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Warning Against A Would-Be Tyrant, Acting 'Under Color Of Law'

Warning Against A Would-Be Tyrant, Acting 'Under Color Of Law'

This is what has happened recently in the United States:

A United States senator, Alex Padilla of California, was physically assaulted, forced to the ground, and handcuffed by agents acting for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as he attempted to ask her a question. Noem had just returned from a raid on the home of an immigrant family in Huntington Park, California. The agents were attired in full combat gear, including helmets, Kevlar vests, and camouflage fatigues. They carried fully automatic M-4 rifles fitted with 20-round magazines and were wearing masks. They did this under color of law.

President Donald Trump ordered the deployment of more than 4,800 soldiers and Marines to Los Angeles, California. He did this under color of law, specifically, 10 U.S.C. § 12406, a statute which authorizes the federalization of a state’s National Guard if the country is being invaded by the forces of a foreign nation, or to put down a rebellion against the United States government, or to enforce and execute federal laws when the president is otherwise unable to do so. A lawsuit filed in Federal court by Governor Gavin Newsom said that Trump’s actions are “contrary to law and outside of the authority granted to the President under that statute,” and Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s actions in deploying some 700 active-duty Marines “are contrary to law and outside Secretary Hegseth’s authority.”

Donald Trump appeared at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and gave an unhinged political speech of the kind he regularly gave and gives at political rallies to an assembly of active-duty soldiers from the 18th Airborne Corps. During the speech, Trump repeatedly mocked his predecessor, President Joe Biden, and asked the assembled soldiers, “You think this crowd would have showed up for Biden?” The soldiers were at the Trump appearance on orders from their Army superiors, and in fact, evidence has emerged that they were hand-picked for their appearance and political views for the occasion.

The website Military.com reported yesterday that “One unit-level message bluntly said ‘no fat soldiers.’" Another order to units at Fort Bragg said, “If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don't want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out.”

Trump recently ordered the renaming of Fort Bragg from Fort Liberty, which the post was named after a law was passed by the Congress renaming Army posts around the country that had been named after Confederate Generals. Trump announced during the speech at Fort Bragg that he was changing the names of seven Army posts back to the names they had before which honored Confederate generals: Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Pickett and Fort Robert E. Lee in Virginia, Fort Gordon in Georgia, Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Polk in Louisiana and Fort Rucker in Alabama. Trump had already ordered the renaming of Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, also named after Confederate generals.

The new names of the posts, using the last names of the Confederate generals, are purportedly named after more recent Army heroes. Trump did this under cover of law, because the Congress ordered that the names of the Army posts could not honor Confederates. But everyone knows the truth of what he has done. In fact, he boasted about his defiance of the law during his speech to the soldiers at Fort Bragg.

Since taking office in January, Trump has issued more than 150 executive orders under color of law. Many of those executive orders, which included attempts to shut down entire departments of the federal government such as USAID and the Department of Education, are in defiance of the federal laws passed by Congress establishing those departments.

Others of Trump’s executive orders, issued under cover of law, have resulted in the illegal firings of thousands of federal government employees, many of whom have been reinstated after lawsuits were filed and judges issued orders that they be rehired. One judge recently ordered that the United States Institute of Peace, which is not part of the executive branch and was established by a law passed by Congress and funded in part by Congress, be returned to its board of governors and the building, which was seized by DOGE terrorists, be returned to USIP control.

The Daily Beast reported yesterday on the owner of a roofing business who had a third of his workforce arrested and detained by ICE agents as they drove to work in late May. The ICE arrests and pending deportations were all done under cover of law, even though the men, all from Nicaragua, had work permits and pending asylum applications.

Yesterday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he will order the protection of undocumented workers in certain businesses he apparently views favorably. “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace," Trump wrote, before once again blaming Joe Biden. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”

Stephen Miller, acting at the behest of Trump, recently ordered Customs and Border Enforcement to step up arrests of undocumented workers who have never been accused or convicted of crimes, including those who work in the industries Trump now seeks to protect. All these contradictory moves, to enforce the law for one group but aggressively apply the law to other groups, are being done under color of law. As reported by the Daily Beast, the consequences of Trump’s illegal application of immigration law are now affecting some of his voters, who own the companies disrupted by the arrests and deportations.

None of the owners of the companies employing undocumented workers have been arrested by ICE during raids on their workforces, including meatpacking plants, farms, garment businesses, and other industries. This disparity in enforcement of immigration policy is, of course, being done under the color of law.

With the tackling, forcing to the ground, and handcuffing of Senator Alex Padilla, and with the arrests and jailing of a mayor and a judge for alleged violations of law, Trump has made it clear that no one is safe from his illegality. Already, ICE has arrested and detained U.S. citizens whom they mistook as being undocumented because of the color of their skin.

This entire Trump regime of illegality is reminiscent of what Black people went through in the South during Jim Crow, when legal behavior by Black U.S. citizens was declared illegal, including the attempt to register to vote, sitting at lunch counters, and riding on public transportation in seats forbidden to Blacks. All the discriminatory behavior of Southern states during Jim Crow and segregation was done under color of law.

The rest of us are now facing the possibility of arrest under color of law for legal behavior such as marching in a demonstration, attending a press conference or rally, or even writing something that offends the sensibilities of Donald Trump.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a speech on Tuesday, addressed the situation we are in this way: “Democracy is under assault right before our eyes, this moment we have feared has arrived. He’s taking a wrecking ball, a wrecking ball to our founding fathers’ historic project: three coequal branches of independent government.”

It's worse than that, much worse. Trump has said that demonstrations against his big happy birthday military parade “will be met with heavy force.” This is a clear threat to suspend the First Amendment to the Constitution against people he does not approve of, while allowing the First Amendment to protect those who support him. Trump also recently announced that he will eventually do away with FEMA and run the distribution of emergency aid to disaster victims out of the White House. This means that he will allocate federal funds at his own discretion to areas and people who support him, while denying the same tax-payer funds to people who do not.

This is the way dictators run their countries. The law applies to one group, but it does not apply to others. Taxpayer funds are reserved for supporters, but denied to those the dictator does not approve of. The distinction made by the dictator can be made geographically, or by skin color, or by political party, or by religion, or any other criterion he chooses, and because the dictator is in power, he can do it all under the color of law.

To act under the color of law is authoritarian lawlessness writ large. Those of us who oppose Donald Trump will learn this weekend with “No Kings” demonstrations just how far our country has descended into a dictatorship.

I fear for us as individuals, and I fear for our country.

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.

Violent Protests In Los Angeles Serve Up Trump's Midterm Propaganda

Violent Protests In Los Angeles Serve Up Trump's Midterm Propaganda

Democrats had better start getting their shit together. In pitting the National Guard and now the U.S. Marines – he mobilized 700 Marines from Camp Pendleton, CA today – against anti-ICE street protesters in Los Angeles, Donald Trump created the question that will be asked every time a Democrat steps in front of a camera for the next 18 months: which side are you on, the violent rioters or the troops? Today, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) spelled out Trump’s strategy in two sentences: “Americans have a choice between Republicans’ law & order vs. the Democrats’ car-burning, illegal alien rioters. So far, every Senate Democrat who has spoken out has backed the rioters.”

There you go, folks. You can say what you will about Trump provoking worse riots by federalizing the CA National Guard without asking Governor Gavin Newsom, but he has framed his politics for the mid-terms. He was always going to use immigration as an issue. Now he can say it’s us against them and point to the riots in L.A. and not just talk about amorphous “illegal immigrants.” Last night on Truth Social, Trump called them “Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers.” At mid-afternoon, returning from a weekend meeting at Camp David, Trump called the protesters “insurrectionists.” The New York Times reported that the word “may become a rationale for him to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act.”

Last night, protests spread to San Francisco, where 150 were arrested in clashes with police. Videos of the protests showed men in all-black outfits, wearing hoodies, masks, and backpacks, breaking the windows of downtown buildings with a hammer and vandalizing a SFPD patrol car.


The video images were almost identical to video taken of the Ferguson riots after the police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 showing a man wearing black pants and a black hoodie and a backpack systematically breaking the windows of an auto parts store. He was followed by another man dressed identically who threw Molotov fire bombs into the store, setting it on fire.

In Los Angeles, several Waymo driverless cars were set on fire by protesters. There is one photo (above) of a masked man standing atop a vandalized Waymo car between two burning cars waving a Mexican flag. More photos showed a vandalized LAPD car with a broken windshield surrounded by paving stones that had been hurled at the police cars.

It is obvious, at least to me, that the men breaking windows and vandalizing the police car in San Francisco are provocateurs. Regular citizens don’t go to a protest wearing black hoodies and masks and backpacks, carrying hammers. These people were dressed that way and equipped with the tools they needed to commit premeditated destruction of private and public property.

I’m going into detail about the photos from both riots, because these are exactly the images Trump has been looking for. So far, images of ICE arrests have depicted federal agents kitted out in combat gear and masks handcuffing individual undocumented immigrants. He can’t run on those images. They may seem extreme but they depict lawful arrests. But he can run on the riots, and that is exactly what he is going to do. Trump and Republican candidates for the House and Senate will use still photos and video footage of the riots during their campaigns in midterm elections next year.

In the meantime, Democrats had better start thinking of what they’re going to do at the “No Kings” protests this coming weekend. There will probably be a great deal of pressure to turn the whole thing into anti-ICE demonstrations in solidarity with L.A. and San Francisco protests and other protests if they spread further around the country this week, as I think they are likely to do.

Donald Trump is a master at this kind of provocation-reaction-more provocation stuff. He has already used Title 10 to call out the National Guard. They haven’t announced what law they will cite in the deployment of active-duty Marines to the L.A. riots. But as the Times pointed out, invoking the Insurrection Act is his obvious next step.

Which raises the question I have seen in my newsfeed and am getting in emails and direct messages: Will Trump “declare martial law?” Some people are even raising the specter of Trump using “martial law” to step in and take over elections during the midterms.

The term “martial law” refers to a situation where the armed forces step in and assume not only law enforcement but governance of an area. There is no federal law or provision in the Constitution for the President to declare martial law. Martial law has been imposed by states more than 60 times since the nation’s founding, because of war or invasion, civil unrest, labor unrest, and natural disaster. Abraham Lincoln imposed martial law on the country during the Civil War, from 1862 to 1866. Franklin Roosevelt approved a declaration of martial law for two years over the territory of Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Other impositions of martial law were done by state governors due to riots. Several times, one of them after the Tulsa race riot in 1921, an Army general imposed martial law until order could be restored, which in the Tulsa case was four days.

Trump is of course notorious for ignoring norms and the law and would probably seek to use the Insurrection Act as a de facto imposition of martial law over blue states such as Illinois, New York, California or others. How far he would go beyond putting troops in the streets of cities, such as he has done in Los Angeles, is something we will have to contend with if or when he tries to make it happen. It is unlikely that either federal or state courts would be amenable to having their jurisdictions cancelled or interfered with in an area over which Trump attempts to impose martial law. That would mean military courts or tribunals would take over the judiciary in the states affected, and that military prosecutors would assume the function of a state attorney general and local district attorneys. It would seem to be a bridge too far even for Donald Trump, but he has exploded a lot of bridges over the last eight years, and it would be foolish to suppose that he wouldn’t at least try.

The danger we face right now is if unrest in the streets of L.A. and San Francisco and other blue cities provides Trump with the opportunity to deploy Reserve, National Guard, or active-duty soldiers to quell unrest that Trump can define as a rebellion or insurrection. The images I’ve seen from L.A. and San Francisco are giving him all the propaganda he needs. No matter who is out there demonstrating against ICE or Trump himself, anarchist provocateurs are likely to take this opportunity to sow chaos and cause more violence than the legitimate demonstrators.

This is an ugly situation, it’s likely to get uglier before it gets better, and there is one person we can count on to make sure that happens: Donald Trump.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

With National Guard Deployed To California, Trump Lights The Fuse

With National Guard Deployed To California, Trump Lights The Fuse

They’ve lost the narrative on the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and this week they went and jumped the shark with the Trump-Musk bromance break-up, so what does he do?

Oh, look over here! Somebody with brown skin threw a rock at a fed in full combat gear, bullet-proof vest, and helmet, carrying a full-automatic assault rifle, wearing a mask over his face as he went to arrest a brown-skinned seamstress in the garment district! I’m going to call out the National Guard!

He really is the master of distraction, isn’t he? Not a single shot was fired and not a single gun was carried by protesters who showed up to demonstrate against overreach by ICE in L.A., and yet Trump cites Title 10 Section 12406 of the federal law to place the California National Guard under the command of himself as President of the United States.

The last time this was done, folks, was 60 years ago in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson used Title 10 to federalize the Alabama National Guard to protect a civil rights march led by Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery two weeks after the infamous “Bloody Sunday” police riot at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

A different federal law, Title 32, has been used to call up various National Guard units to serve either state or federal functions. Under Title 32 status, the Guard remains under state control but can be used for federal functions. Trump used Title 32 to deploy National Guard troops during George Floyd protests in Washington D.C. in 2020. The governor of California used the statute to call up the California National Guard during the Watts Riots in August of 1965.

Title 10 allows the call up and federalization of National Guard troops when the United States is “invaded,” or crucially, when “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Trump used language from Title 10 to justify the California call-up, writing in his order that the troops were to be used to “temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal functions, including the enforcement of Federal law, and to protect Federal property,” justifying the order with this: “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

You will of course recognize that language from Title 10 itself.

Interestingly, Trump did not invoke the Insurrection Act in his order last night. Invocation of that law would have allowed the federalized National Guard troops to act in a law enforcement capacity. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy invoked the Insurrection Act to deploy federal troops to desegregate schools in the Deep South after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education.

The Insurrection Act allows federal troops when requested by the governors of affected states, or under two other provisions of the Act, the President is empowered unilaterally…

“to address an insurrection, in any state, which makes it impracticable to enforce the law,” or

“to address an insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy, in any state, which results in the deprivation of constitutionally secured rights, and where the state is unable, fails, or refuses to protect said rights…”

In all other circumstances, including use of Title 10 to federally activate National Guard troops, the Posse Comitatus Act forbids the U.S. military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

So, what’s going on here? Trump and his blood-thirsty minions certainly understand the different laws which apply to the federalizing of National Guard troops to suppress riots, or rebellions, or insurrections. In fact, Trump used the word “rebellion” in his order last night, and the odious Stephen Miller followed up by tweeting a video of the protests in Los Angeles, calling it “An insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.” Secretary of Defense Hegseth followed suit by threatening that “If violence continues, active-duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized – they are on high alert.”

The blatherings of Miller and Hegseth sound a lot like jumping on the bandwagon to make certain Trump knows they are right there behind him with their eager tongues out.

It is well known that Trump and his chief immigration attack dog Stephen Miller have been looking for an excuse to call out military troops to put down street protests that they can call an “insurrection.” Trump has even lamented that he did not use the military to put down George Floyd protests in 2020, although he certainly did threaten to.

Well, they’re not threatening to deploy troops any longer. It’s obvious Trump’s calling up of the California National Guard is a provocation. He hates the state’s governor, calling him Governor “Newscum” as he blasted protestors as “radical Left RIOTERS AND LOOTERS.”

“Border czar” Tom Homan told NBC News that Governor Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass could be arrested and prosecuted by the Trump DOJ if they interfere in federal arrests of undocumented immigrants. “If she crossed that line, we’ll ask DOJ to prosecute,” Holman said of Bass. “I don’t think she’s crossed the line yet. But the warning we’re sending is, we’re not going to tolerate people attacking our officers.”

They’re spoiling for a fight. So far this morning, 300 of the 2,000 federalized National Guard troops have arrived in Los Angeles, decked out in their full combat gear, carrying loaded M-4 automatic weapons, at least some of them wearing masks. Looking at the National Guard troops and the federal agents who have been arresting undocumented immigrants around L.A., it’s going to be hard to distinguish between them.

The situation in L.A. is bad, and it’s going to get worse. Neither Newsom nor Bass has any control over the people who have been protesting the arrests, many if not most of whom are undocumented themselves. I saw a story on Saturday that said about a third of the population of Los Angeles is immigrant, of which a large number are undocumented. If Trump and Kristi Noem and Holman somehow lined up and arrested everyone in L.A. who is in this country without a valid visa, they’d still be doing it at Christmas, and would have long since overloaded their capacity to hold the arrestees.

Not only that, but the economy of Southern California would be shut down, store shelves in L.A. supermarkets would be emptying out, office buildings would have whole corridors of offices that hadn’t been cleaned or had the trash dumped, lawns and hedges in Beverly Hills would be untrimmed and woolly, restaurants would close for lack of cooks and staff…you get the picture.

Now seems as good a time as any to ask this elemental question: What are Trump and his MAGA henchmen going to do with L.A. once they’ve got their 2,000 National Guard troops fully deployed? The first thing I would point out is what an infinitesimal drop in the proverbial bucket 2,000 soldiers are in a place as enormous as Los Angeles. The city of Los Angeles is huge – 500 square miles, with a population of about 4 million. Los Angeles County, which includes the San Fernando Valley and towns to the east and south of downtown, is even more enormous, covering more than 4,700 square miles with a population of almost 10 million. As a quick comparison, the population of L.A. County is greater than 40 of this country’s states. White people became a minority in Los Angeles in 2001, based on the 2000 census. The white population of the city of L.A. now stands at about 30 percent, with the Latino population at 48 percent. Most demographic projections of the U.S. population predict that whites will be a minority nationally in 2045, according to a Brookings Institution study of census data.

That means white people in the rest of the country have about 20 years before they are eclipsed by minorities, whether Trump and Stephen Miller and the rest of them like it or not. The City of Los Angeles is what the rest of this country may look like by the end of the 21st Century.

Two thousand National Guard troops in Los Angeles and all the ICE agents they can muster isn’t enough to remove even a small fraction of the undocumented people living and working there. If Trump invoked the Insurrection Act and deployed the entirety of the 1.4 million uniformed men and women in the U.S. military, he and Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Kash Patel and the rest of them couldn’t arrest and deport their way out of the future that is not waiting to happen, but is already here.

Trump’s federalization of the National Guard and deploying 2,000 of them to L.A. isn’t based in any recognizable reality about immigration and the demographics of this country’s future. It’s a tactic meant to intimidate a city that didn’t vote for him in the largest state that didn’t vote for him.

Which makes it all the more important that protests against the excesses of ICE, and now the National Guard, must be peaceful. Disgust and displeasure with Trump and his ilk and what they’re doing in L.A. can be and must be expressed without violence. The best way to respond to Trump’s attempts at oppression is nationally with numbers that dwarf the 2,000 National Guard troops Trump is putting on the streets of L.A.

We need one million people in the streets of L.A., Chicago and New York, and we need hundreds of thousands protesting in the streets of other major cities like Phoenix, San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Charlotte, and Washington D.C.

There are more of us than them today, and there will be even more of us tomorrow. They aren’t going to be “replaced,” to use the words of the racist conspiracy theory, but they are going to be outnumbered. Put that in your cheek and chew on it, Stephen my boy, and watch out that you don’t choke on your bitter spit.

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.

troubled Trump

Elon Dumping Don Dumping Elon: Unseemly Or Delicious?

I’ve been waiting for an occasion to use that word, “unseemly,” for months…even years. It’s one of those in between words, describing something that is not specifically terrible or disgusting, but rather inappropriate for a reason falling between morality and tastefulness. The opportunity to put “unseemly” into use doesn’t come along that often in this day and age, because nearly everything happens at the extremes. Things are either so utterly unacceptable that they’re almost beyond words, or they’re so wonderful that describing them becomes embarrassing. Dylan or The Beatles or Taylor Swift are good examples of the latter, and if you need an example of the former, well, wake up.

The spectacle this afternoon of Trump and Musk going at each other like two third graders fighting over who’s going down the slide first on the playground has been, for me anyway, delicious on the scale of an appetizer at a great Northern Thai restaurant or a sip of cool water along a mountain hiking trail on a hot day. Could you have asked for more? Flintlock pistols on the Palisades in Weehawken perhaps, or maybe a real sandbox rather than Truth Social and X, so they could get some nasty grains in each other’s eyes.

I guess we’ll have to settle for the display to which I’m sure most of you have been treated today: Trump describing Musk as “wearing thin” around the White House, “so I asked him to leave;” Musk hauling out the “bomb” of the Jeffrey Epstein files; Trump threatening Musk’s defense contracts; Musk re-tweeting a suggestion that Trump should be impeached with the single word, “yes.”

Lots and lots of punditory delight, complete with references to a mental health diagnosis of “narcissism,” and of course the words “ego” and “bromance” got quite a workout this afternoon.

But the whole spectacle, even though it could have been and was predicted, was still something of a shock, even though it fit so wholly within the personalities – I hesitate to use that word with these two, but there it is – of both men. By late afternoon, you could practically see lines of Ketamine being hoovered up in Texas or aboard a Gulfstream somewhere over Oklahoma, and the buzzer for the Diet Coke button overheating in its spot on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. The nearest McDonald’s probably saw some extra business today, as well.

What does it say about our country that the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man are both gibbering idiots, each of whom needs the other to complete himself? I’ll leave that one to the historians.

In the meantime, Rick Wilson, the Never-Trumper Republican former political operative, had a field day with a video “letter of advice” to Musk in mid-afternoon, pointing out that Musk has two very powerful weapons at his disposal: He can effectively de-platform Trump’s use of X through bots and MAGA promoters by hitting the de-emphasize button. And Musk can take a pick-axe to the “Big Beautiful Bill” by putting together a few TV and digital ads tying about 20 Republicans up for reelection in the Senate and House who will hold the bill’s fate in their hands between now and the July 4 target date they’ve set for passage.

True, as far as it goes. But I think in another 48 hours or so they will take the whole thing to the next level on their own and do sufficient damage to each other’s almighty “brands” that the Big Beautiful Bill will collapse of its own weight, and the damage to Musk’s bottom line between Tesla and whatever Trump has in store for him will be all we’ll be able to stomach before our delight will effectively eclipse the sun and the Earth Will Be Cast Into Darkness.

We can use that opportunity for a nap. We’ll need one by then.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

The Washington Post journalism

If This Is The Future Of Big-Time Journalism, Count Me Out

I trust it will not come as much of a surprise if I tell you that the Grande Dame of Washington D.C. journalism, The Washington Post, is in the midst creating a new quasi-op-ed online section of the paper devoted to publishing “opinion articles from other newspapers across America, writers on Substack and eventually nonprofessional writers,” according to an article in the New York Times. The program, called “Ripple,” which I take as a direct insult to the Grateful Dead and lyricist Robert Hunter, will use – you guessed it – AI to develop what the Times called opinion pieces that will “appeal to readers who want more breadth than The Post’s current opinion section and more quality than social platforms like Reddit and X.”

The paper’s CEO, a British citizen by the name of Will Lewis, “has been looking for new ways to reduce costs at the company while finding new sources of revenue,” according to the Times. He landed on the magic bullet of using non-professional writers working with prompts from an AI writing tool called “Ember,” to go after a potential audience of 38 million adults located “outside of coastal elites.” The fly-over people, in other words.

Non-professional writers would be helped along with their submissions by the AI writing coach Ember, which will provide them with a “‘story strength tracker’ that tells writers how their piece is shaping up, with a sidebar that lays out basic parts of story structure: ‘early thesis,’ ‘supporting points’ and ‘memorable ending.’”

Just wow.

One source at the Post said that the Ember writing coach will also be “inviting authors to add ‘solid supporting points,’” which looks really, really promising to me.

With its dive into Ripple and using AI to prompt non-professional writers to contribute to its digital pages, the Post has “placed a greater emphasis on building deeper engagement with users to create paid subscription businesses.”

All of this is coming to light on a day that the Washington Post published an article on testing the ability of five AI tools to read and summarize material ranging from novels to legal documents, scientific research, politics, and speeches by Donald Trump. They used ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Meta AI and Gemini. The Post article did not get into whether the AI tools will be provided to its new cast of non-professional writers to use in their “research” for the AI-coached opinion writing they will be doing, but it’s not much of a stretch to assume that they will, especially given the fact that the Post has now done an official test to see how well the AI tools work.

The answer: not very well. All the AI tools generated made up or “hallucinated” stuff that wasn’t in their reading assignments. “None of the bots scored higher than 70 percent overall — the typical cutoff for a D+,” the Post reported.

So, there it is, folks. Who knows what desperation will cause the Washington Post to turn to in the future? You have to wonder if they’ve tried just making shit up, and then you recall many of their headlines on Trump-related stories. For example, Trump has spent hours at night rage-tweeting insane gibberish about judges, and the Post reported the next day that he engaged in “analysis” of where he stands in various “legal cases.”

I must add that reading the report on AI and Ripple and Ember and how they will be used in the production of news and analysis at the Washington Post has made me enormously thankful that I have the Substack platform to publish my own journalism.

I am even more thankful for the loyal readers who have stuck with me through the thousands of columns I’ve written during this four-year journey and most especially, my paid subscribers, including the those who responded to my announcement that Salon had stopped paying freelance writers, including me, by buying new paid subscriptions, giving gift subs, and upgrading to founding members to support my work.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

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.

Big Lie: What The Faked MAHA Report Shows About AI (And Bobby)

Big Lie: What The Faked MAHA Report Shows About AI (And Bobby)

I had a friend from my time living in Sag Harbor who is sadly gone from us now, Anthony “Tony” Brandt, who was married to my equally good friend, Lorraine Dusky. I bring up Tony today because he and the way he lived his life illustrate what is so different about us – me and Tracy and Tony and Lorraine and you and yours – and what we are constantly told is the ever-encroaching power, or threat, or utility – we’re always being told something different – of artificial intelligence, or AI.

Tony was a man of books, thousands and thousands of books, which he had acquired over his lifetime. Walking into his and Lorraine’s home on High Street in Sag Harbor was like entering a library. Every wall was covered with floor to ceiling bookshelves. There were more on the glassed-in porch on the front of the house, as well as piles of them out there, and more upstairs in his study, and more in the downstairs extra bedroom, and no doubt more in rooms I had not been in.

Nearly every time you walked into the house, Tony was in an armchair in the living room across from the couch under a lamp, reading. He wrote several books of his own and for years was a journalist writing for Esquire, Connoisseur, The Atlantic, American Heritage, Military History magazine, Psychology Today, and also wrote the books column in Men’s Journal. You could see among the titles what his interests were – lots of American and world history, a complete personal library on Jefferson, military matters including history, tactics, and strategy, and apparently every other book that caught his eye at the yard and estate sales that proliferated in the Hamptons during the summer.

I wondered over the years what Tony did with all those books besides read them. It was clear that they informed his own writing, but there were so many of them it was obvious that he had not collected them for a specific purpose. He had accumulated and read those books because they made him who he was. Any conversation with Tony contained stuff from his books – not the kind of self-conscious specific references that scholars are wont to make; he made casual note of something he had read that touched on the subject at hand.

The general sense you got from talking with him, which I spent hours doing over the years, or simply being around him was that he was not a man of literature so much as he was a man of knowledge which he accumulated right along with his books. His library was as extensive as he was fascinating to be with.

But it was more than knowledge he took from all those books. He took from them not only facts and scholarship and analysis. He gathered up what the books’ authors had to say about their subjects and the world around them, the ineffable sensibility and intelligence that went beyond facts, even beyond the subjects the authors wrote about.

There is the word: intelligence. It doesn’t come just from the words printed on paper between covers. It comes from within the writers, and when their books are good – and most of those Tony had chosen for his shelves were very good – what is within the writers translates into the reader, into Tony. That is why what Tony took from his thousands of books could only be described as ineffable, because it was beyond description except by his presence, the self of Tony Brandt.

It’s also why artificial intelligence will never be the threat to humankind that so many people apparently think it will be. The subject of AI popped up last week with the publication of the RFK Jr. MAHA report that had the subhed of “Make Our Children Healthy Again,” (emphasis in the original.) As you probably know by now, the report was rife with studies that turned out not to exist, and in one case, an author of a study who was made up. As Rolling Stone helpfully summed up, “The MAHA Report was also riddled with broken links, incorrect authors, and other erroneous attributions.” The conservative think tank, the CATO Institute, of all places, went further, concluding that “The data in the report bears little relationship to its conclusions.”

All the coverage of the MAHA report pointed out that at least some of the citations appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence, with some of them containing the telltale notation, “oaicite,” connoting something generated by ChatGTP, which is owned by OpenAI.

So, here we have what was intended to be a landmark study that featured “authors” including the secretaries of the departments of HHS, Education, HUD, Veterans Affairs, EPA, and Agriculture, in addition to Russell Vought, the director of Office of Management and Budget, and Stephen Miller, the White House all-the-time-and-everywhere-jack-of-all-trades adviser on everything from immigration to national security to the budget. The report is a mess because of arrogance and laziness on the part of RFK Jr. and other “authors” who not only couldn’t bring themselves to take the time to study the subject matter, but did not even read the report once it was published.

And AI was right in the middle of the whole thing.

I read a good description today of what artificial intelligence is by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. “AI is being built, even more than most of us realize,” Marshall wrote, “by consuming everyone else’s creative work with no compensation. It’s less ‘thought’ than more and more refined statistical associations between different words and word patterns.” He goes on to make the salient point that the AI “products” being produced will be “privately owned and sold to us.”

Which happened to me today, as a matter of fact. My Google Mail account recently became infected with some sort of AI product owned by Google called “Genesis,” which provided me each and every time I began an email with this unwanted prompt: “Help me write Alt+H.” I didn’t want to be so prompted, and so I went looking on the internet for how to cause the prompt to go away, which took me down a rabbit hole of solutions involving the “settings” tab of Gmail. I unclicked everything they suggested to no avail. The prompt refused to go away. And today, I discovered why. A new message in a little box appeared within the Gmail page notifying me that my “trial” use of Genesis on Gmail was about to expire, but I could buy the service by clicking “here.” I hit “cancel” and look forward to the day that my Genesis trial will be over so I can write emails without being asked if I want “help.”

Doubtlessly, what Genesis has been doing is recording every email I have ever written and preparing what Marshall called the “statistical associations between different words and patterns” so they could provide me with suggestions for sentences that would appear to echo my email “style” (or whatever) from before. As if what I want to do is write every new email so that it is similar to every other email I have already written.

That is just one of the massive holes in AI – the assumption that what human beings want to do is repeat themselves, which in my experience over the last 70 years or so is exactly 180 degrees from what I have observed human beings wanting to do. Fashion, for just one example, would die if people wanted to put the same clothes on every day. So would supermarkets and restaurants, which are in the business of offering you new and different choices for what to cook or eat.

But the weakness of AI goes way beyond its obvious basis in repetition and the apparent tendency of AI to “hallucinate” facts and references when there are none, as shown in the MAHA report.

AI will never be able to feel. AI will never, in short, be Tony Brandt. AI will never be able to take all that information from all those books on Tony’s shelves – and there is evidence that is exactly what AI companies are doing by copying information from books and magazines and internet sources into huge databases from which they can generate their repetitive “help” for us today and in the future.

AI can copy all the sentences and words it wants, but it will never be able to achieve anything resembling something as simple as emphasis – that is, synthesizing the information and applying experience from a human life to choose which fact or what “study” is more important than another except by using statistics or by emphasis according to repetition and usage, by applying numbers to create “solutions” that would in a human being come from within.

Ask yourself this: of the books or articles or poems you have read, or the music you have listened to, or the movies you have watched, what changed you? The assessments made by AI will never be changed except in ways that can be expressed mathematically within its system, by counting things and adding them up, or assessing the importance of something by what it costs – if it’s more expensive, it’s better; if it’s cheaper, it’s not worth as much.

There is also the matter of changing one’s mind. If you assess something and come to a conclusion based on the information you have, and then you come upon new and different information, you may change your mind about the subject. AI can presumably do this by accumulating information, adding to it, and changing because of the added information.

But what if your assessment is one of what might be called a human value? In my life, I have personally seen people who had been racists since childhood change their beliefs about Black people because of their lived experience knowing and working with them, or by becoming friends, or even falling in love with someone of a different race. How does AI factor that into its computations?

Because that’s what we’re talking about in the end: mathematical computations. If you use this word after that word again and again, it becomes either your common usage or your style. But words arranged in patterns can be serious, or ironic, or sarcastic, or even funny. Math doesn’t work with patterns to achieve humor or sarcasm. Math achieves repetition because it has been taught to apply a value: repetition is good, so use again.

Which is as good a definition of humanness in the accumulation of knowledge in the form of words as I can think of, other than in this way: Tony Brandt. Every time I walked into his house on High Street in Sag Harbor, I knew the experience would be different, because Tony would have read a new book or books, or something in the New York Review of Books, or a column in the Times, or a poem in the East Hampton Star, or even something in the tide tables of the Sag Harbor Express that changed him in some way that would delight me and Tracy and the rest of us in new and wonderful ways.

Let’s see AI try to replicate that.

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.

Donald Trump

Chin Up! We're Doing Better Than Expected -- Or At Least Trump Is Doing Worse

It’s wonderful to see isn’t it? A snake in the grass slithering up to bite the ass of the person who had beckoned it forth?

That is the spectacle we have been treated to for these weeks and months since January 20, as one executive order signed by Trump after another has fallen to the considerations of judges who, one, can read the law, and two, require that assertions made in the executive orders, and those made by Trump’s DOJ lawyers in court, must be backed up by evidence and that pesky bane of every authoritarian, reason.

Lawsuits have been filed and Trump’s hastily written executive orders have been subjected to scrutiny by legal minds sharper than those which backed up Trump’s Sharpie. Most recently, the ordinarily somnolent Court of International Trade, in a 3-0 ruling, blocked almost all of Trump’s tariffs, which he had imposed using powers he asserted under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law which allows a president to regulate international commerce after declaring a “national emergency” due to an “unusual and extraordinary threat ... to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States" originating from outside the borders of the country. The court found that retaliating for tariffs imposed by other countries, or otherwise addressing trade imbalances, does not constitute such a threat and thus does not justify the declaration of national emergency necessary for the assertion of powers under the IEEPA.

The Trump administration quickly appealed, and a court of appeals issued a stay of the trade court’s injunction rejecting or limiting Trump’s tariffs, at least until the case can be heard and a ruling can be issued on the merits. In the meantime, a district court issued a similar ruling blocking Trump’s tariffs in response to a lawsuit filed by a toy company that had been hugely and negatively affected by Trump’s tariffs on trade with China. That ruling has also been temporarily stayed on appeal.

Trump reacted to the trade court ruling by attacking the Federalist Society and its leader, Leonard Leo, on whom he had relied for advice on judicial appointments during his first administration. In a rage-filled post on Truth Social, Trump called Leo “a sleazebag” and “a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America,” his catchall criticism for anyone he feels has wronged him in some way.

Trump’s assertion of power using executive orders has run counter to a Supreme Court decision that he and his arch-conservative legal allies had long sought. The decision, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overturned the so-called “major questions doctrine” which dated back to 1984 and required courts to defer to federal agencies when interpreting complicated and ambiguous laws. The trade court cited the Loper decision in its ruling slamming Trump’s tariffs. Trump reacted with fury, writing, “The horrific decision stated that I would have to get the approval of Congress for these Tariffs.”

Well, yes, that is what the sting of the Loper decision feels like when it bites you in the ass.

We are witnessing a delicious moment best summed up by what we might call the hippie-era “what goes around, comes around” doctrine. That occurs when the thing that you wished for starts to affect you in ways that you had not contemplated, perhaps because your contemplation of what you wanted was inadequate in its consideration of what effect it might have in the future.

Multiple lawsuits and federal court rulings have kicked much of Trump’s executive order agenda to the curb. A federal court blocked Trump’s attempt to do away with birthright citizenship, which is written into the text of the Constitution. A federal judge in Boston ruled that Trump cannot stop Harvard from accepting foreign-born students. More lawsuits filed by Harvard seek to overturn Trump’s orders to strip Harvard of federal funds and grants. Legal experts say those lawsuits are likely to be successful because the reasoning behind Trump’s moves against Harvard is so blatantly punitive.

Other judges have overturned Trump’s attempts to bar several major law firms from entering federal government buildings, holding top secret security clearances, or representing companies doing business with the federal government, again because Trump’s orders have been nakedly punitive.

Other judges have ordered the return of people deported under false pretenses. The Supreme Court itself handed down an emergency ruling that the Trump administration must afford undocumented immigrants the same due process rights granted to everyone under the Constitution.

The news website Axios summed up the “flood” of rulings against Trump this way: “The headlines are constant: Judge blocks X; Judge freezes Y; Court allows Z to continue.”

On Friday, Trump bid farewell to his erstwhile ally, Elon Musk, at the end of his time as a so-called “temporary federal employee” overseeing his DOGE worm-burrowing into federal agencies seeking to eliminate or undermine them, as he did with USAID and the Department of Education. But even in those two cases, federal judges have reversed some of the DOGE moves and reinstated funding and in some cases order the rehiring of employees who had been summarily fired without cause in violation of federal regulations.

The effect of DOGE and Musk has been, by their own measure, lame. Musk announced on the campaign trail and after he was appointed to head DOGE that he would reduce the federal deficit by $2 trillion. Then it was $1 trillion, then $200 billion, and Musk had stopped talking about the federal deficit and started claiming “savings” from the discovery by DOGE of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” which in Washington D.C. could be uncovered by a street sweeper with a broom and dustpan.

In the end, Musk claimed that he had “saved” $175 billion. Robert Hubbell yesterday called that figure a “mirage,” citing “A study by the Budget Lab at Yale estimates that cuts to the IRS will result in $350 billion in reduced tax collections over the next ten years—an amount that is double the alleged ‘savings’ by DOGE.”

Much if not most of what Musk and Trump attempted to do with DOGE has been overturned by federal courts, which have found certain of their moves unconstitutional and others to have violated previous Supreme Court decisions such as the Loper decision. In the meantime, the New York Times headlined on the front page of the Sunday paper a major investigative story on Musk’s drug use during the campaign and afterwards while he was working as a temporary government employee.

Musk was described as having used Ketamine, Ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms, the stimulant Adderall, and the sleeping medication Ambien. The Times reported that Musk, like all federal employees, was supposed to have been drug-tested periodically during his employment. He was said to have been forewarned of the drug tests so that he could pass them.

So, Donald Trump has relied on a drug-addled madman with Nazi sympathies to undertake his reform of the government he is charged with overseeing. And now Musk has turned on him, criticizing Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” and its lifting of the debt ceiling.

When Trump rolled out his plethora of executive orders, signing the first bunch before an adoring MAGA crowd at a sports facility in Washington on inauguration eve, I first thought, Oh-oh. They’re serious this time.

I should have known. The lawyers Trump used to write the executive orders were not from the big law firms he would soon move to eliminate from working on federal government cases, because those firms had long refused to do legal work for him. According to Adam Bonica, a professor of political science at Stanford, Trump lost a stunning 96 percent of the cases filed against him in federal court during May. During April, he lost 76 percent. During March, the number was 74 percent. The judges ruling against the Trump administration were appointed by both political parties, with those appointed by Democrats outnumbering Republican judges by only 8 percent.

The Washington Post reported today that Trump’s FBI is in “chaos” due to the mismanagement of Director Kash Patel. Over at the Department of Defense, the top aides to Secretary Pete Hegseth are said to be at each other’s throats.

Here is my estimation of where we are on the first day of June, 2025. Things could be a whole lot worse, and they’re showing signs of getting better, as Trump continues to attack the judges he appointed to the bench and former allies like Elon Musk are now off the White House leash and his Adderall-fueled tongue is bound to start wagging.

Chin up. We’ve got a long way to go, but Trump and the fools he appointed to his cabinet are living up to every expectation we should have had about them.

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.

President Donald Trump

Just What Power Does Donald Trump Still Have?

Way back in March of 2023, Donald Trump went on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News and said he would “solve” the war in Ukraine in “24 hours” if he was elected president in 2024. “There’s a very easy negotiation to take place. But I don’t want to tell you what it is because then I can’t use that negotiation; it’ll never work. But it’s a very easy negotiation to take place. I will have it solved within one day, a peace between them,” Trump confided to the ever-eager, ever-gullible Hannity.

In May of 2023, Trump told a CNN town hall, “I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done — I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”

In August of 2024, Trump told a National Guard conference, “Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled. I’ll get it settled very fast.”

On February 28 of this year, just after the three-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump and Vance infamously sandbagged Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. Accusing Zelenskyy of starting the war, Trump declared that he had not taken sides in the conflict and was “in the middle.” He berated the shocked Ukrainian leader before having him escorted out of the White House, “You see the hatred he’s got for Putin. That’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”

A few days later, Trump paused military and intelligence aid to Ukraine.

In April, after Putin fired yet another barrage of drones and missiles at civilian targets in Ukraine, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP!”

On Sunday, Trump fired off this blast at the Russian president: “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY! I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!”

Yesterday, Trump whined again on Truth Social that “if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!”

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chief of Russia’s security council and Russia’s puppet-president when Putin took a time-out as Prime Minister between 2008 and 2012, fired back: “Regarding Trump’s words about Putin ‘playing with fire’ and ‘really bad things’ happening to Russia. I only know of one REALLY BAD thing — WWIII. I hope Trump understands this.”

Russian President Putin did not attend the abortive “peace talks” in Turkey earlier this month, although Zelenskyy did show up. Now the two sides are trading “proposals” that amount to demands if there is to be a ceasefire and eventual peace.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reports that Putin’s army is pressing to take more Ukrainian land across a wide swath of territory that includes the area around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plantand has been running what it calls “illegal” new power lines near the Sea of Azov in Russian occupied territory, “suggesting that Russia intends to bring the ZNPP's reactors out of their current cold shutdown state…acting upon its long-held plans to connect the ZNPP to the Russian power grid.”

Meanwhile, over the last three days, Russia has bombarded Ukraine with more than 900 Shahed and decoy drones against civilian targets in Ukraine, along with dozens of ballistic missiles and Kh-101 cruise missiles.

ISW reports that Putin is in it for the long haul, importing hundreds of mobile missiles and 155 mm artillery pieces and ammunition from North Korea and thousands of computer chips from China to ramp up its drone production.

Trump’s frustration at not being able to end the war in Ukraine is boiling over. He has changed his timeline for ending the war multiple times, and now he is changing his rhetoric about his “friend” Putin.

The words “World War III” are now being flung back and forth between the superpowers. European nations are sufficiently alarmed that they have just completed a security conference and pledged to increase their defense budgets in many cases to 5 percent of their GDP. The upcoming NATO summit in The Hague is being met with headlines about the “dark cloud” cast by the “war of words” between Trump and Putin.

The biggest question at the summit should be, where is Trump’s power?

Here at home, Trump’s power is taking hit after hit. Tonight, the U.S. Court of International Trade handed down a ruling that Trump exceeded his power to impose tariffs under federal law. “The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined,” the panel ruled. The three judges on the Court of Trade were appointed by Obama, Reagan, and…you guessed right…Donald Trump.

Trump had invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act or IEEPA in setting the taxes on imported goods. The court found that Trump exceeded his authority under the IEEPA and ended tariffs he had imposed on Canada, Mexico, China, and all the other 10 percent tariffs Trump had imposed on every other country on earth, as well as several uninhabited islands.

The Constitution gives the Congress the power to impose tariffs, although the legislature has enacted several laws, including the IEEPA, ceding certain powers over the economy to the president. No president before has invoked the IEEPA to impose “emergency” tariffs. The trade court found that Trump had not adequately supported the reasons for his emergency declaration, ruling that the law did not allow “the President to impose whatever tariff rates he deems desirable.”

Trump has been losing in other courts, which have ruled that his attempt to shut down the Department of Education was illegal, that his takeover of the United States Institute of Peace was illegal, and that many of the federal workers fired by Elon Musk’s DOGE assault on the government must be rehired.

With Musk resigning his “special government employee” status in the face of the reversals of so many of his and Trump’s efforts to remake the government in either Musk’s or Trump’s image – it was never clear which – and Musk’s announcement that he opposes Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” where is Trump’s power now?

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

January 6 insurrectionists

Presidential Immunity Plus Pardon Power Equals Absolute Despotism

Donald Trump’s pardons of January 6 insurrectionists on his first day as president in January of this year were an admission that he instigated the assault on the Capitol, and that he approved of the way the assault was carried out, including violent attacks on police officers resulting in at least one death and leaving others with career-ending injuries.

Looked at in a different way, Trump thus pardoned himself, even though such an action was not necessary due to the incredible law-busting fact that the Supreme Court, in United States v. Trump had given him blanket immunity for virtually anything he does or did that could be defined as an “official act.”

Trump has been using the toxic combination of immunity and the pardon power in a crescendo of lawlessness that was unforeseen by the founding fathers at the time they wrote the Constitution. It’s the biggest fuck you to our democracy since its founding. In his disassembly of whole departments of government that were established in laws written by the Congress, Trump is saying to the other two branches of government, “If you don’t like it, come and get me.”

The Republican Congress, at this point a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization, has sat on its hands, and individual Republican members of Congress, including the speaker of the House, have endorsed Trump’s rape of the government. Congressional Republicans, as well as conservative members of the judiciary, adhere to a royalist theory of presidential power called the unitary executive, which holds that Trump, as president, has sole authority over the executive branch, including the right to fire all appointees and executive branch officers, with or without cause.

Since taking office for a second time, Trump has tested the limits of his executive power repeatedly, eliminating entire divisions of the government such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and firing directors of Congressionally created agencies that had previously been considered independent of the Executive.

Last week, the Supreme Court adopted Trump’s position on his powers by issuing an order allowing him to fire board members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merits Systems Protection Board. The top court paused lower court orders that had allowed the two board officials to continue to serve while a lawsuit they filed makes its way through the courts. The lower courts observed that under the congressional statute establishing the boards, its members could be fired only for “good cause,” and the administration had not provided such cause.

Trump’s unilateral moves in firing government employees and disestablishing government departments have been stymied by the courts multiple times. A report by Adam Bonica on his Substack, “On Data and Democracy,” found that during the month of May, “federal district courts ruled against the Trump administration in 26 of 27 cases—a stunning 96% loss rate.” Trump lost 76 percent of the cases against him in April, and 74 percent in March.

Yesterday, Trump added to his court losses when he suffered a stinging rebuke by a federal judge who found that his moves to punish the WilmerHale law firm were unconstitutional. Other judges have struck down Trump’s similar moves against Jenner & Block and Perkins Coie. Trump had issued orders against the law firms blocking their access to federal buildings and representing clients in lawsuits involving contracts with the federal government. Trump asserted his “right” to punish these law firms and several others because of his absolute control over the federal government.

What Donald Trump has done with his 140-plus executive orders and his attempts to punish law firms and other independent businesses such as CBS and entertainment companies has been to assert authoritarian control not only over the government, but over companies that do business with the government or are subject to government regulation. This is an unprecedented assertion of presidential power. So far, the only check on Trump has been lawsuits filed one after the other by individuals, businesses, and universities affected by Trump’s orders.

Courts have rejected the great majority of Trump’s attempts at absolute control, but as the lawsuits make their way through the courts, they all have one ultimate destination: the Supreme Court. Trump appointed three arch-conservative justices to a court already dominated by Republican-appointed justices. The Supreme Court has gone back and forth with its recent orders on its “emergency docket,” ordering that migrants have rights under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and ordering the return of at least one migrant who was wrongfully deported by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.

But the court has so far failed to enforce its own order to return the mistakenly deported migrant KIlmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. So far, no court has found the Trump administration in contempt of court, but legal experts predict that such an order is inevitable in multiple cases because of the Trump administration’s refusal or inability to provide legal justification for many of the moves they have made.

If and when such a contempt order is issued against one or more of Trump’s departments, we have been told that the United States will be in the first real constitutional crisis of its history. In the past, as in the Pentagon Papers case, and in the Watergate case in which Nixon was ordered by a federal judge to produce the White House tapes, the president then in power capitulated to the court orders and a crisis was avoided.

But this time, the president in office enjoys something Nixon and other presidents never had: absolute immunity from prosecution from his acts as president. Trump also enjoys the power given him under the Constitution to pardon anyone for committing any crime. Last Friday, Trump issued a full and unconditional pardon to a man who had been convicted of several tax crimes that charged him with using his unpaid taxes to finance a lavish lifestyle and buy luxury goods, including a $2 million yacht.

The pardon was issued after the man’s mother attended a $1 million-a-head Mar a Lago fund raiser at which she spoke to Trump personally. She had been a major Republican fund raiser in the past and had contributed to Trump’s election effort in 2024, co-hosting at least three fund-raisers for Trump. In a very real sense, the mother of this tax-cheat bought a pardon for her son by paying Donald Trump directly.

Yesterday, Trump pardoned a Virginia sheriff who had been convicted on multiple counts of bribery for accepting “cash-stuffed envelopes” from wealthy people he provided with badges. appointing them as bogus “auxiliary sheriffs,” that allowed them to break the law. Along with other sheriffs, he had formed a “Protect America Now PAC” to support Trump. The sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for his crimes. The pardon was overseen by Ed Martin, newly appointed as Trump’s “pardon attorney” in the Department of Justice in addition to being put in charge of the DOJ office of “weaponization,” intended to undo actions by the Biden administration the DOJ sees as unfairly punishing MAGA supporters of Trump.

Pardoning random MAGA supporters and people Trump wants to reward for giving him money is the least of it. The real problem is Trump’s ability to pardon anyone he orders to commit a crime in his name. For example, if a judge ends up finding an assistant U.S. Attorney in contempt of court and orders him or her fined, Trump can issue a pardon and negate the contempt finding. This will allow the Trump DOJ to go into court and lie to judges with impunity, knowing that they will suffer no consequences as long as the lies they tell are in support of Trump’s illegal actions being challenged in court.

The same would go for anyone working for Trump in his administration. If Trump orders one of his cabinet secretaries to defy a court order, or to execute an illegal act such as administratively fining a government employee for some imagined crime such as signing a document refusing to carry out an illegal order, he can simply order Pam Bondi and his DOJ not to prosecute whoever is involved. At the end of his administration, Trump can issue blanket pardons that will prevent a new administration from prosecuting crimes carried out under Trump’s orders today.

Trump’s pardons are being called “get out of jail free” cards, but they’re worse than that. By preemptively ordering that certain people not be prosecuted, they will never be charged, much less come to trial and be convicted. As he has shown with his two most recent pardons, Trump can nullify prosecutions which predated his return to office, turning the Department of Justice into an office of revenge and retribution unseen before in American history and certainly not contemplated by the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who asserted in the name of the 13 colonies and their citizens that the corruption of royal rule was being thrown off in contemplation of something better.

Speaking of the rights of “the people,” the signers declared that “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

We have entered into a new age of “absolute Despotism.” Whether we will throw off those who would impose upon us such “abuses and usurpations” as we have endured for the last four months remains to be seen.

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.

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.

Patriotism Has No Gender: Top Court Shouldn't Enable Trump's Bigotry

Patriotism Has No Gender: Top Court Shouldn't Enable Trump's Bigotry

Prior to President Harry Truman’s 1948 executive order that racially integrated the nation’s armed services, one of the major arguments for keeping the military segregated was the idea that Black soldiers should not be allowed to sleep next to or use the same bathroom facilities as white soldiers. There were other arguments as well. One was that integration would somehow damage “unit cohesion, esprit de corps, and discipline” necessary for a fighting force, and that would negatively affect the combat readiness of the military. Another was the false and racist allegation, expressed in these exact words, that “Blacks can’t fight.”

Listen to this claptrap from Trump’s January 27 executive order banning transgender people from service in our military:

“The Armed Forces have been afflicted with radical gender ideology to appease activists unconcerned with the requirements of military service like physical and mental health, selflessness, and unit cohesion.”

“A gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.”

“Absent extraordinary operational necessity, the Armed Forces shall neither allow males to use or share sleeping, changing, or bathing facilities designated for females, nor allow females to use or share sleeping, changing, or bathing facilities designated for males.”

They can’t even come up with new words with which to express their prejudice. Substitute “Black” or “Negro” or “African American” for “gender identity” or “gender ideology” or “male” and “female” in the above statement, and what do you get? Flat out bigotry unadorned by anything even pretending to reason, because prejudice has no rationality.

The Supreme Court yesterday ruled in an order of less than a page that the Trump administration can continue to remove transgender members of the military from their service to this country and ban the service of transgender Americans who volunteer to serve while lawsuits seeking to overturn Trump’s executive order continue to make their way through the courts.

This means that in the future, even if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of service by people who are transgender, those who have been discharged would have to reapply for admission to their previous ranks and positions in the military. They would have lost the intervening time they would have served, been denied time in service leading to retirement benefits, and in cases where service members reside in military housing, they would be ordered to vacate the places where they live.

How the Supreme Court could not read the plain language of Trump’s pathetic excuse for an executive order and see the prejudice dripping from its every syllable is yet another disgrace with which this country must contend. What about patriotism? Are we to read Trump’s executive order and the Supreme Court’s upholding of it, even if it turns out to be only temporary, as denying to people who are transgender the right to be patriotic and act upon it by serving their country in uniform?

Trump’s other executive order that there are “only two genders, male and female” denies the right of Americans to live openly as who they are. The order smacks of the time of segregation, when Black people were denied the right to live full lives, including in many states, the right to marry people of a different race from their own.

They always start somewhere. Today, it is transgender Americans. And tomorrow? Are we to return to a time of Americans being compelled to live half-lives? If transgender people can be denied the right to serve openly in the military, how long until they will be denied the right to be hired for a job in civilian life because of their gender identity? Will banks be allowed to “red-line” loans to transgender people, or even deny them bank accounts and credit cards because they are transgender?

Will transgender people be denied drivers’ licenses unless they reflect the name and gender on their birth certificates? What about the right to vote? Will registering to vote be denied to people who have changed their names and the sex on their drivers’ licenses?

What Trump’s transgender executive orders do is to subtract a group of people from citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution. Are we to have a future which mirrors our past, when Black people, because of the color of their skin, did not have the equal protection of our laws, including the right to vote, the right to attend schools of their choice, the right to employment, the right to eat at a restaurant or to check into a hotel or motel for the night? Will these rights be stripped from people because of their gender identity? If being transgender is effectively made to be illegal, how long before being gay or lesbian or bisexual is illegal?

It's not just patriotism that has no gender. It is citizenship. It is humanity. There isn’t liberal blood and conservative blood, or Republican blood and Democratic blood, or gay blood or trans blood and straight blood, or Black blood and white blood, or male blood and female blood. Cut us, and we all bleed red.

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.

Mike Waltz

Massive Hack Attack Topples Trump's Tower Of Arrogance

Well, that didn’t take long. An enterprising hacker has already penetrated whatever security supposedly protected the third-party communications app used by Mike Waltz to send text messages on Signal to the Secretary of State, the Vice President and the Director of National Intelligence during the White House cabinet meeting last week. The hack was reported earlier today by 404 Media, the new journalism website covering cybersecurity, the intelligence and surveillance business, and other topics involving the rapidly changing terrain of the tech industry.

The hacker apparently read the coverage of the loose use of the Signal app and its cousin TeleMessage, which sells its app to government agencies and corporations which require the archiving of messages sent via communications apps such as Signal, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Telegram. The TeleMessage app is supposed to piggy-back on the other communications apps to provide secure storage of the messages on the other communications platforms, several of which can be set to delete messages after a set period of time.

The hacker, whose identity is not known to 404 Media, sent the tech website screen captures and data that “includes apparent message contents; the names and contact information for government officials; usernames and passwords for TeleMessage’s backend panel; and indications of what agencies and companies might be TeleMessage customers. One screenshot of the hacker’s access to a TeleMessage panel lists the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of CBP officials.”

“CBP” refers to Customs and Border Protection, one of the agencies in charge of protecting, among other borders, our border with Mexico, which according to the Trump administration, has been regularly breached by human traffickers and drug cartels shipping the dangerous drug Fentanyl into this country where it is sold on the street and has been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths of addicts.

Apparently, the hacker set out to penetrate the TeleMessage security just to see if it could be done. “I would say the whole process took about 15-20 minutes,” the hacker told 404 Media. “It wasn’t much effort at all.”

So, what we have here, folks, is a random computer hacker, whose identity and location is not known, meaning he or she could be living in a foreign country and working for its intelligence agency or tech firm in Russia or China, casually surfing into the communications channel Signal that the Trump administration itself admits is permitted to be installed on government-issued computers and cell phones used by high level administration officials even at cabinet meetings inside the White House.

What does this mean? It means that security throughout the U.S. government, including in the Departments of State and Defense and Homeland Security, as well as the intelligence agencies overseen by the Director of National Intelligence, has been so wide open that an apparent independent civilian hacker was able to download names, phone numbers, and email addresses of government officials as well as some of the contents of text messages, including links to tweets containing video and sound clips.

The data accessed by the hacker also included information relating to crypto firms such as Coinbase and Galaxy, meaning that communications within those firms and perhaps between the firms and their clients, who have invested real dollars in the firms’ stores and trading systems of cryptocurrencies, has been breached.

Based on the reporting of information provided by the hacker to 404 Media, communications within and between U.S. government agencies, as well as members of Congress and offices and officers within the White House, should be assumed to be compromised. Trump came into office promising to use Elon Musk and his cybernauts to save taxpayer dollars as well as modernize and increase the security of U.S. government data systems. Based on this reporting, it’s going to cost at least as much as Musk claims to have saved from so-called “waste and abuse” to take back and wipe clean every government computer, data storage facility, and cell phone that has been in use since January 20.

We have known since Trump’s first administration that he refused to use an official secure government cell phone and instead through his first term in office and this term so far has used his private cell phone to communicate with everyone from golfing buddies to foreign leaders. He has been compromised for years.

Now we know that everyone who works for him has been compromised due to their use of highly insecure communications apps. The 404 Media story even identifies the Northern Virginia location of the servers and storage facilities, owned by Amazon, through which and into which TeleMessage has sent data accumulated through its piggy-backing on communications apps such as Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram. In the intelligence business, this sort of information is known as “gold.” The hacker “was able to login to the TeleMessage backend panel using the usernames and passwords” found during the penetration of the communications systems.

When you start to see words like “usernames” and “passwords” and “login” in a story about the official communications of the United States government, you know we’re in trouble.

And the trouble we’re in is rooted in the two north-stars of everything Donald Trump has ever done in his life: a complete absence of consequences and the overwhelming presence of arrogance. That combination is the yellow brick road foreign adversaries look for when they are trying to penetrate U.S. information stores, intentions, and methods of tactical and intelligence operations.

One independent hacker, in what he or she admitted was “15 to 20 minutes,” has stripped the façade from the Trump administration’s pretense of governing and put all our military services, including 1.4 million men and women and trillions of dollars’ worth of military equipment and facilities at risk. It’s going to cost lives.

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.


Trump's Assault On Harvard Endangers Every American's Freedom

Trump's Assault On Harvard Endangers Every American's Freedom

The question for the last three months has been, when will it end? The question today is, will there be anything left?

Every day, this country and our freedom suffer another body blow. Tonight, news landed that after Harvard University rejected demands for federal control of its academic life, the Treasury Department is taking steps to end its tax-exempt status. This, after the Trump administration has frozen some $2 billion in grants and cancelled outright $60 million in federal contracts with the university, with threats to cancel the remainder of Harvard’s $9 billion in federal grants.

This is a partial list of Trump’s blackmail demands:

Harvard must agree to “shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies, including DEI-based disciplinary or speech control policies, under whatever name; demonstrate that it has done so to the satisfaction of the federal government.”

Harvard must submit to the government auditing “the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity” and hiring and admissions so that “every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.” It’s unintelligible gibberish, but their “viewpoint diversity” means the end of free thought at Harvard.

“The University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence,” as defined by Donald Trump.

“The University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.”

There were other demands rejected by Harvard, including that “governance” of the university be altered so that those in charge must be “committed to the changes indicated in this letter.” That means Harvard leaders must do what Trump demands or else.

A letter posted on the university’s X account put the position of Harvard this way: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.”

Other universities such as Columbia and Northwestern have been subject to similar threats and caved into Trump’s demands. The administration is said to have a list of other universities upon which it will make similar demands.

Harvard is such an enormously wealthy institution that they recently announced that students from families making $200 thousand or less yearly would be given free tuition. Harvard is said to have an endowment in excess of $50 billion and doubtlessly has enough billionaires among its alumni to keep the place going – even thriving – for at least the next hundred years.

So why should we worry about Harvard at a time when our country is beset daily by these horrors, among many others:

American citizens as well as undocumented migrants are being snatched off the street and sent to interment camps in Louisiana and El Salvador.

There are new plans to send undocumented arrestees with no criminal records to detention in Guantanamo.

Tens of thousands of federal employees, including those serving in harms way overseas, have been summarily fired without notice on false premises.

Budgets of departments like Health and Human Services are scheduled for cuts of as much as 40 percent and entire federal departments such as USAID have been shut down without Congressional authorization.

The entire weight of the federal government is being wielded daily against organizations such as Planned Parenthood, and individuals from Trump’s first administration he doesn’t like have been threatened with criminal investigation and prosecution by the Department of Justice.

The attorney general of New York state has been referred for criminal prosecution under federal law. Threats to prosecute former President Joe Biden and his family have been made repeatedly by Trump and hang in the balance.

Multiple law firms have been threatened with loss of security clearances and access to federal buildings necessary to represent their clients.

Defiance of court orders by the Trump administration, including those of Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court, are a daily occurrence.

With all of this going on, it seems silly to worry about the wealthiest college in the country, doesn’t it?

No. Harvard is just one more brick in the wall of fascism being constructed around all of us. The demands on Harvard, now spelled out in an official document signed by a deputy commissioner of the General Services Administration, the General Counsel of the Department of Education, and the General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services – all acting on the orders of Donald Trump – are written evidence of the imposition of thought police of a an authoritarian regime.

The next step after such demands is arrest on spurious charges; after that is imprisonment; the next step in the dark stairs leading to dictatorship is arrest without charges, already being used against migrants with no criminal record, some with protected immigration status; down at the bottom of the stairs is imprisonment without trial and conviction; we know from reading history that is less than a decade older than I am what is next: torture, disappearance, death.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland flew to El Salvador today and his request to see Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran migrant renditioned to a prison known for torturing inmates, was at first denied. The Democratic senator was later permitted to briefly visit with Abrego Garcia in a San Salvador hotel.

Until Van Hollen forced the issue by showing up in El Salvador, we and his family had no way of knowing whether Garcia was alive or dead. Not even the Supreme Court has been able to compel Donald Trump to return him from imprisonment in El Salvador that the court has ruled is “illegal.”

It starts with people who are poor without proper “papers.” It starts with those who have skin that is not white or those who are not heterosexual or their gender identity is different from the one listed on their birth certificate. It starts with those from another neighborhood or another religion. It starts with them. Then it’s Harvard. Then it’s us.

We are in the terrible place history has recorded so well and that we ignore at our peril.

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.

How Will Chief Justice Roberts Tame The Monster He Created?

How Will Chief Justice Roberts Tame The Monster He Created?

The Constitution does not have a clause which states specifically, “either we have laws and follow them, or we don’t.” The closest the Constitution comes is in Article II, Section 3, where it is mandated that “the president shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This clause is violated each day when Donald Trump awakens and opens his eyes. He committed the offense of insider trading last week, when two hours before he relaxed his onerous tariffs, he posted on Truth Social that it was “a good time to buy!” signaling to his friends that stocks would be recovering from the dive they took when he imposed the tariffs in the first place.

Trump is running a lawless presidency right out in the open and announcing that fact practically every day because he has been given permission by the Supreme Court to ignore not only norms and traditions observed by previous presidents, but the law itself.

Today, a law-abiding (if undocumented) migrant is the victim of Trump’s blatantly illegal behavior. The most frightening thing about the first three months of Trump’s second term is not knowing where we stand. Unless and until Chief Justice John Roberts decides to step up and draw some lines, there are no limits on Donald Trump. Even if that happens, it remains to be seen whether Trump will deign to adhere to judicially imposed limits. He is already in violation of two district court orders and one order by the Supreme Court itself.

We are learning a grim lesson: Democracies don’t necessarily die in darkness but in the sunlight of outright defiance of the law by a president charged with its enforcement.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Deportation 'Error': When Judicial Pigs Fly -- In Formation!

Deportation 'Error': When Judicial Pigs Fly -- In Formation!

Our alleged Supreme Court last night upheld a district court’s order to return the Salvadoran migrant Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the government had wrongfully deported to El Salvador, where he has been held in the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center prison for the last 26 days.

“The order properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” The Supreme Court's order, issued in response to an appeal by Garcia that he had been wrongfully seized and deported along with some 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members, cautioned District Court Judge Paula Xinis that she should define more precisely what she had meant by the word “effectuate” in her order to return Garcia, whom she said the government had deported by a “grievous error.”

The Trump administration had alleged without evidence that Garcia is a member of the violent street gang MS-13. Garcia has been a resident of the United States with protected status for 10 years, during which time he has never been arrested. He is married to a U.S. citizen. Judge Xinis found that the “evidence” against Garcia “consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived.” Garcia has been a resident of Maryland and claimed never to have been to New York.

For its part, the Trump DOJ admitted in court that Garcia had been deported in an “administrative error” and claimed that there was nothing that could be done to return him to the U.S. because he was being held by a foreign nation, to which the U.S. government had turned him over. Garcia had been given no due process to challenge his deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. In a separate order earlier in the week, Chief Justice John Roberts had temporarily allowed the government to continue using the 200-plus year old law but said that future deportees had to be given due process notice of the proceedings against them and were entitled to challenge their deportation in court. Garcia had been given none of the due process now ordered for future use of the Alien Enemies Act by the Trump administration.

The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, signed a “statement” as part of the court’s otherwise unsigned order. Justice Sotomayor wrote that the Trump DOJ had asserted that it could refuse to return Garcia to the U.S., against the order of a federal judge, “for no reason recognized by law,” and that the Trump administration position “implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.” `We could get down in the weeds as to why the court’s order was issued without naming its author or giving even a hint of what the vote might have been, but the most likely reason is that Roberts, Alito, Thomas et. al. had no interest in putting their names on a legal ruling that is bound to draw fire from Donald Trump and his political and legal sycophants.

The Supreme Court’s order in the Garcia matter is a victory for the wrongfully deported Salvadoran migrant but does not address either the fate of the Venezuelans deported along with him or the use of the Alien Enemies act to justify their deportation. The Alien Enemies Act allows the government to deport persons in a “time of war” who are considered dangerous to the country’s national security. There has been no declaration of war against Venezuela or any other country. The deported Venezuelans, many of whom claim they are not gang members and were rounded up on the basis of their soccer team tattoos and nothing else, are not “enemies” under any definition of that word.

How much leeway the Supreme Court will end up giving the Trump administration to use the Alien Enemies Act is not yet known, but today’s order provides hope that at least some due process will be observed in the deportation of migrants from this country. Under today’s order, the Trump administration will be forced to return at least one wrongfully deported migrant, and the court ordered the government to “be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps” with respect to the return of Garcia. That smells suspiciously like judicial oversight of the Trump DOJ and Department of State, which until this moment have acted in their enforcement of the laws and in judicial proceedings as if they are being run by a criminal gang.

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.