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Whose National Interests Are Served By Trump's Global Bullying? Not Ours

Whose National Interests Are Served By Trump's Global Bullying? Not Ours

With Donald Trump as president, international humiliation has become a condition of being American.

Trump arrived at the NATO summit in Ankara fresh from his gross interference with World Cup officiating. His bullying call to the FIFA chief evidently resulted in the suspension of Folarin Balogun's red card, restoration of the star player to the US National Men's Team roster, and a poor outcome in their Monday match against Belgium -- eliminating the United States from the tournament amid imprecations against the "Trump curse."

As usual, Trump instantly set to work insulting America's traditional allies, renewing his absurd demand to annex Greenland and denouncing NATO, which he said "is never there for us" because its European leaders have no use for his war on Iran. He knows that he is lying about the all iance's fidelity to its parnership with the US, proved with blood and sorrow during the war in Afghanistan, the only time in history when NATO's Article 5 requiring mutual defense has been activated.

Trump's principal complaint against NATO is the reluctance of its member states to support the war that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been waging on Iran. But while preparing to depart Turkey, he demonstrated again why our allies won't join in that idiotic endeavor, when he declared an end to the Iran "ceasefire" that had scarcely been in effect. Like his initiation of the war, that announcement came without consulting the allies whose cooperation he has demanded. Of course, this was exactly how Trump behaved during his first term, when he ended the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that President Barack Obama had negotiated -- with the assistance and participation not only of our European allies but China and Russia as well.

Having dismissed European interests and views back then, only a president as arrogant as Trump would assume that they would join in lockstep when he attacked Iran amid this year's bilateral negotiations. No doubt the Europeans were as shocked by that perfidious strike as the Iranians themselves -- and they just as certainly were appalled by the absence of strategic planning that has led to the Strait of Hormuz closure, destabilizing the Mideast, many thousands of deaths, and the pointless disruption of the world economy.

For the moment, Trump reaffirmed the US commitment to NATO with today's unanimous declaration by its leaders of “our ironclad commitment to our collective defense under Article 5." He even offered a vague commitment to allow Ukrainian production of Patriot missiles, although it will be the Europeans and Canadians who provide $80 billion in new military aid to Kiev.

Trump probably knows that US law prohibits him from simply quitting NATO, and he may not want that fight with Republican senators on the eve of midterm elections. Nobody should be surprised, however, when he returns to spiteful attacks on the Western nations that have been our faithful friends for decades. He will keep undermining our relationships with those countries for as long as he is president. His ego and ignorance won't allow him to act in our real interest -- and those countries won't serve up the corrupt deals to enrich him that he has come to expect, as he flies around in the "Air Force One" that landed in Washington as a Qatari bribe.

If too many Americans don't grasp these realities, be advised that the Europeans, and people around the world, assuredly do. They look upon the United States and its leadership with a mixture of scorn and pity. Yes, "America is back," as Trump and his stooges bray -- back to the disgrace inflicted on our reputation by atrocity and misadventure in places like Iraq and Indochina.

Who is served by all of the chaos and ill feeling that Trump exacerbates with every dim utterance? That would be our adversaries in Moscow and Beijing, who despise NATO as a beacon of democracy in a dark time.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.


While Fascist Goons Hide Behind Masks, Republicans Pretend They Don't Exist

While Fascist Goons Hide Behind Masks, Republicans Pretend They Don't Exist

Whenever members of the white nationalist Patriot Front organization march in Washington, as they did again on July 4, they hide their faces behind white gaiters – as if aware of the shame and revulsion that their drum-beating theatrics inflicted on the United States during our 250th birthday. With a paranoia that matches their racist dogma, the fascist marchers fear the social ostracism they would suffer on social media if their true identities became known.

But Patriot Front’s habitual masking also offers a convenient excuse for the most extreme Republicans to disclaim these ideological mutts, whose militant expression of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant and white supremacist ideology constantly embarrasses MAGA figures in politics and the media. Patriot Front is too close for comfort, so the MAGA right constant attempts to blame its existence on Antifa, the “left,” or the FBI – all conspiracy theories with no basis but plenty of purchase on the right-wing brain.

Consider Mike Lee, the ultra-right Republican senator from Utah, who posted a clip of Patriot Front’s DC demonstration on X/Twitter. “Patriot Front: Brought to you by leftists who don’t know that patriots don’t wear masks.” Lee must have forgotten already about the “patriots” enlisted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who wear masks while carrying out dragnet raids and even while shooting down innocent American citizens. Lee never had a problem with ICE masking.

As many noted in posts roasting him, Lee also appears to have forgotten his own prediction, posted on X at the dawn of the second Trump administration, that Patriot Front would “disappear immediately” as soon as the Senate confirmed Kash Patel as FBI director. “What a coincidence that would be.” In other words, MAGA man Patel would shut down this “false flag” front group as soon as Trump got control of law enforcement.

Like so many Mike Lee posts, that quip has not aged well.

Nor did a similar broadside from Laura Ingraham, who reacted to the fascist marchers in Washington with a dismissive tweet. “I call fake. Looks more like Antifa in costume,” the irascible Fox host wrote. “No one should be allowed to cover their faces.” No one except ICE, she surely meant.

Asked about the fascist demonstrations on CNN, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum declined to condemn them. Burgum saw no need to criticize their noxious conduct, which he depicted as a harmless First Amendment exercise.

“Part of my response to that is that there are protests on the mall that people say things that I think are reprehensible about President Trump, and yet they’re allowed to go on because of free speech in our country,” Burgum replied. He went on to suggest that at least some of those critics are “communists,” the preferred canard for Trump, who has never forgotten what he learned from the late McCarthyite Roy Cohn.

There is no significant cohort of communists lurking anywhere these days, just as there is no evidence that Patriot Front is a government operation or a leftist front (a fact that its maskless founder Thomas Rousseau desperately emphasizes in every media interview). Research organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center have long identified the Texas-based outfit as one of the “most active” neo-fascist groups in the country ever since it split off from another group known as National Vanguard in the wake of the deadly Unite the Right riot in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. There is no question that these fascist formations have grown and prospered in the MAGA era – a phenomenon that ought to trouble the Trump followers, but introspection or even rational thought don’t come naturally to them.

Fabricating conspiracies is so much easier – and more profitable.

On This Special July 4, Celebrate With America's Diverse, Inspiring World Cup Team

On This Special July 4, Celebrate With America's Diverse, Inspiring World Cup Team

Americans seeking inspiration during this anniversary of independence should turn away from the nation’s capital, where Donald Trump’s narcissistic celebration provide only national embarrassment (and perhaps a few laughs). Look instead to the World Cup, where the performance of the US Men’s National Team is renewing the patriotic pride and national solidarity of a free people – led by players whose diversity and citizenship stand against the anti-immigrant bigotry of the current regime.

At a time when Trump and his xenophobic henchman Stephen Miller shriek incessantly about immigrants “poisoning” the nation -- and just vowed to continue their unconstitutional crusade against birthright citizenship – the USMNT is a living testament to true American values.

Under the motto “One Nation, One Team,” their roster is one of the most diverse in the world. The 26 players on the World Cup squad are not only interracial, with 12 Black and three Latino players, but include six born overseas to military families, a dozen with immigrant roots in eight other countries around the globe. Team USA, like the nation it represents, includes an extraordinary global array of languages and cultures, with players who learned the sport both in their home country, like Gio Reyna, who grew up in suburban New York, or team captain Christian Pulisic, raised in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and Malik Tillman, who spent his boyhood in Bavaria on a German youth team.

And then there is Folarin Balogun, born by accident in Brooklyn when his Nigerian mother, on her way back to England, was told that her pregnancy was too advanced to fly safely. Like so many of his teammates, the hugely talented Balogun, chose American citizenship and feels a special responsibility. Having scored two goals for Team USA before he got a red card in last week’s victory over Bosnia-Herzegovina, he has said, “To represent the United States means a lot. I just hope I can bring that prestige and winning mentality over into soccer.”

While American fans thrill to the play of Balogun and his teammates, lovers of the beautiful game who have flocked to our shores have found an America starkly different from what Trump’s vulgarity and bile led them to expect. Or what the dimwits at the Department of Homeland Security intended when they post ultra-nationalist “OUR SOIL” memes on social media ahead of World Cup matches.

People from all over the world are discovering a generous and inclusive brand of American greatness – not in the blustering and domineering Trump style, but in the beautiful welcome extended to the global visitors and their teams, from sea to shining sea. It could be seen in the boisterous hospitality encountered by the Scots in Boston, where they emptied the taverns of beer or the huge crowds who greeted the Japanese in Nashville.

But perhaps the most poignant example is the Algerians who found themselves Lawrence, Kansas, a heartland city that welcomed a team from a nation that Trump himself had once stigmatized. The residents of Lawrence embraced Team Algeria with astonishing enthusiasm and grace.

Indeed, it was the Kansans who expressed sincere thanks for a moment on the world stage brought by the visiting Algerians. “We’re very grateful to Algeria,” said one Lawrence resident as the team departed for a match in Canada. “We’ve loved getting to know your country and we wish you all the best.” During their final group-stage match against Austria, the Algerians unfurled a big banner behind their goal, “Thank You Lawrence.”

That is the America of our better angels, the city on the hill we have longed to become in our highest aspirations, the nation of ideas and ideals that the crooks and criminals now ruling us have aimed to suppress. What happened during this World Cup tournament will be remembered long after Trump’s humiliating “Freedom 250” is mercifully forgotten.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.

Echoes Of 'Uranium One' In Trump's Kazakh Super-Grift (Except This Scandal Is Real)

Echoes Of 'Uranium One' In Trump's Kazakh Super-Grift (Except This Scandal Is Real)

Even Americans jaded by the Trump administration’s gaudy pageant of sleaze and self-dealing may have been stunned by the latest episode of nepotistic corruption. As the New York Times reported this week, both of the president’s elder sons are profiting from a tungsten mining deal between the United States and Kazakhstan personally negotiated by their father. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons are also getting a cut of the proceeds, along with assorted other White House cronies.

Beyond the unsavory arrangements designed to cram still more billions into Trump family accounts, what this investigation exposed once again is that every Republican accusation is really a confession – even if the proof emeges a decade later. The deal revealed by the Times eerily echoes a pseudo-scandal fabricated by Trump crony Steve Bannon to smear Hillary Clinton, which theTimes dutifully promoted on its front page. Bannon was beyond delighted, of course, and the damage to the nation has been incalculable, including the latest Kazakh scam.

Tungsten is a rare metal of critical importance to US defense and technology industries whose export was restricted last year by China, a major source of reserves. An enormous deposit exists in Kazakhstan, however -- and the US effort to exploit that lode promises multi-billion-dollar paydays for the Trump and Lutnick families, as at least 14 companies connected with one or both families are actively working with the federal government on critical mineral extraction deals.

The agreement between the US and Kazakh governments quietly signed last November 6 -- with no disclosure of the Trump or Lutnick grifts -- involves a company called Kaz Resources. The federal government is also subsidizing that firm, and the Trump sons' investment, with at least $1.6 billlion in government funding. As the Times investigation noted, the Trump and Lutnick gang was “doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history."

But the precedent for this Kazakhstan ripoff is the fake 2015 story, that originated in a "strange journalistic partnership between Bannon and theTimes. Bannon's conspiracy theory, advanced in a scurrilous book by his then-employee Peter Schweizer, claimed that Hillary Clinton had overseen the sale of US uranium assets to a Russian company, as secretary of state, in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation by a Canadian donor. This far-fetched notion -- which ought to have been shot down by any competentTimes editor -- ran aground on a simple fact: Neither Clinton nor the foundation exercised any control over the uranium decision. She couldn't have been bribed because she had nothing to sell.

With the imprimatur of the Times, that flimsy tale nevertheless spread far and wide, inflicting permanent harm on Clinton's reputation, her ensuing campaign for president, and the good name of her family's highly successful charity. It was an entirely fraudulent canard for which the paper of record has yet to offer an appropriate correcton or apology. Perhaps someone on the editorial board or Op-Ed page will draw the comparison noted here -- and thus redeem at least a fraction of the ruin that its pages are now recording.




Zohran mamdani

Mamdani's Big Night In New York Primary Stokes Conservative Political Fantasies

With his endorsement driving three insurgent challengers to victory in New York’s Democratic congressional primaries on June 23, Mayor Zohran Mamdani proved again that his combination of social media and community organizing wields big power – especially in a primary contest. But conservatives who fantasize that the socialist cohort will now seize control of the Democratic Party are likely to be disappointed by the full primary results.

Two of Mamdani’s victorious choices are indeed members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA): Darializa Avila Chevalier, an activist and graduate student who defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat in northern Manhattan, and Claire Valdez, a state assembly member who won the nomination to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez in Brooklyn.

Former City Comptroller Brad Lander, Mamdani’s third pick, is not affiliated with DSA. but was supported by many of its members in his landslide victory over Rep. Dan Goldman, whose district straddles parts of both Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Neither Mamdani nor DSA endorsed any candidate to succeed retiring Rep. Jerrold Nadler in Manhattan, where state assembly member Micah Lasher, a longtime Nadler aide, triumphed over a crowded field that included Jack Schlossberg, grandson of President John F. Kennedy, and Trump critic George Conway.

All of the Democratic nominees in the city are viewed as certain to win election in November.

Despite gleeful Republican claims that gleefully warned that the DSA’s big night in New York will slap a “socialist” label on the national Democratic Party, results in other districts showed no such leftward lurch. Just north of the city in Westchester County, Cait Conley, a military veteran and former national security official, easily defeated a pair of rivals who ran to her left and sought to portray her as the “establishment” choice. Conley will now face incumbent Republican Mike Lawler, a top Democratic target who attempted to manipulate Democrats into nominating one of the “more progressive” alternatives.

In Maryland, Democrats chose Adrian Boafo, a Prince Georges County legislator, from among nearly two dozen candidates seeking to succeed retiring Rep. Steny Hoyer, a longtime party leader in the House. Boafo benefited from heavy spending by cryptocurrency interests and the American Israel Political Action Committee, whose machinations have drawn criticism from many Democrats in the wake of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Popular Maryland Gov. Wes Moore crushed a primary bid by a more liberal challenger, and Rep. April McClain Delaney beat back a comeback bid by former Rep. David Trone, with the support of most of the state’s Democratic officeholders.

And in Utah, former Rep. Ben McAdams had little trouble fending off a challenge from a state senator backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s famed socialist Independent. McAdams won the primary to represent a redrawn Salt Lake City district that looks certain to elect a Democrat in November.

The socialist victories in the New York primary provoked some excited comparisons to the House Freedom Caucus, where once-fringe elements in the Republican Party bedevil thir Congressional leadership. But assuming that all of the socialist Democrats nominated on Primary Night join a Democratic majority next January, their ranks will increase to three or four in a caucus of 218-plus members. (They probably cannot count on the increasingly pragmatic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, despite her DSA branding, to support their more exotic ideological excursions.) The Freedom Caucus currently counts more than 30 members, an order of magnitude larger.

Socialism, whatever that may now mean, isn't yet taking over the Democratic Party. let alone America.

Pool Of Slime Reflects The Depth And Breadth Of Trump's Betrayals

Pool Of Slime Reflects The Depth And Breadth Of Trump's Betrayals

Of all the scandals that have beset the nation during the years of the Trump regime, few have so neatly represented the would-be dictator as his despoliation of the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The overgrowth of green slime caused by Donald Trump's idiotic attempt to refurbish the pool evokes the disgust most Americans now feel at the mention of his name.

This episode includes all the varieties of Trumpian scandal we now anticipate in regular rotation. Scheduled for completion by the Fourth of July's 250th anniversary, it is a shambles and yet another Trump-sponsored national disaster.

From its inception, this was a typical instance of presidential corruption, which saw the White House deliver a no-bid contract to a firm called Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which just happened to have done similar work on swimming pools at the Trump Organization's Virginia golf club.

With no controls and little oversight, the cost of the contract keeps rising: having promised to spend no more than $1.8 million, Trump has paid over $14 million, and no doubt the price will continue to escalate.

Separately, but similarly, the White House gave a $1.7 million no-bid contract to another firm, Greenwater Services, to clean up the algae infestation in the Reflecting Pool. Like the initial contractor, this outfit also did work at a Trump golf club, in Bedminster, New Jersey. Naturally, its principal owner is a shady businessman, sporting a greasy pencil mustache, who happens to be a wealthy Trump donor, a Palm Beach neighbor of the president, and a conspirator in various bribery and illicit donation schemes.

Aside from the slime and sleaze, the Reflecting Pool fiasco captures the environmental ignorance and narcissistic vandalism that Trump embodies. While the administration might reasonably have tried to remedy the pool's longstanding drainage problems, Trump hired his cronies to coat the bottom with a substance in "American flag blue" that quickly began to peel off, causing more trouble.

Having failed to consult scientists — whose wisdom he always disdains — the president made the pool's problems worse by increasing the impact of climate change. Turning the pool dark heated it up and made it even more hospitable to algae growth.

As the Cultural Landscape Foundation noted in a lawsuit filed to stop the painting of the pool, it is an "aesthetic injury" — like so many Trump projects — that will "fundamentally alter the existing harmony, solemnity and dignity of the current memorial landscape.

Although Trump and his minions have lied repeatedly about the Reflecting Pool, claiming it is crystal clear when everyone can gaze upon the murky results, he now needs someone to blame. Having botched this entire process with embarrassing stupidity and venality, he insists that the renovation scheme failed because of "vandalism." Indeed, he has claimed that numerous vandals have been apprehended.

On Monday, the president told reporters that five people had been arrested and another five are suspects, while he sought to shift the blame for his own ineptitude. “I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up," he said, while offering no evidence at all that any such attack has occurred. Nor would cutting the blue lining explain the recurring algae blooms.

As Andrew Egger noted sardonically in The Bulwark, the villainous alleged vandals "were so cunning, so devastatingly dastardly, that they managed to pull off this shocking act of national blasphemy without once being visible on the cameras embedded in the Washington Monument that transmit a 24/7 public livestream of the Reflecting Pool." Or else Trump was fabricating as usual.

The sole named individual man arrested so far — a former Olympic athlete named David Hearn, who merely reached into the pool to touch a detached piece of the coating — is manifestly innocent. Like others targeted by this impulsive and malignant president, he seems certain to be exonerated.

Not so the White House vandal and his henchmen, however. We will spend many millions and many months cleaning up the destruction he leaves behind.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.

With Oil Sanctions Suddenly Lifted, Iran Already Banking Billions From Trump's Deal

With Oil Sanctions Suddenly Lifted, Iran Already Banking Billions From Trump's Deal

Not only does President Donald Trump’s “deal” to end the Iran war guarantee profits for the Tehran regime, but the money is already flowing as the United States lifts its blockade of Iranian ports.

Sanctions on the country’s oil sales, which have financed its military and nuclear programs for decades, appear to have been lifted as soon as Trump and Vice President JD Vance electronically signed the “memorandum of understanding” with their Iranian counterparts on June 16. The Iranians also gained immediate access to international banking and insurance services.

According to sources quoted by the Wall Street Journal, the first supertanker loaded with Iranian crude left the port of Chahabar, sailed past the US naval blockade, and cruised out of the Gulf of Oman on Tuesday. A second supertanker soon followed.

The Journal also reports that a draft of the memorandum of understanding outlined the resumption of oil sales, “along with the promise after further negotiations…of extensive sanctions relief, release of frozen assets and billions of dollars in reconstruction funding.” How soon the regime would obtain those additional funds remains unclear, although senior administration officials have suggested they would be tied to “performance” on issues such as nuclear enrichment and opening the Strait of Hormuz.

Murky as the MOU remains, what is becoming clear is that Iran has won a major strategic victory rather than suffering the “total defeat” that Trump has repeatedly claimed. The Supreme Leader and the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps will soon be collecting billions of dollars in fresh oil revenues, having achieved the sanctions relief they have long demanded from the United States. And they will have gotten that benefit, with all its dangers to the West, merely by returning to the pre-war status quo.

So why did we expend hundreds of billions of dollars in military and economic costs, along with more than dozen American lives and thousands of innocent Iranians we were supposedly trying to protect?

If the Journal reporting proves correct, it won’t be easy for Trump and his MAGA propagandists to answer those questions. Indeed, the Republicans who have stooged for the White House on this war and so many other ruinous decisions already appear to see a political disaster looming.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.

Congratulations To All? Trump's Latest Deal Looks Like A Massive Gift To Iran

Congratulations To All? Trump's Latest Deal Looks Like A Massive Gift To Iran

The very first words announcing the Trump administration’s latest “deal” to conclude its war on Iran – which will reportedly be signed on Friday – were entirely false.

“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” the president proclaimed on his Truth Social site on Sunday evening. “Congratulations to all!”

But the agreement, whose details remain entirely opaque and disputed by all parties, is far from complete – if “complete” is meant to indicate that Trump has achieved any of the objectives for which he expended hundreds of billions of dollars, at least 13 American lives, an untold number of Iranian civilian deaths, and severe damage to the world economy and this nation’s international standing.

Instead, what Iranian officials have called a “memorandum of understanding” merely extends the current ceasefire (which hasn’t actually curtailed kinetic hostilities) for two months, while the United States and Iran resume negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear programs, the alleged reason for war.

No honest analyst believes that Trump or his inept negotiators will achieve more restrictions on Iran than the multilateral agreement he discarded in 2018 merely because it was achieved by his predecessor President Barack Obama. In the leaks and comments about this renewed ceasefire, what can be detected is the strong suggestion that this is in fact a far worse deal from the American standpoint – and a far more lucrative outcome for the Iranians.

Unless the Iranian news agencies are lying just as brazenly as Trump always does, the Tehran dictatorship will collect at least $24 billion in previously frozen funds during the 60-day negotiation period. The Trump administration's response has come in the form of non-denial denials, and it now appears that those previously unavailable billions will be exchanged for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. That reopening is the only aspect of the mooted :"deal" that both sides agree will happen, and merely resolves a crisis that Trump and his Israeli partner Benjamin Netanyahu provoked when they initiated this conflict.

Of course the reopening of ship traffic in the Persian Gulf won't actually resolve anything, because the Iranians will still be able to close the strait whenever they choose -- a commercial and diplomatic superpower that they can now exercise entirely due to Trump's blundering.

Beyond that, we have no idea how or whether Trump's low-wattage diplomatic team will negotiate a credible agreement that restricts Iran's nuclear development with any force, as the JCPOA did. The likelihood of such an achievement within the next two months seems vanishingly small, since the JCPOA talks required many months and skills that the Trump gang simply doesn't possess,

But even now we can measure what Trump is doing against what Obama did: If the Iranians get $24 billion to reopen the strait, without any real restrictions on their nuclear program that will represent more than ten times the amount of money Tehran received after signing the JCPOA. In other words, Trump has sold out cheap to end this pointless war -- and the rest of us will pay the price.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.

Rising Up Against Trump-Kushner Resort Ripoff, Albanians Lead The Way

Rising Up Against Trump-Kushner Resort Ripoff, Albanians Lead The Way

Americans exasperated by the Trump family’s ceaseless trashing of culture and nature can look toward a small country on the Mediterranean for inspiring resistance. As we await with dread the president’s next round of gilded vandalism in our capital, the people of Albania are pouring into the streets of their capital to stop Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump from degrading a gorgeous and vital coastal refuge into yet another garish upper-crust resort.

Over the past week the streets of Tirana have seen throngs of protesters, denouncing the crooked couple, along with inflatable pink flamingos that symbolize the wildlife habitat endangered by their multibillion-dollar profiteering project. The “flamingo revolution” is expected to spread across the nation in coming days as revelations about the real-estate scheme intensified public outrage.

Ever the clueless heiress, Ivanka inflamed the situation still when she told a podcast host when how she and Kushner “discovered” Sazan -- an undeveloped island along the Albanian coastline – while swimming off a friend’s yacht. Describing herself as “captivated” by its pristine beauty, she said the ultra-luxury development she and her husband envision as “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that.”

To the angry Albanians, however, the grasping and pretentious couple represent the opposite of how they want to live and are instead a “tangible manifestation” of oligarchy’s threat to the natural environment, economic equity and democracy.

The coastal region that Kushner proposes to transform into a “very high-end luxury product” where he would “want to be at with my family and with my friends” is a place of exceptional biodiversity and ancient cultural heritage. It would ravage not only Sazan, Albania’s only island, but the wetlands and habitats in a surrounding marine national park and along the adjoining coast, to make way for hotels, apartment complexes, and a marina.

According to BirdLife International, those waters now shelter the Mediterranean monk seal and hundreds of bird species, including endangered flamingos and pelicans.

The project sponsor is Kushner’s Affinity Partners, financed with dubious investments from his royal cronies in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which has proceeded in the usual high-handed Trump style. “

“From start to finish there has been a total lack of transparency,” said Aleksandr Trajce, executive director of the country’s leading conservation group, the Protection and Preservation of the Natural Environment in Albania (PPNEA). As he told The Guardian, “We have seen no public consultation or public documentation regarding permits.”

Indeed, the Albanian government has plainly sped the project’s approvals ever since the reelection of Donald Trump in late 2024, granting it “strategic investor status.” Unsurprisingly, the involvement of Kushner and Trump in this bulldozing scheme has provoked suspicion, which led Albania’s independent public prosecutor to announce a probe of legislative changes enabling the swift approvals.

The surging revolt against the Trump-Kushner depredations have forced the Albanian government, led by longtime Prime Minister Edi Rama, to seek talks with the protesters while declaring his iron determination to see the project built. He may well fear that his ambitions to bring his country into the European Union will be jeopardized by its shadows of environmental pillage and possible corruption. As for the flamingo revolutionaries, they may well be encouraged by the fate of a Trump deal slated for neighboring Serbia -- which fell apart last year after top government officials were indicted for abusing their authority in promoting the plan. When Affinity Partners announced the Belgrade development's abandonment in December 2025, it explained that “meaningful projects should unite rather than divide" and cited its "respect for the people of Serbia and the city of Belgrade.”

Perhaps we need a "Flamingo Revolution" on these shores too.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.



Trump's Failure To Protect The World From A Nuclear Iran Began Eight Years Ago

Trump's Failure To Protect The World From A Nuclear Iran Began Eight Years Ago

The weeks of stalemate in Trump’s war with Iran seem likely to end either in an apocalyptic bombing campaign, replete with war crimes against the civilian population, or an announced “deal” designed to obscure a massive strategic defeat. With the regime in Tehran refusing to meet Washington’s terms for shutting down its nuclear programs, Trump is poised to fail his own minimum objective for this “excursion.”

After all the destruction and cost in lives and treasure that would be a terrible outcome, as nearly every sane human being would agree. And yet despite the limp acquiescence that Trump’s idiotic and ruinous policies so often encounter, this need never have happened. Even the most hawkish analysts, who could scarcely contain their enthusiasm for Trump's belligerence, now admit that we are on the brink of an impending security disaster for the United States, Israel and the world. What they have not admitted yet is that the path leading here began with a Trump decision they endorsed in his first term -- to end American participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 deal with Iran reached by the Obama administration in partnership with Russia, China, and the European Union.

Whether driven solely by Trump's envy and animus toward Obama, or by the machinations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or both, that rash choice led directly into the current cul-de-sac. That carefully wrought agreement, crafted during nearly two years of talks and consisting of 150 pages plus detailed appendices, included an inspection regime and multiple safeguards against Iran enriching uranium to weapons grade before 2030.

The principal reason that the Iranians now have a stockpile of nuclear "dust" -- actually highly enriched uranium -- is that they began to produce the material again in 2021, three years after Trump destroyed the original agreement. His alternative to the JCPOA was to reinstate economic sanctions on Iran, in what he termed a "maximum pressure" policy to force abandonment of their nuclear project. Like so many Trump policies, it was an absolute failure and, of course, an insult to the international partners whose cooperation had been central to the success of Obama's initiative.

In his usual style, the president has sought to conceal his responsibility for the post-JCPOA fiasco behind a barrage of lies. When he pulled the United States out of the deal, he denounced it as a "decaying" and "rotten" plan that would inevitably permit Iran to acquire a nuclear arsenal. More recently he has claimed that Iran was only weeks away from building weapons that, without his intervention, would have destroyed the entire Mideast. He has promised that his negotiators -- the wholly unqualified and unethical team of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner -- are on the verge of unveiling a "far better" agreement.

But those assertions, repeated at nauseating volume on his Truth Social pages, are entirely fictional.

Instead, as his bellicose accomplices in the Republican leadership, the neoconservative right, and the extremist government of Israel can no longer pretend not to see, we will soon confront a simple fact. The world -- and especially the United States and its allies -- would have been more secure if the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran had remained in effect during these years, with continuing diplomatic, military and economic measures to contain Iran and curb its worst ambitions, bolstered by support from our allies and even our adversaries.

The veteran Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea voiced these fears in Yediot Aharonot, warning that Iran's power has increased as a consequence of Trump's war and that his country, like the rest of the planet, is now “subject to the absolute authority of a capricious, hollow, desperate American president." As Barnea noted, the same goes for Netanyahu, who has enabled and abetted Trump even as the White House boxed him out of the ongoing talks.

With his feckless adventurism and ignorance, as well as the incompetence of his advisers, Trump bears the blame for this wreckage. But he is not alone: the guilt is shared by those who promoted his absurd candidacy and his short-sighted policies. They know who they are and so do we.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.

Insider Trading? Thousands Of Stock Transactions Detail Trump's Market Grift

Insider Trading? Thousands Of Stock Transactions Detail Trump's Market Grift

Rarely does President Donald Trump evoke bipartisan applause while delivering a State of the Union address, but he inspired just such a moment last February -- when he called out former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over her husband’s history of stock trading.

"As we ensure that all Americans can profit from a rising stock market, let's also make sure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information," said Trump as members of both parties stood to applaud.

While Republicans and Democrats in both houses have long invested in markets, with some banking huge profits from such dubious trades, it is Pelosi who has endured the most flak. Republican members named a bill to restrict Congressional stock trades after her: the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments or PELOSI Act. During that speech a smirking Trump urged the former Speaker to stand up and demanded that Congress “pass the Stop Insider Trading Act without delay.”

Yet neither that bill nor any other reform legislation would have stopped the eye-popping orgy of recent stock trades by none other than Trump himself, with thousands of individual market transactions on his account revealed this week in disclosure documents. A new filing with the Office of Government Ethics, released on May 14, showed more than 3500 specific trades in Trump’s name during the first quarter of 2026, with a value between $220 million and $750 million. represents by far the largest series of securities transactions by a sitting president in American history.

As one observer noted on X, that adds up to 60 trades per day, while he issues executive orders, talks with foreign leaders, shifts tariffs, and gives policy directives that directly affect the value of his holdings.

Former White House ethics counsel Richard Painter told Forbes magazine that he had researched the financial history of every preceding chief executive. “I don’t think we’ve had any president trade in the stock market.” Previous presidents had blind trusts with index funds, if they owned any stocks at all.

What outraged ethics experts was not just the volume of Trump’s market activity, but the obvious overlaps between his actions and policies and the equities that he bought and sold. Although it is impossible to determine exactly how much he may have profited from what looks suspiciously like insider trading – exactly the crime he accused the Pelosis of perpetrating – there can be little doubt that he has made millions.

Not long before he delivered that State of the Union slap at Pelosi, Trump bought somewhere between $1 million and $5 million in Dell Computers stock. Then on May 8, less than three months later, he gave a public speech at the White House where he urged “everyone” to “go out and buy and Dell,” driving the company’s stock to an all-time high. Since he bought Dell stock in February it has gone up a whopping 96 percent.

Around the same time, Trump bought a big chunk of Nvidia stock, just before that firm announced a big chip agreement with Meta,and then purchased still more Nvidia a week before the Commerce Department permitted the sale of the company’s chips to Saudi Arabia. Ironically, Nvidia was among the stocks whose purchase by Paul Pelosi provoked Republican outrage, which he later sold before its value rose astronomically.

Praising such companies as Palantir and Intel on his social media platform has similarly inflated their stocks after he bought chunks for his account.

Trump increased his Palantir holdings just as the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security were awarding billion-dollar contracts to the company, whose principal shareholder is the fascist-curious, Trump-backing billionaire Peter Thiel.

During the same period, Trump invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Robinhood, the financial technology firm. News reports indicate that those purchases occurred as the Treasury Department named Robinhood as the brokerage and trustee for the federally funded “Trump Accounts” to be set up for American kids. Those children don’t stand to earn much, but never mind -- Trump will do very well.

The list of sleazy transactions goes on and on, with many more examples no doubt to be unearthed in months to come. The response from the White House and the Trump family echoes their usual “move along, nothing to see here” refrain. Don Junior recently complained that charges of rampant corruption against his father were “getting old.” And it is true that the crooked misconduct dates back to the first Trump administration; it is simply more widespread, more encompassing, and more brazen now.

At least it would be better if the family and the administration flacks could get their stories straight. Eric Trump says that his family’s stock holdings are exclusively in broad market indexes like the Schwab 1000, a claim belied by Trump’s own filings, which show thousands of individual trades. Meanwhile, a White House spokesman told Fortune that all of Trump’s assets are in a trust “managed by his children” with no conflicts of interest, another obvious contradiction.

The Trumps – and the Kushners, and many others associated with the First Family – have gaslighted the American public with such bogus “explanations” of their grift-gorging for many years. Everybody in the Trump circle, including Cabinet officers such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has long known that the president is a crook. Out of cowardice and personal ambition they have turned away from challenging his self-enrichment. The public, too, has largely ignored Trump’s corruption, believing that “both parties do it,” and there is plainly some basis for that cynicism.

But the scale of Trump’s exploitation of public resources, his incessant stealing with both hands, is exponentially worse than any theft previously perpetrated by Democrats or Republicans. At a time when voters expected this president to look out for their pocketbooks, he does nothing but stuff his own, plundering them and profiting hugely. Polls suggest that they have at last begun to notice – and don’t like what they see.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.

Trump And Kennedy Render America Defenseless Against A Deadly Virus, Again

Trump And Kennedy Render America Defenseless Against A Deadly Virus, Again

When ominous reports of a highly lethal and potentially communicable illness reach our airwaves, Americans now must rely on foreign authorities to reassure us — or to warn us.

The hantavirus is at our doorstep, but the Trump administration, and specifically its top health official Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have dismantled the federal scientific infrastructure that traditionally protected the nation from such threats and substituted literally nothing in its place. While we may escape the direst consequences of their vandalism for the moment, there is no guarantee that far worse is not coming, and soon.

The ruinous public health impact of Donald Trump's return to the White House was just as predictable as his rush to enrich himself and his family by every corrupt means. We knew what he is because we saw what he was. His historic failure to competently manage the COVID-19 pandemic mostly occurred in plain sight, as he tried to ignore and then downplay a deadly onslaught of which he had been duly warned.

With his presidential messaging warped by egomania, Trump promised that the spreading pandemic would swiftly and "miraculously" fade away. He knew that was a lie but resisted a sound public testing program because he didn't want "bad numbers" as the election season began. He failed to provide critically needed hospital supplies as doctors and nurses died. And he undercut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidance on safety protocols while promoting quack cures, comic-book science, and loony ideas like "injecting" bleach.

Trump's mindless, chaotic response led to many thousands of unnecessary deaths, for which he somehow mostly escaped blame, while right-wing media demonized veteran public health officials. And all that insanity occurred while responsible federal officials were still in office — meaning before Kennedy got the chance to pursue his impulse to destroy the public health edifice that required decades to build.

That course of destruction accelerated as soon as Trump and Kennedy took over last year, although the dismantling had begun during the first Trump administration. Within weeks after his second inauguration, the president signed an executive order terminating United States membership in the World Health Organization, a token of his pig-ignorant attitude about the global vectors of diseases that know no borders. At the same time, he ended U.S. observance of International Health Regulations that govern cross-border investigations of disease outbreaks like COVID-19, Ebola and now hantavirus.

Trump's malign commands are not only leading to the deaths of millions of innocent people in other countries, suddenly deprived of essential medicines and care, but now are jeopardizing American access to vital, timely, lifesaving information. Whatever capable officials are still left in our government can no longer see the WHO surveillance databases or communicate with its working groups of doctors and scientists — who played a major part in our defense against Ebola during the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, Trump's sycophant Kennedy has directed an even more damaging reign of ruin on the systems that protect us within our own borders. Apparently motivated by an urge for vengeance on the CDC, which thwarted his anti-vaccine propaganda, Kennedy ousted nearly a third of the agency's employees. Among the functions most harmed by his stupid waves of firing and rehiring was the renowned Epidemic Intelligence Service, whose medical detectives are trained to investigate and assess infectious outbreaks like hantavirus (or, to take another topical example, the measles epidemic conjured by Kennedy's anti-vax imbecility).

According to Dr. Celine Gounder, everyone who worked for the CDC's Vessel Sanitation Program, which monitors cruise ship health conditions, cashiered all its full-time civilian workers in early 2025. (Most of them were later rehired.) Only an idiot would imagine that the government should save money by ruining such precious public services.

The demoralizing impact of Trump and Kennedy on American public health will take a toll that has scarcely been felt yet.

"I hope it's fine," said the president when asked about the hantavirus on Sunday. This time it probably will be. But his halting answer was an eerie echo of what he said in January 2020 — before he and his stooges demolished the best public health system in the world.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.


Discerning The Grim Reality Behind Trump's Fog Of Wartime Lies

Discerning The Grim Reality Behind Trump's Fog Of Wartime Lies

For anyone who believed Donald Trump's promise to be a "peace" president, his regime becomes more confusing every day.

Having started a war with Iran for no intelligible reason, Trump now alternates between threatening to bomb them back to the Stone Age and overseeing a ceasefire in which the firing hasn't actually ceased. Yesterday, US forces launched what the Pentagon called “self-defense strikes” after Iran fired missiles and drones against the destroyers USS Truxton, USS Rafael Peralta, and USS Mason, as well as attacking with small boats.

Trump insists the ceasefire is still in place and that negotiations toward a peaceful resolution continue. Meanwhile to avoid the Constitutional requirement for Congressional authorization, he has called the war an "excursion," a "military operation," a "conflict," and most recently a "skirmish."

But having issued repeated orders to strike boats allegedly carrying narcotics in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which most of the world regards as a violation of international law, Trump and his Pentagon stooge Pete Hegseth claim that we're "at war" with the supposed narco traffickers on those vessels. According to their twisted logic, those accused smugglers are combatants, and thus not entitled to arrest and trial instead of summary execution.

In the real world -- which bears little resemblance to the Trump fantasy universe -- we have been at war with Iran for months and while the outcome remains to be seen, this misadventure isn't going well by any sane measure despite Trump's constant grandiose prevarications.

He constantly insists that Iran was on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons before the US started this war, a claim he reiterated this week when he slandered Pope Leo. The mullahs were "two weeks away" from possessing atomic bombs, he wrote on Truth Social, to be deployed immediately against Israel, every other country in the Mideast, Europe and the United States. They were about to blow up the world! Only the most braindead MAGA imbeciles believe such fables. The International Atomic Energy Agency and every other credible authority -- including the US intelligence community's own assessment last year -- have determined that Iran is nowhere near to building even a single bomb, nor has its leadership undertaken any decision to do so.

Both he and Hegseth boast that their current military campaign has "completely destroyed" Iran's military, including its navy, air force, missile and drone production facilities. Yet somehow Iran continues to control the Strait of Hormuz and to hit targets at will, including US navy vessels and the territory of US allies in the Gulf.

Trump has said many times in recent weeks that negotiations to conclude the "skirmish" are on the verge of success, although what success would mean is far from clear. He blusters on and on, assuring Americans that the Iranians are desperate to make a deal while he "holds all the cards."

Yesterday the Washington Post revealed that the CIA does not agree with that optimistic assessment. In a secret report to the White House, the agency found that Iran can endure the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz for several months before encountering any serious economic trouble. As one US official told the Post, the Iranian leadership -- the same leadership that Trump says no longer exists -- has become "increasingly confident" that they can outlast the Trump administration in a contest of wills.

There is a reason that almost every word out of Trump's mouth is a lie. Neither he nor we can tolerate the reality of the world deformed by his incompetence and narcissism.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.




Justices Gut Voting Rights To Shield GOP Majority -- And Their Own Disgrace

Justices Gut Voting Rights To Shield GOP Majority -- And Their Own Disgrace

What a happy coincidence for House Republicans that the Supreme Court's conservative bloc found a way to help preserve their party's Congressional majority, apparently just in time for the 2026 midterm elections. Without the timely intervention of the right-wing justices, a Democratic wave loomed over the White House and Capitol Hill -- which threatened not only the plans of the Trump administration, but the corrupt conduct of the High Court itself.

Masterminded by Chief Justice John Roberts and written by his ideological sidekick Justice Samuel Alito, last week's decision in Louisiana v. Callais not only eviscerated the last remaining protections of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, but immediately propelled a fresh wave of partisan redistricting across the South. This was the entirely predictable result of a series of Supreme Court decisions that have undermined racial equality while encouraging white majority legislatures to redraw Congressional maps as a means to ensure perpetual power for the GOP.

And all this was done with self-righteous zeal in the name of "racial neutrality," good government, and Constitutional jurisprudence.

The court's critics have noted how little remains of those traditional values after two decades of the Roberts court. Since the majority overturned Roe v. Wade, women saw yet another step in the diminution of their control over their own bodies and health, an attack on their autonomy that is already costing innocent lives in the most backward states. Now in Callais, Black and Latino Americans see the razing of minority political power in the most segregated regions and the return of Jim Crow, delivered by a party that countenances unabashed racism in its ranks.

Alito's justification for abandoning decades of precedent -- and the clear textual purpose of the 1965 Voting Rights Act -- made little logical sense. Rather than determining whether a state's Congressional district map imposed the effect of a racial hierarchy on state voters, he ruled, the court would demand proof of racist intent on the part of legislators who drew that map. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her dissent, the impossibility of knowing or proving what was in the minds of those legislators is obvious. It is also a completely invented standard.

Alito claimed wrongly that recent presidential elections show that the nation has progressed beyond the remedies imposed by the Voting Rights Act, because Black voter turnout was higher than white turnout in two of the most recent presidential elections. Of course, turnout for Congressional elections is different in midterms -- and the years that Alito cherrypicked to make his argument happened to be those when Barack Obama, America's first Black major-party presidential nominee, was on the ballot.

But with their ire provoked by what Alito described as an "unconstitutional racial gerrymander" in Louisiana, the justices feel justified in even the most dishonest discourse. That is why both Roberts and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh could support this devastating decision, despite having voted precisely the opposite way only three years ago. In the case of Allen v. Alabama, court found that state legislators had discriminated against the state's Black voters by dividing them up among seven districts to prevent the election of more than one Black member of Congress. Kavanaugh and Roberts, along with the court's liberal minority, rejected the state's argument -- identical to Alito's argument now -- that the plaintiffs had to prove racist intent to trigger the Voting Rights Act's protections.

The result was a new Congressional map in Alabama, drawn by a special master, that offered Black voters the opportunity to elect two members -- who both happen to be Democrats.

What has changed since Kavanaugh and Roberts endorsed that wholly just outcome? Only two things: The 2024 election of Donald Trump and Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, which Republicans on the court plainly aim to preserve against increasingly long odds in this year's midterm election -- and the likelihood that if Democrats regain the majority in either or both chambers, then this historically corrupt Supreme Court majority will find itself confronting investigative scrutiny, legislative challenge, and a strong possibility that Trump, the authoritarian they have so brazenly empowered, will not be able to nominate any more constitutional vandals of their ilk.

These right-wing justices, despite their whine about "racial gerrymandering," showed that they have no problem with partisan gerrymandering that has an undeniable racial impact on minority voters. It is fair to assume that among the reasons, beyond their own ideological loyalties, is the urge to protect their own misconduct from the embarrassing oversight that will surely ensue when power changes hands again.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.




Trump 'Justice': Fascists Celebrate Bogus DOJ Indictment Of Southern Poverty Law Center

Trump 'Justice': Fascists Celebrate Bogus DOJ Indictment Of Southern Poverty Law Center

More than friendly to fascists both abroad and at home, the Trump administration is now seeking to destroy the Southern Poverty Law Center – historically one of the nation’s most powerful and effective opponents of the Ku Klux Klan, American neo-Nazis and other white supremacist movements.

On April 22, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced – at a blatantly political press event – that the Justice Department has indicted the SPLC for “wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.” The indictment, described by Patel as “massive” and “sweeping,” relies on the notion that the SPLC ‘s use of paid informants in violent white supremacist outfits such as the Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance and Atomwaffen somehow defrauded its donors.

Blanche and Patel went on to assert that those payments -- which over the years amounted to millions – had financed the continued existence of those groups, a claim echoed in right-wing media outlets. In the New York Post, for instance, FBI a columnist wrote that by paying its confidential informants, the SPLC “kept relic organizations like the Ku Klux Klan on life support.” The alleged motive was to justify the SPLC’s own continued existence and fundraising by maintaining a threat from fascist violence, which Republicans in Washington have persistently minimized or dismissed. Indeed, the Trump administration has hired and promoted any number of far-right extremists, especially since its return to power.

The absurdity of the indictment is obvious to anyone – including former federal prosecutor Blanche – who knows how the FBI prosecutes organized crime, terrorism, narcotics smuggling or violent extremism, in nearly every case depending on paid informants. In fact, over the past few decades, the FBI and the Justice Department have relied on information from SPLC and its informants to jail violent Klansmen and Nazis. The indictment also charges that SPLC “concealed” its identity behind false fronts when sending money to informants, just as the FBI and the Justice Department would do, so as not to expose their paid spies.

To suggest that the SPLC “supported” the activities of those criminal groups, as the DOJ indictment alleges, is precisely the same as saying that federal prosecutors and FBI agents were responsible for financing the Mafia, narcotics cartels and terrorism networks.

Under questioning from reporters, Blanche essentially admitted that the indictment’s fundamental claim is baseless. Asked whether the indictment specifically alleged that the SPLC payments benefited the Klan, Atomwaffen or other extremist groups, Blanche admitted that it offered no such evidence. “To the extent that there’s any link between that individual receiving the money and benefits to that organization,” he said, “that’s not in the indictment.”

Not surprisingly, perhaps, former federal prosecutors who have gone after the Klan and other violent extremists were appalled by the government’s attack on SPLC. Former federal prosecutor Doug Jones of Alabama described the indictment as “outrageous” and “pure political retribution” by Trump. Having taken down Klan groups in court, Jones recalled how the SPLC “helped dismantle the Ku Klux Klan’s oerations in Alabama and beyond” in 1981, when its attorneys and investigators secured justice in a Mobile lynching incident.

There are literally dozens of similar cases in the SPLC files.

It isn’t only liberal lawyers who can see through the phony arguments in the DOJ indictment. In The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s Trump-friendly publication, the conservative Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld warns that “the Justice Department will have a hard time proving that the [SPLC’s] use of informants amounts to fraud.”

More than one conservative has welcomed the indictment as just desserts for an organization whose views they despise, particularly because the SPLC has defended Muslims, gays, and trans people as well as Blacks and Jews. So much for freedom of speech, a value that is upheld on the right only when convenient and comforting.

Still. the most telling commentary on this disgraceful frameup comes not from liberals or conservatives, however, but from the fascist right. Gleeful as they are, the fascists admit that the indictment is nonsensical and indeed view its legal falsification as evidence that Trump is truly on their side.

Curtis Yarvin, the fascist gadfly whose writings have influenced various Big Tech figures and others in the Trump circle, celebrated the indictment on X: “What’s cool is that I don’t really see a strong legal case that the SPLC shouldn’t be able to run these kinds of wacky black ops. That means DOJ is prosecuting the SPLC just because it (kind of) can. If so this would be an unusual sign of ‘finally getting it.’”

And on the "revolutionary fascist" American Futurist Telegram channel – whose authors include former members of the Atomwaffen neo-Nazi group, linked to at least five political murders – the indictment won praise for the same sickening reason. Far from secretly propping up violent white nationalists, they know that SPLC was their worst enemy.

“The SPLC was not funding racist groups to enable their racism — they, in fact, were not funding racist groups at all,” the American Futurist-linked TAF Private channel posted, according to Raw Story. “What they were doing was funding bad actors within groups, with the intention of destroying those groups from the inside.”

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the old saying goes – and for the Trump White House, the enemy of fascism is its enemy, too.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.

No Deal: Why Trump's Negotiations With Iran Are So Unlikely To Succeed

No Deal: Why Trump's Negotiations With Iran Are So Unlikely To Succeed

With the Iran ceasefire scheduled to end in two days, Vice President JD Vance has returned to Islamabad with his sidekicks Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to resume the abortive peace negotiations that have so far failed. While everyone should wish for success, we have little reason to anticipate news of anything more than an extended truce from the Pakistani capital. We must hope that if and when these talks fail, the president will refrain from his hideous plan to obliterate Iranian civilization and stand warned against such war crimes.

The outlook remains dim, however. Even if Donald Trump had actually written The Art of the Deal (he didn’t write a word of that bestseller, his first big fraud), it would be foolish to expect that the president or his hapless envoys can deliver a viable agreement with the Iranians anytime soon. Taken together, they lack all of the qualities required to achieve the complex diplomatic resolution required in this crisis – like the agreement that Trump so cavalierly discarded in 2017.

During the days after he first won the presidency, I consoled my distraught family with a prediction that Trump’s combination of arrogance, ignorance, impatience and incompetence would likely blunt his impulses to ruin the country and the world. That insight – based on many years of observing him in New York – proved accurate in many ways, but in this second term we’re seeing the downside of the president’s personal weaknesses, and those of the figures around him. Having gotten us into another bloody and very costly mess in the Middle East, neither he nor his underlings have a clue how to get us out of it.

The problem isn’t only that Trump and his team of morons neglected to fashion any plan for their sudden urge to attack a faraway country with a million men under arms, a big weapons arsenal, and a long history of ideological resilience. That was a historic and particularly stupid mistake, characteristic of Trump’s shallow intellect – but now, after inflicting massive damage on Iran, the world and our own economy, he and his government are evidently stuck in the quagmire they created.

The manifest incompetence that has so often hindered Trump, often to our great benefit, is now on full display as he flounders in attempting to secure a negotiated peace. He is unable to firmly decide what terms he is seeking, what is up for discussion, and even who will be doing the talking. He berated our European allies, went to war without building a coalition, then demanded their assistance to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and finally said that nobody needed their help. That childish pout is his usual approach to all global issues, but is even more wrong now.

As his predecessor Barack Obama understood when his State Department began work on the first Iran nuclear agreement, an international coalition was vital to success. So it would be now if only Trump had the wit and the will to build one.

What Obama also had that Trump disdains is an experienced team of negotiators. The idea that Steve Witkoff, his real estate crony and crypto corruption partner, or Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and nepo billionaire, possess any of the requisite knowledge or skills to achieve a peace agreement is simply ludicrous. The same goes for Vance, whose brief stint in the Senate qualifies him for nothing, let alone a sensitive diplomatic mission. The sight of this gang spending a “marathon” 21 hours in Islamabad and then departing in pique when the talks broke down demonstrated how naïve and foolish they were. The final stage of Obama’s nuclear deal went on for months.

Of course, we know that Trump lacks the capacity to stay with the process long enough to achieve a worthwhile outcome. The Iranians, as our friend Lucian Truscott IV observes today, no doubt believe they can just wait him out.

Finally, Trump lacks the integrity to conclude a lasting peace agreement. He has proved more than once to the Iranians that he is untrustworthy, after ordering the bombing attacks that actually killed not only their Supreme Leader but his negotiators as well. They know that to him, a treaty that they signed after years of intense bargaining, with the force of law in the United States, meant nothing. Neither did the honor of our country.

The only deal that Trump or any of these men can be expected to uphold is one that enriches them personally. That is the “art of the deal” that this president has been pursuing since the day he returned to the Oval Office.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.