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Pete Hegseth

Hegseth Declares Trump Is History's Greatest Military Commander

There was a press conference held at the Pentagon yesterday morning by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine. The gist of what they had to say was that the press, the media, whatever you want to call it – specifically, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC – they got it all wrong in their coverage of the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites on Saturday night. But Secretary Hegseth knew what happened, and how it happened, and who was responsible for the “game changing and historic” mission. Here is what he told the press gathered in the Pentagon briefing room:

“Let me read the bottom line here. President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history. And it was a resounding success, resulting in a ceasefire agreement and the end of the 12 Day War.”

In history. Got that?

Hegseth was standing there in the Pentagon where General George C. Marshall, working in conjunction with General Dwight D. Eisenhower and British General Bernard Montgomery and General Omar Bradley planned and executed the D-Day invasion of France on June 6, 1944.

That invasion involved a fleet from eight different navies of 6,939 vessels, including 1,213 warships, 4,126 landing craft, 289 escort vessels, 277 minesweepers, and 864 merchant craft. Beginning around midnight, 2,200 American, British and Canadian bombers attacked targets along the coast and inland German military positions.

According to the Eisenhower Presidential Library, about 133,000 combat and support troops landed on French soil during the 24 hours of D-Day. 73,000 American troops, including the airborne troops who parachuted and flew on gliders behind enemy lines and Army Rangers who climbed the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, came ashore at Omaha and Utah beaches. Approximately 83,000 British and Canadian soldiers landed at Sword, Juno, and Gold beaches.

There were at least 10,000 allied casualties on D-Day, with more than 4,000 soldiers confirmed killed.

The Normandy landing on D-Day was the largest seaborne invasion in history involving one of the largest one-day bombing campaigns in history.

The Secretary of Defense needs to go downstairs to the Pentagon’s department of military history, assuming it survived DOGE, and do some reading. We have a great military, which in conjunction with the great militaries of Russia, Canada, Great Britain, and the Free French, defeated Hitler’s Germany and rid Europe of the Nazi scourge. It took years. Millions were killed in thousands of battles.

Dropping a dozen big bombs from seven stealth bombers, and 75 other precision guided weapons from other stealth aircraft and firing cruise missiles from submarines into a country that had had its air defenses decimated by days of Israeli bombing and drones…well, it was was an impressive military operation, but it weren’t no D-Day, and Donald Trump ain’t no Ike.

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

Fake Man Starts Fake War And Makes Fake Peace

Leave it to Donald J. Trump to come up with a purely performative war, and folks, he’s done it. His big air assault on Iran Saturday night accomplished exactly nothing. The New York Times reported on its front page yesterday that a secret report from the Defense Intelligence Agency has found that the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities at three sites around the country set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months. Additionally, the vaunted bunker buster bombs, 30,000-pound projectiles designed to penetrate the surface of the earth before detonating far underground, failed to destroy the underground nuclear facilities at Fordo.

The report contained some new information as well. Israeli sources said that Iran has built smaller nuclear plants in secret locations “so the Iranian government could continue its nuclear program in the event of an attack on the larger facilities,” according to the Times. This information had not been made public previously. The report confirmed that Iran moved “almost all of its nuclear material” before the U.S. bombed its nuclear facilities on Saturday night, the Times reported on Tuesday afternoon.

Hegseth’s breathless announcement on Sunday morning --- 125 combat aircraft! 14 bunker busters! 75 other bombs and cruise missiles launched from submarines! – was all for show. The administration is so far back on its heels that a Congressional briefing on the attack scheduled for Tuesday has been pushed back until Thursday.

Iran responded Monday night by firing 14 missiles at the U.S. base in Doha, Qatar…after warning the Pentagon the attack was coming so the missiles could be easily shot down. The number of missiles was said to be calculated to match the number of U.S. bunker busters so that Iran’s retaliatory strike would not be seen as an escalation. The U.S. dutifully hit 13 of the Iranian missiles with anti-missile fire. One Iranian missile was said to have hit an unoccupied small building on the American base. There were no American casualties.

Trump went on Truth Social to announce that he had engineered “a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE… when Israel and Iran have wound down and completed their in progress, final missions!” He then mumbled something about 12 hours for this and 12 hours for that, until the “end, what should be called, “THE 12 DAY WAR.”

On Tuesday morning at 10:50 a.m., Representative Earl A. “Buddy” Carter, Republican of Georgia, formally nominated Donald J. Trump for the Nobel Prize “in recognition of his extraordinary and historic role in brokering an end to the armed conflict between Israel and Iran.” Buddy didn’t mention that Trump was himself a participant in the “war” he ended.

As he departed the White House this morning for the NATO summit, Trump bragged that he was able to get the two nations to stop fighting despite the fact that “We have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

Every television network, broadcast and cable alike, shifted immediately into Full Tape Vault mode looking for another instance that an American president had dropped “the F-bomb” on camera live, and finding none, announced that Trump was first to achieve this momentous accomplishment.

From Air Force One on his way to Europe, Trump continued to brag, “It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR! Both Nations will see tremendous LOVE, PEACE, AND PROSPERITY in their futures. They have so much to gain, and yet, so much to lose if they stray from the road of RIGHTEOUSNESS & TRUTH.”

Trump ordered a major attack on Iran. The bombs dropped. The cruise missiles flew. The satellite photos were published. Trump’s own Defense Intelligence Agency assessed that, “Iran retains control of almost all of its nuclear material, meaning if it decides to make a nuclear weapon it might still be able to do so relatively quickly.”

Trump’s fake war produced fake peace. Everything is the same as it was before. Israel still has its nukes. Iran is still a few months away from a developing its own nuclear weapon.

Relax. Trump is going for his Nobel. All is well.

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.

With Trump, It's A New War -- And Always Another Lie

With Trump, It's A New War -- And Always Another Lie

If there is one thing we have learned about Donald Trump over the last 10 years – for New Yorkers, over the last 50 – it is that you cannot believe anything he says.

Anything.

If he said he was going to give Iran a chance to come back to the negotiating table and he would mull things over for two weeks, the Iran attack was going to happen in two days. If he called Saturday’s bombing Iran “a spectacular military success,” it was something less than that. If he said Iran’s nuclear sites were “obliterated,” they weren’t. If he said Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon has been ended, it hasn’t.

Trump toyed around with whether or not he was going to order the attack, telling reporters on the White House lawn on Wednesday, “I may do it. I may not do it. Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

That was a lie, but it wasn’t a lie lie. It was a strategic feint. Any leader who is planning an attack on an enemy is going to try to seem like it’s either not going to happen, or the planning is in an early stage, when actually it is almost complete. That was the case with Iran.

Planning for the attack had been going on for weeks, and Tehran knew it. They probably started moving the centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium, and the uranium they had already enriched, away from their three nuclear weapons development sites when Trump was elected last November. By the time he started bellowing that he would “never” allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon, their nuclear material was safe somewhere else.

Trump tells so many lies every day, we only half listen to him. We have gotten used to tucking his lies away in mental rabbit holes so we can get ready for his next bunch of whoppers. But you want to know who has been recording every syllable that comes out of his mouth? The Iranians. They have spent years slowly accumulating enough partially enriched uranium that they have been within a year, or even within months according to some intelligence estimates, of being able to produce a bomb. Do you think they were going to let all that work go to waste just because the Americans were stupid enough to put the international clown, Donald Trump, back in the White House? Not a chance in hell. They were ready. They’ve been ready for months.

With Donald Trump, nothing is ever as it seems. Why does he tell so many lies? Is it because he can’t help himself, that it’s pathological? Not even close. He tells lies to keep his opponents guessing, out of step, off their game.

Even the war he just started with Iran is a lie, in that it has another purpose. I read somewhere over the last few days that all wars are started as much for domestic reasons as for their stated foreign policy goals. Why did George Bush start his war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? Did he really believe that Iran had its own secret nuclear weapons program, or that they had developed a stockpile of WMD, weapons of mass destruction? No. He needed a war, and Afghanistan was not enough, so he ginned one up against Saddam.

Domestically, Trump is not in trouble, but he’s not in great shape. He can’t get interest rates down. He hasn’t whipped inflation. His Big Beautiful Bill is in trouble. His attempt to use Elon Musk and his DOGE-niks to conquer the budget deficit and save trillions in spending was an abject failure, with recent stories saying the whole thing is going to end up costing more than it saved. And his big plan to get tariffs to solve everything has failed miserably.

All the stories about tariffs now lead with how Chinese President Xi Jinping has played him like a violin. He can’t even get his big ICE roundup of undocumented immigrants up to speed. There were reports early this month about Trump’s immigration hatchet man, Stephen Miller, “yelling” at Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, ordering them to triple their arrests.

Trump’s war against Iran isn’t just about preventing them from developing a nuclear weapon. Like everything else, the war is about Donald Trump. He was going to drop that gigantic Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb from the moment he learned it existed. He needed that bombing campaign the way he needs golf courses and Diet Cokes and well-done steaks. He needed the White House appearance last night backed up by his war puppies, Vance, Hegseth, and Rubio. He needed his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon this morning giving out the numbers – 125 aircraft, 24 Tomahawks, seven B-2 bombers, 14 bunker busters – complete with map headlined with the mission moniker – this is so perfect, it’s all Trump – “Operation Midnight Hammer.”

You know what he’s doing, because he’s done it so many times before: Hey, look over here! Not only a big shiny object, a big shiny BOMB…which he puts in ALL CAPS every time he uses the word.

Because why? Because Donald Trump. The whole thing was Donald Trump all the time, all the way, from beginning to end. And it’s going to stay Donald Trump. You want to know why? Because now will come the analysis that the attack wasn’t as successful as he said, and he’ll be able to attack anyone who questions his genius. He’s already started, going after the lone Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who strayed off the reservation by claiming that the attack was unconstitutional. Trump started up a new SuperPAC to back anybody who wants to run against the poor guy. And woe be unto anyone who questions Trump’s assertion that Iran’s nuclear ambitions are done for. He’ll be able to throw around the T-word, “traitor,” if you dare point out inconvenient facts like reports that there was no measurable radiation produced from the bombing of the three nuclear sites. Not even a roentgen, according to the IAEA, was emitted from the destruction done to the Iranian nuclear facilities.

But Trump’s war puppy at the Pentagon was jubilant: "Iran's nuclear ambitions have been obliterated," Hegseth crowed at an 8 a.m. press conference at the Pentagon this morning. "The operation President Trump planned was bold and it was brilliant."

There could be good reasons for the peculiar lack of radiation from the damage done to three nuclear weapons sites. Maybe at Fordo, where satellite photos show six craters that look like someone stabbed the earth with an ice pick, the bombs went off so deep and caused such a collapse underground that they sealed off all the radiation. Maybe the same thing happened at Natanz, where another neat hole has appeared in the middle of an open field surrounded by a curving two-lane road.

We won’t know until the Pentagon does its BDA, battle damage assessment, and maybe not even after that, because which Iranian official is going to allow anyone onto any of the top-secret sites to check out the holes and maybe put a Geiger-counter on the gray dust?

Which is exactly the way Trump likes it. Who is going to question his chest-pounding assertions about his “brilliant” attack that has “obliterated” Iran’s dream of nuclear weapons?

Well, the Russkis, for one. Former Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, got on his Telegram account this morning and announced that other countries are "ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads." He didn’t go into any details, but presumably that would mean Russia and its new war-buddy North Korea.

And then there is this possibility that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere, so I’ll just put it out there right now: What if Iran has already succeeded in producing a nuclear weapon? They haven’t let the IAEA near their nuclear facilities for a while, so what if Iran cranked up its 60 percent uranium to “weapons grade” 90 percent, and they went ahead and made one? And having made it, then squirrelled it away far from where they knew the U.S. would come a-bombing-when-they-come.

While we’re at it, let’s throw in this hideous tidbit. What if the Ayatollah, at age 86, is sufficiently infirm and hidden away that some Republican Guard maniac up and decides, hey, let’s lob our nuke at Jerusalem and see what happens?

Every military expert who can get himself or herself on the TeeVee has been yapping about how easy wars are to start, but goodness me, how hard they are to end. Well, I’m not on the TeeVee, but I’ll agree with the experts on that one.

But I haven’t heard many of them talking about what wars have this extra added little tendency to produce every time you start one:

Unforeseen consequences.

Get ready, because we are in for a few, and they come from a place where Donald Trump, no student of history he, has ever spent much time.

Donald Trump will be learning that it’s a brand new thing to lie yourself out of inconvenient facts like dead American bodies.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Why War To Impose Regime Change On Iran Will Bring 'A World Of Hurt'

Why War To Impose Regime Change On Iran Will Bring 'A World Of Hurt'

At West Point, that’s what we used to call getting into a situation that was way over your head. It meant there was practically no way you were going to get out of the trouble you were in. No matter which way you turned or what you did, punishment and humiliation beckoned.

It’s what the United States found itself in the day in March of 1965 that Lyndon Johnson ordered the Third Marine Division into Vietnam. It’s where we were headed a few months later in July when Johnson increased our commitment of troops to 125,000 and doubled the monthly draft call-up to 1,000 young men per month. In that same month of March, Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder, the carpet-bombing of “Communist strongholds” in South Vietnam.

A year later, our military presence in Vietnam was 385,000, and Secretary of Defense McNamara had initiated Project 100,000, recruiting and drafting soldiers who were below previous mental, medical, and behavior standards to meet new manpower goals demanded by the war.

Within two years of starting the war in Vietnam, we were in a world of hurt.

Seven years later, the United States military would go down to defeat by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces. Two years after that, the last helicopter would lift off the U.S. embassy in Saigon, and our military presence in that country would end completely.

On March 20, 2003, another U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, would oversee the invasion of Iraq. The initial air attack on Iraqi forces and military and political headquarters in Baghdad, dubbed “Shock and Awe,” was said to have succeeded spectacularly. Three weeks later, Rumsfeld would announce that U.S. forces had “taken Baghdad.” The war that was planned as a lightning strike to topple Saddam Hussein and “bring democracy to the Middle East” had worked!

But the thing about wars like those in Vietnam and Iraq is that the other side gets a say. In Iraq, Rumsfeld tried to avoid the fact that Iraqis were fighting back, even going so far as to ban the use of the word “insurgency” by the so-called Coalition Provisional Authority, the makeshift operation that had been established to administer the defeated country of Iraq.

Four years later, on January 10, 2007, President Bush announced a “surge” of 21,000 new American combat troops into Iraq to deal with Rumsfeld’s forbidden word, the insurgency that had arisen and was leading to the deaths of American soldiers every day.

About two years later, on December 4, 2008, the U.S. agreed with a new Iraqi government that U.S. forces would withdraw from Iraqi cities by the middle of 2009 and be gone from the country altogether by the end of 20ll. By June of 2009, 38 U.S. military bases had been turned over to the Iraqi government and U.S. forces had withdrawn from Baghdad. In the Vietnam war, withdrawal of U.S. forces from combat was called “Vietnamization.” In Iraq, it was called a “Status of Forces Agreement.”

More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. In Iraq, more than 4,000 members of the U.S. military were killed. Tens of thousands were wounded in Iraq. Hundreds of thousands were wounded in Vietnam.

In both countries, the United States had found itself in a world of hurt and withdrew with America’s tail between American legs.

Is it possible to learn from the past, from mistakes made by previous administrations and by previous Congresses that approved the trillions spent for, well…for nothing?

That is the question we face today all over again, as Donald Trump gets to turn the White House Situation Room into his personal playground and plan his way into another American misadventure, this time in the country of Iran.

Here are some handy facts and figures that I can guarantee are not being discussed down there in that Situation Room.

Vietnam in 1965 had a population of 38 million. In 1966, the country we said we were defending from Communism had a landmass of 66,000 square miles. There are no specific figures for Vietnam’s GDP in 1965, but by 1984, Vietnam’s GDP was only $18 billion, with a per capita GDP somewhere between $200 and $300. These figures of course suggest that Vietnam’s GDP twenty years earlier when we invaded was significantly lower.

In 2003, the population of Iraq was 27 million, and its landmass was 170,000 square miles. Iraq’s GDP that year was $22 billion. Its per capita GDP was only $818.

Those are figures for the years the great, big, powerful United States of America decided to invade those two countries.

Now let’s have a look at Iran in 2025. Iran is approximately four times the size of Iraq, with a territory of 636,000 square miles. Its population is 92.5 million, approximately three times the size of Iraq’s population the year we launched our invasion in 2003. Iran’s GDP is $1.75 trillion, about three-fourths the size of Russia’s GDP. Iran’s per capita GDP is $20,000, larger than Russia’s per capita GDP of $14,000.

All these figures indicate the relative strengths of countries to fight back against an invasion like one by the almighty United States. Iraq, when we invaded, was far weaker than the Iran of today. And that goes double or triple for the poor agrarian country of Vietnam in 1965 when an American president thought defeating Communism in that country would be easy.

So that’s who Donald Trump and his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, are thinking about going to war with. Oh, wait a minute! I’m sorry! It’s all over the news tonight that Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard are not in Trump’s “inner circle” of advisors, as he prepares for whatever he’s planning on doing as soon as this weekend.

That is when the U.S. will launch a massive air assault on Iran, according to a report by Seymour Hersh tonight. There will be “heavy American bombing,” according to what key U.S. and Israeli sources Hersh has “relied upon for decades.” Hersh is the author of “The Samson Option,” the authoritative 1991 book about how Israel built its nuclear arsenal and “America’s willingness to keep the project secret,” so it is apparent that Hersh’s sources in both Israel and the U.S. defense establishment are good ones.

Hersh has written a piece titled “What I have been told is coming in Iran,” on his Substack. Hersh reports that Trump has “signed off on an all-out bombing campaign,” but it won’t happen until this weekend because “the president wants the shock of the bombing to be diminished as much as possible by the opening of Wall Street trading on Monday.”

Does that sound like Donald Trump, or what? The timing of an “all out” attack on the most populous nation with the most powerful military in the Middle East will be timed not on tactical considerations, but on the fucking stock market.

Hersh reminds us that there are more than two dozen U.S. air force bases and navy ports in the Middle East which are no doubt being prepared right now for Iranian retaliatory strikes. Already, military dependents have been flown out of bases like the ones in Qatar and Kuwait. All the air forces bases in the region contain pre-positioned military “assets,” as they are called, that can be used in the air assault on Iran.

Hersh reports that the U.S. will strike “the bases of the Republican Guards,” the elite Iranian military force which protects Iran’s political and religious leadership. Trump killed General Qasem Soleimani, one of the top leaders in Iraq’s Revolutionary Guards in a drone strike on a vehicle carrying him at the Baghdad Airport in 2020.

Hersh reports that there is some confusion about Trump’s intentions if Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “departs.” Hersh reports that he was “told that his [Khamenei’s] personal plane left Tehran airport headed for Oman early Wednesday morning, accompanied by two fighter planes, but it is not known whether he was aboard.” Trump has demanded that Khamenei agree to an “unconditional surrender.” We are not at war with Iran, at least not on this day, Thursday, two days before the weekend that Hersh says the U.S. intends to launch a massive air strike on Iran, so it is unclear who Khamenei would “surrender” to and why.

If Khamenei has “departed,” it would seem unclear if Trump’s plans for a massive air attack on Iran will go forward. But the plans for dropping the famed “bunker buster” bomb on Iran’s key nuclear facility at Fordow seem to be very much alive, and Hersh quotes another “informed official” saying of the plans for the American attack, “This is a chance to do away with this regime once and for all, and so we might as well go big."

Hersh compares what might happen in Iran to Libya in 2011 after “western intervention,” when Gaddafi was killed and the country descended into chaos. As he ominously puts it, “The futures of Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, all victims of repeated outside attacks, are far from settled,” indicating that an American assault on Iran that takes out its political and religious leadership might plunge a huge portion of the Middle East into chaos.

“Donald Trump clearly wants an international win he can market,” Hersh concludes.

That’s what Lyndon Johnson was hoping for in 1965. It’s what George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld thought they were getting when they ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A big air campaign and a quick win.

This is me remembering our history with invading much smaller countries with our huge military might:

We’re headed into another world of hurt.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Neither 'Surgical' Nor Easy, A Trump Strike On Iran Will Mean War

Neither 'Surgical' Nor Easy, A Trump Strike On Iran Will Mean War

Donald Trump held another top-secret meeting with his so-called national security “team” in the Situation Room to discuss “the war between Israel and Iran,” a White House source told Axios on Wednesday.

That’s a lie. They weren’t talking about the war between Israel and Iran. They’ve talked that to death. All Trump wanted to know from the likes of Secretary of Defense Pete “Keep That Bottle Away from Me” Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe was whether dropping a bunker buster bomb on Iran’s nuclear facility at Fordo will be successful and when he can start bragging about it.

There is a word that isn’t used enough to describe Donald Trump: Impatient. He is probably the most impatient president in U.S. history. He wants things to happen not tomorrow, but yesterday, and he wants it over before he plays his next round of golf at Bedminster.

Hegseth and the rest of them have been down in the Situation Room with a gigantic flat-screen showing Trump how it will work. See, the bombers take off from here…pointing to Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean where the U.S. maintains a base and has a stash of B-2 bombers…they fly in this direction…they are refueled here…and they go boom-boom here.

Trump doesn’t want to read reports with facts and figures. He likes to see it, and he wants it guaranteed. He doesn’t care about the details. He wants the visual. He’ll demand that the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) be fitted with a camera so that after the attack, televisions in the United States will be able to show the bomb falling toward its target, followed by the distinctive white out of the strike.

He will demand that another jet film the aftermath of the series of strikes it will take to knock out the Iranian enrichment facility and manufacturing plant. He wants to be able to stand out on the links at Bedminster or on the south lawn of the White House and confidently tell a gaggle of eager reporters that he acted decisively, and now Iran does not have the capability to produce a nuclear weapon…something that Joe Biden and Barack Obama and the rest of them were not able to guarantee, but he can.

There is only one problem: There are no guarantees when it comes to waging a war, which is exactly what we will be doing if we attack Iran and attempt to knock out its nuclear program. There are only “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns” in the memorable words of Donald Rumsfeld, describing the evidence, or lack thereof, the U.S. had about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and its contacts with terrorist groups.

Trump faces a list of problems as long as the fairway off the first tee at Bedminster. The intelligence he is relying on comes almost exclusively from Israel, which has agents and intelligence gathering materiel on the ground inside Iran. Israel, to put it bluntly, is not a disinterested party in this and has been leaning on every American administration to become involved in taking out Iran’s nuclear capability. Trump has other sources of intelligence – the CIA and NSA and satellite intelligence, for example – but the thing about intelligence is that it’s all very specific right up to the point that it’s not, and thus becomes speculative, part of the unknown unknowns that Rumsfeld, for all of his bluster, was at least willing to admit.

For example, the nuclear facility is deep within a mountain south of Tehran. The New York Times quoted Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, describing the Fordo facility: “I’ve been there, it’s half a mile underground.”

Yep, it probably is…the last time Mr. Grossi looked, when Iran accompanied him and other inspectors who visited the site. But did they show him the new tunnel they’ve been working on for the last two or three years, the one leading to a new area of the facility they’ve built knowing that the original one, the one they showed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is the one that will be hit when the day comes that some American president…uh, say, Donald Trump…is stupid enough to put his okay on a plan to bomb Fordo?

There are the little workshops and labs hidden all over Iran where new centrifuges are being put together and research is being done and all the other gimcrackery that goes into a nuclear weapon is being built, far from the obvious targets of Fordo and Natanz, Iran’s other enrichment facility.

Does Trump and his team of “experts” really believe that Iran has put all its dreams of nuclear weapons capability in one convenient basket that every satellite in the sky can see from space and put crosshairs on? That’s actually a good question, because Donald Trump and Elon Musk had a field day firing experts in every government department they could find, including in the Pentagon and the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

They already fired Air Force General Timothy Haugh, who also leads US Cyber Command, and his deputy, Wendy Noble. Haugh and Noble had to go because Laura Loomer waltzed into the Oval Office and told Trump that the two NSA officials had been “hand-picked” by Trump’s nemesis, General Mark Milley…plus DEI, and Noble is a woman who was probably appointed over a more qualified man because of her gender, I’m sure Loomer said.

So there went two experts who could have attended the big meetings in the Situation Room yesterday and today, and who the hell knows how many other experts on Iran and nuclear weapons were sacrificed to budget cuts and DEI purges and everything else that has been wreaked upon key federal agencies since January 20. Hegseth, along with taking down the photographs of previous Secretaries of Defense he and Trump don’t like, has done his own purging of the Pentagon, and because the staffing inside that building is top-secret, we have no way of knowing how much talent went down the drain for spurious reasons like DEI and suspected disloyalty to Trump and the Republican cause.

What is known about what a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facility might look like? Well, the Air Force will likely demand that they be able to do a couple of nights of “softening up” of the Iranian defenses around Fordo and wherever else the attack will hit. That means jets off carriers flying into Iranian air space to take out any remaining air defenses the Israelis might have missed, or that the Iranians replaced since the last Israeli strikes.

See, that’s the thing. In a war, and that’s what is going on in Iran right now, the bad guy doesn’t just take a hit and give up its ability to defend himself. Iran doubtlessly has multiple layers of air defenses it can deploy for just this possibility, that the U.S. would send B-2’s to knock out Fordo. Iran hides air defenses, they dig them into tunnels, they bury them in bunkers, they conceal them in civilian neighborhoods, and after Israel makes one of its strikes, they haul out their back-up defenses and set them up and get ready for what they clearly see as the Big One: the U.S. coming after Fordo and Natanz.

Then there is the issue of retaliation. Let’s say Trump orders the attack on Fordo, and we have a couple of days of celebratory videos showing explosions and those nose-camera shots from bombs falling towards targets. Do you think that Iran will just sit back and lick its wounds and ask for a new round of negotiations? The Ayatollah has already said that Iran does not negotiate under duress, and moreover, he has said that there will be no UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, the absurd demand from you-know-who.

Iran has a massive stockpile of medium range ballistic missiles that are said to be very accurate and can hit American targets in the Persian Gulf states as well as Iraq and anything we’ve got in Turkey, which is a NATO ally, after all, and likely to house various U.S. military outposts.

You know as well as I do what that means. Iranian missiles will kill Americans. Some of them will be military, but some will be civilians, so Trump won’t be able to take that sitting down. He’ll have to re-retaliate with new strikes on Iran to knock out their missiles and their ability to mine the Strait of Hormuz and attack international shipping. And how do we expect the Houthis to respond, especially if Trump’s threat to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader isn’t hollow, and he gives that order?

The Red Sea will return to being a shooting gallery, and let’s not even get into what’s going to happen to oil prices and gas prices at the pump back here in the good ole U.S.A. Then there is the issue of Iran ordering its sleeper cells of terrorists, which are said to be pre-positioned around the world, to start hitting American civilians on the streets of London and Paris and who knows? New York and Washington D.C. aren’t out of the question as targets for Iranian terror.

You see how quickly this whole “let’s knock out Iran’s nukes” thing devolves into an all-out war?

The truly frightening thing for me is the image I’ve got stuck in my head of Trump and his gaggle of national security officials in the White House Situation Room with a clown like Hegseth standing at the end of a big table pointing at a big flat-screen showing boom-booms and IA generated images of Iran’s uranium centrifuges all exploded into pieces of bent and charred aluminum and steel and his fake confidence and Christian Nationalist fervor making the whole thing look like it’s not only a walk in the park, but blessed from On High.

We have watched Donald Trump and the Musk-minions as they have wreaked havoc throughout our government for the last three or four months, and folks, now we are about to see the national security price we will pay for all that cost-cutting and DEI firing and “transgender for all” fear mongering. It’s one thing to pick up the paper and read lists of programs that have been shut down and see totals of tens and hundreds of millions that have been thrown in the shredder.

But now Trump is going to make a decision that will put American military men and women in airplanes flying over a hostile nation that has the ability to shoot them out of the sky, and the fact is, Trump and his MAGA base are not prepared for what that means and what will happen next.

He's not just mulling over an attack on Iran’s nuclear facility with some big bombs dropped from high altitude stealth bombers. He’s getting ready to start a war.

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.

Uh Oh: Big Baby With Scary Big Toy Will Bomb-Bomb-Bomb Iran

Uh Oh: Big Baby With Scary Big Toy Will Bomb-Bomb-Bomb Iran

Time-travel with me now, if you will, to the year 2002. I guess you could describe it as a “while the world slept” moment on December 12 of that year when CNN reported, “U.S. troops get in place in the Gulf.” The report ticked off the steps that were already being taken: Central Command leader Gen. Tommy Franks moved to the As Saliyah base in Qatar. He airlifted into place a modular command and control headquarters. Remember the briefing room with the three flat-screen TV’s that looked so sexy when the invasion began in March? That was part of the modular command center.

Three thousand troops were already in place in Qatar. The Third Infantry Division, about 30,000 strong, was conveniently “training” in Kuwait. In January, the first 25,000 combat troops in the U.S. began their mass movement to Kuwait.

I’m taking the time to remind you of that ignominious time in our not-too-distant past because another version of that sort of build-up is already underway in Europe and the Middle East. Over the weekend, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth moved three dozen U.S. tanker aircraft to bases in Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom The tankers are used to refuel U.S. fighter jets and bombers, and can also be used to refuel Israeli aircraft. There have now been reports that military assets – we don’t know exactly what they are, but they could be aircraft, troops, vessels, tanks, and other heavy equipment – have been “deployed” to the Middle East.

On March 17, 2003, President George Bush, in a televised address to the nation, demanded that Saddam Hussein and his two sons, Uday and Qusay “surrender” and leave Iraq. He gave them a 48-hour deadline.

Today, in a modern twist on the dusty old tradition of a presidential address from the Oval Office, Trump took to his Truth Social account and threatened the life of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” Trump posted. “But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin. UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”

Is any of this starting to seem familiar? Imaginary threatened Iranian missiles that will be “shot” at “American soldiers?” Where, may I ask, are these American soldiers that Iranian missiles might be fired at? One of the general MSM round-up stories this afternoon casually said the U.S. already has 40,000 soldiers in the Middle East, without identifying their locations. I would guess Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, probably a few still in Syria, and I’m sure we’ve got some in Egypt and scattered around on small bases elsewhere.

Hey, we put them there, right? Iran is pissed off enough that they are rocketing Israel and sending armed attack drones. If they get pissed off at us, they’ll be firing at U.S. targets, which would logically include American military bases, including air force and naval stations, and Army bases that have been in Kuwait since…you guessed it…since we liberated that country from Iraqi occupation with Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

Are you detecting a trend here? The U.S. supplies Israel with about $3 billion a year in military hardware and other aid with basically no limits on how it should be used. Trump has been engaged in alleged “negotiations” with Iran over its nuclear program – which are necessary only because he cancelled the treaty that was already in place.

Trump’s negotiator is a New York real estate guy he’s friendly with, Steve Witkoff, who has owned inexpensive buildings in lower Manhattan, Washington Heights, and the Bronx through a firm called Stellar Management. He also owns commercial property and hotels like the Park Lane and high rise apartment buildings in Tribeca and Philadelphia, Chicago, and Dallas. So Iranian negotiators, who are not dummies, know that they are sitting down to discuss the future of their nuclear program with a guy who oversees the installations of new toilets in apartments and supervises the changing of sheets and swabbing out bathrooms at hotels.

At least when Bush was threatening Saddam Hussein, he was sending people like Colin Powell to the U.N. and he had a Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who was serving in that job a second time. Rumsfeld was an asshole, but at least he wasn’t a sexual abuser tattooed cartoon like Hegseth who challenges troops to pushup contests to show them how macho he is.

But why am I even talking about Hegseth? It doesn’t matter that Trump has a real estate buddy he met in a deli in New York negotiating for him, and a Secretary of Defense who has paid off a woman to keep her mouth shut about the night he sexually assaulted her in a hotel room. It doesn’t even matter that his secretary of state is a man he once called “Little Marco” to his face on national television.

The only one who matters is Donald Trump, and he's having so much fun, he can barely stand it. He’s bubbling over threatening Iranians and making demands. He is so blasé about Israel’s attacks on Iran and the issue behind them, nuclear weapons, Trump even took the time last night to angrily tell reporters that he’s not going to call Minnesota Governor Tim Walz about the Democratic members of the state House and Senate who were killed and wounded by one of his supporters. Why isn’t it important to call Tim Walz? Because according to Trump, Walz is “slick” and “whacked out.”

“Why would I call him?” Trump said on Air Force One, on his way back to the White House so he could meet with his highly qualified national security team this afternoon in the Situation Room. “The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a, he’s a mess. Why waste time?”

Trump clearly thinks the people on the other end of his negotiations over nuclear weapons don’t follow the news in the United States, and don’t have anyone studying the person with whom, ultimately, they are dealing.

Oh, damn, I’m doing it again. I’m comparing the situation with Donald Trump getting ready to attack Iran with people who, while they made some terrible decisions based on some terrible information about Iraq, were at least fucking sane.

See, that’s the problem we’re having. It’s almost impossible to cover what’s going on – which is that we are apparently preparing to start a war with Iran – without involuntarily sanewashing the madman who’s making the decisions. That’s what it’s called, sanewashing, a whole word they came up with just to deal with Donald Trump.

We can’t treat this man as if he is a rational actor. A rational human being, a man with actual human feelings, would not call the governor of Minnesota childish names right after his state has had two of its political figures shot by someone who had a list of 45 more Democrats he wanted to assassinate. A rational actor would not post on a social media platform a demand that the leader of a country with which we are not at war -- yet – unconditionally surrender.

To whom? is the question that should be asked. Why would the Supreme Leader of Iran surrender to Donald Trump when the U.S. hasn’t fired a single bullet at them or dropped a single bomb. The Congress hasn’t declared war or even passed one of those lame-ass “authorization of use of force” thingees.

The answer is as obvious as the depressed look on Trump’s face watching his big military parade pass his reviewing stand on Saturday, and it was occurring to him that his big celebration of self wasn’t going at all the way he had planned. The soldiers in the tanks were waving to girls in the stands. The marching formations were out of step, looking like they hadn’t taken the whole thing seriously enough to practice marching. The crowds looked like tourists out for the afternoon in Washington D.C. with nothing else to do. The bleachers weren’t even half full. Everybody watching on TV could see the whole thing was a bust. And elsewhere, on the phone ever-present in his pocket, Trump could see that the rest of the country was in the streets, millions of them, having the time of their lives telling him to go fuck himself.

The Iranians had to be watching all this on television and going oh shit as the second night of Israeli rockets hit them. Look at Trump’s face. He is not happy. That is not good for us.

So here we are, dear readers, after the weekend that Donald Trump saw how enormous his opposition is, and how organized, and how peaceful, for crying out loud. He’s mad as hell, and as luck would have it, he has a way to show it. He can drop the world’s biggest bomb that isn’t a nuke on Iran, and nobody can stop him. All the libs, all the newspaper editorial pages, all his MAGA allies who are beginning to understand the truth about “American First.” It means, as ever, Trump first.

All those guns on those tanks on Saturday weren’t loaded, but goddamn it, he can order up some B-2 bombers and load them up with some Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs, and he’ll show them!

We can come right out and admit it: We have a big, angry child in the White House, and he’s throwing a tantrum, and the only thing that will make him happy is starting a war in the Middle East.

Man, are we in for it.

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.

Something Big Is About To Go Down In The Middle East

Something Big Is About To Go Down In The Middle East

The U.S. Department of State raised its travel advisory for Israel to its highest level today: “Do not travel: armed conflict, terrorism and civil unrest." The move comes the same day as news reports that the U.S. has sent an “armada” of aerial tankers to Europe. As many as two dozen KC-135 Stratotankers and KC-46 Pegasuses landed at U.S. bases in Spain, Greece, Germany, Italy and Scotland, according to the Washington Post. Another report said that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had also ordered heavy lift cargo jets to bases in Europe, apparently a reference to the American C-5A, the largest cargo aircraft in U.S. inventory.

Yesterday, Hegseth acknowledged that he had sent U.S. forces to the Middle East, without offering any specific details. “Over the weekend, I directed the deployment of additional capabilities to the United States Central Command Area of Responsibility,” Hegseth posted on X. Central Command is headquartered in Tampa, Florida, but has command over all U.S. forces in the Middle East, including American units stationed in Iraq and Kuwait, as well as U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf states of Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and a U.S. Naval base in Bahrain.

Hegseth couched the U.S. military moves in terms that sound benign, but usually mask other, more sinister motives: “Protecting U.S. forces is our top priority and these deployments are intended to enhance our defensive posture in the region.” When you start hearing words like “posture” and “enhance,” something is going on at the Pentagon that they’re not talking about.

The President of the United States, however, was talking yesterday afternoon before he departed the G-7 Summit in Alberta, Canada. As he posed with other leaders for a photograph, Trump was heard telling them, “I have to be back. There is something I have got to do.” Trump had just refused to sign a joint statement by other G-7 leaders calling on Israel and Iran to deescalate the conflict. Shortly before announcing he was leaving the summit, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”

He just can’t resist telegraphing his intentions even as his Secretary of Defense is rattling sabers like ordering the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its battle group of destroyers from the South China Sea through the Singapore Strait into the Central Command area of responsibility. The USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group is already located in the Gulf of Aden where it has been overseeing the fight with the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Great Britain announced on Saturday that it was sending fighter jets to the Middle East “as a precautionary move to protect British bases and personnel,” according to British Finance Minister Rachel Reeves. Last year during the exchange of missiles between Israel and Iran, British jets shot down Iranian drones that were flying towards Israel.

Late yesterday evening, headlines in the New York Times and Washington Post started talking about whether Trump will make the decision to use the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the largest non-nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, against the Iranian uranium enrichment facility in Fordo, Iran. The U.S. is the only nation that has the huge bunker-buster bomb and the only aircraft that can deliver it, the B-2 bomber. Israel has long wanted the weapon and the B-2 bomber, but the U.S. has refused to supply it.

Experts say the bunker buster is the only weapon that could destroy the Iranian nuclear facility, which is buried deep underground. One report said that the only way the Fordo facility could be destroyed would be if a wave of B-2 bombers delivered one bunker buster after another, each of them dropped down the same hole made by the previous bombs.

Trump dropped another hint where this is all probably going when he posted this on Truth Social today from Canada before he left to return to the White House: “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.”

Meanwhile, American dependents have been flown on military aircraft out of Bahrain, where the U.S. maintains a huge naval facility, to Italy, where they were put on commercial flights to return to the U.S. The State Department had already flown staff out of U.S. embassies around the Middle East, including the ones in Iraq and Kuwait.

Even later this evening, a new statement was issued by the G-7 leaders, this time including President Trump: “We, the leaders of the G7, reiterate our commitment to peace and stability in the Middle East. In this context, we affirm that Israel has a right to defend itself. We reiterate our support for the security of Israel.”

With all the talk of aircraft carriers and tankers and cargo planes and jets being sent to the Middle East to defend American interests, I would definitely keep my eye peeled for some sort of wag-the-dog fake Iranian provocation that will be ginned up to justify the deployment of B-2 bombers to “enhance” the American “defensive posture in the region.”

Unless I miss my guess, they’re burning the midnight oil in the Situation Room in the White House as we speak. If you haven’t downloaded the Truth Social app yet, now would be a good time, because that’s The Room Where It Happens for this president.

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.

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.