Jonathan P. Baird

I took these photos when I was on the Nation civil rights trip. They were all from the area around the Edmund Pettus Bridge. There are memorials around the bridge. March 7 was the 60th anniversary of the March from Selma to Montgomery.

Last Sunday morning, on March 2, my dog Shady died suddenly and unexpectedly. He was eleven. He had not been sick. He wolfed down his breakfast, then threw it all up, pooped in the house (very unlike him) and then had trouble getting up. He managed to go outside to pee but he was definitely out of sorts and he cried and whimpered a little. Within an hour, he was gone. I remain in a state of disbelief that Shady is no longer with us.

People often said he was the biggest golden retriever they had ever seen, He weighed over 120 pounds but he wasn’t fat, just very large-boned with beautiful body lines. As my friends Sally and Kim have said, Shady was a gentle giant. He was a big presence in my not-so-big house.

It is funny because when I picked him out of a large litter, he was the runt. There was no way to predict his eventual size. At the same time he was so big, he was a scaredy-cat. He hated to go over his head in water. He rarely wandered off too far.

When I would take him out at night, he sometimes didn’t like to go past my mailbox. He was tuned into sounds and smells that were way beyond me. He would freeze and be immobile and unmovable. He wanted back in the house. I always figured there was some animal lurking in the dark that I could not detect. We do live in a very rural place with woods all around.

Shady was extremely stubborn. He had a mind of his own and occasionally he would take off. There is a two mile loop near my house we call the Dingle and one time we were walking it, Shady took off into the woods and would not come back. I yelled quite a bit and then returned home. No Shady. It was starting to get dark and I was getting worried. Around dusk, a neighbor who lives about a mile away called me and he said Shady was there. I drove right over and when I arrived, Shady bolted and jumped in my car so fast. I guess he was scared too.

He was a chow hound and kind of an omnivore. He was one of those dogs who would eat so fast you would want him to slow down but it was impossible. He was not part of the slow food movement. He loved treats and I admit I loved to spoil him. Donuts were his thing, especially apple cider donuts.

He had a way of spreading out around the house. When he slurped water, he left a big trail. He was a perpetual shedding machine who with his long hair lived to destroy vacuum cleaners. Golden retriever hairballs seemed to inhabit every corner of my home. My car also featured golden retriever hair and there was no dog-free zone there. Dog truly was my co-pilot.

Shady loved toys. Of all the toys he ever got, he liked this little toy duck we named Ms. Quacky best. He proudly would carry Ms. Quacky around in his mouth as he pranced around being King Dog. My younger dog, Blue, also loved Ms. Quacky. The two of them had a competition about who would get control of Ms. Quacky. That competition never stopped

Of all the things we did together, I think hiking mountains was Shady’s favorite. He would run ahead and come back. Usually he didn’t go too far ahead. One time when my friend Steve and I hiked a back trail on Mt. Chocurua, he took off ahead up the trail and was gone for almost an hour until we caught up with him. There were other dogs in a party ahead that were more interesting than us.

He was the friendliest of dogs. I was always proud of Shady’s good nature because he was so friendly to everyone, dogs and people. It was like he expected to be loved . He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Sometimes he would jump up on people which was not always appreciated but it was out of enthusiasm.

One great thing about living in the country is all the back roads and trails where you can roam and mostly get away from cars. I guess I am paranoid about cars. I once lost a dog when I lived in Berlin NH who was struck by a hit-and-run driver. I have been determined to never have that experience again.

You have to be careful, though, about hunters. Shady did not like gunshots. It was a primal thing for him. One thing about living in North Wilmot, gunshots are always going off. He hated fireworks too. With those noises he would freeze and he would not want to walk outside. Sometimes, I would take him home if he was too freaked out.

I think running free everyday was and is essential for my dogs. Maybe we overdomesticate our animals and they need dog-time when they can run in the woods, even if not for that long. They thrive on that and tend to be more settled after running around.

I named Shady after the former Philadelphia Eagles running back, Lesean “Shady” McCoy. That Shady had great moves.It was disconcerting when that Shady got traded to the Buffalo Bills when my Shady was still young. I wanted Shady to be on the Eagles! That trade was one of Chip Kelly’s worst moves.

During Covid, working at home, Shady and Blue were my constant companions and they helped me cope with the social isolation and helped to get me through. It did make me think more about the human-dog relationship. Dogs fill a gap. Their unconditional loyalty surpasses human loyalty. Maybe part of why humans love dogs so much is that their love and devotion is undivided. It is rare to get that same level of affection from our fellow humans.

Shady was a little atypical for the breed. He had no interest in retrieving. He wasn’t the type of dog who would run repeatedly and get a tennis ball you threw 100 times. For whatever reason, he wasn’t into that.

There are a couple shout-outs connected to Shady that I need to offer. My friend and neighbor Wendy Lavallee is a dog person extraordinaire. For almost Shady’s entire life, Wendy helped me, took Shady and Blue and cared for them while I was at work. Any time I had to leave town, she generously would keep my pups and care for them. Wendy has her own dog care business and my dogs could not have been in better hands. Wendy has a magical connection with dogs.

I also need to thank my union, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE). Our union negotiated a great collective bargaining agreement featuring telework rights which allowed more time to work from home. Needless to say, my dogs loved it (as did I). As a federal worker, that now is threatened. If we lose that and have to return to the office full time, I don’t know how I could explain it to Blue.

We had a bunch of nicknames for Shady: the Shademeister, Mr. Shady, Shady Boy, Big Puppy and Shade. He was my Dog Emeritus.The dog had an amazing ability to make people happy. He had a radiant spirit. His passing is a reminder of the importance of loving and telling your love because you never know what will happen next. I don’t know why Shady died and it happened so fast. I totally did not expect that.

I saw a dog quote that I like: “Dogs are not our whole life but they make our lives whole”. I was privileged to have Shady in my life. You could not ask for a better friend.

Everyday since the onset of the second Trump administration Americans who care about civil rights have suffered a barrage of blows aimed at turning back the clock and reversing all gains that have been made in the struggle against racism since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v Board of Education. There are almost too many items to list but I will mention some important ones:

– Trump’s challenge to the 14th amendment and birthright citizenship
– Trump overturning LBJ’s Executive Order 11226 which sought to end racial discrimination by the federal government in contracting
– the Executive Order banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts not only from federal government hiring and practices but also from state and local programs receiving federal dollars
– the Executive Order requiring schools teach “patriotic education” and banning accurate teaching in K-12 schools of the history of racism
– the purge of competent, experienced and capable black and female military leaders who were accused of “being woke”
– the reversal of seven earlier Executive Orders designed to combat environmental racism
– Trump firing two Equal Opportunity commissioners who were confirmed by the Senate to serve set terms, leaving the EEOC without a quorum so the agency can’t take votes on policy or enforcement of civil rights laws
– renaming military bases after traitorous Confederate generals, segregationists and enslavers
– co-President Musk’s racist and xenophobic attack on a federal judge of color, Amir Ali, who has ruled against DOGE

It is easy to treat each shocker as an isolated, individual event. The problem with that approach is that it fails to delineate patterns. There is no effort to place events in a historical context or to connect how individual occurrences tie together.

Donald Trump, his administration and the MAGA movement are trying to roll back America’s commitment to the value of equality. This struggle has been ongoing since our nation’s founding. The two greatest American sins are slavery and the genocide against Native Americans. From the very start of the nation, our commitment to multi-racial democracy was opposed by an alternative set of illiberal values rooted in racism.

The fight has always fundamentally been about white supremacy and whether America would maintain that hateful tradition. Our history has a ping pong-like quality where that struggle has gone back and forth with gains followed by reversals.

The Civil War was fought to end the slave system that dehumanized African Americans, denied them the right to vote and brutalized them through terrorist acts of violence. Even though the Union forces won the Civil War, the Reconstruction period that followed was short-lived. Particularly after federal troops pulled out of the South in 1876, the racist forces again prevailed.

From around 1890-1940, all the positive civil rights gains that happened in the aftermath of the Civil War were wiped away. White southerners called for Redemption – the return of white supremacy and restoration of the old, pre-Civil War order.

The historian W.E. B. DuBois described the era as one where “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery”. The KKK and white racists in the South enforced a form of racial fascism where black people were racially segregated and frozen into a status of subjugation. Over 4000 lynchings reinforced racist rule. These social relations remained the norm until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s-1960’s.

The Brown v Board of Education decision ushered in a period of advance in the struggle against segregation. Our society started to recognize its legacy of voter suppression and discrimination in every area of life, including housing, employment, education and health care. Barriers like the denial of the right to serve on a jury, have an interracial marriage, swim at a racially segregated beach, eat at a restaurant, travel on a bus or stay in a hotel disappeared.

There was undeniable improvement in the economic well-being of many people of color and that was complemented by increased representation in elected political office.

Unfortunately, that success stands threatened as we hover on the cusp of a new period of backwardness. The many actions I outlined show that the coalition of illiberal forces organized around the Trump administration and MAGA are actively working to restore white supremacy. In our era, they wear suits instead of Klan robes.

Their patriotic history is a fairy tale based on suppressing black history. America hasn’t acknowledged the depth of racist poison undergirding our institutions and our way of life, We have not done well in many areas like fair housing, employment discrimination, mass incarceration, racial hate crimes, police violence, and unequal public education. Adam Serwer calls what is going on now the “Great Resegregation”, the restoration of America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender.

The Trump side has argued that efforts to end discrimination are themselves a form of discrimination. They indulge the fantasy racism is over, maintaining that we should all be color-blind. Colorblindness rhetoric is about the idea of solving our race problem by ignoring it. It is a convenient way to head off public discussion of racism.

I believe that the current onslaught against DEI is a cover to justify the rollback of civil rights. It is code. The intended message is support for white supremacy. Conservatives don’t usually publicly use the N-word now. They talk about DEI causing plane crashes and black immigrants eating dogs and cats. That way they can be racist and have plausible deniability.

Many white people still mistakenly believe racism serves their interest but it is the billionaire class that is hogging the money and screwing over black and white workers. Racism remains the billionaires’ most effective divide and conquer tool. The civil rights movement advanced the economic and political rights of all working people and white people have benefited when racism is beaten back.

We have come too far and learned too much to go back.

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.