Trump’s and America’s Thug-Like Behavior, at Home and Worldwide

What, if Anything, Can Be Done to Stop the Psychos Running Our Country?

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On January 2, 2026, President Donald Trump rang in the new year by sending U.S. military forces into Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, to kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The couple were taken to New York City and held in a Brooklyn jail on as-yet unindicted charges of drug smuggling and trafficking. Subsequently Trump went on TV and posted on his social media site that the U.S. would run Venezuela for several months and demand 50 billion barrels of its oil. The money made from selling Venezuelan oil would be controlled, Trump said, by “me.”

On January 8, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross and two of his colleagues shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman and mother of three, right after she’d dropped one of her children off at school. Citing no actual evidence, Trump and his vice-president, J. D. Vance, claimed Good was a “domestic terrorist” and an agent of a vast Left-wing conspiracy who had tried to run Ross over with her car, so he shot and killed her in self-defense.

During the first week of 2026, Trump also threatened the government of Denmark with an invasion by the U.S. military if Denmark doesn’t give the U.S. Greenland, a largely self-governing autonomous territory in the North Atlantic. “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” Trump said, using the thug-like language of which he is so fond. The five political parties in Greenland united to voice their opposition to U.S. conquest and annexation, and so did the Danes. Danish officials warned that an attack by one member country of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on another would shatter the alliance that has helped keep peace in Western Europe since 1949.

These actions, along with others Trump took in late 2025 – including the demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make room for the grandiose “ballroom” he wants to build next to it – make clear that Trump has never wanted to be a powerful but constitutionally limited U.S. President. Instead, he wants to be America’s Führer, its absolute ruler. Trump is making it clear that once he decides he wants something, he will do anything in his power to get it, and so far the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court have essentially done nothing to rein in his claims of absolute power despite the constitutional design of our government as having three co-equal branches that check each other’s power.

Those ICE agents, as well as ones from a dizzying array of other organizations within the Department of Homeland Security, including the Border Patrol and something called Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), were sent not only to Minneapolis but other American cities (all of them with local governments controlled by the Democratic Party) not to support local law enforcement but to act as an occupation force. Various mayors and governors have pleaded with Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and others to withdraw ICE and Trump’s other forces on the ground that they are not making residents safer, but quite the opposite.

Trump’s response has been to “double down,” to use a phrase employed quite often about him. Instead of withdrawing the occupation forces from ICE and the other Homeland Security agencies, he’s sending more of them. His response to criticism of Renée Good’s murder has been to up the ante on the posthumous attacks on her character and reputation. And Vice-President Vance has declared that ICE agents have, not just the “qualified immunity” that has long bedeviled attempts to hold police officers accountable for attacking and killing civilians, but “absolute immunity.”

Think about that. The Vice-President of the United States is telling the citizens and residents of his country that they can be slaughtered at will by agents of the federal government, and nothing can be done either to protect them in advance or to bring their killers to justice after the fact. We are all living at the whim of poorly trained federal agents (Trump stipulated that newly hired ICE, Border Patrol and HSI agents get just 47 days of training, a number he reportedly seized on because he is now the 47th U.S. president) who literally have blanket authority to kill any one of us at any time they feel like it.

Trump also made his ideological project clear on January 7, when he issued an executive order unilaterally withdrawing the U.S. from 66 international agencies, some independent and some affiliated with the United Nations. I won’t bother to repeat the list – you can read it at https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/withdrawing-the-united-states-from-international-organizations-conventions-and-treaties-that-are-contrary-to-the-interests-of-the-united-states/ – but, predictably, among the hardest hit targets are any agencies dealing with the control of human-caused climate change (which Trump regards as a hoax) and any agencies dealing with protecting the rights of women or people of color.

It’s often argued that Trump doesn’t have an ideology, that he acts in a sort of willy-nilly fashion unconstrained by any vision of what he wants the world to be. There’s some truth to that, but Trump definitely has a series of prejudices that determine most of how he governs both at home and abroad. Among them are a pathological worship of “strength” and a consequent denigration of “weakness.” Trump is often accused of lacking “empathy,” but in fact he’s not only consciously worked to rid himself of any consideration for other people, he’s quite proud of that.

Trump also accepts as givens that white people are innately superior to people of color, men are superior to women, and rich people are superior to poor people. Trump believes that women exist mainly to gratify the sexual urges of men, especially rich and powerful men like himself, and to bear their children. That’s one reason why his current Defense Secretary (whose department Trump has unilaterally renamed the “War Department” even though Congress changed the name in 1947 and it would take another act of Congress to change it back) Pete Hegseth fired the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because he was a Black man and the head of the Coast Guard because she was a woman.

Trump’s philosophy was capably explained by Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff – one of the few advisors who’s stayed with Trump through both his first term and his current one. In an interview with Jake Tapper of CNN on January 5, Miller said, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, couldn’t have said it any better. And late last year Pete Hegseth told Congress that he believed the U.S. military should practice “lethality, not legality” – a blunt promise to the rest of the world that the U.S. would commit war crimes anywhere it fought.

During his first term as President, Trump got tired of having people around him who tried to talk him out of his worst impulses, who kept telling him he couldn’t directly profiteer off the Presidency, he couldn’t deploy the U.S. military on the streets of American cities, he couldn’t snuggle up to dictators like Russian President Vladimir Putin while denigrating the republican governments of the European Union. In his “wilderness years” from 2021 to 2025 he put together a new team whose members he could count on to give him the absolute “loyalty” – not to the U.S. Constitution but to the person of Donald Trump – he demands.

And while during Trump’s first term we were assured by some writers that the U.S. was not in danger of being turned into a fascist dictatorship because Trump was literally too lazy to put in the effort, that’s no longer a reality in his second. He has assembled a set of relatively young, energetic ideologues who are eagerly pitching in and giving his project of the fascist transformation of America the raw energy and influence it needs to succeed.

Donald Trump, George Orwell, and “Doublethink”

On July 18, 2016, while the prospect of Donald Trump as President was still a nightmare rather than an all too grim reality, The New Yorker published an interview with Tony Schwartz, the real author of Trump’s alleged “autobiography” The Art of the Deal (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all). In it Schwartz warned the U.S. and the world about Trump’s cavalier attitude to the whole idea of “truth.” “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”

The moment I read that quote I thought of George Orwell and his final work, the classic dystopian novel 1984. In 1984, the world is controlled by three great super-states, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. All three are ruled by all-powerful dictatorships based on similar ideologies which use technology to maintain total surveillance of their entire populations 24/7. They also are perpetually at war with each other, in various combinations, because, as Orwell put it, “War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”

One of the central tenets of the ruling ideology in 1984 is something called “the mutability of the past.” As Orwell writes, “Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For once it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”

We are now seeing the Trump administration apply this principle in real time in the case of Renée Good. Trump and his spokespeople are repeatedly telling the world that Good was a “domestic terrorist” who was trying to run ICE agents over with her SUV. The fact that widely circulating videos of the incident don’t show anything like that isn’t stopping them. Even the footage shot by Jonathan Ross right before he shot Good shows Good telling him, “I’m not mad at you,” and trying to ease her car out of his way before he draws his gun and fires the three shots that killed her. But, in classic Orwellian fashion, Trump, Vance, and other members of the administration keep repeating the lie that Good was out to kill ICE agents, and Trump’s dwindling number of fanatic followers believe it.

The key technique used by the Inner Party, the ruling elite of Oceania in 1984, is a mental exercise called doublethink, which Orwell described as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. … The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.” Trump, from the start of his political career (and even before that as a businessperson), has been, as Orwell would have put it, a doubleplusgood doublethinker.

It’s why the people who note the contradictions in Trump’s rhetoric and accuse him of hypocrisy are missing the point completely. Trump not only believes in hypocrisy, he wallows in it. As Tony Schwartz told The New Yorker a decade ago, based on his personal experience with the man, Trump has the ability to believe whatever lies he needs to in order to maintain his self-image of being all-powerful. Just after he won back the presidency Trump started wearing a new version of the MAGA baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan, “Trump Was Right About Everything.” It’s a claim of omniscience most religious believers (and one of Trump’s real-world exercises in doublethink is claiming to be a committed Christian while violating just about everything Jesus stood for) would reserve for God.

One of the quirks of the modern world has been that the rise in information technology – in particular the increasing use of digital rather than analog storage to hold our records of the past, and the development of artificial intelligence (AI) – has given modern-day dictators and autocrats much greater power to manipulate reality than Orwell could have imagined. In 1984 Orwell posited that the Ministry of Truth would maintain elaborate networks of minions to destroy surviving records of past events that contradicted the Party’s current version of the past. Today inconvenient records can be erased permanently with the mere push of a button on a control panel. Trump’s officials have already done this with economic statistics, disease progression, and the evidence of human-caused climate change.

Soon the technology will exist, if it doesn’t already, to create or alter videos like the ones shot by bystanders of the killing of Renée Good in whatever shape and form the ruling elite demands. Right now the Trump administration has to keep repeating the Big Lie that Good was trying to kill Jonathan Ross in the face of video evidence to the contrary. In a few years, through AI they’ll have the power literally to remake the video evidence to show exactly what they want it to show. Trump and his supporters have already used AI to respond to last October’s “No Kings” protests against him by creating a video in which he plays a combat pilot literally dive-bombing the protesters with shit.

It’s revealing of Trump’s faith in doublethink and his determination to control reality that he has refused to allow the federal government to share its evidence in Good’s killing with Minnesota state and local authorities. His stated reason for doing so is that Minnesota’s state and local governments are “corrupt,” and he knows this because Minnesota voted against him in all three Presidential elections. Trump insists that he actually did carry Minnesota all three times, and state authorities “stole” the election from him. (In the real world no Republican Presidential candidate has carried Minnesota since 1972.) As with the overall result of the 2020 Presidential election, Trump is remaking history in his own desired image and acting on his delusions.

While there are plenty of things Trump promised in the 2024 campaign to do on “day one” of his return to the Presidency that he hasn’t, including lowering consumer prices and ending the war in Ukraine, the one big thing he did do was pardon all 1,500 participants in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of his election loss. This not only created a cadre of people who had already committed political violence on Trump’s behalf, many of whom went on social media to proclaim their willingness to do so again, it was also a key step in Trump’s Orwellian campaign to rewrite the history of January 6 by casting the rioters as “freedom fighters” and the Capitol police who tried to stop them as agents of an oppressive “deep state.”

The “Unitary Executive” and Trump’s Claim of Absolute Power

One of the key weapons in Trump’s quest for absolute dictatorial power has been the theory of the “unitary executive.” First propounded by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the “unitary executive” theory holds that because the executive is the only branch of the federal government in which the framers of the Constitution vested ultimate authority in just one person, the President, therefore they meant the President to have absolute power. Trump reiterated this claim in a recent interview with the New York Times (a paper he’s suing for $15 billion for allegedly defaming him in 2024) in which he said he had the authority to commit the U.S. military to battle anywhere in the world at any time, and the only limits on this power were “my own morality, my own mind.”

America’s first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, knew better. In 1848 Lincoln, then a first-term Congressmember from Illinois, strongly opposed the U.S.-Mexican War – a position so unpopular it killed his career in electoral politics for the next decade. On February 15, 1848 he wrote a letter to William H. Herndon, his law partner in Springfield, Illinois (https://papersofabrahamlincoln.org/documents/D200458), criticizing then-President James K. Polk’s defense of the war. “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure,” Lincoln wrote. “Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose.”

Lincoln went on, “The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where Kings have always stood.”

Trump has made no secret of his desire to be an absolute monarch, to place himself where kings have always stood. Early in his second term he posted to the official White House Web site a mock cover of Time magazine, with an image of himself wearing a crown and the slogan, “Long Live the King.” When he gave his 2025 State of the Union Address, instead of asking Congress for legislation, he boasted of the number of executive orders he had issued, essentially ruling by decree in classic dictatorial fashion. He told Congress that once they passed the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” making the 2017 tax cuts permanent and decimating Medicare and Medicaid, he needed nothing else from them.

During his 2024 campaign he strongly suggested that it would be the last election the U.S. would ever have or need. He told his supporters at rallies, “Vote for me just this once, and you’ll never have to vote again.” He unilaterally abolished the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) even though it had been established by Congress and therefore, at least in theory, only the Congress had the power to get rid of it. Trump also slapped his own name on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C. even though the name had been fixed by Congress in 1964 and could not legally be changed without Congressional authorization. And he renamed the Department of Defense the “Department of War” despite Congress having adopted the “Defense” name in 1947.

One of the major tactics of Trump’s second term has been to declare so-called “national emergencies” and claim that these justify his assumption of absolute power. He did that with his tariff policy, beginning his second term by demanding power to fix tariffs of any size on any country in the world at any time. Trump also did that by ordering military action against Venezuela and threatening it against Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and Iran. Indeed, his Iran policy, threatening retaliation against the Iranian government for the crime of shooting unarmed protesters when Trump’s ICE agents are doing that themselves, is yet another example of Trumpian doublethink.

Trump has recently been dropping hints that he may cancel the 2026 and 2028 elections altogether because of yet another bullshit “emergency.” Never mind that the U.S. held Presidential elections in both 1864 and 1944 despite being faced with genuine emergencies – the Civil War and World War II, respectively – that directly threatened the survival of the nation. Trump will do whatever it takes to stay in power after his current term ends despite the stipulation of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

Either he will openly defy the Constitution and run again anyway, declare an “emergency” that requires him to suspend the election and remain in power, or do what Latin Americans call imposición: find a pliant stooge to run in his place and so keep Trump in power through a puppet President. Indeed, I suspect at least part of J. D. Vance’s motivation for giving that chilling speech in which he said that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” was to show Trump his diehard loyalty so he can be elected President as Trump’s surrogate in 2028 instead of Trump throwing him under the bus in favor of someone else, including (as I predicted in 2024) one of his adult children.

The Dwindling Options of Stopping Trump

And the most chilling thing about Trump’s power grab is that his opponents have so few options available to stop him. Democratic politicians and the sort-of Left-leaning hosts of media outlets like MS NOW keep pointing to opinion polls that say what Trump is doing is monumentally unpopular with the American people. They forlornly look to the 2026 midterm elections as a way of putting at least one house of Congress back in Democratic hands and thereby revivifying Congress’s constitutional role as a check on Presidential power. Their hopes for that election remind me of the equally futile hopes of Russian democrats in 1917 that a national election scheduled for 1918 would vote the Bolsheviks out of power. That election never happened because Vladimir Lenin ordered it canceled.

Trump’s behavior during both his first and second terms has made it clear that he doesn’t regard Congress as having any legitimate power to stop him or even slow him down. Either he will refuse to let officials in his administration testify before Congressional committees even when they’re subpoenaed to do so, or when they do show up he will encourage them not only to defy the committees, but to do so in a highly combative fashion that questions the very idea that Congress has a right to question whatever the administration is doing.

Trump is also working industriously to block the media from any adverse reporting on him. When he isn’t aggressively filing multi-billion dollar lawsuits against outlets like the New York Times and the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) to intimidate them, he’s getting his billionaire supporters to buy them out. Already we’ve seen the father-and-son team of Larry and David Ellison buy the parent company of CBS, cancel Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, and install a Right-wing minder at CBS’s once vaunted news department to kill all stories Trump doesn’t want to see aired, including a 60 Minutes report on the high-tech dungeon in El Salvador to which Trump has been sending people he declares as “terrorists” without any due process whatsoever. More recently he’s supported the Ellisons’ hostile takeover bid for CNN’s parent company and has reportedly given them a hit list of CNN anchors he wants them to fire when they take control.

The murder of Renée Good in Minneapolis January 8 and the similar slaying of Keith Porter by ICE agents in Los Angeles eight days earlier (which hasn’t been as widely reported because Good was a white woman and Porter a Black man) are among the salvos in Trump’s attempt to silence protesters against him. In the short term they’re not working – people in Minneapolis swelled the streets in defiance of ICE and literally risked their lives to do so. Trump will likely respond to these protests by upping the ante and ordering either ICE or the U.S. military itself to shoot into unarmed protesters and kill them en masse, and that will quite likely spell the end of major street protests against Trump the way the Chinese military similarly stopped protests against their regime after its 1989 mass murder of protesters in Tiananmen Square.

To quote Orwell again, “All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or they grew too soft. Either they became stupid or arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown, or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again they were overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to have created a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.”

Trump’s critics frequently point to the example of Nazi Germany as an authoritarian state that proclaimed its destiny to rule for 1,000 years but only made it to 12. But the Nazis didn’t fall because of any internal weakness; they fell because they aroused the enmity of so many other countries they ended up losing the world war Adolf Hitler had started to conquer the world. To defeat Nazism, the U.S. (a representative republic) and Great Britain (a constitutional monarchy) had to ally themselves with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, a dictatorship in its own way as brutal as Hitler’s that probably killed more people than the Nazis did.

Looking over the world, Trump probably realizes that the only countries that could conceivably defeat the U.S. militarily are China and Russia in coalition. That’s one reason why he’s sucked up so heavily to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and dialed back big-time on his confrontational attitude towards Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Trump’s obsequiousness to Putin has baffled a lot of people, but I’ve long suspected it’s really because he admires Putin and sees him as a role model. Just as Putin successfully crushed Russia’s short-lived experiment with republican governance and re-created the Czarist and Soviet dictatorships, so Trump wants to destroy America’s longer-lived republican experiment and install himself as dictator for life.

That also explains the reason why in December 2025 Trump’s administration issued a new National Security Strategy (NSS) (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf) that essentially adopted Russia’s talking points on the Ukraine war, including pledging to oppose any further expansion of NATO. “It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, present unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and re-establish strategic stability with Russia,” the document read.

Instead the document bristled with contempt for Western Europe. It read, “The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birth rates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”

Trump’s general attitude towards the world was summed up in a series of tweets both from him directly and others in his administration justifying the intervention in Venezuela by saying, “This Is Our Hemisphere!” It’s been argued that Trump, who ran as a principled opponent of America’s expansive role in the world and still proclaims himself the “Peace President” while starting or threatening military action in places as diverse as Venezuela, Greenland, and Canada (doublethink strikes again!), believes in the 19th century imperialist vision that divides the world into “spheres of influence.”

Trump sees the world as divided into three broad spheres: the Western Hemisphere, under the suzerainty and control of the United States; the former Soviet Union (and the Czarist Empire before that) and eastern Europe, under Russian control; and an Asia dominated by China. The NSS pays lip service to America’s interest in China and preserving the quasi-independent status of Taiwan, but it’s hard to believe that an administration so wishy-washy on the Russian attempt to conquer and subjugate Ukraine would come down hard on China for doing a similar thing to Taiwan.

Western Europe doesn’t fit snugly into this “spheres of influence” pattern. (In 1984, most of western Europe is part of Eurasia, the super-state formed by the Soviet Union, while Britain is part of Oceania, which had evolved from the United States.) It’s a lot of things Trump hates: confederated, cosmopolitan, relatively tolerant of immigrants (especially immigrants of color), and willing to use the power of government to control what its leaders view as “hate speech” (the real meaning of the passage in the NSS that criticizes Europe for “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition” – Right-speak for keeping far-Right trolls off the Internet).

Trump has made it clear to western European countries that the only way they can redeem themselves in his eyes is if they elect far-Right anti-immigrant nationalist parties whose politics mirror Trump’s own. Among these are the Reform Party in Britain, the National Rally in France, and the effectively neo-Nazi Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany. In both his Presidential campaigns Trump threatened western Europe that the U.S. might not come to their defense in case of a Russian attack, despite our obligation to do so under Article V of the NATO treaty, if Europe’s countries didn’t start spending more money on defense.

Ironically, a number of them are starting to do exactly that – not because they’re meeting Trump’s demands but because the increasing unreliability of America as a security guarantor has led European political leaders of all ideological stripes to realize that they need to protect themselves instead of counting on the U.S. to do it for them. Meanwhile, Trump has asked Congress to increase America’s already bloated military budget by 50 percent – yet another indication that he wants to rule not only the U.S. but much of the rest of the world with the sheer force of U.S. military might.

At the end of William Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part 2, the dying King Henry IV tells his son and successor, Prince Hal, to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” Henry IV had taken power in a coup d’état (as dramatized by Shakespeare in a previous play, Richard II), and his whole reign had been beset by attempted revolutions and civil wars instigated by supporters of Richard’s designated heir. Accordingly, on his deathbed he tells Hal to unite the country by mobilizing it behind a foreign enemy – and everyone in the court knew who the likely enemy would be: France, which Britain had already tried to conquer decades earlier.

Trump is clearly using threats of military action abroad at least in part to unite the U.S. behind him in the face of growing opposition to his policies. While his conduct in office both times has shown he’s never wanted to be President of the entire United States of America – it’s obvious he regards the regions of the country that voted against him as enemy territory he needs to subdue with military or quasi-military force – he wants to forestall domestic opposition by, among other things, keeping America engaged in one military conflict after another. Military action also has the desirable (to Trump) consequence that he can define all domestic political opposition as “treason.”

At this point there seem few, if any, ways to forestall or reverse Trump’s and his minions’ devastating transformation of the U.S. from an imperfect but still vital democratic republic into an authoritarian, or even a totalitarian, dictatorship. One of the major ironies is that this is happening in the year of the 250th anniversary of America’s declaration of independence from kings in general and George III in particular. Just as Richard Nixon planned to use the Bicentennial in 1976 to set aside the 22nd Amendment and run for a third term – which didn’t happen only because the Watergate scandal evaporated Nixon’s political capital – Trump plans to use the 250th anniversary to anoint himself and his movement with absolute power to run the U.S. for however long this nation lasts.

Donald Trump and the Government Shutdown

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

President Donald Trump, who constantly boasts that everything he does is “the greatest the world has ever seen” (and everything someone else does that he doesn’t like is “the worst thing the world has ever seen”), has now presided over a shutdown of the U.S. government that is, you guessed it, the longest the country has ever seen. Not surprisingly, the record this shutdown broke was set in 2018, during Trump’s first term, which lasted 35 days and was over funding for Trump’s proposed 2,000-mile long wall across the entire U.S.-Mexico border.

The main issue that sparked the current shutdown was over federal subsidies for health-care exchanges that provide insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These subsidies were expanded in 2020 and 2021 to deal with COVID-19, but this year Trump and Congressional Republicans were determined to gut them. So they put into their so-called “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” a provision that terminated them as of the start of the open enrollment period for health-care plans on or around November 1.

Congressional Democrats, though a minority in both houses, were determined to restore these subsidies so people already at lower income levels wouldn’t be hit with health insurance premiums that were double, triple, or even a higher multiple of what they were paying earlier. They apparently thought they could shame Republicans with tales of people on the spot and forced to choose between access to health care and paying for rent and food. They thought wrong. Today’s Republicans are not only against the whole idea of a social safety net, they’re actually proud of their ability to make people starve.

The reason is the modern-day Republican party is dominated by the Libertarian agenda, which holds that it is not only bad public policy but actually immoral to tax rich people to help non-rich people. Libertarianism’s founder, novelist and political commentator Ayn Rand, said in response to a question about whether society had an obligation to take care of people with disabilities, “Misfortune does not justify slave labor.” She meant that taxing the rich to pay for social services for the non-rich essentially turns the rich into slaves.

In 2017, during Trump’s first term as President, I wrote that though he had campaigned for office as a European-style nationalist conservative, pledging to protect safety-net programs like Social Security and Medicare against other Republicans who wanted to cut them (and blaming so-called “illegal” immigrants for the economic crises facing those programs – actually immigrants aren’t allowed to collect Social Security, though they have to pay the payroll taxes that fund it), he was governing as a Libertarian. The reason, I argued, was that Libertarianism appealed to the two most important things to Trump: his bank balance and his ego. Not only does Libertarianism generate public policies that make Trump and other rich people even richer, it assuages his fragile sense of self by telling him that his wealth establishes his superiority to the common run of humanity.

When the Republicans swept the 2024 national elections, winning back the U.S. Senate, keeping the House of Representatives, and winning back the Presidency, Trump and his advisors, including Russell Vought and the others behind the so-called “Project 2025” (a massive 922-page blueprint from the Heritage Foundation for a Right-wing remaking of America), saw the chance for a thoroughgoing Right-wing transformation of America. Among their weapons was the theory of the “unitary executive,” which basically holds that since the executive branch was the only one for which the framers of the U.S. Constitution gave ultimate responsibility to just one person (the President), they meant that the President should have near-dictatorial powers.

Trump expressed this late in his first term, when he said about the Constitution, “There’s this little thing called Article II, which says I get to do whatever I want.” Since he returned to the Presidency on January 20, 2025, he has made it clear that he intends to impose near-absolute one-man rule on the U.S. Among other things, he hired 200 people involved in drafting Project 2025 for jobs in his administration, including Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). (For more information on Russell Vought, see https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/27/russell-vought-profile-donald-trump).

During his first month back in office, Trump unilaterally created a new federal agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and put his chief campaign donor, multibillionaire Elon Musk, in charge of it. Musk and DOGE sent their minions into various government departments and fired employees wholesale. Sometimes they had to hire them back almost as quickly – like when they fired people in charge of securing America’s nuclear weapons or tracking down potential epidemics – and then had trouble reaching them because as part of firing them, they’d canceled their government e-mails and had no other contact information.

Trump also made it clear that he didn’t consider himself bound by any ethical norms against directly profiting from being President. The record of Trump’s second term is replete with deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars Trump has made with foreign governments to invest in businesses owned by himself or his adult children. There’s a clause in the Constitution that is supposed to make this illegal – Article I, section 9, which reads, “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” – but during his first term Trump denounced this as “that phony emoluments clause” and made clear he doesn’t consider himself bound by it.

Trump has essentially recruited private police forces, accountable not to the United States government but to him personally, within the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). He has sent these forces into cities and states whose mayors and governors don’t want them, and he’s also federalized National Guard troops and even sent in U.S. Marines to enforce immigration laws. These have resulted in mass sweeps through areas with large Latino populations, detaining U.S. citizens as well as both documented and undocumented immigrants. Often Trump’s agents wear masks, drive in unmarked vehicles, and literally “disappear” people to unknown locations either in the U.S. or elsewhere. During the 2024 campaign Trump made it clear that immigrants are to him what Jews were to Adolf Hitler – never more so than during his one debate with his major-party opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, when he accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio of eating other people’s dogs and cats.

Trump has also openly expressed his contempt for the constitutional order on numerous occasions. On his way home from a state visit to Japan, he said that once Congress passed his “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” which slashed taxes for the very wealthiest Americans and eviscerated Medicare, Medicaid and other social-service agencies, he needed nothing more from them. (This echoed his statement during the 2024 campaign in which he told supporters, “Vote for me just this once, and you’ll never have to vote again.”) During his 2025 State of the Union Address he boasted that he’d issued more executive orders than any President ever. Clearly Trump intends to follow the classic dictator’s playbook and rule by decree, the separation of powers and the rest of America’s Constitution be damned.

Also Trump has actively sought to silence all public criticism of him. As part of a so-called “budget rescission” bill by which Congress repealed funding they’d already approved, he was able to eliminate federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Trump installed Brendan Carr as head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Carr used that authority to threaten commercial broadcast networks with loss of their station licenses if they aired programming critical of Trump. The firing – blessedly temporary – of ABC late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was just the most blatant instance of Trump and Carr teaming up to silence a prominent critic. And Trump’s friend David Ellison bought Paramount, CBS’s parent company, and canceled Stephen Colbert’s late-night show. Trump responded by putting out an exultant post on his “Truth Social” media site which demanded that NBC similarly fire its late-night hosts, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

The most bizarre and visible manifestation of Trump’s desire to rule by diktat was his physical destruction of the East Wing of the White House. In late October he called in a wrecking crew with bulldozers to demolish the East Wing, added to the White House in 1902, to make room for the 90,000 square-foot “ballroom” he wants to build on the property (dwarfing the 55,000 square feet of the White House itself). The ballroom is estimated to cost $250 to $350 million, and the money is being contributed by wealthy individuals and corporations (including Comcast, parent company of NBC and Universal, as well as Amazon.com) that want to curry favor with Trump. Apparently this is a classic strategy of property developers – if you’re waiting for approval of a new project, destroy what’s already there to present the authorities holding up your project with “facts on the ground” and leave them with the alternatives of letting you build what you want or leaving an unsightly mess.

More recently Trump not only gutted the White House bathroom adjoining the Lincoln Bedroom, turning it from a tasteful blue-green art deco interior into an expanse of marble that makes it look like a mausoleum, he was so proud of this he posted 25 photos of it to social media. And he’s said in public that getting the ballroom done is his highest current priority – while the government is still shut down and millions of Americans are threatened with losing not only SNAP and affordable health insurance but the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program and Head Start to fund children’s pre-school access. Trump’s bizarre noblesse oblige attitude also led him to host a 1920’s-style “Great Gatsby” Hallowe’en party on his private Mar-a-Lago golf course and resort in Florida on the eve of the demise of SNAP funding. Can you say, “Let ‘em eat cake”?

And Trump has successfully intimidated both the Republicans in Congress and the six-member radical-Right majority on the current U.S. Supreme Court to go along with him and his totalitarian project. (I call Trump a “totalitarian” rather than an “authoritarian” because authoritarians merely want to be obeyed. Totalitarians want to be worshiped.) One of his key strategies was his blanket pardon of all 1,500 people facing criminal prosecution for having participated in his unconstitutional attempt to stay in power after losing the November 2020 election that resulted in a riot in and around the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. This created a cadre of people who not only had committed political violence on Donald Trump’s behalf before, but had gone on social media expressing their willingness to do so again. More recently, when one of the January 6 defendants committed a new crime, Trump fired federal prosecutors for having referenced his January 6 involvement in their sentencing memo.

The Government Shutdown in Context

Both Trump and Republicans in both houses of Congress have made it clear that their price for restoring funding to the federal government is the complete capitulation of Congressional Democrats. The last time they threatened a shutdown, in February 2025, they got their wish. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) got enough Democrats to vote to keep the government funded on Republican terms because, as he said at the time, he feared what Trump and the Republicans would do if they were given blanket authority under shutdown conditions to decide unilaterally which government departments would be considered “essential,” meaning they would be kept open, and which wouldn’t be, which would mean even more mass firings and the permanent ending of many government agencies.

Already Trump has targeted entire agencies for abolition even though they were initially authorized by Congress, and therefore only Congress can get rid of them. Among his targets are the Department of Education, which Republicans have been trying to get rid of since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1981; the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB); and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Trump said he went after USAID because its mission to help alleviate starvation and disease epidemics in Third World countries ran counter to his so-called “America First” agenda – and then he contradicted himself by pledging $40 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money to the government of Argentina to help keep its far-Right President, Javier Milei, in power. Democrats glumly pointed out that $40 billion would have been enough to keep the Affordable Care Act subsidies in place for another year.

The government shutdown reached an acute phase on November 1, when funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, ran out. Trump and Congressional Republicans openly boasted that they were essentially holding SNAP, and the estimated 42 million Americans who depend on it, hostage to get Congressional Democrats to reopen the government on their terms. Already House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), who often seems to be Donald Trump’s Mini-Me, had unilaterally taken the House out of session for a month and a half so Senate Democrats would have no choice but to pass the House’s version of a funding bill if they wanted the government to stay open.

At least two lawsuits were filed in federal court to force the Trump administration to continue to fund SNAP. In one of the cases, judge John McConnell in Rhode Island ordered the government to pay for SNAP using a contingency fund created under the same law that created and sustained SNAP in the first place. On November 3 the Trump administration announced that it would comply with that ruling, but said they would only pay half the regular amount of benefits for November. “Even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while States get the money out,” Trump posted on Truth Social, his own site. “If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding, just like I did with Military and Law Enforcement Pay.”

That’s already authoritarian enough – Trump presenting himself as the Great White Father deciding unilaterally who gets paid and who doesn’t – but it didn’t last long. The very next day, Trump did another Truth Social post reneging on his pledge to follow the court order and saying he wouldn’t allow SNAP benefits to go forward until the government reopens: “SNAP BENEFITS, which increased by Billions and Billions of Dollars (MANY FOLD!) during Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office (Due to the fact that they were haphazardly ‘handed’ to anyone for the asking, as opposed to just those in need, which is the purpose of SNAP!), will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”

The People Fight Back

Trump’s bizarre attempts to turn himself into an American dictator ruling by decree have generated push-back from millions of Americans. A series of three major nationwide mobilizations, one called “Hands Off” and two called “No Kings,” have taken place. The most recent one, on October 18, drew an estimated 7.5 millions Americans into the streets in all 50 states, including out-of-the-way locations whose citizens had voted solidly for Trump. Trump’s response was to create and post to social media a childish AI video featuring him as a Top Gun-style fighter pilot flying a plane and literally dumping shit on the protesters.

People have also started to fight back at the ballot box. While there aren’t that many U.S. elections held in odd-numbered years anymore, the ones that took place on November 4, 2025 were disastrous for Republicans. Moderate Democrats Alison Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, beating their Republican opponents by 15-point margins – considerably larger than the last pre-election polls had predicted. New York City just elected its first Muslim and first openly socialist Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, with a shade over 50 percent of the vote in a three-person race against former Democrat Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

In an intense victory speech, Mamdani directly attacked Trump by name. (Spanberger had avoided criticizing Trump and Sherrill made just a veiled reference to him.) Mamdani also cited various people as his exemplars, including Eugene Debs, first Socialist Party candidate for U.S. President (he ran five times between 1894 and 1920); Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of an independent India after British colonial rule ended in 1947; and Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s Mayor from 1933 to 1945, whom Mamdani said was his role model for what he wants to do with the office. Mamdani’s most intriguing reference was to a major politician who had said, “You campaign in poetry but you govern in prose.” Though he didn’t name the person he was quoting, it was Mario Cuomo, former New York Governor and Andrew Cuomo’s father.

Later in the evening California voters learned that they had passed Proposition 50, put on the ballot by the California legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom to redraw the state’s Congressional district maps. Newsom intended this as an answer to a similar mid-term redistricting in Texas, where at Trump’s behest the state legislature sought to redraw their maps to add five more Republicans to the next Congress. Proposition 50 was designed to counteract the Texas gerrymander by adding five more Democrats to California’s House delegation. Just as Spanberger and Sherrill did 10 points better in the election than in the final polls, Proposition 50 had been expected to pass by a 10-point margin but the actual tally was nearly two to one.

The next morning, Trump got unexpected resistance from the United States Supreme Court. The Court heard arguments November 5 on two lawsuits that aim to reverse Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs on other countries. Trump has claimed the power to enact his own tariffs on any country in the world at any rate he wants for as long as he wants under a 1977 law called the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA). This allows the President to “regulate … transactions involving any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.” There are a few problems with that, including that IEEPA doesn’t mention the word “tariff” and that the Supreme Court has consistently held that the power to “regulate” does not include the power to “tax,” which is reserved to Congress under Article I of the Constitution.

The tariff issue is especially significant because it’s one item on which Trump has not only not embraced the Libertarian agenda, but has gone exactly in the opposite direction from it. While Trump has fulfilled the Libertarian agenda in his attacks on the independence of government workers and in seeking to abolish social-service and regulatory agencies like CFPB and USAID, he’s violated the central Libertarian tenet that capital – and capitalists – should be free to roam the world and invest wherever they like without pesky government restrictions. Trump has also violated Libertarian orthodoxy in insisting that the government take shares in private companies and force major retailers to “eat” the cost increases from his tariffs – which has led the Libertarian Cato Institute to denounce him as a socialist. (He is not; he’s a Vladimir Putin-style “crony capitalist” who uses his power as a national leader to demand deals that will make money for him personally.)

As reported on the Vox.com Web site (https://www.vox.com/politics/467485/supreme-court-tariff-argument-trump-learning-resources-vos-selections), the objections of radical-Right Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Any Coney Barrett (the latter two appointed by Trump in his first term) mirror classic Libertarian notions of the limits of governmental authority in general and Presidential authority in particular. Gorsuch asked Solicitor General John Sauer, who argued the case for the Trump administration, if Congress could delegate to the President other powers the Constitution specifically grants Congress, including the power to “regulate …commerce between the states” and the right to declare war. Roberts said he was troubled that Sauer’s position would give the President the right to impose tariffs “on any product, from any country, in any amount, for any length of time.”

But so far the indications from Trump and his minions are that he’s responding both to the election defeats and the Supreme Court’s skepticism about his tariff authority by doubling down on his positions and policies. Once again he’s insisting that he won’t negotiate with Democrats until they agree to reopen the government on Republican terms. In the meantime, thousands of government employees have either been laid off altogether or “furloughed,” forced to keep working without being paid. We already know from Trump’s experience as a private businessman that his favorite way to employ people is to promise them anything, get what he wants from them, and then weasel out of the bothersome necessity of actually paying them.

Trump has asserted that even after the government reopens, he personally will decide who gets back pay for the shutdown’s duration and who doesn’t. There’s a little problem with this: a law, passed in 2019, that requires that government employees who weren’t paid during a shutdown are supposed to get every dime they’re owed in back pay once it reopens. The President who signed this bill into law: Donald Trump. As the shutdown drags on, Democrats are becoming increasingly worried that Republicans will use it as an excuse to get rid of SNAP and other social programs they’ve never liked, as well as end so many of the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies it will become the Unaffordable Care Act and Republicans will have achieved by indirection what they failed to do both in Congress and the courts.

Trump is also calling on the Senate Republican majority to eliminate the filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes for the Senate to accomplish almost anything. (Exceptions are “budget reconciliation” and “rescission” bills, which can pass with a simple majority.) So far Senate Republican leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) has resisted getting rid of the filibuster for the same reason that the late Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) did the last time Trump got impatient with the filibuster in 2017. Like McCain, Thune reasoned that the Republicans were in the Senate minority before, they might well be again, and when they are they will want the filibuster in place to resist what a Democratic President and Congress might do.

So the shutdown continues, seemingly with no end in sight. We’re heading into the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons, and millions of Americans will have to worry about what air travel will be like over the holidays with air traffic controllers working without pay and frequently calling in sick. The Republicans are increasingly counting on more Democrats to cave until the 60-vote threshold is reached to pass the House’s bill to reopen the government on Republicans’ terms. After the November 4 election, in which voters rewarded Democrats who fought back against the administration instead of yielding to it, this looks even less likely than it did before.

Important New MS-NBC Documentary on Former Congressmember, U.N. Ambassador, and Civil Rights Activist Andrew Young

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, October 17) my husband Charles and I watched the premiere of a documentary on Andrew Young called Andrew Young: The Dirty Work. Andrew Young was born in New Orleans on March 12, 1932, went to Howard University (the most significant of the historically Black colleges and universities; among its many illustrious graduates were Thurgood Marshall and Kamala Harris), got a doctorate of divinity from a Northern seminary named Dillard in Connecticut, and was assigned to preach at a church in Marion, Alabama. He’d grown up admiring Jesse Owens and had dreamed of being an Olympic athlete himself, but the leaders of his church told him that either he took the assignment to pastor the church in Marion or they’d have to close it. While in Marion he met his first wife, Jean Childs (they stayed together until she died of cancer in 1994 and he remarried to Carolyn McClain two years later), and became interested in Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of achieving social change without resorting to violence. In 1960 Young joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization formed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to advance the cause of civil rights and equality for African-Americans without violence. Young became a personal assistant to King, and the title of this documentary came from the way King assigned him to do the “dirty work” of keeping the movement going administratively. Young was often criticized for not participating in civil disobedience and getting himself arrested along with King and the other SCLC leaders, to which he responded that someone had to stay outside and be a liaison between the leaders who had been arrested and the supporters outside as well as the media. Young finally lost his arrest virginity in Saint Augustine, Florida, when he tried to intervene between police and a group of Black children who were doing a pretend protest march. The police went ahead and arrested the kids, and took Young into custody as well.

Young was active in the 1963 confrontation in Birmingham, Alabama in which racist police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor turned fire hoses on nonviolent Black protesters and created images that shocked the world. He also took part in the protests in Selma, Alabama in 1965 that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed Blacks to participate in the electoral process relatively equally until its gradual step-by-step dismantlement by the radical-Right revolutionary majority on the current U.S. Supreme Court. And Young was with King when he was killed; they’d literally had a pillow fight in King’s room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee just minutes before King stepped out on the balcony and got shot to death. King’s murder derailed his plans for a “Poor People’s Campaign” which involved a mule train traveling by wagon to Washington, D.C. and staging a camp-out to create a so-called “Resurrection City.” This was King’s idea to bring back the Black and white constituencies that had won the great victories of the civil rights movement only to splinter under the influence of so-called “Black Power” activists like Stokely Carmichael (seen here in archival clips), who not only rejected the doctrine of nonviolence but actively discouraged white participation in the movement. They took overly seriously the writing of Martinique-born pan-African activist Frantz Fanon, who said, “The liberation of oppressed people must be the work of the oppressed people themselves.” The Black Power advocates seized on this idea and declared that the liberation of oppressed people must only be the work of oppressed people themselves, which sounded good in theory but ignored the reality that African-Americans are an oppressed minority and their only hope for equality was, among other things, winning the goodwill of sympathetic white people.

As King got older he became convinced that African-American oppression was just a part of a broader system of U.S. capitalism and imperialism, and the idea of the Poor People’s Campaign was to dramatize this and build a coalition of poor people of all colors. After King’s death the Poor People’s Campaign went ahead as scheduled but without his charismatic leadership and appeal to white Americans, and it soon degenerated into a rather squalid campground whose political point was largely lost. (In a way the Poor People’s Campaign was a forerunner of the Occupy movement of the early 2010’s.) After King’s death, Young drifted for a bit until singer and activist Harry Belafonte convinced him that the next logical step for the movement and its staff was to start running for elective office themselves. Accordingly he ran for Congress in 1970 and lost, largely due to a bizarre statement he made on camera that he wouldn’t mind seeing the destruction of Western civilization if that would mean a better replacement that would achieve true equality for all people. He tried again in 1972 and won, serving until 1977 when newly elected President Jimmy Carter appointed Young ambassador to the United Nations. Young helped broker Carter’s effort to get Israel and Egypt to recognize each other and arranged a transfer to Black rule in Zimbabwe, nèe Rhodesia. But he touched the third rail of American politics when in 1979 he met secretly with Zuhdi Labib Terzi, who’d been appointed U.N. representative of a putative Palestinian state, and thereby alienated Israel. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance gave Carter an ultimatum – either Young would resign or Vance would – and Carter, apparently to his later regret, chose Vance over Young. In 1981, on the urging of many of his associates, including Martin Luther King’s widow Coretta, Young ran for Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia on a platform of increasing investment in Atlanta, making the city a banking center, and ensuring that women and people of color were given a fair chance at the income these investments would generate.

In 1990 Young, after losing a Democratic primary for the governorship of Georgia (a story not told in this documentary), headed the Atlanta Olympic Committee for the 1996 Olympic Games, which Atlanta won over the early favorite, Athens, Greece (the sentimental choice because Athens had been the site of the first modern Olympics in 1896, 100 years earlier). Young headed the Olympic Committee and was in that job when a terrorist planted a bomb in Atlanta’s Centennial Park which went off, killing two people and injuring about 100 others. Young had just left Centennial Park when the bomb exploded, along with most of the crowd that had attended a concert there, and the incident became notorious because Richard Jewell, a security guard who had spotted the bomb just before it went off, was accused of planting it. The actual bomber turned out to be Eric Rudolph, a white terrorist who set off three subsequent bombs in Atlanta and Birmingham before he was finally caught in North Carolina in 2003. Former FBI executive Chris Swecker, who participated in the case, recalled that Rudolph’s motives were what’s become the all too typical rag-bag of Right-wing terrorists: “He had borrowed ideas from a lot of different places and formed his own personal ideology. He clearly was anti-government and anti-abortion, anti-Gay, ‘anti’-a lot of things. The bombings really sprang from his own unique biases and prejudices. He had his own way of looking at the world and didn’t get along with a lot of people.”

Andrew Young: The Dirty Work was an unusual documentary about this sort of person because it didn’t feature any talking heads speaking about Young: just a steady narration by Young himself and various archival clips of people who featured prominently in his life, including Martin Luther King. It was divided into two sections; the first hour dealt with his work with King and ended with King’s assassination, and the second started with the 1996 Atlanta bombing and proceeded backwards to tell the story of Young’s political career. It avoided any depiction of what Young did after the 1996 Olympics, including serving as president of the National Council of Churches from 2000 to 2001, and working with a controversial group that attempted to whitewash Wal-Mart’s image and encourage Black people to shop there, Confronted by activists who accused Wal-Mart and other big chains of driving independent stores out of business, Young responded bitterly in a Los Angeles Times interview, “You see those are the people who have been overcharging us, and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans, and now it's Arabs.” Andrew Young: The Dirty Work was a well-made documentary even though it told mostly the “white legend” of Young’s career.

Angela Harvey, Rodney Chester, and Nathan Hale Williams: Three Black Queer Artists Expressing Themselves in Movies

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I spent five days, October 8-12, in Riverside, California for the annual Convocation of the Unity Fellowship Movement. One of the most fascinating events we went to during the convocation was a combination film screening and question-and-answer session held at the Riverside LGBTQ+ Center featuring filmmakers Angela Harvey and Nathan Hale Williams and actor Rodney Chester. Harvey and Chester were both present from the opening of the session, though Williams arrived later and Harvey left early due to another commitment. Harvey and Chester both projected enormous charisma; Harvey was dressed in skin-tight blue jeans and a simple top, while Chester looked electrifying in a powder-blue suit. Harvey’s film was called Black Rainbow Love, and was 45 minutes of interviews with African-American Lesbians and Gay men in coupled relationships with other Black partners. She said that she was having problems finding a distributor for it because at 45 minutes it’s too long to be a short and too short to be a feature. She also said that it wasn’t taken seriously by a number of the film festivals to which she submitted it because it only had two people credited with being on the crew: herself as producer, director, and writer, and Ken Branson as cinematographer and editor (though Harvey said she’d done a lot of the editing herself). Completed in 2022, it’s sort of a modern updating of the classic Queer documentary Word Is Out (1977) specifically focused on Black Queer people and the dual struggles they face with both racism and homophobia. (Blessed be, Harvey did not use the horrible jargon word “intersectionality.”) Harvey identified herself as a single Lesbian, though she’d been routinely coupled until 2019, when she finally realized she’d had a history of being trapped in co-dependent relationships and needed to break free of emotional commitments to other people.

To me the most interesting of Harvey’s interviewees were Deidre Gray, a Transwoman from the Midwest, and Rayceen Pendarvis, an older woman who said she’d been a mentor and substitute mother to a lot of Queer people who’d been cast adrift by their families of origin. Almost inevitably given that the director was a Lesbian, Black Rainbow Love featured more women than men, but Harvey proved to be a sensitive interviewer with a knack for getting her subjects to reveal themselves. After the movie I suggested that she should do a follow-up about African-American Lesbians and Gay men involved in interracial relationships – and Harvey, much to my surprise, took the suggestion well and didn’t challenge me to make such a film myself. In her opening presentation she stressed that she’s nearly 60 years old and had never even thought of becoming a filmmaker until she did this one, though she’d worked as a writer on the cable TV series Teen Wolf. Mostly she’s a motivational speaker, counselor, self-described “GROWTHologist,” and also a writer and poet who was selling two books at the event, an adult coloring book called Colorful Growth and a poetic memoir called Poetic Alchemy: Seven Intentions for Healing, Personal Growth, and Transformation. Rodney Chester turned out to have been an actor mainly known for his role as part of the cast of Noah’s Arc, a cable TV series that had a two-year run (2004-2006) on the Queer-themed network Logo. He said that despite the fact that Noah’s Arc was the most popular show on Logo for the short time it ran, it was canceled because the network couldn’t find a sponsor – which an audience member said reminded him of the fate of Nat “King” Cole’s 1957 variety show on NBC, which also didn’t draw a sponsor because no one wanted to have their product identified with a show featuring a Black host. Chester recalled that there was a lot of pressure from Logo to introduce white characters into Noah’s Arc, which the producers resisted because they wanted to keep the show all-Black and focused on the issues specifically faced by Black Gay men. He said that the actor who played his partner on the show was straight in real life, and it was a professional challenge for Chester not to cross the line that would make his co-star uncomfortable with physical displays of affection between them.

The rights to Noah’s Arc ended up with Paramount, which produced a feature-film version released this year. The feature includes the same actors as they’ve naturally aged, and one twist in the movie is that the baby he and his partner were raising in the original series has grown up and come out as Transgender. Chester also had a supporting role in the next film shown as part of the afternoon, Nathan Hale Williams’s and Jennia Frederique’s 90 Days (2016), a 20-minute short produced by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in association with Williams’s own production company, iN-Hale Entertainment, and Full Frequency Media. 90 Days seemed to me the weakest film on the program, not only because I’m still committed to the idea that we’ve been sold a bill of goods in being told that the whole cadre of diseases lumped together under the name AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) can be blamed on a single virus, the so-called HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), but because even if you accept the HIV/AIDS model as true, it’s awfully didactic. It centers around the straight relationship between Taylor (Nic Few) and Jessica (Teyonah Parris), who met at the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles (which, by coincidence, Charles and I had recently visited on a day trip to L.A. and we recognized quite a few of the locations inside that incredible establishment) and had been dating for the titular 90 days. The issue between them was that Jessica had dodged any physical intimacy between them without telling Taylor why, and on the night in question Taylor brings over a red jewel case containing an engagement ring and plans to propose to Jessica – until she tells him that (shock!) she’s HIV positive. The most celebrity-adjacent actor in the movie is Pauletta Washington, Denzel Washington’s wife, who gave up her own acting career to raise their children. She plays Taylor’s mother Gayle, and her main function in the film is to question whether it’s wise for Taylor to marry a woman he’s known such a short time. Williams, who wrote 90 Days solo as well as co-directing it with Jennia Frederique (who also is in the film in a supporting role), dared to leave the ending open rather than tell us definitively whether Taylor does or does not let the fact that Jessica is HIV positive break up their relationship. One member of the audience, apparently having missed the import of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s logo being on the credits, thought that the big reveal was going to be that Jessica was a Transwoman.

The third and last film on the program was All Boys Aren’t Blue, a 2021 adaptation of a young-adult novel by George M. Johnson, also directed by Nathan Hale Williams and produced by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation along with Williams’s own iN-Hale Productions and All Tea No Shade Productions. Johnson’s novel was published in 2020 and has become one of the most frequently banned books in the U.S. due to its open addressing of the issues facing a young Black Queer growing up in this country. (It was the number three most banned book in the U.S. in 2021, the second most in 2022 and 2023, and the most banned in 2024.) The film adapts three vignettes from Johnson’s book: a story of how they were (since Johnson has come out as non-binary the plural pronoun is appropriate) beaten up by bullies at age five (they were out with two older cousins and they were attacked by six larger boys, one of whom literally kicked most of Johnson’s teeth out, leading to them getting adult teeth way ahead of schedule and being literally unwilling to smile); a portrait of their grandmother Nanny (Jenifer Lewis), the only supportive member of their family; and their account of pledging the most prestigious Black college fraternity and having to deal with the other members’ homophobia. George Johnson is played by three different people: Thomas Hobson as a child, Dyllon Burnside as the one who relates the story of Nanny, and Bernard David Jones as a college student. The result was an incredibly powerful film that, at 40 minutes, has the same problem as Black Rainbow Love: it’s too long to be a short and too short to be a feature. Williams and Rodney Chester joined forces for an hour-long Q&A that addressed the difficulties of getting Black- and Queer-themed films out to a mass audience. They were originally supposed to show a fourth film, Come Together: Art’s Power for Change, a making-of documentary about the groundbreaking 2006 film Dirty Laundry, the story of a young urban Gay Black man who’s summoned to the Southern home where he grew up to deal with a family crisis. The film was intended as a tribute to Dirty Laundry’s director, the late Maurice Jamal, but the event ran too long for them to be able to show it. Nonetheless, Williams and Chester paid homage to Jamal’s ability not only to get the feature made but to recruit name actors like Rockmond Dunbar and Loretta Devine to be in it. All in all, the event was a tribute to the power and persistence of these Black Queer artists not only to get their films made but to present them to the public as best they can and do their level best to build an audience for Black Queer cinema.

Charlie Kirk's Shooting Death: America's Reichstag Fire

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On February 27, 1933, four weeks after Adolf Hitler had been named Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag, the home of Germany’s legislature, burned to the ground. A mentally impaired Dutch Communist named Marinus Van Der Lubbe was accused and ultimately convicted of arson. But Hitler and his fellow Nazis insisted that there was a much broader conspiracy that had burned the Reichstag, involving not only German Communists but the Soviet Union, and on that basis he got the Reichstag to pass the so-called “Enabling Act” that made Hitler absolute dictator of Germany for the next 12 years.

On December 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, right-hand man of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, was shot to death at the Smolny Institute in his home town of Leningrad (since given back its original name, St. Petersburg). As Hitler had done with Van Der Lubbe and the Reichstag fire, Stalin used this as an excuse to purge the Soviet government of all the people who had sided with his former rival, Leon Trotsky. The Kirov assassination led to the so-called “Great Purge” from 1936 to 1938, in which hundreds of thousands were summarily executed or sent to camps in the Gulag.

From the moment Right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while making a speech at Utah Valley College on September 10, Trump and his supporters have made it clear that they intend to use Kirk’s death in the same ways Hitler used the Reichstag fire and Stalin used the Kirov murder. Trump began the process by releasing a video the day of the murder in which he said, “For years, those on the radical Left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.

“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now,” Trump continued. “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

Trump continued with a litany of political crimes allegedly committed by people on the Left against people on the Right. “From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health-care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical Left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” he said.

Note that he didn’t say a word about political violence committed against centrist, liberal, or Leftist politicians by members of the Right. He didn’t mention the murders of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark on June 14, 2025 or the attempted murders of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife the same day. Nor did he bring up the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in San Francisco October 28, 2022. According to the Wikipedia page on the Pelosi attack, the perpetrator, David DePape, “had embraced various far-Right conspiracy theories, including QAnon, Pizzagate, and Donald Trump's false claims of a stolen election in 2020. Online, he made conspiratorial, racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic posts, and pushed COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.”

According to a study by the Right-wing Libertarian think tank the Cato Institute – hardly the sort of organization that would be in the business of whitewashing the political Left – 74 percent of all reported incidents of political violence in the U.S. in 2024 involved Right-wing perpetrators and centrist, liberal, or Leftist victims. But reality doesn’t matter to a master of public persuasion and media manipulation like Donald Trump, especially now that the six Right-wing revolutionaries (commonly mislabeled “conservatives”) on the U.S. Supreme Court have essentially given him blanket authority to do whatever he likes, the Constitution be damned.

In the week or so since Charlie Kirk’s murder, the “politically correct” line has been to decry political violence on both sides and assert that “political violence has no place in American life.” That’s historically untrue; as Jamil Abdullah Amin, then known as H. Rap Brown, said in 1967, “Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.” The U.S. won its independence in a war in which between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans were killed. It achieved dominance over the North American continent through a genocidal campaign to wipe out the Native population. When Edward R. Murrow interviewed Adolf Hitler in 1940, Hitler said, “I don’t know why you Americans make such a fuss about the Jews. I’m only doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians.”

On the Fox & Friends show on September 14, host Ainsley Earhardt tried to get Trump on the P.C. line about the Kirk shooting that political violence is wrong no matter who commits it or why. “What do we do about our country?” Earhardt asked Trump. “We have radicals on the Right and Left, people are watching videos and cheering, some people are cheering that Charlie was killed. How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”

Trump was having none of it. Instead he gave this combative answer that made it clear he thinks political violence from the Left is despicable, but political violence on the Right is not only justified but righteous. “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble: I couldn’t care less,” Trump said. “Radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime. Radicals on the left are the problem, and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. They want men in women’s sports, they want Transgender for everyone, open borders. Worst thing that happened to this country.”

Trump had already sent that message on January 20, 2025. There’s been a lot of talk about all the things he promised to do on his first day back in the White House that he didn’t do, like lower consumer prices (they’ve gone up) or end Russia’s war against Ukraine (it’s still going on, and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is escalating it with drone fly-overs over Poland and Romania, both members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] and therefore countries the U.S. is sworn to defend militarily against attack).

But the big thing he did do on day one was pardon 1,500 people who’d committed political violence on his behalf on January 6, 2021 in support of his illegal attempt to remain President despite having lost the 2020 election. That created a cadre of people who’d not only demonstrated their willingness to commit political violence on behalf of Donald Trump, but many of them went on social media to declare their willingness to do so again if Trump should ever need them. It sent a signal to the entire nation; it was Trump’s way of saying, “I’m totally on board with political violence as long as you commit it for me.”

And other voices on the Right are seconding Trump’s aggressive agenda and going even further than he has. “Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire,” wrote Right-wing influencer Matt Forney on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “It is time for a complete crackdown on the Left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO [the ‘Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations’ law]. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They caused this.”

Elon Musk, who bought Twitter, renamed it X, and let back on a lot of the Right-wing hate-spewers the previous owners had banned, posted, “If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die.”

Fox News host Jesse Watters, who replaced Tucker Carlson and often seems determined to prove he can be even meaner, said, “They are at war with us. What are we going to do about it?”

Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, a Right-wing think tank whose Web site defines its mission as “to keep America and its great cities prosperous, safe, and free,” said, “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”

Even Trump’s hatchet woman Laura Loomer, who reportedly during the last weeks of Charlie Kirk’s life was questioning his loyalty to Trump over his insistence that the Justice Department should release all its files on the late alleged child sex abuser and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, said in the wake of Kirk’s murder that the government should “shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization. No mercy. Jail every single Leftist who makes a threat of political violence.”

It’s Not Just Words, It’s Actions

Not surprisingly, the radical Right in America has gone far beyond just demanding that the government suppress the Left, or what passes for an American Left, in an unconstitutional campaign of intimidation. They’re also going about it themselves, putting up Web sites claiming to identify 30,000 online posts that said less than reverential things about Charlie Kirk, and they’ve already got at least 30 people fired from their jobs or put on administrative leave for their posts about Kirk.

Todd Rokita, attorney general for the state of Indiana, put up a post on X calling on state residents to report people who make adverse comments on Kirk or his legacy online. His post read, “Hoosiers: If you have evidence of Indiana educators or school administrators making comments that celebrate or rationalize the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we need to hear from you. These individuals must be held accountable—they have no place teaching our students. Submit evidence through the Eyes on Education Portal. Together, we can expose hate, protect students, and empower parents across Indiana.”

Matthew Dowd, a former news analyst at MS-NBC (the supposedly “liberal” alternative to Fox News) who had previously worked as a policy analyst for Republican President George W. Bush, was fired for posting online that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”

Spokespeople for Comcast, MS-NBC’s parent company, called Dowd’s post “an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event. That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions. We should be able to disagree, robustly and passionately, but, ultimately, with respect. We need to do better.”

The Washington Post, whose former reputation as a bastion of liberalism and press freedom is being systematically destroyed by its current owner, Amazon.com founder, multibillionaire and Trump suck-up Jeff Bezos, likewise fired columnist Karen Attiah for a post she made to Substack. While Attiah mentioned Kirk only once in passing, she did speak out “against political violence, racial double standards, and America's apathy toward guns.”

PHNX Sports, an online sports news site based in Arizona, fired reporter Gerald Bourquet for having posted, “Refusing to mourn a life devoted to that cause is not the same thing as celebrating gun violence. Truly don’t care if you think it’s insensitive or poor timing to decline to respect an evil man who died.”

Hannah Molitor, who worked for the Next Door nonprofit in Milwaukee, Wisconsin promoting early childhood education, was fired over a post she put up that read, “What happened to Charlie Kirk is horrible and no person should ever lose their life to gun violence," she wrote. "However, just realize that one side of the aisle is actively fighting to bring an end to unnecessary deaths by gun violence and it was not the side Charlie was on. Yes I am making his death political, no I do not care. If all you do is spew hate, you’re bound to get some in return.” Molitor told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that in addition to being fired, she got death threats, including one which contained a photo of a gun as well as pictures of her home.

Also in Wisconsin, Elkhorn School District superintendent Jason Tadlock reported receiving over 500 voicemail messages and e-mails demanding he fire West Side Elementary School associate principal Cynthia Rehberg for allegedly posting online that Kirk “deserved what he got.” Tadlock traced the campaign against Rehberg to Ryan Fournier, national chair of Students for Trump. Rehberg in fact had posted no such thing, and Fournier later admitted that he’d got his facts wrong, but Tadlock told the Journal Sentinel that he was still getting voicemails and e-mails demanding that Rehberg be fired.

I had already posted this article when President Trump and the “Make America Great Again” movement scored the biggest scalp of them all (so far) in their jihad against anyone who challenges their dominant narrative about Charlie Kirk and his murder. On September 17 ABC-TV put late-night host Jimmy Kimmel on indefinite suspension because of a rather sad joke he made the night before about Kirk’s alleged shooter being a Right-wing false-flag operator. Trump and his head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened Kimmel just before ABC fired him, just as they previously pressured CBS to end Stephen Colbert’s show in June. Trump’s goal is to eliminate anyone who criticizes him from any public square.

These tactics are familiar to anyone who’s studied the history of the American Right. They are the same ones used in the so-called McCarthy period, named after the so-called “anti-Communist” Senator from Wisconsin who served from 1946 to 1957, to target university professors, Hollywood entertainers, and anyone else who seemed overly sympathetic to the Left and its ideologies. While I find such tactics equally reprehensible used by Leftists against the Right – I probably raised some hackles when I described the #MeToo movement as “Left-Wing McCarthyism” – for the most part it’s the Right that demands and pressures private employers to fire people for having politics they disagree with, not the Left.

Ironically, one of the most powerful voices against using the power of both government and the private sector to target the livelihoods of people you disagree with was Charlie Kirk himself. Showing a better understanding of what the First Amendment means than President Trump or Attorney General Bondi, he wrote in a 2024 social media post, “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

Trump’s Hatred of Free Speech When It’s Against Him

Within a week of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, President Trump was on his way out of the U.S. for a state visit to Great Britain. He was scheduled to be received by the royal family for a series of private events at Windsor Castle. Trump did not agree to make the usual speech a visiting foreign leader makes to the House of Commons, reportedly because he didn’t want to have to face hostile questioning from Members of Parliament exercising their right under British law.

Before he left, Trump gave a news briefing at the White House in which he said, “I’m not so sure,” to a reporter who asked him whether protesters against him are protected by the First Amendment. (They are.) Trump then went on to a rambling account of the night he went to dinner at a Washington, D.C. restaurant – the first time during either of his Presidencies he’s ever eaten at a restaurant in the nation’s capital that he didn’t own – and was accosted by four women protesters complaining about the U.S.’s support of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza.

“And they’re women, in many cases women,” Trump said. “In many cases they’re professional agitators. I had one the other night. I had four the other night, all in one group, total phonies. They started to scream when I got into a restaurant, oh, something about Palestine. And I said, ‘Well, we’re doing a great job about peace in the Middle East. I get lots of awards for that, with the Abraham Accords.’ But a woman stood up and started screaming. And she got booed out of the place, too. People, a lot of people in the restaurant. I went there to show how safe it was, and it was safe. And the woman, she was just a mouthpiece. She was a paid agitator. And I’ve had a lot of them. And I’ve asked Pam [Bondi, attorney general] to look into that in terms of RICO, bringing RICO cases against them, criminal RICO. Because they should be put in jail.”

Think about that for a moment. The President of the United States of America just called for using a law designed as a weapon against organized crime – the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) – to prosecute and imprison four women who confronted and allegedly insulted him at a restaurant. Trump’s bizarre assertions that all those who protest against him are “professional agitators” and “total phonies” who are being paid to do so reminded me of the way Southern racists of the early 1960’s used to blame the civil-rights protests on “outside agitators.” Many of them said the Jews were the ones behind the movement because they couldn’t conceive of African-Americans being able to organize it on their own.

Attorney General Bondi echoed Trump’s hatred of the First Amendment when she appeared on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller – one of Trump’s most vile henchmen – and said, “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech. And there is no place, especially now, after what happened to Charlie, in our society.” Katie Miller asked her, “Do you see more law enforcement coming after these groups who are using hate speech, putting cuffs on people, on the basis that some action is better than no action?” Bondi replied, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech. And that’s across the board.”

That bit about Bondi threatening to prosecute “anyone with hate speech … across the board” is so much B.S. If she asserts that power, and her prosecutors can actually secure indictments (a number of grand juries in Washington, D.C. have refused to indict defendants in cases where they allegedly assaulted police officers and immigration agents, including one that faced felony assault charges for throwing a sandwich at an ICE agent), you can be sure she’ll be targeting actual or alleged Leftists heavily and Rightists not at all. Reportedly some genuine conservatives have expressed concern over Bondi’s willingness to prosecute people for mere speech, but you can bet, given the pattern we’ve seen throughout both Trump’s presidencies, that sooner or later they’ll fall in line with Trump’s repressive agenda and start making apologies for it.

Kirk’s Killing Capped a Crazy Week

In one of those weird historical coincidences, Charlie Kirk was assassinated at the end of a week that had also seen three of the five justices of the Supreme Court of Brazil convict the country’s former President, Jair Bolsonaro, of illegally staging a coup to remain in power after the people of Brazil voted him out of office. Trump had already imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazil and said the reason was they were daring to prosecute Bolsonaro for what Trump himself had done on January 6, 2021.

It was also the week when Ryan Routh, the alleged perpetrator of the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump on September 15, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Florida, went on trial. Routh acted as his own attorney, and the judge assigned to his case was Trump appointee and groupie Aileen Mercedes Cannon. (Judge Cannon was the one who drew jurisdiction over the case brought against Trump for allegedly illegally retaining classified documents when he first left the White House in 2021. Her bizarre rulings on her behalf earned her two smackdowns from the federal appeals court in the area.) During the first day of the trial, Routh launched into an opening statement that invoked Charles Darwin, Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Putin, and was shut down by Judge Cannon. Later, during a cross-examination, he congratulated one of the Secret Service agents who apprehended him.

When – after a false alarm on September 10 in which FBI director Kash Patel announced that a suspect in the Kirk killing had been arrested, only having to walk that back when that man turned out to be innocent – a genuine suspect was finally arrested two days later, America’s Right-wing culture warriors probably thought they’d hit the jackpot. The arrestee turned out to be 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, a Gay man who was living with a partner who was undergoing gender transition. No doubt they started licking their lips with glee at the prospect of being able to blame the death of their hero on both Gay and Trans people.

There’s no evidence that Robinson’s Trans partner, Lance Twiggs, had any involvement in whatever he might have done, and they’ve been fully cooperative with the government’s investigation, but America’s Right-wing culture warriors won’t be dissuaded by the facts. Indeed, just minutes before he died, Charlie Kirk had been confronted by an audience member who asked, “Do you know how many Transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” “Too many,” Kirk responded, invoking the widely held and totally erroneous belief among Right-wing Americans that Trans people are uniquely dangerous and violence-prone.

Though many observers, including Trump himself, credited Charlie Kirk with helping Trump win back the White House in 2024 by mobilizing young voters – especially young men – to vote for him, no doubt Kirk will be even more valuable to the American Right in death than he was in life. Kirk’s many reprehensible views – including his belief in the so-called “Great Replacement Theory” that holds there’s a worldwide Jewish conspiracy aimed at getting people of color to reproduce more than white people so they will ultimately take over the world, and his racist statement that he feared for his life whenever he got into a plane with a Black pilot – will fade into the dust or be conveniently flushed down the memory hole.

In life, Charlie Kirk was a potential embarrassment. In death, he will become a martyr. Trump had already begun the process of his canonization when he said on September 10 – well before there was a serious suspect in the case – “Charlie was the best of America, and the monster who attacked him was attacking our whole country. An assassin tried to silence him with a bullet, but he failed because together, we will ensure that his voice, his message, and his legacy will live on for countless generations to come. Today, because of this heinous act, Charlie’s voice has become bigger and grander than ever before. And it’s not even close.”

On April 5, 2023, Charlie Kirk made a statement about gun violence in which he said, “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.” That made me think of the similar karmic debt paid by the late comedian Sam Kinison, who used to ridicule laws against drunk driving – until he was killed in an accident caused by a drunk driver. If Charlie Kirk had to get shot at all, I wish he’d merely been wounded, not killed, so he’d have had a chance to re-evaluate his position on sensible gun regulation the way President Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, became an advocate for gun laws after he was wounded in the attempted assassination of Reagan in 1981.

Or maybe he wouldn’t have. Maybe he’d have worn whatever shrapnel remained in his body as some sort of twisted badge of honor and cast himself as a martyr for the cause of unrestricted access to guns. We’ll never know. What we do know is that President Trump, Attorney General Bondi, and those who fill out the second Trump Administration won’t waste a minute in exploiting the death of Charlie Kirk to extinguish what few bits of political freedom still remain in this country and use it to advance the cause of turning Trump from a Constitutionally limited President into what he’s always wanted to be: America’s Führer.