The Climate War That Trump Is Winning

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Lacking any knowledge of climate science, President Trump nevertheless persists in calling global warming a “hoax”, a “scam”, a “con job” advanced by climate scientists who are “stupid people”. Fittingly, on taking office again, he immediately set about cancelling all climate initiatives, hyping oil and gas with his infantile “drill, baby, drill” mantra, hobbling wind and solar, and slashing regulations.

On his first day he set in motion the yearlong process that removes the United States from the Paris Agreement, the treaty to combat climate change. Adopted by 195 parties at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015, the U.S. is the only country to withdraw, with the White House calling it “restoring American sovereignty” in keeping with “America First”. It is just one of a long list of United Nations organizations that he simultaneously, on his own, chose to cancel by executive order that day.

Halo Mustafa Al Askari, the environmental minister of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, threatened by rising oceans caused by climate change, spoke directly:

”Tragically, the world’s [second] largest emitter of greenhouse gases has withdrawn…Mr. President, this is a shameful disregard for the rest of the world”.

the great undoing

Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is an ardent deregulator. Just weeks ago he celebrated what he called “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States”. His agency has worked to unravel the over 200-pages of peer-reviewed evidence that led to the 5-to-4 Supreme Court Massachusetts v. EPA decision in 2007 that agreed carbon dioxide is a pollutant that, under the Nixon-era Clean Air Act, must therefore be regulated as a threat to public health. That paved the way for the Obama administration to impose a tight schedule of progressive emission reduction for the auto industry, and to force the shutdown of coal-burning power plants.

In February, the Trump administration put an end to this, which is what prompted Zeldin’s euphoria. Trump threw out what came to be called the “endangerment finding”, decreeing that carbon dioxide is to longer a public health hazard. The auto industry can discard emission restrictions, utilities will be free to pollute, abandoned oil and gas wells can be left to leak methane unchecked. Reacting to the announcement, a New York Times headline read “Trump Allies Are Near ‘Total Victory’ in Fight Against Climate Rules”.

A coalition of over 160 civil rights, environmental, faith, health, and labor groups have banded together to call for Zeldin’s ouster for actions the opposite of the agency’s mission of protecting human health and the environment. Zeldin has instead made the EPA business friendly, more concerned to “deliver economic prosperity”. A much smaller EPA will see to its ineffectuality. Some 3,000 of the agency’s 15,000 employees took early buyout offers. Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget calls for a massive 54.5% funding cut.

cutting corners

Zeldin didn’t wait for the lengthy regulation reversal process that nullified the “endangerment finding”. He had put out the word that all companies needed to do to avoid compliance with environmental rules was to send an e-mail to the EPA to ask for an exemption. In response, at least 15 coal-burning power plants, four steel mills, four chemical facilities, and two mines did so. The coal plants did not have to retrofit controls of toxic pollutants such as mercury which can cause developmental problems in infants and children. The chemical plants needn’t curb their pollutants such as ethylene oxide, a gas linked to several types of cancer.

mine, baby, mine

All this is in concert with Trump again moving to revive the coal industry. “Beautiful clean coal” he absurdly calls the dirtiest of the greenhouse gas emitters. He has even had the Energy Department order
that five coal-burning power plants, due for retirement, stay on line; ordered the Pentagon to enter into long-term contracts to buy mire electricity from coal-burning utilities; and awarded $175 million to upgrade six coal-fired plants in four states.

That won him a trophy that read “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal” from an industry group wearing hard hats in the White House. “The goal is to stop the political closure of coal plants” says Energy Secretary Chris Wright, evidently unaware that a nationwide switch to more economical natural gas is what’s been driving the retirement of coal plants. But Trump is winning. Coal use increased 13% last year. Emissions rose 1.9%.

biden retribution

The EPA has been erasing dozens of Biden-era regulations that sought to limit the pollution spewing from automobile tailpipes, power plant smokestacks, and oil and gas wells. For their part, Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have peeled back the climate initiatives in President Biden’s Inflation Control Act as part of the “Big Beautiful Bill”. By last September, renewable energy projects worth $18.6 billion had already been cancelled. Investment in clean energy had dropped by 20%, said The Financial Times.

The repeal of climate regulations and cancelled funds for clean energy could pump between 22 billion and 32 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2055, according to Environmental Defense Fund.

An example is the Solar for All program of the Inflation Reduction Act. It was to help 900,000 households get access to solar energy, saving them about $400 a year and reducing fossil fuel consumption. But Trump considers renewable energy a “green new scam”, mocking the Green New Deal espoused by progressives, so the EPA killed the program with Zeldin calling it a “boondoggle” that would waste “billions of green slush fund dollars”.

As soon as he was sworn in, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy ordered the reversal of fuel economy standards — the miles per gallon goals for cars and pickup trucks — in keeping with Mr. Trump’s desire to increase the use of gasoline and diesel fuels. Add to that Congress’s huge spending bill doing away with Biden’s and earlier subsidies the consumers could tap to reduce the cost of electric vehicles.

The auto industry got the word. Honda, Ford, General Motors, Stellantis (Chrysler and Jeep) have all scrapped plans for EVs and taken multi-billion dollar hits to their profits from writing off electric auto investments. The whiplash of Trump’s Iran war driving up the price of gasoline might have them taking another look.

These reversals have left climate and environment activist groups adrift and demoralized. Ramon Cruz, a former head of the Sierra Club, said to The New York Times, “I won’t try to sugarcoat it. This is a generational loss.”

on the other hand…

Tax breaks and subsidies for the oil and gas industry continue unabated, as they have for decades. During his run for the White House, Trump hosted oil and gas company executives for dinner at Mar-a-Lago and told them if they were to pool $1 billion for his campaign, he assured them they would save more than that in taxes. They must have ponied up. Last year the biggest companies reaped nearly $6 billion from last summer’s sweeping tax bill. Over the next ten years oil, gas, and coal industries are projected to get $18 billion in subsidies and tax breaks.

institutional destruction

The Trump administration has cut research on climate even to the extent of removing reference to terms such as “global warming” and “climate change” from exhibits and websites across the government.

  Last July Zeldin ended the updating of a database that hundreds of companies use to calculate their greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the third most viewed database of some 281,000 data sets on data.gov. The reason is that the database’s creator, Dr. Wesley Ingwersen, elected to leave the agency when he was suspended along with 139 others who had signed a letter charging that Trump’s policies “undermine the E.P.A. mission of protecting human health and the environment”.

  Elon Musk’s DOGE fired hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) along with cancelling dozens of the agency’s contracts and leases. Trump proposed eliminating the the agency’s scientific research divisions. The administration has proposed a $2 billion cut — 28% — to NOAA’s budget. But in a bipartisan move Congress’s spending bill would maintain funding for NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which the administration proposed eliminating entirely due to its climate change portfolio.

  Trump and removed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have floated eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) altogether. They proposed that the states take over the job of responding to disasters in a time of storms of ever-increasing intensity such as Hurricane Helene that tore apart western North Carolina in late August 2024. It is a wildly impractical idea which we covered in this short piece but it’s under review nonetheless.

  In December, the Trump administration announced its intention to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Located in Boulder, Colorado,
National Center for Atmospheric Research.

it is one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions, but it is to be dismembered because, according to Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director, who is in no position to pass judgment on climate science, the center is “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country”.

As for alarm, Julie Lundquist, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Wind Energy at Johns Hopkins University, says,

“This is a terrible move to make at any time, particularly now that we’ve just had the third hottest year on record….Like many atmospheric scientists in the U.S., I consider NCAR the single-most vital resource for scientists working to understand and predict Earth’s atmosphere and weather.”

A publication at her university says this action…

“comes at a time when severe weather is becoming more frequent, disruptive, and expensive, with billion-dollar disasters striking the U.S. roughly every two weeks.”

Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University, calls NCAR “The beating heart of our field” for its research aircraft, inventions, and computer models that forecast hurricanes, track wildfire smoke, and project rising sea levels and floods “to inform “airlines, farmers, maritime shippers, city planners, construction workers, local governments and communities, and emergency preparedness systems.”

world on a string

Trump wants the world to be awash in fossil fuels, sold by America. Using the threat of tariffs, Trump has coerced countries in Europe and Asia to buy America’s liquefied natural gas under contracts that stretch for years to come. He has opened up millions of acres in Alaska to drilling, including the pristine and long protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

In November in London, the 176 countries of the International Maritime Organization were preparing to vote their agreement to a global tax that would penalize ships with emissions that exceed certain thresholds. The tax had already been provisionally adopted the preceding April; this was to be the final vote.

Enter Donald Trump, “outraged” at a carbon emissions tax, threatening countries with higher tariffs, visa restrictions, extra fees on their ships calling at U.S. ports, their sailors not allowed to disembark, should they vote for approval.

”The United States will NOT stand for this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping and will not adhere to it in any way shape or form.”

…he fulminated. Enough countries caved such that the tax, long in the making, was put off for a year. This one man of gargantuan ego dictated that a global tax to reduce emissions from ships — they burn bunker fuel, the dirtiest of oils — must not happen.

fighting clean energy

In his zeal for the world to run only on oil and gas, Trump wants to abolish renewable energy. In October he pulled the plug on the largest solar project in North America, Esmeralda 7 in Nevada. It had undergone regulatory review and permitting under President Biden’s Interior Department and would have supplied power to two million homes.

Inexplicably peculiar is the animus Trump holds for wind turbines. Three days before last Christmas he had his Interior Department order a halt to all work on five wind projects in the oceans off the East Coast. Collectively the five come to a $25 billion investment expected to power 2.5 million homes and buildings and provide 10,000 jobs. All were vetted and issued permits by the Biden administration.

The pretext – with no testing or evidence put forward – is that the spinning blades of what Trump calls “windmills” interfere with coastal radar and are therefore a national security risk. Not an outlandish concern but the Defense Department has all along reviewed all five projects and raised no such concerns. Besides, the turbines aren’t going anywhere; their location is known to operators. One of the companies, Dominion Energy, even put up $250,000 to upgrade radar facilities opposite the largest of the five undertakings off the Virginia coast.

This was not the first shutdown for the Danish firm Ørsted. Last August Trump stunned Connecticut and Rhode Island when he halted the company’s Revolution Wind off their shores, a $6.2 billion wind farm that is slated to power 350,000 homes. A federal judge had allowed construction to continue. This time around the work is almost completed, with 58 of 65 turbines installed yet Trump unaccountably called a halt.

Court orders have caused work to resume. The interruptions were costly, running to several million dollars a day for each project. Vineyard Wind is now completed. Dominion just sent a burst of power ashore from its first turbine with the project of 176 turbines 70% completed.

obsessed

“My goal is to not let any windmill be built”, Trump has said. Nothing explains Trump’s action at a time when A.I. data centers that Trump himself wants in America’s competition with China needs an enormous infusion of electric power. Just this week the Interior Department -(which is to say, Trump) announced that it will pay TotalEnergies, a French energy giant, almost $1 billion – our tax money, please note — to not produce energy, to abandon its plans to build two large wind farms off the East Coast.

The media has looked no further than Trump’s anger when in 2011 he could not stop an offshore wind farm that he thinks spoils the view from one of his golf courses in Scotland. How can that translate into a mania against the technology worldwide as if the wind turbines themselves have become demons in his psyche. He sees the thin, slowly turning blades gleaming white in the sun somehow ugly when viewed from his gaudy visual aesthetic – see the gold bric-a-brac slathered everywhere in the Oval Office. He says the whirring noise “causes cancer”. They “are driving the whales crazy”. The blades are killing “all the birds”. They do, but of course not all. A 2020 study reported in The Week magazine says 200,000 a year in the U.S. – so far – but there’s a long way to go to match the ”599 million that die in collisions with buildings and the 2.4 billion killed by cats”.

(Funny thing, though. When Virginia fretted in 2018 over what to do about nesting grounds of seabirds as it prepared for a major bridge and tunnel expansion in the tidewaters of the Chesapeake Bay, the first Trump administration said not to worry: it had done away with criminal penalties for “incidental” migratory bird deaths that came “in the course of normal business”.)

Trump Family Enlists in War Against Iran!

< war|205|18|>One of the measures available to the military when recruitment lags is to raise the eligibility age for joining the United States Army. Normally, we age out when we turn 36, but this week Donald Trump had to sign a desperate measure, his presidency and his war having discouraged recruitment, by increasing the age of eligibility to 42. How did that ever get out with Secretary of “War” muzzling the doings of the Pentagon?

It gave late-night pundit Lawrence O’Donnell an opening to say that suddenly son Eric, precisely age 42, often cast by late-night comics as least favored by Daddy Trump, albeit without proof, the chance to completely change the public perception of him. You see, youngest son Barron had celebrated his 20th birthday a week before but he hadn’t leaped at his chance for greatness by reporting to a recruitment office to fight alongside his dad, so he had left it wide open for Eric “to prove that

he is the brave Trump, something we have never seen before, a brave Trump”, said O’Donnell. Which didn’t happen.

So we concede to The Onion our never-to-be believed headline.

Donald Sr., after all, obtained five deferments, first when in college but ultimately claiming a bone spur in his foot attested to podiatrist Barry Braunstein in hometown Queens, New York, who did a “favor” for Trump’s father – his landlord. “It was family lore,” said daughter Elysa Braunstein to The New York
The storefront where Dr. Braunstein practiced podiatry.

Times. It was “something we would always discuss” among family and friends.

“He spent the rest of his life playing golf on those feet”, O’Donnell derided, and yet “he could not serve in any capacity in the military, not as a driver, not in an office job.” When asked by a reporter years ago “which foot”, Trump could not remember.

three of the four

There are now three Trump siblings eligible for service. We don’t overlook daughter Tiffany, age 32. She, of course, was a mere six-years-old when the attacks struck her home city and country on September 11 of 2001, but both of her older brothers were of prime age, Trump Jr. then 23, and Eric then 17. Neither volunteered for military service. Did they do anything?

And this time around, Trump’s two eldest sons have invested in Powerus Corporation, a newly created drone firm, just as Papa Trump’s administration will be spending heavily on ramping up drone production. Rather than enlisting they have opted for what has always been called “war profiteering”.

growing anger

Jesse Ventura was furious. The pro wrestler, actor, and former Minnesota governor ripped into the Trumps’ avoidance to serve. ”Because how can you send somebody else’s kids to a war if you won’t send your own?” Ventura continued…

So I’m calling on Barron Trump to enlist in the US military. Do something your father never had the courage to do. So, I’m calling right now for Barron Trump, Donald Trump’s son. You know, after all, he’s had three wives. He’s had kids by each wife, and nobody’s ever served in the military. I want to see a Trump in the military. Everybody in my family has served.”

Ventura was a Navy SEAL.

a long ago america

It was surely a different time, a time when honor rose above self-serving. (My dad, too old for military service, quit his civilian job and went to work in a defense plant making planes for World World II). O’Donnell drove the point hom:

“It was unthinkable that a president of the United States could lead the country in a war while he sons refused to go to war”

He reminded those of those hazy about World War II born many years since that “all four of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s sons served in World War II [emphasis ours but surely Lawrence would concur]. Dwight Eisenhower’s son John served in the U.S. Army during World War II and the Korean War and rose to brigadier general. The following presidents mostly had daughters who were not permitted in combat elements of the service or there was no war on in their time.

O’Donnell also told us that a uniformed Princess Elizabeth served as an Ambulance driver when she was 18
Princess Elizabeth at age 18

during the London blitz as Hitler bombed London and England nightly during the Second World War. This was when her father was no less the King of England. O’Donnell said no one took any notice of that. It was expected of her.

Where has valor gone?

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Steve Breen.

The Patently Ridiculous Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Trump’s Disastrous War

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Donald Trump told the world the U.S. and Israel had launched their attack on Iran at 2:30 a.m. February 28th not even from the White House but from Mar-a-Lago and in a post on Truth Social.

The Constitution gives Congress the sole power to declare war, but Mr. Trump had launched “Epic Fury” as a single individual without the authorization of Congress or even any consultation we know of. He would later say it would last four or five weeks — or maybe longer, maybe into the fall. The objective has still not been stated – oil, regime change, missiles, drones. He claimed in a G7 call that Iran “is about to surrender”; 24 hours later Iran’s new supreme leader issued his first public statement, a vow to keep fighting.

Trump began calling it an “excursion”. Families of service members killed in his war are thus told they died for an “excursion”. He said the terms of any negotiated end to the war would have to be “unconditional surrender”, evidently not knowing what that meant for lack of his knowledge of our history. The last unconditional surrender by a fanatical nation like Iran was in August 1945 — and it took atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Trump was born a year after, so how could he know?

Not to worry. When Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade asked, “When are you going to know when it’s over?”, Trump responded,

”When I feel it. Ok? Feel it in my bones.”

It used to be guts, how he said he made decisions. Now it’s bones. That’s how this one man decides to war or not to war. He went on:

”Look it’s all gonna work out. We took an excursion, we have to do a little excursion to get rid of mad people, crazy people.”

the warfighter

For his part, Pete Hegseth, who calls himself the Secretary of War, was saying,

” We will keep pressing, we will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemy.”

Congressman Eugene Vindman posted,

“Former Army JAG here. No quarter orders are a violation of the law of war and Geneva Conventions.”

No quarter means you don’t take prisoners, you execute them. The Hague Convention of 1899 declared it a war crime. It is prohibited in international law. The Hague Convention of 1907 states that “it is especially forbidden”.

For all his carryings-on about “maximum lethality” and no observance of “stupid rules of engagement”, perhaps no quarter actually is Hegseth’s preference. I wonder what he thinks of My Lai.

reckless engagement

Rather than restrict itself to military targets, to destruction of drone and missile manufacturing sites and stockpiles, to repeated “obliteration” of uranium enrichment facilities, the U.S. has destroyed at will, attacking Tehran, and therefore civilian populations, a hospital, a desalination plant in a country desperate for water, and killing as many as 175 young girls in a school adjacent to a naval headquarters in our most horrifying atrocity since My Lai, owing, it is believed, to outdated satellite photos. We were saying to the Iranian people that our warring has been against the regime and not against them, but now we are shattering their economy and starving the people themselves. Had we not been so unbridled in our “lethality”, Iran might not have blocked the Strait of Hormuz, which has brought upon the world an economic cataclysm.

the strait

The Strait of Hormuz.

Iran’s new ayatollah – reportedly injured, possibly disfigured and not having made any personal appearances – has said that the Strait will remain blocked until the U.S. and Israel end their attacks.
CNN reported that multiple officials with knowledge of the Pentagon’s and National Security Council’s planning of the military operation in Iran underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait as retaliation for U.S. military action.

Hearing that, Hegseth was furious, recited CNN’s headline.

“Patently ridiculous, of course. For decades Iran has threatened shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. This is always what they do — holds the Strait hostage. CNN doesn’t think we thought of that. It’s a fundamentally unserious report. The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

Then why were we so unprepared with that eventuality?
The U.S. is scrambling to figure out what to do. The White House’s preferred strategy is to escort ships through the Strait, but the Secretary of Energy Chris Wright says the U.S. is not prepared to do so, which says they had no anticipation of the Strait being closed. More ships are being sent to the region. For that purpose? Nor have they realized the disastrous vulnerability of that supposed “plan”. Not just because restoring the passage of oil to normality means escorting the 80 tankers a day that go through the Strait, but that Iran is mining the Strait and will attack our ships. America is unprepared for the shock of a U.S. Navy ship sunk with hundreds of lives lost.

Hegseth says about Iranians…

“They’re exercising sheer desperation in the Straits of Hormuz. Something we’re dealing with, we have been dealing with it. Don’t need to worry about it.”

…which clearly says he knows nothing of what awaits. It is distressing that here, this publication, knows far more than the secretary of defense and the president. But here it is, what Let’s Fix This Country has known all along. If you want to know just how stupid this administration is, and what it is getting into, read what now follows — all of it, kindly. This ran in our January 17, 2012 issue under the subhead, “The Strait is no place for picking a fight”:

”The geography of the planet has always been a determinant of power and a decisive influence over the outcome of war.

There have been threats in the past to mine the strait or to sink ships to block its channels. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has mentioned using “minesweepers”, but how would they cope with the far more advanced mine technology developed by China and Russia and, it is believed, supplied secretly to Iran? China, especially, has shown indifference to Iran’s nuclear aspirations and is focused on Iran’s oil.

That technology is alarming. There are mines that are virtually non-detectable, that can “swim” underwater just above the seabed for miles and be guided to exact geographical coordinates, where they will then drop and immerse themselves into the seabed. Pre-programmed to recognize the magnetic and acoustic signatures of specific ships, they can be fired remotely and from great distances. When fired, they do not simply explode but rather launch a missile at the identified ship directly above, or angled to within a certain radius. The Strait has been a subject of threat and counter-threat before, making it probable that Iran had reason already to have extensively mine the Strait with such highly advanced mines in preparation for a day such as this.

Do we think that Iran, naval maneuvers notwithstanding, would never confront the far more powerful U.S. Navy? Perhaps not, but there were reports in 2006, the last time the Hormuz choke point was in the headlines, that its Revolutionary Guard navy had prepared for a massive assault on international shipping in the Persian Gulf to disrupt trade.

Then there is the serious threat that ships have become vulnerable in the face of missile technology. The strait is reportedly targeted by Iran with anti-ship missiles. If an American carrier, with its crew of 5,000, were struck, it would mean all out war.

Not even missiles are needed. Four years ago, five speedboats taunted three U.S. warships entering the Gulf in a provocative action that almost drew our fire. Speedboats may seem to be no match for powerful naval ships, until one remembers that an even lesser suicide craft blew a hole in the destroyer USS Cole, when it was docked in Yemen in October 2000, killing 17 sailors. More ominous still, a war game conducted by our Navy in 2002 showed that warships are disturbingly susceptible to waterborne guerrilla tactics. In that simulation a Navy convoy lost 16 major ships, including an aircraft carrier, in a matter of minutes to a “swarm” of such speedboats.

An article in Foreign Affairs by Colin H. Kahl School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service paints a still more alarming picture of Iran’s preparations which are…designed to prevent advanced navies from operating in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. These systems integrate coastal air defenses, shore-based long-range artillery and antiship cruise missiles, Kilo-class and midget submarines, remote-controlled boats and unmanned kamikaze aerial vehicles, and more than 1,000 small attack craft equipped with machine guns, multiple-launch rockets, antiship missiles, torpedoes, and rapid-mine-laying capabilities. The entire 120-mile-long strait sits along the Iranian coastline, within short reach of these systems.”

Iran has fitted itself out as a porcupine but neither Trump nor Hegseth show any knowledge of it.

painted into a corner

I might as well close on the mundane of Trump’s preoccupations. He has boasted of low gasoline prices for months, key to his promise to defeat inflation, yet seemingly had no realization of what his war would due to oil prices. Brent crude is $103 a barrel at this writing, up from $69 in mid-February. After proudly telling us of gasoline costing “$2.30 a gallon in most states, and in some places $1.99 a gallon” in his State of the Union address, the price at the pump has surged to a national average today of $3.675 a gallon.

To try to tamp down gas prices, Trump will draw down 172 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve beginning next week, U.S. oil reserves, in coordination with all 32 member countries of the International Energy Agency, which “unanimously agreed” to release a combined 400 million barrels. Trump repeatedly criticized Biden for drawing on the reserve after the start of the Ukraine war. He says,

”We’ll do that, and then we’ll fill it up. I filled it up once, and I’ll fill it up again. But right now, we’ll reduce it a little bit, and that brings the prices down.”

The U.S. has been selling Venezuelan oil into the U.S. since late January, currently at the rate of 280,000 barrels a day in Trump’s attempt to lower gas prices at the pump. Most consequently, he has had the Treasury lift sanctions that have stranded Russian oil tankers at sea from delivering their oil, freeing our adversary to sell “hundreds of millions of barrels of crude” on world markets, says The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal reports that Russia’s oil has become “a hot commodity”. Just the week before, Russia had a problem finding buyers. But now, Trump has handed a priceless windfall to Russia — huge income to aid in its war against Ukraine, and this at the same time the U.S. is drawing down its weapons inventory, seriously crimping what might have been sent to Ukraine, thus dealing that desperate country a double blow.

Mar 14 2026 | Posted in Defense | Read More »

Here’s How Trump Will Steal the Coming Elections

< elections|101|| Democrats naively assume a blowout this fall. Trump will make it an obstacle course.>

Donald Trump fears impeachment should Democrats take majority control of the House of Representatives this November. There are a few Republican grumbles about his presidency but nowhere enough for the Senate to then convict and remove him from office. Eight of them would have to join all the Democrats to reach the needed 67% super majority.

Jim Vondruska, New York Times.jpg

Nevertheless, it seems that Mr. Trump is troubled by a third impeachment damaging his reputation. So, he who persistently but falsely calls elections “rigged” and ridden with “horrible corruption” is marshalling every weapon and contrivance to be the one who actually rigs elections.

To know what’s coming, here’s a round-up of the several tactics Trump is employing to minimize Democratic votes. As the election approaches, keep a link to this and watch for what it describes. It wraps up in an apocalypse that Trump’s cohort has already planned for us, discovered by The Washington Post.

shut out

We can start with gerrymandering, taken to a new extreme. At Trump’s urging, Texas has redrawn its election maps to deliver five more districts safe for Republican candidates. That set in motion a gerrymandering war, with California countering with a referendum to temporarily suspend its redistricting commission so as to engineer five more seats for Democrats. Virginia contemplates doing the same. Indiana notably refused to comply despite Trump’s pleading. Six states have redrawn their maps. No matter the outcome, gerrymandering, which could easily be replaced by agnostic software carving up each state by equal population counts rather than party voting patterns (as we have written of repeatedly), is the most cynical corruptive of what we like to think is our democracy.

ban voting by mail

Even earlier than he did in 2020, Trump is attacking mailed-in ballots with the intention of banning them by executive order. “We’re the only country in the world that uses this type of mail-in ballots”, he lies. Almost three dozen countries permit postal voting.

Those who have economic difficulty going to the polls to vote — they sacrifice pay to get off from work, for example — are thought to be bigger users of mailed ballots. Republican strategists think that describes Black and Hispanic voters who traditionally vote Democratic, so taking away voting by mail will discourage them from voting.

That is not admitted, of course. Rather, Trump’ s claim, devoid of evidence, is that mailed-in ballots are rife with fraud.

voter id

Proof of who you say you are in order to vote — colloquially “photo ID” — is very popular. The SAVE America Act, currently working through Congress, requires proof of citizenship, such as your birth certificate or passport, in order to register to vote. It requires that you present that same proof at the polls every time you vote in a federal election. Poll workers will be subject to prosecution should they fail to make these demands.

Almost half of Americans have passports — books or cards but for the rest the $165 for a passport or $65 for a card amounts to a poll tax. Furthermore, an estimated 21 million people lack uncomplicated access to proof they are citizens. That affects voters left and right, but Republican supposition is that it will prevent voting by Democrats in urban centers — Blacks and Hispanics again — with little harm from votes lost in red states where Republican wins are assured.

The Act contains the ban of mail-in ballots that Trump seeks, with exceptions only for illness, disability, military, or out of country. Proof of citizenship will be needed to obtain a mail-in ballot. This is especially problematic for Americans living abroad.

Trump says the SAVE Act is needed to stop illegal aliens from voting. This is nonsense, as checks of voter rolls have shown.
Georgia’s found that 20 of the 8.2 million of the state’s registered voters were not United States citizens; none of the 20 had voted in the 2020 general election. A review of Utah’s approximately 2.1 million registered voters found one “confirmed noncitizen.” Just one. And that one non-citizen had never voted. State after state report much the same.

No less than the Heritage Foundation, principal authors of Project 2025, found only 24 cases of fraudulent voting over the course of the decade they studied.

About why Democrats oppose the SAVE Act? Trump says…

”One reason, because they want to cheat. There’s only one reason. They make up all excuses. They say it’s racist. They come up with things. You almost say what imagination they have. They want to cheat, they have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.”

It need always be repeated that this is Trump alone, with nothing to support his fabrications, but successfully using repetition to get his followers to believe his lying. He’s gotten 33% of adults believing the biggest threat to safe and secure elections is voter fraud.

The House passed the SAVE bill last year, but it ran aground in the Senate where it needs 60 votes. In this second go-round, Majority Leader John Thune has told Trump he will not end the filibuster in order for Republicans alone to pass it with a simple majority. Trump now says about the SAVE America Act,

“It supersedes everything else…must go to the front of the line. I as president will not sign other bills until this is passed.”

He has said that if the Senate fails to pass it, he will unilaterally make it happen by executive order.

voter rolls

Under the current version of SAVE, all states would be required to remove non-citizens from their voter rolls, as well as submit their unredacted lists to the Department of Homeland Security. In the absence of the law’s passage, the now politicized Justice Department has been suing states to turn over their private voter rolls. So far, 24 states and Washington D.C. have refused to do so, with about a dozen complying.

Just days ago, Ohio’s secretary of state turned in the state’s complete voter registration list with private data about eight million Ohioans without any surety about how the data will be used or shared.

The FBI just executed a raid of Arizona’s Maricopa County that took in “terabytes of data”, estimated one report. Irrespective of a recount that was watched nationally, the Republican-led state senate subpoenaed the data saying it had found “irregularities” in Joe Biden’s 2020 victory by under 11,000 votes,

Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded that Minnesota turn over the personal data in the voter rolls — additional to what the state had already offered, as well as information on Medicaid and food-assistance programs (and repeal its “sanctuary policies”). Governor Walz refused.

The Trump administration has offered no explanation of why it is aggressively pursuing data that belongs to the states nor of its intended use. That it demands personal data says that the newly authoritarian government plans for the U.S. to become a China-style surveillance state. From White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson we get…

“No one should take this Democrat pearl-clutching seriously when they have spent years undermining and denying the results of free and fair elections…President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.”

Democrats cheat and subvert. Believe the lie so as to trust what we’re up to, she says.

What we can expect is that Justice will filter out all Latino/Latina names and challenge the validity of possibly hundreds of thousands in districts where Democratic candidates could win. Trump ‘s personal DOJ will then mandate that before the election every challenged registrant be validated before that individual’s vote can be permitted, a time-consuming task meant to overwhelm already-burdened election workers. Unable to complete the job, this will disenfranchising voters likely to be Democrats.

Mandate by what right? None. But Trump will coerce by denying the federal funding to states that refuse to comply. These extortions will be unconstitutional, but by the time the courts get around to saying so, the elections are over and won’t be undone.

voiding registrations

The purpose of every action we describe is voter suppression with Democrats the target. Red states have been purging voters in Blue cities from the rolls in industrial quantities. If you haven’t voted recently you may show up at the polls and find you’ve been cancelled. If your polling place is open, that is. We can expect closure of polling stations in Black areas to make lines insufferably long so that people will quit or will be turned away at closing time, their vote denied. The GOP will deploy “election observers” to challenge signatures on mail-in ballots.

nationalization

Trump wants elections to be nationalized because “Our elections are crooked as hell”, he says, absent justification. Boasting that he has accomplished so much, he mused, “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

The Constitution reserves everything having to do with elections to the states:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

The executive branch has no role in elections and no rights.

Nationalization, in defiance of the Constitution, is needed because of non-citizens casting ballots, thinks Trump. “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally”, he said — a lie on both counts. On a podcast he said Republicans should…

“nationalize the voting process…should say ‘we want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least, many, 15 places’”.

With Congress members standing behind him at a bill signing, he voice a novel theory:

“If a state can’t run an election I think the people behind me should do something about it, because, you know, if you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections. I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do ’em anyway. The federal government should get involved…. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”

For Trump, losing — whether his or an endorsed candidate – means votes were counted illegally and dishonestly. He told NBC News he will only accept the results of the 2026 midterm elections if they are “honest”, that if he believes they aren’t, then “something else has to happen.” Only he gets to judge.

To podcaster Dan Bognino he said,

“We have states that are so crooked and they’re counting votes, we have states that I won that show I didn’t win.”

So many Americans know so little about their country and its democracy that in a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll a difficult-to-believe 23% think the federal government should take over election administration and vote-counting in certain states.

nationalization by other means

The ranks of ICE will be hugely expanded in the coming months. They amount to Trump’s private army. Dressed in camo and full battle kit, there will be plenty of them to be deployed to voting places throughout the country to “secure elections” but in fact to intimidate Latino voters to stay home or risk deportation.

It is illegal to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place. The Brennan Center for Justice assures us that whereas a presidential declaration of an emergency – Trump’s go-to justification for giving the slip to the Constitution – unlocks 137 different laws, none gives the president authority over elections. Not even the Insurrection Act.

But we hear of Justice Department and Home Security apostles holding meetings to discuss sending armed law enforcement to monitor voting places anyway; 73% of Republicans are in favor. ICE agents or National Guard troops would be in position to seize voting machines and ballots if undesired candidates are in the lead, a move Trump considered in 2020. (Looking back, he recently told The New York Times, “Well, I should have.” )

The raid by the FBI of the Fulton County (Atlanta) repository of voting records which saw the FBI haul off hundreds of boxes of ballots with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard mysteriously in attendance has not been explained. All three of Georgia’s 2020 vote recounts — and by three different methods — were found to be extraordinarily close in number, but Justice will likely invent something as pretext for November’s key elections. Was Fulton County a dry run for ICE or the Guard to raid voting places and make off with ballots with claims of fraud?

You’d think so to hear House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt say Gabbard is “committed to ensuring a United States election can never, ever be rigged again”, as if it ever has been.

Apocalypse Now

But if all these maneuvers show signs of being insufficient, Trump will not be deterred. The Washington Post has reported that pro-Trump activists working with the White House have produced a 17-page draft executive order for taking over the state elections. The scheme claims that China interfered in the 2020 election is the basis for a national emergency, that assumed Chinese interference in the coming elections warrants declaration of an emergency “that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting”, says the Post. Why 2020 and not the 2022 midterms or the 2024 presidential? Because Chinese intrusion caused Biden’s win, you see, and they’re pretending to prevent China from doing it again.

Peter Ticktin is a New York Military Academy classmate of Trump’s, and now a Florida lawyer who is promoting the executive order draft. (He had in 2022 filed a lawsuit against Democrats for alleging that Trump’s campaign had colluded with Russia). The Post quotes Ticktin saying…

”But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”

The emergency would empower the president to ban mailed ballots and voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference. Trump, who has railed against mailed-in ballots for taking too long after Election Day to count, wants paper ballots, which if everyone must use will take much longer, but they make wholesale cheating possible which machines prevent.

So there you have it — the nationalization that Trump and his myrmidons are planning for us. There is no one to inhibit him. He is free to break the country and toss the Constitution into the trash. After all, didn’t the Supreme Court reward him with immunity?