Who’s Benefitting?

The corruption on display by the Trump administration just keeps growing. Metastasizing, actually.

A reader recently sent me a video that reported on a little-noted element of ICE’s efforts to acquire warehouses. There’s been a lot of pushback from locals who object to the purchases on the grounds that they will be barely-veiled concentration camps, but I had not previously encountered a different objection, an itemization of the obscene overpayments being made— sales prices that are wildly inflated over assessed values and/or recent, previous acquisition costs, with the identity of those profiting from these transactions difficult to determine.

The woman in the linked video asks a reasonable question: who’s benefiting from this boondoggle?

It’s difficult to grasp the astonishing degree of corruption of the Trump administration–not just the official favors being done for the president’s billionaire cronies (the tax cuts and official permits and terminations of investigations begun under previous administrations), but the numerous outright bribes from foreign countries and domestic fat cats. (The Center for American Progress estimates the Trump family has taken in 1.8 billion in cash and gifts.)

This outright looting has certainly not been accompanied by any moves benefitting the American people. It’s a shame that the length of Trump’s meandering, bloated and mendacious State of the Union speech kept so many people from seeing or hearing the Democratic rebuttal presented by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger–as a recent post from the Contrarian reported, it was a concise and effective 13 minutes.

Spanberger began with three simple questions: Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family?Is the president working to keep Americans safe — both at home and abroad? Is the President working for YOU? She proceeded to point out that Trump’s reckless trade policies have cost American families an average of $1,700 each. (Despite Trump’s insistence that tariffs are paid by foreign countries, they aren’t–as every economist, liberal or conservative, has pointed out, they are a tax on Americans, intended to offset the revenues lost thanks to the deep tax cuts for the wealthy.)  

Spanberger also highlighted the escalating closures of rural health clinics, thanks to provisions in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” 

And tonight, the President celebrated this law — the one threatening rural hospitals, stripping healthcare from millions of Americans, and driving up costs in energy and housing. All while cutting food programs for hungry kids.

Spanberger–who was an intelligence officer with the CIA before entering politics–then turned to the question of public safety, pointing out that ICE’s time spent sowing fear is time “not spent investigating murders, crimes against children, or the criminals defrauding seniors of their life savings.” Worse still, Trump has destroyed America’s reputation as a force for good in the world–outcomes she attributed to the appointment of “deeply unserious people to our nation’s most serious positions.”

Turning to the third of her questions, Spanberger ticked off the multiple grifts of an administration that she quite accurately accused of being the most corrupt in memory. Not only is Trump enriching himself, his family, and his friends at a scale that is unprecedented–“cozying up to foreign princes for airplanes and billionaires for ballrooms”–there’s the ongoing cover-up of the Epstein files, the crypto scams, and the embarrassing plastering of his name and face on buildings all over our nation’s capital.

Spanberger ended her thirteen minutes by reminding her listeners that We the People have the power to stop the desecration of the American Idea. We have the power–and the obligation–to put an end to what is truly a massive theft, not just of our funds, but of America’s founding philosophy.

As she concluded,

George Washington warned us about the possibility of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” rising to power. But he also encouraged us — all Americans — to unite in “a common cause” to move this nation forward.

That is our charge once more. And that is what we are seeing across the country.

It is deeply American and patriotic to do so, and it is how we ensure that the State of our Union remains strong, not just this year but for the next 250 years as well.

If we’ve learned anything from the slow drip of the Epstein files, it is that a class of wealthy and entitled individuals consider themselves above the laws that govern us “little people.” That sense of impunity has now led to unprecedented corruption and the wholesale looting of dollars meant to provide for the public good.

“It’s time for a change” has never been a more powerful slogan.

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Speaking Of Education..

There are many ways to “slice and dice” the U.S. citizenry–ways to distinguish between the Americans who support our mad, would-be monarch, and those who don’t. Research strongly suggests that one of those ways is education–not just the wide distinction in voting patterns between Americans with college degrees and those without (in 2024,college graduates went for Harris by 13 points), but between voters with and without such degrees who continue to cheer the persistent, arguably hysterical war that the administration and the Republican Party is waging against science, history, and genuine education of all sorts.

That war is wide-ranging.

MAGA’s White “Christian” nationalist base is once again trying to post the (cinematic version of the) Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. Red State legislators–very much including Hoosier lawmakers–continue to confuse education with job training, evaluating the “merit” of high school and college programs on the basis of student’s later earnings. RNK, Jr. has led the battle against medical science and probative evidence, while others in the administration continue to force changes to accurate historical displays in the nation’s parks and museums, turning them into “patriotic” propaganda.

But the administration continues to wage its most ferocious war on the nation’s universities. And as Arne Duncan, the former U.S. education secretary, and David Pressman, a former ambassador to Hungary recently argued in the linked essay, America’s universities need to dramatically improve their response to the unremitting assaults on academic freedom.

For decades, universities have cast themselves as guardians of free inquiry and intellectual independence. Yet when confronted with political coercion aimed squarely at those values, too many have revealed a troubling gap between rhetoric and practice.

In their essay, they draw a troubling parallel between what happened to the universities in Hungary and what they see unfolding in the United States. They point out that the early responses were the same, and predict that if the current spinelessness continues, the outcome will also be the same.

In Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Hungary, a kleptocratic and illiberal political movement began not with tanks in the streets, but with pressure, “compacts” and quiet accommodation. Storied institutions of higher education and research were slowly captured, their leaders coerced through financial threats and political pressure.

There, university rectors told themselves that going along was the best way to protect their institutions and their work. But they were wrong. Accommodation did not moderate the regime; it emboldened it, signaling weakness and inviting further demands.

Duncan and Pressman list the Trump administration assaults: conditioning federal research grants on ideological conformity; threatening investigations; freezing funding; intrusive oversight; turning money meant to cure disease and advance knowledge into political ransom. But, as they charge, with only “a handful of notable exceptions,” academic leadership has responded “with timidity, silence or preemptive concession.”

As the authors charge, “When institutional self-preservation replaces moral leadership, universities abandon their core mission. This is a striking abdication of responsibility — particularly from leaders entrusted with educating the next generation of citizens.”

It’s hard to disagree with their warning that allowing legal caution to displace moral leadership is anticipatory surrender.

Lest we be tempted to shrug off that warning, we might want to take a look at what is happening in Florida right now, where Ron DeSantis is making Florida the poster child for the GOP’s war on reality. The state has just handed down a sociology curriculum that they are requiring all public colleges to use– and the Florida Department of Education is already working on a similar framework for American history classes.

Aligned with the state-sanctioned sociology textbook, the framework requires that the courses do not “include a curriculum that teaches identity politics” or one that “is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.”

The Florida Department of Education also distributed an instructor’s manual and textbook, while demanding that institutions submit their current sociology syllabi, “including detailed assignment schedules, topic calendars, or modules to show course coverage.” The state has entirely banned class discussions that “state an intent of institutions today to oppress persons of color,” “that argue most variations between men and women are learned traits and behaviors,” and “that describe when, how, or why individuals determine their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.”

Welcome to Fantasy Island….

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Rights Aren’t Just For People We LIke

One of the pithier explanations of the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment was written by Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in a case titled United States v. Schwimmer. In that opinion, Holmes wrote that “if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

Holmes was acknowledging the obvious: majorities don’t seek to censor popular opinions. They seek to suppress the “ideas we hate,” the beliefs and utterances that they find offensive.

That lesson–that rights are universal, and not reserved for people with whom we agree or people we consider part of our “tribes”–was one of the most difficult for my undergraduate students to learn. Surely the government can sanction people we know are lying! Surely the City Council can pass ordinances against material we consider smut! Surely religious liberty doesn’t mean that atheists and Satanists have the same rights as good Christians!

That pesky principle–that rights also apply to disfavored folks–was the subject of a recent article in the Washington Post,describing yet another aspect of Trump’s inability to grasp that simple concept, or the fact that people he hates (and boy, there are a lot of them!) are entitled to equal treatment under the law.

This particular evidence of Trump’s ignorance involved the pardon power.

As Biden prepared to leave the presidency, he had used that power to commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal prisoners awaiting execution. He didn’t free them; the commutation meant that they will serve life in prison. The article reports that Trump “was outraged at this decision and set out to roll it back.”

Ironically, if Biden had pardoned the murderers altogether or had them released (which would have been constitutionally possible but politically scandalous), Trump couldn’t have done anything about it. But because they remain under life sentences, his administration can still influence their fates. It can’t lawfully kill them, but it can dictate the conditions of their confinement.

Our vicious President issued an executive order on his very first day back in office, declaring his intent to “ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes.” The Justice Department that he has turned into a weapon he controls proceeded to implement the directive by sending those prisoners to the most isolating imprisonment possible — “a ‘supermax’ facility that cuts inmates off from most human contact.”

A number of the affected prisoners brought suit.  U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee in the District of Columbia, ruled that the transfer violated the Constitution’s guarantee of due process, at least in their cases.

As the article points out, It’s a decision that “cuts to the heart of the rule of law.”

Kelly’s opinion is on appeal, and given the unprecedented leeway granted to Trump by the Supreme Court, there’s no telling what the final outcome will be. But as the article points out, Trump’s effort to undo Biden’s clemency is a warning about Trump’s own flagrant misuse of the pardon power, including the threat that it might encourage future presidential successors to “reach for more boundary-pushing ways to get around past pardons.”

Trump has been nothing but “boundary-pushing.” Most pundits attribute that boundary-pushing–more properly labeled illegality–to Trump’s overwhelming desire for power, to the self-aggrandizement that he has displayed throughout his life. That explanation, however, assumes a degree of “knowingness”–a deliberate decision to ignore restraints that he doesn’t believe should apply to him.

I think that’s wrong.

If We the People have learned anything about this sad excuse for a human being, it is that he isn’t just mentally ill, isn’t just slipping into a senility that is getting harder and harder to ignore. He is also profoundly ignorant. He has consistently manifested a lack of understanding of–or even a basic familiarity with– the Constitution he took an oath to defend. He is quite clearly incapable of understanding the quote by Holmes with which I began this post, and if he did understand it, he would reject it.

What We the People have come to understand is the immense–and in many cases, irreversible– damage that can be done to a nation when it elevates a profoundly flawed, incompetent and thoroughly vicious man-child to a position of power.

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Wag The Dog

A new, major disclosure in the slow but inexorable emergence of evidence against Jeffrey Epstein has arguably prompted the madman in the Oval Office to bomb Iran–without bothering to request the required authorization from Congress. 

As Heather Cox Richardson, among others, has reported, it turns out that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) had been running a parallel investigation of Epstein and several other people, not for the sex trafficking that is the subject of the Epstein files, but for drug trafficking, prostitution, and money laundering.

That investigation began under the Obama administration in 2010, and it was still underway in 2015.  It came to light because a heavily redacted document that was found in the files came from the director of the DEA’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF). That document referenced DEA reporting that “the above individuals are involved in illegitimate wire transfers which are tied to illicit drug and/or prostitution activities occurring in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York City.” 

Senator Ron Wyden has described OCDETF as “a premier task force set up to identify, disrupt and dismantle major organized crime and drug trafficking operations.” According to reports, OCDETF targeted dangerous drug cartels, the Russian mafia and violent gangs moving fentanyl and weapons.

The Trump administration abruptly dismantled OCDETF last year, and required the agency to shut down all operations by September of 2025.

Wyden has been focusing on the finances that facilitated Epstein’s organization–following the money. When he found that JPMorgan Chase had “neglected” to report some $4 billion dollars in suspicious financial transactions that were linked to Epstein, he sought additional records from the Treasury Department.

Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, refused to produce them.

Wyden has now introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act. (The Epstein Files Transparency Act didn’t cover Treasury records.) He is quoted as saying that “following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”

As Heather Cox Richardson has reported, Wyden has written to the administrator of the DEA, noting that “[t]he fact that Epstein was under investigation by the DOJ’s OCDETF task force suggests that there was ample evidence indicating that Epstein was engaged in heavy drug trafficking and prostitution as part of cross-border criminal conspiracy. This is incredibly disturbing and raises serious questions as to how this investigation by the DEA was handled.”

Epstein and his fourteen co-conspirators were never charged with drug trafficking or financial crimes. It now appears that the DEA and DOJ during Trump’s first administration simply terminated the investigation. Wyden has pointed out that the heavy redactions in the recently uncovered document  go “far beyond anything authorized by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.” For that matter, the document wasn’t classified, so there was “no reason to withhold an unredacted version of this document from the U.S. Congress.”

Wyden has asked the DEA to produce a number of documents by March 13, 2026, including an unredacted copy of the memo in the files, evidence about what had originally triggered the investigation, why no one was charged, and why the names of the fourteen co-conspirators were redacted.

The very next day after these revelations became public, Trump bombed Iran. The New York Times reported that “The United States, joined by Israel, launched an attack on major cities in Iran, as President Trump called on Iranians to overthrow the government.” 

Permit me to point out that Trump ran on promises to keep America out of wars, that one of his most embarrassing self-owns has been his shameless campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize, and that one of his purported reasons for demanding “regime change” in Iran–the regime’s crackdown on dissenters–is, shall we say, inconsistent with his own deployment of ICE thugs in America’s cities.

It’s a real-life re-enactment of a 1997 American political satire–“Wag the Dog,” a black comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, in which a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer fabricate a war in Albania to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. In a real-world example of life imitating art, the film President was caught making advances on an underage girl inside the Oval Office; recent disclosures strongly suggest that–in addition to shutting down investigations of Epstein, and persistently lying about the extent and duration of his “friendship” with Epstein and their connections to Russia –Trump once raped a thirteen-year-old girl.

How many Americans and others will be killed in this real life effort to wag the dog?

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A Wellness It Isn’t

We all experience repeated echoes from our childhoods, and some of those echoes are apt for our time. If my grandmother were still alive, for example, I can picture her reacting to the ongoing damage being done by RNK, Jr. and the rest of Trump’s clown car by shaking her head and saying “a wellness it isn’t.”

She would be so right. Some recent confirmation:

On CBS’ Sunday Morning, the network’s chief medical correspondent had a lengthy interview with David Oshinsky, author of “Polio: An American Story.” He also interviewed violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, who contracted polio as a child. The segment can be found on YouTube, and is worth watching if you missed it. It included heartbreaking pictures of hundreds of children in iron lungs, and showed the long lines of children waiting for shots with their grateful parents when a vaccine became available. While we contemporary folks like to think that polio has been entirely eradicated, it is still crippling people elsewhere on the globe–and experts warn that RNK, Jr.’s anti-vaccine campaign–a campaign that has consumed too many parents in the U.S.– threatens to invite that dread disease back.

The New York Times tells us that Kennedy’s insane war on effective, life-saving vaccines is curtailing research into these vital protections. The consequences of his war on science, medicine and public health expertise are being felt throughout the industry. Investors are described as “hesitant to bet on a field that has fallen out of favor in Washington,” and manufacturers are seeing declining sales. Pfizer’s chief executive has been quoted as saying that the anti-vaccine animus is “almost like a religion.” Asked what needs to change, he said, “the health secretary” characterizing Kennedy’s rhetoric as “anti-science.”

Indeed. As Lincoln Square recently noted, “certainty has sunk its teeth into his brain, like so many brainworms before it.” The article recounted Kennedy’s efforts to support stem cell treatments, which have not been medically vetted, are not FDA-approved and “have been shown to cause really, really adverse effects. Blindness. Death. Chronic pain.” But RFK, Jr. has “done some reading, found that lots of people say it’s great, and has concluded that the lack of FDA approval isn’t based on a dearth of evidence–he’s convinced that it’s part of the FDA’s war on non-traditional medical treatments.

Who needs pesky evidence?

Rolling Stone conducted an investigation into the growing number of ethical breaches at the CDC, including cases in which appointees allied with Kennedy have approved grant proposals that had not gone through a typical review process. And a complaint filed with the World Health Network details numerous violations of CDC guidelines in the agency’s revisions of recommendations for isolation. 

Corruption can take many forms; at HHS, that corruption appears to be an outgrowth of Kennedy’s obsessions–his evident belief that he knows better than doctors and scientists, and his willingness to rely upon “evidence” that confirms his prejudices while ignoring evidence that rebuts them. Trump’s corruption, on the other hand, is entirely transactional and open to bribery.

A recent example: one of Trump’s innumerable Executive Orders will boost domestic production of the weedkiller glyphosate. As the linked article from Reuters reports, the executive order “invoked the Defense Production Act to ensure the domestic supply of phosphorus and glyphosate, a widely used weedkiller at the center of tens of thousands of lawsuits by plaintiffs claiming it causes cancer.” Trump’s order came after Bayer, which acquired Monsanto and is the only U.S. company that produces glyphosate, proposed a $7.25 billion legal settlement to address tens of thousands of lawsuits claiming its glyphosate weedkiller Roundup causes cancer. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” citing evidence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in studies of exposed workers.

The Executive Order also purports to provide “immunity” for makers of the herbicides. That immunity undoubtedly made the folks at Bayer very happy, and we can only wonder what Bayer promised Trump to persuade him to issue the order, which has infuriated the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement. (Even RNK,Jr. doesn’t defend Roundup…)

It’s all part of this administration’s corrupt war on science and evidence, and its willingness to sell its laws and regulations to the “highest bidder”–the corporate fat-cats and others willing to “bend the knee” and “comply in advance” with the destruction of democracy and the rule of law.

A wellness it isn’t.

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