New PBS Documentary The War Cabinet Reveals How the So-Called “Peace President” Became a War Leader
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“The powerful do what they can, and the weak do what they must.” That’s how David Sanger of The New York Times summed up Donald Trump’s philosophy of the world and humanity’s role in it in an interview for a recent episode of PBS’s long-running TV documentary series Frontline, “The War Cabinet,” aired Tuesday, May 26. Directed and co-written by Michael Kirk, with the familiar dulcet tones of Will Lyman as narrator, “The War Cabinet” was an attempt to show how a man who sold himself during all three of his Presidential campaigns as a “peacemaker” morphed into an all-out war leader after he regained the White House in 2024.
Another reporter interviewed for the program, Eric Cortellessa of Time, said, “Part of the appeal with President Trump is that he is going to reshape the world in a way that outlasts him. That there will be a pre- and post-Trump world. Part of what he wants his legacy to be is to be able to say, ‘I did what nobody else could.’” I’d long suspected that Trump wants to be so profoundly transformative a U.S. President – more so than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan – that the history of America will be divided into B.T. and A.T.: “Before Trump” and “After Trump.” Now Cortellessa, who’s done at least two major interview features with Trump for Time, suggests that that ambition extends to the entire world.
“When I talk about [Trump’s] foreign policy doctrine, it’s the ‘me, me, me’ foreign policy doctrine,” said The New Yorker reporter and essayist Susan Glasser. “For Donald Trump there’s another factor, and that is the glory of Donald Trump. It seems so incredible that a great nation of 350 million people could actually be acting in the world because of the whims and interests of one guy who wants to pursue his self-aggrandizement.” Not that it hasn’t happened before. Do the names “Alexander the Great,” “Napoleon Bonaparte,” “Joseph Stalin,” “Mao Zedong,” and “Adolf Hitler” mean anything to you?
The idea that a President of the United States is comporting himself under the philosophy that “the powerful do what they can, and the weak do what they must” is chilling enough, especially in this 250th anniversary year of America’s declaration of independence from Great Britain. It’s exactly the opposite of the belief that “all men are created equal.” Even though when Thomas Jefferson wrote those words he effectively meant, “All white male landowners are created equal,” it was still a philosophy that definitively rejected the idea that a handful of people are destined to rule, and everybody else is supposed to accept, meekly, humbly, and gratefully, whatever crumbs their overlords are willing to dole out to them.
The Frontline documentary began with a montage of clips from Trump’s three Presidential campaigns in which he repeatedly declared himself an anti-war candidate. That was the claim he made in his second-term inaugural address on January 20, 2025, in which he said, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be, a peacemaker and a unifier.”
That got a lot of horselaughs from people all too aware that Trump’s whole strategy as a politician has been to seize on the divisions within the American people and exploit them for votes. Trump’s rhetoric began to change with a bizarre series of demands to acquire territory held by other countries. He insisted that Canada become “the 51st state.” He threatened to attack Panama in order to retake the Panama Canal, which had been U.S. territory until it was returned to Panama by a treaty negotiated by the Carter administration in 1978. Trump also threatened to attack a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally, Denmark, to seize control of Greenland.
And though thus far he hasn’t attacked Canada (except for starting a massive trade war with them), Panama, or Greenland, Trump has ordered bombing raids in Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and Venezuela. The Frontline show actually began with an account of Trump’s White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky on February 28, which went off the rails when Vice-President J. D. Vance upbraided Zelensky for not wearing a suit and tie to the meeting.
“Mr. President, Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” Vance said. “You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict. Have you said ‘thank you’ once in this entire meeting? No, in this entire meeting, have you said, ‘Thank you’? Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who’s trying to save your country – and let’s go litigate those disagreements rather than trying to fight it out in the American media when you’re wrong. We know that you’re wrong.”
“Vance brought that righteous indignation to that meeting,” Curt Mills, editor of The American Conservative and one of a number of true Trump believers who agreed to participate in the Frontline telecast, said. “For a lot of the people on the so-called New Right, who are the national populist or the hard-core MAGA base or people who really want to see change in American foreign policy, and I’m one of them, it was the coup de grâce of a new generation of approach. In some ways it was the high-water mark of Vance’s political career to that point.”
The program also discussed U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ran for President against Trump in 2016. The Frontline documentary included some of the bizarre posturing between Rubio and Trump over the relative size of their “hands” (presumably a metaphor for a body part just below the waist) as well as a clip from a campaign debate in which Rubio endorsed George W. Bush’s war against Iraq – and Trump said, “Obviously the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake, all right? We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” Trump overwhelmingly defeated Rubio in the 2016 primaries, including in Rubio’s home state of Florida.
“I think Marco Rubio spent a couple years after that defeat wavering over what course to take,” said Susan Glasser of The New Yorker. “He believed Donald Trump was a dangerous force in the world. He believed what he was doing was antithetical to American interests. But then he looked at what happened to those Republicans who spoke out against Donald Trump and essentially ended their own political careers, and Marco Rubio’s political career – he didn’t want it to be over.”
So Rubio wrote a book, Decades of Decadence, in which he basically reinvented himself as a Trump-style phony “populist,” and by the 2024 Republican National Convention he was giving full-throated endorsements of Trump’s re-election as “the only way to make America wealthy and safe and strong again.” Rubio’s conversion was so complete that long-term Trump ally Steve Bannon appeared on the Frontline show and said that when he read Decades of Decadence, he had a hard time believing Rubio wrote it.
A number of interviewees for the Frontline program made the point that Trump, during his first term, had had a number of Cabinet members and other high officials who tried to talk him out of some of his nastier initiatives. Trump had wanted to bomb Mexico to deal with the drug cartels, and to send U.S. military troops into the streets of American cities to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. In his second term, as Cortellessa of Time explained, his goal was “to remove people who saw themselves as guardrails, to eradicate any possibility of having people who were going to act as brakes on his desires.”
One of Trump’s key appointees in that campaign was Pete Hegseth, Iraq combat veteran and co-host of a weekend program on Fox News, whom Trump chose as his Secretary of Defense – or, as Trump and Hegseth have unilaterally renamed him, “Secretary of War.” The Frontline depiction of Hegseth began with a speech from one of Trump’s televised Cabinet meetings in which he demands fulsome praise from all his appointees. It’s a ritual Trump started in his first term and has continued in this one. “From the troops directly, which they ask me to say all the time, thank you for your leadership, for your boldness, for your clarity, for providing a shield for the rest of us to put America first and to apply peace through strength,” Hegseth told Trump. “We’re in the strength business, that’s our job.”
Among Hegseth’s priorities was a housecleaning of America’s top military leadership, targeting anyone who’d been promoted by the Biden administration, anyone who wasn’t a white male, and, as Hegseth himself put it, “any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] woke shit.” Hegseth particularly targeted the Judge Advocates General (JAG’s). Among their responsibilities are to warn commanders whether the orders they are about to give are illegal.
In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth recalled one JAG officer told his company it was illegal to shoot somebody just because they were carrying a weapon. Once the lawyer walked away, Hegseth told his troops, “I will not allow this nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed.” As Secretary of Defense, Hegseth called the entire U.S. officer corps to an in-person meeting at Quantico, Virginia and laid down the message: either get with the program of “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” or leave.
The new Trump doctrine would face its first test in dealing with the Houthis, Iran-backed rebels in Yemen. The Houthis were attacking civilian vessels in the Red Sea, and Trump’s war Cabinet called a remote meeting to discuss what to do about it. Amazingly, they not only used a commercial messaging app, Signal, they inadvertently invited a journalist, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, to join the chat. At first, Goldberg told Frontline, “I thought it was a disinformation operation or some elaborate spoof. … The senior-most officials of the United States government were using Signal to talk about upcoming bombing campaigns, and inadvertently invited a journalist. I’ve never been involved in anything this absurd or surreal.”
As a result, Goldberg ¬– and, ultimately, the entire world – got a rare behind-the-scenes look at how the current U.S. government decides issues of life and death. Vance was reticent about ordering a bomb strike against the Houthis, calling it a bailout of Europe since almost all the ships the Houthis had targeted were European. Hegseth was gung-ho to do it. Then Stephen Miller, Trump’s most controversial aide and one who’s been a continuous part of both Trump Presidencies, entered the chat with the message, “The President was clear: green-light.” At that moment, all debate ceased and the conversation turned to planning the details of when and where the attacks would take place, itself a serious breach of security protocol.
After the attack, Trump, as is his wont, declared it a complete and total victory. “It’s not even close to true,” said Jamie McIntyre, reporter for the conservative Washington Examiner. “That war went on for 52 days. Achieved almost nothing, except the expenditure of billions of dollars. The Houthis are still there.” Meanwhile, Trump and his administration needed a scapegoat for the security breach of allowing a journalist onto a top-secret chat planning military actions, and they found him in National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Trump fired him and gave the post to Rubio, the first person since Henry Kissinger to be both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the same time.
“Donald Trump treats even the most senior officials of the U.S. government as courtiers,” Susan Glasser told Frontline. “It’s the sort of Trump 2.0 version of the adults in the room. People like [White House chief of staff] Susie Wiles and Marco Rubio essentially have a sort of shoulder-shrugged, you know, ‘what-can-you-do’ kind of version of playing the adults in the room. Maybe they have different opinions than the president, but in the end they’re not going to really do anything to stop him from doing whatever he wants.”
Trump’s next attack on a foreign country came about in June 2025, two months after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the White House to discuss a coordinated U.S./Israel attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Both Netanyahu and Secretary of State Rubio made statements to the effect that the U.S. would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Vance, who like Hegseth served in the Iraq war, said an attack on Iran “would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.” But Trump went ahead and ordered the strikes anyway, then claimed they had “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Right-wing activists like podcaster Steve Bannon and The American Conservative editor Curt Mills saw the parallels between Trump’s attack on Iran and George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq – and they didn’t like them. Bannon said, “This is exactly the same pitch as the Iraq War – weapons of mass destruction – you have to get it. So they understand one thing: They think the playbook works. This could suck us into a war that make Iraq and Afghanistan look like a Sunday afternoon picnic. You’re talking about a major country, an ancient civilization, 90 million people, the Persians. These are the same folks the Romans fought, and the Greeks.”
Another person within the Trump administration who argued against the attack on Iran was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who insisted based on the intelligence agencies that reported to her that Iran was nowhere near developing either a nuclear weapon or the capability of delivering one. But after Israel launched the attack on Iran, and Trump joined in with American forces, he bluntly told a reporter who asked about Gabbard’s comment, “She’s wrong.” As a result, Gabbard became persona non grata in the Trump administration. Members of Trump’s staff joked that the initials of her title, “DNI,” now stood for “Do Not Invite,” as she was frozen out of key meetings. More recently, she has resigned, ostensibly to take care of her husband, diagnosed with advanced cancer.
Trump’s next aggressive campaign against another country’s leadership targeted Venezuela, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio – the Florida-born son of Cuban expatriates – heartily supported. “He has very strongly held beliefs, from a very young age, about left-leaning dictatorships in Latin America,” said Ashley Parker of The Atlantic. “And there is also a sense that if Venezuela can fall, and there can be regime change in Venezuela, then Cuba might be next.”
Knowing that Trump couldn’t care less about free and fair elections, either in Venezuela or in the U.S., in order to get Trump to authorize an attack on Venezuela he needed an ally. He found one in Stephen Miller, and the two decided to use drugs as the issue to persuade Trump to attack Venezuela, “They changed the argument to drugs – that was a big deal,” said American Conservative editor Curt Mills. “The president is undoubtedly prudish about drugs. He is a teetotaler himself. I think it’s a very underexplored element of his psyche. His older brother died of alcoholism. That was a richer vein to persuade the president.”
Trump began the campaign against Venezuela by ordering air strikes against small boats in the open seas off the Venezuelan coast. The claim was that the boats were being used to smuggle cocaine and fentanyl into the U.S., even though Venezuela does not produce fentanyl at all. Not only did they target the boats and destroy them, Trump posted on his Truth Social Web site, “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. Beware!” Eventually the boat strikes killed 110 civilians, including two sailors who were the victims of a so-called “second tap” attack, illegal under international law because once you have rendered your enemies helpless, you’re supposed to take them alive.
When Venezuelan President Maduro continued to defy Trump – even mocking him by dancing at a rally the way Trump does – Trump ordered a U.S. ground invasion of Venezuela to capture Maduro and bring him to the U.S. for a so-called “trial” on drug charges. Rubio was hoping that the successful capture of Maduro would restore democracy to Venezuela. Trump wanted no such thing; instead he allowed Delci Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice-president, to take formal control of the country on condition that she sign over Venezuela’s vast oil resources to U.S. companies. “We’re going to be running it with a group,” Trump said of Venezuela’s oil industry, “and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly. We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It will be paid for by the oil companies directly.”
“If I were Marco Rubio, I would be deeply pained and distressed by the course of events in Venezuela,” said Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. “You have to wonder what rationalizations he’s telling himself to justify what’s just happened. He’s finally now gotten the results he wants in removing Maduro from power, but none of the reasons why he believes Maduro should be removed from power are actually being respected on the merits. The Maduro regime persists. There’s this explicit claim made about the value of extracting oil from the country. You basically have now the [same] Chavista regime in power in Venezuela, but answering to the Americans. I mean, it’s a pretty tangled situation for somebody like Rubio, on the ideological merits, to defend.”
New Yorker and former New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins believes that the quick and easy success in Venezuela emboldened Trump to do another all-out assault on Iran, either at Netanyahu’s behest or with his help. “Trump is on a roll, and I think he knows he’s on a roll. He believes he’s on a roll,” Filkins told Frontline. “I think the Venezuela operation emboldened Trump to believe that he could do these very effective one-shot missions. Go in, do what you need to do, destroy what you need to destroy, get out, done. No consequences.”
“One factor that people don’t talk about enough is luck,” Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic told Frontline. “So far Donald Trump is one of the luckiest people in the history of the planet. He sends American troops into the middle of Venezuela. Pulls it off. He practically destroys the Iranian nuclear program without losing a plane or a pilot. Luck is a factor, and momentum is a factor in all this. It’s luck, it’s roll of the dice, it’s the pure expression of power.”
In February 2026 Netanyahu came to the White House for another visit with Trump. This time there was no official ceremony, no joint press conference, no fanfare. This was when Netanyahu allegedly talked Trump into an all-out air campaign against Iran involving killing the long-time Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. According to American Conservative editor Curt Mills, “Netanyahu is pretty canny at saying, ‘You’ll be one of the great presidents. You’ll be like Reagan or Lincoln or Roosevelt if you do something substantial. No other president has been able to handle the Iran portfolio – Carter, Reagan, H.W., Clinton, Obama, W., Biden. And you can just solve it.’”
Instead Trump’s war against Iran – launched without any Congressional approval, in defiance of the U.S. Constitution, which states only Congress can start a war – has lasted four months so far and produced exactly the sort of quagmire Trump used to criticize George W. Bush for getting us into in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s also upended the global economy and raised U.S. gasoline prices by 50 percent. And it has sent Trump’s already negative poll numbers into dismal territory, with just 33 to 37 percent of Americans surveyed saying they approve of the job Trump is doing.
Not that Trump really cares about all that. It’s become clear that Trump has no intention of allowing himself or the Republican Congress ever to be voted out of power. His total dominance of the Republican primary electorate has enabled him to destroy the political careers of Senators Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) as well as Congressmember Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky). These, along with the other metaphorical trophy heads on Trump’s wall – Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and many others – successfully intimidate any Republicans in either house of Congress who might otherwise stand up to him.
Trump has also launched an aggressive campaign to redraw Congressional districts to make sure Republicans keep their House majority in 2026 despite the growing unpopularity of their policies. He was aided in this by the Right-wing revolutionary (often mistakenly called “conservative”) majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, which in May hammered the final nails into the coffin of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Trump is on a roll to make sure not only that he transforms the American Republic into the American Empire, but that he does so without any chance of being reversed, either in the 2026 midterms or the 2028 Presidential election. Either he will declare an “emergency” that allegedly requires him to suspend the 2028 election and remain in power indefinitely, or he will run what the Latin Americans call an imposición candidate: a totally loyal stooge who will allow him to maintain effective control of the U.S. government even though he won’t technically hold the title, “President of the United States of America.”
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
New PBS Documentary Showcases W. E. B. Du Bois, a Major Voice in the Historic Struggle for Civil Rights and Racial Equality
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night (Tuesday, May 19) PBS presented a stunning documentary called W. E. B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause as part of their American Masters series. (I’ve often wondered how they decide who’s an “American Experience” and who’s an “American Master.”) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois has long been a particular hero of mine. He was born in 1868, three years after the South at least technically lost the U.S. Civil War, in the relatively emancipated town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Du Bois’s father was descended from a French Huguenot (Protestants who fled France during the religious wars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance) slaveowner, and his dad bailed on the family when William was 10. He always insisted on pronouncing his last name “Doo-BOYS” in the English fashion rather than the French “Du-BWAH,” and that caused a bizarre controversy when in the early 1960’s, just after Du Bois’s death, Richard Nixon denounced the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, a movement set up by the Communist Party U.S.A. to attract young African-Americans to the cause, as a Communist front organization. This did collateral damage to the Boys Clubs of America, who’d seen their donations nosedive because a lot of people thought Nixon had meant them. Nixon’s reaction was to blame Du Bois himself for the confusion and demand that the clubs use the “Du-BWAH” pronunciation of his name, whereupon the people running the clubs on behalf of the Communist Party dug up an interview with Du Bois himself in which he explained, “I am an American. My name is Doo-BOYS.” Du Bois was born and raised in Great Barrington in a community that was otherwise almost all white. His teachers recognized his intellectual ability and insisted him to study hard; he graduated from high school with honors and set his sights on getting into Harvard University. Unfortunately, his family didn’t have the financial means even to consider sending him to Harvard, but the congregation of the Congregational Church of Great Barrington, which the family attended, raised enough money to send him to the historically Black Fisk University in Nashville. There Du Bois was hit with the realities of institutionalized racism and Jim Crow segregation for the first time in his life. Like most Fisk students, he had to work his way through school, which he did by becoming a schoolteacher after his sophomore year. After he graduated from Fisk, he finally got into Harvard, but Harvard wouldn’t accept his course credits from Fisk, so he had to repeat two years as an undergraduate before he was admitted to Harvard’s graduate school.
He got a masters’ degree from Harvard and then sought a grant offered by former President Rutherford B. Hayes to study the new discipline of sociology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Germany, where among other people he met pioneering sociologist Max Weber. Weber liked to cite Du Bois as a counter-example to people who insisted that Blacks were incapable of high intellectual achievement. Du Bois later recalled that in Germany “I found myself on the outside of the American world, looking in. With me were white folk – students, acquaintances, teachers – who viewed the scene with me. They did not always pause to regard me as a curiosity, or something sub-human; I was just a man of the somewhat privileged student rank, with whom they were glad to meet and talk over the world; particularly, the part of the world whence I came.” Du Bois had hoped to win his Ph.D. in Germany, but the university required that you live in the country for at least three years, and the stipend he’d received only lasted for two. He finally won his Ph.D. by returning to Harvard, and his was the first Ph.D. ever awarded by Harvard to a Black scholar. Du Bois got a teaching job at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where he met and married one of his students, Nina Gomer. After two years at Wilberforce, Du Bois received a grant to do a sociological study of the Black community of Philadelphia, particularly the Seventh Ward. He moved himself, Nina, and their young son Burkhardt into the roughest part of the Seventh Ward and conducted over 500 interviews for what became his first published book, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Before the book was published, Du Bois had left Wilberforce and taken a teaching position at Atlanta University. There he coined the phrase “The Talented Tenth,” referring to the most intellectually gifted Black Americans whose demonstrated abilities would help lift the entire race out of bondage. In 1900 he went to London to attend the world’s first Pan-African Congress, despite the misgivings of the British government that the group was really intended to bring down the British Empire by encouraging its colonies in Africa to rebel and declare independence. He also went to Paris and organized an exhibit for the 1900 World’s Fair to commemorate the achievements of Black people worldwide. Du Bois returned to the U.S. at a time when the country’s most influential African-American was Booker T. Washington, who argued that Black Americans should accept segregation in exchange for vague promises of equality within it. Washington famously said, “In all purely social matters, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hands in all things essential to mutual progress.”
During his years in Atlanta, Du Bois was hit hard by Jim Crow personally; his young son Burkhardt took ill and died at a time when all three Black doctors in Atlanta were out of town and no white doctor would care for him. He also was angered by the lynching of Sam Hose, a Black man who was hanged by a freelance mob in Atlanta in 1899. The lynchers not only took pride in what they’d done, they literally cut off pieces of Hose’s body and traded them amongst each other as souvenirs. Ironically, Du Bois spotted Hose’s knuckles on sale in a souvenir shop while walking through Atlanta with white journalist Joel Chandler Harris, then associate editor of the Atlanta Constitution and later internationally famous (and more recently reviled) as the author of the “Br’er Rabbit” stories based on folk tales he’d heard from Atlanta’s African-Americans. Du Bois’s growing activism led him to seek opportunities to write for the popular press, both white and Black. Despite difficulties in selling his pieces to Black outlets, most of which were sympathetic to Washington, Du Bois wrote a negative review of Washington’s memoir Up from Slavery in 1901 and published an entire book, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. The Souls of Black Folk was mostly a collection of essays, but it included one fictional story about “John,” a sympathetic African-American character who ends up the victim of a lynching. In 1905 Du Bois and others organized a meeting of Black activists at Niagara Falls, New York, and set up a group called the Niagara Movement. It didn’t last long, but in 1909 Du Bois was the only Black participant in a meeting to set up another organization for African-American civil rights, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which still exists. He was offered the presidency, which he turned down because he had decided that the real power of the organization lay in its ability to change public opinion of both whites and Blacks about racial issues. So he demanded and got the editorship of the NAACP’s publication, The Crisis, which he held for the next 14 years until the combination of the Great Depression and increasing encroachments on his editorial control by new NAACP leadership (notably its controversial new chair, Walter White, who got a lot of jokes made about his last name because he was so unusually light-skinned for an African-American a lot of people who saw him thought he was white) caused Du Bois to leave The Crisis in 1934.
According to this show’s writer/director, Rita Coburn, The Crisis became so popular among Black Americans that many of them who hadn’t known how to read before learned to read so they could read The Crisis. In the premier issue in November 1910, Du Bois wrote the mission statement, which said the publication’s purpose would be to "set forth those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people." He called The Crisis "a record of the darker races,” and added, "It will first and foremost be a newspaper: it will record important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problem of inter-racial relations, and especially those which affect the Negro-American. Secondly, it will be a review of opinion and literature, recording briefly books, articles, and important expressions of opinion in the white and colored press on the race problem. Thirdly, it will publish a few short articles. Finally, its editorial page will stand for the rights of men, irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of American democracy, and for reasonable but earnest and persistent attempts to gain these rights and realize these ideals. The magazine will be the organ of no clique or party and will avoid personal rancor of all sorts. In the absence of proof to the contrary it will assume honesty of purpose on the part of all men, North and South, white and Black." The Crisis was on the scene, and frequently was the first publication outlet, for many of the authors who made up what became known as the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920’s. Along the way DuBois and his wife Nina had a second child, daughter Yolandé, who in the 1930’s began dating Black bandleader Jimmie Lunceford. But Du Bois didn’t think a bandleader was an appropriate husband for his daughter, so he forced her to marry the Black poet Countee Cullen. Unfortunately, Cullen was Gay, and instead of going on a honeymoon with the new Mrs. Cullen after the ceremony he went off on a vacation with the best man at the wedding. (This anecdote startled me because, while I’ve known about Lunceford for years and have collected all his records, I knew absolutely nothing about his private life.)
One important Du Bois story that wasn’t mentioned in this film was a debate in Chicago in March 1929 between Du Bois and a white supremacist author and publicist named Lothrop Stoddard on the topic, “Shall the Negro Be Encouraged to Seek Cultural Equality?” The story of this fascinating event was told by Ian Frazier in the August 26, 2019 The New Yorker (available online at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/when-w-e-b-du-bois-made-a-laughingstock-of-a-white-supremacist). Du Bois went on first and said, that contrary to the claims made by racist pseudo-scientists like Madison Grant (whose own racist books had provided most of the material for Stoddard’s), “the proofs of essential human equality of gift are overwhelming.” Du Bois said that the “Nordics,” the people Stoddard held out as the epitome of the white race, “have overrun the earth and brought not simply modern civilization and technique, but with it exploitation, slavery and degradation to the majority of men. … They have been responsible for more intermixture of races than any other people, ancient and modern, and they have inflicted this miscegenation on helpless unwilling slaves by force, fraud and insult; and this is the folk that today has the impudence to turn on the darker races, when they demand a share of civilization, and cry: ‘You shall not marry our daughters!’ The blunt, crude reply is: Who in Hell asked to marry your daughters?” Stoddard in turn quoted Booker T. Washington’s fingers-and-hands metaphor and said, “The more enlightened men of southern white America … are doing their best to see that separation shall not mean discrimination; that if the Negroes have separate schools, they shall be good schools; that if they have separate train accommodations, they shall have good accommodations.” At this point the published record of the debate by its organizers, the local magazine The Forum, contains the bracketed word, “[Laughter.]” The report of the debate in the Baltimore Afro-American explained that the laughter came from the Black people in the audience who knew full well that the accommodations offered Blacks under Jim Crow segregation were far from “equal” to those offered whites. The Afro-American reporter went on to explain, “When the laughter had subsided, Mr. Stoddard, in a manner of mixed humility and courage, claimed that he could not see the joke. This brought more gales of laughter.” The Forum’s publishers thought they had a potential gold mine in further Du Bois/Stoddard debates, but as Du Bois grimly predicted, Stoddard turned down their offer.
In 1935 Du Bois published what was quite possibly his most important book since The Souls of Black Folk: Black Reconstruction in America, his attempt to use his considerable skills as an historian and a sociologist to demolish the myth that the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877 had brought to power a lot of corrupt Black officials who were manipulated by white “scalawags” for their own nefarious ends. It was the ruling history of the era and Du Bois, who’d lived through and worked on the NAACP’s campaign against D. W. Griffith’s racist 1915 masterpiece The Birth of a Nation – a film which had used Griffith’s considerable talents as a movie director to dramatize the racist view of Reconstruction – was determined to reverse it once and for all. Alas, his view of Reconstruction wasn’t taken seriously until the 1960’s, when white historians like Erle McKitrick and Eric Foner (the latter of whom was interviewed for this film) adopted it. Though Du Bois – much to the discontent of fellow NAACP officials, most of whom had been white Quakers – urged African-Americans to support and participate in the U.S.’s involvement in both world wars, after the end of World War II he became strongly pacifist. Part of his change had come from his growing disillusionment with capitalism and his belief that socialism offered humanity the way forward. Part of it was influenced by the new woman in his life, author, composer, and journalist Shirley Graham, whom he’d started dating when he and Nina were separated and whom he married after Nina’s death in 1950. Graham was an active Communist and encouraged Du Bois to join the party. Part of it was also due to a bizarre prosecution Du Bois was subjected to by the U.S. government, which indicted him for having signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal and chaired the Peace Information Center (PIC), which was formed to lobby for the document. The government charged that the PIC was an unregistered lobbying organization for the Soviet Union, but Du Bois and his attorney, Left-wing former Republican New York Congressmember Vito Marcantonio, got the judge to dismiss the case.
In 1945 Du Bois had gone to Manchester, England for the fifth and final Pan-African Congress, where he'd met Kwame Nkrumah, who would become the first President of Ghana after the country achieved independence from British colonial rule in 1957. With the American political climate growing more hostile to Du Bois’s views, Nkrumah essentially offered him asylum in Ghana, and Du Bois accepted. He renounced his American citizenship and became a Ghanaian national (ironically Ghana and the neighboring Gold Coast had been the principal sources for Black slaves kidnapped and sent to America during the African slave trade), where he lived until he died at age 95 on August 27, 1963: the day before the National March on Washington. When his death was announced from the stage at the March on Washington, there was an audible sigh of sorrow from the massive crowd. Du Bois made more than his fair share of political mistakes: he supported Woodrow Wilson for President in 1912 (alienating most Black voters of the time; not many Blacks voted at all, but the few that did were usually Republicans at a time when the Republican party still acted like the “party of Lincoln”), then was shocked when the Virginia-born Wilson instituted outright segregation in federal employment. It’s also creepy, to say the least, to see the photos in this documentary showing Du Bois hobnobbing with such vicious Communist dictators as Stalin, Khrushchev, and Mao. But in general he was an admirable figure and he remains one of my personal heroes. I give PBS a lot of credit for showing this documentary now instead of waiting for next February to time it during so-called “Black History Month.” It’s also a radical statement at a time when Southern states, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s final evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, are hastening to redraw their Congressional and state legislative maps to drive the few remaining African-American representatives in those states out of power once and for all. The Voting Rights Act was often referred to as “the Second Reconstruction,” and while it took the white Southern establishment 61 years to destroy the Second Reconstruction when it only took them 12 to end the first one, the likely result of the schemes by Southern legislatures and the U.S. and Virginia Supreme Courts will be to keep the House of Representatives safely in Republican hands after the 2026 midterm elections despite the growing unpopularity of their and President Trump’s policies. Activism like Du Bois’s has never been needed since his time as much as it is now.
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
"White with Fear," a 2024 PBS Documentary, Showcases America's Mass Radical Right
It Didn’t Start with Trump, and It’s Not Going to End with Him.
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Last night (Tuesday, March 24) KPBS ran an unusually compelling and quite chilling documentary called White with Fear, produced, directed, and written by Andrew Goldberg and dedicated to the proposition that (as I’ve argued previously in my zengersmag blog posts) the real origin of the Right-wing movement that eventually elected Donald Trump to the Presidency not once but twice (heaven help us all!) was in the late 1960’s, when Richard Nixon ran for President for the second time in 1968 and won. Goldberg’s presentation noted the white racialist terror that became widespread in the mid- to late-1960’s as Black ghettoes across the country exploded into riots. He artfully used archival footage to show, among other things, a suburban woman senior citizen in the white suburb of Dearborn, Michigan who bought a gun and taught herself to use it, showing up at target ranges, for fear that her community would be invaded by Black people from nearby Detroit. In 1968 Nixon and U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond (D turned I turned R-South Carolina) concocted what they called the “Southern Strategy” as a response to the threat George Wallace’s independent Presidential candidacy posed to Nixon’s campaign. The “Southern Strategy” turned out far better than expected; it seemed that a large number of working-class whites all across America harbored deep racial resentments and formed a constituency that the Republicans could easily tap into. With the Democrats, formerly the party of slavery, secession, and the Ku Klux Klan, having largely abandoned their racist constituency and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the racist vote was up for grabs and the Republicans gleefully seized on it. Goldberg’s program did an interesting comparison of Nixon and Trump as both being driven by personal resentments. In Nixon’s case it was coming from a hard-scrabble lower-class background in Whittier, California and watching while upper-class elites grabbed all the honors that he thought should have been his; in Trump’s (though Goldberg didn’t make this case explicitly) it was from being the son of a real-estate mogul who’d made his fortune in the outer boroughs of New York City but hadn’t been able to crack Manhattan.
In my own writings I’ve argued that Nixon was the Jekyll-and-Hyde President; Jekyll-Nixon wanted to do good things for the country, like environmental protection (he signed into law the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, which Trump has now eviscerated), national health insurance (Nixon’s proposal was actually more radical than Barack Obama’s and would have covered a lot more people at lower cost), a guaranteed income. Hyde-Nixon did things like keeping the Viet Nam War going at least four years longer than it should have and attempting to rig the 1972 Presidential election in his favor through the myriad of “dirty tricks” that became known collectively as Watergate. The first step in the creation of the modern radical Right in the U.S. was the Nixon/Thurmond “Southern Strategy” in 1968. Nixon ran explicitly on a promise to bring “law and order” back to America – as did Trump in both 2016 and 2024 – and a number of Leftists dredged up this old quote from Adolf Hitler in 1932 (a year before he took absolute power in Germany): “The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the Republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order. Yes, without law and order our nation cannot survive. Elect us and we shall restore law and order." In his 1968 and 1972 campaigns, Nixon proved a master of what Goldberg and other commentators before him called “dog-whistle racism,” making appeals to racist voters through coded language like “law and order” and “welfare queens.”
In 1968 Nixon and Wallace together got 57 percent of the vote to Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent, a sign that after Lyndon Johnson’s landslide win in 1964 (the last time a Democrat won the majority of white voters in a U.S. Presidential election), the U.S. had firmly realigned itself Rightward. In 1972 Nixon won the sort of landslide re-election victory Trump falsely claimed for himself in 2024, carrying every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, at least partly due to the Watergate “dirty tricks” and a fratricidal war within the Democratic Party largely over the Viet Nam war. Despite the GOP’s short-lived near-collapse in the mid-1970’s as a result of Watergate, the Republicans made a sweeping comeback in the 1980 and 1984 elections with Ronald Reagan, who continued Nixon’s successful campaign to win white working-class voters by dog-whistle appeals to their racism. One hugely important thing Reagan did in office was in 1987, when his appointees to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) eliminated the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” that had given broadcast radio and TV stations an obligation to present all sides of a political issue. This allowed the conversion of the AM radio band from music (whose broadcasters had largely abandoned it in favor of the better-sounding FM band) to talk, and by far the most popular talk-radio shows were Right-wing political propaganda from hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, both of whom appear via archival clips in White with Fear. Limbaugh’s shows seem eerily premonitory of Trump’s, both in the sneering contempt and hatred with which he greeted anyone with a different point of view from his and in the fanatical devotion of his followers, who described Limbaugh as “saying what I think” and proudly proclaimed themselves “dittoheads.” Goldberg mentioned Roger Ailes, who was on Nixon’s campaign staff in 1968 and then masterminded Limbaugh’s emergence as a radio and TV star and was present at the creation of Fox News, the cable channel launched in 1995 which brought the Right-wing propaganda and its sneering contempt for anything that could be described as “liberal” or “leftist” to TV. One of the interviewees was an early Fox executive who insisted that the channel be a legitimate news outlet – until Roger Ailes fired him and made it clear that Fox’s mission was to blur the “news” and “editorial” sides into a broad and devastatingly effective propaganda outlet pushing the Right-wing agenda 24/7.
Goldberg mentions various benchmarks in the evolution of America’s radical Right, including the report from the U.S. Census Bureau which predicted that by 2050 (later revised to 2030) more than half the American population would be non-white, which a lot of America’s white people regarded as a harbinger of doom. Also a key element in the Right’s evolution was the election of Barack Obama as President in 2008, which seemed to be a fulfillment of one of racist America’s great fears: one of them is now the leader of this country. Obama’s election and the financial crisis he had to deal with immediately on taking office in turn led to the rise of the “Tea Party,” which swept the Republicans into control of the House of Representatives in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. Goldberg’s documentary includes a clip from CNBC host Rick Santelli’s rant on the floor of the Chicago stock exchange against home borrowers who’d kept up their payments being asked to sacrifice for the sake of ones who hadn’t, which is widely credited with having kicked off the Tea Party. One key index of the influence the radical Right was having over American politics was the so-called “birther” campaign against Obama – led largely by his eventual successor, Donald Trump – that claimed he was “really” born in Kenya and/or that he was really a secret Muslim (though that didn’t stop the Right from attacking his actual Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and accusing him of fomenting racial hatred against whites). It was obviously a thinly veiled racist attack on Obama over the quite visible difference between him and every other American President. Obama got re-elected in 2012, despite confidence among national Republicans that in a low-turnout election (which 2012 was) he would lose.
One of Goldberg’s most interesting interviewees was Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for the RealClearPolitics Web site. After the 2012 election, while most mainstream Republicans were saying that the party needed to broaden its appeal to non-white voters, Trende published an analysis called “The Missing White Voters” saying that Obama had been re-elected because whites who had voted in 2004 and 2008 had sat out the 2012 election. In a follow-up article Trende published after Trump won the 2016 election (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/09/the_missing_white_voters_revisisted_132308.html), Trende wrote, “I reasoned that these were probably people who liked George W. Bush and perhaps John McCain, but were turned off by Mitt Romney’s wealth and patrician air. If Republicans nominated someone with more working-class appeal, I reasoned, these people could be motivated to vote.” Though Trende, both in his 2016 piece and in the White with Fear documentary, disclaimed the message often attributed to him that the Republicans should become a “whites-only” party, he wrote after Trump’s first victory, “[F]or now the best indications are that these voters were, in fact, inspired by a Republican candidate with more blue-collar appeal. Donald Trump did do better with nonwhites than Mitt Romney, which played a significant role in his victory. But there’s little doubt that a strong showing with these rural whites, who are disconnected from the global economy that increasingly defines urban and suburban environs, played a major role in his win.” Trump, for his own part, went Nixon and Reagan one better; instead of dog-whistle appeals to racism, he went for broke and spewed open hatred towards people of color in general and immigrants in particular. Trump’s defenders insist that not everyone who voted for Trump was a racist, but it’s clear that virtually all American voters who are racist supported (and still support) Trump.
Trump has shrewdly turned immigrants into an all-purpose scapegoat the way Adolf Hitler did with Jews. Trump was also able to grow his support among people of color in the 2024 election, notably by hooking them with conservative positions on so-called “culture war” issues. I remember a good Mexican-American friend of mine warning me during the 2016 campaign that a surprising number of U.S. citizen voters of Mexican descent were going to vote for Trump because they thought so-called “illegal aliens” were taking jobs away from them. Goldberg also discusses the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” which argues that whites worldwide are falling victim to a demographic trend, masterminded by an international Jewish conspiracy, that is deliberately driving down economic opportunities for whites to boost them for people of color. Though I’m surprised that someone with so obviously Jewish-sounding a name as Goldberg didn’t stress more the anti-Semitic implications of the “Great Replacement Theory” – which, like the racist opposition to the 1960’s African-American civil rights movement, argued that people of color were too stupid and intellectually inferior to organize such movements on their own, so they were dependent on Jews to do it for them – old-fashioned Nazi-style anti-Semitism is at the root of the “Great Replacement Theory” and many of the people who advocate it. There’s an interview with one of Trump’s first-term White House staff members who thought he had arranged for Trump to deliver a full-throated condemnation of anti-Semitism and mob violence at Charlottesville, North Carolina in 2017. Instead Trump, probably advised by his dark eminence Stephen Miller (who wasn’t interviewed for White with Fear the way Steve Bannon was), delivered his now-infamous statement that “there were very fine people on both sides – on both sides.”
White with Fear is an ominous documentary that suggests that America’s radical-Right movement is a force with real staying power and determination to remake America into a Christian nationalist dictatorship in which all the gains women, African-Americans, other people of color, Queer people and especially Trans people will be reversed permanently. When Hillary Clinton, who was interviewed extensively in White with Fear, was debating Donald Trump in 2016, she asked him point-blank when he thought America had been “great” and to which he wanted to return to “make America great again.” Since then it’s become readily apparent: the period from 1870 to 1913, before Progressive legislation aimed at restricting the unlimited power of corporate America to treat workers and the environment as disposable commodities. It was also before the income tax (more than once Trump has said he hopes his tariff regime will eliminate the need for the federal government to charge and collect an income tax) and when U.S. Senators were still elected by state legislatures rather than directly by the people (which caused huge levels of corruption, as well-heeled would-be Senators like Leland Stanford of California literally bought their way into the Senate). It was before anyone was conscious of the environment as a political issue and urban dwellers were told that the growing levels of smoke in their cities were signs of “progress.” And of course it was also a time when African-Americans were losing the gains they had made during Reconstruction and being forced back into the position of a permanent service class as whites had always intended when they brought their ancestors here as slaves in the first place; when other Americans of color were being told they were here at the sufferance of whites and that could be revoked at any time when they “got out of line”; when women were being told that their destiny was, as the Nazis put it, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (“children, kitchen, church”) and total subservience to the men in their lives (their fathers when they were children and their husbands when they grew up) rather than any independent involvement in society; and Queer people were told they were the spawn of the Devil and they had no legitimate place in the world at all.
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Last night (Tuesday, March 24) KPBS ran an unusually compelling and quite chilling documentary called White with Fear, produced, directed, and written by Andrew Goldberg and dedicated to the proposition that (as I’ve argued previously in my zengersmag blog posts) the real origin of the Right-wing movement that eventually elected Donald Trump to the Presidency not once but twice (heaven help us all!) was in the late 1960’s, when Richard Nixon ran for President for the second time in 1968 and won. Goldberg’s presentation noted the white racialist terror that became widespread in the mid- to late-1960’s as Black ghettoes across the country exploded into riots. He artfully used archival footage to show, among other things, a suburban woman senior citizen in the white suburb of Dearborn, Michigan who bought a gun and taught herself to use it, showing up at target ranges, for fear that her community would be invaded by Black people from nearby Detroit. In 1968 Nixon and U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond (D turned I turned R-South Carolina) concocted what they called the “Southern Strategy” as a response to the threat George Wallace’s independent Presidential candidacy posed to Nixon’s campaign. The “Southern Strategy” turned out far better than expected; it seemed that a large number of working-class whites all across America harbored deep racial resentments and formed a constituency that the Republicans could easily tap into. With the Democrats, formerly the party of slavery, secession, and the Ku Klux Klan, having largely abandoned their racist constituency and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the racist vote was up for grabs and the Republicans gleefully seized on it. Goldberg’s program did an interesting comparison of Nixon and Trump as both being driven by personal resentments. In Nixon’s case it was coming from a hard-scrabble lower-class background in Whittier, California and watching while upper-class elites grabbed all the honors that he thought should have been his; in Trump’s (though Goldberg didn’t make this case explicitly) it was from being the son of a real-estate mogul who’d made his fortune in the outer boroughs of New York City but hadn’t been able to crack Manhattan.
In my own writings I’ve argued that Nixon was the Jekyll-and-Hyde President; Jekyll-Nixon wanted to do good things for the country, like environmental protection (he signed into law the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, which Trump has now eviscerated), national health insurance (Nixon’s proposal was actually more radical than Barack Obama’s and would have covered a lot more people at lower cost), a guaranteed income. Hyde-Nixon did things like keeping the Viet Nam War going at least four years longer than it should have and attempting to rig the 1972 Presidential election in his favor through the myriad of “dirty tricks” that became known collectively as Watergate. The first step in the creation of the modern radical Right in the U.S. was the Nixon/Thurmond “Southern Strategy” in 1968. Nixon ran explicitly on a promise to bring “law and order” back to America – as did Trump in both 2016 and 2024 – and a number of Leftists dredged up this old quote from Adolf Hitler in 1932 (a year before he took absolute power in Germany): “The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the Republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order. Yes, without law and order our nation cannot survive. Elect us and we shall restore law and order." In his 1968 and 1972 campaigns, Nixon proved a master of what Goldberg and other commentators before him called “dog-whistle racism,” making appeals to racist voters through coded language like “law and order” and “welfare queens.”
In 1968 Nixon and Wallace together got 57 percent of the vote to Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent, a sign that after Lyndon Johnson’s landslide win in 1964 (the last time a Democrat won the majority of white voters in a U.S. Presidential election), the U.S. had firmly realigned itself Rightward. In 1972 Nixon won the sort of landslide re-election victory Trump falsely claimed for himself in 2024, carrying every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, at least partly due to the Watergate “dirty tricks” and a fratricidal war within the Democratic Party largely over the Viet Nam war. Despite the GOP’s short-lived near-collapse in the mid-1970’s as a result of Watergate, the Republicans made a sweeping comeback in the 1980 and 1984 elections with Ronald Reagan, who continued Nixon’s successful campaign to win white working-class voters by dog-whistle appeals to their racism. One hugely important thing Reagan did in office was in 1987, when his appointees to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) eliminated the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” that had given broadcast radio and TV stations an obligation to present all sides of a political issue. This allowed the conversion of the AM radio band from music (whose broadcasters had largely abandoned it in favor of the better-sounding FM band) to talk, and by far the most popular talk-radio shows were Right-wing political propaganda from hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, both of whom appear via archival clips in White with Fear. Limbaugh’s shows seem eerily premonitory of Trump’s, both in the sneering contempt and hatred with which he greeted anyone with a different point of view from his and in the fanatical devotion of his followers, who described Limbaugh as “saying what I think” and proudly proclaimed themselves “dittoheads.” Goldberg mentioned Roger Ailes, who was on Nixon’s campaign staff in 1968 and then masterminded Limbaugh’s emergence as a radio and TV star and was present at the creation of Fox News, the cable channel launched in 1995 which brought the Right-wing propaganda and its sneering contempt for anything that could be described as “liberal” or “leftist” to TV. One of the interviewees was an early Fox executive who insisted that the channel be a legitimate news outlet – until Roger Ailes fired him and made it clear that Fox’s mission was to blur the “news” and “editorial” sides into a broad and devastatingly effective propaganda outlet pushing the Right-wing agenda 24/7.
Goldberg mentions various benchmarks in the evolution of America’s radical Right, including the report from the U.S. Census Bureau which predicted that by 2050 (later revised to 2030) more than half the American population would be non-white, which a lot of America’s white people regarded as a harbinger of doom. Also a key element in the Right’s evolution was the election of Barack Obama as President in 2008, which seemed to be a fulfillment of one of racist America’s great fears: one of them is now the leader of this country. Obama’s election and the financial crisis he had to deal with immediately on taking office in turn led to the rise of the “Tea Party,” which swept the Republicans into control of the House of Representatives in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. Goldberg’s documentary includes a clip from CNBC host Rick Santelli’s rant on the floor of the Chicago stock exchange against home borrowers who’d kept up their payments being asked to sacrifice for the sake of ones who hadn’t, which is widely credited with having kicked off the Tea Party. One key index of the influence the radical Right was having over American politics was the so-called “birther” campaign against Obama – led largely by his eventual successor, Donald Trump – that claimed he was “really” born in Kenya and/or that he was really a secret Muslim (though that didn’t stop the Right from attacking his actual Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and accusing him of fomenting racial hatred against whites). It was obviously a thinly veiled racist attack on Obama over the quite visible difference between him and every other American President. Obama got re-elected in 2012, despite confidence among national Republicans that in a low-turnout election (which 2012 was) he would lose.
One of Goldberg’s most interesting interviewees was Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for the RealClearPolitics Web site. After the 2012 election, while most mainstream Republicans were saying that the party needed to broaden its appeal to non-white voters, Trende published an analysis called “The Missing White Voters” saying that Obama had been re-elected because whites who had voted in 2004 and 2008 had sat out the 2012 election. In a follow-up article Trende published after Trump won the 2016 election (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/09/the_missing_white_voters_revisisted_132308.html), Trende wrote, “I reasoned that these were probably people who liked George W. Bush and perhaps John McCain, but were turned off by Mitt Romney’s wealth and patrician air. If Republicans nominated someone with more working-class appeal, I reasoned, these people could be motivated to vote.” Though Trende, both in his 2016 piece and in the White with Fear documentary, disclaimed the message often attributed to him that the Republicans should become a “whites-only” party, he wrote after Trump’s first victory, “[F]or now the best indications are that these voters were, in fact, inspired by a Republican candidate with more blue-collar appeal. Donald Trump did do better with nonwhites than Mitt Romney, which played a significant role in his victory. But there’s little doubt that a strong showing with these rural whites, who are disconnected from the global economy that increasingly defines urban and suburban environs, played a major role in his win.” Trump, for his own part, went Nixon and Reagan one better; instead of dog-whistle appeals to racism, he went for broke and spewed open hatred towards people of color in general and immigrants in particular. Trump’s defenders insist that not everyone who voted for Trump was a racist, but it’s clear that virtually all American voters who are racist supported (and still support) Trump.
Trump has shrewdly turned immigrants into an all-purpose scapegoat the way Adolf Hitler did with Jews. Trump was also able to grow his support among people of color in the 2024 election, notably by hooking them with conservative positions on so-called “culture war” issues. I remember a good Mexican-American friend of mine warning me during the 2016 campaign that a surprising number of U.S. citizen voters of Mexican descent were going to vote for Trump because they thought so-called “illegal aliens” were taking jobs away from them. Goldberg also discusses the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” which argues that whites worldwide are falling victim to a demographic trend, masterminded by an international Jewish conspiracy, that is deliberately driving down economic opportunities for whites to boost them for people of color. Though I’m surprised that someone with so obviously Jewish-sounding a name as Goldberg didn’t stress more the anti-Semitic implications of the “Great Replacement Theory” – which, like the racist opposition to the 1960’s African-American civil rights movement, argued that people of color were too stupid and intellectually inferior to organize such movements on their own, so they were dependent on Jews to do it for them – old-fashioned Nazi-style anti-Semitism is at the root of the “Great Replacement Theory” and many of the people who advocate it. There’s an interview with one of Trump’s first-term White House staff members who thought he had arranged for Trump to deliver a full-throated condemnation of anti-Semitism and mob violence at Charlottesville, North Carolina in 2017. Instead Trump, probably advised by his dark eminence Stephen Miller (who wasn’t interviewed for White with Fear the way Steve Bannon was), delivered his now-infamous statement that “there were very fine people on both sides – on both sides.”
White with Fear is an ominous documentary that suggests that America’s radical-Right movement is a force with real staying power and determination to remake America into a Christian nationalist dictatorship in which all the gains women, African-Americans, other people of color, Queer people and especially Trans people will be reversed permanently. When Hillary Clinton, who was interviewed extensively in White with Fear, was debating Donald Trump in 2016, she asked him point-blank when he thought America had been “great” and to which he wanted to return to “make America great again.” Since then it’s become readily apparent: the period from 1870 to 1913, before Progressive legislation aimed at restricting the unlimited power of corporate America to treat workers and the environment as disposable commodities. It was also before the income tax (more than once Trump has said he hopes his tariff regime will eliminate the need for the federal government to charge and collect an income tax) and when U.S. Senators were still elected by state legislatures rather than directly by the people (which caused huge levels of corruption, as well-heeled would-be Senators like Leland Stanford of California literally bought their way into the Senate). It was before anyone was conscious of the environment as a political issue and urban dwellers were told that the growing levels of smoke in their cities were signs of “progress.” And of course it was also a time when African-Americans were losing the gains they had made during Reconstruction and being forced back into the position of a permanent service class as whites had always intended when they brought their ancestors here as slaves in the first place; when other Americans of color were being told they were here at the sufferance of whites and that could be revoked at any time when they “got out of line”; when women were being told that their destiny was, as the Nazis put it, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (“children, kitchen, church”) and total subservience to the men in their lives (their fathers when they were children and their husbands when they grew up) rather than any independent involvement in society; and Queer people were told they were the spawn of the Devil and they had no legitimate place in the world at all.
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
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.
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
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: Republicans 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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)