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White House

Fascism's Follies: Trump Create Crisis At West Point

There is a crisis at West Point. This one is not self-invented, as other crises at the have been previously, but rather invented at the White House by Donald Trump.

The crisis is familiar. Trump has ordered that all “quotas, objectives, and goals” in admissions, promotions and career fields be ended at the service academies, that teaching things called “gender ideology,” “critical race theory,” and “DEI,” (presumably as an academic subject that no one has ever heard of) be ended forthwith, and that “lethal force be promoted” by teaching that “our founding documents remain the most powerful force for human good in history.”

This has caused something of a panic at the academy. They’re tossing out history courses on “Topics in Gender History” and “Race, Ethnicity, Nation,” according to an op-ed in the New York Times written by Graham Parsons, a tenured professor of philosophy at West Point who is resigning from the faculty at the end of the term in protest against the changes forced on the academy by Trump’s gender and race warriors at the Pentagon and White House.

“West Point seems to believe that by submitting to the Trump administration, it can save itself in the long run,” Parsons opined in the Times, writing without permission or having submitted his manuscript for clearance by the academy leadership.

I am something of an expert about change at West Point. Change comes slowly to the 250-plus year old academy, but it has happened. And each time significant changes have occurred at West Point, military leadership and academy alumni have been convinced that it would lead to the end of West Point’s history of providing the nation with Army leaders of merit and honor.

This is not the first time academic change has happened at West Point. Prior to 1985, the academy had no program of “majors.” Every cadet graduated with a bachelor of science with heavy emphasis on applied mathematics, engineering, and military leadership. When the academy began offering a program of 45 majors, allowing graduates to go into graduate programs in law, medicine, computer technology and other subjects in addition to their regular service in the combat and support arms, you’d have thought the earth had shifted and West Point had begun to crumble into the Hudson. No more four years of calculus crammed into just two? No requirement to study ordnance engineering, the science of weapons? My God! What was the world coming to?

But by the time the majors program arrived at West Point, the academy had already endured two of its greatest earthquakes: the admission a Black cadet in the late 1800’s, and the arrival of women when the U.S. military was integrated by gender in 1976. The military academies also endured another major change. In the early 1970’s, compulsory attendance at church was ended with an 8-0 Supreme Court decision refusing to even hear the government’s appeal of a lower court decision. Along with three of my classmates, I played a role in the cessation of this clearly unconstitutional practice by filing complaints with the Secretary of the Army that exhausted administrative remedies, allowing a federal lawsuit to be filed after we graduated. At the time, we were told that if “mandatory chapel” was ended, it would lead to the end of West Point itself.

In 2011, the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” allowed the admission of gay and lesbian cadets and for them to serve openly at the academy. This was yet another revolution that for decades Pentagon and academy leadership thought would lead to the collapse of “good order and discipline” and a reduction in the combat effectiveness and readiness of West Point graduates.

It goes without saying that none of the aforementioned earthquakes led to the collapse of West Point or the other service academies. In fact, they have thrived, with applications for admission higher than they have ever been.

In fact, I would make the argument that West Point is better in every way since the admission of Blacks, women, and gays and lesbians. It hardly bears saying that neither the army nor any of the other uniformed services is comprised solely of white males. We would not have a fighting force to defend the nation without the honorable service of a diverse population of volunteers who fill the ranks of enlisted soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and the officer corps.

What Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are trying to do at West Point and the other service academies is fascistic folly. The Naval Academy, responding to Trump’s executive order on DEI and gender, removed more than 300 books from the academy library. The town of Annapolis, which surrounds the academy, responded by making all the banned books readily available in the town library and its bookstores.

The removal of certain topics of study from the curriculum at West Point is not going to materially affect cadets who undergo extensive training apart from the classroom, both at the academy and during summers spent training with real-world army units in the field. A cadet spending his or her summer training in a unit with a female company commander or a Black platoon leader – or both – is worth a half dozen books on gender studies or critical race theory. The same is true at West Point itself. The academy has had multiple women and Blacks who have served as “First Captain,” the highest-ranking cadet. West Point has had a female Commandant of Cadets, the brigadier general in charge of the Corps of Cadets, and a Black lieutenant general who has served as Superintendent of Cadets, the academy’s highest-ranking officer.

Diversity in the academy’s leadership and in the leadership of the corps of cadets will not end just because Donald Trump signed an executive order, nor will the diversity of the army itself. About 11 percent of soldiers are Black; about 17 percent of soldiers are women. I don’t know the percentage of the army who are gay or lesbian, but I can tell you that the great majority of my class of 800 had no idea that about 25 of our classmates were gay, back in the time when the closet was not a choice but a necessity for gay people in both military and civilian life.

Donald Trump can sign all the executive orders he wants, and Pete Hegseth can thunder about DEI and “wokeism” until he goes hoarse, but they are not going to change the facts on the ground either at West Point or in the Army at large. Women and Blacks and gays and lesbians are not going to be erased by fascist edicts, and by the way, neither are transgender service members, who I guarantee you will find ways to wait out the current nightmare of executive orders that can attempt to cancel their service, but will never bring to any sort of end who they are and their desire to serve their country. Even if some are forced out of the service, they will be back when Trump’s executive orders are inevitably reversed.

West Point has been there on the Hudson since Thomas Jefferson founded the it in 1802 as the nation’s first service academy. It’s not going away. The passion and patriotism of young men and women of all races and sexual persuasions and sexual identities will overpower this authoritarian hiccup in our history. Fifty-six years after I graduated from West Point, I know this as well as I know my own name.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Running His Crypto Scam Out Of White House, Trump Will Pocket Billions

Running His Crypto Scam Out Of White House, Trump Will Pocket Billions

Let’s say you and I and every bank robber serving time in federal prison and every con artist behind bars for fleecing suckers out of their life savings and every Bernie Madoff-style-Ponzi schemer and every Mafia don who ever blackmailed a bodega owner or ran a crooked dice game – let’s say we all got together in a room and tried to come up with a brand new scam to rip people off and separate people from their money…and get away with it free and clear.

I’m here to tell you that even with all that criminal talent, we couldn’t come up with a masterpiece of thievery that compares to what Donald Trump and his family are running right now, today, out of the White House. Our President, the one 77 million of our fellow citizens voted for and put in the Oval Office for another four years, the one who told the Atlantic earlier this week that “I run the world,” has decided that he will spend his time in office fleecing that world of every dollar and nickel and dime he can get, and he’s doing it with crypto.

It’s so complicated that you can barely wrap your mind around it, and yet it’s so simple, not even Trump and his two dullard sons could fuck it up.

The New York Times published a story on Tuesday that makes a brave attempt at explaining how they’re doing it: Secret Deals, Foreign Investments, Presidential Policy Changes: The Rise of Trump’s Crypto Firm. It’s written by three of the Times’ top investigative reporters, and it’s thick with details of shady foreign investors from dark corners of the money-world like Abu Dubai and the Cayman Islands and Hong Kong, and the reporters do their best to describe the whacko-crypto-Rube-Goldbergo thing called “World Liberty Financial” the Trump family has established to run their scam, and it’s so impenetrable, I guarantee your eyes will cross and then roll back into your head as you try to make sense of it.

This is what the New York Times is so good at: they get out there and make a record of who’s involved and how many times they’ve been indicted and how much time they’ve done in prison. Then they make the connections between the three card monte pasts of the crypto scammers and the Trump family in the White House, with Eric and Don Jr. flying around the world to Pakistan and the Emirates and taking meetings with Silicon Valley zillionaires and coming up with new scams like the pay-to-play crypto dinner Trump is planning to put on at one of his golf clubs for anyone…and I mean anyone…who spends some of their millions on a fucking meme coin called “$TRUMP” in order to be on the guest list.

The Times reports that World Liberty Financial – in reality, behind a very, very thin corporate veil, Donald Trump himself – made $550 million selling its first digital token, “$WLFI,” to a bunch of crypto scammers who recently settled cases brought against them by the Securities and Exchange Commission. At least one scammer, Justin Sun, the guy who bought the banana stuck to a wall with duct tape for $6 million, had his SEC case dropped, right after – you guessed it – he spent $75 million buying $WLFI “coins.”

And here’s the beauty part. I’m going to do my best to describe the scam the Times calls “partnerships” between the Trump company, World Liberty Financial, and other crypto firms. Here it is, in all its glory, and you tell me if this doesn’t sound like a crypto protection racket. The smaller crypto outfits agree to buy, say, $20 million to $30 million of World Liberty’s “coins” like $WLFI. The Trump company then agrees to buy a smaller amount of their crypto currency.

This “investment” of World Liberty in the smaller crypto firms is supposed to give them credibility in the world of crypto, and for this generous endorsement, the Trump company gets to keep the difference between what the little guys spent on $WLFI, and what the Trumps spent on the little guys’ coins, amounting, according to the Times, to as much as a 20 percent premium. All of the specific details like names of the crypto firms and amounts they “invested” is kept confidential, so nobody in the greater world of crypto can discover how badly they’ve been taken to the cleaners.

Got that? You give me a quarter, all your lunch money, and not only do I promise not to beat the shit out of you with the SEC and DOJ and FTC and all the other regulatory and prosecutorial departments I control, I’ll even give you two dimes back and not tell anybody how I held you up.

And oh, by the way, buy a few million of my worthless crypto “coins” – of which I already own 80 percent of the world’s entire stock – and I’ll feed you some rubber chicken at my New Jersey golf club and give you a tour of the White House after hours.

Wow, what a deal.

There are other scams, because of course there are. Trump pardoned one guy who got convicted of violating banking laws with his crypto business. In return, he permitted the Trump company to buy some of his crypto currency at bargain basement prices. And then Trump turned around and announced the U.S. government will put its power and prestige behind a so-called “crypto reserve” that will store up a bunch of crypto currency just like it stores oil in “oil reserves” against a future shortage of that precious resource, and you’ll never guess whose crypto currency the U.S. government has chosen as one of the currencies it will store in its reserves, along with the grandfather of all crypto, Bitcoin. Yep. The crypto currency that Trump bought from the guy he pardoned, the value of which has now shot straight up like a rocket.

Remember how corrupt we thought Spiro Agnew was when it was revealed that after being elected Vice President, he continued to take cash from contractors he had extorted when he was governor of Maryland? Just the image of the Vice President reaching across his desk and physically accepting a paper bag full of twenty-dollar bills was enough to get him to resign in return for a plea bargain on a tax evasion charge that gave him no jail time.

How much do you figure Donald Trump will scam in crypto by the time he leaves office? The Times didn’t attempt an estimate of the amount he has made so far, but just running through the hundreds of millions and tens of millions mentioned in their story, along with the tens of millions in the stories that have been written about the pay-to-play golf club crypto dinner, he’s approaching a billion dollar take…after just 100 days.

It's no wonder he doesn’t give a shit about the damage to the world’s economy his tariffs have done. The only economy he cares about is the blue-smoke-and-mirrors illusion of crypto. Like his hair, nobody but him knows how much of it is real, or how the elaborate scam is held together, but it got him elected, and it’s going to make him richer than he ever dreamed.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.


In Cultish Cabinet Meeting, Trump Lackeys Hawk 'Gulf Of America' Hats

In Cultish Cabinet Meeting, Trump Lackeys Hawk 'Gulf Of America' Hats

The members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet sat behind red MAGA-style hats emblazoned with the inaccurate terminology “Gulf of America” during a televised White House meeting held on Wednesday.

While the hats are not available on Trump’s official online store as of the time of writing, he has frequently used his presidency to promote MAGA-branded merchandise. It is just one of many ways that Trump has used his publicly funded office to enrich himself.

The administration has tried to push the rebrand of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” for months and has successfully convinced digital map providers like Google and Apple to display it. But others have resisted, like the Associated Press, which continues to describe the body of water by its historically accurate and globally recognized name. In response, Trump has banned the AP from covering White House events and has been involved in legal wrangling as he attacks freedom of the press.

As if the whole “Gulf of America” hat thing wasn’t absurd enough, billionaire Elon Musk also attended, wearing two different MAGA-style hats on his head. The attention-hungry move follows reports that he will soon step back from his role in steering the unpopular Trump White House.

Elon Musk is wearing two Trump caps on top of each other

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 30, 2025 at 5:45 PM

Adding to the Cabinet meeting’s cult-like atmosphere, Trump opened the gathering by insisting they share a false reality. Lying, he claimed that it was not his fault that the nation's gross domestic product shrunk in the first quarter of 2025. Instead, he incorrectly blamed former President Joe Biden.

“That’s Biden. That’s not Trump,” Trump complained. “I was very against everything that Biden was doing in terms of the economy, destroying our country.”

In reality, the economy is suffering because of Trump’s chaotic tariff moves. His policies have increased the costs of goods and caused global economic uncertainty. The shrinking economy has virtually nothing to do with the former president.

When Trump took office, the U.S. economy was booming following policies that Biden put in place to recover from the COVID-19-fueled downturn under Trump.

The strange hats and the promotion of a false reality with Trump’s Cabinet of billionaires show evidence of a cult of self-deception. Trump and his team may try to sell a false version of reality to the public, where the Gulf of Mexico is renamed and tariffs are working out—but public opinion polling shows it isn’t working.

Trump is unpopular and so are his ideas, and a red hat isn’t going to make that go away.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Trump White House Escalates War On The Press

Trump White House Escalates War On The Press

President Donald Trump is ramping up his assault on the press, opening new avenues for federal retribution against outlets which displease him as his administration prepares to mark 100 days in office.

Trump has long railed against journalists as the “enemy of the people,” used the power of the state as a cudgel against the industry in his first term, and promised more of the same in his second.

His return to office brought what Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop described as a “sharp, often contemptuous rupture” between the federal government and the press, with the White House seeking over the last few months to dominate reporters, place new restrictions on critical outlets, and lift up right-wing propagandists in their place.

The president’s threats against news outlets have been so extreme for so many years that by contrast, such moves struck some observers as “small beer” or “trivial nonsense.”

But Trump’s talk is cheap until it isn’t — at any time, on a whim, he or the assortment of ideologues and shills he’s appointed can set the gears of government grinding against his foes. And this weekend brought a sharp escalation and worrying signs for the future.

Justice Department ends restrictions protecting journalists

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday laid the groundwork for the imprisonment of journalists who produce reporting that damages the president’s interests.

In an internal Justice Department memo, Bondi rescinded Biden-era protections which restricted prosecutors “from seeking records and compelling testimony from members of the news media,” stating this was necessary “in order to identify and punish the source of improper leaks” by individuals whose conduct she described as “treasonous.”

Notably, her memo targets not just the leaking of classified information but also “disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.”

Trump regularly rails against reporting based on anonymous sources. Bondi’s move raises the prospect of the Trump administration responding to such reports by forcing reporters to choose between revealing their sources and going to jail.

Bondi, a Trump loyalist who previously parlayed frequent Fox appearances defending Trump into a post on his first impeachment legal defense team, will apparently be making the call over when the Justice Department uses that legal tool.

Other top prosecutors and investigators who might weigh in include her deputy, Emil Bove, who previously represented Trump in state and federal prosecutions; Ed Martin, the lawyer for January 6 defendant who now serves as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia; FBI Director Kash Patel, who has called for the federal targeting of journalists; and his extremely online deputy, the former Fox host Dan Bongino.

How far will they go? Trump wants them to go very far indeed.

Trump calls for investigations of media pollsters

Trump responded on Monday to new surveys which show his approval ratings plunging in light of his catastrophic tariff rollout by calling for investigations into the pollsters and the media outlets which conduct them.

Trump claimed in an early morning post on Truth Social that results from New York Times/Siena and ABC/Washington Post polls were due to the surveys “looking for a negative result.”

“These people should be investigated for ELECTION FRAUD, and add in the FoxNews Pollster while you’re at it,” he wrote. “They are Negative Criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I WIN ELECTIONS BIG, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse.”

Trump regularly accuses his media foes of breaking the law, and in a March speech at the Justice Department headquarters he instructed its employees to “watch for” their “totally illegal” behavior.

The president is currently suing Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer over the results of one of her presidential campaign surveys.

Trump has personally dictated Justice Department investigations into two former officials from his first administration who became critics, as well as into ActBlue, the hub for Democratic campaign fundraising — and he could launch a similar legal assault on any news outlet which displeases him at any time.

A cry of desperation from CBS News

60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley concluded Sunday’s broadcast with a blunt explanation for the resignation last week of Bill Owens, a journalist with decades of experience at CBS News and the show’s longtime executive producer.

“Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger,” he said. “The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he had lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”

Trump and his administration had targeted CBS News for retribution following a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris, the editing of which the president alleged had been unfair to him.

Trump launched a lawsuit seeking $10 billion in damages from the network, which First Amendment attorneys described as “ridiculous junk” and “a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.” Brendan Carr, his handpicked chair of the Federal Communications Commission, is conducting an investigation into the editing that former FCC commissioners have denounced.

Rather than stand firmly behind the company’s journalists, Paramount Chair Shari Redstone is reportedly seeking a settlement with Trump and an agreement with Carr that will allow the company’s merger to go through.

Trump gloats about media owners bowing to his will

Trump thinks he’s winning his battle against the press, as The Atlanticreported in a recent interview with the president:

“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—[Washington Post owner Jeff] Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.

Trump understands that many of the news outlets whose work he decries are owned by multinational corporations or wealthy magnates whose business interests make them vulnerable to federal retaliation.

After only a few months in office, he’s seen the pressure he’s exerted on CBS News push it to the breaking point, while the resolve of major newspaper owners is seemingly crumbling. And he has years more time in office to try to break them to his will.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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