Trump’s Actions So Far: Sure Looks Like Fascism

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For over a year as he campaigned for the presidency, we have heard Donald Trump voice intentions that do not sound like our country’s constitutional democracy. We heard about Project 2025, a 920-page treatise prescribing the harsh measures needed to transform America into a Christian conservative nation.
We learned that a central tenet was the “unitary presidency” in which the president has direct control over the entire federal government. The liberal media filled with opinion pieces about the coming autocracy. Trump quipped that he would be a dictator, but only on Day One.

But few reporting Trump’s plans went so far as to apply the “fascism” label. With Trump now in office and after just a single week of action, it’s time the scales fall from their eyes.

a definition

Fascism has no one definition. Its most succinct is from Mussolini himself: “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”, and as dictator he could have added that he was the state. Fascism centralizes the government in the dictator who sets the laws. Fascists are not constrained by constitutions. It exalts the nation over the individual, the race that makes up that nation, the religion of that nation. Mussolini espoused doctrines of racial superiority, xenophobia, imperialism, and his own power. Hitler took the same manias further, ostracizing and then murdering those not of the German (Aryan) race.

trump law

Immediately he was inaugurated, Trump appropriated the law unto himself. Many in his blizzard of executive orders, although dreadfully mistaken, such as withdrawal (again) from the Paris Accords on climate and exiting the World Health Organization, are entirely within his right as president, but others tell us he thinks the Constitution is just a nuisance. He took some of these actions within hours of swearing to “preserve, protect and defend” the founding document, the oath presidents must swear to at inauguration, its words prescribed by the Constitution itself.

 In swift violation, Trump ordered U.S. agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the U.S. if neither mother nor father is a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. Trump does not want citizenship to go to brown people — or Blacks, such as Haitians, whom he wanted us to believe were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. In his zeal to preserve America for the white race, he seeks to override the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment which states,

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

At last count, the attorneys general of 22 states have filed suit. A federal judge in Seattle has temporarily blocked Trump’s order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional”, telling the Justice Department to refrain from any enforcement.

The question is whether Trump may put his immunity to use and disobey the courts by using every means to encumber his targeted Americans, such as ordering that they not be issued passports, prevented from voting, be denied government social benefits.

 In just his first week, Trump broke yet another law, firing 18 inspector generals across the federal government, with dismissals immediate in violation of advance notice required by the statute. The law stipulates that:

“”President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both houses of Congress…not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer.”

He would need 18 written explanations, yet all he has to say is “Some people thought that some were unfair or some were not doing the job”. What people? Trump’s imaginary “people are saying”. He says of the firing, “It’s a very standard thing to do”. It is not. Inspectors general stay in place from one administration to the next irrespective of party switch.

Trump’s spokespeople have said that they need inspectors general who agree with the president’s agenda and changing priorities. That’s not the role of strictly neutral inspectors general. Main Republican Senator Susan Collins called out the president’s hypocrisy:

“I don’t understand why one would fire individuals whose mission is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse. So this leaves a gap in what I know is a priority for President Trump.”

The door will now now be wide open for corruption, for kickbacks, bribes, no bid contract letting. The Brookings Institution has calculated that every dollar invested in inspectors generall has brought back thirteen dollars to the American taxpayer. No longer.

 He ordered that enforcement of the TikTok ban be delayed to allow still more time — additional to the 276 days already granted by the law — for the Chinese owning company ByteDance to find an American buyer. The law provides for an extension only if he can certify there is “significant progress” toward a sale. There is none in sight. Trump is therefore unconstitutionally undermining a law passed with bipartisan support by Congress, signed by President Biden, and even just days ago affirmed to go forward by the Supreme Court.

 In contravention of another law, the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, he directed the U.S. armed forces to provide troops, detention space, transportation, and aircraft to enforce border security. The Act restricts the use of federal troops in domestic law enforcement, a principle that dates as far back as Ninth Century England. Will the troops stay clear of that? At a time when the immigrant flow is at its lowest in years, he decreed a national emergency to justify sending 1,500 troops to the border because migrants make for an “invasion”.

 Trump asked the Justice Department to dismiss with prejudice (meaning they cannot be resumed in some future year)…

“all pending indictments against individuals for their conduct related to the events at our near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

Additional to allowing possible crimes to go unprosecuted, we here have the first instance of Trump directly giving orders to the Department of Justice. Traditionally presidents do not interfere with the conduct of justice. Dictators do.

racial purity

They have made seemingly impossible journeys to come here, seeking asylum from predatory regimes or murderous gangs in their home countries or to find work to support their families, but Trump has characterized them as criminals, rapists, released convicts, mental defectives, with only “some of them good people”. He speaks of migrants as “vermin” and “poisoning the blood” with direct antecedents in Hitler’s “thinking with the blood” and “community of blood”.

His racist rants legitimate comparisons as a test for fascism. As soon as they gained power in 1933, Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis) began herding into concentration camps those of the rival Communist Party, and then began isolating Jews with exclusionary laws. We will be watching, although it will probably be done secretly with access the press denied access, the parallel in the Trump regime’s plan to round up and force into detention camps undocumented migrants in the millions for deportation, or so they intend.

jailbreak

But Trump’s most flagrant abuse of power was to overturn the justice system by pardoning the insurrectionists who had attacked the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, more than 400 of whom were convicted of assaulting police officers — 140 of them injured and seven dead of related causes. Additional to 14 whose sentences were commuted, his order reads:

“…a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021…”

The Constitution directs the president that “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”, but Trump calls them “hostages”. They are individuals convicted of crimes by juries in the United States justice system — the result of the largest federal prosecution in Department of Justice history. Trump dissolved it entirely with flamboyant strokes of his Sharpie, holding it up for the cameras to say “Look what I can do”.

The president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States” says Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution. It is safe to say the authors did not have in mind Trump’s colossal abuse of the privilege. Not only has he pardoned 1,500 convicts, but they were rewarded for committing crimes in service of Donald Trump. That’s the only reason he pardoned them.

It is a disastrous decision, an assault on the justice system. Apparently impetuous to get past the issue quickly, and without any consideration of its ramifications, Trump vacillated during an internal debate over targeted clemency vs. blanket release, Axios reports, and finally just said, “F**k it: Release ’em all”. Wiping out the massive work of identifying the attackers, developing evidence, taking them to court has made enemies of hundreds of career prosecutors in the Justice Department and of judges who conducted the trials.

Trump has returned to the streets violent people who bludgeoned the Capitol Police with flag poles, bear spray, fire extinguishers, stolen riot batons, and fists on their way to find Congress members and Vice President Pence with murderous intent. The police have been getting warnings on their cell phones as each convict is released who that officer testified against. They, prosecutors, and judges have to fear violence against themselves and their families. They must be constantly vigilant; an assailant gets to pick his moment. That is what Trump has unleashed.

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy, said at Miami Airport,

“I’m happy that the president’s focusing not on retribution…but I will tell you that I’m not going to play by those rules. The people who did this, they need to feel the heat.”

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes served two years of an 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy said of the pardons,

”All the wrongs are being undone. So none of these people should have been here in the first place…President Trump did the right thing…because they did not get a fair trial.”

Asked by Alex Wagner, reporting for NBC at a prison outlet, “Did you ever feel like he had landed you guys in jail?”. A woman answered,

”Absolutely not…Now why was I sitting in prison while Anthony Fauci is loose? Why am I sitting prison when Liz Cheney is loose? Why did those people get pardoned, because they’re guilty and were never brought to justice, and yet me and mom made a mistake and broke a window at the Capitol. I’m sorry, but do I have to lose my whole life for it? We have these criminals running the government that now have pardons. That bothered me.”

No mention that Trump ruined their lives and served no time. One young newly-released inmate said of Trump,

”This man’s been indicted, he’s been attacked, he’s been shot at, he’s been through hell. The man is not a quitter, and so if this man really needed us to show up somewhere,…I have no right to quit on him, so I would show up.”

Jake Angeli-Chansley, the “American Shaman” who was costumed in a fur hat with horns in the Capitol rotunda, tweeted (in all caps) “Thank you Mr. Trump!!! Now I am gonna buy some motha***in guns!!!”.

There was no trace of remorse from the convicts. They carry the reverse image of believing they were rescuing the country from a stolen election, that it is Biden who should be in prison. As former Republican Congressman Denver Riggleman said, “Every single person that day, whether they attacked the Capitol or not, believed in something that was false.” Donald Trump had told them they were right.

With Trump’s new best friend and influencer Elon Musk giving the Nazi salute – twice – and at the inauguration, no less, and supporting the far-right to neo-Nazi party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) as Germany’s best hope, there is no reason we shouldn’t speculate about fascism.
Trump has apparently been doing his homework on how to be a dictator beyond Day One. The backdrop of his town hall in which he swayed to music for 39 minutes said in giant letters, “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING”. New York University professor and scholar of fascist Italy, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, says,

“This is totally fascist. Mussolini’s slogan was ‘Mussolini is always right / Mussolini ha sempre ragione’”.

Most of all, Trump wanted his insurrectionist horde back on the street. They are for him a private army to call on, a loyal army who owes him for their freedom. You should not think for a minute that he is unmindful of this. It’s yet another fascist parallel should Trump put this resource to use. He can summon them to act as praetorian guard when he visits a hostile city, there to break up protests and rough up protesters, much like Mussolini’s blackshirts. Far-fetched? He has already shown his inclination, having protesters tear-gassed in Lafayette Park June 1, 2020, to clear the way to go to St. John’s Church. Trump can tell them “Do whatever you want, I’ll pardon you.”

We need to pay close attention. Yale history professor, Timothy Snyder, another scholar of fascism and author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”, warns us:

”The only thing that people can cite against [Trump wanting to be a dictator] is the idea that it can’t happen here, or somehow an American couldn’t do these things. Those are the very ideas that make it happen here, and if you don’t think an American can do it, you’re inviting an American to do it to you”.

Trump Treasury Pick Says Keep Minimum Wage at Poverty Level

Wall Street breathed a “collective sigh of relief”, said Politico when President-elect Trump chose a traditional financial sort, Scott Bessent, to be the next Secretary of the Treasury. He is a “legendary stock trader who understands financial markets”, said the Wall Street Journal. And surprise! The investor and hedge fund manager was once the chief investor for George Soros’s fund.

But nothing rubbed off the left-wing philanthropist billionaire onto Bessent, as we just learned
They largely won. States have steadily raised the minimum
wage, but far from all of them.

from his appearance at the Senate confirmation hearings. Senator Bernie Sanders asked Bessent if he would join legislators “who want to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage to take millions of Americans out of poverty”. Back came the standard, reflexive conservative evasion in this exchange:

Bessent: Senator, I believe that the minimum wage is more of a statewide and regional issue.

Sanders: You don’t think we should change the federal minimum wage of seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour?

Bessent: No sir.

The last time the minimum wage was changed — to $7.25 an hour — was 2009. The sixteen years since are the longest stretch without increase since the minimum wage was made law in 1938. And, of course, inflation has eaten away at even that low wage. For what $7.25 got you in 2009 you would need $10.60 today. Put another way, 2009’s $7.25 has the buying power of only $4.96 today. And this way: A person working an eight-hour shift with no time off over 52 weeks would make only $15,080 for the year — the poverty level Sanders and cohort hopes to dispatch to a shameful past.

NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Donald Trump about the minimum wage in her interview on “Meet the Press” in early December. She held up what appeared to be a map showing “these nineteen states that voted for you” that still keep to the federal level of $7.25 an hour. The implication was clear. Isn’t this the working class in the mid-country that the MAGA movement is pledged to champion? Trump’s reaction:

“It’s a very low number I will agree. Let me give you the downside, though. In California they raised it up to a very high number. It’s had a very negative impact.”

There it was again, the automatic deflection away from Welker’s nineteen to the state that had, beginning last April, instituted the highest minimum wage in the land — $20 an hour for fast-food restaurant workers. Sanders and allies are of course not advocating a federal rise to $20, which makes Mr. Trump’s detour deceitful. Moreover, Trump was still going by the prediction that the California wage hike would cause job loss and restaurants would go out of business. But by the interview eight months later, California employment in the fast-food sector had increased.

Trump did relent a bit, adding, “But there is a level at which you could do it. Absolutely”. Raise the wage, that is. But now we have Mr. Bessent sticking with the Dickensian world of depression wages that he wants to preserve for the billionaire class to exploit.

States other than the nineteen have repeatedly been raising the minimum wage for years. On January 1st, 21 states did so again. For 13 it was an inflation adjustment. Current rates for other than the nineteen range from $10.30 an hour in Montana to $17.00 in Washington D.C. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal tells us that,

“the unseen effect will be added pressure on many businesses to cut hours, increase prices, and automate away opportunities for unskilled workers seeking a first job”.

This is always the Journal‘s hand-wringing on behalf of business. Let’s Fix This Country ran a number of articles on the this subject as far back at early 2013. In them the Journal was saying much the same as now, even giving the CEO of a restaurant chain the run of the op-ed page to frequently harangue against any increase in the wage.

Except it’s a big lie for the benefit of business. The dire warnings of “unseen effect” have never materialized. Instead, after years of minimum wage increases across the country we have a booming economy and unemployment under 4%.

Bessent tried to make “regional issue” his answer against a minimum wage increase. He was presumably referring to the varying cost of living in different states. In those 19 states still holding the line at $7.25, an increase would make for prices people could not afford, is that claim. That is always the stock line at the Journal as well: Those are places “where a buck usually goes much further than on the coast”. It is a glib excuse to do nothing. But no one’s argument is to raise the wage to the level of the coastal states.

And if once true, is it still the case that a number of states like Mississippi and Lousiana are so much cheaper? Cheaper in the ratio of $7.25 to D.C.’s $17.00 an hour? Not something in between? But the rationalization is always recited with no contemporary data to support it.

We pick on the Journal because its editors are still making the same arguments they did in our articles of a decade ago, as evidenced in an editorial this October about the time when Kamala Harris was saying she once worked at a McDonald’s and Trump was strapping on an apron for fifteen minutes so that he could say he’d worked there, too. The WSJ’s shtick is,

”[T]here’s no doubt that fast-food jobs provide young people lessons in treating customers courteously, showing up on time, and taking and following orders, which can serve them well throughout their careers.”

Well, yes. No argument about that. Except that the newspaper repetitively uses it to justify keeping the minimum wage at a minimum to give young people jobs.

There’s a problem with that. Some time back, a study found that the average age of a fast-food chain worker was 29, not teen-age. An age when we think people should be able to marry, have children, and support a family. Drop by your favorite fast-food joint and have a look. Are they all in their teens? But the myth will do at the Journal where arguing for business comes before people.

the greed to come

In a further look at who we are about to have as Treasury secretary, Bessent’s answers said hold down wages for those at the bottom, keep the low taxes for the rich. Senator Raphael Warnock asked a series of questions about at what level of personal income might Bessent consider letting tax rates revert to their higher levels in force before the 2017 cuts that are soon to expire? Untimately, Warnock asked, “What about one billion dollars?”. Couldn’t someone earning a hypothetical billion or more dollars in a single year pay the pre-level maximum of 39.6% rather than Trump’s cut to 37%? Bessent answered, “Sir, again, I think these are the job creators”.

You see, they will take that 2.6% difference that might have been used to reduce the annual deficit and go looking for jobs to create. Sure they will.

Chief Justice Doesn’t See Some Threats to Court Are Self-Inflicted

”I feel compelled to address four areas of illegitimate activity that…threaten the independence of judges on which the rule of law depends”, was the subject of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ annual report on the federal judiciary including his own court that he published at year-end. He elaborates on four categories: “(1) violence, (2) intimidation, (3) disinformation, and (4) threats to defy lawfully entered judgments.”

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

To be sure violence and intimidation “directed at judges because of their work” aren’t simply “unacceptable” – the weak word he uses – but must be met with the harshest of legal penalties. But he seems blinkered for his report’s complete failure to show a recognition that the Supreme Court itself has contributed at least to widespread criticism if not yet open defiance of “lawfully entered judgments”.

undercut by gaping ethics lapses

There is no mention whatever of the investigative reporting by Pro Publica that beginning in 2023 unearthed twenty years of scandalous ethics violations by Justice Clarence Thomas for accepting lavish cost-free travel and vacation benefits bestowed upon him and wife Ginni by billionaire Harlan Crow and by his never reporting any. Crow over the years had interests in many issues that had come before the court so there has been more than a whiff of corruption.

Further sleuthing found the same sort of violations by Justice Samuel Alito. Still more instances of “personal hospitality” accepted by Thomas and Alito were revealed just this Christmas-week by a two-year Senate investigation. And yet, responding in 2024 to the outrage that the court needed an enforceable code of conduct, the court refused any oversight and came up with a tepid code that left recusal solely up to the individual justice and didn’t even fully nail down reporting of gifts.

Roberts has no end of problems with Alito, a free range justice who can’t find any fault in his actions, and instead has often been in a lather over criticism of the court:

“This type of concerted attack on the court and on individual justices [is] new during my lifetime…We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.”

In May The New York Times broke the story that an upside-down American flag – a signal of distress but also of protest and seen at the January 6th uprising — had been hanging at the Alito’s house. His wife’s doings, said the justice. Another, an historic “Appeal to Heaven” flag associated currently with the movement for a more Christian government, was seen outside their New Jersey vacation house.

The public has a naïve view that judges ought to be neutral, that flying banners and flags with political connotations of any sort is impropriety, yet Alito refused calls to recuse himself from cases related to January 6th as did Thomas, whose wife Ginni, in close to 30 messages to Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, had strongly advocated in the run-up to January 6th that everything in his power be done to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and hand Donald Trump a second term as president. No conflicts there, right?

In 2023, Alito sat for Wall Street Journal interviews with lawyer David Rivkin, giving Alito the opportunity to express his views to a wide audience. Rivkin often wrote opinion pieces for the Journal but at that moment represented the petitioners at the Supreme Court in Moore v. U.S.. If Rivkin’s softball interviews were not currying favor from Alito, they sure had the appearance, yet the justice refused to recuse himself from the case. “When Mr. Rivkin participated in the interviews and co-authored the articles, he did so as a journalist, not an advocate”, was how Alito self-justified the conflict.

And just about when Roberts was polishing his report, Alito was at it again. One of his former law clerks asked Alito to take a call from Trump regarding his qualifications for a certain government position. Alito was effectively creating a debt owed to Trump by asking him the favor of hiring his former law clerk. This was happening the day before the Supreme Court would rule on whether Trump’s sentencing in the New York “hush money” case could go forward. Trump and his lawyers had petitioned the court to halt the sentencing — the final step that made Trump a convicted felon before he became president, which Trump passionately sought to avoid. Alito in a statement said he had no idea Trump would petition the court, a move the media had openly contemplated beforehand because that is what Trump always does. Democrat Representative Jamie Raskin did not mince words:

“Justice Alito’s decision to have a personal phone call with President Trump – who obviously has an active and deeply personal matter before the court—makes clear that he fundamentally misunderstands the basic requirements of judicial ethics or, more likely, believes himself to be above judicial ethics altogether.”

the court’s complicity

That brings up a larger question about how the Supreme Court conducts its business. Trump did what no other criminal defendant in history has ever done. He appealed directly to the Supreme Court to block his criminal sentencing scheduled for two days later in New York. He did so before exhausting all of his appeals within the state “which is the normal sequence for anyone not named Trump” as Chris Hayes of MSNBC put it. The Trump lawyers made an “appeal raising claims of Presidential Immunity”. He was not yet president again and was convicted of crimes committed when he was then not yet president either. Nevertheless, the court treated it as an emergency petition and turned it around within 24 hours.

The question is why did the Supreme Court honor this petition at all? Just as Roberts is complaining about the disrespect of the courts, the justices were granting privileged access unequalled even by the three-day turnaround when the court stopped the Florida vote count and awarded the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, scarring the court’s record forever.

Moreover, while the court said sentencing could go forward, it did so because the judge had said in advance that there would be no consequences — no jail time, no penalties, Trump didn’t even have to show up in person, which is unheard of in sentencing. As attorney for the Democratic Party Marc Elias wisecracked, “The only thing he left out is giving him parking validation and making sure he doesn’t have to pay congestion pricing to travel to the court house.” The implication was that the partisan court would have halted sentencing had Judge Merchan in New York imposed any inconvenience.

The vote was 5-to-4 vote with Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett siding with the three liberal justices. But note that four said that sentencing should not happen. They dishonored a jury’s finding of Trump’s guilt (and Trump has endless opportunity under the justice system to appeal), a signal that these four justices are in Trump’s corner whatever. Is it any wonder that such favored treatment has contributed to a public questioning of the court’s legitimacy?

and then there are the decisions

“Within the past few years…elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings”, Roberts writes. Perhaps he should look to his own court for such “lawfully entered judgments” that are breeding defiance.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, a radical assault on 50 years of precedent, was met with fury. During arguments seven months before the decision, Justice Sonia Sotomayor bitterly criticized her conservative colleagues.

“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible.”

Nothing has changed that assessment. No matter one’s passions about abortion, turning control over to the states has created ongoing chaos. At its worst, it is causing horrifying deaths in states such as Texas where the laws are so mindlessly severe that gynecologists are leaving the state and hospitals fear prosecution for saving the lives of dying pregnant women. Is Roberts mindless of the aftershocks and danger Dobbs, as it is called, has caused. His report is silent.

Moreover, that Roe was repealed soon after the reconfiguring of the court with three new conservative justices amplified the public’s questioning of the courts legitimacy. There’s the ongoing stench of how that came about. Inventing the mendacious nonsense that no justice should be installed in a presidential election year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell violated the Constitution’s call for “advice and consent” by blocking for 11 months any consideration of Obama’s choice (Merrick Garland) to replace Antonin Scalia to give Trump the choice (Neil Gorsuch), and then, while voters were already casting ballots in the presidential election year four years later, changed his to ram through a third Trump pick (Amy Coney Barrett) before Biden took office. When justices are replaced and the laws suddenly change, it “doesn’t look like law”, said Justice Elena Kagan.

anointed above the law

Last year’s blockbuster decision was that the president should have total immunity from prosecution for official actions even if illegal. Roberts’ report is on the “federal judiciary”, not just his court, but there is no mention of this momentous change in his annual report! He fears malcontents starting to disobey rulings of the courts in “defiance of judgments lawfully entered by courts of competent jurisdiction”, yet has practically invited malcontent Donald Trump — constantly railing against prosecutors, judges, and the legal system, and intent on retribution — to break laws at will with no consequences. The public sees this special deference accorded to a single person – yes, it applies to future presidents, but it was tailored to protect Trump, even rigged with prohibitions against the use at trial of certain evidence – and finds the Supreme Court not just biased but corrupt. It has elevated this one man above the law.

It was the culmination of a long process. It began when the court overturned the Colorado Supreme Court decision to keep Trump off that state’s ballot. A lower court had found Trump guilty of fomenting an insurrection which made him ineligible to run for federal office according to the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. That section reads as self-executing, just as the due process section of that same amendment has always been treated, yet the court ruled that Congress must decide whether there has been an insurrection and whether the amendment should prevail. That obviously would not and did not happen. How is this not “lawfare”? It would have been impractical for each state to have decided the insurrection/ballot question, but nevertheless we watched the court void a section of the Constitution in favor of Donald Trump.

When Judge Tanya Chutkan moved the D.C. District Court toward trial of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump’s attempted government overthrow, Trump’s lawyers claimed that as president the ir has immunity from prosecution. Chutkan ruled there was no such immunity; Trump appealed. So comprehensive and convincing was the unanimous decision by the three judge panel of the appellate court that it was thought that the Supreme Court would decline to even hear the case, yet once again it intruded in Trump’s favor. First it took weeks to do so, then months of further delay before finally coming up with the entirely novel notion — and not until July — that after almost 250 years the presidency needed to be shielded by immunity. The court had so blatantly stretched the process — wasn’t there about to be an election and shouldn’t voters know whether the candidate was guilty or innocent? – that there was no time left before the election for the Smith trial to proceed. The fix was in.

It was not a good year for Roberts to say in his report, “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them” when his own court had rigged the outcome and eroded trust. He was apparently surprised that his lofty arguments didn’t soar above politics to convince the public that it wasn’t about Trump. “Our perspective must be more farsighted.”

the death of expertise

Conservatives have long inveighed against the “administrative state”, by which is meant government agencies fleshing out legislation with the actual rules of how they are to be implemented. They got their wish last year when the court last year used its 6-to-3 conservative supermajority to deliver a decisive blow to what those on the right like to call “unelected bureaucrats”. The six justices cut back sharply the power of federal agencies to interpret laws; henceforward, the courts will do their own interpreting.

The court has again overturned precedent — its decision in the 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council the the courts should give deference to the agencies expansion of a law in its rule-making when the legislation is ambiguous or not fully spelled out. This became known as the Chevron Doctrine.

The court’s decision hands to business what they have wanted: the expectation that when they sue to challenge a regulation, the agencies are out of the loop. The courts will decide. But the agencies specialize in their many fields, whether agriculture, energy, drugs — a long list. Cases will now go before judges who are entirely ignorant. Imagine their having to rule on whether the a ban on a chemical should be lifted which the EPA has decided is too hazardous in the human environment. The common sense view is that the Supreme Court has shown itself gto be incompetent for its wildly impractical ruling. Moreover, it is viewed as appropriation to itself the court system what is the purview of the executive branch — a devious power grab.

Yet Roberts wonders there is a worrisome increase in threats to defy the courts. Be still. “It is not in the nature of judicial work to make everyone happy. Most cases have a winner and a loser.” The court decides for us and we should not raise our voices.

Jan 17 2025 | Posted in Law | Read More »

Year-End Clearance: Some News Items That Shouldn’t Be Left Behind

In no particular order:

STOP THE CLOCK: The Supreme Court will on January 10th decide whether a controversial ban on the social media app TikTok, signed by President Biden in April of last year and about to take effect January 19th, violates the First Amendment. But Donald Trump’s lawyers have submitted a brief to the Court asking that their hearing be postponed until after Trump is inaugurated the day after, January 20th, so that the then-president can negotiate a compromise.

“President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal-making expertise, the electoral mandate and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the government”

A baffled MSNBC host Christina Ruffini asked,

“Does the president even have standing to do this? And what kind of a motion is this? Is this an amicus brief, a writ? I don’t know what this is. Can he just involve himself in a case that he is not, you know, a party to?”

But Trump appointed three out of the nine justices, so he thinks he, still just a citizen, has a right to special deference.

THE GREAT ONE: It rises majestically to its snow-capped peak 20,310 above the near sea-level Alaska tundra, the most rapid ascent of any mountain on Earth. It was unaccountably named Mt. McKinley after the 25th president until President Obama’s Department of the Interior granted Alaska’s long-standing request that the mountain finally be renamed Denali, meaning “The High One” or “The Great One” in the language of Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascan people who have inhabited these lands for thousands of years.

But now, as part of Trump’s campaign to reverse everything of the nation’s first black president, Trump wants the mountain restored to the McKinley name. In a speech before the arch-conservative group Turning Point USA in Phoenix, Trump obscurely said:

“They took his name off Mount McKinley, right? That’s what they do to people. That’s one of the reasons that we’re going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley, because I think he deserves it. . . That was not very gracious to somebody that did a good job.”

Alaskans are furious. Denali is the state’s official name for the mountain, ignoring the McKinley label. The mountain is located in Denali National Park and Preserve. Denali is a commonly used name elsewhere in Alaska, for an interior borough, schools, a highway. As for McKinley, he was from Ohio. He never set foot in Alaska.

MAGAFEST DESTINY: It was laughed at when proposed late in his presidency, but it has returned, and this time he means it. Mr. Trump again wants Greenland, calling it “an absolute necessity”, never mind that Denmark and Greenland have a long history dating back to the 10th century when Norse explorers settled there.

Additionally, he is irate that Jimmy Carter signed away control of the Panama Canal, which he says is now charging U.S. ships exorbitant rates to transit. He is irate, also, that the American flag is at half-mast for Carter, probably ignorant that control of the canal would have reverted to Panama a quarter century ago on the last day of 1999 under the Panama Canal Treaty.

As if that is not imperialism enough, Trump has begun calling Canada the 51st state, referring to President Justin Trudeau as its “governor”. Is it that he wants to show Vladimir Putin that he, too, can take away other countries’ land?

Fact is, Greenland would be valuable for national security reasons, a strategic choke point against Russia’s increasing activity across the top of the world now that ice melt has made navigation possible. It also has the rare earth minerals needed for this century’s technology that China, the world’s biggest source, is keeping for itself in retaliation against Biden’s export ban of semiconductor chips and technology that China is using to build its military against us.

Trump is also worried that the Panama Canal could fall into the “wrong hands”, taking note that a Hong Kong firm controls two ports near the canal. “We will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States”, he said to a crowd in Phoenix.

SOONER SUMMER SUNSETS: It is unclear what moved Donald Trump to deliver at this moment an edict on Truth Social that,

”The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

The costs were not enumerated, but neither was there any knowledge of how planet Earth tilts and curves. Down where he is, there are 10 ½ hours of daylight even on the shortest day of the northern hemisphere — the Winter Solstice, December 21. Mr. Trump doesn’t need the extra light for his golf afternoons. But he would take away the northern latitudes’ light in late afternoons from March to November.

VISA VITRIOL: A feud erupted at year-end when Trump hired Sriram Krishnan as senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence, a venture capitalist who has argued that there should be no green card and H-1B visa limits. A limited number of H-1Bs are handed out each year to foreigners with special skills needed by U.S. tech companies.

Trump allies objected. Wasn’t the president-to-be elected to deport immigrants who are taking jobs that should belong to Americans? Right-wing extremist and Trump Influencer Laura Loomer called Krishnan’s appointment “deeply disturbing”.

Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are users of H-1B talent. Musk tweeted about those objecting to H-1B visas, “Those contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem”, and later explained “contemptible fools” to mean “those in the Republican Party who are hateful unrepentant racists”. H-1Bs are “the top 0.1% of engineering talent”, is Musk’s point. It’s like the NBA recruiting foreign players to “help your whole team (which is mostly Americans!) win the NBA”.

Ramaswamy claimed on X that recruiting foreign workers is necessary because America “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” Musk agreed, saying that “the number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.”

Trump will have to figure out how to work both sides of this schism: The less-educated working class who elected him who think they are qualified for such jobs, and the billionaire tech-bros who know they aren’t. For now, it looks like he’s with Musk: Trump said a few days ago:

“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”

Of course Trump would be hiring common workers under the H-2B visa allotment, not H-1B; his properties hired 209 foreign workers in 2024 for jobs that Americans might have wanted, contrary to his pledge to supporters.

Will Bunch, columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer observes that Musk is “a man with 11 kids who spends Christmas Eve tweeting” on his soapbox X. Once holding liberal views, Musk has taken a decided turn to the right, tweeting one recent morning (at !:03 AM) support for Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) political party : “’Only the AfD can save Germany.” Next will he get behind Marine Le Pen in equally troubled France?

1846 TO 1848 REDUX: James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, a firm that does political risk analysis. He wrote in November at World Politics Review that,

“Trump appears to be moving toward a more aggressive use of the U.S. military at the border to combat migration, and his advisers are also building a case for cross-border military operations into Mexico. In other words, the signs are that the incoming Trump administration is preparing for an actual war against the drug cartels in 2025 that goes well beyond the ‘War on Drugs’ of the past.”

Several members of Trump’s team are reportedly on board with plans to launch military operations into Mexico. Political scientist Daniel Drezner, writing at Substack says that,

“When it comes to Mexico or the Panama Canal, however, it is hard to believe that Trump will back down. I sure don’t see Marco Rubio trying to talk him out of it. As I noted in the New York Times, ‘Mr. Rubio’s own hawkishness will mesh well with the MAGA view on Latin America; expect to see lots of American force used in that region.’”

President-elect Donald Trump’s expansionist cravings have left Russian propagandists “delighted”, according to a new report from The Daily Beast‘s Julia Davis.

She monitors and translates Russian state television news broadcasts. She says Kremlin insiders see Trump’s bellicosity toward neighbors as an equivalence acceptance of Russia’s war of conquest in neighboring Ukraine.

WHO KNEW?: In a mid-December press conference, the president-elect said,

“I’ve spoken to way over 100 people, where they called to congratulate not only the election but also the size of the election and the extent of the victory.”

But what really wow’d him was,

“You wouldn’t believe how many countries there are. There are a lot of countries.”

After four years a president and a president about-to-be, Mr. Trump was surprised there are a hundred countries, having no clue that there in fact 195. Former City University of New York professor and “This Week in Google” podcast host Jeff Jarvis was unforgiving: “The idiot you elected, America.”

PAY TO PRAY: You can participate in the inaugural festivities, but each has a price tag befitting its “benefits”. If you give $100,000 or raise $200,000 you attend church with the president-elect at the “One America, One Light Sunday Service” on January 19th.

CRIME FICTION: After the horrific slaughter in New Orleans, Trump tweeted,

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true. The crime level in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

Crime, especially murder, has been dropping sharply for years in a row. The New Orleans suspect, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was a Texan born in the United States and served in the U.S. Army.

DOES LIKE THIS IN THE CONSTITUTION: As one after another corporate billionaire came to present their one-million dollar inaugural offerings at dinner with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, seeming permanent resident Elon Musk invited himself to join them. And he had inserted himself into the funding deliberations in the House, telling Speaker Mike Johnson to scuttle an1,800-page bill and substitute a continuing resolution with just a few pages. The left-wing media took to calling him the “co-president” and then “President Musk”.

“But no, he’s not going to be president that I can tell you”, Trump assured us. “And I’m safe. You know why? He can’t be. He wasn’t born in this country.”

Obama appointee Eric Columbus had fun with that: “The last guy Trump claimed wasn’t born in this country was president for eight years.”

Trump Taps Bhattacharya to Run NIH.     Who?

Hegseth, Kennedy, Gabbard, Patel — The media loops through these controversial choices day after day. Certain of the less-noticed Trump picks are no less controversial but are overlooked. Here’s one of particular importance at a time when viruses pose an increasing threat to the human race.

settled opinion

The right has arrived at a widespread view that lockdown mandates and remote teaching in 2020 and 2021 were the wrong remedies for confronting the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s hindsight that gives no quarter to the epidemiological “experts” – now spoken of with scorn — who had to come up with methods to combat a plague not experienced in a hundred years.

So it was deemed “karmic justice”, said a full-page Wall Street Journal interview, when President-elect Trump tapped Jay (Jayanta) Bhattacharya to be
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The professor at Stanford University was much vilified for his contrarian views in the early months of the outbreak. The article is titled “The Man Who Fought Fauci—and Won” and tells us that his Bengali first name means “one who is victorious in the end.” The newspaper says, “Bhattacharya is as qualified as you can get to be head of the National Institutes of Health”, not least for his nomination being “a triumph of free speech”.

Dr. Bhattacharya is both a physician and economist, a combination that led to statistical conclusions first voiced in March and April of 2020 that made him a pariah in epidemiological circles. He co-authored an op-ed titled “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?” that argued, followed by a study a month later, that the number of asymptotic and undetected cases vastly outnumbered those confirmed by testing, meaning that the death rate relative to all infections was much lower than the alarm sounded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH. Consequently, there was little justification for…

“the extraordinary measures …[of] shelter-in-place orders and quarantines… being carried out in cities and states around the country.”

This was not helpful. Dr. Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, had persuaded President Trump that a few weeks of stay-at-home shutdown of the economy was the right medicine to halt the spread of the virus. The nation was watching on television the refrigerator trucks in New York City hauling away the dead and Governor Cuomo pleading with the federal government for respirators. The death count was of greater alarm than the death rate.

To combat the spread of the disease, the CDC and NIH were following the standard public health practices of the past – avoidance of contact (“social distancing” of six-feet), masks, and
In the U.S., close to 1,500 healthcare workers
aiding the rest of us have died from Covid.

vaccines when they miraculously became available in early 2021. They were dealing with unknowns. Use of hand sanitizers were urged because it was not yet known that Covid was transmitted as an aerosol. Schools closed, because it was not yet known that children proved less susceptible. “Remote learning” was substituted, the fear being kids in classrooms would become Covid carriers and take the virus home to mom, dad, and highly vulnerable grandparents.

Bhattacharya, however, called the lockdown measures “the single biggest public health mistake”, that the “scientific establishment utterly failed during Covid”, that scientists embraced ideas that “failed to actually protect Americans, led to countless people losing their jobs, and of course the harm to children from school closures.”

the great barrington declaration

Months later, in October of 2020, Dr. Bhattacharya and two colleagues, Oxford University Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology Sunetra Gupta and Swedish bio-statistician and former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, published an open letter which they called the “Great Barrington Declaration” (named after the town where it was presented). Dr. Bhattacharya is no stranger to this publication. Here’s what we reported at the time about the declaration:

”It makes no mention of wearing masks, distancing, crowd avoidance, nor any other of the preventives urged for months by scientists and medical professionals. It offers neither footnotes nor data traditional to scientific documents.”

It was something of a petition — its website, in 29 languages, asking for endorsement and claiming that 500,000 “concerned citizens” had signed on, among them over 10,000 medical and public health scientists, and over 28,000 medical practitioners, was its claim. Our report continues:

”The declaration claims that herd immunity can be achieved when as little as 10% to 20% of a population has been infected and carries antibodies, a proposition which the mainstream community finds preposterous. Francis Collins, who heads the National Institutes of Health, calls the theory ‘fringe’ and ‘dangerous’. Fauci called it ‘ridiculous’… It ‘is just nonsense’, said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which produces the widely-cited epidemic model that the White House itself has used in its briefings. A recipe for ‘carnage’ tweeted Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. ‘Allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical,’ was the reaction of the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. ‘Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak’.

Think of vaccines. The standard threshold for herd immunity is at least 60% and more usually 70% of the population having had a disease…The point is that there must be a high enough proportion of persons in any cluster, gathering, or crowd to cause a virus to have difficulty finding someone with no antibody defenses…But with only 10% to 20% having been infected, a virus can easily find targets….The Washington Post did an analysis that showed that for the United States, with a population of 328 million, to reach a 65% herd immunity threshold could lead to 2.13 million deaths.”

The White House was considering adoption of the Barrington method. Trump’s new science adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist having no experience with respiratory diseases, was taken with the theory of “herd immunity” and brought the declaration’s authors to the White House. Our report objected:

”How would older people be protected, as the Great Barrington document blithely assumes?…How could the
nation’s hospitals possibly deal with the onslaught of cases if the disease were allowed to run wild? Does this administration care at all for the safety — both physical and mental — of the nation’s doctors, nurses, and hospital staff?”

All of this is forgotten. Conservative media remembers only the economic setback and the learning loss of school children without regard for the consequences of letting the virus run free. They forget what the Great Barrington Declaration actually said, and celebrates it as virtuous contrarian free speech.

Now riding the wave of revisionist approval, Dr. Bhattacharya presses his case as if proven valid. He bears particular animosity toward Dr. Fauci given his opposite view of how the pandemic should have been handled, referring to him and others as a “small number of scientific bureaucrats” who dominated “for a very long time.” The scientific elite denies…

“scientific facts like immunity…the rights to bodily autonomy, to informed consent, to free speech… deciding that any dissent against their ideas was so dangerous that they weren’t going to permit it.”

These violations “embraced by scientists as necessary to control the pandemic” were unnecessary and failed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths, in Bhattacharya’s view.
It fails to mention that hundreds of thousands of the 1.2 million Americans who died from Covid effectively practiced Dr. Bhattacharya’s herd immunity by refusing to wear masks or get vaccinated.

paired with RFK Jr

The National Institutes of Health is ritually spoken of as the crown jewel of the America health system. It is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). With a budget of $48 billion, the NIH employs roughly 20,000 people at its 27 institutions devoted to different diseases and research. It awards grants of another $31 billion annually for work done by outside organizations and universities.

HHS is soon to be run by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., if the president-elect has his way. “Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research”.

Dr. Bhattacharya has no experience running a large organization but has big plans. He finds the NIH “sclerotic” and offers data that the median age of its researches is a decade older then forty years ago.

“The NIH has not given support for the ideas of younger people that it once did…We’re spending all this money, but we’re not getting the kind of innovation one would expect from this kind of investment.”

He wants to redirect the NIH to chronic diseases such as heart and cardiovascular disease and cancer. The $8 to $10 billion spent on infectious disease is disproportionate, he maintains. His advocacy of herd immunity by allowing “natural infection” squares with Kennedy, who believes vaccines cause autism and says “there is no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective”, and he Covid-19 vaccine is “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Last November, according to NBC News, Kennedy told an anti-vaccine group, “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, ‘God bless you all. Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.’” Deliberate inattention – what sounds like a shutdown of research — at a time when a number of viruses threaten us is more than troubling, especially as we see H5N1 (bird flu) cross over from dairy herds to humans and watch for human-to-human transmissions with what could be a 50% death rate.

Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist currently at the University of Saskatchewan, has worked with the NIH, and has been “on the frontlines of communication” in the media about Covid-19. She is surprisingly outspoken about Dr. Bhattacharya, writing at X:

”Despite his mild manners, Bhattacharya is a self-interested extremist who gives cover to anti-vaxxers & promotes policies that will kill people. He will set American health, innovation, & science back for a generation. He’s not here to reform NIH. He’s here to destroy it.”