D. Earl Stephens

Tuesday was a banner day in the news business as it continues its transition into authoritarian-controlled propaganda that is sold to the highest bidders, which in this case are our nation’s ever-increasing collection of hideous tech bros — otherwise known as Boosters of Trump (BOTs).

It was nothing if not a wild and disgusting day, and featured some heavy-hitters in the political, entertainment and journalism world, as well as reputable truth-tellers like Larry David, who was the only person proving capable of seeing though all the never-ending BS that has blanketed the United States of America.

Good ol’ Sarah Palin appeared out of the Alaska wilderness and into a courtroom in New York City Tuesday where she once again provided some much-needed, albeit brief comedic entertainment to a starving American public.

You’ll remember Palin, who with the help of John McCain and his slippery handlers was hurled downward into the Republicans’ glass floor 17 years ago, making it possible for literally anything or anybody to lower themselves and land with a thud in the basements of power in Washington.

Before there was Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, Marsha Blackburn or Lauren Boebert, there was Sarah Palin …

The 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, Russia-stalker, second-rate reality TV star, and Hall-of-Fame embarrassment lost in the retrial of her defamation case against The New York Times, because of course she did.

Defamation cases are almost impossible to prove, but you can’t blame her for trying, because as delicious as this loss was by one of America’s all-time fools, the real news here is how bad it made the supersonic losers at ABC-News look by comparison.

Just four months ago, that one-time reputable news outlet flew the white flag in their very public $16M surrender to the America-attacking Trump on similar charges.

This time George Stephanopoulos was the target of the beady-eyed Trump, who was incensed that he was incorrectly referred to as “a rapist” on the air during Stephanopoulos’ questioning of Mace about Trump’s veracity as a serious candidate given his talent for treating women like one of his sand wedges.

Turns out all Trump was technically found guilty of was being a lowly sexual-abuser. Before settling, ABC-News decided to conveniently forget the fact that the very judge who tried the case, said that most people would call what Trump did, and what the jury found him guilty of, was in fact, “rape.”

You say, “potatoes.” I say “rape.”

ABC-News’ capitulation, while weak and embarrassing, also only encouraged lowlifes like Trump, because … also on Tuesday … CBS-News signaled it was about to tell its once-rivals at ABC-News to hold their beer …

The venerable 60 Minutes, which has been one of the few news programs that has continued to righteously pound away on the America-attacking Trump will now be in search of a new leader. Executive Producer Bill Owens, announced his resignation Tuesday saying:

“Over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”

Owens sudden departure is hinting loudly at yet another surrender by yet another billionaire to Trump.

This time Shari Redstone. The Chairwoman of the Board at Paramount which owns CBS, has been dutifully kissing any inappropriate ass she can find in the White House to ensure her sale of Paramount for gobs of billions to the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison goes through.

She can’t have Trump mad at her for telling the truth on air, so Owens had to sacrifice herself on the Mar-a-Lago altar first.

No surprise, Ellison is yet another slimy tech bro and the buddy of the sexual-abuser Trump, who some judges refer to as a rapist.

The sexual-abuser, who some judges refer to as a rapist, has sued CBS for $20 billion claiming the network aired two different versions of an answer Kamala Harris gave about Israel and Gaza on the network’s flagship news programs, Face the Nation as well as 60 Minutes.

As if the serial-lying Trump doesn't give 17 different answers to any question every hour ….

Well, rather than fight that one out and win going away, Redstone has apparently figured it is much easier to just hand the whole franchise over to Trump’s buddy, Ellison, and be done with the damn thing. And if and when that deal goes through, if you are wondering if you will ever be able to trust anything from the CBS-News division again, the answer is, no.

While insiders at 60 Minutes like correspondent Scott Pelley are saying, “This isn't something Bill (Owens) is doing of his own volition: There was no choice in any of this," I am saying I’d have a whole helluva lot more respect for him, if he stood in strong and made these grotesque sellouts fire him and drag him out of the building.

Resigning in advance is just weak, Bill. I’ve walked a mile in your shoes during my career, and take great comfort I didn’t cave to dishonest brokers who had it out for me and the truth. Ask me about it. I’d be glad to enlighten you ...

Finally, Larry David arrived on the scene to save Terrible Tuesday when he took to the editorial pages of The New York Times to politely skewer the smarmy, one-time comedian, turned Trump-propagandist, Bill Maher, with some deftly aimed satire in his short and sweet piece “My dinner with Adolph.”

David, the genius behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm never mentioned Maher by name preferring instead the roughly 257 million people across the world who will end up seeing or hearing about the piece connect the dots all on their own.

I’ll guess it’s behind a paywall for now, so I’ll treat you to the piece’s conclusion:

“Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. “I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.” “I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.” And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night ...”

Maher of course accepted an invitation to dine with the America-attacking Trump recently, and through his 500-lb. smirk bragged to everybody that breaking bread with the racist, Lysol-guzzler was actually a very normal and wholesome experience. Hell everybody should try it, but of course they can’t because not everybody can be Bill Maher.

Here in part is how Maher described his dining experience, sandwiched around his usual overcooked, fatty condescending barf:

“Honestly, I voted for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk to Donald Trump. That’s just how it went down. Make of it what you will.”

Oh we will, sport, no worries there.

Your foolish capitulation and normalization of a woman-abusing, America-attacking thug should finish you off for good. That you tipped him at the door after being played like Stephen Miller’s used violin was pret-ty, pret-ty, pret-ty, pret-ty pret-ty …pathetic.

You’ve been a damn fool for going on a long time now, Bill. Your once-clever condescension is now full-blown, look-at-me arrogance.

I know you will invariably ignore my advice to just shut up and go away for a period of about six years for some serious introspection, because I have come to understand that guys like you and Trump simply can’t help themselves.

You have the phonies in our billionaire-controlled media to do that for you …

You might have noticed that in damn near every column I have written that mentions the orange mobster who is somehow once again disgracing our White House, I have dutifully referred to him as the “America-attacking Trump.”

I have used this deadly accurate compound modifier steadfastly and very intentionally to describe this despicable man. I have done this strictly for the sake of accuracy and credibility.

As a United States citizen first, a United States Navy veteran second, and a journalist third, I have found that the normalization of Trump’s hate for our country, our people, and our governing institutions to have been one of the most egregious and detestable things of all.

He regularly spits on America, and that should always be the first thing mentioned about this rotten SOB in any telling of whatever the hell it is he is up to at the time.

Whether openly asking for Russia’s help in the 2016 election, surrendering to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki two years later, stealing and then refusing to surrender classified documents, repeatedly denigrating our fallen, or ultimately conspiring to overthrow our votes and then the government on January 6, 2021, while his vice president and other members of Congress were hunted down, Trump has proven beyond a shadow of any doubt he is an enemy of the United States of America.

Trump is an “America-attacker” as sure as I am typing this, and now we have learned his drunken, racist and misogynistic Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is one, too.

I warned the minute Trump put forth the wildly unqualified Hegseth to somehow “lead” our troops, he was doing it for one reason and one reason only:

“NOTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America. EVERYTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America.”

It’s both that simple and terrifying.

By words and by deed it is clear as day that Trump has absolutely no respect for the country he violently assaulted, nor our men and women who wear the uniform, because like any authoritarian leader he sees them as servants to him, and not our country.

As I typed in Warning Shot just months ago:

“Hegseth is a terrible man, who does not believe women should serve in combat, because ‘it hasn’t made us more effective.’ This is no surprise coming from a man accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2017, and then paying her off for her silence.
“Hegseth was also flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by members of his military unit because of a tattoo on his bicep that’s commonly associated with white supremacist groups.”

• Sexual abuser: check
• Racist: check
• Trump’s kind of guy: check

I added:

“With this nomination, Trump is going out of his way to signal that he is no longer asking his hate groups to “‘stand back and stand by” but to “stand up and move in.’”

On Sunday evening we learned from The New York Times that the wildly unqualified Hegseth shared classified information about imminent strikes in Yemen in yet another group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer.

It’s now fair to ask if there is anybody who Hegseth hasn’t shared our war plans with.

And that is exactly the question that needs asking RIGHT NOW.

This abominable lack of regard for the safety of our troops and nation, has now moved way past dereliction of duty, and into the neighborhood of treason.

I see a lot of people have been calling for this full-time abomination to be removed. Well, I am calling for him to be arrested. God knows how many secrets this incompetent moron has leaked and how many of our troops and operatives are in danger right now.

By definition, treason is the crime of betraying one's own country BY ACTIONS THAT UNDERMINE its government or security.

There needs to be full-scale investigation into Hegseth, and the damage he is doing to our troops and our country, because it is a five-alarm fire. We have never been here before.

Predictably, the America-attacking Trump wasted no time defending his drunken lackey, and took aim at the leaks instead of the alleged high crime itself.

In reporting in the Times:

“The president told Mr. Hegseth that disgruntled “leakers” were to blame for the report and made clear that he had Mr. Hegseth’s back. The president also said he had plenty of experience dealing with leakers”.

That is exactly how you would expect an America-attacking felon to handle this.

Trump has littered his cabinet with unqualified stooges who will do his bidding, before America’s.

With Hegseth’s appointment, he purposely outdid himself because when not if Trump has once again done something so egregious … so sickening … so anti-American … he will need a fawning weakling in the Department of Defense to roll over and play dead, so that hecan use the troops to defend him and not America.

I am telling you right now this day is coming.

Trump, and his Supreme Court see his power as absolute. There is NOTHING that applies, or restricts him from doing whatever the hell it is he thinks needs doing in the interest of national security, which means hissecurity.

Just when in the hell will everybody finally realize this, and start acting accordingly?

The America-attacking Trump hates this country.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

-Dr. Martin Luther King in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Those magic words were written 62 years ago today and still echo like thunder across our charred American countryside as a madman and his morally corrupt henchmen in the Republican Party try to burn everything to the ground.

These words are as true today as they were then, and there is victory in honoring them.

Just as we were six decades ago, and six decades ago before that … we are a country capable of producing great men like King, and rudderless deviants like Trump. Visionaries like Lincoln, and stone-cold bigots like Lee ...

I’m afraid this will never change, my friends, because six decades from now when Trump is long extinct, evil will once again grow out of the muck and mire, and good men and women will fight from the sturdy foundation of what is good and right to put it down.

King’s words endured, and speak to us all six decades later. Trump’s words land like slop on some pavement, and mean nothing six seconds after he’s said them.

One man possessed depth, vision, and courage, and was guided by a north star hanging high in the sky leading us to a place where all men are created equal. The other man is a coward, who has been blinded by a terminal case of hate, and has the singular ability to always go lower no matter what.

One man spoke for the good and righteous, the other for himself, and the morally weakest among us.

Today, I am not here to tell you what is wrong in this country — we’ve heard about enough of that — I am here to tell you all that is right.

You are right. I am right.

I am not going anywhere. Are you …?

The good and righteous aren’t quitters and have done nothing but fight for what is most certainly right in this country since her inception. Elected presidents not kings. Voting rights for all, women’s rights, social programs that benefit everybody, environmental protections, and countless other good deeds and ideals that are just too damn long to list here.

Countless hundreds of thousands of Americans have given their lives on foreign battlefields because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Evil men must be stopped in their tracks when they gas and incinerate people. Evil men must be stopped in their tracks when they pack up innocent people in the dark of night and send them off to perish in dirty jails …

And while the good and righteous have been knocked down through the centuries, we have always pulled ourselves back up, and together have risen to our feet — stronger for the battle.

Evil is never going away, good people. This is both terribly sad, and easier to deal with in the knowing …

When we won the rights for women in the ‘70s, evil didn't get up and leave town. It lingered … bided its time … drooled in the darkness … readied itself to pounce on us again.

When Hitler was finally stopped in his bloody tracks, evil didn't get up and go away — it once again waited to have its way with a moral weakling like Trump to get on with its hideous, never-ending mission.

Sure, life would be easier if everybody would just finally see the light, but there is just too much to be gained by the few by keeping the many in the dark.

Today I am telling you that the sun is slowly rising across America after setting in 2016. It is a never-ending revolution of an unsteady nation confirmed by a history the purveyors of evil would rather you didn’t read.

We should shout this out.

The good and righteous are stepping into the accelerating light. They are making their voices heard and their votes count. They are dragging our politicians into that light and making them account for their actions — good and bad.

When I read King’s words again this morning, they filled me with strength, and a righteous fury.

He would have wanted us all to stand on his shoulders and reach for the sky.

He would have wanted us all to keep fighting for all who bled, and sweat, and cried for what is right before us.

He would have wanted us all to stay strong so that the generations who will follow, will have a sturdy platform that they, too, can stand on while they fight for what is most certainly right, and reach even higher toward King’s north star.

I am telling you today that victory is in the trying, and as long as we are trying we will never be defeated.

NOW READ: It's already begun: History offers an ominous lesson about economic crashes

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer stands, as U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) signs executive orders and proclamations, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 9, 2025.

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“Let’s give more hard-working people a fair shot at a decent life. And let’s usher in, as President Trump says, a ‘Golden Age’ of American manufacturing.”

-Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) Wednesday spouting MAGA rhetoric before a meeting with the America-attacking Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

“She’s really done an excellent job. She’s a very good person.”

-The America-attacking Donald Trump during the meeting with Whitmer, in which he moved her around like a piece of used office furniture, before converting her into a photo/op where he once again said the 2020 election was “rigged.”

First, I want to thank Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer for getting all this out of the way early before a 2028 presidential election that may or may not happen.

By doing us the courtesy of not wasting our time any longer pretending she’s anything but a complete phony we can move on to rooting for and supporting candidates who really do share our ideals, and understand the extreme danger we are in right now in America.

Because either you understand that, or you don’t. This is no time for playing cute, and screwing around in the squishy middle.

Until her embarrassing public surrender Wednesday, I actually had Whitmer pegged for possible stardom.

I believed in “Big Gretch” and wrote glowingly about her and the women in Michigan, who had played a large part in facilitating the resistance against the ghastly Trump the past seven years. Frankly, they were inspirational and made me proud to support a party that stood up for voters, and against those who facilitated violent attacks against them.

Sure it was an easy stand to take, but I appreciated their toughness, panache and zeal nonetheless. They were on the right side of the fight, and damn, I was proud to fight alongside them.

Turns out, there is nothing Whitmer will do for the good people of Michigan unless she thinks it is good for herself, and that is just terribly, terribly sad.

Her political career died an ugly death Wednesday, because she’s too damn weak, and self-centered to understand that real leaders don’t walk into enemy territory and surrender to racist tyrants, they fight them every damn step of the way.

Here’s how AP reported her self-induced kidnapping to the vile woman-abusing Trump:

“She was feet from his desk when he signed a pair of memoranda directing the Justice Department to investigate two of his critics and signed an executive order exacting retribution against a law firm whose work he opposed.”

A national Democratic strategist quoted by NBC-News put it this way:

“It is a massive indictment on Whitmer and her team’s judgment to, first, not have an answer on the tariff question and then go the White House and get absolutely played by Donald Trump to the point she is caught in the Oval Office as he signs one of his revenge and retribution executive orders and says 2020 was rigged.”

Another strategist, who admires Whitmer put it more succinctly:

“Just a f------ disaster.”

There was no damn reason for Whitmer to be within three states of the White House, yet there she was literally in the lions (er, lyin’s) den. Worse, this was not the first time she has met with this monster since he was reelected.

Watching her show so little self-respect for herself is absolutely painful. Watching her show so little respect for people like myself, who have supported her with my time treasure, and endorsement is absolutely galling.

In a feeble statement, Whitmer claimed she was brought into the Oval Office in front of the press "without any notice" and emphasized her presence was not an "endorsement of the actions taken or statements" made at that event.

Sure, OK. She just happened to be at the bank with the crook while it was being robbed …

All of this surrendering and capitulation by “marquee” Democrats points to a larger problem within the fast-fading party itself. People are sick and tired of their sick and tired act.

Either you believe what you are saying, or you don’t. Either you believe Trump is an extreme danger to our democracy, the rule of law, clean air and water, and any damn American value you tell us you care about, or you don’t.

Only roughly one in four Americans have a favorable opinion of a party that has become littered with out-of-touch “leaders” running on the old, stale fumes of recycled garbage.

From a CNN poll last month:

Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents say, 57% to 42%, that Democrats should mainly work to stop the Republican agenda, rather than working with the GOP majority to get some Democratic ideas into legislation.
The survey was taken March 6-9, days before 10 Democratic senators — including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — voted with Republicans in the chamber to advance a GOP-authored spending bill to avert a government shutdown, much to the chagrin of many other Democratic lawmakers and progressive critics.
The majority’s desire to fight the GOP marks a significant change in the party’s posture from the start of Trump’s first term. A September 2017 poll found a broad 74% majority of Democrats and Democratic leaners saying their party should work with Republicans in an attempt to advance their own priorities, and just 23% advocating for a more combative approach.

They simply aren’t listening to us.

Too many Democratic leaders aren’t fighters, they are whiners, right Schumer?

Instead of standing up for Americans, they are doing nothing at all, or even worse: They are rolling over for Trump.

It’s pathetic.

Was there ever a better illustration of how little they think of us when just days after losing the most important election of our lifetimes, Joe Biden eagerly invited the America-attacker back to the White House and the scene of the January 6, 2021 crime, and in front of roaring fire flashed his toothy smile, and heartily exclaimed, “Welcome back!”

I’ll never be able to unsee that. “Welcome back.” Holy hell …

And, say, have you been reading all these stories recently about the never-ending sniping between the Clintons, Biden, Kamala Harris and Barack Obama teams during the most important election of our lifetimes?

We’re out here knocking on doors with our hair on fire, shoveling our hard-earned cash out the door and were (are) frankly terrified of what another Trump term would mean, while these inbred, lifetime campaigners were airing petty feuds behind closed doors.

The party needs a bath.

A few Democrats like Cory Booker, and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren, Reps. Jasime Crockett, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before him, have finally owned up to their their gross inaction, and are busy doing what they were elected for — the very least of which should be standing relentlessly against a two-bit, lying crook who sees good people on both sides of a KKK rally, and whose violent attack on our vote may have irreparably wrecked this country for good.

Democratic Party leadership is full of too many complete phonies, and the only ones who can’t seem to see this are the so-called leaders themselves.

A lot is rightfully made of Republicans’ appalling refusal to take on the odious Trump, but tell me: When are Democrats going to start taking action on their own?

Why are Schumer and Dick Durbin still leading the Democratic senate?

Unless they see a 29 percent approval rating as something to be proud of …

Ya know, what happed here in Wisconsin last week should be instructive to Democrats going forward. There are lessons to be learned.

We won a crucial Supreme Court race up here by double-digits, because instead of it being about professional politicians, the race was simply about the issues.

By electing Judge Susan Crawford, thus ensuring liberals will control this court until at least 2028, Wisconsinites by huge margins signaled they don’t want billionaires like the grotesque Elon Musk interfering with our elections.

Wisconsinites said they believe in fair political maps.

Wisconsinites said they believe in a woman’s right to choose.

In fact, the only national politician who got involved up here was the despicable Trump himself, who gave a full-throated endorsement of the race’s ultimate loser, Brad Schimel.

That terrible tandem lost by a whopping 10 points, an almost unheard of margin in this razor-close state.

Turns out, Trump’s toxic agenda is not popular here, and this vote happened BEFORE people’s life savings were battered by these destructive tariffs that Whitmer wants to politely haggle over, instead of doing everything in her power to shove in the nearest s---can.

The Democratic Party is broken, people, and it’s OK to say that.

It would be far, far worse not to.

We have the power, so we must demand change, dammit.

Unless you don’t think we’re worth it …

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Since this piece published, The New York Times has reported this: “The day after the inauguration, Ms. Whitmer penned a handwritten letter — which has not been previously reported — congratulating Mr. Trump, saying she looked forward to working together and praising his support for the auto industry in his first address, according to a person who relayed the text of the letter. Ms. Whitmer included her cellphone number and invited Mr. Trump to call her if she could be of any help to him.”

THE ANSWER: Racism.

THE QUESTION: How in the hell did we get here?

There is no other way to explain the American-attacking Trump’s rise to power, and most important, his ability to hold onto it despite being easily the stupidest, most dishonest, and openly bigoted man to ever step foot in our White House.

Just four years after trying to take a blowtorch to our votes, he is busy incinerating our life’s savings, and making measles great again, yet tens of millions of Americans are still stubbornly standing in his corner no matter what.

And I am not talking about the millionaires and billionaires who have gobs of money to gain while these markets are intentionally shorted, either. I am talking about Joe and Jane America, who are watching their retirement savings go up in smoke. I am talking about farmer Fred, whose Trump sign that he has defiantly planted in his field is now worth more than the crops he is growing at a loss.

I am talking about people who you know, and maybe even live with.

Go ahead and say what you want about this wretched, burnt-orange monster (please), but it's your friends and family who still support him who are to blame for this terrible, terrible mess we are in right now.

Without them, there is no him.

You can pretend this isn’t true if it somehow makes you feel better. You can invent high-minded reasons for them to go so low with their vote. You can make pathetic excuses for their absurd recklessness, but when you do that, you are helping to spread the seeds of hate.

You simply do not get to support a racist without being one yourself, and Trump is the most notorious bigot of our times. It is the sickening secret sauce to his political success, and a decade after he burst onto scene with all the grace of s--- to a shingle, we have completely normalized it.

Like his endless lying, it’s a given.

You seldom see either of these things mentioned in our press anymore.

He has eliminating swaths of important Black history from our government records, and it is being met with a shrug. He is doing away with decades of work aimed at giving EVERYBODY a chance at the American dream and it is being met with surrender.

There is absolutely no need to do any of this, but it is nonetheless happening at a furious rate.

Why?

The truth is, Trump has an endless capacity and craving to hate. His insatiable appetite to stoke racial unrest seems to come from a place deep inside him where the lights went out, presumably after his racist parents made it clear even they couldn’t stand to have him around the house anymore.

His big sister, Maryanne, called him, “a brat,” who has “no principles. A man who is “cruel and can’t be trusted.” A “phony.”

Because nobody knows you better than your big sister ...

The very minute this loudmouth used the shaky platform built for him from his ridiculous reality TV show to attack Barack Obama’s citizenship it should have disqualified him from getting within 500 miles of a pigsty, much less the White House.

Instead, it was his opening, the thing that separated him, and the foundation for every terrible thing that has followed the past decade or so. We are in danger of losing our democracy after 250 years, because Donald Trump is a racist, not in spite of it.

It is the only reason he was able reclaim an office he has completely disgraced, and why I have decided to circle back and underline this sore subject today, as our country descends into the sewer while dragging as many countries as possible down with us.

It is why the very first thing he did upon harrumphing back into the White House for a second term was take a sledgehammer to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts across the United States.

Trump knew that was far more important to his supporters than all this relentless bull---- we were hearing about their phony concerns over the price of gas and eggs. You don’t drag a rebel flag to a rally because you need a job …

Viciously attacking DEI and people of color with alacrity was the art of the deal that put him back in a job he is completely unqualified for. It gave him the capital among his supporters to exact his heinous revenge on the courts and the people, who had the gall to try to hold him to account for assaulting women and our country.

He lied to them that everything would be better on Day 1. They didn't believe that, because what was really important was putting those uppity people of color in this country back in their place.

Sure the 401k they have sweated their lifetime to build is taking a terrible beating right now, but at least they don’t have to hear about those damn Tuskegee Airmen anymore ...

Shortly after President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, he told the venerable journalist Bill Moyers, who was a staffer at the time:

“Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine.”

He undershot that prediction a bit, but it’s the Johnson comment to Moyers which preceded that one a year or so earlier that hasn’t stopped ringing in my ears ever since Trump was improbably elected the first time in 2016:

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

Everything starts with Trump’s unrivaled, and professional bigotry.

He, and his revolting party, are so good at it, that lately I am watching Democrats fall all over themselves warning of the use of “identity politics” in their messaging. People are turned off by that, we have been told.

Really now … because “identity politics” are the only thing that have been turning the Republican Party and their supporters on for decades …

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

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I am not sure how you are holding up right now (I reckon I can guess), but from my sturdy perch here in Madison, Wisconsin, the past week has been one of the longest years of my life …

I hope you’ll give me a few minutes of your time today while I take you through it, because I do believe the battle against cancerous greed and deadly fascism was officially joined.

While Republicans, led by the grotesque anti-Americans Elon Musk and Donald Trump, were busy trying to blow our lights out for good, they were met with a hurricane of resistance that built in strength throughout the week, before finally making landfall Saturday at cities large and small across our country.

The huffing and puffing got started way back on Monday morning when I banged out Battle Cry:

“I’m typing to you today with my left hand on the keyboard, while biting the fingernails on the right one. The grotesque Elon Musk just left my state of Wisconsin after publicly handing out millions of dollars of blood money in a greasy effort to buy our Supreme Court.”

I meant it when I said:

“I honestly don’t know if we are going to make it in America, but I do know there are hundreds of thousands of people here in Wisconsin who understand the stakes, and as long as we do, we will never be beaten.”

Well, beaten was the last thing we were when a day later Judge Susan Crawford battered the candidate the despicable Trump and Musk bought and paid for in a disgusting attempt to rest control of our Supreme Court in Wisconsin.

In Not On Her Watch the following morning, I laid it out this way:

“By walloping Brad Schimel by 10 points in a state where razor-thin margins are the rule, the people of Wisconsin put the America-attacking Donald Trump on notice: You have gone way too far, sport. Back up now, or prepare to be flattened in the future.”

There had been a decided shift in the winds Tuesday evening, as the hurricane gathered strength, and if you stopped just for a moment you could feel it blowing through your town. Never forget, fortune favors the bold, and the patriots on the Left were finally strutting their stuff.

“What happened up here in Wisconsin Tuesday night, and with Cory Booker’s epic speech on the Senate floor in Washington, completely changed the playing field and how we patriots must look at things going forward.
Never underestimate your power as a United States voter, even if Republicans are doing everything they can to take that power away. Our representatives work for us. That has somehow been forgotten. I will expect the battle to be joined by all those gutless Democrats who ran for cover after November 5th. When we fight, we win.
And never underestimate the women in America. No surprise, all four liberal justices on our court in Wisconsin are women. Watching them on that stage last night gave me goosebumps. They-were-feeling-it. THEY DID THIS. They stood up to the patriarchy and all that damn dirty money, and showed them who was really boss.”

After getting some much-needed downtime Wednesday and part of Thursday, on Friday it was time for a reveal. That election had really taken it out of me. My worry had overwhelmed me ...

“By the time the clock had menacingly ticked toward exactly 8:08 p.m. just three evenings ago, I decided enough time had passed to check the results of the Supreme Court Election up here that was going to determine whether everything we had fought for the past 15 years was going to be incinerated by a political party that despises progress and human rights even more than it does the truth.
This was a cruel and unusual election because it simply asked too much from too many up here after that dreadfully close 2024 presidential election just five months before.
We had put our time and treasure on the line, as we knocked on doors, hearts on sleeves, only to come up agonizingly short when enough voting Americans decided they liked being constantly lied to by an American-attacking racist, and a larger group still, who had decided that going to the polls wasn't worth their time at all.
So I took a deep breath and walked the 20-or-so paces into my office, prepping myself — good or bad — to accept our fate as a nation. We simply could not afford to lose this damn election.
In addition to the catastrophe that would ensue here if the grotesque Elon Musk’s candidate won, it would also have emboldened the fascists’ nationally to move with due speed to burn 225 years of progress to the ground. They would have had a mandate for arson.”

That’s when my trouble started. That’s when early results showed that evil was trying to have its day.

That’s when the PTSD set in ...

“I had been at this very spot just 147 days earlier, when I saw in horror that the very good woman, who had done nothing with her professional life except serve her country, losing to the man who had done nothing with his miserable life except take from it, and attack it.
I pushed myself away from my desk, stood up, and walked slowly and unsteadily toward the direction of the kitchen, so I could get some water, and steady myself while I processed this newest straight-line wind of madness.
I was in shock, and simply not prepared for the terrible feeling of losing again.
Maybe the cause had literally become bigger than life. Surely there were thousands of others who were dealing with the severity of this condition ...
Since that terrible evening on November 8, 2016, when we learned again that our country was capable of doing both great and absolutely horrific things, this fight for what is most assuredly right has taken a terrible toll on too many of us.
As a veteran I am not going to tell you that this is like being on the raging high seas, or some battlefield, but I am going to tell you that the future of America is on the line, and the stakes have never been higher.
This war is being waged on our soil.
We try to go about our daily lives in as normal a fashion as possible, but trouble is everywhere. People are being disappeared and caged. Alliances are being torched. History is literally being rewritten. Our life’s savings are being inhaled by hideous billionaires. Books are being banned …
This is coming at us all at once, and even when we try to tune it out, we are but one news alert away from being knocked dizzy again.
When I regained my senses and was ready to brave the confines of my office 10 minutes after my event, I pushed my chair in tight to my desk and called up that website again.
That’s when I saw the tide had turned decisively. First Sauk County fell, and then Green, Door, and Brown. The swing counties were ALL swinging Left, and Crawford was positively blowing him out.
Here in Dane County, home to Madison, we were putting such an epic a---kicking on Trump and Musk’s candidate the final results would be in the neighborhood of 85%-15%.
A wave of relief washed over me, while I watched good overwhelm the forces of evil — if only for a night. I looked to the sky, and said, “thank you.”

Our mental health is nothing to play with, good people. A lot is being asked of us. Like a stalker, worry quietly follows us everywhere we go and is ready to pounce even when we think we are looking.

Worse, it afflicts only those who have the audacity to care …

We must find people we can lean on during these unsteady times, and I assure you, you will find them here.

After penning worry early Friday morning, by nightfall, Trump had completely wrecked the economy. So efficient was he with his dirty work and ghoulish preening that by the time the stock market had suffered its worst intentional crash in U.S. history, he was harrumphing around his golf course in Florida stiffing his caddies.

Yes, he went f------ golfing. But not before writing this to his cult on his nuclear-powered propaganda channel:

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH.”

I learned long ago to never underestimate this guy’s singular talent for always going lower. Ten of millions of people are in severe financial distress right now precisely because of this slobbering grifter, who bankrupted SIX casinos while playing fast and loose with his daddy’s money.

This country has never seen a poorer excuse for a man …

When Saturday finally rolled around, like you I bet, I was in the ringer. There was but one more thing to do: climb the hill to The Square surrounding our capitol building to join the tens of thousands of fellow patriots who poured in from all parts of Wisconsin to completely give it hell.

We shouted, and defiantly stood against the forces of evil in this country. We smiled and hugged and threw our fists in the air because we knew …

We knew that after Booker’s epic speech and our stirring victory in the Supreme Court election Tuesday night, the wind was once again at our backs.

NOW READ: Trump voters are pretending like they were duped. Don't believe it.

“I’ve got to tell you, as a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin — and we won.”

-Judge Susan Crawford Tuesday night after being elected in a landslide to become Wisconsin’s next Supreme Court Justice

In the wake of that stunning election here in Wisconsin, I reckon there will be a lot of people telling you not to over-read the results of just one state election. Those people will be dead wrong when they do it, but before I address their faulty assumptions, let’s talk briefly about a few of the gigantic things Crawford’s win does for the people of Wisconsin — all with associated affects on America:

1. It protects women’s right to choose. Had her opponent Brad Schimel won, you could have expected Republicans to drag women by their hair and back to an 1849 state law here heavily banning abortion. And no, that’s not hyperbole.
2. The semi-fair political maps that were finally drawn last year abolishing the most gerrymandered maps in the nation, would have been incinerated by Republicans. And I say, semi-fair because the new maps still favor right-leaning voters who are at best 50 percent of the population here. I will be pushing for truly fair maps in this space in the future, but I’m too damn happy to do much grousing about anything right now.
3. It protects the recent restoration of collective bargaining rights for Wisconsin public workers and teachers unions that were lost under Republican control in 2011.

Like I said gigantic.

It also restores what has become a blurry notion of right and wrong in this country, because there is no damn way a grotesque billionaire slime ball bombing into our state and passing out money for votes is anything but wrong.

In fact, it is criminal.

By walloping Schimel by 10 points in a state where razor-thin margins are the rule, the people of Wisconsin put the America-attacking Donald Trump on notice: You’ve gone way too far, sport. Back up now, or prepare to be flattened in the future.

Democrats around the country got the fuel-injected boost they so badly needed, because they finally got around to listening to their voters instead of cowering in the corners, and conceding the floor to these odious Republicans. You feeling me right now, Chuck Schumer?

Because at almost the very moment the Democrats’ new national leader, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, was finally giving his 25-plus hours of good trouble a break, the race here in Wisconsin was being called for Crawford.

If you didn’t feel the earth shift after that one, you weren’t paying attention. And if you weren’t paying attention why in the hell not?

Everything changed in the past 24 hours, and it is the people on the Left, and not most of our damn politicians who we can thank for that. Booker said as much during his heroic speech, and immediately after in a must-see interview with Rachel Maddow:

“I do really credit constituents, who were impatient, who were demanding, who were scared, who were angry, and, very understandably, taking that anger out on Democrats, who have to take some responsibility for being where we are in American history right now.
“But I suddenly realized that I have just got to do something myself. I have got to try to prove worthy for my constituents that I’m willing to step out and step up in some way and hopefully be able to share their stories that were so hurtful.”

And before I continue here, a lot of us have caught a lot of crap for trying to hold Democratic politicians into account since that ghastly election November 5th. Knuckleheads like James Carville have even suggested we stand down. If I had a dollar for every time somebody told me to “stop beating up on your own” I’d have enough money to buy some election.

But if you still somehow didn't feel the switch in the political winds last night, let me tell you who did: the racist Trump.

Something that got very little mention in the run-up to this crucial race in Wisconsin was the absence of the serial liar in the state. Say what you want about the economy-crasher — and don’t stop — but facts are he has won two out of three times he’s run up here, which is a pretty good batting average for a bunt-hitter.

While Trump did throw his support for Schimel, he made sure to do it from the safety of his nuclear-powered social media accounts. There were none of his unhinged cult rallies in the state, where literally anything would come out of his trashcan of a mouth.

Trump’s absence in Wisconsin did all the talking for him. He knows deep in his empty, black heart that he is failing, and people aren’t at all entertained by what he has been serving. Markets are crashing, food prices are going up, national security is at risk, and benefits like social security are no longer safe.

Human beings are being disappeared.

Never underestimate the vanity of a guy who paints himself orange, and tapes dead ferrets to his head each day before going off to berate the public. He wasn’t going to be seen anywhere in the vicinity of this state, if losing big up here was a possibility.

So the despicable bastard needed somebody to blame for his potential failure — a scapegoat.

Enter oily Elon.

As I was spiking the football in this column, I got this alert from my friends at Raw Story:Trump says Elon Musk will be out of the White House 'soon'

See? Everything that went wrong Tuesday night was Elon’s fault.

Nobody in history has been better at recycling one-time supporters into trash than Dumpster Donny, but Musk presents a unique challenge. How does he say, “Sure I’d love to take gobs more of your money, Elon, but is there any way I can see you less?”

The answer to that question is, no. Musk completely owns him, even if Vladimir Putin would disagree.

Trump is now being dragged around the world by Putin and here at home by Musk, and the good people on the Left need to be pointing this out every other minute.

What happened up here in Wisconsin Tuesday night, and with Booker’s epic speech on the Senate floor in Washington, completely changed the playing field and how we patriots must look at things going forward.

Never underestimate your power as a United States voter, even if Republicans are doing everything they can to take that power away. Our representatives work for us. That has somehow been forgotten. I will expect the battle to be joined by all those gutless Democrats who ran for cover after November 5th. When we fight, we win.

Never underestimate the women in America. No surprise, all four liberal justices on our court in Wisconsin are women. Watching them on that stage last night gave me goosebumps. They-were-feeling-it. THEY DID THIS. They stood up to the patriarchy and all that damn dirty money, and showed them who was really boss.

Ya know, I dig around in a lot of the corners here in the powerhouse of Madison, Wisconsin, where we voted for Crawford to the astonishing tune of roughly 85% to 15% over Schimel. Let me tell you who you will find knocking on the doors, making the phone calls, working the polls, opening their homes, and fighting back with a vengeance at our one-after-another rallies in this city: WOMEN.

Damn, I am proud to stand with them. And damn I am one happy dude right now.

Forward!

NOW READ: Finally, a Democratic Party leader who will treat us like adults

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

Despite all my moaning since a slim majority of Americans decided it was safer to carry on with their lives walking a tightrope without any safety nets, than it was to stay grounded, and together against the billionaires who have proved over and over again they want to eat us all, I have been mighty proud of the good and righteous people on the Left.

Too many Americans don’t deserve us, but the idea of America does, dammit. Despite being knocked down and staying down on that gray November day, we picked ourselves up and braved the fascist winds that are blowing at a gale off the Potomac right now.

This was no easy thing.

Watching our country double-down on a repulsive madman, and a party that provably means us harm was like a knife to the heart. Even today, it defies anything rational or decent.

We have hit town halls, and rallied in the freezing cold at our Capitals. We have canvassed, made phone calls and written our congresspeople. We are showing up everywhere to fight against the same terrible things better people than us did while sacrificing their lives on the battlefield.

You know, in the painful hours that followed the most consequential election in our nation’s history November 5th, I typed a piece through defiance and tears that ended up getting a lot of read: DO NOT SUBMIT.

I remember it being about the easiest thing I have ever written, because if you are reading this you almost certainly know that the only way to beat evil is to never give into it.

Except that is exactly what too many institutions, including the Democratic Party, have been doing. And while the party is finally showing some signs of life, all thanks to us, these institutions are caving into the orange, American-attacking felon exactly like he does every time he’s in a room with Vladimir Putin.

It is just disgusting to watch, it really is.

On Thursday afternoon, the University of Michigan became the latest institution of “higher learning” to bow down to Trump, when they offered up a public sacrifice of their once proud, state-of-the-art Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) program because the grifter was threatening to pull OUR money from the university.

Up until Thursday, Michigan had been at the forefront of helping to lead America out of the darkness, into the light, and toward a better place where our children were "not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

You won’t find a more noble or necessary cause.

In the story I linked to above in the Detroit Free Press, Rebekah Modrak, the chair of the faculty senate hit a home run with this beauty:

“The federal government is determined to dismantle and control higher education and to make our institutions more uniform, more inequitable, and more exclusive. They are using the power of the government to engineer a sweeping culture change towards white supremacy. Unfortunately, University of Michigan leaders seem determined to comply and to collaborate in our own destruction.”

Michigan’s surrender follows similar gross actions from scores of other places that should know better. Places like museums, libraries, and department stores, are all tearing up their DEI initiatives faster than Trump can devour three Big Macs.

Makes you wonder how important DEI really was at these places if they are now ready to turn on a dime a run like the dickens from ‘em.

Law firms are falling at Trump’s fat, little feet, because apparently it’s become just too damn expensive to stand on the right side of the law.

Even ABC-News disgraced itself when it settled with the American-attacker for $15 million in a defamation suit they win 999 out of 1000 times. This is one of the most pathetic things I have ever seen as journalist, and lately I’ve seen more than enough.

But really, just when in the hell is even one of these places going to say, “You know what, pal? Take your racist ass on out of here. We’ll get along just fine without you, or we’ll see you in court. Up to you, sport.”

In fact, the first place that says that will get a big, fat donation from me. And I’ll bet you I’m not alone.

It is brutal watching all this.

When in the hell are these places going to learn what you and I already know: Silver-spoon fed punks like the draft-dodging Trump see capitulation and submission as a weakness. Once you do it once, he’ll be harrumphing back again demanding more. It’s all about the humiliation with this insecure baby, who never did get over being dumped in some military boarding school, because his parents found him impossible to be around.

As for the diversity aspect of all this, it’s taken this complete mess of an administration but four months to prove that we have never needed it more in this country.

Take a look at the so-called cabinet that this orange bigot who sees “fine people” on both sides of a KKK rally has assembled. It is not only stuffed with more white males than any cabinet since — no surprise — Ronald Reagan’s, but has more clowns in it than the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Project 2025’s Russell Vought just to name a few ...

Then there are the three white women who have gleefully lowered themselves into that despicable cabinet headlined by a puppy-killer.

Consider the big news this week, when we found out a group of geniuses led by Hegseth, the stone-cold drunk who is somehow leading our Defense Department, came within inches of getting our best, brightest, and bravest killed when they treated the launch of a strategic airstrike in Yemen with all the secrecy and regard they’d give some fantasy football draft at a topless bar.

Great job there, fellas. The only reason you still have your damn jobs is precisely because you are white. So let’s save all this handwringing over the harm DEI initiatives are having on America, you incompetent nitwits. You are precisely the reason they were needed in the first place.

Any university that goes along with that and these guys, isn’t worth a dollar of tuition. Any university that is too stupid to see what is going on in America right now, and the parallels to what happened in Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s should just get out of the education business altogether.

Look, I have long been a supporter of our universities, even if I never attended one. I fancied these places as institutions of higher learning that educated our young people, and prepared them for life’s long, hard road ahead — and the odious sins of our past.

My only real gripe with ‘em has been their price tag. Who the hell can afford to send their kids to these places?

Actually, never mind, I know the answer …

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

I am mad, I am scared — and right now, I am looking for people who will fight with me against the most dangerous attack on our rights, benefits, and Democracy in my lifetime.

Unless we start punching back hard, and right now, we are not going to survive this, good people.

At a time we’ve never needed leaders in the Democratic Party more, we are literally getting less.

And yes, yes, I get it: Republicans are completely reprehensible. I have written about this exhaustively. To repeat: I blame the voters. If not for them, there is no him. Our country is littered with the morally dead.

That is a terrible reality, which makes our situation even more dire. Maybe losing their benefits will change some minds, and owning the Libs will become just too damn expensive, but I am done trying to get in the heads of members of a vindictive, racist cult.

We need fighters, and right now we have two for sure, one of whom is the future of America, and not just some damn political party.

Along with Independent Bernie Sanders, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has more power than anybody in the Democratic Party right now because she’s an old-school Democrat.

That’s called irony.

At a time we have never needed our political leaders to fight for us more, she is on the road hitting all the right notes.

AOC is known as a “progressive” Democrat, but I’ll make a friendly wager with you that before long she will change her political affiliation to Independent. And I will give her a standing ovation when she does.

And that goes for any other Democrat who does the same.

The Democratic Party has no sense of itself right now, or the terror people are going through. I don’t know about you, but we are furious in my house right now.

We are also scared to death.

We are scared of what the Republican fascists are doing, sure, but we are really scared that we don’t have a party fighting for us that understands this.

We have a complete madman attacking us right now, and too many Democrats would rather we focus on elections that are almost two years away, instead of what is menacingly at our doors RIGHT NOW.

Many of you will know, I am an Independent. And if you didn't, you probably should. As a longtime print journalist, I couldn’t be bothered with political affiliations. I saw both parties as flawed, and politicians as people to be scrutinized, not worshipped.

(As an aside: I have been guilty of worshipping a few politicians lately, and am ashamed of myself, but that’s another column for another time.)

I have voted for Republicans and Democrats during my lifetime, and if you’ve read me even for a bit that shouldn’t be news, either. I haven’t pulled the lever for anybody on Right in a long time, though, and doubt I ever will again.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t smelled trouble for Democrats for years now.

This boomeranged at me on my Facebook page earlier this week. I guess I typed it 10 years ago Tuesday:

“You are Hillary Clinton. Literally 117 million Americans hate your guts. Another 90 million say, meh. There are 27 million who love, love, love you. About 100 million don't vote (they are Americans, after all). You are the front-running Democrat. Your party is in trouble.

That’s harsh, sure. It was also 100 percent correct.

I have been writing about this time in history a lot lately, not because I was right — I would have paid almost anything to be wrong — but because we are back in almost exactly the same place we were then, and simply cannot afford to make the same mistakes going forward.

I supported Sanders in 2016, because it was clear to me that the millionaires and billionaires had acquired too much power. Republicans’ Citizens United was a wrecking ball, and unless everybody understood this, it was going to bury us in the rubble.

I am not going to rehash that damn 2016 election, because it is a massive waste of time, but I am going to say we better start listening to this man right now, because along with AOC, Sanders is one of the only people who has correctly taken the pulse of the American people at this crucial juncture in our history.

We are mad.

We are scared.

We HATE these f------ billionaires.

THEY understand this.

Instead, we have monumental weaklings like Chuck Schumer leading the party. It has gone a million miles past pathetic, and the dude needs to go. I am telling you — HE NEEDS TO GO.

In Wisconsin, we have a make-or-break election coming up on April 1st. Everything we have fought our tails off for in this state the past decade, could be incinerated — including fair maps and a woman’s right to choose — if Judge Susan Crawford doesn't prevail over Elon Musk’s lapdog, Brad Schimel in this State Supreme Court Election.

The grotesque Musk is literally buying votes in this state right now. Not enough of this atrocity can be made.

This Supreme Court race here in Wisconsin is a classic bellwether election. If it is seen as a race between a candidate who is representing the people of this state vs. a candidate who is bought and paid for and representing the despicable billionaires like Musk, the left-leaning Crawford will win.

If this election is seen as just another rock fight between a Democrat and a Republican, she will lose.

The issues are on the side of the Left, if only they (we) would just get out of their (our) own damn way and shout them out — LOUDLY.

Which is exactly what AOC and Sanders are doing right now.

Lately, they have been here in Wisconsin and other places rallying tens of thousands of people around the country to “Fight The Oligarchy.”

Their rallies are high-energy and enormous, because their message addresses our anger and our very real fears. There is so much good and common sense being spread in them it is a wonder, that every-damn-Democrat isn’t every-damn-where ringing the same bells loudly.

Instead, too many of these Democrats are capitulating, and treating this assault on their voters as just another breezy political season.

Is it any wonder the party has never been less popular? Just 27 percent of registered voters have a positive view of the party.

Read that again. This is a five-alarm fire.

Look, I didn't write this piece today to insult Democrats. I have worked my a-- off with them to beat back this relentless evil. I wrote this piece because I am angry and scared, and have absolutely no confidence in the party to lead us out of this mess.

I am a fighter, and I am looking for people like AOC and Bernie Sanders who will fight alongside me.

I don’t give a damn if you are a Democrat or not …

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

This second iteration of the Republican authoritarian regime that has taken over our White House has been a terrible assault to the senses. The one-after-another attacks on our economy, civil liberties, environment, government and benefits have been a helluva lot to deal with.

In related news, it turns out that this term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS) that the cultists who follow America’s No. 1 traitor have slobbered on us, is actually a miraculous life-saving, democracy-saving condition inherent among good and decent people who want their environment, rights, benefits, children, and country protected from billionaires and felons who are drooling to line their pockets with our hard-earned cash.

Because people who have the audacity to care are prone to this condition, its side effects are pain, nausea and sleeplessness.

That said, I am guessing by now most of you agree the pace of this Republican carnage has been expedited completely by design. By blasting us with a nuclear-powered firehose, these fascists hope to knock us off our moorings and unsteady us. While we are reacting to this, they are doing that … While we are reacting to that, they are doing this …

“We’re going to invade Greenland!!” “We are inside the government accessing your personal information.” “Canada will be the 51st state!!!” “Gaza will be our beach resort!!!”

Only one of these things is actually underway, and that is truly terrifying. The rest of their nonstop bulls--- distracts us from the vitally important. It irritates us, stirs us up. Scares us …

It also works particularly well in upsetting people who are susceptible to TDS. In fact, no surprise, it is an often-used Russian propaganda technique. This excellent piece, from Rand presciently written in 2016, gets into all this at length. Here is but a sampling:

We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”

Mostly this technique is cruel, and anti-American, which is precisely why it is being used on the American public by a psychopath who cares little about anything else but himself.

Before turning to another issue associated with this “firehose of falsehood” I just want to remind you again to nevernormalize what is happening in America right now, because THAT will end us faster than anything. We have TDS because we have chosen to care for ALL the people in our country, who aren’t billionaires.

We are not in a cult.

I want to talk little bit today about the fascist Trump regime’s attack on the Associated Press, which is a part of Republicans’ broader aasault on the truth.

During my newsroom days, AP was an invaluable news service which employed reporters and news bureaus where most newspapers couldn’t to bring home the news of events happening around the country and the world to millions of people. Long way of saying: We couldn’t have provided our readers a well-rounded newspaper each day without them.

At a time we’ve never needed well-researched, straight-down-the-middle news more, AP is predictably under attack by an administration that deals in lies. When AP scoffed at Trump’s war on the Gulf of Mexico, he barred them from attending any further White House circus events.

Because they didn't submit to senseless stupidity, they were showed the door.

AP gave a well-reasoned retort for their refusal to dumb themselves and their readers down to no avail.

Some of you will know that the AP Stylebook is the go-to guide for journalists and provides instruction for proper usages of things like grammar, spelling, abbreviations, and even libel law, with sound reasoning for their instruction.

I use it to this day, but now access it online. Here’s an old copy from my newspaper days, before the Internet swallowed us whole:

substackcdn.com

It is ever-evolving to reflect current events and parlance.

For what it’s worth, here is AP’s reasoning for not surrendering the truth to King Cruel — as if they ended one:

"The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years," the updated Stylebook entry states. "Refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen."

Outside the U.S., "Gulf of Mexico" is still used.
The Stylebook also notes, "Trump's order only carries authority within the United States. Mexico, as well as other countries and international bodies, do not have to recognize the name change.”

In other words, they are trying to be accurate, as always. But this won’t do, because this Trump/Musk regime’s job, like the any authoritarian group, is to bury us in propaganda and lies with their “firehose of falsehoods.”

Here is their pathetic reasoning for removing one of the foremost news organizations in the world from their lie-filled press briefings:

"It is a privilege to cover this White House," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters explaining their Joseph Goebbels-like decision to bar AP. "Nobody has the right to go into the Oval Office and ask the president of the United States questions. That's an invitation that is given."

So here is who they they are now giving this privilege to, among other right-wing bilge (with thanks to NPR’s David Folkenflik, who as always, does tremendous job covering these issues): Breitbart radio, One America News Network, Newsmax and the New York Post.

These are not news organizations, they are straight-up, rightwing propaganda outlets. They have no interest in the truth, because they are immune to TDS.

Straight-down-the-middle news operations like AP are being shown the door, because it is impossible to spread Russian propaganda when you have reputable folks like them hanging around.

This is only going to get worse, as the America-attackers, anti-vaxxers, drunks, and billionaire in the Trump regime, who are trying to steal our money, and pollute our air, water and the truth go about their filthy work.

Recently, I was told by a member of Trump’s cult that I had TDS. It’s hardly the first time this has happened. When I produced an AP story to buttress an argument we were having at the time, I was told that AP is “fake news.” That was the first time I’d heard this from a cult member.

I hate with everything in my being what this traitor has done to our country, but I hate the morally lost who prop him up even more.

If only everybody had a case of TDS.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

On March 14, 2025, New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s political career died a terrible and unnecessary death.

By refusing to stand up for Americans and against this country’s first wannabe king, the Democratic leader in the Senate did everything he could to ensure his party stays in the minority for the foreseeable future.

This is unacceptable.

It should have been a no-brainer for Senate Democrats to follow the lead of their brethren in the House by standing together against a reckless Republican bill to fund a government that Donald Trump and his grotesque henchman, Elon Musk, have done nothing but use as their personal feeding trough.

In supporting the continuing resolution (CR), Schumer was joined by nine other gutless Democrats who feigned terrible angst before doing the completely wrong thing.

Democratic Senators Dick Durbin (Ill.) (minority whip), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Maggie Hassan (N.H.), Gary Peters (Mich.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.) and Brian Schatz (Hawaii) (Nev.) all voted yes along with Schumer. Maine's Angus King, an Independent who caucuses with Democrats also was a ‘yes’.

To be clear: This dirty bill wipes away many funding directives, and will now give the fascist Trump the power to reallocate money as he sees fit without any fear of judicial or legislative pushback.

It is abhorrent. It is submissive. And it is disgusting.

Let me tell you something: I have grown sick and tired of Democrats like Schumer whining they have no power, when they actually had all the power in the world to reject this evil slop.

Polls have repeatedly showed that a majority of Americans do not like what they are seeing from the ghastly Musk/Trump/Putin trifecta which is currently murdering our veterans, planting our farmers, spitting on our seniors, torching the First Amendment, assaulting our public servants, and stepping on anybody with a beating heart.

Even the courts have effectively stood up to Putin’s puppet, and have been ordering among other things, that government employees be offered their jobs back.

In siding with federal employee unions, federal district judge, William Alsup, laid out this howitzer aimed right between the eyes of Trump Justice Department attorneys Thursday, who he believes have been “lying” to him. This was a quote from that hearing I found in Politico:

“You will not bring the people in here to be cross-examined. You’re afraid to do so because you know cross examination would reveal the truth. I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth. … I’m tired of seeing you stonewall on trying to get at the truth. ... It is sad, a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said.

But Schumer must have been napping and/or looking the other way. Rather than stand for something, he took the easy way out and rolled over, so that his party could be battered another day. Rather than drawing a line in the sand, and saying you will not continue to beat on Americans on my watch, he took an ugly swan dive off some short pier.

Truth is, I have been tired of Schumer for a long time now. He has always been a completely ineffective communicator at a time expert communication has never been more important. And if he really is as good at the behind-the-scenes wrangling as people say he is, then that is exactly where he belongs: behind the scenes.

When one of the first things Democrats did after November’s disastrous election was put Schumer and Durbin back in power, I knew we were in big trouble. In my piece NO, I typed this back in early-December:

“Consider what happened very, very quietly during a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning in some hallowed office buried deep inside our Capitol Building that was attacked only four years before.
That’s where the now minority Democrats in the United States Senate got together and basically let us know nothing had changed from November 4th to November 5th in their foggy view. Nope, it was going to be business as usual for us Democrats, and if you, dear reader, don’t like it, well, that’s just tough s---.
Just 28 days after the most consequential election in American history, the 47 members of the Democratic Senate voted to stay the course with the leadership team that will be representing us through some of the most terrifying times in our nation’s history.
At a time we’ve never needed inspirational leaders who can connect with the voters more, they read the board, and decided to stay with the same pieces in power.
Yep, good ol’ 74-year-old Chuck Schumer will be back leading the team, assisted by the 79-year-old Dick Durbin. It was a great day for the “get the hell off my lawn” gang, and a bad one for America.
Instead of at least taking the pulse of the electorate following our shocking loss a mere month ago, they went full speed ahead to assemble a leadership team they thought was best to serve us.”

Schumer’s surrender Friday was predictable to anybody paying attention, which sadly does not include enough Democratic senators. Apparently, they are of the mind that polite Democratic tactics will be enough to ward off this brutal, fascist tsunami.

Democrats look confused, listless, and divided at a time they’ve never needed to be bold, fearless and on their game more.

Billionaires have been the only winners in this Republican regime so far, which makes Schumer’s inability to read the room positively insane at best, and wildly incompetent at worst. If Schumer doesn't understand that this spoiled, yacht club bully, Trump, cannot handle being told no by now, he’d be wise to channel the strength of the leader he drafted off of in the first Trump regime.

In an unprecedented move Friday afternoon, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi loudly put her venerable voice in the room and issued the following statement urging Democrats in the Senate to stand up, while telling the fascist, America-attacking Trump to sit down.

Listen to women indeed. And right now, please.

And speaking of false choices … This idea that we have to go along or get along with Chuck Schumer would one of those.

He needs to step aside pronto. His tone-deaf vote should be the end of his role in any leadership capacity. He can no longer be trusted with the Democratic purse strings.

Schumer has had a mostly honorable run as leader of the Democrats in the Senate, and during his decades in public service, but he simply must set aside. He is wildly out of touch, and pathetically overmatched.

In the coming days some organized grassroots groups will be putting increasing pressure on the Democratic Party to show some damn spine, and for Schumer to go. One of these groups that officially launched this afternoon will have my backing.

The Reformers are a group of rank-and-file Democrats from across the country who are demanding change.

“The party needs to start listening to the people,” said California Democratic Strategist Christopher Webb. “We need a party that lifts up people and listens to us. The party is still in that endless cycle where they think hatred of Trump will carry the day. It won’t. Democrats simply aren’t giving us anything to vote for right now.”

Webb is partnering with Senior Democratic Strategist David Yankovich, who was key in getting Senator Doug Jones elected in Alabama in 2018, to head this effort. This effort will be rolling out in earnest over the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

I wish them Godspeed.

Finally …

If you STILL aren’t convinced Schumer needs to go, well have a look at what the devil himself said about his capitulation Friday:

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When you are getting a pat on the back from an America-attacking felon, who is trying his damndest to push our country off a cliff, you have become nothing but a useful idiot, Chuck.

Resign.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

In just seven, short weeks, the traitor, Donald Trump, has crashed the economy, taken us to the brink of recession, wrecked the government, lost the respect of our friends and neighbors around the world, and surrendered to the murderous Vladimir Putin.

It is EXACTLY what was expected from the proven America-attacker by anybody capable of thinking about anything but themselves heading into November’s disastrous elections.

The United States of America is in a free-fall not seen in modern history, and there is absolutely no reason to believe we will ever return to anything resembling respectability, or gain back the trust we lost when a serial-lying, Russia-owned convicted felon was elected by a collection of selfish bigots, idiots, and trolls who whine they’ve been left behind because they can’t figure out a way to excavate themselves from the mud puddle they gleefully slid into.

And rather than wait any longer, because I am Monday Morning furious today, I am going to move right into the “WE TOLD YOU SO” part of this column:

(I wish I could credit the meme-ist here, and will if anybody can credibly put a name to it. But it speaks to me, so I share …)

We told these lopsided people that all this turmoil was coming, if they couldn’t break themselves out of their rut and join the rest of us Americans, who were terrified of what might come only because we were smart enough to recognize demented evil when we saw it.

(I am a bit surprised it has happened this quickly, though. Trump’s suicidal tendencies, and lust for cash were only slightly underestimated in these parts …)

All Kamala Harris did — besides flatten Kid Grotesque in a debate which should have settled things — for four months was warn us about this and him. I needed no convincing, and I know most of you didn’t either, but the rancid corporate media still needed a horse race under orders of the billionaires who are currently eating us alive, and newsroom “leadership” which has so pathetically lost its way, it’s a wonder, they can still dot an “i” or cross a “t.”

The potential end of America was, and is, a front-page story. The ONLY story fit to print, in fact.

As I type this, the stock market is crashing faster than Elon Musk after a ketamine-fueled bender, and is now steaming toward a “correction” phase. The two-ton traitor himself was dragging himself around like Frankenstein’s double onto one right-wing propaganda show after another Sunday, laying the groundwork for a recession that is almost sure to come.

“I hate to predict things like that,” he barfed. “There could be a period of transition,” but eventually “it should be great for us.”

A recession “should be great for us,” he says. You MAGA blinking yet? Hello???

That would be the very recession that the gruesome media warned about repeatedly, but was dexterously avoided for four years by Old Man Biden, who had lost the zip on his fastball, sure, but still understood the game better than just about anybody on Earth.

He left the orange menace plenty to work with, but Trump promptly grimaced hard, and emptied his diaper all over it.

Working families and retirees are losing gobs of money right now, and nobody knows when it will end. Prices are high and getting higher, and the tariffs Trump was told by literally everybody to avoid, are going to make things much, much worse.

Oh, and this update flashed on my screen as I typed this heat: The Black Lives Matter mural that was painted near the White House nearly five years ago? Well, that is being removed as I throw down these words, because THAT is what really matters to MAGA.

Not the price of eggs, or better jobs, or more jobs, or “working class” issues. No, the thing that gets them out of bed in the morning is getting even, and dealing out hurt.

I’m not wrong about this.

I said it once and I’ll say it again: MAGA has illustrated there is no known pain or sacrifice to our civil liberties or pocketbooks that they won’t absorb just for the satisfaction of watching some poor kid of color go without something they don’t think he or she should have.

So sure do away with that mural, and then come back here and explain just how in the f--- that will fix anything that is broken in your meaningless, backward lives.

(And, yes, that’s the great John Lewis, and yes, we have never needed men like him more. Gary D. Williams Jr./Creative Theory Agency gets credit for this beauty.)

Where was I …

Ah, yes, the the hourly carnage, and our loss of respect by anybody in the world who really matters, like Canada, or Mexico for example. What kind of self-respecting half-decent person treats their neighbors this way — I mean, goes out of his way to be just as obnoxious, loud and heinous as Trump?

If he’s doing it to prove he’s tough, then let me remind him that he’s a morbidly obese old man, who wears a diaper, paints himself orange and tapes a dead ferret to his head everyday just to look undead.

Nobody thinks you are tough, sport, they think you need to finally eat that last Big Mac, so we can finally get some f---ing peace and quiet around here and sleep better at night.

So one more blast for you diehard Trump supporters out there before I publish this flame-thrower and pray I don’t lose my retirement savings: There’s not a big difference between our circumstances right now. We are ALL being f----- by Putin’s puppet. WE can plainly see that, while YOU somehow refuse to.

Thing is, the minute you snap out of it, and remove yourself from this cult you are so clearly in, there is actually a half-decent shot WE can fix this, and survive.

But time is quickly running out.

It’s on you.

ALL OF IT.

NOW READ: Could Trump arrest us in the middle of the night for speaking our minds? He already has

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

I want to get a few things out of the way this morning, before really digging in and mining the anger inside me about the Democratic Party’s approach to the second Trump regime, which is aimed at finishing off America for good.

One of these things is the method in which our disintegrating mainstream media is framing this truly appalling chapter in American history. It’s as if they have completely given up and aren’t in the least bit interested in offering us the complete story of the madness playing out right in front of our tired eyes.

They’ve normalized it to the point of absurdity. AI would do a better job.

For example … It’s one thing to report:

“The president took issue with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy today.”

But it’s quite another, and far more accurate to report:

“The president, who has relentlessly stood with Russian President Vladimir Putin, since the murderous dictator helped him into office in 2016, took issue with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy today.”

See the difference?

Context, and facts used to be important vehicles on the road toward accuracy in prosecuting good journalism. It is in large part due to the shoddy work of too many in our media, that we are in this terrible mess.

Mayhem has been completely sterilized.

Worse, much worse, too many in the tone-deaf Democratic Party seem to be dancing right along to our media’s off-key delivery of the news. They are dealing with things as they wish they would be, instead of how they actually are.

So let’s shovel out some facts here, for some more much-needed context, as a setup for the trump cards I will be dealing next.

FACTS:

-Trump is a wannabe fascist who has horrible things to say about literally everybody except … Putin.

-Trump is a 34-count convicted felon.

-Trump has taken six businesses to bankruptcy.

-Trump is a twice-impeached, America-attacking goon who only by the grace of an incompetent and/or bought-off attorney general would be in jail right now.

-Trump is a raging bigot, who sees good people on both sides of a KKK rally, and once again referred to Elizabeth Warren at his slobbery address to Congress on Tuesday night as Pocahontas.

-Trump has hired a billionaire — or the billionaire has put the proverbial gun to Trump’s head — and is now laying off tens of thousands of workers in places like our veterans affairs offices. He is defunding things like cancer research, and has his drooling sights set on killing Medicaid, and potentially social security and Medicare.

-Trump is a self-admitted and convicted vile, and repeated woman-abuser.

-Trump believes our air and water should be just as dirty as he is.

-Trump is completely incapable of steering the passage of any helpful legislation through Congress and to the American public, and instead rewards billionaires with tax cuts, who are lining his bottomless pockets.

I’ll mercifully stop there, because the list really is close to endless, and you have better things to do than sweat in anger while reading this piece.

With that gory detail as a backdrop, I want to let you in a very brief conversation I had with my sister-in-law, Patty, Thursday night. When I got to the, “How are you doing” part of the discussion, she answered, “I’m scared.”

She’s scared because she’s normal, and has the audacity to pay attention. She’s scared because she depends on the benefits that Trump is threatening to take away. Patty’s husband was a Marine who came out of Vietnam a broken man. She spent the majority of her life taking care of him, while also working a full-time job and raising four kids.

The fact is she’d be in the street if not for the benefits she has earned.

She has served her country honorably for 75 years, and just wants assurances that her damn country will honor that service and their promises.

Instead, she’s “scared.”

This is appalling, but mostly sad. I mean, REALLY-FUCKING-SAD.

Anybody with a functioning brain and heart knows this.

We are in deep, deep trouble right now, and every minute we dither, play stupid political games, and wait to answer this attack on everything good in America we will fall deeper into the well.

I made this case relentlessly in a column that got a lot of eyes earlier this week, when I asked among other things:

What would you do if everything you had and everyone you loved was threatened? Would you act like Volodymyr Zelenskyy or Chuck Schumer?

So far the answer from our Democratic leadership has been: “Basically nothing.”

By now most of you have heard that Texas Congressman Al Green took issue with Trump directly during his gory address, when he lied that he “had been delivered a governing mandate not seen for many decades.”

This is nuclear-powered bullshit of course, and Green stood up and shouted back, “You have no mandate!”

And with that he was escorted out of the chamber.

Green later said: “I did disrupt and I did so because the president indicated he had a mandate and I wanted him to know he didn’t have a mandate to cut Medicaid.”

He also said:

“Friends, I would do it again.”

I say:

“God bless, Al Green.”

So what was Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ response to this, despite the fact Republicans have literally made a living out of disrupting (and far more rudely) these speeches?

This was:Dems privately confront Trump speech disruptors

Democrats like Green who were not submissive to the fascist, obnoxious, race-baiting, women-abusing, America-attacking slob were called to the mat by their OWN party.

Instead of going after the monster and his Republican Party who are provably abusing us, Jeffries and Democratic leadership went after their own. Instead of going after the 10 pathetic Democrats who went along with Republicans’ efforts to censure Green, they went after the Democrat who was censured.This is an untenable situation.

And I’d like to add (for context) that up until the disastrous November 5th election, I have been a supporter of Jeffries. But if this is how he is going to conduct business, then he needs to go.

Let me try putting it this way: Start fighting back now, or quit, Jeffries. I will not defend you or your cowardice “leadership” any longer.

I (we) don’t have time for this. Every day things get worse. Literally the entire world is looking on in disbelief while the orange monster sides with Russia and against patriots like my sister-in-law, Patty.

THIS ISN’T NORMAL, DAMMIT.

When a guy like Al Green stands up and says what everybody is thinking, and DEFENDS us and Patty, it’s not cause for censure or condemnation, it’s cause for celebration.

Because if we are STILL operating under some warped, bankrupt notion that this lewd, abusive wannabe-fascist deserves even a shred of our respect, then America isn’t dying …

It is already dead.

NOW READ: Even amid Trump administration dysfunction, Democrats are noticeably flailing

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

It would be helpful if we stopped pretending this terrible chapter in American history won’t close without bloodshed …

It would be helpful if Americans, and our feeble Democratic politicians in particular, stopped implying by their comatose actions that Democracy is some damn American right and has no end date.

America very well might be arriving at hers, because, yes, it really is that bad right now.

Rather than bringing Ping-Pong paddles and groovy, little signs to a fascist hate-fest disguised as a State of the Union speech, it would be helpful if our meek, out-of-touch Democratic politicians at least pretended they understood the perilous moment we are standing in right now.

We are in deep, deep trouble, and now would be a wonderful, necessary time to step in front of your favorite mirror and honestly ask yourself what you are willing to do to fight for our country’s survival.

We are but six-plus weeks into the repulsive, wannabe-king’s second term and the damage he and his party are causing are already at catastrophic levels.

Our air, water, earned benefits, peace, public safety, civil rights, and human rights are all under immediate threat. Worse? This is only the first course of many that will be served by the vindictive, orange madman, and his pathetic party of supplicants.

The insults, the attacks, endless provocations, and thrashing of our Constitution will continue daily. All this carefully planned evil will be aimed at exactly one thing: breaking us.

Everything he is doing is designed to pound us into submission, and he’s having a grand damn doing it.

This was entirely his aim when he and his pet mutt, JD Vance, double-teamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the behest of Boss Putin in the Oval Office on Friday. The idea was to publicly humiliate the man who has done more to defend America’s interests across the globe than any Republican in memory.

Because Zelenskyy has tasted gun powder and breathed the odious smell of death on the battlefield, he wasn't about to be pushed around by some morbidly obese, 78-year-old yacht club bully and his toady, who think swinging a sand wedge to free a golf ball from some bunker is dangerous business.

Zelenskyy punched back and wasn't having it. He told the truth, and didn't back down. The future of his country is on the line right now, and he acted like it.

And therein lies the playbook for dealing with this sadistic bastard — if only the cautious, too-clever Democratic Party and their weak leaders, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, bothered paying attention.

While Rome burns, they dither.

They act as if we have all the time in the world, when time is something that is not guaranteed right now. They seem to somehow have no idea how bad things are about to get, or most certainly will be when elections they seem to be pinning their hopes on roll around next year.

Everything changed on November 5th, but by the looks of it, very little has changed in the Democratic Party.

This country will never be the same, and the sooner we come to grips with that, and start acting accordingly the better.

What would you do if everything you had and everyone you loved was threatened? Would you act like Zelenskyy or Schumer?

One of the big mistakes of Joe Biden’s presidency was this notion that everything was going to be OK, and that his idea of America matched the actual circumstances of America.

If I had a dollar for every time he said this, I’d fold up shop and move to Tahiti:

“We are the United States of America – there's nothing we can't do if we do it together. We just have to remember who we are.”

It was a noble statement and magical thinking that would have worked great pre-2016, when we could still believe without being laughed at that our two parties could work together in a crisis to protect America.

When we were attacked by the terrible human being who is now somehow leading us January 6, 2021, that magical thinking needed to go out the nearest window.

Instead, our Justice Department twiddled its thumbs and allowed the America-attacker to build himself back up, so that WE would have to deal with him AGAIN.

I seethe just thinking about this, but it is where we are right now, and the sooner we all understand this the better.

The clock is ticking. The bomb is in place.

Which brings me back around to my original premise: At some point, he will do something so heinous … so anti-America … so dangerous … that the people who truly love our country will be forced into the streets to take a life-or-death stand. Sadly, this is actually the best-case scenario, because the worst case is we just go quietly into the dark, gloomy night and become an authoritarian country, where we have zero rights or say in how we are governed.

Yesterday under the cover of his blankets, the America-attacker shared this with us:

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Now read the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; OR THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PEACEABLY TO ASSEMBLE, AND TO PETITION THE GOVERNMENT FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES."

He is telling us what he thinks of America and silly things like the Constitution. Kings don’t pay attention to that kind worthless drivel.

And, really, end of the day, it not him who we have most to fear. It’s the stupid, goddam Republicans who are stubbornly in all of our lives. These are the people who have illustrated there is no known pain or sacrifice to our civil liberties or pocketbooks that they won’t absorb just for the satisfaction of watching some poor kid of color going without something they didn’t think she should have.

So the choice is yours: You can continue thinking there is some magical way out of this, or you can begin to take the threat to everything you hold dear seriously, and ACT accordingly.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

Let’s get this out of the way: I wouldn’t watch Traitor Trump deliver his Russian propaganda to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night with your eyes.

If you are interested in the truth about the state of our union, hang with me for a couple of minutes, while I deliver it here.

Right now the United States is being attacked from within by a demented, drug-addled, South African, apartheid-loving billionaire, and a murderous Russian dictator, who has God knows what on the orange, draft-dodging, reprehensible wannabe-American king who has already violently attacked us once, and is trying his damndest to finish us off for good.

If you are pressed for time, you can stop right there, because that really is the nut of it. It surprises me that this is so hard for the corporate media to report, and for Democrats to message.

We are under attack.

Our “union” has not faced a threat like this since a Civil War that tried to rip it apart, and resulted in the deaths of 620,000 Americans, or an astonishing two percent of the population at the time.

And if you are saying, well that’s not going to happen again, I will keep the comments open as always so you can tell my why, because I am telling you again: Trump’s only goal is to demolish America, and hold power until he finally, blessedly expires. I guarantee you he could care less how many people die, or how much hurt he inflicts while he attempts this.

He provably hates this country, and most of the people in it.

Nothing … Let me repeat that, NOTHING, that Trump is doing right now (or ever) is for the good of America, and EVERYTHING Trump is doing is for the good of himself, and the billionaire oligarchs who helped install him in office.

I should also say quickly while I am passing credit around for our demise that the dangerous right-wing extremists who are literally telling us they want to replace our democracy with a Christo-fascist regime are also yuge fans of this psychopath. These are the broken souls who Trump has referred to as “fine people.” Trump is the broken soul who his big sister, Maryanne, once told us is “cruel” “has no principles” and “can’t be trusted.”

Nobody knows a person better than his big sister.

This is old news, sure, but for the life of me, I can’t understand why stuff like this isn’t being used repeatedly in coverage of this sickening man to remind people who he really is. That the media has normalized him as anything but a gruesome monster, is a truly epic failure, and is as good a reason as any for the abominable state of our union.

America is a complete mess right now because one of the two major political parties is pathetically weak and cowardly, and has surrendered to a known killer. And if you think I am going too far here, you can also use the comments below to tell me how ignoring climate-change, eliminating vaccines, defunding cancer research, attacking Medicaid, and torching myriad other life-saving and/or life-enhancing programs isn’t going to result in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

This, of course, is on top of his appalling response to Covid that resulted in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of other Americans during his first go at wiping us out.

He is a one-man killer pandemic, who is being given room to gasp for air by a Republican Party that used to know our enemies when they saw them, unless, of course, they were busy bombing the bejesus out of innocent countries they told us were enemies for no good reason …

Er, on second thought, strike that. The Republican Party was ripe for the picking by a soulless, woman-abusing tongue-dragger who would rather burn books than read them.

Shock and awful.

As I typed above I have absolutely no interest in watching or listening to this wretched ghoul — ever. I know what he is, and what he is capable of. He will undoubtedly go lower than a sewer rat Tuesday because it is his singular talent.

The truth is, prices are high and getting higher right now, and anybody with a damn brain in their head knows all these jack-assed tariffs are only going to take them higher. He has not spent a minute talking about high prices or inflation since taking office, because he specializes in bankruptcies and grifts. Even the stock market is underwater thanks to his deluge of moronic economic policy.

He is leveling our federal government to make Putin and the billionaire oligarchs happy, and thousands of American families miserable, whose only sin was to choose a professional life in public service.

He is bringing back dirty air, dirty water, and the measles.

He is killing centuries-old alliances that were built brick by brick thanks to the ultimate sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of men and women, who fought against fascism, instead of defending it.

He is engaged in a Hitler-esque takeover of our armed forces, because NOTHING he does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America, and EVERYTHING he does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America.

Bluntly? He is up to no good.

THAT is the state of things in this damn country.

If you are somehow still confused by this, by all means go ahead and watch Tuesday night, but don’t you dare tell me I didn't warn you.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.