Jonathan P. Baird

The first month of the Trump presidency has featured the much-discussed “flood the zone” strategy. Conducted at a breakneck pace, the multi-pronged campaign has been an effort to overwhelm the public to make resistance seem futile. Courts cannot keep up with the onslaught of events. No one can.

Trump’s plan is to discourage opposition by making it seem like peoples’ movements and courts cannot stop an irresistible tide that is moving very quickly on many fronts. I believe the plan was in place before Trump took the oath of office. It is Project 2025 jet-propelled by the Musk squad.

President Trump’s social media tweeted out a line from Napoleon Bonaparte: “He who saves the country does not violate any law”. This was the Napoleon who declared himself Emperor of France in 1804. At almost the same time, the White House social media also sent out a picture of Trump wearing a crown. On his social media, Truth Social, it was proclaimed “Long live the King”.

Whether this was supposed to be a joke or just owning the libs, I don’t think the deeper strategy behind Trump’s actions are being appreciated. I will offer a big picture perspective on how I see the Trump end-game. He does not want to leave the presidency during his lifetime. This is his most lucrative scam yet. He wants to be a dictator or a king ruling over the serfs whose role is to praise him.

Relying on an extreme version of the unitary executive theory giving the President absolute power, Trump seeks to turn back the clock to a gilded age before the New Deal. In that era imperialist great powers carved up the world as they colonized the Third World. Trump wants a return to the heyday of U.S. imperialism where might made right. Emulating Putin, he wants to maximize his personal fortune so he can be a legitimate billionaire instead of a fake one. He doesn’t want to have to worry about going to jail, ever.

The billionaire posse around him at the Inauguration was a tipoff. They plan to serve each others’ interests to insure they receive their precious tax cut. Could someone explain why tax cheats like Trump and the other billionaires deserve a further tax cut? So many of them never have paid their fair share of taxes in the first place. What a staggering display of greed! No doubt they will throw a few crumbs at the masses. They will pretend they are “pro-worker’ as long as it doesn’t interfere with their raking-in billions.

So far, Trump has, in effect, outsourced his presidency to Elon Musk. He doesn’t appear to be that interested in the job of President. While he plays golf (10 outings in 33 days) he leaves the dirty work to Musk who allegedly is fighting corruption in the Deep State. The idea that a convicted felon like Trump who has an extensive record of cheating his contractors cares about fighting corruption is laughable. One of his first acts was firing Inspector Generals.

Musk’s main role has been to fire federal employees, particularly probationary ones. This is part of deconstructing the administrative state. The firings have been done in the most callous disrespectful way imaginable. Federal workers receive anonymous, cowardly emails that often accuse them of poor job performance even though there is no record of poor job performance. Often the workers have had excellent performance records. The firings are in contravention of federal law and without any good cause.

In bullying fashion, Trump/Musk apparently believe he can bulldoze federal statutes and regulations which have mandated job protections. The arrogant way Trump treated Gov Janet Mills of Maine showed how full of himself he is right now. He believes he is the law.

Federal programs are intricate and complex and they take time to learn and understand. The idea that Musk’s twenty-somethings will blow in and discover big fraud is an illusion. Musk is playing a smoke and mirrors game. There is fraud and waste in the government but these kids are not going to find it in 15 minutes. The chance that they understand anything about the programs they are savaging is next to nil. Here the truth matters not at all. The image is everything which is why you have Musk on stage at CPAC with a chainsaw.

Musk’s entire DOGE enterprise is lawless from top to bottom. DOGE is not authorized by Congress. Its authority rests on the thin reed of an Executive Order. Trump says DOGE is an extension of his limitless Article II power under the Constitution but no court has yet given Trump the type of Article II power he craves.

The United States was created in opposition to a monarchy. Separation of powers and the three branches of government were created so the U.S. would never degenerate into a monarchy. Rule by non-stop issuance of Executive Orders could not be a more shaky legal ground. Trump is hollowing out the legislative and judicial branches so all power rests with him.

DOGE has zero transparency. We don’t know who they are or what they are doing but like good serfs we are supposed to shut up and let them do whatever. We are supposed to ignore Musk’s obvious conflicts of interest. If Trump’s maximalist program is like Putin or Orban, very bad trends of worsening income inequality, lower life expectancy and shrinking of democracy are likely.

The racism and sexism of the Trump presidency must also be called out. It is clear they are trying to rehabilitate racism and sexism in service of white and male supremacy. The obsession with DEI is a fig leaf: they are trying to roll back all civil rights gains made since the 1960’s. Renaming military bases after Confederate generals is a good indication of the reactionary mindset as is the dangerous hate they have directed against LGBTQ people. Trans people are such a small number and they have used them as a group to hate on.

Prepare for a post-constitutional government with white men once again large and in charge. Expect rule by fear with civil rights stripped away and perceived political enemies prosecuted. Say good-bye to abortion rights in all states as well as an end to gay marriage. Toxic masculinity will be the rule and there will be a resurgence of violence against women. No fault divorce will start disappearing in the states and there will be an effort to repeal womens’ right to vote. Patriotic education will mean Americans will be indoctrinated into a fraudulent history that whitewashes our national sins.

Whether this is our future depends on whether the American people resist. There is still time.

Great turnout in Concord on a freezing cold day! And Leonard Peltier is free!

As a secular Jew, I would not pretend to any great knowledge of Jewish theology. I was bar mitzvahed and confirmed in the reform Jewish tradition a long time ago. However, there are some parts of Jewish thought that are so central to the tradition that they are inarguably Jewish.

Judaism emphasizes treating strangers with kindness and compassion. Obviously that is something that has often not happened in the Jewish world like everyplace else but the aspiration and practice have to do with the treatment Jews received in Egypt in ancient times. In the book of Deuteronomy, there is this famous passage: “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”. Passover is about welcoming the stranger.

That message about the stranger is central to a Jewish perspective on mass deportations of immigrants and their incarceration in concentration camps. More than many groups, Jewish historical experience has a repetitive aspect where we have been forced to flee or have been subject to expulsion and mass deportation. Being scapegoated, Jews have been herded into ghettos and forced into concentration camps.

I know when I hear of the Trump administration’s plans to deport millions and to build camps for them to be held, including at Guantanamo, it evokes Jewish history because our people have been subject to that same viciousness.

While most would immediately conjure up World War 2, there are earlier parallels. In the early 20th century, immigration to the United States became a hot issue. In 1911, Congress issued a comprehensive study known as the Dillingham Commission Report. It concluded that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, many of them Italians and Jews, posed a threat to American culture and well-being.

Just as has happened now, a climate of extreme intolerance, nativism and xenophobia developed in the United States. Antisemitism reached new levels of acceptance. In her book, America for Americans, the historian Erika Lee describes it:

“Manhattan upper-class elite barred Jews from the most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs, resorts and private schools. Discontented farmers in the Midwest and South who formed a new political party known as the populists blamed Jews, whom they believed controlled the nation’s banks, for their economic suffering. Both Protestant and Catholic religious leaders promoted antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as Christ killers and as dishonest and greedy businessmen. Eugenicists argued that Jews were irredeemable and biologically inassimilable. The KKK actively promoted Jewish conspiracy theories and charged that they were congenitally incapable of virtue or patriotism.”

The exact same scapegoating that happened to Jews in the early 20th century is going on with those categorized as “illegal immigrants” today. Trump falsely says other countries are emptying out their jails and asylums. Instead of any effort to understand why so many people have sought to enter the United States, immigrants are unfairly slandered and fast-tracked for mass deportation.

Trump has suspended all refugee admissions. He is ending protected status for hundreds of thousands and he wants to deport millions who are not serious or violent criminals. Many have lived in the US peacefully for over 15 years. Trump is treating all immigrants, including legal and undocumented immigrants, as well as refugees and asylum seekers, as threats to the United States.

So many of the immigrants from Central America are coming because it became unsafe and impossible to live in their home countries. The U.S.-financed wars in Central America created crises of livability in their countries. We have seen the results in the greatly increased numbers coming to the Southern border since 2014, especially children and families.

Really since the 1980’s, many people who came from places like El Salvador and Guatemala had entirely legitimate asylum claims as civil wars forced people to leave. These were wars the U.S. played a major role in perpetrating by financing brutal military regimes.

As a Jewish person, I see immigrants as often fleeing for their lives much in the way Jews tried to escape the Nazi death machine. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 formalized the unwelcoming of Jews in the U.S.. That law mandated tiny entry quotas to America while the Nazi terror ramped up. The United States could have saved millions of European Jews from the death camps but the Jew hating in America prevented that.

The extent of the antisemitism at that time remains under-appreciated just as xenophobia is today. It was not just the spewings of Father Coughlin or Henry Ford. Antisemitism kept escalating. Both Britain and the U.S. closed their door to Jewish arrivals. Even after two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust, in 1947, 250,000 Jews in Western Europe remained in Displaced Persons Camps. No one would take them.

Part of the argument used against allowing more immigration of Jews in the 1920’s-1930’s was that Americans would be displaced from jobs. The argument had some legs because of the Great Depression but the same argument is used now against immigrants. The truth is that we need more people to fill jobs that there are not enough Americans to do.

The mass deportation of Jews to concentration camps was the ultimate horror but Trump is following in that cruel tradition sending immigrants to Guantanamo. He signed an Executive Order about it. Guantanamo has been the site of torture and indefinite detention without charge or trial. It is a law-free zone, outside the United States’ legal protections. What could go wrong? The script writes itself.

Stephen Miller, a Jewish person, is the architect of Trump’s mass deportation/concentration camp scheme. One biographer titled his book “Hatemonger”. There is a Yiddish word , shanda, which perfectly describes Miller. The word means “shame”. “terrible embarrassment”, and “disgrace”.

As a kid, I remember these words on the wall of my temple: “Justice, justice shall you pursue”. It should be clear that mass deportations and concentration camps have nothing to do with justice. They are the opposite.

Many years ago, there was a very popular film thriller, Seven Days in May, based on the novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey. The movie told the story of a military coup in the United States where the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs turned against the President. During my lifetime, coups have been run by militaries. There were the Brazilian generals in 1964, Gen. Suharto’s coup in Indonesia in 1965 and Gen. Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973. We don’t tend to think of coups outside a military context.

What we are seeing now from Trump and Musk is a different kind of coup. Operating entirely outside law, the coup plotters have tried to capture the computer and payment system of the United States. By doing that, they effectively hold the nation captive. The strategy is to move quickly on many fronts and to break things.They are trying for a fait accompli where their actions dictate irreversible results regardless of what courts might later do.

They say they are combatting fraud and abuse but they have not gone through any legal channels authorized by federal law. Instead they bypass all norms and focus on declaring jobs are eliminated. This is what they have done with US AID which Musk says is in the wood chipper. Meanwhile Musk’s team gains access to enormous data including the personal and private information of millions of Americans who are either taxpayers or federal benefit recipients which people widely thought was secure and protected.

Data is power and there is no doubt this information could be of enormous value to Musk’s business operations. For all we know he may already have downloaded Americans’ data onto his personal servers and computer network.

Because the law moves slowly, Musk’s hope is to destroy institutions before there can be a reaction. As of this writing on February 9, courts are beginning to respond to both job loss at US AID and the monkeying-around inside the Treasury Department.

So we have the world’s richest man, an unaccountable private citizen and a questionable security risk, who is a major defense contractor, making unilateral decisions unvetted by anyone. Clearly, he is not calling Trump to ask permission for his actions. We have only the vaguest notion of what Musk and his band of juvenile tech bros are doing. There have been no hearings or public debate about someone, anyone, gaining access to the federal payments system.

No legal process gave Musk the authority he is exercising. His actions are a smash-and-grab. It must be pointed out that only Congress has the spending power under Article I of the Constitution.

Whether the issue is special education, consumer protection, air traffic control, food safety, environmental pollution or myriad other areas, federal laws have been in place for a long time and are protections for the public. Musk belittles federal workers but without these workers, many more people would die or be seriously injured. About the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) , Musk just tweeted “RIP”. That followed a tweet saying “delete” CFPB. He will make it “DOA”. He is entirely out of control.

Anyone who thinks Musk would care about consumer protection is out of their mind. Musk is not just anti-consumer protection, his thinking is post-constitutional and post-ethics..

Wired Magazine has reported that Musk’s team has not just “read-only” access but actual administrative privileges to the entire payment system and they have been re-writing code on it. On Twitter/X, Musk himself has said that “the DOGE team is rapidly shutting down certain “illegal payments””.

Musk has no authority to decide what is illegal. We don’t know if he is stealing money, compromising national security, gaining future financial advantage or retaliating against his enemies. He is trying to re-design the entire U.S. government with Trump’s seeming blessing. Musk blessed Trump with $300 million.

Because Musk is a major defense contractor with billions in government contracts, he is in a conflict of interest position. He got Trump to fire the head of FAA after his rocket company was fined.

He has been tweeting hateful posts about US AID. It is not clear why he hates it so much, maybe because it helps poor people and promotes democracy, Musk, with Trump’s apparent agreement, fired 97% of the agency, cutting its global workforce of more than 10,000 to 294 employees. You will not see Musk cutting any Musk businesses to save money.

As is the case with many federal workers, US AID workers are unionized. Musk and Trump could not be more anti-worker and anti-union. They try to rip up collective bargaining agreements like they are confetti. Their hatred of the federal workforce extends across-the-board. Trump’s pick to head the OMB, Russell Vought, has said he wants federal workers “traumatized”.

Not surprisingly, unions representing US AID workers are suing the Trump administration. Public Citizen and Democracy Forward lawyers, acting on behalf of the AID workers, stress that not a single one of the Administrations’s actions received Congressional approval.

If Musk can get away with decimating US AID, expect that to be a road map for what they will do to other federal agencies. They are not cutting with a scalpel, more like a meat cleaver. Many lawsuits have been filed by a wide array of actors to stop Musk and DOGE.

It was telling that Musk stated he would re-hire the 25 year old DOGE employee who resigned for having a viciously racist social media account. The individual had posted: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool”. That post, which Musk never repudiated, speaks volumes.

Musk and Trump are trying to rehabilitate racism and white supremacy. Musk’s nazi salute was no accident. He has been actively supporting the neo-nazi party in Germany.

One big question is how the Trump administration will respond when courts reverse their illegal and unconstitutional actions firing people and invading privacy. Will they respect court orders or disregard them? Blowing off court orders would reflect an absolute constitutional collapse, opting for fascism.

Congress should be standing up for its own power as a separate branch of government because Trump and Musk are usurping power from that branch to the Executive. The Republican Party has disgraced and humiliated itself by collaborating with the coup. They are pretending what is happening is some kind of normalcy but they are promoting congressional impotence. No doubt many Republicans are afraid MAGA thugs would turn on them if they spoke out.

In a case about birthright citizenship, a Reagan federal court appointee, Judge John Coughenour, made a statement that is equally applicable here:

“It has become ever more apparent that to our president the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain.”

The months ahead will determine if there is any rule of law left in the United States.

For Democrats and progressives, this is a very dark time. Leading up to the 2024 election, the Democrats had one major overriding goal and that was the defeat of Donald Trump. They failed. If the Democrats were a football team, their general manager, head coach and assistant coaches would all have been fired and replaced.

But that is not how Democratic leaders have responded to a catastrophic loss. I am reminded of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman: “What, me worry?” The lack of leadership is striking. The Party has made no effort to look hard at what went wrong. Nor do they seem up to the challenge of fighting autocracy and billionaire rule. As Sen. Bernie Sanders has said:

“The Democratic Party is increasingly, a party dominated by billionaires, run by well-paid consultants whose ideology is to tinker around the edges of a grossly unjust and unfair oligarchic system.”

Voters did not sign up for the overwhelming onslaught of unconstitutional maneuvers we have so far seen from Trump. He is violating laws on a scale we have never seen before while scapegoating DEI. He is reveling in his own brand of performative cruelty. He has turned lying on social media into an art form. Anand Giridharadas called all the Executive Orders a coup against Congress, like a second January 6.

The Democratic response has been underwhelming and lethargic. It is like Republicans are on a search and destroy mission against democracy but Democrats are asleep at the switch. Our septuagenarian and octogenarian Democratic leaders don’t appear to appreciate the gravity of the situation. They are busy voting for absurd and laughable cabinet choices.

Our two New Hampshire senators voted for the dog killer, Kristi Noem, for Homeland Security Secretary. Noem defended the dog murder as an example of her ability to perform “gruesome jobs in life when necessary”. How revolting! That person may not be as ridiculous a choice as Hegseth, Kash Patel or RFK Jr. but she most certainly did not deserve confirmation. Such a sycophant would never stand up to Trump no matter how unhinged he might be. No doubt she will be a key operative in carrying out his racist and hateful immigration plans.

I have nothing against Kamala Harris but she underperformed Joe Biden’s 2020 national popular vote by more than six million votes. Democrats raised a billion dollars but our base voters were not inspired to turn out to vote. What is the story behind the poor turnout when there was so much money to spend? Democrats lost every battleground state and Trump gained in blue states and among male and working class minority voters. Democrats also lost both Houses of Congress.

The same thing played out at the state level. As Andy Volinsky pointed out in the Concord Monitor on January 31, this is the fifth election in a row Democrats lost the Governor’s race. They also lost the House and Senate in the state legislature and the Executive Council. As Volinsky wrote, that is a political disaster but who is holding leaders accountable for poor state election results? Where is the new blood that maybe could turn it around? Leaving the same leaders in charge is a self-destructive repetition compulsion.

Democrats don’t understand why they lost but they want to keep doing the same thing. And they have shown seemingly no interest in reforming themselves. For example, uninspiring Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer should be removed for ineptness. Where is the fightback? He is sleepwalking through a constitutional crisis pretending this is business as usual.

Then, on the House side, there was the Democratic choice to make Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Instead of picking a charismatic young legislator with social media expertise, Democrats picked a 74 year old suffering from esophageal cancer. It is like they want to lose.This is a political party in desperate need of an overhaul.

We need a vital opposition from the grassroots that can motivate and rally masses of people and will stand up to the billionaire class and autocracy. Democrats should frame the struggle as the working class versus the billionaires but the Democrats are afraid to frame it that way and pick a fight maybe because of their own reliance on billionaires.

The Harris campaign presented a canned, phony message massaged by their out-of-touch consultants. Other than abortion rights, who could figure what they stood for? Instead of any authenticity, Democrats thought it would be wise to play it safe and not tell the story of how much the American working class has been screwed by the system. Democrats told a story about how great the economy was. People weren’t buying.

One writer, Thomas Frank has consistently diagnosed the Democrats’ problem. He has pointed to a 50 year history of the wreckage of neoliberalism reflected by NAFTA, shuttered factories and the loss of good paying blue collar jobs across the country. This was engineered by Bill Clinton, not Republicans. Instead of defending a working class majority as they did in the FDR era, Democrats now focus more on appealing to suburban Republicans and the professional managerial class.

Democrats don’t tackle income inequality or even defend Medicare-for-all. Harris, who had previously supported Medicare-for-all, opposed it during the campaign. I think Democrats failed to give masses of people good reasons to vote for them. They could not persuasively say how their election would improve life.

Speaking more broadly about the whole progressive movement, it is time for some soul-searching. The movement is hardly a welcoming place. Anyone who has been around progressives would have to acknowledge the attitude of sectarian nastiness and intolerance that are all-too-common and it has been that way for a long time.The magnitude of our loss should mandate much greater humility.

We face an unprecedented threat. Trump and his MAGA movement are trying to fast track a theocratic autocracy. They seek a post-constitutional regime where the dictator has all the power with hollowed-out checks and balances. They are out to reverse everything progressive since the New Deal.

I found peoples’ strong response to the Trump administration’s across-the-board spending freeze very hopeful. That response forced Trump to rescind the OMB memo. Then two courts blocked Trump. Every effort to slow down autocratic takeover matters and has value.

On social media, I saw Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez say this: “One thing about me is that I will fight Nazis until I’m six feet in the ground”. That is the spirit we need now. Resistance matters if the American people are going to save our democracy.

Corruption is often defined as the abuse of public power for private gain. Whatever their other faults, American presidents have not historically used their office as a vehicle to accumulate personal wealth. There is a tradition of presidents disclosing their taxes and then putting their assets into a blind trust. The idea was consistent with the notion the presidency is about public service.

Like other authoritarians, Donald Trump moves to the beat of a different drummer and right from the start he has demonstrated a drive for personal enrichment. This is one president who, last time and this time, has shamelessly used the presidency for the pursuit of maximizing his own wealth. His middle initial should not be J. It should be G. for Grift.

During the campaign it was like he was selling everything that was not nailed down. Just stick a Trump branding name on a product. Take your pick – gold high top sneakers, $199 Trump cologne, $100,000 18-karat gold watches, ultra MAGA gold golf balls or Trump bibles. In his golden age of hype, it appears there is almost nothing he would not sell.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics found 168 new products on trumpstore.com since November. You can get a $200 MAGA victory blanket, a $30 inauguration seal coffee mug or a $550 “Trump 45-47” Bling Clutch. The Trump store is run by Trump organization and it puts millions in the President’s pocket. So much for not turning the presidency into a profit-making business.

The weekend before the inauguration, Trump released meme coins named after himself and his wife. The meme coins, $Trump and $Melania, are crypto tokens. They perfectly reflect the scam nature of MAGA. A meme coin has no intrinsic value. They are usually based on an internet joke, a product of hype and shared delusion. They reflect and make use of a celebrity’s image.

People make money riding the speculative highs and lows of meme coin trading. Value is highly volatile. Meme coins are used for crypto “pump and dumps”. Investors can use social media to push a profile causing a surge in value. That can allow insiders to sell making quick profit before the price falls. If this sounds sleazy, you got it. As Jacob Silverman has written, it is a bunch of insiders self-dealing fake money and dumping it on the public.

The Friday before his inauguration, the value of $Trump spiked as high as $72.62. 80% of the tokens were allocated to insiders. Trump owned an estimated 800 million of the new $Trump coins blowing up his fortune. On the day of his inauguration, Trump announced the $Melania coin which had a quick rise and fall. By Tuesday, the day after the inauguration, Trump’s own coin value went down to $38. It is hard to think the values offered mean anything but Axios reported the coin had made Trump $56.6 billion on paper.

This art of the deal is about taking something worthless, making easy money and selling before the price crashes. It is about bleeding suckers dry. Just like in everything, there will be losers, likely low level MAGA diehards who bought into what they thought was a get-rich-quick sure thing. Lawsuits about meme coin cheating are an almost certain likelihood.

Trump did a turnaround in his attitude toward crypto when he saw it could be a personal money-maker. He said his sons opened his eyes. Don Jr. and Eric launched their own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Trump now says he plans to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet” and a “bitcoin superpower’.

As the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has written corruption is a process as well as a set of practices. In her book, Strongmen, she wrote:

“They turn the economy into an instrument of leader wealth creation, but also encourage changes in ethical and behavioral norms to make things that were illegal or immoral appear acceptable, whether election fraud, torture or sexual assault,”

The legal questions raised by Trump’s behavior abound. There are massive conflicts of interest and securities fraud issues. Trump is seeking to gain while being obligated to regulate. Non-disclosure and de-regulation are his way. The ethics expert, Norm Eisen calls the meme coins “the single worst conflict of interest in the modern history of the presidency”.

Those seeking favors or policy change can buy the $Trump meme coin. This becomes particularly problematic considering the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The Constitution bars federal office holders from receiving payments from foreign governments. Foreign governments can buy the $Trump meme coin and raise its value. No one is policing this activity. It is like the Trump administration is successfully pretending the emoluments clause doesn’t exist. Who will stop foreign governments from giving Trump money in the scheme? It would appear no one.

The proliferation of meme coins would also appear to be the issuance of unlicensed securities opening the door to securities fraud but Trump has replaced the SEC Chair with a crypto currency advocate. The new Chair is likely to take the position that no crypto currency is a security. This is essentially putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. I would expect we will see much defrauding of investors as insiders “pump and dump”.

Last year, House Democrats released evidence that showed Trump accepted $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his first term. He used Trump properties such as Mar-a-Lago and Trump International Hotel in Washington DC for fundraising events and meetings with foreign heads of state. He turned the office of the presidency into a vendor of his own brand.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s transition team submitted an ethics pledge that doesn’t require him to address potential conflicts of interest. Trump’s return is both a shady cash grab and a statement about the end of accountability and ethical standards in government. It is entirely fitting that Trump fired inspector generals from more than a dozen federal agencies. They have been the watchdogs for uncovering fraud and abuse. Trump failed to give Congress the 30 day notice required by law nor did he provide substantive rationale which is also required by law. This is what one would expect from a convicted felon.

Long before the super-fire that has devastated whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles, climate scientists had issued dire warnings about the dangers of climate change. Really the warnings go back decades for anyone who was listening.

I remember when I was in college in the early 1970’s. I was in a seminar class titled The Literature of Expanded Consciousness and we had dinner with the West Coast poet Gary Snyder. He warned about the harm from fossil fuels and that was more than 50 years ago. Then there was NASA scientist James Hansen, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. In considering the L.A. wildfire, it is impossible not to be struck by our climate change denialism.

Every massive environmental disaster is seen as an isolated event. There is an unwillingness to connect the dots. Donald Trump’s tweets blaming Governor Gavin Newsom of California are a good illustration. Instead of any effort to understand the L.A. wildfire and place it in context, there is a cheap shot blaming effort. Much of the Right is absurdly blaming Diversity Equity and Inclusion, like that had anything to do with it.

There is a climate emergency going on now. It is not something in the future. It is happening in red states and blue states. Both parties bear blame for ignoring it and both have failed to respond. When the L.A. fire happened, I thought of the August 2023 Lahaina wildfire in Maui. Then I thought of all the other wildfires on the West Coast and Western Canada in recent years.

Because we forget so fast, I would mention the summer of 2017 that was a summer of fire. In her book On Fire, Naomi Klein described how 1800 square miles of forest, farm and grassland burned in British Columbia forcing 50,000 people to evacuate their homes. Then there was the fire in November 2018 in Paradise California, a town of 27,000, that was razed to the ground.

In 2020, over 8100 fires contributed to the burning of nearly 4.5 million acres of California land. About 75% of California’s most destructive wildfires measured in terms of structures burned, have occurred since 2015. Just the number of fires has been overwhelming. It is hard not to think we are trying to forget.

Historically, California experienced wildfires in June and July but climate change has increased the frequency, season length and burned area of wildfires. The combination of tinder-dry conditions, almost no rain for the last six months and very high hot winds created the inferno in L.A. Two rainy winters promoted the growth of brush but it was followed by near-zero rainfall for an extended period. Conditions were beyond ripe.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported that evidence for dangerous fire weather conditions linked to human-caused climate change is strongest in regions like the western U.S. and southeastern Australia. The area of heightened wildfire risk has increased with higher levels of warming. It is entirely predictable that the warmer the planet gets, the more frequent and extreme wildfires will become and that is what we are seeing. When forests burn they will release vast amounts of carbon back into the atmosphere which only accelerates warming.

The California writer, the late Mike Davis, studied disasters, especially in L.A..Many years ago he made the case that the dry hills surrounding L.A., running from Pasadena to Malibu, will regularly ignite when the Santa Ana winds blow. He critiqued the building of so many homes in the hills knowing what was likely to happen. Davis wrote:

“The fires are like gun violence. You always get the same mechanical repetition of action, but nothing changes at the root.”

I would say the root is our continuing failure to stop our reliance on burning fossil fuels. Every year that we fail to deliver the required reduction in emissions, the rate of future cuts required in the following year increases. But we pretend there is no climate emergency.

The problem we have is unregulated capitalism. Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change as far back as the 1970’s. Bill McKibben writes that even back then ExxonMobil scientists predicted with great accuracy how much the temperature would rise by 2020. He says they started building drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea levels they knew was coming.

However, instead of explaining and publicizing the science, they hired a small army of public relations experts to sow doubt. Their mission was delay in the service of maximizing profit for themselves. This is the logic of short-term thinking and the capitalist marketplace.

Now we face a new administration where, in the face of indisputable evidence, Donald Trump says climate change is a hoax and where he repeatedly says, “drill baby drill”. The insanity of that is palpable. It is like driving off a cliff. It is the equivalent of injecting poison into your body. It is worse than stupid. It is pathologically self-destructive and suicidal.

When the climate disasters start happening under his presidency, let’s see who Trump blames. Will he blame red state governors when the next mega-fire or flood happens in a red state? Will he blame budget cuts or DEI? Will he make aid contingent on whether he won the state in 2024 in the last election? We know he will blame everyone but himself. And, of course, he won’t blame climate change.

I am persuaded that no state is safe. Look at Montpelier or Asheville. Where is the snow cover in New Hampshire this winter? Not enough for cross country skiing from what I can see. We are fortunate to live in a northern clime though. The L.A. fire is a likely model of what we will see more in many locales, especially in the western U.S. I expect large portions of the South will become too hot to live in. Within the next twenty years, I would expect a new exodus to the north as people seek more habitable climes. Humans cannot live in 120 degree temperatures.

We must stop sleepwalking into climate apocalypse.

In a little-discussed move, on December 17, outgoing Governor Chris Sununu withdrew the nomination of Mindy Atwood to be New Hampshire State Librarian. He said he would leave the decision of who would be State Librarian to the new governor, Kelly Ayotte.

Sununu’s decision reeked of the political cowardice that is typical of Republicans in 2025. They are usually bowing to Trump no matter how outrageous his behavior but in this situation Sununu caved to pressure from the Christian right not to select Atwood. Nothing could be less libertarian or in keeping with the best New Hampshire values.

Sununu was responding to objections centered on Atwood’s advocacy against book censorship. Why aren’t libertarians up in arms about free expression and students’ rights to read? Why do students need censors from the government? Can’t students decide what they want to read without “protection”?

When Atwood applied for the job she wrote: “I deeply believe in the mission of public libraries to provide free and equal access to public information for everyone”. Atwood is entirely qualified for the position of State Librarian. She is the former Director of Abbott/Sunapee Library and for the last two years she was the Administrator of Library Operations at the New Hampshire State Library. She is widely supported by librarians around New Hampshire.

So why did Sununu yank her nomination? To the extent any reason was presented, we heard there was opposition from far right Executive Councilor David Wheeler (R-Milford). Sununu apparently believed the Executive Council wouldn’t support Atwood. Wheeler had said Atwood was “too woke” and was quoted on NHPR saying that Atwood had given presentations on behalf of regional and national library associations challenging censorship. How wild! A librarian who opposed censorship! Wheeler said:

“It was her involvement and the state library’s involvement in opposing parents from keeping their kids from seeing pornography in libraries. She was fighting parents to have any type of choice over what the kids can see.”

This has a very familiar ring to it. It sounds exactly like what the group Moms for Liberty was up to in Florida. They were about protecting students from material they deemed “inappropriate”. In the case of Mindy Atwood it was not about any particular books she favored for inclusion in libraries, including anything categorized as pornography. The retiring state librarian, Michael York, has pointed out that under New Hampshire state law, the State Librarian has no authority over what materials schools and libraries acquire and provide.

We need to see the larger context of the effort to stop people like Mindy Atwood from being State Librarian. Looking around, it is not hard to decipher. Lurking out of sight, Christian nationalists favor book banning and not just of books they deem pornography. They are overwhelmingly preoccupied with sexual order and with opposing LGBTQ books. They have consistently tried to ban books that included characters of color that featured themes of race and racism.

The Christian nationalists are modern-day Anthony Comstocks. They favor promoting a particular variant of Christianity and they see themselves as fighting for salvation against the forces of darkness. They have a cherry-picked narrow-minded perspective masquerading as a biblical worldview. Fundamentally, they are about inserting reactionary religion into public schools. While many see them as a cultural force opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, I see the Christian nationalists as a political movement. They have created a fictionalized version of American history based on the myth that America was founded as a Christian nation. They don’t support pluralistic democracy.

Rescinding Mindy Atwood’s nomination should not be seen as an isolated event. It fits in a national book banning narrative. Book banners have become increasingly active across the country. PEN America, a non-profit that supports freedom of expression in literature, reported 3,362 book bans affecting 1,557 unique titles in the 2022-23 school year. Its newest data, released in November 2024, showed the number of book bans skyrocketed to over 10,000 in the 2023-2024 school year, with Florida and Iowa accounting for over 8,000 of them.

The conflict between secular Enlightenment values and fundamentalist religion goes back to America’s beginnings and it continues. As a mainstream librarian, Atwood reflects the secular side of the conflict. Fundamentalism doesn’t adapt to any secular knowledge that conflicts with its brand of revealed religious truth. Free expression and the right to read widely and freely will never be tolerated by the Christian nationalists. They are control freaks.

Being from New England and being inheritors of the tradition of Thoreau and Emerson, it is appropriate that we are sensitive to the anti-intellectualism embedded in Atwood’s rejection. What pornography are the Christian nationalists assuming Atwood would allow? Is is a passage from Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, or E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey? Is it Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe or All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson? Those last two are among the most challenged and banned books.

Inevitably, the censoring is subjective. One person’s pornography is another person’s literature. Maybe it is just me but when I was a kid, I would have wanted to read anything forbidden. That would have catapulted to the top of what I wanted to read.

It is worth pointing out that there is little evidence showing a relationship between reading edgy books and negative outcomes. Protecting the right to read is not anti-parent. I would worry that we would have a few parents with a certain world view determining whether or not books could be available in the library.

There is no good reason why Governor Ayotte could not re-nominate Mindy Atwood to be State Librarian. As noted, she has all the qualifications. The reasons given for rescinding her nomination are lame.

Like many Bob Dylan fans, I ran out on New Years’ Day to see the new movie, A Complete Unknown. What impressed me about the movie was how well it captured that time in the early 1960’s when America’s old culture was coming apart and something new was being born.

The movie is a period piece. It takes place between the somnolent 1950’s and the birth of the counterculture. Dylan was more in flux than ever then, moving from acoustic folkie playing protest songs to his new electric incarnation.

That folkie time was best captured by his album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. That is the album with the picture of him and his girlfriend Suzy Rotolo on the cover. It was one of the first albums I ever bought. It was vinyl, 33 rpm. I listened to it so many times. I had a tiny record player that was like a little suitcase. It was a prize possession. It played 45’s and 33’s. I listened away from my parents, in the privacy of my bedroom.

It is amazing how many great songs were on that album. Although it was Dylan’s second album, it was his first that featured his own original songs. Eleven of the thirteen songs were Dylan originals. They included “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, “Girl from the North Country”, “Masters of War, and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”. Also on it was the masterpiece “Blowin in the Wind”.

The movie does a good job of placing the songs in a context that gave them more meaning. Of course, Bob was always enigmatic, the riddle who could not be reduced to any agenda. Still, the protest songs on the Freewheelin’ album had lasting power. Consider the start of “Masters of War”:

“Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.”

Those lyrics could be about now but they were written near the time of the Cuban missile crisis when the danger of nuclear war was frighteningly close. Dylan has a funny take on it though. In Talking World War III Blues, he wrote:

“Well the whole thing started at 3 o’clock fast
It was all over by quarter past
I was down in the sewer with some little lover
When I peeked out from a manhole cover
Wondering who turned the lights on…

Well I rung the fallout shelter bell
And I leaned my head and I gave a yell
“Give me a string bean, I’m a hungry man”
A shotgun fired and away I ran
I don’t blame them too much though, I know I look funny”

Even on nuclear war, Dylan had his own original spin. He grew to hate that anyone looked at him as any kind of leader or protest icon. In his memoir, Chronicles, Volume 1, he made that so clear. The movie transmits the tension between the Dylan the folk movement wanted him to be and the Bob that was emerging.

Bob cultivated a sense of mystery about himself. The same person who wrote George Jackson could also sell Chryslers at the Super Bowl. He was not on anyone’s bandwagon. Dylan prided himself on being eclectic. In Chronicles, he mentions influences: the wrester Gorgeous George, Joe Hill, Picasso, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland.

The Woody Guthrie connection is developed in the movie. Dylan goes to visit Woody in New Jersey where he was institutionalized suffering from Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative condition. Bob sings “Song to Woody” a song he wrote. Because of his condition, Woody can’t speak but he pounds the wall, in appreciation I thought.

Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, both played superbly by Ed Norton and Monica Barbaro, perform very helpful roles in advancing Dylan’s career but they also can’t handle Dylan’s break when he goes electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. They both seem in awe of Dylan’s genius but entirely frustrated at his evolution

Dylan, who is extremely well played by Timothee Chalamet, comes off as a self-absorbed jerk. In the movie, his romantic relationships are disasters and he appears to care little for either Baez or his other main girlfriend Suzy Rotolo , called Sylvie Russo, in the movie. Baez calls him “kind of an asshole” and at one point gives him the finger. As portrayed in the movie, Bob’s relationships were erratic, impulsive, and selfishly inconsistent.

One truly impressive thing about the movie was that Chalamet, Norton and Barbaro all sang the songs and played the instruments when they performed. Norton especially captured Pete Seeger bringing out Pete’s moral integrity, his bravery, his helpfulness as well as his being square.

When the movie had Dylan singing “The Times They Are A’Changin, you could feel the urgency of the 1960’s busting through. The Eisenhower 1950’s were being left behind. One of the lesser-known tracks on the Freewheelin’ album was “Oxford Town”, a song about James Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss. Dylan wrote:

“He went down to Oxford Town
Guns and clubs followed him down
All because his face was brown
Better get away from Oxford Town..

Oxford Town in the afternoon
Everybody singing a sorrowful tune
Two men died neath the Mississippi moon
Somebody better investigate soon.”

Dylan was inextricably connected to the 60’s even if as an unwilling symbol. Like other folkies, he connected to the struggle for racial justice. Oxford Town was not a one-off. Think “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “Hurricane”.

America has periods where it is like any sense of morality goes to sleep. As we enter a time of darkness and suppression of the struggle against racism, we need Bob’s anti-authoritarian energy for the fight back against racism and fascism.

Back in 1980, when I was a young activist living in Boston, I had the opportunity to hear Clarence Norris speak. He was the last surviving Scottsboro Boy. He died in 1989. Norris came to Boston to rally support for Willie Sanders, a black man from Dorchester who had been wrongfully accused of committing a series of rapes in the Allston-Brighton section of Boston.

That night I remember Norris saying,”Nothing has changed as far as framing innocent black men are concerned.”

The story that Norris told should be widely known. The Scottsboro Boys were nine young black men who in 1931 were accused of raping two white women. The case became an international cause celebre. After years of Jim Crow, the defense of the Scottsboro Boys became the first interracial civil rights effort in 40 years. All over the nation, black and white people held demonstrations protesting and demanding freedom for the nine.

Segregation was the legally-maintained way of life in the United States back then. Since the 1890’s white people generally had acquiesced to white supremacy and had a weak history of opposing racism. Scottsboro was a turning point away from that acquiescence.

The country was plunged in the Great Depression and times were desperate. Unemployment and hunger ruled. The nine black males who became the Scottsboro Boys were hoboing on a train, traveling and looking for work. After a conflict with a group of white men who they kicked off the train, word spread about the fight. When the train, which was moving very slowly, reached Paint Rock, Alabama, a crowd of white men gathered including some who had earlier been forced off that train.

Two white women appeared and claimed they had been raped by the black men. A lynching almost occurred but the local sheriff managed to get the nine to a jail in Scottsboro Alabama. Higher authorities called in the National Guard because the situation was so volatile. Norris said, “I knew if a white woman accused a black man of rape, he was as good as dead. All I could think was I was going to die for something I had not done.”

Norris was 19. Only four of the nine even knew each other. One was 13 years old.

Southern white men were obsessed with the idea that black men had an insatiable sexual appetite for white women. Most lynchings were about that fantasy. The two women in the Scottsboro case, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, had a past history of prostitution but they were transformed into paragons of white purity. Southerners saw the case as an attack on Southern womanhood.

Thousands came to Scottsboro for the trial. Two hundred National Guard ringed the courthouse. On the morning of the trial, a drunk 70 year old real estate attorney who spent 20 minutes with the defendants before trial took the case and urged them to plead guilty. The lawyer had not tried a case in decades. Besides the defendants, there were no black people allowed in the courtroom. The jury was all white men.

The trial lasted three days and all were found guilty of rape. Eight of nine defendants got the death penalty and one received life in prison. Of note, Ruby Bates could not identify any of her attackers. Price and Bates claimed they were raped at knife and gunpoint but no weapons were ever found. Nor was any medical evidence indicating rape produced at trial.

Outside the courthouse, huge crowds partied. When the sentences were announced, the crowd went wild with joy. People danced in the street. Bands struck up “Dixie” and “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”.

Three weeks after the trial, the International Labor Defense (ILD), a group connected to the Communist Party USA, decided to throw its resources into defense of the Scottsboro Boys.They appealed the verdict to higher courts and fought off execution dates. The defendants were often beaten by the guards. Their cells were close to the chamber with the electric chair. Lights dimmed in their cells whenever that chair was utilized.

Clarence Norris watched eight coffins be brought into the prison yard. He was scheduled to die that evening. A telegram arrived late in the day.. He and the others received a stay of execution. Their case went to the U.S, Supreme Court and the Court ruled 7-2 in Powell v Alabama that the defendants had received ineffective assistance of counsel in violation of due process. The Scottsboro case was the first case in which the Supreme Court held a state accountable to provide an adequate defense.

In an effort to get the Scottsboro Boys the best defense, the ILD reached out in unexpected fashion. They retained Samuel Leibowitz, possibly the best-known criminal defense attorney in the country. Leibowitz took the case pro bono. The Court had ordered a new trial. Leibowitz had a spectacular record of success having won 77 of 78 murder cases he had handled. One case had a hung jury.

Leibowitz’s presence stirred up tremendous resentment in the South. There was much sentiment that the “Jew lawyer” should go back to New York. In the second trial Leibowitz produced Ruby Bates as a defense witness. She asserted that she and Price had fabricated the rape story and testified they had never been touched by any of the Scottsboro Boys. The jury still found the defendants guilty but the trial judge set aside the verdict and ordered another trial.

Alabama then replaced the trial judge with someone who had never attended law school. The new judge denied all defense requests and sustained every prosecution objection. Again, for the third time, the jury made a guilty finding. Leibowitz again appealed to the Supreme Court. In Norris v Alabama, the Court agreed that Norris was denied equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court found it was legal error that African Americans were excluded from serving on the jury.

Tired of the bad publicity, Alabama agreed to drop charges against four of the defendants. Norris was not among them. The fourth trial, which began July 13, 1937 ended in a guilty verdict with the death penalty. The four freed defendants went on a speaking tour on behalf of the five who were still being prosecuted.

Things were not easier for the five. The state moved them to another prison where they were made to work 12 hour days in a cotton mill. They were also subject to beatings by the guards. The health circumstances for the five worsened in the new environment.

After a prolonged negotiation with the Alabama governor, Norris had his sentence commuted to life in prison. In January 1944, Norris received parole but there was one condition. He had to stay in Alabama. Norris could not accept that and he moved to New York, violating parole .His lawyers convinced him though that he should return to Alabama. He had doubts but he was told he would not be returned to prison.

When he returned, he was incarcerated again for two more years. In 1946, he was again up for parole which he received. Once out of jail, he again violated parole by leaving the state. He headed north. He took another name. For the next 30 years he lived in obscurity, working a steady job as a sanitation workers. He was still wanted for breaking a condition of parole.

In 1976, Alabama’s Attorney General opened a new investigation of the case. The NAACP helped with this advocacy. Governor George Wallace pardoned Norris in October 1976. Norris unsuccessfully sought $10,000 in compensation for his mistreatment. Alabama never paid a dime. In November 2013, more than 80 years after their convictions, three other Scottsboro Boys who had never been pardoned got posthumous clearing of their records.

The Scottsboro story is told in Clarence Norris’s autobiography, The Last of the Scottsboro Boys. There is also a very good video history, Scottsboro An American Tragedy, which was made by PBS.

What is sad is Alabama’s failure of reckoning with the pointless suffering it inflicted. Nine lives were devastated. The case showcases our national failure since Reconstruction to rectify our national curse of racism. How many other Clarence Norris-type stories are out there that no one knows about? We are still failing.