"He is deranged and dangerous!" Impeach Him!

 

Leaders in California have denounced Donald Trump as “reckless” and “deranged” after the US president suggested Iran could “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego – two liberal cities in the blue state that has been a frequent target of his administration.

At a rally in ruby red Nebraska on Monday night, Trump told supporters that he hoped to see a “tremendous victory” in the fast-approaching November midterm elections. He then suggested high prices due to the war with Iran were a “small price to pay for keeping the world safe – keeping our country safe”.

“They can take out a city,” Trump said in Grand Island. “Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” The crowd applauded. “It’ll be over very soon,” Trump said of the war.

The governor and the cities’ mayors quickly condemned the comments. “After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego,” the California governor, Gavin Newsom, said on X. 

“He is deranged and dangerous.”

Newsom, a Democrat who has repeatedly clashed with Trump over his two terms, said from his press office account: “Let’s be clear: The President is advocating for an attack on 10+ million U.S. residents in two of America’s largest cities. This is not normal. None of this is. And we will continue to remind folks of that every day.”

Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, assailed the president for making what she called “irresponsible threats” that “could potentially compromise” the safety of America’s second-largest city. “The role of a president is to protect the country, not to actively threaten it and encourage attacks on American lives,” she said in a statement.

Todd Gloria, the mayor of San Diego, said his city was “not collateral damage” in the president’s war. “We are not expendable. And we are never a “small price to pay,” he wrote on X “Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”

San Diego, the nation’s eighth-largest city, is home to critical US military infrastructure.

Online, the comments – part of a rambling, nearly hour-and-a-half speech – set off a debate about what the president actually meant. Was it a crude joke about two blue cities or had he, accidentally perhaps, disclosed confidential intelligence about potential Iranian targets?

Some conservative activists argued that Trump, in his elliptical way of speaking, was referring to high gas prices when he argued that it was a “small price to pay”, and not the capacity of Iran to “take out” a US city.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

US defence officials have previously stated that Iran currently lacks the capability to launch a direct missile attack on the US mainland.

Trump has argued in previous speeches that allowing Iran to develop a nuclear weapon would threaten US cities. In his last state of the union speech, he claimed that Iran was working to build missiles that would “soon” reach US soil...

“Thirteen million Californians call LA and San Diego counties home,” said Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee for governor who has sought to take up the anti-Trump mantle carried by the outgoing Newsom. “Their lives are not a ‘small price to pay’ or a punchline for Donald Trump.”

-The Guardian

 

The List of Dread: Elections, Guns, Parental Rights vs. Trans Rights, and Immigration -Joyce Vance

 

I used to joyously await the start of a new term of the Supreme Court and the interesting (in a lawyerly way) issues that were about to consume us for the next nine months. New developments to discuss. Cases and analysis to parse. For a federal prosecutor, there was always something interesting happening.

No more. Now, even though its active shadow docket has made the Court an ever-present feature of American life, without summers off, I approach the first Monday with an unsettled feeling. What will the Court do to us this year?

It’s already taken away Roe v. Wade, allowed dark money to pervade our politics, given Trump a pass from prosecution for January 6, and permitted partisan gerrymanders. How much worse can it get? This term, there are some distinctly unpleasant possibilities.

Everyone else is picking their favorites, or at least their top cases, for the term right now. Instead, I have my list of dread. I’m not here to tell you what undecided petitions I’m eagerly awaiting decisions on. I’m here to assess just how much damage—or major advancement of the conservative hetero-orthodoxy, depending on your perspective—the Court will do this term.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be Civil Discourse if I didn’t remind you that this is one of the reasons it’s so critical to do everything we can to advance Democratic Senate candidates wherever we can. Justice Alito is already teasing a resignation at the end of the term. He told CBS Court reporter Jan Crawford he’d thought about it at the end of the last term but decided there was still more work he could do.

Here, then, is:

The List of Dread

Elections: Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota. Scheduled for oral argument on December 8, Mi Familia Vota tees up two connected issues. The first is really quirky. In a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, the Court ruled in 2013 that an Arizona law that required documentary proof of citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA or Motor Voter Act) and an existing consent decree. 

The law requires Arizona to “accept and use” the federal form for registration, which permits voters who attest under penalty of perjury that they’re citizens to register without showing the actual documents, which of course, many people don’t have readily available.

Arizona looked for a way to get around that decision and ended up creating a dual-track system for registering in which voters without physical proof of citizenship are “federal-only” voters and can’t vote in state elections. The RNC and Arizona lawmakers are arguing that the state has the ability to dictate conditions that apply to state forms. 

When the case is argued, we’ll be listening for whether there are five Justices who believe that either the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA or “Motor Voter Act”) or an existing federal consent decree prevents Arizona from forcing people to show their documents instead of just opening themselves up to criminal prosecution if they lie, as the current system does, in order to be able to vote in state elections.

If there aren’t, states will be able to come up with any number of restrictions that will keep eligible citizens from registering to vote in critical state elections by virtue of making it difficult for some people (for instance, as with the proof of citizenship requirement, those who can’t afford the documents or are transient, etc.)

As if that’s not enough, there’s also a second issue, involving whether the NVRA prohibits Arizona from implementing a program to systematically remove people it suspects of being noncitizens from voter rolls within the 90-day period in advance of the election, which has not been permitted until now. 

We’ve seen how error-prone the federal government is at identifying noncitizens it believes have registered to vote. If the majority accepts this view, it could become infinitely more difficult for voters to stay registered and be able to cast ballots that will be counted.

That’s why Mi Familia Vota tops the list of dread.

Guns: Viramontes v. Cook County & Grant v. Higgins. We talked about this one in June when the Court declined to take a case called Snopes v. Brown that challenged the constitutionality of a Maryland law that banned semiautomatic rifles, including the AR-15. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch wanted to hear the case. Justice Thomas wrote an eight-page dissent from the denial of cert, with which he called the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning that AR–15s are not “arms” protected by the Second Amendment a “surprising conclusion.” 

That’s not the kind of language you use if you intend to continue to ban AR-15s. Justice Kavanaugh did not vote to hear the case; he seemed to want to wait for another one, and he mentioned Viramontes. Now, here we are. When Snopes was rejected, Kavanaugh wrote: “Given that millions of Americans own AR–15s and that a significant majority of the States allow possession of those rifles, petitioners have a strong argument that AR–15s are in ‘common use’ by law-abiding citizens and therefore are protected by the Second Amendment.” 

He concluded, “in my view, this Court should and presumably will address the AR–15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.” All that stands between us and legal AR-15s is whether the other five Justices are willing to stop the madness.

Parental rights versus trans rights: International Partners for Ethical Care, Inc. v. Ferguson is scheduled for oral argument on December 7. This is a case about standing and whether parents whose children are at home with them can sue over what might happen if they run away. Bear with me for a second, although the case is currently just about that threshold issue of whether parents have standing in this situation. If the answer is yes, then the parents will be able to sue to invalidate a Washington state law that lets shelters notify the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families, rather than immediately telling the parents where the child is if that minor child is trying to receive gender-affirming care.

Does the First Amendment protect religious beliefs at the expense of LGBTQ rights: St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy. Colorado law permits religious schools to participate in its universal pre-K program, so long as they follow the same rules as everyone else. But Catholic schools are challenging that, arguing that binding them to follow LGBTQ nondiscrimination rules interferes with their free exercise of their religious beliefs. 

They want an exemption, even as they want to be included in the state-run education program. If there are five votes here (and religion has been trumping other rights and especially LGBTQ rights in a series of cases, including a number out of Colorado), constitutional rights will give way to religious beliefs the Court chooses to elevate.

Immigration and whether the Supreme Court will sign off on letting the Trump administration abandon due process: Last month, the Supreme Court decided the Trump administration could continue with “third country” deportations at least until the Court hears oral argument in DHS v. DVD in December. Only the three liberal Justices dissented, and it’s hard to contemplate why the Court would permit deportations to countries like war-torn South Sudan that the U.S. has deemed too unsafe for Americans to travel to if they were going to tell the administration no after the argument.

This case is about whether people can be sent to unsafe countries they have no prior connection to, may not even speak the language in, where they will potentially face torture, violence, and even death without having the opportunity to ask a court to prevent them from being sent to a specific country where they will be in harm’s way. It’s not about whether they can avoid being deported altogether, just about whether the administration can dump them, for instance, in a war zone, without minimal due process—notice and a hearing—first.

The justices’ ruling means that, at least temporarily, the administration can continue sending people to countries like Equatorial Guinea, where U.S. deportees were hooded, bound and beaten by the police, according to a report in The New York Times. In his brief, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote that the third-country deportation program is “an essential tool to remove certain aliens, including some of the worst criminal aliens.”

The technical issues at argument will be whether the judge who enjoined the due process-less deportations had jurisdiction and whether the administration’s policy violates the Constitution and international protections against torture.

There is plenty to watch on the Court’s docket this term. We’ll read the briefs, listen to oral argument, and of course, discuss what the opinions mean when they are handed down. We’ll figure out what it means for our lives and our democracy.

That work takes time. Civil Discourse isn’t behind a paywall six days a week because I believe everyone should have access to reliable information about what our government is doing and what the law actually says. Paid subscriptions are what make it possible for me to keep it that way.

So, as we begin another Supreme Court term, if you read Civil Discourse regularly and find this work useful, I hope you’ll become a paid subscriber. If you already are one, thank you. You make it possible for everyone—including people who can’t afford to pay—to be part of this community and have access to the information we’ll need in the months ahead.

We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance

 

"Americans...have the power to throw the Trump administration out of office and, together, to build a better nation"

 

On Saturday October 3^rd, the Power to the People festival, organized by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, took over the stage at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. On two stages were rock, alternative, and hip-hop royalty, joining together to remind Americans of their agency to change the future and reclaim American democracy.

The line-up of musicians was legendary. Joan Baez, Jack Black, Cypress Hill, Dropkick Murphys, Flavor Flav, Foo Fighters, The Linda Lindas, Mike McCready, Killer Mike, Dave Matthews, Public Enemy, Nathaniel Rateliffe, Bruce Springsteen, Stephen Stills, and Serj Tankian, among others, covered seven decades of American music.

The festival featured a “Freedom Village” where attendees could find ways to get involved in government, grassroots organizing, education, mutual aid, and social impact organizations. Festival organizers donated a portion of the proceeds from ticket sales to VoteRiders, a nonpartisan organization that works to overcome barriers to voting and make sure everyone who is eligible can vote.

Both in person and in the live stream of the concert, artists urged Americans to remember that they have the power to throw the Trump administration out of office and, together, to build a better nation.

The artists at the event pointedly demonstrated their right to free speech. They were explicit and thorough in their spoken descriptions of their anger at the Trump administration and billionaires who have taken over the country, and they chose songs that needled Trump—John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son,” for example—or excoriated his policies: Baez and Rateliff sang Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” Springsteen sang “Streets of Minneapolis,” and the Dropkick Murphys’ sang “Don’t Call Me a F*cking Terrorist,” the last two both written in the wake of the Minneapolis shootings by ICE agents. They emphasized their freedom to express themselves by singing Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

The ten-hour concert ended with the performers singing Guthrie’s famous anthem “This Land is Your Land,” written in 1940 as the Great Depression dragged on. Guthrie wrote it to reclaim the United States of America for its working people. “This land is your land,” he wrote, “this land is my land/From California to the New York islands/From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters/This land was made for you and me.”

Tonight Morello sang a verse often left out of the anthem: “In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple/By the relief office, I saw my people/As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking/Is this land made for you and me?”

Famously, Guthrie painted on his guitars the words “This Machine Kills Fascists,” a slogan he took from the World War II machinists and workers who put stickers saying “This Machine Kills Fascists” on their heavy equipment to express their support for the war effort. Guthrie believed that music could fight the hatred, ignorance, and greed that built fascism just as powerfully as a gun.

Tonight Morello reminded the audience: “Every act of art is an act of resistance.” Curiously, today’s concert took place on the anniversary of the day that Woody Guthrie died in 1967. And eighty-six years after he wrote “This Land is Your Land,” his work continues to echo. “This is still America,” Springsteen told the audience of the administration’s tyranny, “and this will not stand.”

—Heather Cox Richardson

The Supreme Court’s Latest Decision Could Hand the GOP the Midterms

 

Just when it seemed the Supreme Court might be prepared to stop Donald Trump from sabotaging the midterm elections, the six Republican justices who dominate the court handed the president a potentially far-reaching victory on Sept. 25 with another ruling on its emergency “shadow” docket.

The ruling in Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters permits the administration and Republican-led states to use a newly expanded federal database to review state voter lists, overturning a lower-court decision that had concluded the database could not be used for the midterms because it violates federal privacy laws and the Administrative Procedure Act. 

The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program was created in 1986 to allow federal, state and local government agencies to verify the citizenship and immigration status of noncitizens applying for public benefits, relying on records maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the Department of State.

However, in March 2025, Trump promulgated Executive Order 14248 (titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections”), that revamped the program to permit state and local authorities to verify the citizenship status of registered voters so they could purge noncitizens from the rolls — a purpose the SAVE program was never intended to serve.

The executive order also directed the Social Security Administration to make its records available to the DHS for that purpose. Two months later, the DHS, acting on its own, launched a modified SAVE program that allows state and local authorities to conduct unlimited bulk searches of multiple individuals at once. 

In September 2025, the League of Women Voters, together with its affiliates in Texas, Louisiana and Virginia, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the federal government, claiming that the expanded SAVE program violated the Social Security Act, the federal Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

On June 22 of this year, District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, who sits in Washington, D.C., blocked the revamped SAVE program from being used for the midterm elections. The Justice Department, led by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, took its case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and, after failing to secure relief there, turned to the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, where the administration has enjoyed great success.  

The court’s three Democrats argued that the use of the database will result in voter disenfranchisement.

The high court granted Sauer’s request with a seven-page unsigned “per curiam” ruling, holding that the plaintiffs’ claims about the expanded database lacked merit, and that “the Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.” In their dissent, the court’s three Democrats argued that the use of the database will result in voter disenfranchisement. 

On its face, as some commentators have noted, the court’s ruling appears limited in scope because the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 prohibits states from conducting “systematic” purges of registered voters in the 90-day “quiet period” prior to elections.

If the terms of the NRVA are faithfully and literally applied, this means that states can utilize the expanded SAVE program to conduct only “individualized” (one at a time) citizenship checks of prospective voters in the weeks remaining before the midterms. Use of the SAVE program is also voluntary, as states are not compelled but only urged to use the system. 

The problem is that neither the NRVA nor the Supreme Court’s shadow docket ruling defines what is meant by “systematic” purges, and that individual purges can easily be aggregated to have a mass impact. In a post for Democracy Docket, reporter Yunior Rivas explained the problem this way:

Now, a crucial voter protection [under the NRVA] could hinge on whether the Supreme Court [in subsequent cases that will surely come its way before the midterms] wants to narrow the definition of “systematic” as applied to purges. And there’s reason to fear that it does [ … by allowing states to] run thousands of voters through SAVE and then evade the NVRA’s quiet period by treating each resulting citizenship challenge as an “individualized” inquiry. 

Rivas also observed that the Supreme Court’s shadow docket decision does not prevent the Trump administration from preparing master citizenship lists for each state, which GOP-led states could use to purge unlimited numbers of individual voters without even using the SAVE program. 

The legality of the lists is currently pending in litigation.

In fact, those citizenship lists are being compiled pursuant to Executive Order 14399, which directs the DHS, SSA and State Department to create lists of all “confirmed” citizens residing in every state who are entitled to vote. Once again, states are not required by the order to use the lists to purge their voting rolls, but the order stipulates that election officials in states that permit noncitizens to vote will be referred to the DOJ for possible criminal prosecution. 

On Sept. 14, the Supreme Court handed Trump a rare shadow-docket defeat, preventing the U.S. Postal Service from interfering with mail-in balloting. But that decision did not address the legality of the citizenship lists. The legality of the lists is currently pending in litigation brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the public-interest groups Protect Democracy and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, but no decision has been rendered. 

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. 

According to the DOJ, 27 states, including Texas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Indiana, have agreed to use the expanded SAVE database, which in practice has proven to be plagued by serious mistakes. In one Texas county alone, searches conducted under the database returned an astounding error rate of 21%. There is no reason to believe the master citizenship lists will be any more reliable. 

Standing alone, neither the expanded SAVE program nor the citizenship lists may be capable of changing the outcome of the midterms. But they do not stand alone. They are part and parcel of a multifaceted plan to sabotage the elections, engineered by a president with dictatorial aspirations and a core of committed quislings determined to keep him and the MAGA movement in power through the midterms and beyond.

-Truthdig, rooted in Truth. Independent by Design. Your support helps ensure that rigorous reporting, thoughtful analysis, and investigative journalism remain accessible to everyone. Support independent journalism.

 

Trump's Recent Attacks on the U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito told CBS News that President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on the court are “harsh” and decried “damaging” efforts to politicize the court’s decisions—though he also attacked President Joe Biden—as Trump has increasingly lashed out against the 6-3 conservative court for ruling against him in several high-profile cases.

Key Facts:

Alito was asked about criticism of the Supreme Court as it’s issued a number of politically controversial decisions in recent years, angering the left with decisions on issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights while also ruling against Trump administration policies like tariffs and restricting birthright citizenship.

When asked whether the court is “damaged” by attacks from political leaders on both sides of the aisle that paint the court’s justices as “political actors,” Alito agreed, saying partisan attacks on the court can be “quite damaging” to the Supreme Court as an institution.

Alito alleged there’s been a “great change” in how presidents respond to Supreme Court rulings in recent years, as leaders have attacked the court for its decisions rather than expressing disappointment while still showing respect for the outcome.

His comments come as Trump has frequently lashed out against the Supreme Court in recent months for issuing rulings he doesn’t like, decrying the court as a “shell of its former self” while claiming conservative-leaning justices are caving to Democrats and suggesting justices he appointed should be more “loyal” to him.

When asked about Trump’s attacks, Alito declined to single the GOP president out, claiming President Joe Biden had also levied “harsh” criticism against the court and describing Trump as just having “his way of saying things.”

Alito did wrap Trump into his criticism, however, telling CBS that Biden “was very harsh, and President Trump has been very harsh.”

“We are not part of any political movement, and we are not attempting to further any political agenda,” Alito argued to CBS about the Supreme Court, saying the justices are “trying to interpret the Constitution as best we can and apply it in cases that come before us.”

The Supreme Court’s new term will begin next week, which include a number of cases concerning Trump administration policies. Among the cases justices are set to decide are disputes over Trump’s immigration policies on mandatory detention and third-country deportations, as well as issues championed by Republicans like the legality of the federal ban on assault weapons and proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting. 

The court’s first oral arguments of the new term will be in a major climate change case, as the court decides whether parties can sue fossil fuel companies in state court for their alleged role in the impacts of climate change. Alito will not participate in that case, as the justice unexpectedly recused himself Monday amid pressure from advocacy groups to step down from the case due to his fossil fuel investments.

-Forbes

Undaunted Arts in D.C. Despite the "Mad, Boorish, Wanna-be King"

 

Trump’s intensified, malicious assault on the arts in his second term should have surprised no one. Like all authoritarians around the globe, he views the arts community as a pack of subversive dissidents, a danger to his grip on power and his command of the public psyche. Ever since they shed the golden handcuffs of royal arts patrons, visual and performing artists have found themselves at odds with despots.

The values and qualities that are foundational to the arts — creativity, inclusiveness, whimsy, irreverence, internationalism, etc. — are a threat to totalitarian bullies who seek absolute control, demand an echo chamber for their propaganda, target minority communities, vilify nonconformity, and celebrate militarism.

In the case of the Trump regime, the antagonism between state power and the arts is no doubt heightened by a boorish president who worships only money and himself. For decades, New York City (the arts capital of America) has held in disdain the crass Queens real estate baron whose taste runs from laughably garish to cheap/cheesy.

Since returning to office, Trump has followed a familiar pattern among autocrats. In seeking to destroy the independent arts community, he has attempted to defund PBS, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts — not to mention higher education (which fosters and cultivates the arts). 

He has reduced the arts’ stature by substituting gross spectacle (e.g., mixed martial arts) at the White House for celebrations of American culture, while invading and attempting to take over art institutions like the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The only surprise in all of this was how thoroughly incompetent the barbarians were who pounded at the arts’ gates — and how visceral the consequent backlash has been. The takeover of the Kennedy Center has become one of the most visible, absurd displays of Trumpian ego and foolishness colliding with reality. 

In attempting to capture the Center, trying to MAGA-ize the programming, incessantly failing to affix his name to the memorial of a slain president, demanding it become another vanity architecture shrine to him, closing down the building to hide the flight of performers and audiences, and repeatedly incurring the wrath of judges and patrons, Trump has given his critics victories in court and plenty of incredulous laughs.

In response to the mad, boorish, wanna-be king, repeated, public displays of affection for the Kennedy Center have erupted. A massive crowd gathered to watch the letters of his name removed from the building. Again, the public metaphorically embraced the building earlier this month with a rally and march around the iconic structure. 

At these events and in the coverage surrounding the ongoing saga, Washingtonians have spoken lovingly of their own experiences at the Kennedy Center, their multi-generational encounters with the arts, and the arts philanthropy the Kennedy Center has contributed to the city in schools and through free performances. The Center is personal to thousands and thousands of people.

Now that the performing companies and outside artists have had to find other venues, the backlash has played out around D.C. I got a glimpse of this last weekend at a stunning performance of the Dance Theater of Harlem at the National Theater, which included the return of arguably its most iconic work, its 1982 adaptation of the Russian fairytale, Firebird.

Before the performance, executive director Robert Garland and representatives from the Washington Performing Arts Society spoke to the crowd. Given the origins of the company in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, its commitment to reaffirming the participation of African Americans in the classical arts, and the return of the dynamic prima ballerina Alexandra Hutchinson, who trained in D.C., one can imagine the emotion that animated the speakers and the crowd. 

What — in ordinary times — might have been perceived as banal references to city pride or the need to support the arts, the comments plainly had added punch, given our current climate. The speakers were repeatedly interrupted with applause and knowing laughter.

Attending the performance became not just a joyful expression of affection for a spectacular dance company, but a political statement reaffirming our civic commitment to the arts and our determination to defy the Orange Bully’s effort to commandeer them for his own purposes.

This sort of emotional encounter has not been a solitary event. The National Symphony Orchestra, homeless thanks to the deranged Kennedy Center landlord, has had to find other venues and construct a concert series on the fly. Its opening evening at the Strathmore Music Center in Bethesda was therefore highly anticipated.

The Washington Post described the scene: The orchestra began the evening in the European fashion, entering as a group rather than milling about and tuning onstage while the audience settles in, which is more common in the United States. That created the occasion for a powerful expression of thanks and gratitude, as the players walked out en masse in white tie and long dresses. An eager audience immediately stood to greet the now nomadic ensemble.

The Post report noted that in response to the Herculean effort of “securing a budget and scheduling a season outside the concert hall it has called home since 1971… their audience said thank you with a rousing display of emotion.” Such respect provides hope that “the NSO may not just survive the fiasco of Trump’s Kennedy Center takeover, but it also could connect to local audiences in a new way.” 

The report continued: “‘It will be an interesting season,’ music director Gianandrea Noseda said later in the evening. The audience laughed at the irony loaded into the word. And they laughed again when he stressed the bright side of the forthcoming peripatetic season: ‘It will be a bit more time to go here and there, but also more exciting: You can find different restaurants.’” And so it has been!

That spirit of joyous defiance now permeates the arts community in D.C. Under duress, it has found solidarity and newfound pride in a city that has long played (excuse the expression) second fiddle to New York.

Under siege from a fascist regime that failed to appreciate the tsunami of opposition it would unleash, the arts are enduring and flourishing. It takes more effort for arts patrons to reach the venues and navigate start-up online box offices, but — especially when done with purpose, as an act of resilience — that can make the experience all the more rewarding.

We celebrate the undaunted, undiminished, and unbowed artists, donors, executives, venue operators, staff personnel, and audiences who are ensuring that the arts thrive in D.C. More than ever, the country and the city need beauty, wonder, delight, camaraderie, and inspiration to remind us of our shared humanity and values.

We are grateful to all who keep arts alive — and look forward to the emotional high we will no doubt enjoy upon the release of the arts (and politics) from the fetid president’s grasp. In the meantime, if you live or visit D.C., find a performance that speaks to you, and enjoy both the artistic experience and the opportunity to express defiance of the barbarian Trump regime.

The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now!

Photo: Demonstrators gather during a rally outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on September 18, 2026, in Washington, DC, to form a human chain around the building after Trump announced the potential closure of the facility.(Photo by Tom Brenner/Getty Images)

The American Mythology of Liberal Democracy

 

“No matter how much American foreign policy may be caricatured as overly idealistic, the country’s rhetorical commitment to a liberal international order and support for democracy around the world have provided a principled basis for continuing involvement in international affairs.  It has focused U.S. attention on abuses of power abroad that are actually susceptible to U.S. influence.  It has also facilitated democratic transitions in places such as Chile, the Philippines, and South Korea.”

– Francis Fukuyama, The Washington Post, September 13, 2026, “How realism gets the world profoundly wrong.”

There is no greater myth regarding American exceptionalism than the view that only the United States has always seen the promotion of “liberal democracy” as part of its national identity.  In actual fact, the United States pledges itself to “liberal democracy” the world over only when its military designs are compromised or stymied.  The model was President Woodrow Wilson’s “war to end all wars” during World War I.  When Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in 1917, he famously stated that the “world must be made safe for democracy.”

Wilson understood that the American people were not interested in a conflict as part of a larger geopolitical battle but would rally around the idea of a moral crusade to permanently eliminate militarism and establish a lasting global peace.  President Franklin Roosevelt had the same challenge in trying to bring the United States into World War II, when the nation was reluctant to do so.

President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is the best example of the myth of liberal democracy: he used a lie regarding weapons of mass destruction to justify the use of force, and when there were no nuclear weapons to be found, he bleated that U.S. forces were there to create liberal democracy as a paradigm not only for Iraq, but for the entire Arab world.

Donald J. Trump used the same template for the use of force in Iran: he argued that we were trying to prevent the development of nuclear weapons but then switched to introducing liberal democracy as a justification for an illegal and immoral war.  The example of Venezuela is classic: Trump talked about democratic reform and regime change, but his real designs were on the country’s oil and gold.

Fukuyama’s most risible assumption is that the United States has never been “simply trying to maximize its power.”  If that were so, then why would the United States develop a far-flung network of 750 military bases and facilities in more than 80 countries and territories in the wake of World War II?  

And why would the United States engage in regime change and attempt assassinations in countries that were trying to genuinely democratize, such as Iran and the Congo in the 1950s or Chile in the 1970s?  And why would the United States engage in disinformation in order to justify the use of military force against Iraq in 2003 or Iran in 2026?  The list goes on and on.

Fukuyama is no stranger to the mythology regarding “liberal democracy.”  In 1992, he wrote The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that the end of the Cold War marked the triumph of Western liberal democracy and the end point of humanity’s ideological evolution.  Fukuyama believed that the fall of communism and the Soviet Union marked “liberal democracy” as the “final and best form of human government.”  He concluded the “no superior ideological system will challenge liberal democracy as the ideal model for society.”

Myths regarding U.S. exceptionalism and liberal democracy prevent the United States from having a real debate about our national security goals.  Specious American alarmism is designed to capture support for the use of force in scenarios that don’t advance our geopolitical or international interests.  In an effort to increase defense spending, moreover, we exaggerated the Soviet threat during the Cold War, and now we are exaggerating the China threat.

Phony threat assessments lead to mistaken notions about the nature of the threat, the demand for a costly policy of “containment,” and the global military posture that currently exists.  There are perils to be faced regarding climate change, energy issues, and threats to the environment, but they require diplomacy and multinational consultation, not military force.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.