off green programs, and let Musk dismantle any agency that was investigating him or his businesses. Trump’s so certain of his royal prerogatives that yesterday he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a clip of Frank Sinatra singing My Way.

Like other conservative/fascist movements across history, from Mussolini to Stalin to Hitler to Putin to Orbán — all grounded in first defining an “other” who must be feared and stopped — today’s GOP has morphed into something that Eisenhower and even Nixon wouldn’t recognize.

And now he’s threatening to start World War III, all because neither he nor his nepo-baby son-in-law nor any of the 13 billionaires in his cabinet know the first thing about how to actually negotiate on the world stage.

Although Pope Leo XIV says his remarks weren’t specifically directed at Trump, his claim that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” certainly hits the mark. This is not conservativism, this new “one man above all” ideology that drives today’s GOP. It’s raw, naked evil. And it’s about damn time that Democrats and Americans of good will begin to call it out for what it is.

-Thom Hartmann

Justice According to Trump

The Justice Department has moved to drop the last remaining January 6 insurrection criminal matters: the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys seditious conspiracy cases. It’s a gratuitous move. On the first day of his second term, Trump issued full pardons to more than 1500 people who overran the Capitol on January 6. Then he commuted the sentences of 14 of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers defendants, the people convicted of the most serious January 6-related offense, seditious conspiracy. Getting clemency got them out of prison, but it didn’t erase their convictions.

So earlier this week, Trump’s U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, moved to vacate the convictions of prominent insurrectionists including Stewart Rhodes and Ethan Nordean. She wrote that doing so was “in the interests of justice.”

 

Here’s what that means: The government wants to pretend the indictments didn’t occur and juries never convicted these defendants on some of the most serious charges that can be leveled against people in a democracy. Vacating a conviction means it never happened.

Prosecutors need a judge’s permission to dismiss a case after it has been indicted. These cases are on appeal, and the government filed its request to vacate before the defendant/appellants’ first briefs are due. Pirro explained “The government respectfully requests that, before the defendants are required to file their opening brief, the Court vacate their convictions under 28 U.S.C. § 2106 and remand so that the government may move to dismiss the indictment with prejudice.” A defendant’s conviction isn’t final until it has been affirmed on appeal, and these convictions haven’t been, so it’s still possible to do away with them. The government argues that judges “routinely” grant these types of motions.

One might hope that the judges here will inquire further into precisely how fulfilling the government’s requests serves “the interests of justice.” But rejecting them could easily result in mandamus orders from a higher court requiring the judges to do so. It’s likely Trump will get his way.

This is what Donald Trump does for his friends—the people willing to plot a violent insurrection in hopes he could hold onto power after losing the 2020 election. He treats the people he thinks of as enemies very differently, but the stench of corruption is the same.

The current example is former CIA Director John Brennan—one of the ultimate catches on Trump’s revenge prosecution list. Trump became convinced during his first term in office that Brennan had been involved in some shadowy plot against him, and although nothing in the extensive “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation carried out by then AG Bill Barr and Special Counsel John Durham bore that out, Trump apparently still holds a grudge. Trump has always been sensitive to the 2017 intelligence assessment that found ​Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election in order to help him, and since Brennan was at the CIA when that happened, Trump seems to hold him responsible. The intelligence assessment appears to have been accurate; both the FBI and a bipartisan Senate Committee agreed.

Brennan is now the target of an investigation in the Southern District of Florida, which appears to be amping up, despite the fact that the career prosecutor who has been running that investigation had been resisting “pressure to quickly bring charges against the former CIA director and prominent critic of President Donald Trump,” according to CNN. She reportedly questioned the strength of the evidence and was subsequently removed from the case. She will be replaced by Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. Attorney during the Reagan administration. diGenova is one of the lawyers who helped with Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.

CNN went on to report that the Justice Department said in a statement that it is a routine practice to move attorneys around on cases “so offices can most effectively allocate resources.” The statement continued, “It is completely healthy and normal to change members of legal teams.” That’s unlikely to fool anyone. It’s counterproductive and wasteful of time and deep knowledge about the evidence in a case to make a move like this, and it doesn’t happen in the absence of solid reason. Here, it appears to be happening, as we saw in the Eric Adam’s case in New York, and the cases involving Jim Comey and Letitia James in the Eastern District of Virginia, to remove an unwilling prosecutor and replace her with a more compliant one. We don’t yet know what the potential charges might look like here, and the government seems confident, with the matter proceeding in Judge Aileen Cannon’s district. But it’s hard to imagine there’s anything of substance here.

The polar opposite treatment of these two cases clarifies just how defunct the Justice Department is. During Trump’s first term in office and his bid for reelection, I repeatedly spoke of the danger he posed to our criminal justice system and hence to our democracy, the risk he would turn us into a banana republic where an authoritarian leader uses the criminal justice system to reward his friends and punish his enemies. And here we are. This is what the stakes are in the midterm elections. Because a president who is willing to do all of this—and has a party behind him that is willing to be complicit—will try to do whatever it takes to hold onto power. It’s a moment where no one can afford to stay on the sidelines.

This isn’t about one case or a handful of defendants. It’s about whether the rule of law still has meaning, whether Trump will succeed in eroding it into yet another political tool; applying it differently to people depending on who they are—and whose side they’re on. When a president can make convictions disappear for his allies while leaning on prosecutors to go after his critics, the damage isn’t just theoretical, it’s already happening in front of our eyes. And once that line is crossed, it doesn’t easily uncross itself. It’s on all of us to see it clearly and refuse to look away.

Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse and making it possible, through you subscriptions, for me to write the newsletter.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

Trump Lies

— Trump Moves Toward $20 Billion Iran Deal After Blasting Obama for Far Less. Remember when President Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2015 (which ended their uranium enrichment and led to the release of 4 US hostages they held) and part of the deal was to return $400 million of their own money to them that we’d held frozen for years? Trump went nuts, calling a press conference and saying, “Iran was in big trouble, they had sanctions, they were dying, we took off the sanctions and made this horrible deal and now they’re a power. We paid $400 million for the hostages. Such a bad precedent was set by Obama. … What we’re doing is insane.” Well, it appears that insanity is contagious: multiple sources are reporting that the Trump regime is considering giving the Iranian government as much as $20 billion for the uranium they have. After the deal was reported, Trump claimed it was never serious; did he just get caught? Will it go forward anyway? It’s really impossible to know when Mango Mussolini is so desperate for a way out of his insane, illegal war, so seriously mentally ill, and so deeply unstable… — Is Cuba next? Trump has already commenced violent hostilities and war-making — without congressional authority and without provocation — against Iran, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nigeria and Somalia and now it appears that Cuba will be next. The guy revels in blood, be it watching gladiators bloody each other in UFC fights, watching the daily “blow them up” reels the Pentagon gives him of people he’s killing in small boats in the Caribbean and in Iran, or cheering on Netanyahu’s slaughters in Gaza and now Lebanon. He apparently gets joy from pain and death, like every other psychopathic leader in history. Now we learn that the Pentagon is laying the groundwork for an invasion of Cuba. Because, of course, why not? If nothing else, ‘Lil Marco thinks it’ll help his ‘28 presidential chances, and every Republican in the House and Senate except a small handful have given him complete authority to ignore the Constitution and Congress. He said on Monday, “We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this,” and last month said he hopes to have “the honor of taking Cuba,” adding that he “can do anything I want with it.” This is Caligula-level hubris. Congress must act to reign this in, and then follow it up by impeaching him. — Trump Eyes Billions From IRS in Stunning Cash Grab. Looks like billions of your and my tax dollars are going straight into Trump’s money bin. An IRS official leaked some of Trump’s tax information to the press years ago, so now he’s suing the IRS for $10 billion for his pain and suffering. Instead of fighting the lawsuit, the agency — which falls under the Executive Branch and is headed up by Trump’s billionaire New York real estate buddy Scott Bessent, who works for Trump — is now “negotiating” with Trump to decide how many millions or billions they’ll give him to make the lawsuit go away. As he said in a moment of cynical candor: “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself. We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care, because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.” Right. Like the children’s cancer charity he and Eric stole from? Or the phony Trump Foundation that gave a big bribe to Pam Bondi when she began to investigate his phony university back when she was Florida AG, and then was shut down with a court order that all 3 of his children take classes in how to not scam people with nonprofits? Can you imagine the media meltdown if a Democrat had done something like this? They swooned for a week when Obama wore a tan suit… — Is the Grocery Aisle the New Front Line of Economic Crisis? The recession is real: people are using credit to buy groceries. About a third of Buy Now Pay Later users (29 percent) are using these high-interest short-term credit programs to buy groceries, a big spike up from 14 percent two years ago, with 38 percent of Gen Z’ers saying they’ve done the same. Forty-seven percent of them also report they’ve been late making BNPL payments in the past year since Trump began his “Liberation Day” tariffs and took an axe to our economy. Ten of the last eleven recessions happened during Republican presidencies, almost always following massive tax breaks for billionaires and cuts to benefits for poor and middle-class people. GOP policies are designed to impoverish most Americans while creating an elite upper class; they’re just a reboot of a system that Adam Smith characterized in the 1700s in his book A Theory of Moral Sentiments and have been pushed by billionaires or their equivalent in every generation since. Warren Buffett famously said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” He was right. — Did a Trump Megadonor Just Prove ‘America First’ Was Always Optional? One of Trump’s biggest donors — over $50 million — is moving a small musical instrument factory to China, killing 150 jobs in Eastlake, Ohio. This is, of course, what billionaires do; squeeze every imaginable penny out of everything they touch. Billionaire John Paulson could have just continued to operate the factory he bought — which has supplied brass instruments to high school marching bands for generations — but, hey, he could make a few extra bucks by using cheap Chinese labor instead. His MAGA workers are feeling betrayed with one telling a reporter, “I’m starting to regret my vote for Trump.” Nonetheless, the cult runs deep; five of six MAGA workers who’ll now be unemployed tell reporters they’ll continue to vote for Republicans. After all, they all hate the same (Black, Hispanic, Queer) people, right? And that’s what counts the most… — When an 85-Year-Old Gets Detained, What Does It Say About ICE? France is outraged at ICE brutality against an 85-year-old French woman who’d come to America to marry her wartime sweetheart. Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé came here on a tourist visa and forgot to renew it; ICE busted her and threw her into a hellhole concentration camp for weeks. She was released this week after intervention by the French government, which is furious. Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said she was subject to “acts of violence” and the story is all over the French newspapers. She’d married former American GI Bill Ross, who she’d met in the 1950s at a NATO base in France, and the couple reconnected decades later after both were widowed. She’d started the formal immigration process to get a green card, which may be what flagged ICE that she was in the system (some reports suggest her husband’s son, a former cop, turned her in to get more of his dad’s estate). We’re holding at least 70,000 people, including thousands of children, in these brutal camps with no due process. Meanwhile, ICE is hiring people who’ve been fired by police departments and flunked out of police academies in their effort to get as many masked, armed thugs onto the streets as they can before the election this fall. Fourteen months into his chancellorship, Hitler only had 40,000 people in his detention camps; history tells us where this all goes and it ain’t pretty… The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

"Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has amassed approximately $6.16 billion in assets under management—including $1.2 billion in the past year alone"

 

The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee on Friday morning announced a “sweeping” probe into alleged self-enrichment by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump who has served as a high-profile White House envoy in the Middle East while also, according to Congressman Jamie Raskin, “soliciting billions of dollars from Gulf monarchies for [his] private business ventures.”

In a letter addressed to Kushner, the Maryland Democrat charges that by pushing for investments in his international investment firm, A Fin Management LLC (Affinity), while also serving as “Special Envoy for Peace” for the Trump administration, he has created “a glaring and incurable conflict of interest” in the eyes of the American people.

While Raskin points out that Kushner repeatedly vowed to stay out of government during Trump’s second term and, going further, said he would not raise funds for Affinity during that time, both promises were “quickly” broken.

In April of 2022, the New York Times reported how Kushner had secured a $2 billion investment from a sovereign wealth fund directed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MbS. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, investigations were demanded over accusations that previous financial ties meant that MbS had Kushner “in his pocket.”

According to Raskin’s letter on Friday:

"Mr. Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has amassed approximately $6.16 billion in assets under management—including $1.2 billion in the past year alone—with an extraordinary 99 percent of its funding derived from foreign nationals. These include sovereign wealth funds operated by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. At the same time, Mr. Kushner has assumed a central role in sensitive geopolitical negotiations across the Middle East and beyond.

"Despite explicit public assurances that he would avoid both government service and fundraising during President Trump’s second term, Mr. Kushner has done precisely the opposite. He has inserted himself into the world’s most volatile global conflicts as one of the United States’ chief negotiators all while deepening his financial reliance on, and entanglement with, foreign governments."

Citing the horrific US complicity in Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza as well as Trump’s illegal war of choice against Iran, Raskin’s letter to Kushner charges that “your decision to play completely irreconcilable and unethical dual roles has been haunting American foreign policy since President Trump returned to Washington in 2025.”

Noting that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia remains “your largest investor through Affinity and thus possesses significant financial leverage over” Kushner, Raskin explains to the president’s son-in-law in his letter that “you cannot both be a diplomat and a financial pawn of the Saudi monarchy at the same time; you cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own.”

Due to these concerns, explained Raskin, the House Committee on the Judiciary investigation will probe “your conduct and that of your firm with the goal of learning information critical to reforming our bribery laws, conflict of interest provisions, other statutes and rules governing the conduct of government and special government employees, and FARA.”

Offering a list of requests, the letter demands that Kushner provide a detailed account of his communications with various investment partners and entities related to his business dealings and that of his work as special envoy to the president, with a deadline of April 30 to comply.

“This investigation will be a priority for our committee in the coming period,” Raskin’s letter states. “We expect your full cooperation and that you will provide us with all relevant documents that touch upon how your business interests, family wealth, and governmental duties and missions have merged and converged.”

-Jon Queally, Common Dreams

Thanks to Trump’s Iran War, Big Oil Raking in $30 Million Per Hour in Windfall Profits

 

US President Donald Trump’s unprovoked war of choice in Iran has been a goldmine for the fossil fuels industry, which is earning massive windfall profits thanks to the rise in the price of petroleum.

An analysis published by The Guardian on Wednesday estimated that the 100 biggest oil and gas companies have collectively raked in an extra $30 million per hour since Trump launched his war with Iran without any congressional authorization in late February.

In just the first month of the conflict, The Guardian reported, Big Oil made $23 billion in windfall profits, and the industry is projected to haul in an additional $234 billion in windfall profits by the end of the year if the price of oil stays in the $100 range.

The top beneficiaries of the Iran conflict are Saudi Aramco, which is projected to earn $25.5 billion in windfall profits by the end of the year; Kuwait Petroleum Corp., which is projected to earn $12.1 billion; and ExxonMobil, which is projected to earn $11 billion.

“The excess profits come from the pockets of ordinary people as they pay high prices to fill up their vehicles and power their homes, as well as from businesses incurring higher energy bills,” The Guardian noted. “Dozens of countries have cut fuel taxes to help struggling consumers, meaning those nations, including Australia, South Africa, Italy, Brazil and Zambia, are raising less money for public services.”

The Guardian’s analysis was conducted by climate watchdog Global Witness, using data from intelligence provider Rystad Energy.

Patrick Galey, head of news investigations at Global Witness, told The Guardian that Big Oil’s windfall profits should be a wakeup call to the world about the dangers of relying on fossil fuels.

“Moments of global crisis continue to translate into bumper profits for oil majors while ordinary people pay the price,” Galey said. “Until governments kick their fossil fuel addiction, all of our spending power will be held hostage to the whims of strongmen.”

Climate advocates have for months been calling for a windfall profits tax on Big Oil during the Iran War as a way to retrieve some of the money consumers have lost during the conflict.

Earlier this month, the climate advocacy organization 350.org renewed its previous call to slap fossil fuel companies with a windfall profits tax, and then invest the revenue into renewable energy sources to provide real long-term relief to global consumers.

Beth Walker, an energy policy expert at climate change think tank E3G, also recommended a windfall profits tax with the aim of ending reliance on dirty energy sources.

“Governments should use taxes on windfall profits to accelerate the transition to green energy,” said Walker, “rather than deepen dependence on fossil fuels.”

 -Brad Reed, Common Dreams

 

"“This is an authoritarian government operating as if the president is king"

 

…As Jacob Rosen and Olivia Gazis of CBS News noted, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is supporting Trump’s attacks on those he perceives to be his enemies by sending to the Department of Justice two criminal referrals yesterday. One is for the former government official who was the whistleblower over the July 2019 phone call in which Trump told Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky he would release money the U.S. Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s 2014 incursion…but only after Zelensky did him the “favor” of smearing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The whistleblower told the intelligence community inspector general: “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”

Gabbard’s second referral is for the inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who found the complaint “credible” and “urgent” and set in motion the process of sharing it with the congressional intelligence committees, which led to Trump’s first impeachment.

As Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, noted, the effort to criminalize whistleblowing from 2019 for what was Trump’s well-established behavior is most likely an attempt to chill future whistleblower complaints.

There certainly appears to be concern on the part of MAGA loyalists that they are in danger of losing power, and that might mean legal repercussions. Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee, Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought denied that he had held back funds Congress had appropriated. Doing so is called “impoundment,” and it is illegal, but the administration has been engaged in it since it took office in January 2025.

Vought is a Christian nationalist and a key author of Project 2025, which sets out to dismantle the federal government. Today Vought said his job was to make sure money was spent “consistent with our agenda.” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo: “They absolutely impounded. He just lied to America.” “He has no respect for the American Constitution and the separation of powers,” Merkley said. “This is an authoritarian government operating as if the president is king. And if we want to save our democracy, we have to save ourselves from the strategy that Mr. Vought implemented.” Republican senator Chuck Grassley (IA) also reminded Vought: “Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it.”

[Yesterday] Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted on social media that an opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews and approves surveillance warrants against foreign actors and agents in the U.S., “raises serious concerns about FBI implementation of FISA 702,” the law that allows warrantless surveillance. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) reposted Massie’s comment and added that he, Wyden, has sent “a classified letter to House and Senate colleagues about a secret interpretation of surveillance law that every American should be concerned about.”

This exchange seems to suggest that FBI director Kash Patel has authorized FBI agents to use surveillance on Americans without a warrant, illegally…

-Heather Cox Richardson

 

Impeachment

 

The United States Constitution provides two paths for removing a sitting president from office: impeachment and the procedures outlined in the 25th Amendment. Both approaches are being raised again, and with increasing fervor, as ways to bring an early end to Donald Trump’s second term of chaos, incompetence and corruption. Both are clearly warranted, but structural hurdles built into both render them legally infeasible. 

Instead of looking for a magic bullet in the Constitution to bring Trump down, progressives and anti-Trumpers should concentrate on building a lasting, broad-based and genuine pro-democracy movement. Impeachment hearings and calls for invoking the 25th can play a role in that process, but only an ancillary one. Here’s why.

Impeachment  

The Founding Fathers were well aware of the dangers of unbridled one-man rule. Along with removing the yoke of King George III, they sought to prevent the rise of homegrown tyrants driven by ambition, greed and vanity.  At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, after prolonged debate about the extent of presidential powers and whether the new federal charter should include a provision authorizing the impeachment and removal of the president, the delegates adopted the now-famous clause inscribed in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution that provides, “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” 

To strike a balance between a strong chief executive and what the antifederalists dreaded would eventually devolve into monarchy, they created a two-step process for impeachment. As set forth in Article I of the Constitution, the House of Representatives holds the sole power of impeachment, akin to a grand jury’s authority to return an indictment against a criminal defendant. A simple majority vote is all that is needed to accuse federal officers of committing an impeachable act and send their cases to the Senate, which is given the sole power to try cases of impeachment. In the upper chamber, however, a two-thirds vote (67 senators today if all are present) is needed to sustain a guilty verdict and remove a defendant from office. 

The conventional thinking that Trump will eventually suffer Nixon’s fate has been proven wrong. As it was designed to do, the two-thirds requirement has drastically curtailed the frequency and impact of impeachment. Including Trump, only 21 federal officials have been impeached in our history. Fifteen were judges, two were Cabinet members, and one was a senator. The other three were presidents — Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998 and Trump in 2019 and 2021. All were acquitted by the Senate. To date, there have only been eight impeachment convictions, all handed down against federal judges. 

Trump is often compared to Richard Nixon for his abuse of power, ruthlessness, paranoia and relentless pursuit of revenge against real and imaginary enemies. Both men have also been accused of believing in the “madman theory” of the presidency — the idea that if the president appears to be temperamentally extreme and unhinged, he will be seen as willing to do anything, no matter how vile or illegal, to impose his will.   

But the conventional thinking that Trump will eventually suffer Nixon’s fate has been proven wrong. The Republican Party of the 1970s was tethered to constitutional governance. Today’s GOP has degenerated into a neofascist political cult. Trump has given the party control of all three branches of government, and he has given party leaders permission to be the most authoritarian versions of themselves. The party did not abandon Trump even when presented with overwhelming evidence in his second impeachment trial that he had incited the Jan. 6 insurrection. There is no reason to believe it will abandon him now.

Still, hope springs eternal. On April 6, Democratic Rep. John Larson of Connecticut introduced a resolution to initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump. Drafted by Ralph Nader and constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, the resolution consists of 13 articles that charge Trump with, among other derelictions, violating Congress’ war powers by unconstitutionally initiating wars as a belligerent or co-belligerent against Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Nigeria and Gaza; militarizing domestic law enforcement with deployments of the National Guard; and using Immigration and Customs Enforcement to racially profile citizens and suspected immigrants. 

In a rational country with leaders committed to the rule of law, the resolution would swiftly lead to Trump’s demise. But we are not that country today. 

The 25th Amendment

Ratified in 1967, the 25th Amendment was drafted in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy to clarify the law of succession when the president becomes disabled. According to the first paragraph of Section 4 of the amendment: 

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments [the Cabinet] or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

As Trump continues to unravel, invoking Allah in threats to obliterate Iranian civilization and attacking the pope as too liberal and weak on crime, calls to invoke Section 4 have accelerated. But Section 4 is an even weaker remedy than impeachment. The second and final paragraph of Section 4 instructs that the president can attempt to override a declaration of disability by notifying the Senate and House leadership that no such disability exists. 

Thereafter, the vice president, with the support of either a majority of the Cabinet or “the other body” of the first paragraph, can contest the president’s override. To resolve the conflict and place the vice president in charge, a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress — not just the Senate — is required to confirm that the president is, in fact, “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

The procedures outlined in Section 4 have never been invoked, and it strains credulity to think they will be used against Trump as long as JD Vance is the vice president and the Cabinet is staffed by sycophants and grifters who routinely pledge their loyalty to their dear leader. 

This is not to say that agitating for impeachment or calling for Trump’s removal on 25th Amendment grounds is pointless. But we should not view the avenues for forcing Trump’s early exit as ends in themselves. Rather, they are best seen as organizing tools that can be useful in drawing Americans into a broad-based movement to restore democracy. In Hungary last week, 16 years of authoritarian rule ended with the defeat of Viktor Orbán. It can and must happen here.

-Bill Blum, Truthdig