Why Are We in Iran?

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

As the war in Viet Nam droned on and on and on between President Lyndon Johnson’s dramatic escalation in 1965 and the fall of Saigon 10 years later, an increasingly world-weary American public began asking the question, “Why are we in Viet Nam?” Even Norman Mailer used the phrase as the title of a novel published in 1967, though it’s about a teenager hunting in Alaska with his father and the book’s only connection with Viet Nam is that at its end, the son announces that he’s leaving to fight in the war.

Similarly, Americans these days are asking, “Why are we in Iran?” They have been since February 28, when President Donald Trump, in keeping with his usual shock-and-awe tactics through which he’s manipulated not only the rest of the world but the American people, suddenly launched air raids on the Islamic Republic of Iran in coalition with Israel. The raids killed members of Iran’s ruling elite, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the Israelis threatened to murder anyone the Iranians appointed to replace him – including Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, who was picked to take over.

Trump and his officials have offered myriad explanations for why the U.S. chose to attack Iran at this time, and also the connection between America and Israel. At some points the explanation was that Ali Khamenei had ordered the slaughter of thousands of unarmed protesters in the streets of Tehran and Iran’s other major cities, which rang hollow given that agents of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) goon squads have been killing unarmed protesters themselves in Minneapolis and other American cities.

At other times Trump has offered the preposterous explanation that Iran was getting ready to attack the U.S. – which it wasn’t, and couldn’t even if it had wanted to. He said it was to make sure Iran never developed a nuclear weapon – just seven months after he boasted that a previous but more limited U.S./Israel bomb raid on Iran had “completely obliterated” their nuclear program. Trump also said that it was to eliminate Iran’s ballistic missile capability. Iran does not have intercontinental ballistic missiles, though they’ve used the missiles they do have quite effectively to retaliate against U.S. military bases, embassies and other locations in Arab countries.

So why is the U.S. suddenly involved in a major war with Iran? And it is a war, despite the current attempts of the Trump administration to walk back on the term. Just as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, one of Trump’s great role models, said his war against Ukraine wasn’t a war but a “special military operation” – Putin even made it a crime, punishable by 15 years in prison, for any Russian to call his war a “war” – so Trump has rather blandly labeled it an “excursion,” as if it were a vacation cruise.

Trump’s Forgotten Promise Not to Launch “Forever Wars”

Donald Trump is not the first U.S. President to get elected (or re-elected) on a promise of peace and then break it when he took office. Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 under the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.” Just one month after his second term began, he was asking Congress for a declaration of war against Imperial Germany and its allies in World War I.

Likewise Lyndon Johnson, running for a full term of his own after having taken over as President following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, promised he would not, as he put it, “send American boys to do what Asian boys should do” in fighting the Viet Nam war. Then in 1965 he dramatically increased the U.S. troop presence again and again, until by 1968 – when he withdrew from his re-election campaign – there were half a million U.S. servicemembers in Viet Nam.

But it seems especially shocking coming from Donald Trump, who despite his appalling record of dishonesty and dissimulation in just about everything else had been consistent on at least one thing: his opposition to “forever wars,” the quagmires that U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq became. Trump won the Republican Presidential nomination in 2016 partly because he was the only Republican candidate who promised not to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid (though the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” he pushed through Congress on party-line votes cut both Medicare and Medicaid), and partly because he decisively rejected the neoconservative consensus that the U.S. should use its military to impose more congenial governments in other countries.

Trump learned one major lesson from his time out of office between 2021 and 2025. In his first term he had appointed a number of Cabinet secretaries and other officials who were from the usual Republican apparat. Many of them tried to talk him out of doing the crazy and illegal things he wanted to do, like set up massive detention centers for so-called “illegal immigrants” (in practice the Trump dragnets have swept up not only legal residents but U.S. citizens) or use the military to seize voter rolls.

Now he’s surrounded himself with spectacularly incompetent people whose only qualification for their jobs is absolute fealty to Donald Trump. His demand for personal loyalty became apparent in 2017, when he abruptly fired then-FBI director James Comey. According to statements Comey released at the time, Trump had got disillusioned with him because, asked by Trump for a pledge of “loyalty,” Comey said he’d be loyal to the U.S. constitution and laws, but not to Trump personally.

His current Cabinet members, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense (whom Trump insists on calling “Secretary of War” even though Congress changed the name of the Department of War to the Department of Defense in 1947 and therefore it would take an act of Congress to change it back) Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and (until recently) Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, are a bunch of no-account losers I’ve compared to the residents of the “Island of Misfit Toys” in the TV cartoon special Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

In looking at Trump’s Cabinet appointees, I’ve frequently thought of the complaint Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, often made privately to Adolf Hitler. Goebbels pleaded with the Führer to hire people who were actually good in their jobs instead of just people with “low Party numbers” – people who had joined the Nazi movement early on and whom Hitler therefore considered personally reliable. Goebbels got absolutely nowhere with Hitler on this (though sometimes Hitler lucked out, like when he hired as his armaments minister his personal friend, architect Albert Speer, whose genius for coordinating defense production arguably kept the war going for two years longer than it would have without him).

Is the War on Iran a Religious War?

Not long ago the slightly liberal cable news network MS NOW ran a report (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epBcjVsJ_sU) suggesting that Trump’s motivation for the war on Iran may be Biblical in origin. It showed Pete Hegseth telling the National Prayer Breakfast February 5, “America was founded as a Christian nation. It remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it. And as public officials we have a sacred duty 250 years on to glorify Him. [Points upward at the sky.] … We talk a lot about ‘peace through strength.’ At the War Department [sic], we see ourselves as the Strength Department. But we also need to remember that we derive our strength through faith, and through truth, and through the word of God.”

The report also quoted a story in the British newspaper The Guardian saying that an organization called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has been receiving an unprecedented number of complaints about U.S. officers indoctrinating their troops with Christian propaganda in connection with the war in Iran. The Guardian reported that a commanding officer told his soldiers that the war was “all part of God’s divine plan,” and that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark His return to Earth.” Other commanders may not be quite so specific about it, but apparently the orders to the troops are full of references to the “end times” and claims that the war against Iran is Biblically sanctioned.

Pete Hegseth wears the mantle of Christian warrior on his body – literally. His chest is emblazoned with a tattoo containing the so-called “Jerusalem cross,” actually a series of cross-like designs used as the flag of the kingdom of “Christian Jerusalem” established by the First Crusade in 1099. An actual Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, had an idea of America diametrically opposed to Hegseth’s claim that “America was founded as a Christian nation.” In an 1805 letter to the Barbary pirates, essentially the Islamic terrorists of their day, Jefferson said, “America is in no way founded on the Christian religion.”

Why the Founders Didn’t Want a Standing Army

One of the bizarre ways in which the American experiment has deviated big-time from the design of the framers of the Constitution is the whole idea, specified in Article II, section 2, that the President is “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” The authors of the Constitution never thought that this power would last 24/7 throughout the President’s term!

Instead, they set up a process by which it would be Congress that decided when, and with whom, the United States would be at war. Then, and only then, would the President’s Commander-in-Chief power come into play. Throughout the history of the U.S., especially since World War II (the last one the U.S. fought under an actual, Constitutionally mandated declaration of war), Congress has gradually ceded more and more of that power to the executive.

Donald Trump has flatly ended Congress’s role in war-making altogether. In an interview last January with The New York Times (which, by the way, he is suing for $10 billion), he said that the only constraint on his power to send the U.S. to war any time he feels like it, against any enemy he feels like attacking, is “my own morality, my own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” Trump said, adding: “I’m not looking to hurt people.” He went on to concede “I do” in regards to whether his administration needed to adhere to international law, but said: “It depends on what your definition of international law is.”

He's already put that doctrine into practice with his unilateral takeover of the government of Venezuela. Trump sent U.S. armed forces to “arrest” Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, kidnap him, and hold him in New York for “trial.” He then installed Maduro’s vice-president, Delci Rodriguez, as the new president of Venezuela on condition that she do whatever he tells her to (much to the disgust of many Venezuelans, who had hoped Maduro would be replaced by opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, whom Trump sidelined out of jealousy that she, not he, had won the most recent Nobel Peace Prize). Rodriguez obviously has a lot of experience sucking up to dictators; she got to be vice-president sucking up to Maduro and president sucking up to Trump.

According to some reports, it was precisely the ease with which Trump was able effectively to conquer Venezuela that encouraged him to attempt the same thing with Iran. The population of Venezuela is estimated at between 31 million and 35 million people; that of Iran is over 92 million. Iran has a long and proud heritage of defending itself and fighting for its liberty and freedom since the Persian Empire 2,500 years ago. And instead of a weak kleptocracy like Venezuela’s, Iran has a well-organized command-and-control structure centered around the Council of Experts, which elects the Supreme Leader, and the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

By chance, years ago I read an interview in Foreign Affairs magazine with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and he seemed like a thoughtful, intelligent person. I don’t recall much of what he actually said, and certainly Iran under his rule was not a good place for the values I believe in: religious liberty, personal freedom, the rule of law, women’s rights, and Queer rights. (Ironically, Iran was one of the easiest countries in the world to obtain gender-confirmation surgery because the government equated Queer and Trans people and assumed that if you were having sex with people of your own gender, you were “really” a member of the opposite one.)

So I wasn’t quite willing to join the chorus of approval of Khamenei’s death and declare that the world is a better place without him. And by all accounts, his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, is even harder-line and less inclined to liberalize. Then again, Mojtaba was reportedly injured on the first day of the U.S./Israeli attack, and Israel has vowed to kill anyone the Iranians appoint as a new Supreme Leader. Trump called on the people of Iran to seize the opportunity to rise up and create a new government free of clerical domination, but the repressive apparatus is still very much in place and anyone trying to take Trump up on his challenge risks near-certain death at the hands of the IRGC.

Opinion Polls, Fox News, and the Danger of a Standing Army

So far, most of the public opinion polling on the Iran war has shown the American people decidedly against it, usually by margins of 10 percent (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/polls-show-what-americans-think-about-the-war-in-iran). One outlier has been the poll from Fox News (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-views-divided-us-action-against-iran), which shows the public as dead-even in their views of the Iran war: 50 percent support it and 50 percent oppose it.

Other numbers from the Fox poll show more dangerous trends. People who’ve actually served in the U.S. military are nearly 20 percent more likely than the general public to support the war (59 to 39 percent). Fareed Zakaria discussed these results on CNN and cited another poll which indicated that among voters who’d never served in the U.S. military, Kamala Harris won by nine points over Trump in the 2024 election. But Trump won among people who had served in the military by 20 points, and that was enough to return him to the White House.

This is a good illustration of why the framers of the Constitution didn’t want the U.S. to have a permanent full-time military. Their idea was that the U.S. would rely on state militias for its defense. That is the real reason for the Second Amendment, the only article in the Bill of Rights that has a qualifier attached (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”). Just as the framers never envisioned the President’s commander-in-chief power as extending through his entire term, they neither foresaw nor wanted the U.S. to have a permanent military establishment.

The record of Latin American countries in general proves the justice of the framers’ position, even though modern advances in war-fighting technology have rendered it impractical. Throughout the last 200 years, ever since the nations of Central and South America won their independence from Spain and Portugal, the biggest single threat to their liberty and freedom has come from their militaries. Over and over again, in country after country, Latin American militaries have overthrown democratically elected leaders and installed violently repressive dictatorships, sometimes with U.S. help (Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973).

Until the early 1970’s, the American military – at least those parts of that actually saw combat – was part and parcel of the overall population. The abolition of the draft and its replacement by the “all-volunteer army” severed that connection. According to a May 2025 survey by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) (https://www.dvidshub.net/news/511917/survey-shows-growing-gap-between-civilians-military), “Just one-half of 1 percent of Americans served in uniform at any given time during the past decade – the longest period of sustained conflict in the country’s history,” the report says. “Meanwhile, as the military shrinks in size, the connections between military members and the broader civilian population appear to be growing more distant.”

According to the DVIDS survey, the older you are, the more likely you are to have a relative or friend who is serving or served in the military. “More than three-quarters of civilian adults ages 50 and older reported having an immediate family member – a spouse, parent, sibling or child ¬– who served or serves in the military,” the report said. “For many, that service took place before the end of the draft and the introduction of the all-volunteer force in 1973. Only 57 percent of civilian respondents ages 30 to 49 said they had an immediate family member who served. The percentage dropped to one-third among respondents ages 18 to 29.”

Another statistic that shows a worrisome disconnect between America’s military and its civilian population is party affiliation. According to the DVIDS survey, “Seventy-three percent of Republicans, 59 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Independents said an immediate family member served in the military.” Coupled with racial disparities (the report indicated that 68 percent of whites have a family member who served or is serving, versus 59 percent of African-Americans and only 30 percent Latino/as), these statistics suggest that the U.S. military is becoming a caste unto itself, whiter and more Right-wing than the nation it is supposedly protecting. This is the stuff of which coups are potentially made.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution were worried about the dangers a standing military posed to democracy for just that reason. When you have a social force that is different politically and socially from the population as a whole, you have a force that can fatefully undermine and ultimately stop any experiment in self-governance. And that’s especially true when the force is also the part of society that has the arms, the authority to use them, and the license from the state to maintain order and fight wars both at home and abroad.

Remember Donald Trump’s claim during the 2024 campaign that the real danger to the U.S. was “the enemy within.” He fulfilled that statement by winning enormous sums of money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, making sure their “training” did not include sessions about the need to obey the Constitution, and giving them virtually unlimited authority to do whatever they wanted. In the wake of the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE and CBP agents, respectively, in Minneapolis, Vice-President J. D. Vance gave a speech in which he said those agents had “absolute immunity” for any crimes they may commit while serving.

So What Are We Doing in Iran?

There have been innumerable explanations offered for why the Trump administration decided unilaterally to invade Iran. As I noted above, the idea that we were doing it to safeguard the rights of Iranians to protest their government rings hollow coming from an administration that not only kills its own peaceful protesters but slanders them after they’re dead as “domestic terrorists.” The argument that the attack was needed to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon and/or the missile systems to deliver one also rings hollow, given that the Obama administration had negotiated a diplomatic deal to do just that, and Trump withdrew from it in his first term.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the U.S. attacked Iran because Israel was already going to do so and they invited the U.S. to join it. A day later Trump said that was B.S. – if anything, he said, it was the U.S. that brought in Israel, not the other way around. But it was the thesis behind a PBS Frontline documentary aired March 10, “Remaking the Middle East” (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/remaking-the-middle-east-israel-vs-iran/), whose producer/director/writer, James Jacoby, used footage he’s been collecting for years to argue that Benjamin Netanyahu had wanted to destroy Iran’s nuclear-weapons capability since he first took power in Israel 30 years ago, and Trump – unlike Obama or Joe Biden – took up his challenge.

Another reason that’s been advanced is that Trump is following Shakespeare’s advice to end domestic dissent through a strategy to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” Trump is already compromised by the gradual drip-drip-drip release of the files on the late pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, including the allegation from one of Epstein’s victims that Trump literally tried to rape her when she was 14. Certainly the war against Iran has wiped off virtually every mention of Epstein from the news, thereby accomplishing Trump’s long-standing goal to move “beyond” the Epstein scandal.

But the most chilling, and most likely, reason for Trump ordering the attack on Iran despite the way it has destabilized the world and shot energy prices up after Trump’s victory lap in the State of the Union address February 24 that they were at last coming down, is simply that he felt like it. During his first term Trump was surrounded by generals and others who kept talking him out of his wildest and most reckless plans for military adventurism. Now the guard rails are long gone and Trump has this big shiny new toy he wants to play with – and the whole world is at the mercy of this deranged, megalomaniac madman American voters inexplicably put into the White House not once, but twice.

Trump’s 2026 State of the Union: A Master Class in Demagoguery

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

On February 24, 2026 President Donald Trump gave his State of the Union Address, the second of his second term. Admittedly, the first one from March 4, 2025 was given the historically pettifogging title “Address to a Joint Session of Congress” on the ground that a newly elected (or re-elected) President could not be fulfilling his constitutional mandate to “from time to time give Congress Information on the State of the Union.” But in both these speeches, Trump not only directly insulted the opposition party, he made clear his determination to govern the country alone, without input from Congress, the judiciary, or the American people, which judging by opinion polls are increasingly unhappy with his job performance.

Trump started speaking at 9:11 p.m. Eastern time. Within four minutes, he’d already indulged himself no fewer than three times in one of his most annoying rhetorical quirks: saying that something he really likes is the greatest the world has ever seen. It was a fascinating speech from a pathological standpoint, though I’m not saying that to hint that Trump is mentally ill or suffering from age-related dementia the way his father, Fred Trump, did with Alzheimer’s disease. Trump is actually a brilliant public speaker, and in the State of the Union he was mostly at the top of his game, though he did seem to tire as the speech wound on and on and on (107 minutes, the longest on record, breaking the 99-minute record Trump himself set last year).

Trump indulged to the max one of the tricks his Republican predecessor Ronald Reagan brought to his State of the Union speeches: inviting a litany of heroic Americans to sit in the audience and be called out by name. Trump went Reagan one better and actually pinned the Congressional Medal of Honor on two World War II servicemembers, both nearing 100 years of age, during the speech. He also gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Connor Hellebuyck, goaltender for the U.S. Winter Olympics hockey team, which had just won the gold medal in overtime two days earlier. Trump had extended invitations to both the men’s and women’s hockey team, but the women’s team had wisely turned him down because of scheduling conflicts.

One got the impression from the all-white faces that turned up when Trump introduced the men’s hockey team that Trump picked them to honor because hockey is one of the few sports left played mostly, if not exclusively, by white people. In fact, that was the tone throughout the speech. Trump, both literally and figuratively the son of a Ku Klux Klan member (Fred Trump was one of seven people arrested at a Klan rally in New York City on Memorial Day, 1927), picked a lineup of heroes to honor that, with two exceptions (a Venezuelan dissident politician named Enrique Gonzalez and his niece Alejandra), were all white.

Immigrants Are to Trump What Jews Were to Hitler

Throughout his State of the Union speech, Trump repeatedly demonized what he called “illegal aliens” and said they were at the root of all America’s ills – when he wasn’t blaming them on the Democrats and his political opponents generally. As he did throughout the speech on issue after issue, Trump proclaimed victory; he said, “In the past nine months, zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States.” While he then paid lip service to documented immigrants – he said, “We will always allow people to come in legally, people that will love our country and will work hard to maintain our country” – what that means in practice is, “We will always allow people to come in who are white, speak English, and have politics similar to mine.”

The one group of people to whom the second Trump administration gave blanket refugee status to were Afrikaners, white Dutch-descended South Africans who claim the current Black government of South Africa is discriminating against them. The claim is false; in fact, as part of the peaceful settlement ending South Africa’s apartheid regime and transitioning the country to majority rule, the Black South Africans had to guarantee they would maintain white ownership of most of the land and much of the country’s economy. That’s been a flash point of discontent for many Black South Africans ever since the change happened in 1990, in which they’ve seen most of the country’s wealth remain in white hands even though state power is now held by Blacks.

In his State of the Union speech, Trump boasted that the day before “I hosted a ceremony with Americans who lost their treasured loved ones to the scourge of illegal immigration. People came into our country. How we allowed this to happen with our open borders. These are the angel moms and families that for decades our government betrayed and our media totally ignored. Totally. It was terrible. Hard to believe, actually.” One particularly horrific case he cited was that of Iryna Zarutska, an 18-year-old Ukrainian woman who, Trump said, “was riding home on the train when a deranged monster who had been arrested over a dozen times and was released through no cash bail, stood up and viciously slashed a knife through her neck and body. No one will ever forget. … She had escaped a brutal war, only to be slain by a hardened criminal set free to kill in America [who] came in through open borders.”

There’s just one problem with that story: according to the British newspaper The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/25/trump-state-of-the-union-factcheck), Iryna Zarutska’s alleged killer, DeCarlos Brown, Jr., was not an undocumented immigrant. “Trump has long insisted that non-citizens are responsible for violent crime throughout the U.S.,” wrote the Guardian staff. “Data show that relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are more than twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes, and 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes.” But Trump has never let the facts get in the way of his anti-immigrant jihad.

One of the low points in Trump’s war on immigrants has been his attacks on the Somali community in Minnesota. While at least he didn’t accuse Somalis of stealing and eating people’s pet dogs and cats the way he did in his September 2024 debate with Kamala Harris – which, as I wrote then, was exactly the sort of scurrilous group libel against Jews the Nazis used to “justify” their mass murder – he did say that in Minnesota, “members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer. We have all the information. And in actuality, the number is much higher than that. And California, Massachusetts, Maine and many other states are even worse.” (Other estimates put the amount of the alleged fraud at $9 billion.)

During the occupation of Minneapolis by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in early 2026, which resulted in the killings of American citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti, Trump justified his refusal to allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to cooperate with local law enforcement to investigate the Good and Pretti slayings by citing the fraud allegations. He also claimed, without evidence, that Minnesota had rigged the Presidential elections all three times he ran so he officially lost the state when he “really” should have won it. Trump said he would create a task force to investigate “waste, fraud, and abuse” in federally funded social service programs and put his vice-president, J. D. Vance, in charge of it. Like Ronald Reagan, he claimed there was so much “waste, fraud, and abuse” in these programs that ending it could balance the federal budget. (Hint: it didn’t work for Reagan.)

Trump also used the fraud allegations against the Somali community in Minnesota as an object lesson in why immigrants from certain parts of the world should never be let into the United States. “The Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption, and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception,” Trump said. “Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings us problems right here to the USA. And it is the American people who pay the price in higher medical bills, car insurance rates, rent, taxes, and perhaps most importantly, crime. We will take care of this problem. We're going to take care of this problem. We are not playing games.”

Trump’s Whack-a-Mole Game on Tariffs

Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union speech just four days after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated his signature economic initiative: the willy-nilly imposition of tariffs on just about every country in the world under the so-called “economic emergency” provisions of a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The day the justices announced their decision, which was 6-3 and included three Republican justices, two of them appointed by Trump in his first term, Trump was furious. He said the six majority justices were “just being fools and lapdogs for the RINO’s [‘Republicans in Name Only’] and the radical left Democrats.” About the two justices Trump appointed who joined the majority, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, Trump said, “I think it’s an embarrassment to their families.”

Trump was only marginally less combative towards the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address than he’d been in his impromptu press conference four days before. “Many of the wars I’ve settled were because of the threat of tariffs,” Trump said on February 24, adding that his tariffs “will remain in place under fully approved and tested alternative legal statutes. And they have been tested for a long time. They're a little more complex, but they're actually probably better — leading to a solution that will be even stronger than before. Congressional action will not be necessary. It's already time-tested and approved. And as time goes by, I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.”

There you have Trump’s tariff policy in the proverbial nutshell. Instead of paying attention to the Court majority’s holding that he doesn’t have the power under the Constitution to impose tariffs unilaterally, he’s going to play a game of whack-a-mole. He’ll keep finding new statutes on the books (a number of which were already helpfully pointed out to him by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the only Trump appointee who dissented) he can use to impose tariffs willy-nilly without Congressional approval. “Congressional action will not be necessary,” he boasted, adding that he hopes that the income from tariffs will enable him and future Republican governments to abolish the income tax altogether and fund the federal government almost exclusively through tariff revenue, as was the case before 1913 when the U.S. enacted its first federal income tax.

The SAVE America Act: Trump’s Secret Weapon for Perpetual Power

Quite a lot of Trump’s critics are holding out hope that the American democratic experiment will fulfill its purpose once again and vote Trump and the Republicans in the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) coalition out of power. All too many hosts on MS NOW (what used to be MS-NBC) recite current polls showing how unpopular Trump is with the American people overall, on the economy, and even on immigration, Trump’s signature issue. But the hopes that the American people can vote for a Democratic Congress to constrain Trump after 2026 and replace him with a Democrat in 2028 are being trashed by a truly diabolical piece of proposed legislation to which Trump, of course, gave a full-throated endorsement to in his State of the Union speech.

It's called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or “SAVE America” as its proponents label it. It would impose a nationwide voter identification law, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. It would require every American voter to provide proof of citizenship status both when they register to vote in the first place and every time they cast a ballot. According to the U.S. State Department, valid documents for proving citizenship include a birth certificate, a U.S. passport, a consular report of birth abroad, a certificate of citizenship, or a naturalization certificate. Your standard photo ID, even if it’s a so-called “Real ID,” isn’t good enough.

Just about all these documents require fees, often substantial fees, to obtain. My husband Charles and I recently acquired U.S. passports, which cost us $165 each for the passports themselves plus an extra $20 for the identity photos. This has led some critics of the proposed law to claim it’s effectively a poll tax, in violation of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax.”

It also has some other quirks, including the fact that not everybody’s name currently in use matches the one on their birth certificate. Women who take their husbands’ names after marriage, as the radical Right urges them to, would have to bring in their marriage license along with their birth certificate to verify their identity. So would people who have changed their names to conceal their identities from former partners who abused them during their relationships. It would come down particularly hard on Transgender people who have undergone gender transition – an especially fraught group of people under the Christian nationalist regime Trump and his minions want to impose on America. (See below for the truly weird case Trump cited to bolster his argument that children are being subjected to gender transition willy-nilly without their parents’ approval.)

The SAVE America Act would also restrict the use of mail ballots. While it wouldn’t abolish them altogether (though Trump did say in the State of the Union speech that he’d like there to be “no more crooked mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military, or travel, none”), it would require that only mail-in ballots received before Election Day could be counted. Existing law in many states allows mail-in ballots to be counted if they arrive after Election Day as long as they were postmarked before then. This is a particularly sore point with Trump, who was leading in the 2020 Presidential election in same-day votes but lost several key states when mail-in ballots came in afterwards.

And perhaps the worst provision of all is it would require all states to send their entire voter rolls, including people’s actual registration forms, to the federal government. Trump has already been demanding this. His Justice Department seized all the ballots and registration forms for the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, on a warrant signed by a judge in St. Louis, Missouri. And more recently Attorney General Pam Bondi told the state government of Minnesota that one of her conditions for ending the ICE and CBP occupation of Minneapolis was that they turn over all the state’s voter records to her department. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz rightfully refused, but the spectre of their personal information being forwarded to the feds could be enough to discourage a lot of potential voters from registering at all.

Indeed, the SAVE America act is a huge and far-reaching blueprint for massive voter suppression. Its real purpose is to use the spectre of non-citizen voting (which hardly ever happens; the total number of people convicted of illegal voting in 2024 because they weren’t American citizens is in two digits) to disqualify whole swaths of the electorate who wouldn’t be likely to vote Republican from being able to vote at all. Trump had already tried to rig the 2026 midterm election by having Republican-controlled states like Texas gerrymander their Congressional districts to elect more Republicans, but this failed because Democratic-controlled states like California fought back and redrew their maps to elect more Democrats. Now Trump and the Republicans are pushing this latest and far more extreme strategy of disenfranchisement.

Trump said that Democrats “don't want identification for the greatest privilege of them all: voting in America.” That sums up one of the biggest differences between the two major parties in the U.S. in 2026: Republicahs regard voting as a “privilege,” while Democrats call it a “right.”

The Curious Case of Sage Blair

One of the oddest passages in Trump’s State of the Union address was about Sage Blair, a 14-year-old from Virginia who allegedly reached puberty uncertain about their sexual and gender identity. Here’s how Trump told their story: “In 2021, Sage was 14 when school officials in Virginia sought to socially transition her to a new gender, treating her as a boy and hiding it from her parents. Hard to believe, isn't it? Before long, a confused Sage ran away from home. After she was found in a horrific situation in Maryland, a left-wing judge refused to return Sage to her parents because they did not immediately state that their daughter was their son. Sage was thrown into an all-boys state home and suffered terribly for a long time.”

A post by John Russell on the Queer-friendly Web site lgbtnation.com (https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/02/invited-an-ex-trans-christian-student-to-the-sotu-yesterday-who-is-she/) told a more complicated version of Sage’s story. First of all, the woman who attended Trump’s State of the Union speech with Sage is not her mother, but her grandmother Michele Blair, a radical-Right Christian activist who legally adopted Sage when Sage was two. “Michele Blair … sued the Appomattox County School Board, several district employees, and a Maryland public defender in August 2023,” Russell reported. “Blair’s lawsuit cites the ‘“distress” about her body’ Sage experienced ‘with the ‘onset of puberty in 2019,’ which allegedly included hallucinations, depression, eating disorders, and self-harm.

The lawsuit claims that Blair supported Sage’s gender-nonconforming “dress and interests” when they started high school at Appomattox County High School (ACHS) in August 2021. Around the same time, Sage was diagnosed with “‘severe gender dysphoria’ and related symptoms.” The same day, Sage indicated to ACHS counselor Dena Olsen, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, that they identified as a boy and was told they could use the school’s boys’ restroom. Sage also reportedly expressed a desire to use he/him pronouns and the name Draco, and allegedly told Olsen and another counselor, Avery Via (also named as a defendant), that their parents were not supportive of their gender identity.

From then on Sage’s story, as reported by Russell, became truly horrific. Sage said they were subjected to multiple instances of bullying and assault at high school when they were identifying as male and using the first name “Draco.” According to their lawsuit, Sage decided to run away out of fear of how Michele might react if she found out about their gender identity, which in turn led Sage to be victimized again, this time by a male human trafficker who kidnaped Sage, took them to Washington, D.C. and Maryland, and allowed them to be drugged and raped by multiple adult men. Sage’s attorney, Maryland public defender Aneesa Khan, had Sage placed in a Maryland Department of Juvenile Services facility for boys, where the abuse started all over again. Sage escaped and fell into the trap of yet another abuser who took Sage to Texas, where they were “raped, drugged, starved, and tortured” until rescued by state police.

“But today, all of that is behind them,” Trump said in his State of the Union speech. “Because Sage is a proud and wonderful young woman with a full ride scholarship to Liberty University. Sage and Rachelle, please stand up. And thank you for your great bravery.” The university she’s attending is a dead giveaway about how she’s being used by the radical Right to advance their anti-Trans agenda. Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia was co-founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1971. Control passed to Falwell’s oldest son, Jerry Falwell, Jr. upon his father’s death in 2007, but allegations of sexual misconduct against Falwell, Jr. led the trustees to replace him with his brother Jonathan in 2023.

Sage Blair’s regrettable and tragic case has become a cause célèbre among anti-Trans activists in particular and the radical Right in general. One part of Michele’s lawsuit was thrown out of court in 2024, and the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that dismissal in 2025. Michele’s other lawsuit, alleging that Sage’s high school violated their rights under Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by acting with “deliberate indifference” to the threats Sage was being subjected to, is still pending. Beginning in 2023, Republicans in the Virginia legislature have regularly introduced bills called “Sage’s Law,” which would require that Virginia high schools immediately inform their parents or guardians whenever a student comes out as Trans.

Trump’s State of the Union address was a blueprint for the America he and his supporters want to see. It’s one in which the vote is restricted as much as possible to well-to-do white people while Blacks are sent to the back of the bus, Latinos live in constant fear of deportation without trial or any other legal process, women are sent back to what the Nazis called “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (“children, kitchen, church”), and Queer and especially Trans people live in a continual state of terror every moment of their lives. It’s also one in which an unholy alliance of politicians and businesspeople run the economy with absolute control, and the environment is continually plundered for short-term profit until the earth finally rebels and becomes uninhabitable for humans.

"Washington Week" Profiles Donald Trump's Dark Eminence, Stephen Miller, Friday, February 13

On Friday, February 13 – an appropriate date – PBS’s long-running public-affairs program Washington Week did a show-length profile of Stephen Miller, the dark eminence behind Donald Trump’s jihad against immigrants in general and immigrants of color in particular. Here is a full transcript (done by me, not the network) of a show that dances around the obvious reality that, like his boss, Miller is a thoroughgoing racist and white supremacist who is trying to remake America as a white-dominated Christian nationalist state. As I was preparing this post, news broke that Stephen Miller sent out a memo calling for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to involve itself directly in the 2026 midterm elections, on the pretext that they are hunting down hundreds of thousands of naturalized U.S. citizens whom they accuse of voting before they became citizens. As part of this effort, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said DHS has to make sure “we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country,” a thinly veiled threat to do whatever they can to ensure that Republicans keep control of both houses of Congress despite the growing unpopularity of Trump and the Republican agenda. -- M.G.C., 2/18/26

“Washington Week with The Atlantic” transcript, February 13, 2026

Few people in Washington have more power and influence than Stephen Miller. He’s the architect of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, and he’s the president’s enforcer. Moderator Jeffrey Goldberg discusses the beliefs and the record of Stephen Miller with Leigh Ann Caldwell of Puck, Zolan Kanno-Youngs of The New York Times and McKay Coppins and Ashley Parker of The Atlantic.

TRANSCRIPT

Jeffrey Goldberg: Few people in Washington today have more power and influence than Stephen Miller. He’s the architect of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policy. And he’s the President’s enforcer, making sure that the MAGA elite and the Cabinet stay true to Trump’s vision. Tonight, a close look at the beliefs and the record of Stephen Miller, next.

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Jeffrey Goldberg: Good evening, and welcome to Washington Week. We’re going to do something a little bit different tonight. We’re going to try to understand some of the most important and disruptive Trump policies through the prism of one aide: Stephen Miller. He’s no ordinary aide, as you all know. He’s been with Trump since his improbable run as the 21st century’s most important political leader, and no one seems to understand the President and his impulses better than Miller.

He's also a revolutionary. His ideas come from far outside what we used to think of as the Republican mainstream. And he’s a vociferous, uncompromising advocate for policies that only a few years ago would have been deemed unworkable or extreme.

Joining me tonight are four reporters who have covered Miller for years and know him well. Leigh Ann Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent at Puck. McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent at The New York Times. And Ashley Parker is a staff writer, also at The Atlantic.

Thank you all for joining me. All of you have covered Miller for years. You’ve written a lot about Miller. Ashley, very recently; Zolan, very recently. But I want to just start at the beginning. McKay, why don’t I just go to you because you wrote a sort of definitive early profile of Stephen Miller in 2018. So where did he come from? Where did his politics develop? Give us a little sense of the forces that created this Stephen Miller we know of today, before he entered the general political consciousness.

McKay Coppins, staff writer, The Atlantic: Yeah, I think the thing that most struck me talking to him years ago when I was profiling him was how much of his political world view was forged in opposition to his upbringing. Right? He grew up in Santa Monica, in a family of very well-off progressive Jewish parents, and was surrounded by what he would describe as “a bubble of progressive affluence,” right?

He went to a high school where they would have, you know, multi-racial retreats and multi-cultural festivals. And his first exposure to conservative politics was actually reading, on a lark, Guns and Ammo magazine, which then led him to people like Rush Limbaugh, Larry Elder, David Horowitz, the kind of prominent conservative talk-radio hosts and polemicists of the time. And you can see from the very beginning, as a teenager in a very liberal high school, him kind of mimicking the political style of those people.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Wait, wait. You mentioned the high school. Just watch with me for one moment a clip of – this is Stephen Miller running for student government. Watch this:

Stephen Miller (high-school clip): Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash, when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, first of all, the Che Guevara look. Really, he doesn’t do that anymore. He’s really into the silk suits now, or something. But you wrote – part of your profile was focused on the fact that he’s an expert troll. And so in your study of him, and your conversations with him back then, was he just trolling his liberal friends, or his liberal adversaries? Or was that something more serious?

McKay Coppins: This was actually the mystery of Stephen Miller to everybody who ever knew him in every stage of his life: in high school. Later at Duke, when he went to college. He was – everyone was trying to figure out whether this was performance art or whether he really believed it. And he would – that was a classic example of teenage Stephen Miller. But he would write columns for the Duke student newspaper picking culture-war fights on campus.

What I think – where I landed, because I asked him about this a number of times – is at first he’d say, “No, no, no, I believe in everything I say.” But then he at one point said, “I do believe in constructive controversy for the sake of enlightenment.” Those were his words. And I think that gets at something fundamental about him, which is he has always believed that there is a role for provocation and performance in politics.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. So, Ashley, let me ask you this: does he go further, rhetorically, than he actually believes? Or, when you’re listening to him, especially in this second Trump term, is what he saying what he actually believes? Is he just trying to provoke, and then he’ll try to bring it back a little bit?

Ashley Parker, staff writer, The Atlantic: Again, I think at this point both things are true. But we have sort of come full circle to where the caricature has become the character, and it’s hard to differentiate. You see in some of these early high-school videos of Stephen Miller, him sort of occasionally break the fourth wall to kind of do a kid-faced toothy grin, or kind of almost smirk at himself as if he can’t believe he said what he just said.

But in reporting my profile, one of the people I spoke with was Steve Bannon, who recounted, I mean, early on Stephen Miller would open for Donald Trump in 2015, in 2016, in that campaign at his rallies. And Stephen – Steve Bannon, who again loves all the incendiary stuff – recalled, saying to Stephen Miller, “Look, the main point of being an opening act is so the main guy doesn’t have to top you, right? You have to stop saying these things, because Trump can’t come out there and beat it.”

And so people have told me in the White House, one of the things they like about him, perhaps counterintuitively, is that he is incredibly dogmatic. That intensity – maybe not the trolling, but that intensity and the passion, is the same behind closed doors and in the Oval Office as you see in front of the TV cameras. And so whether you agree with him or not, you sort of always know where he stands, which is –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Ashley Parker: – on the far extreme when it comes to immigration.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Zolan, you’ve watched this for a while. How has his ideology shifted? And we’ll talk about the linchpins of the ideology in a minute, but has he shifted? Has he become more extreme? Because obviously the second Trump term is very much unlike the first Trump term.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs, White House correspondent, The New York Times: Sure, sure. I actually think from everyone I’ve talked to that Stephen’s ideology has actually been rather consistent. He’s been more visible and more powerful in the second term, you know. In the first term, he might have been limited in many ways to kind of being the architect, overseeing immigration policy in the Department of Homeland Security. And he was a speechwriter, of course, getting involved in comms as well.

Now you have somebody who is taking that ideology, that was formed through his upbringing, through working with Michele Bachmann, now to imposing that on domestic policy [and] foreign policy as well. His role has expanded. If I could also follow up on the previous subject, I think that the rhetoric and the provoking, Stephen also sees that as key to implementing his policy, right? I mean, in the first term –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Shelling the beach in advance of the actual policy roles?

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: And he believes that America – you often hear of America having a role as a sanctuary for immigrants, being a pro-immigrant country. He is trying to change the perception in the nation towards immigrants, to basically make it so that the pendulum of politics shifts, and there’s more of a tolerance towards the policies that he’s trying to implement.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Leigh Ann, talk about – well, we know he was an expert at provocation. He was a serious conservative, more conservative than Republicans at the time as he was growing up. He comes to Washington. Talk about his course through Congress until he meets Trump.

Leigh Ann Caldwell, chief Washington correspondent, Puck: Yes, as you said, he worked for Michele Bachmann, who is this –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Remind us.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: Michele Bachmann is somebody who actually ran for President in 2008. She was a fringe candidate, an outlier, and she was also very provocative. She crashed and burned very quickly. He –

Jeffrey Goldberg: She was a little bit ahead of her time, in terms of Lauren Boebert before, a Lauren Boebert kind of person.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: She was kind of pre-Trump, yeah, absolutely. But then he found a home with Jeff Sessions, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who was also very anti-immigrant. And ideologically, they were on the same page. Jeff Sessions was adamantly involved in [opposing] comprehensive immigration reform during the Bush and early Obama years – the Bush years, really – and trying to kill it. And Stephen Miller was instrumental in that.

He had a reputation on the Hill – he was a comms director at the time – of being way outside the mainstream. He would also, in internal comms meetings with his fellow Republican comms directors, would provocate in the same way he does publicly. People used to just roll their eyes and dismiss him.

Now, he is probably the most powerful non-elected official in this country, and you still see actually that tension on Capitol Hill with Stephen Miller. People remember Stephen Miller then, and there’s a lot of grumbling on Capitol Hill, even among Republicans, who think that Stephen Miller’s policies are going to far and will hurt them.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Ashley Parker: It’s hard just briefly to overstate – I covered the Gang of Eight immigration bill for The New York Times as a Congressional correspondent. And this was sort of the last time that immigration, bipartisan immigration [legislation], had any real momentum, right? You had four Republicans, including Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio; four Democrats.

You had the tentative, cautious, but you had the buy-in of the tech community, the business community, the labor community, the activist community, the Hispanic community. And the reason that bill essentially sank and did not come up for a vote in the House was single-handedly because of Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, working alongside Breitbart News, to kill it.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: And remember, just during the end of the Biden administration, when James Lankford was working on a bipartisan bill to close the borders, and then Trump came in as a potential candidate and killed it. Stephen Miller had a role in that, too.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Well, let’s talk about Sessions and the jump from Sessions to Trump. Obviously Sessions – we don’t have to rehearse this one at length, but [he] was a Trump loyalist and Trump turned on him because Sessions appointed the special prosecutor, etc. How did Miller make the move to the Big Man? I mean, it’s a classic Washington story, also? It’s not that unusual. But did he discard Jeff Sessions when –

Leigh Ann Caldwell: So, so, not yet. What happened is in January 2016 Miller was one of the very first people to come and leave Jeff Sessions’s office and go to Trump’s campaign.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And this is still when Trump was very improbable.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: Yes, very improbable. Before the Iowa caucuses, a good month before then. But Jeff Sessions, a month later, was the very first person, first Senator, to endorse Donald Trump. And so they were still very close, working together to promote this enigma of Donald Trump.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Interesting.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: But, you know, fast-forward to Jeff Sessions being Attorney General; Jeff Sessions recusing himself into the Russia investigation; Jeff Sessions losing his job and being fired because of that; and the person left standing is Stephen Miller, who discarded Jeff Sessions at that moment.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. When you say “discarded,” what do you mean?

Leigh Ann Caldwell: There was no public statement of Stephen Miller supporting or saying anything nice about Jeff Sessions in that moment. And then a person close to Stephen Miller at that time said no one was more furious at Jeff Sessions than Stephen Miller.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I mean, this goes to another question about Stephen Miller and his view of a powerful executive. I want to get to that, but let’s stay on the immigration views. There’s a tweet – and he tweets a lot, as we know, and he tweets very frankly about his views. There’s a tweet:

Stephen Miller [via X, nèe Twitter, December 27, 2025]: Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon – but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire Third World for 60 years. For those who don’t know, the U.S. had negative migration for the half-century between the first non-stop transatlantic flight and the moon landing.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Basically, what he’s saying is American innovation all happened because white men – I mean, that’s the interpretation here – did all these things, and then the country lost focus because it started letting in the quote-“Third World.” McKay, come back to California.

McKay Coppins: Because I think that’s crucial to understanding his fixation on immigration.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yeah, because this is all – first, it’s ahistorical. Americans invented plenty of things at the same time as immigrants were coming into the country. In fact, many of the people who were immigrants invented those things, as new Americans. But let’s go back to the visceral feeling against immigrants.

McKay Coppins: Yeah, I mean, obviously none of us can read his mind. But to understand how these views formed, you have to understand the post-9/11 politics on the Right, in southern California in particular. Post-9/11, there was a general rise in xenophobia, fear of Muslims, outsiders, foreigners. We had been through this national trauma. It’s understandable, to a certain extent.

But Miller’s particular fixation on immigration was really born out of the Right-wing media ecosystem in California at the time, which was always rotating around immigration issues. You know, I think if he had been born in Cleveland or Montana or even, you know, Washington, D.C., I think it would have been a very different story.

But the people that he idolized, the local talk-radio people on the Right, the kind of group of conservatives that he fell in with, were always talking about immigration. And so –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Extremely negatively.

McKay Coppins: Of course.

Jeffrey Goldberg: The only reason I say that is because Ronald Reagan, the greatest Republican in the history of California, was not in that camp.

McKay Coppins: No, of course. Right. Something had shifted in the decades after Reagan. Some of it had to do with the Right-wing backlash against George W. Bush’s attempt to find a grand immigration compromise. But because he was always on the far Right of the Republican Party, and because he came from California, immigration was kind of a natural wedge issue that he latched onto.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So what was it? Growing up in southern California, he saw Hispanics, the Latino population, as just too big; trying to dominate white America?

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: There’s sort of two things. You’re talking about the sort of post-9/11 Republican backlash against real efforts to actually have some sort of comprehensive immigration reform. What you saw was sort of a xenophobic view where you generalize to many immigrants coming from the Middle East as national security threats. And you’ve seen that rhetoric replicated by this administration.

But then when it comes to also immigrants coming from Central and Latin America, you’ve had – and this still exists today – this real push by conservatives that these are, this is economic competition with people who are born in the United States. Now, of course, economic studies do undercut that. They show that immigrants broadly actually benefit the economy. But this is a prime example for the white grievance argument.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to stay on that for a second, because Stephen Miller is Jewish, and part of his family came over here 100 years ago as refugees from anti-Semitism in Europe. In your conversations with him, does that ever play into his understanding of the world, and his own background as a great-grandchild of immigrants?

McKay Coppins: I’m going to introduce one data point which may or may not be relevant, but he told me that one of the books that most shaped him was Wayne LaPierre’s book – head of the National Rifle Association (NRA). In that book, Wayne LaPierre makes the argument that the Holocaust and, I think he says Auschwitz, are prime examples of the need for Second Amendment rights.

You know, to make what you will of that argument, but if the Jewish people had been armed, they would have been able to stand up against this authoritarian genocidal regime. I think that he found a way early on to kind of meld his general Right-wing world view with his Jewish identity and background. I think it became a little more strained as he got deeper into Trump-era Right-wing politics and found himself swimming in waters that were, say, a little bit less friendly to Jews.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, because there is an element of let’s call it the racialist far Right that doesn’t have fond feelings about Jews. Let me make just one brief editorial aside. I’m sorry, but this prompts this thought: I wish that the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had had more guns back then, but I still think they would not have been able to defeat the German army. I mean it sounds like – it’s just a, like – put that aside from now. We’ll do a special episode about that. I’ll bring it up with Wayne LaPierre the next time he’s on the show.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: But the thing I would just add to that, too, is when you look at Stephen Miller’s comments about immigration, he does have a very narrow sort of view of who – which immigrants are justified to be in the United States. And it’s not – it doesn’t always track with the law. If you go into a legal port of entry at the border, you have a legal process to come into the country.

He pushes back against that. He pushes back against the parole system the Biden administration started. They’ve revamped their refugee program to focus on English-speaking refugees coming into the U.S., and not from African and also Muslim-majority countries, too. So there’s a through-line there of who he thinks is deserving to be in the U.S.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So this is why South African Afrikaners are given privileges, the only people allowed into the country.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: The only refugees that are automatically allowed in.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to talk a little bit about his power in the White House. I came into direct contact with this question last year during the Signal controversy. When I was in that chat, J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, everyone else are in that chat room arguing back and forth about the utility of striking Yemen. And then Miller comes into the chat and writes:

“As I heard it, the President was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the U.S. successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost, there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.” (Pete Hegseth replied, “Agree.”)

And it shut down the debate. It shut down J. D. Vance. It kind of made me think, “Well, Stephen Miller is worth a half-hour on Washington Week,” if that’s the case that he’s so powerful. Talk about inside the White House, what kind of power Stephen Miller has.

Ashley Parker: It is kind of hard to overstate his power inside the Trump second term White House, in part because his purview is so much broader than just immigration, although it certainly includes immigration. It includes trade. It includes foreign policy. It includes national security. It includes education. The entire war on the quote-unquote “elite university system” Stephen Miller, in his free time, when he’s not dealing with immigration, is the architect of that,

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Ashley Parker: And also it’s, you know, you were asking earlier about if his views have become more extreme. I think it’s instructive to understand him in some of the same ways we understand President Trump himself, which is that his views haven’t necessarily changed, but he used those – even more than Trump, in certain ways, Stephen Miller used those four years out of power to basically get better, stronger, faster, more ruthless.

And he understood the mistakes he made in the first term. Why the travel ban, you know, he wrote the first executive order, led to chaos at the airports, got struck down in the courts. This time he knows that if you care about being hard-line about immigration, it’s not just important to have your people at the Department of Homeland Security, although that is important.

But there’s certain positions at Health and Human Services where you want a strong ally with your point of view. There are certain jobs at the State Department, in the Western Hemisphere division. So he now knows all the levers of power.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But, Leigh Ann, let me ask you this. Minneapolis, Tom Homan comes in and says, “Well, we’re pulling out.” Obviously, this did not go well, certainly from a public-relations perspective, for the administration in Minneapolis, largely because of the two deaths caused by ICE [and CBP] agents, of protesters. Did he go – did Stephen Miller go too far this time?

Leigh Ann Caldwell: It seems that way. Yeah, I think that, a couple of things. On his standing in the White House, there was – he had a 40th birthday party that his wife, Katie Miller, hosted for him, back in the fall – or the summer, actually. Everybody who attended told me that they had never seen so many people in the administration in one place. It was every single Cabinet member/official, [Trump’s press secretary] Karoline Leavitt. Everyone was there.

Ashley Parker: You needed like a designated survivor to be put in place.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: Exactly, and it was a show of how important he is in this administration. It was also notable that there were no members of Congress there, except for the Speaker of the House. Which gets back to your question, “Did he go too far?” This is something that the President has got a lot of push-back on. Stephen Miller has been criticized very publicly by Democrats, and very privately by Republicans.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Although Senator Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), a prominent Republican, does not like him at all, and has told the President that.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: Despises. Every single time he can publicly say how much he hates Stephen Miller, he does it. He can be talking about something totally different to a reporter, and he will bring up Stephen Miller.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He’s also retiring, which is interesting.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: He’s also retiring, but he does have a line to the President, and he’s told the President many times that Stephen Miller is doing him and the Republican Party no justice.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: You did see something rare after the [Alex] Pretti shooting from Miller, which was him also sort of trying to clean it up and saying, “Well, look, I was getting information from CBP agents.” There was a period there where they tried to soften that language. That’s rare.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But, McKay, let me ask you this: what does he ultimately want? And, by the way, you have 30 seconds to answer that question.

McKay Coppins: Well, I think that he wants a lot. But I think that when it comes to immigration in particular, I think if you guys are right, he has made it very clear in my conversations that he wants to entirely reframe our understanding of our country as a nation of immigrants.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He’s basically in an argument with Emma Lazarus, in a way.

McKay Coppins: Right. I mean, there’s a key moment in the first term where he was asked about the placard at the base of the Statue of Liberty –

Jeffrey Goldberg: That’s Emma Lazarus. That’s the poem, right.

McKay Coppins: And he completely dismisses it, like disdainfully dismisses it. And I think like that just – that is his ideological project. He – if he leaves – if he can retire in a country that does not see immigrants as being welcome into this country, that does not see immigrants as part of the national story, he will be happy.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He’s a fascinating figure. Obviously, the most powerful non-elected official, I think we can all agree on that. More powerful than a Cabinet official. We’ll talk about him again and again, obviously, but that’s all the time we have for now. I want to thank our guests for joining me, and thank you at home for watching us. You can read Ashley’s profile on Stephen Miller by visiting theatlantic.com. I’m Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.

“The Librarians”: PBS Airs a Powerful Documentary about Librarians on the Front Lines of the Culture Wars

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

On Monday, February 9 PBS aired a powerful and unflinching 2025 documentary called The Librarians, about how librarians are being dragged into the culture wars being waged by an ascendant radical Right (it’s really a perversion of language to call these people “conservative” when their political, cultural, social, and moral ambitions are anything but “conservative”). Their ultimate goal is to turn the U.S. into a Christian theocracy, and one of their immediate goals is to eliminate any opinions they disagree with from public discourse, including critiques of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder in collaboration with Janique L. Robillard, Maria Cuomo Cole, and Jana Edelbaum, tells the story of how librarians across the country, especially (though not exclusively) in Southern states, have essentially been drafted into the culture war. They’ve been torn between the ethics of their profession, which among other things call them to oppose censoring the content of their libraries simply because other people don’t like certain books; and the increasingly vociferous demands of organizations like the well-funded, powerful nationwide group “Moms for Liberty” which demanded that school libraries in particular censor books with anti-racist or Queer themes.

Moms for Liberty was founded on New Year’s Day 2021 by three Right-wing activists in Florida. They were originally opposed to mask requirements instituted in 2020 to slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, but their agenda soon broadened to include running candidates for local school boards who were pledged to support their racist, anti-Queer agenda. In 2022 their campaigns were successful in 11 Texas school districts, including one in a town called Granbury that became a major focus of the film.

The campaign was started by a Texas state legislator called Matt Krause, who in October 2021 released a list of 850 books he wanted banned from Texas public school libraries. Krause also said his list was not all-inclusive and he reserved the right to add future titles. Krause explained that the books he wanted removed from state school libraries were ones which “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” That seemingly unexceptional statement is actually radical-Right code-speak for anything which “might make white people uncomfortable by pointing out that the U.S. built its prosperity on the backs of enslaved Africans.” (For more information see https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-matt-krause-launches-inquiry-into-850-books.)

Krause included with his blacklist a demand that the Texas Education Agency and school districts throughout the state asking each individual he sent it to whether their schools had any of the books on his list. He also asked for a detailed accounting of where the books were and how much money had been spent on them. Among the books cited by Krause and other would-be Texas censors were Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Peggy J. Parks’s How Prevalent Is Racism in Our Society?, a picture book put out by Amnesty International illustrating the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and novels like Tim Federle’s The Great American Whatever, Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, and “Pink Is a Girl’s Color” … and other silly things people say, a children’s picture book by Stacy and Erik Drageset.

One of the key people involved in the radical-Right takeover was successful school board candidate Courtney Gore. She was a prominent activist in the area with solid Right-wing credentials. After the school district removed 130 books from school libraries on grounds they were “pornographic,” Gore did something unusual for someone with her background. Instead of meekly going along with the pressure from her colleagues and funders to ban whole lists of books as “pornographic,” she actually read them and realized they weren’t pornographic at all. Though Gore maintains that she still considers herself a “conservative,” she posted on Facebook in May 2022 that “I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy B.S. I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer, it’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”

Another quirky story told in the documentary concerns Granbury parent Monica Brown, one of the leaders of the book-banning movement. What made her story unusual is that the oldest of her nine children, son Weston Brown, is Gay. When he came out to her at age 23, she immediately and irrevocably banned him from any Thanksgiving dinners and other family functions. Weston ultimately moved to San Diego, found a partner named Andrew, and agreed not to have anything to do with the birth family that had raised him, homeschooled him, and kept him as insulated as they could from any intimation either that Queer people existed or he might be one.

Then he saw Monica Brown testifying before the Granbury school board on a social-media video that had gone viral. “It was one thing when my parents’ beliefs were causing this rift between us and it was just a family matter,” Brown told NBC News. “But seeing now that she’s applying those same views to public activism, at a time when so many basic rights are being challenged, I couldn’t stay quiet about that.” The Librarians includes a scene in which Weston Brown spoke to the Granbury school board and pleaded with them not to ban Queer-affirming books like the one he says turned him around, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue.

"It’s been nearly five years since I came out to my family,” Weston Brown told the Granbury school board. “I'm not allowed to join in family celebrations or holidays, or be part of my eight siblings' lives, all because I’m not straight. I’m here to implore you to listen to librarians, educators and students, not those speaking from a religious perspective or at the bidding of a political group. If you choose to marginalize differences and remove representation, you will only cause harm.” Monica Brown immediately followed her disowned son to the podium and spewed the usual radical-Right nonsense. She ignored everything her son had said and didn’t have anything to do with him – until the meeting ended. Then, as Weston was being interviewed by a reporter in the parking lot, she walked up to him and started filming the interview herself with her cell phone.

As I’ve noted in previous posts about the American radical Right and its position on Queer issues, one thing most pro-Queer people don’t understand about the radical Right is that it doesn’t believe in the existence of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender people. They believe we are all naturally heterosexual and cisgender, and any people who express themselves as homosexual or Transgender are either deliberately rebelling against God or suffering from “trauma-induced sexual sin.” Weston Brown recalls that when he came out to his parents as Gay, “They thought that I was mentally ill or demonically possessed.” This is the ideology behind so-called “reparative therapy,” the various attempts to “cure” Queer or Trans people from their “trauma-induced sexual sin” and turn them into cisgender heterosexuals.

One thing we’ve learned about the radical Right since its political ascendancy, which predated the Presidencies of Donald Trump but was kicked into high gear by the Trump phenomenon, is the thug-like way they go after their enemies, especially ones like Courtney Gore who were formerly on their side. Gore reported receiving death threats. So did Amanda Jones, a 20-year veteran librarian in Louisiana who in 2021 won the School Librarian of the Year award from School Library Journal. The award was in recognition of an innovative program she devised during the COVID-19 lockdown. She reasoned that as long as students couldn’t go to the outside world, she would use computer technology to bring the world to them by presenting virtual tours of other countries.

Then in 2022 Jones ran afoul of the would-be book banners. In July 2022 she spoke publicly against censorship at a meeting of the Livingston Parish Public Library Board. (In Louisiana, counties are called “parishes.”) As a result, she got viciously attacked by various organizations, including Citizens for a New Louisiana and Bayou State of Mind. Bayou State of Mind accused Jones of "advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” Citizens for a New Louisiana put out a leaflet showing a photo of Jones inside a red circle with a white border, and captioned it, “Why is she fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kids’ section?” She was, of course, doing no such thing, as any member of these organizations who’d actually read the books in question the way Courtney Gore did in Granbury, Texas would have found out.

Since then Jones, who is still a librarian at the same school in Louisiana she attended as a child, has published a memoir called That Librarian detailing her struggle against book-banning and the attempts of the radical Right to turn librarians into censors. She still gets awards, but now they have names like the Association of School Librarians’ Intellectual Freedom Award and the Louisiana Library Association’s Alex Allain Intellectual Freedom Award. When Jones was honored at the National Book Awards in 2023, Oprah Winfrey said, “Amanda Jones started getting death threats, all for standing up for our right to read ... but she's not stopped fighting against book bans, or stopped advocating for access to diverse stories.”

Librarians, especially in schools, have become one of our principal lines of defense against the Radical Right’s depressingly successful campaign to end America’s experiment in self-governance and make the U.S. a neofascist dictatorship. They already control the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court. They also have organized at the state and local levels in ways progressives can barely dream about. They want a world in which Blacks are once again in the back of the bus, women are once again stuck in the kitchen, Queers are still in the closet, Fundamentalist Christianity becomes a state religion, and giant corporations are able to extract maximum surplus value from their workers without any nonsense about health, safety, or decent pay.

The Librarians is a chilling account of how a handful of individuals are courageously fighting an often lonely battle to maintain and expand America’s and Americans’ freedoms in the face of a well-organized, well-funded campaign to destroy them. It deserves to be seen by every American who wants this country to remain a democratic, secular republic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump, George Orwell, and “Doublethink”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dwindling Options of Stopping Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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