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.

PBS-TV's "Frontline" Exposes Syria's Past – And America's Likely Future – in "Syria's Detainee Files"

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

Last night (Tuesday, June 10) I watched a quite moving but also very depressing documentary on PBS’s long-running Frontline series: “Syria’s Detainee Files.” We Americans used to be able to watch shows like this detailing the repression by which dictatorships in other countries kept themselves in power in the comfortable assurance that “it couldn’t happen here.” Today we can’t believe that anymore: given the armed invasion of the streets of Los Angeles by 4,000 California National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines ordered by Führer Donald Trump (over the objections of both California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass), ostensibly to facilitate deportation operations being carried out by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) but actually to suppress peaceful protests against them, this depiction of Syria’s past looks all too much like America’s future. It was a program to which I had to pay strict attention because virtually all the interviews were in Arabic, and rather than do voice-over translations directors Sara Obeidat (who also co-produced and narrated) and Sasha Joelle Achilli chose to run the English translations as subtitles. That meant I pretty much ignored my husband Charles when he came home from work about three-fifths into the program. What made the show especially fascinating was that it included interviews not only with some of the victims of the Syrian government’s torturers but also some of the torturers themselves.

Syria is a Middle Eastern country which was put under the control of France through a League of Nations “mandate” after World War I in 1920. Its formal independence was guaranteed after World War II when it was admitted to the United Nations, and in 1958 it briefly merged with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt as the United Arab Republic. In 1961 a military coup took place in Syria and the generals now running the country terminated the political union with Egypt. In 1963 the Ba’ath Party, whose main platform was (ironically) the union of all Arab countries into a super-state, took over and Hafez al-Assad emerged as dictator in 1970. When Hafez died in 2000 his son Bashar al-Assad took over and ruled until late 2024, when after decades of insurgency his regime was finally overthrown and he sought and received political asylum from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Under Bashar’s regime a vast network of intelligence agencies was created, of which the most brutal and repressive was one with the innocuous title “Air Force Intelligence.” Agents of Air Force Intelligence – including its national chief, Major General Jamil Hassan – ran several private prisons, detention centers and torture chambers while Bashar claimed “plausible deniability.” A surprising number of participants in Air Force Intelligence’s torture activities agreed to be interviewed, though only one – a bulldozer driver named Yusuf Obeid who was pressed into service to use his bulldozer to dig mass graves for people who’d died under torture – actually allowed his real name to be used.

Obeid recalled that he’d been working as a bulldozer driver for the city of Damascus when one day he received orders from an intelligence officer to drive his bulldozer to Najha cemetery on the outskirts of the city. “There was an armed agent,” Obeid said. “He said, ‘Follow me,’ and drove in front of me. He arrived at the cemetery entrance and I followed him. We continued until there were no more graves. He told me to dig a large 15x15 meter pit, at least 3 meters deep. A black Mercedes arrived, followed by two large, refrigerated trucks, then a military truck carrying soldiers. I started to smell something. As they got closer there was a horrible stench. Then I realized what was inside those fridge trucks. It smelled like rotting dead bodies.” One of the torturers, interviewed under the name “Hussam,” said, “On Wednesday mornings, back when I worked there, we would have an ‘execution party.’ Our role in executions was to place the rope on the prisoner, then step aside. Only an officer can push the chair out. One time, we put a guy on the rope. [The officer] pushed the chair, the rope tightened, but after 22 minutes, he still hadn't died. So they told me, ‘Grab him and pull him downward.’ I grasped the prisoner like this and I pulled him down. He still didn't die. So another guard who's bigger and stronger said, ‘Go, I will do it.’ Before he died he said one thing: ‘I’m going to tell God what you did.’ Just that, that's all he said.”

Another, an officer using the name “Osama,” recalled, “They would keep them under harsh torture day and night until they admitted to killing so-and-so. On that basis, they’re sent to the field court, where no questions are asked. It’s just about confirming your statement and signing it with your fingerprint. A month or two later, their sentence would be delivered to the prison.” The accounts from some of the torturers almost inevitably reminded me of the stories told by some of the Nazis who worked as guards in the concentration camps, who were at first appalled at the brutality they witnessed but ultimately not only became desensitized to it but emerged as willing participants. If “Syria’s Detainee Files” had any heroes, they would be the brothers Shadi and Hadi Haroun, who got caught up in the Syrian resistance during the so-called “Arab Spring” protests of 2010-2011. They recalled attending a peaceful gathering in one of Damascus’s town squares to demand that Bashar resign and allow free elections to replace him, when all of a sudden one of them noticed a sniper on a balcony overlooking the crowd. The sniper started picking people off, and then a full army unit invaded the town square and just started firing at people indiscriminately. Shadi was arrested and sent to the notorious Air Force Intelligence prison at Mezzeh, and Hadi took advantage of a series of town-hall meetings Bashar al-Assad was holding throughout Syria to confront the president and get him to release Shadi.

Hadi actually got an oral commitment from Bashar himself for Shadi’s release, but that wasn’t good enough for Major General Hassan. When he met the general, Hadi recalled, Hassan “raised his glasses and looked at me and said, ‘I don’t want to release your brother, it's that simple.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, Major General. There is an order from Bashar al-Assad to release him.’ I said it so confidently. He said, ‘Sure,’ then picked up the phone and dialed a number. ‘With respect, sir, you ordered the release of Shadi Haroun. But he is a danger to the country. I want to question him myself. Then, with your approval, I’ll decide if he should be released.’ He said, ‘You see, I don’t want to release him.’ I couldn’t understand what he was doing. Was he trying to send me a message that Bashar al-Assad may be the president of this country, but I'm the president of this mini-state? As in, ‘I am the president of the state of Air Force Intelligence.’” Ultimately Shadi was moved to an even nastier prison at Harasta and then to a still worse one at Saydnaya, where Hadi was also detained. The prison conditions were so overcrowded that prisoners were literally stacked on top of each other, and a number of them died from simple oxygen deprivation because the cells were so full none of the prisoners could get enough air. Shadi recalls one interrogator who stuck a gun in Shadi’s mouth and told him that he was going to be tortured to death anyway, so he should let the officer shoot him and get it over with relatively quickly.

When they were finally released, the Harouns understandably left Syria and fled to southern Turkey, where they remained until Bashar al-Assad’s rule of terror finally ended in December 2024. Then they returned to Syria, went to Mezzeh prison, and tried as best they could to piece back together the incomplete records of how the prison had been run under Bashar and who had been kept there. That wasn’t as easy as it sounds, since many of the records had been destroyed or thrown away. There’s one heartbreaking scene in which the brothers find a binder that was supposed to have held the records of anyone executed there – only the binder was blank. All the pages had been removed. Also, when they arrived there the prisoners were each assigned a number, and no record was kept of their names, because the people in charge wanted to be able to say honestly that they’d never heard of them. The sheer cruelty and organized viciousness of the Syrian authorities – or their brethren among dictatorships in general is very much apparent on this program. It gave rise to Atlantic journalist Adam Serwer’s oft-quoted comment (and book title), “The cruelty is the point,” and it’s also the attitude expressed by O’Brien, the representative of the ruling party in George Orwell’s 1984, when he tells the book’s dissident protagonist Winston Smith (as he’s torturing him), that power is the ability to make another human being suffer.

“Obedience is not enough,” O’Brien says, “Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” We are now experiencing in the United States the transformation of an imperfect but still hopeful republic into an authoritarian, even a totalitarian, dictatorship in which our new masters will demand, as Bashar al-Assad and hundreds of similar dictators throughout history have done, not only to be obeyed but to be worshiped. “Syria’s Detainee Files” illustrate the human cost of such a world and what it does to the torturers as well as the victims. One of the torturers interviewed in this movie, a former warrant officer in Air Force Intelligence called “Abbas,” said, “In my opinion, every human being has two souls – an evil soul and a good soul. They are in a constant state of war. One of them is telling you to think and have empathy. The other is telling you to be selfish and destructive, saying, ‘You’re an agent of this regime. Keep quiet. Or you’ll die.’” Actually I’ve long felt that Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Mike Johnson, Stephen Miller, and the people like them who are now ruling the United States and seeking to destroy its last vestiges of democracy don’t have “good souls” because they have deliberately purged themselves of everything noble and decent in their natures. They equate kindness, compassion, and empathy with “weakness” and believe, like O’Brien in 1984, that the world they want, like Syria’s past or America’s likely future, is “a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

The Gloves Come Off in Donald Trump’s Combative March 4 and 14 Addresses

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

https://www.reddit.com/r/insanepeoplefacebook/comments/1itls2v/trump_posts_fake_magazine_cover_of_himself_with_a/?rdt=43415

”Crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions. Whoever can supply them with illusions is really their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

– Gustave Le Bon, √The Crowd (1895)

”If a majority of our people turned their backs on you and the future, they did it out of simple childishness and fear.”

– Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar), letter to defeated Democratic Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, November 6, 1952

On Tuesday, March 4 – just two weeks after newly re-installed President Donald Trump literally proclaimed himself king of America via a mock Time magazine cover showing him wearing a crown with the slogan, “Long Live the King” – he gave a so-called “Address to a Joint Session of Congress.” It was really a State of the Union speech (though given that rather awkward designation because pettifogging historians don’t believe that a newly installed – or, as in Trump’s case, newly re-installed – President can be fulfilling the Constitutional duty to “from time to time give Congress Information on the State of the Union”). It lasted 99 minutes – the longest on record (indeed, of the six longest State of the Union speeches ever, four have been given by Trump) – and it was remarkable for its combative tone and its refusal even to feint at “bipartisanship.”

Trump’s immediate predecessor, Joe Biden, had mostly avoided direct criticism of Trump. When he felt the need to do so, he diplomatically referred to “my predecessor.” Trump, not surprisingly, showed no such reticence. He regularly denounced Biden, calling him “the worst President in American history” and addressed the rival political party as at best an inconvenience and at worst a bunch of hopeless ingrates. “I look at the Democrats in front of me and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud, nothing I can do,” Trump said in his most bizarrely self-pitying tones. “I could find a cure to the most devastating disease, a disease that would wipe out entire nations, or announce the answers to the greatest economy in history, or the stoppage of crime to the lowest levels ever recorded and these people sitting right here, will not clap, will not stand and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements.”

So instead of trying to govern in a spirit of bipartisanship, Trump said, he would govern on his own. “Over the past six weeks, I have signed nearly 100 executive orders and taken more than 400 executive actions, a record to restore common sense, safety, optimism and wealth all across our wonderful land.” Trump said. “The people elected me to do the job, and I'm doing it. In fact, it has been stated by many that the first month of our presidency, it's our presidency, is the most successful in the history of our nation by many. And what makes it even more impressive is that, do you know who number two is, George Washington.”

Trump’s claim of a “mandate” drew a shocked and anguished reaction from one African-American Congressmember, Representative Al Green (D-TX). Waving his cane, he yelled back at Trump, “No mandate to cut Medicaid” – America’s health-care program for low-income people. Though Republican Congressmembers regularly heckled Barack Obama and Joe Biden during their State of the Union speeches, Green’s outburst got House Speaker Mike Johnson to order him removed from the chamber.

If the Democrats really wanted to be an effective opposition, they would all have walked out en masse in solidarity with Congressmember Green and had their own impromptu rally on the steps of the Capitol to denounce Trump’s lies. But they didn’t. A few gradually trickled out of the hall as Trump’s speech droned on, and on, and on. Later some Democratic leaders in both houses of Congress made themselves look ridiculous by pretending to be working out for a boxing match, throwing punches in mid-air and dancing in a gesture that got rightfully laughed at by virtually everyone who saw it.

A Libertarian Agenda

Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on March 4 came at the end of a whirlwind six-week period during which he and his allies, including independent multibillionaire Elon Musk and newly appointed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russell Vought, are seeking nothing less than the utter destruction of the federal bureaucracy. They are imposing by executive fiat a radical-Right revolutionary agenda that aims drastically to shrink the size and scope of the federal government over the lives of individual Americans – and simultaneously to hand control of the country to the richest and most powerful.

In a bizarre March 4 interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Pete Buttigieg, former Secretary of Transportation under Biden, gave a presentation that fundamentally misunderstood what is going on in the U.S. today. He asked why there aren’t principled conservatives and libertarians standing up against Trump and his authoritarian agenda. Trump has successfully driven out just about all the principled conservatives who used to sit in the U.S. Congress – Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger – and as for the libertarians, Trump is basically enacting their agenda.

Libertarianism is a political philosophy first articulated by Russian-born American novelist and political commentator Ayn Rand (1905-1982) in the 1940’s and 1950’s (though she disliked the term “Libertarianism” and called her philosophy “Objectivism”). It’s actually based on the earlier Protestant theology of the Swiss-born John Calvin (1509-1564). Unlike previous Christian leaders, Calvin believed that only a certain handful of people, whom he called “The Elect,” were saved by God and destined for Heaven. What’s more, he believed the way God would show who “The Elect” were was by their material success in this world. Calvinism essentially flipped Christianity on its head; instead of a religion exalting the poor and weak, Calvin’s version became one that supported the rich and strong.

Though Rand herself was a lifelong atheist, her vision of the human race was essentially a secular version of Calvin’s. Her philosophy held that rich people were by definition superior to the common run of humanity. Therefore, society should be run in a way which did as little as possible to interfere with the prerogatives and prejudices of the rich. Instead, it should seek as much as possible to help them stay rich and become even richer, and should block the efforts of non-rich people to use governmental power to compel the rich to offer any financial or social benefits to the non-rich.

Rand reversed Karl Marx’s “labor theory of value,” which held that all value in the economy was created by workers. Instead, Rand argued, all value was created by visionary capitalists who created the industries in which the workers worked. In the novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), her main expressions of her political philosophy, Rand constructed plots in which her ultra-rich capitalist heroes would lose all their money through no fault of their own, and then earn it all back again and more, thus illustrating their vast superiority over the common run of mere mortals. Rand even argued that the spirit of entrepreneurial capitalism was so powerful it could transcend the laws of physics; the hero of Atlas Shrugged, John Galt, is a genius who builds a motor that literally runs on air.

Rand and her followers, including future Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, argued for a severely limited government that would have only three functions: a military, to defend the nation against foreign threats; a criminal justice system, to enforce domestic laws and punish people who killed or stole; and a civil justice system, to arbitrate differences between people with property and protect them against the efforts of people without property to take it from them. Rand and her followers vehemently rejected social programs designed to help the non-rich, especially if they were funded by taxes aimed primarily at the rich. When asked what society should do to help disabled people, she said, “Misfortune does not justify slave labor.” Her argument was that taxing rich people to pay for social programs to help non-rich people was essentially enslaving the rich.

She also said that asking the question, “What should we do … ,” was building the collectivist assumption into the way the question was framed. In her view, if rich people voluntarily wanted to set up private charities to help non-rich people, that was their right (though in the plots of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, the rich people she most admired were the ones who refused to donate to charities). But it was not only bad policy but downright immoral to tax rich people to pay for services for non-rich people. That’s why people who have noted that Trump’s and Musk’s policies are targeting agencies that help other people are missing the point completely. Trump and Musk are following a Libertarian agenda that holds that running programs to combat Ebola, bird flu or AIDS in the Third World is not only wrong but evil.

During Trump’s first Presidency, in March and November 2017, I posted items to this blog pointing out that while Trump campaigned in 2016 as a European-style nationalist conservative, pledging to protect Social Security and Medicare against fellow Republicans who were promising to cut them, he was governing as a Libertarian. The reason, I argued, is that Libertarianism appealed to the two things most important to Trump: his bank balance and his ego. Not only did Libertarianism generate policy proposals that would make rich people like Donald Trump even richer, it assuaged his notoriously vulnerable sense of self by telling him that his wealth automatically established his superiority over ordinary humans.

That’s one reason for the bizarre section in Trump’s address on March 4 on which he claimed that the U.S. Social Security Administration had people on its rolls who were up to 300 years old, and were presumably receiving benefits. Trump didn’t offer an explanation for who was actually collecting this money, though he said, “[W]e're going to find out where that money's going, and it's not going to be pretty.” This had already been exposed as not only wrong but a lie – it had to deal with a computer program used in the 1970’s that, if they didn’t have a birthday for someone, filled in a date from the 19th century – but Trump went ahead and told it anyway.

The day after Trump’s big speech to Congress, Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Though Trump pledged in both 2016 and 2024 not to cut Social Security or Medicare, he, Musk, Vought and the other Libertarian ideologues in his government know that the only way they can possibly finance huge tax cuts for the rich and balance the federal budget is by ending, or at least drastically cutting, Social Security and Medicare.

The New-Boys Network

One major feature of the first six weeks of Trump 2.0 has been the overwhelming assault on the federal workforce led by Trump and his “hand,” to use the Game of Thrones term, Elon Musk. This is a direct implementation of one of the nuttier ideas of Curtis Yarvin, a young blogger and podcaster whom Trump’s vice-president, J. D. Vance, has cited as his ideological guru. Yarvin’s bonkers ideas got a nationwide airing on Rachel Maddow’s MS-NBC show on September 30, 2024 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeVhHNSe9Ks). She showed clips from an interview Vance gave to Right-wing podcaster Jack Murphy and then presented a clip from Yarvin himself, via a speech he gave to a wildly adoring Right-wing crowd at a public meeting.

Yarvin’s speech offered an uncannily accurate prediction of what Trump and Musk would do to the federal workforce when Trump won back the White House. Speaking in front of a banner reading “RAGE” – which Yarvin explained was an acronym for “Retire All Government Employees” – Yarvin said, “You have a government in Washington. You’re either for it or against it. And what is a government? A government is just a corporation running a country, nothing more, nothing less. It just so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed, and there’s a very simple way to replace that, which is what all corporations have found. We simply delete them. We haven’t been able to do that for over 200 years. So it’s gotten a little bit stale.”

Yarvin went on to explain that his vision of “the system” that needs to be “deleted” goes far beyond the government and its workforce. “[I]t includes a lot of things, including things that are called universities, that are funded by the state. It’s a very, very large system, and it also must be destroyed. Fortunately, there are a lot of very talented Americans who actually know how to run things and make things work, and they are generalists. You need to get these people, put them in a position of responsibility, and have them do their thing. And finally, you need a CEO, and a national CEO is what is called a dictator. It’s the same thing. There’s no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they have to get over their dictator phobia.”

Though Trump still claims to be a “populist,” he made clear his real class interest when he had four of the richest men in the world – Elon Musk, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai – given seats of honor at his January 20 inaugural. During the later stages of the 2024 campaign there was a lot of nonsense written about how the high-tech industry had supposedly been relatively liberal before and now was moving Right to support Trump. That was a bunch of B.S. The truth is that a lot of the founders of big Internet companies had read Ayn Rand’s novels and saw themselves as heroic capitalists in the mold of her characters. Indeed, in the early stages of the Internet I read articles by people complaining that they wanted to engage in serious political discussions online and couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t a Libertarian.

That eventually changed as Internet access spread beyond the original Silicon Valley “tech bros” and moved into the general population. There is now a wide variety of political views expressed online, from progressive Left to radical Right. But the people running the big tech companies remain in the thrall of a Libertarian ideology that tells them they are the “makers,” everyone else is a “moocher” or a “taker,” and they should be allowed to do whatever they like to society as a whole. Every time a Trump opponent goes public with the criticism that Elon Musk’s wholesale firings of government employees are “disruptive,” what they don’t realize is that in the high-tech world “disruptive” is actually a compliment. The whole high-tech computer/Internet industry is based on the idea that all change is “progress,” and all “progress” necessarily good.

I’m sure most people who’ve used the Internet have had the experience of receiving a so-called “upgrade” to a Web site and finding the new version far clunkier and harder to use than the previous one. But that doesn’t matter to the people running the industry, who seem to insist that their customers exist to serve them instead of the other way around. In his March 4 speech, Trump said, “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” What he really meant by that was he’s persuaded, either by pressure or outright buy-outs (like Musk taking over Twitter and ending the lifetime ban imposed on Trump by its previous owner), social media outlets to end their bans on hate speech, health-related disinformation, and other radical-Right propaganda.

Trump certainly isn’t a fan of the First Amendment generally, especially as it applies to criticism of him personally. As Scott Nover wrote on March 5 on the Time magazine Web site (https://time.com/7264811/trump-free-speech-joint-address-essay/), since retaking the Presidency on January 20, “Trump has operationalized his long-held animosity for the tenets of the First Amendment, attacking the independent press, free speech, and peaceful protest.” When the Associated Press (AP) refused to go along with Trump’s unilateral renaming of the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” Nover reported, “The White House retaliated against the AP, kicking its reporters out of presidential briefings in the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One. On Feb. 21, the news organization sued three White House officials over the blocked access, saying the decision would infringe on its First Amendment right to freedom of the press as well as its Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

Trump has also taken away the power of the White House Correspondents’ Association to determine which White House reporters get to be on “the pool” that regularly covers the President. Instead, he’s said he’ll make those calls himself, just as he took over administration of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., leading a number of top artists to cancel their bookings there. He’s banned mainstream outlets like the AP and Reuters from White House briefings, and instead invited reporters from obscure Right-wing Web sites like Newsmax, One America News and Real America’s Voice. The fiasco surrounding Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky’s February 28 White House meeting with Trump and Vance was touched off by Real America’s Voice reporter Brian Glenn, boyfriend of Right-wing Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), asking Zelensky why he hadn’t worn a suit to a meeting with the U.S. President – a criticism later seized on and amplified by Trump and Vance.

Even when Trump seems to be on the point of doing something positive, he turns it into a personal issue and an ill-disguised threat. In the March 4 speech, he called on Congress to pass laws like the U.S. Senate’s Take It Down Act to regulate so-called “deep fake” images created through artificial intelligence (AI) and then posted online. “And I'm going to use that bill for myself too, if you don't mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody,” he said. That suggested that if Congress indeed passes such a law, Trump will use it to order the removal of caricatures like the one flown in a parade in London a few years ago showing him as a giant baby, wearing a diaper and nothing else. And in his 2016 campaign he told his rally audiences to beat up anyone who crashed the event and caused a disturbance, and promised to pay their legal bills if they were arrested by police for doing so.

On March 4, the same day Trump gave his speech to the joint session of Congress, he sent this post on his own social-media site, Truth Social, outright threatening any colleges and universities that allowed so-called “illegal protests” on their campuses. “"All federal funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests," Trump wrote. "Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!" And three days later he acted on his threat, announcing the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University in New York over what four federal agencies called their “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” This, mind you, is coming from a President who’s hosted Holocaust deniers to dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s call for the deportation of legal immigrants who protest on behalf of Palestinian rights in Gaza was put into effect on March 11, when Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil was abruptly removed from Columbia’s New York campus and moved to a detention camp in Louisiana pending deportation. At first the government said it was revoking Khalil’s student visa – but later it turned out he was here on a so-called “green card” that gave him legal permanent resident status. He had settled in the U.S. so extensively that he had married an American woman and was about to have a child with her. She was eight months pregnant when her husband was taken and summarily declared “illegal.” Earlier, on March 5, Indian Columbia student Ranjani Srinivasan’s student visa was revoked. The Department of Homeland Security announced that she considered her to have “self-deported” because she’d made vacation plans to return temporarily to her home country.

Trump’s statement made it clear that he regarded Khalil as an enemy of the U.S. and he would be just the first of many deported for similar reasons. “I think we ought to get them all out of the country,” Trump said. “They’re troublemakers. They’re agitators. They don’t love our country. We ought to get them the hell out. I think that guy, we ought to get him — I heard his statements too. They were plenty bad, and I think we ought to get him the hell out of the country. I watched him. I watched tapes, specifically, I watched tapes, and you can have him, okay? You can have him — and you can have the rest of them. … Columbia used to be a good school. Now it’s been overrun because of bad leadership.”

The overwhelming evidence from both Trump’s first term as President and the first six weeks of his new one is that Trump has, and has never had, any desire to be a powerful, influential but Constitutionally limited President. Instead he wants, and has always wanted, to be a Führer, to govern by executive decree and be the ultimate source of all legal authority. (The constitution of Nazi Germany said that “the will of the Führer” was the ultimate law.) He’s been aided by a powerful Right-wing legal theory called the “unitary executive,” which basically argued that since the executive branch was the only one for which the framers of the Constitution vested ultimate authority in just one person (the President), the President should be all-powerful and have the right to do just about anything. Trump himself said this during his first term when he referred to the Constitution and claimed, “There’s this little thing called Article II, which says I get to do whatever I want.”

Tariffs: Now You See Them, Now You …

One of Trump’s most peculiar and bewildering obsessions is with tariffs. Trump seems to think that tariffs are taxes paid by foreign countries and if the U.S. imposes them, that’s “free money.” In fact, tariffs are taxes paid by American consumers on just about everything they buy. The only difference between tariffs and other sales taxes is that tariffs are charged on goods imported from other countries. A number of people have tried to explain this to Trump, ranging from his first-term economic advisor Gary Cohn (who came away from a meeting with Trump on tariffs reportedly saying, “What a fucking moron”) to Bloomberg News editor John Micklethwait in the only even semi-critical interview Trump faced during the last two months of the 2024 campaign. They have all dismally failed.

Trump’s weird obsession with tariffs has led to his willful destruction of the American economy. His on-again, off-again approach to imposing them has rendered the executives of American manufacture unable to make investments because they don’t know from month to month, week to week, or even day to day just how much their raw materials will cost. One car dealer posted an online video pointing out that the price of a Dodge Ram on his lot would automatically rise from $80,000 to $100,000 on the basis of the 25 percent tariff Trump was imposing on Canadian steel. Trump says that manufacturing companies can avoid the tariffs if they use only American raw materials and components. But even if everything they needed to make cars existed in the U.S., it would take years for them to build new supply chains and retool their factories to use only American components.

The proof of Trump’s deliberate wreckage of the U.S. economy lies in what the stock indexes are doing in response to his tariffs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average tanked 700 points on Monday, March 11 and was lower by at least 1,700 by the time the week ended. Standard & Poor’s and the NASDAQ, the index for high-technology stocks, posted similarly dramatic declines. Trump’s response – and this, mind you, is coming from a President who during his first term regularly cited stock market gains as proof his economic policies were working – was to declare that the stock market was irrelevant and the U.S. is in a “period of transition” that will ultimately lead us to a better future,

If there’s one thing my 71 years of life on this planet has taught me, it’s to beware of any politician who defends policies that make you miserable and worse-off immediately because they’ll create a better future. They never do; all they do is make the people imposing them richer and more powerful permanently. At best, Trump’s tariffs seem like a schoolyard bullying game, aimed at punishing countries for having allegedly taken advantage of the U.S. in previous trade relationships. At worst, Trump seems to be creating what economists call “autarchy” – a state of affairs in which a country tries to cut itself off from all foreign trade and insists that it can go it alone in the world economy. Just ask a North Korean – if you can get him or her in a position where they can talk freely – how well that’s worked for them.

A March 4 article by Eric Levitz on the Vox.com Web site (https://www.vox.com/politics/402530/trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-explanation) exposed how self-contradictory Trump’s explanations for his tariff policy really are. “In recent weeks, Trump has provided five different — and contradictory — justifications for his tariffs on Mexico and Canada, none of which make much sense,” Levitz wrote. They are: 1) to get Canada and Mexico to act to stop undocumented immigrants and drug smuggling across their borders with the U.S.; 2) to force companies to move production to the U.S. and thereby narrow the trade deficits; 3) to force Canada and Mexico to renegotiate their trade agreements (the last one of which Trump himself signed to great fanfare in 2018); 4) to coerce Canada into becoming the 51st U.S. state; and 5) to raise revenue for the U.S. government.

Some of these justifications suggest that Trump will unilaterally lift the tariffs he’s imposed if he gets policy concessions from the countries he’s imposed them on, especially Canada and Mexico. Others suggest they’re intended to remain in place indefinitely because the U.S. government will be making revenue from them. Trump gave that game away in a little-noticed TV clip in which he finally answered the question Hillary Clinton tried to ask him in the 2016 campaign: just when does Trump think America was “great” and to which he wants us to return to “make America great again”?

Trump’s answer was revealing: between 1870 and 1913. It was an era in which corporations controlled more of the American economy and had more political power than either before or since. It was an era without environmental restrictions on the ability of corporations to pollute; indeed, city residents were told that the smoke that had taken the place of fresh air in their communities was a sign of “progress.” It was an era in which political offices were openly bought and sold – especially seats in the U.S. Senate, which at that time was still elected by state legislatures instead of directly by voters. It was an era in which labor unions were illegal – an era Trump and Musk would love to return to. In a 2024 podcast interview they both joked about being able to fire striking workers, which is at least technically illegal under U.S. labor law (though companies in fact do it all the time).

It was the era in which Congress passed the first legal restrictions on immigration to the U.S.: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which as its name suggests was intended to ban all future immigration to the U.S. from China. It was the era in which the U.S. Supreme Court made its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in 1896, which held that racial segregation was constitutional and allowed white Southern governments to return African-Americans to a virtual condition of permanent servitude.

And it’s significant that Trump’s definition of the period when America was “great” and to which he wants to return us ends in 1913, when the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect. It allowed the federal government “to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Until then, the primary way the federal government funded itself was through tariffs.

Already in the 2010’s members of the radical-Right “Tea Party” movement, which anticipated Trumpism in many ways, had declared that the original U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights were “divinely inspired.” But they claimed that three subsequent amendments – the 14th, which among other things established “birthright citizenship,” which Trump has attempted to abolish unilaterally by executive order; the 16th, which made the income tax constitutional; and the 17th, which moved electing Senators from state legislatures to the voters – were literally the work of Satan.

“[I]f you think back a million years ago to Trump's inaugural speech – it does seem a long while ago – who was the president who was most venerated in that speech?” New York Times White House correspondent David Sanger said on the March 14 episode of the PBS series Washington Week. “It wasn't Washington. It wasn't Lincoln. It was [William] McKinley. McKinley, the man who loved tariffs and expanded the United States, ended up being the winner of the Spanish-American War, ended up with the Philippines, which he really didn't know what to do with once he got it. [It’s] pretty fascinating that he is the one who Trump has chosen to go follow.”

The Libertarian Dream and the Fascist Reality

In his second Presidential term, even more than he did in his first, Trump is enacting an authoritarian playbook by dictatorial means. In his first term (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2020/07/trumps-gleichschaltung-kills-people.html) I compared Trump’s demand for “loyalty” from his Cabinet members and other appointees – “loyalty” not to the laws or the Constitution or the duty of the executive to “take care that the laws be faithfully administered,” but to the person (and ever-changing whims) of Donald Trump – to Adolf Hitler’s and the Nazis’ Gleichschaltung.

One of those indigestible compound words the Germans love to construct out of bits and pieces of their language, and a word that doesn’t have a convenient English translation, Gleichschaltung in practice meant subverting the power of agencies the Führer didn’t like by appointing people to run them who fundamentally disbelieved in what they were set up to do. As Trump put together his Island of Misfit Toys Cabinet in the wake of the November 5, 2024 election that returned him to the Presidency – a set of appointees so outrageously unqualified it reminded me of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and his frequent pleas to Hitler that he needed to pick people who were qualified for their jobs instead of just long-time Nazis with “low Party numbers” – it was clear that Trump’s second-term Cabinet was Gleichschaltung on steroids.

Trump appointed Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News commentator, as Secretary of Defense when Hegseth’s only discernible qualification was having written a very nasty book denouncing the modern-day military as too “woke” – which in practice has meant firing all the top commanders who happened either to be female or people of color and replacing them with white men. As part of a deal Trump made with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to get him to withdraw his own independent 2024 Presidential campaign and endorse Trump, Kennedy got to be Secretary of Health and Human Services despite his well-known activism against vaccines. Now that he’s in office, he’s published a list of topics researchers at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, are not allowed to discuss in their papers unless they first send the drafts to “the NCI Clearance Team for review prior to publication.” Among the restricted topics are COVID-19, vaccines, bird flu, opiates, marijuana, obesity, stem cell or fetal tissue research, abortion, autism, peanut allergies, fluoride, measles, and “environmental justice.” (Source: ProPublica Web site, https://www.propublica.org/article/national-cancer-institute-flagged-topics-vaccines-autism-rfk-jr.)

Trump appointed Linda McMahon, wife of a wrestling promoter, ostensibly to run the Department of Education but really to abolish it (a demand of Right-wing administrations at least since Ronald Reagan’s). As head of the FBI, Trump appointed Kash Patel, whose main qualifications seemed to be having published a book critical of the FBI – which contained an appendix listing all the supposed political “enemies” he would want to use the Bureau to prosecute – and having published anti-FBI propaganda that turned out to have been funded by Russian intelligence. To run the Justice Department, Trump hired two of his personal attorneys, Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, to be Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, respectively. What’s more, Trump showed up at the Justice Department offices on March 14 and gave an hour-long speech that was essentially marching orders to his appointees to use the Justice Department to reward his friends and punish his enemies.

Trump’s March 14 speech was basically a performance of Trump’s Greatest Hits. He boasted that he’d pardoned all 1,500 of the Capitol rioters from January 6, 2021, calling them “political prisoners who have been grossly mistreated.” He also said that the greatest day of his first term had been when he fired former FBI director James Comey on May 9, 2017. Comey’s sins, in Trump’s eyes, had been his authorization of a special counsel investigation into allegations that Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign had been helped by Russia and Comey’s refusal to swear “loyalty” to the person of Donald Trump. What’s more, the day Trump fired Comey he had two high officials from the Russian government in his office: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Trump boasted to both that by firing Comey he had quashed the Russia investigation.

While heaping praise on judges who’d ruled in his favor, like Florida District Court Judge Aileen Mercedes Cannon, Trump blasted both judges who ruled against him and FBI and Department of Justice officials who had been involved in investigations against him. Even before that, Trump had ordered the mass firings of FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors who had worked on the January 6, 2021 cases, the investigations into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents when he left the Presidency the first time, and anyone else who had the temerity to investigate him or his friends. “Unfortunately in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and goodwill built up over generations,” Trump said. “They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.”

A master of what George Orwell, in his book 1984, called “doublethink” – “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them” – Trump accused former President Joe Biden of “weaponizing” the Justice Department against him while “weaponizing” it himself against Democrats, news media and anyone else on Trump’s “enemies list.” Trump named specific individuals he wants to see prosecuted, including Andrew Weissmann, who worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged ties between Trump and Russia in 2016; Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, to investigate the January 6, 2021 riots and Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents; and Norm Eisen, who formerly worked with an organization called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Trump misidentified Eisen as a current staff member of CREW.

Trump also called for the direct prosecution of news media outlets like CNN and MS-NBC (which he invariably calls “MS-DNC” as part of his claim that they’re a propaganda arm of the Democratic National Committee). “I believe that CNN and MS-DNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party,” he said. “And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal.” As usual, he hasn’t made it clear just what he wants them prosecuted for, but there’s evidence that Trump’s jeremiads against the media have already started to work.

Trump has already won a $15 million defamation settlement from ABC for having said a New York court found him liable for raping journalist E. Jean Carroll (based on a quirk in New York law that defines “rape” as penile penetration; Trump fucked Carroll against her will with his finger, not his dick, and was found liable for “sexually assaulting” her). The multi-billionaire owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times pulled their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris over Trump in the 2024 campaign at the last minute in what Yale professor and On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder called “anticipatory obedience,” and Trump rewarded Amazon.com and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos with a front-row seat at his inaugural along with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. And MS-NBC did their own en masse firing or demotion of various show hosts, including African-Americans Joy Reid and Jonathan Capehart and most of their Arab-Americans.

Between Elon Musk’s chainsaw-like firings of massive numbers of federal employees (the chain saw was his own metaphor, wielded at a radical-Right political gathering, though he copied it from Argentinian President Javier Milei, a Trump-like faux “populist” politician), Trump’s blatant disregard of the media’s First Amendment-guaranteed right to criticize him, his descriptions of immigrants as “savages,” “animals,” and “monsters” (elsewhere I’ve noted that immigrants are to Trump what Jews were to Hitler: an all-purpose scapegoat he can blame for virtually anything), and his blatant disregard of court orders against him (including a New York judge’s order attempting to block deportation flights of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador), Trump not only wants to become America’s Führer, he’s well on his way to achieving it.

Trump’s affection for foreign strongmen like Russian President Vladimir Putin became apparent when he sent U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Saudi Arabia to negotiate an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine – without inviting any Ukrainians. It became even more obvious when Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance met with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky at the White House on February 28 and went out of their way to humiliate him. “You don’t have the cards,” Trump taunted Zelensky, saying that “I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy and I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States.” Trump told Zelensky the U.S would be “out” if Zelensky didn’t make a deal with Putin, and Trump put America’s money where his mouth was by cutting off military and intelligence support to Ukraine.

In a fascinating interview with podcaster Anand Giridharardas, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) predicted that the next few months will determine whether the United States will remain a democratic republic or degenerates into tyranny. “I think what you’re seeing is that a lot of people are actually very transparently up for that transition,” Murphy said. “There are a lot of people in this country, and a lot of the folks who now occupy positions of power in the United States Congress, who don’t even need to defend democratic norms and democracy. This idea that took root within the conservative movement maybe a decade ago that democracy is outdated and antiquated, and needs to be replaced by a CEO model, is now pretty mainstreamed.” (Source: complete podcast at https://the.ink/p/watch-dem-senator-warns-us-may-be; my transcript at https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2025/03/us-senator-chris-murphy-talks-with.html.)

We may not even have those few months. Already Trump, Vance, Musk and the others in their entourages are sweeping through what’s left of the federal government at warp speed. Last April PBS aired a three-part British documentary on Julius Caesar, who successfully destroyed ancient Rome’s experiment in republican governance after 500 years (twice as long as ours), reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/04/julius-caesar-making-of-dictator-part-1.html, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/04/julius-caesar-making-of-dictator-part-2.html, and https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/04/julius-caesar-making-of-dictator-part-3.html. Though the makers of this series didn’t make the Caesar=Trump parallel themselves, the inference was unmistakable: both Caesar and Trump were men born into wealth and privilege who determined to use their money and power to destroy republican government and declare themselves absolute rulers. In my review I wrote, “Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator is a grim and all too timely warning of how fragile a republic can be in the face of an authoritarian – a Caesar, a Hitler, a Putin, a Trump – determined to destroy it and with enough popular support to be able to pull it off.”

Trump has successfully neutralized just about any possible source of opposition to him. His own Republican Party is cowed into submission; half its voters are diehard Trump supporters while the other half are frightened not only for their political lives but their personal lives and those of their families. Remember that Trump began his second Presidency by pardoning all 1,500 of the January 6, 2021 criminals – many of whom went on social media immediately and proclaimed their willingness to commit political violence on Trump’s behalf again. The Democratic Party, such as it still is, has been neutralized; enough Democratic Senators went along with Trump’s and the Republican House majority’s bill to keep the government open on their terms out of fear that in case of a government shutdown, Trump and Musk would have even more carte blanche authority to cut government programs than they do now.

By purging the U.S. military of its top leadership and replacing them with his loyalists, Trump has ensured that the next time he orders the military to shoot and kill unarmed civilian protesters, they will do it. That will immediately evaporate any and all street resistance to Trump’s agenda on the part of ordinary Americans. Trump is still so bitter at former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley for refusing to go along with such orders in the first Trump Presidency that he ordered Milley’s photo taken down from the walls of the Pentagon just 10 days after it went up.

While I was writing the above, I got a phone call from a Mexican-American friend of mine who said the U.S. of 2025 is reminding him of the Mexico of the 1980’s, before the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) actually started losing elections. I’ve long felt that the U.S. Republican Party has wanted the same kind of total political dominance the PRI had in Mexico during the last two-thirds of the 20th Century. They allowed other parties to exist and go through the motions of campaigning, but the PRI always won, either legitimately or through rigging the elections to make sure that happened.

Also while I was writing the above, I’ve been watching TV news coverage of the court case in Washington, D.C. that attempted to stop the Trump administration from unilaterally deporting over 250 Venezuelan immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, whose government is being paid by ours to host these detainees. The Trump administration is using a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act that had hitherto been used only against enemies in declared wars (the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II). They claim the deportees are members of a gang called Tren de Aragua (“Aragua Train”), but they flew them out of the country without giving them any chance to offer evidence that they are not part of the gang. Adam Isaacson, of the human-rights group Washington Office of Latin America, said, “Basically any Venezuelan citizen in the US may be removed on pretext of belonging to Tren de Aragua, with no chance at defense.”

What makes this even more ominous is that the federal judge, James Boasberg, had issued an order telling the Trump Administration to have the planes turned around and flown back to the U.S. pending a hearing in his court on the case – and the Trump Administration basically told him to fuck off. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Levitt, said, “Federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President’s conduct of foreign affairs, his authorities under the Alien Enemies Act, and his core Article II powers to remove foreign alien terrorists from U.S. soil and repel a declared invasion” – even though the U.S. is not at war, declared or otherwise, with Venezuela and the “invasion” is only a piece of Trump rhetoric denouncing immigrants in general.

“Now, ultimately, if they completely break this thing – and I think that comes by the transparent, brazen violation of a court order, and most significantly an order from the Supreme Court – then we have to talk about a wholly different set of tactics,” U.S. Senator Chris Murphy told podcaster Anand Giridharardas February 18. “And I don’t think that we need to cross that bridge right now. But if we are at a moment in which they have just completely and brazenly taken control of the government without any regard to the judicial branch, then we have a different conversation about the kinds of things that citizens should be doing.” Already the Trump administration has openly defied a court order and said that they don’t consider themselves bound by it – one more step in the rapid transition of the United States of America from a democratic republic to a corrupt authoritarian oligarchy.

Murphy also said on that podcast, “The idea that we would make decisions for ourselves instead of investing decision-making power in an hierarchical structure, which is what we do for mostly everything else that we care about in our lives, and that we would choose to live among people who are very, very different from us, even while our biology, millions of years baked in, tells us that we’re better off and safer retreating to our tribes.” America’s 250-year experiment in republican self-governance managed to survive Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and even Donald Trump’s first term, but it is highly unlikely to survive Trump 2.0 and the likely succession of Trump’s children once he’s termed out in 2028.

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy Talks with Anand Giridharadas on The.Ink Podcast

The day after Donald Trump's Nuremberg rally – oops, I mean his address to a joint session of Congress – I intended to write a Zenger's Newsmagazine blog post (my first in nearly four months) about the Führer's speech. Instead I stumbled on this post from The.Ink podcast with host Anand Giridharadas and U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut). Murphy's appearance here drew attention from the rest of the medla largely because of his prediction that the next few months will determine whether the U.S. remains a democratic republic or becomes an authoritarian oligarchy ruled in perpetuity by Donald Trump, his "hand" Elon Musk, and their ultra-rich cronies. But he had a lot more to say than that, including what it will take to get the Democratic Party to stand up for democracy and resist Trump's autocratic takeover with all the tools at their disposal. After I spent this afternoon transcribing this blog post, which you can watch at https://the.ink/p/watch-dem-senator-warns-us-may-be, I found myself wishing that last night, when Congressmember Al Green (D-Texas) was expelled from the speech for challenging the President's lies, the entire Democratic delegations of both houses of Congress had walked out in solidarity and staged their own event on the Capitol steps. Instead they once again succumbed to what Giridharadas calls their "politeness problem." – Mark Gabrish Conlan, March 5, 2025

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Anand Giridharadas: O.K., we are live. Hey, everyone pouring in. It takes a second for everyone to get in, but welcome to another live show of The.Ink. I’m very delighted to be here today with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who is no doubt familiar to many of you, and has been especially familiar in recent weeks as one of the most fiery and visible sources of opposition to the madness of the second Trump administration. So, Senator, thank you so much for making time to chat with us.

Chris Murphy: Yeah, awesome. Great to be with you.

Giridharadas: You know, you’re someone who’s in the arena, as the saying goes, but you’re also sort of unusually – you write books, you’re a student of American history, and also you’ve studied the various stages in the history of this country, through wars, crises, insurrections, fractures, serious things. I wonder at this hour how you would define this moment in that sweep. How would you define what this is that we are living through and how you would situate it in the sweep of the very serious things this country has been through in its history?

Murphy: Yeah. Listen, I’m very reluctant to engage in too much hyperbole here, but I think this is increasingly becoming the most serious moment since the Civil War. And I just think it’s a miracle that we have lasted as long as we have: 240 years of multicultural democracy. This is an absolutely revolutionary idea that gets pulled apart at its seams every generation or so, because it’s unnatural.

The idea that we would make decisions for ourselves instead of investing decision-making power in an hierarchical structure, which is what we do for mostly everything else that we care about in our lives, and that we would choose to live among people who are very, very different from us, even while our biology, millions of years baked in, tells us that we’re better off and safer retreating to our tribes.

So what we’ve done is unnatural: self-governance in a society that’s multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-racial. And so of course there are these times when folks get told it would just be a lot more efficient if one guy made all the decisions. We’d get stuff done a lot faster. And wouldn’t it be easier if we just kicked out everybody that doesn’t look and feel and sound like us? That’d be a lot simpler.

So I think that this is increasingly serious, because I think what you’re seeing is that a lot of people are actually very transparently up for that transition. There are a lot of people in this country, and a lot of the folks who now occupy positions of power in the United States Congress, who don’t even need to defend democratic norms and democracy. This idea that took root within the “conservative” movement maybe a decade ago that democracy is outdated and antiquated, and needs to be replaced by a CEO model, is now pretty mainstreamed.

And I think we have to realize that we need to confront it head-on, instead of sort of thinking that Republicans are really for democracy in their hearts, but are being cowed into silence by a really strong leader. We need to understand that actually now a lot of them, more than you’d think, are on board for this whole transition. And that’s why we have to take it head-on.

Giridharadas: That comparison you make, which I think is valid, to the most serious crisis since the Civil War. Obviously we know how that one was resolved. I don’t think anyone thinks that that kind of way of resolving this one would be what anyone wants, or certainly what you or I would want. But I’m curious for you, maybe to speak personally first. How have you – I think we’ve all witnessed you, it’s not to say you were a wallflower before, but I think we’ve witnessed you go through something publicly in the last few weeks.

You’ve been very clear about a lot of things for a few years, but I think we’ve all seen you go through something, and you’ve become very visible to maybe people who didn’t know you two months ago, outside your state. Can you talk about what kind of experience you’ve gone through to get to that place of realizing the gravity, in spite of how seriously you took it before? What has been your kind of radicalization around this in the last few weeks, and how have you changed?

Murphy: Well, as you know, I’ve spent a lot of the last two or three years just stepping back and doing a lot of thinking about the spiritual state of the country. And I think I came into this moment maybe understanding, better than some other people, how angry and anxious this country is, and how many people are in a truly revolutionary mood. And so for me, it made sense that there were a lot of folks in this country who were really willing to entertain the idea of throwing out 240 years of democracy.

Now that’s not the majority of the country, but it’s a strong, powerful minority. And listen, I’ve been pretty angry at my party for not sort of realizing the spiritual unspooling that was happening in America and finding ways to plug into it in a more powerful, more constructive manner. But I also watched very carefully over the last four years, as the anti-democratic “conservative” movement very methodically put together a plan and an infrastructure to make sure that they were able to seize this moment.

I think a lot of folks thought that Trump 2 was going to be like Trump 1. Just a lot of bluster. We’d survive. But I watched them get ready for this moment. And so I’m just convinced that they are operationalizing, as we speak, a plan to convert our democracy into something fundamentally different: an oligarchy, a kleptocracy, in which only a handful of people have power, and the rest of us are just pawns for profit and gain to that small set of elites.

And so all of the moves that have been made – the targeting of independent journalists, the conversion of our justice system into an exercise in forcing loyalty to Donald Trump, the normalization and endorsement of political violence – they are not all just sort of random points on a map. They all exist on a continuum, part of an effort ultimately to try to install Donald Trump and his family in power permanently.

And I think this has been coming. The groundwork has been laid for this moment for four years, and I am just absolutely confident that it is as grave and as significant as the crises that we faced 150 years ago.

Giridharadas: You know, I don’t know if you can see the chat, but what’s emerging in the chat is a lot of people listening to that, I think, appreciate you personally and, from what they’ve seen, you reflect the gravity. I think it is no surprise to you that most people watching this, and I think most Democrats out there, feel completely abandoned by the vast majority of your colleagues.

I think, to characterize it loosely, there is a sense of being texted a lot for $5 by Democrats, often sometimes by people who have hundreds of millions of dollars in their own bank accounts, asking you for $5. And then, when we’re living through what you say is the most serious crisis since the Civil War, they’re just not there, right? And I’m sure you could point to things someone said in the committee and things that are being done that we just don’t know about.

But I think you probably sympathize with the broad feeling, that I’m sure you’ve heard from your constituents and others, that basically people feel completely undefended by the Democratic Party in the worst crisis since the Civil War. So let’s say you’re an exception to that, which I think most people would agree with. Just put it as bluntly as you can: what is going wrong with your party that they are leaving so many of their most loyal supporters feeling this way?

Murphy: Well, I think there’s a lot of things going on. One is that it’s a lot easier to get up in the morning if you convince yourself that everything is going to be O.K., right? It’s a lot easier to sort of go do your job if you think that all of these things are just random points on a grid, and that this is going to look a lot like the first four years [of the Trump Presidency] looked. If you actually think that we are months away from the destruction of our democracy, such that it is irreversible, man, that requires a different level of energy when you wake up every morning: a different level of urgency that frankly not everybody inside the Democratic political infrastructure has.

I think it’s also true that when you get to this level of power, you start to care deeply about the institutions and you want to protect your institution. And so here in the Senate there’s still a lot of talk about working with Republicans and not fighting Donald Trump on everything, because we want to make sure that the Senate is preserved as a place where bipartisanship can happen.

But that’s illogical when you’re fighting against a would-be tyrant who doesn’t give a shit about institutions or norms, and is willing to shatter every single one. If the rest of the field is burned to the ground and the Senate still stands on the top of a pedestal, what does it matter? So for me, it was easy to say I’m not voting for any of Trump’s nominees, I’m not expediting any of these nominees, until this constitutional crisis is solved. I’m not going to be complicit in populating an administration by people who are going to violate the rule of law.

And then the last thing is it’s hard when you’re fighting liars. It really is. I mean, we do hold ourselves to some concept of truth, and provable truth. And so I think it has caused us not to be clear about what is likely happening, because we’re not absolutely sure. Right, like what is Musk doing inside the Treasury right now? Do we have irrefutable proof that he is stealing people’s data in order to enrich himself, or ultimately to withhold your Social Security benefits because you posted something ugly about him on Twitter?

Like no, I don’t have the smoking gun, but why should I give them the benefit of the doubt? Why do they deserve the benefit of the doubt about anything? I am going to lay out the worst-case possible scenario because I think the worst-case possible scenario is the most likely one. But a lot of Democrats, until they have that smoking gun, don’t want to leap to conclusions. So I think those are a set of factors that play into people’s frustrations that not everybody in the party is talking the same way.

Giridharadas: Does what you just said justify leadership changes in the House and the Senate immediately?

Murphy: I think the Senate and the House are stepping up here. I think you have seen my colleagues come to the decision, almost to a person, that they are not going to support these nominees. I think you will see a very vigorous effort to oppose the upcoming reconciliation bill, which is their attempt to steal money from the rest of us [and] cut Medicare and Medicaid benefits to fund their tax cuts. So I think you are going to see Democrats starting to rise to this moment, and I’m going to continue to try to rally them to rise to this moment.

Giridharadas: But I think people are asking in the chat specifically about Senator [Chuck] Schumer and [House Democratic] leader [Hakeem] Jeffries. If you’re right about [us being] months away [from losing our democracy], if you’re right about [this being] the worst crisis in 150 plus 60 years, is it time at least to think about new leadership in terms of either of them?

Murphy: I think they both have very difficult jobs. I wish that all 47 Senate Democrats were really easy to sort of marshal and push into one direction, but they aren’t. We have a diverse cast of characters, and so our leadership is pretty easy to critique from the outside. It’s harder to operationalize on the inside. And remember, leadership doesn’t only come from the folks that have the official titles. Leadership comes from AOC. Leadership comes from Jasmine Crockett. Leadership comes from me, right, from other Senators. So I think the job is harder than people think. And I think that leadership comes from a variety of different places.

Giridharadas: I wanted to ask you about the kind of broader point that people were making last year, when there was debate about whether President Biden should stay on the ticket. And I think it’s come up again in what you’re talking about now, which is the question about whether Democrats have a “culture of politeness” problem that prevents the stating of hard truths. [Murphy nods.]

You and I have spoken in the past about the “subtlety problem,” which is a slightly different thing about picking fights. But I’m talking about a culture of politeness, where things everybody was saying in group chats about President Biden’s capacity were not being said out loud. Things maybe everybody is saying privately about this moment don’t necessarily reflect what they say in front of the cameras. Is there a politeness problem that needs to be shaken off, given the stakes that you’re talking about?

Murphy: That’s a good question. I’ve never really thought about it as a “politeness problem.” But, listen, there certainly has been a shaming exercise that has happened inside the party on folks that get too far out of the conventional wisdom. In retrospect, though I didn’t support his candidacy, [Biden’s primary opponent] Dean Phillips understood something about where the American public was that it took the rest of us far too long to understand.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren still get shamed by the mainstream of the Democratic Party because they are “dangerously populist,” even though they are plugged into the actual conversations that people are having in this country about … [Sound cuts out at this moment, 15:01, and doesn’t resume until 15:48.]

Giridharadas: Thank you all for joining in while we’re waiting. And I’m glad we’re getting to have this conversation. I think this is a very blunt and plain-spoken conversation. All right, let’s see if we can get him back. … [At 17:54:] I think this has been a really fascinating conversation thus far, and I think even news-making, I would say. I need to kind of process everything we’ve been hearing, but it’s been a really powerful and clear message, and I think it’s kind of been a benchmark for what we should expect to hear from Democrats in general. I mean, this should be the basic floor of what we think. …

Giridharadas [Returns with Murphy at 19:32]: O.K. I was telling the good people, while we were waiting for you, that this is the problem when the tech oligarchs are the people doing the constitutional crisis. It’s not so helpful. It would be better if they were in the furniture business, or something.

Murphy: No, at worst they are watching us and interfering with content they don’t like. At best, they’re just not paying attention to their technology because they are spending all of their time trying to destroy the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration].

Giridharadas: Exactly, and a quite perfect time to do that, also. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the new chair of the Democratic Party [former Minnesota Democratic chair Ken Martin]. There was a question of how fundamental should the change be. That was litigated during the actual election. You had quite a range of voices from the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, to the moderates.

And there was some debate about whether Ken Martin, the new chair, said that the message was kind of great and mostly fine versus more of an overhaul. What is the process at this point, do you think, of really rethinking the party in the way that you were trying to do in the last few years, and now with greater urgency? It’s obviously really difficult to do when you’re running 80 miles an hour. How can this happen right now?

Murphy: So, I mean, a) I don’t think we should overhype the power of the Democratic National Committee. It has never been a thought leader inside the Democratic Party. I’m not saying it isn’t relevant. I weighed in on behalf of another candidate, because I do think it’s important to have the right person there. But I think Ken Martin will do just fine and will be a very good party chair.

But yes, it does feel overwhelming. There was this – and it still exists – this meme, this idea that the resistance didn’t work in 2017, and so we shouldn’t do it again. And in part, because people want to focus on a bigger project, which is rebuilding the Democratic Party brand and winning back all those working-class voters – and, I mean, I’ve talked a lot about that as well. I think the problem is we actually have to do the resistance and rebuild the party, and we have to do both at the same time. And I actually don’t think there’s a choice.

The resistance, to my mind, worked. I mean, we didn’t stop the big tax cut in 2017, but we stopped the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. We literally saved tens of thousands of lives. We won in the midterms in 2018. We beat him in 2020. Did it solve the underlying problems in the party? No, but there were political wins, and really big ones. There were policy wins, and some really big ones. So I think you’ve got to do that again so that you shave the edges off of their policy agenda, and ultimately you put yourselves in the best position to win in 2018 [sic].

But we have to rebuild the party, because the party brand is just fundamentally broken. We are the party of elites. We are the party of the status quo right now. We are the party of market-based reforms. And people want really big revolutionary economic change. They want the system unrigged. They want their democracy unrigged. And right now we are not the party selling that convincing message.

So I admit that these are two big projects that have to happen simultaneously. Rebuild some form of the traditional political day-to-day resistance, and convince folks that we cannot run back the Democratic Party that got our clocks cleaned in 2024. We’ve got to build a new party.

Giridharadas: One idea – so there’s obviously, in what you said, that there’s the idea of actual, substantive policy, proposing much bigger, bolder things than in the past. And then there’s also the question that you and I have spoken about in the past, of just how you communicate ideas and connect with people in the kind of revolutionary mood you’re talking about? And that communication has, again, seemed incredibly fractured in recent weeks, as we’re going through this very serious thing? Again, people will turn to you, people will turn to AOC, but just very fractured.

One idea that’s been proposed is creating some kind of unorthodox thing of a single point of communication. Some people have suggested Pete Buttigieg, who’s kind of out of government right now, do a daily response, or various shadow Cabinets. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of these proposals. Do you think any of those things are interesting, as a way to solve this problem of so much bile being thrown at people, and people not really having a clear response?

Murphy: Not really. I’m all for people searching for new ideas, but that just sounds like something else for people to compete over. If you were to create a shadow Cabinet and you had to pick Democrats to be in each one of those positions, you’d have to come up with a process. There’d be campaigns, and there’d be back-room efforts to try to be the shadow Secretary of Defense. I mean, it would be a lot of wasted energy, and I’m not sure ultimately it would result in the best people being in those positions.

I mean, what’s happening now is a little meritocratic. I mean, the folks who are having the more amplified voices are the folks that are just more plugged in with the actual emotional Zeitgeist of the country. And I don’t necessarily have a problem with a moment in which the folks that are portraying the kind of urgency that the American public wants are the folks that actually are being kind of self-selected by the movement in the country as leaders inside the party.

Now, do I think that we have an information distribution problem? Yes. But I think that that is something that needs to be solved in a really thoughtful, well-planned way. We don’t have the echo chamber that Republicans have because they spent money on it, and we didn’t. We spent a billion dollars – two billion dollars – in the last election, and most of that was on 30-second TV ads. That was a horrible mistake.

We should be building the kinds of permanent, owned media, the permanent set of influencers and amplifiers, that the Right has. That should be our project, not coming up with a sort of bullshit “shadow Cabinet.” Sorry. If that’s your idea, I feel bad about it now.

Giridharadas: Not at all. So you’ve talked about blanket holds as something that you’ve discussed. Senator Schatz of Hawai’i has talked about that also. Are there other things beyond that, that are kind of tactics in your arsenal? Maybe ones we haven’t been talking about, maybe more serious ones than that? Are there tools besides that, that you have in mind to, if you say we’re possibly a few months away from irreversibly losing democracy, what else have you got besides blanket holds?

Murphy: Listen, there are a limited number of tools in our toolbox as the minority party in the Senate and the House. The House has very few. The Senate has a handful. One of them is just kind of gumming up the works and making things take a little bit longer, but that tactically only prevents nominations or legislation from occurring by hours.

The other is just to signal that we are not being complicit in any of this, and we’re not going to support them doing anything legislatively, or we’re not going to support any nominations, until they take seriously the destruction of our democracy and the handover of our government to billionaires. And so I at the same time don’t want to overhype what we can do internally, while also telling my colleagues, “You better do everything you can do.” And that’s still an internal debate. I mean, there are still a lot of my colleagues who are voting for these nominees because they’ve got a lot of reasons they do that. But one of them is that they don’t think that our internal day-to-day tactics don’t translate to the outside; that nobody pays attention to what happens inside the Beltway.

I don’t think that’s true. I’m not saying everybody pays attention to whether there’s 47 of us or 21 of us voting against the nominee to go to the Department of Agriculture. But I do think that the most committed activists don’t love it when the Democratic Party isn’t putting up the loudest fight that they can. And if we aren’t putting up a loud fight, then they aren’t willing to give four hours or six hours or eight hours or 12 hours a day to the fight.

And when that inner ring of the most committed activists aren’t doing that, the next ring of potential committed activists aren’t stepping in. So I think that there are ripples that start here in the United States Senate, and so that’s why I argue to use every tool that we have, because I actually do believe that over time, that’s one of the tactics that helps build a meaningful, loud national opposition with scope.

Giridharadas: Two more things before I let you go. I know your time is limited, and you’ve been generous with it. When you look at the “Musk coup” element of this surprising Presidency already, I’ve talked to scholars of fascism who’ve said, “I’ve seen every trick in the book, but this thing feels actually quite unprecedented and hard to imagine: planting a very rich man as your sort of boss.” Do you believe that Elon Musk has broken federal laws, as far as you’ve seen the reporting, what you know to have happened in recent weeks? And should he be prosecuted for that, if so?

Murphy: I don’t know that he’s broken federal criminal laws. Certainly, they have smashed statutory protections for agencies. They have violated the Constitution. I don’t know whether he has broken individual criminal laws. And part of it is that they have cloaked this entire thing in secrecy, between the firings of the inspectors general, the gag orders, the intimidation of the press.

And we haven’t even talked about that: the fact that it’s just not clear that the press is asking the kinds of questions that they might otherwise, because the owners of these outlets are deeply scared of President Trump and Elon Musk. So there may be criminal statutes that have been violated, but I don’t know that to be a fact.

Giridharadas: I want to end by talking about what people can do. I mean, obviously I was pressing you and your party on what you can do for people, But obviously this is a democracy, and at the end of the day people need to make their own voices heard and pressure people to do things. People know the usual: call your representative, call folks that you know. There were protests yesterday [February 17, Presidents’ Day], as you know.

I think a lot of people are at a loss. I think a lot of people really don’t understand, because it’s not just a hijacking by 100 people. It’s a hijacking by 100 people with, as you said, the support of a significant number, tens of millions of people creating protection around the hijacking. What can people do, besides the obvious stuff that they know to do?

Murphy: Yeah, I think the obvious stuff that people know to do still works. And I think there are a lot of folks out there who doubt that, right? There were protests yesterday with hundreds of people, some with thousands, but not necessarily the size and scope that you would think this moment would demand. And I think that is due to the fact that a lot of folks don’t think that it has impact and influence – and it does.

The only route through this crisis is the mobilization of the public. Political gravity still exists in this country. It works a little bit differently than it did 10 or 20 years ago. But if the public is mobilized, it can and will have an impact. Because ultimately it may not persuade Elon Musk to stand down, but it will start to eat away at enough Republicans so that everything they want to do becomes a little bit harder; so that there is finally a little bit of legislative friction against the tasks that they are undertaking.

Donald Trump’s net popularity has come down by about six or seven points already. If that drops by another six or seven points because of our mobilization, well, then that frays a bit the hold that he has on the party. The only route through this crisis is the mobilization of the public. Now, right now, joining groups like Indivisible and Move On, calling, showing up, all of that matters. Volume matters.

I remember back in 2017 when their number one agenda item was to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And they didn’t do it only because we mobilized; only because, in the end, we made just enough Republicans realize that this was not going to be worthwhile for them politically. That works now. Now, ultimately, if they completely break this thing – and I think that comes by the transparent, brazen violation of a court order, and most significantly an order from the Supreme Court – then we have to talk about a wholly different set of tactics. And I don’t think that we need to cross that bridge right now.

But if we are at a moment in which they have just completely and brazenly taken control of the government without any regard to the judicial branch, then we have a different conversation about the kinds of things that citizens should be doing. But right now, traditional political mobilization can, and I think will, work. But we need more people than hundreds out at these protests. And part of that is our job: to have more people talking like me to convey the sense of urgency that will convince people to mobilize.

Giridharadas: There’s some talk among people [who] have suggested a general strike. Is that something you think people should look at?

Murphy: I think when we talk about those elevated tactics, right – general strikes, civil disobedience – I think people will know the moment when it comes. I will not tell you we are there yet, and you frankly don’t want to promise that you can do something that you can’t. So I think you’ve got to be very thoughtful and well-planned in those kinds of actions. I don’t think we’re there yet. If the moment comes, people will know it.

Giridharadas: Before I let you go, a lot of people appreciate your leadership right now. Are you thinking about running for President, and are you including – or beyond that – what would be your kind of commitment to people if this continues to get the very bad trajectory that you’ve talked about? What is your kind of vow to people about how you’re going to defend people who are feeling very defenseless?

Murphy: Yeah, I don’t know. You asked me the question at the beginning about why are people paying attention to me now. I think it’s in part because I legitimately don’t have a personal agenda here. Like, I do not wake up every day thinking about my political future. I’ve got two kids whom I want to see grow up in a democracy, and I see it, right? I just have a vision of how dangerous this moment is. I have clarity.

I have existed in politics for a long time, plagued by a lot of grey. There are a lot of moments in my political career in which I saw my side, and I also saw their side. And, you know, no. I see what they are doing, and what they are doing is evil. And so I wake up every day speaking authentically and urgently, in part because I’m not thinking about sort of my next move here. I’m just – I will be satisfied if, at the end of the day, democracy is still here four years from now and we actually have a free and fair election for President.

And my commitment is just to not be afraid. That’s my only commitment. I mean, you can imagine the kinds of calls that we get into this office, given that political violence has been normalized, and given the fact that I’m out there talking in a way that not everybody else is talking. And so my only commitment is just to not be afraid in a way that a lot of other institutional players are clearly acting scared. I’m just not going to do it.

Giridharadas: I think many people here would join me in saying we hope that your attitude is contagious among your colleagues, and that you’re able to be an influence on them. Thank you so much for taking time to chat with us today, and for your voice in this time.