The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
@LucianKTruscott
Trump's Scandalous Coup Attempt Is Bigger Than Watergate

Trump's Scandalous Coup Attempt Is Bigger Than Watergate

One of the nasty truths about our two nastiest presidents is that getting close to them would likely end you up in jail. Both presidents were Republicans. Both were preternaturally corrupt. And both demanded the kind of loyalty from their subordinates that required you, when asked, to commit crimes in furtherance of the ambitions of the boss.

If you worked in the West Wing for Richard Nixon, you got Watergate on you like grease from French fries. Forty officials who served in the Nixon administration were either indicted or jailed. Sixty-nine people in all were charged with crimes, when you included the Watergate burglars and ancillary campaign workers like Donald Segretti. Of those, 48 were found guilty, including former Attorney General John Mitchell, and top presidential aides H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman, Charles Colson, and White House lawyer John Dean. Nixon lawyer Herbert Kalmbach also went to jail for his boss, as did one of Nixon’s former cabinet secretaries, Maurice Stans, who served as Commerce Secretary before he resigned to help Kalmbach move funny money around in the Nixon reelection campaign.

Now history, specifically Republican history, is repeating itself with Donald Trump. The Republican party is up to 58 indictments associated with Trump’s attempted coup following his loss of the 2020 election. Eighteen people were indicted this week in Arizona for their roles in attempting to overturn the election results in that state. Those charged include four of Trump’s attorneys: Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Christina Bobb, and Jenna Ellis; Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows; and Trump campaign aides Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman. Also indicted were the 11 Republican party members who signed the fake elector forms that were engineered from the Oval Office by Kenneth Chesebro and Donald Trump. Chesebro, who was also indicted in Georgia on similar charges and pleaded guilty, is suspected of cooperating in the Arizona indictments.

In Michigan, 16 Republicans were indicted last July for their roles in the fake elector scheme. One has pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against the others. The 16 were charged with forgery, conspiracy to commit forgery, election law forgery and conspiracy to commit election law forgery. They face as many as 14 years in prison for the charge of “meeting covertly in the basement of the Michigan Republican Party headquarters on December 14th, and signed their names to multiple certificates stating they were the ‘duly elected and qualified electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America for the State of Michigan.’” None were certified or duly elected electors in the state of Michigan.

On Wednesday, it was revealed that Donald Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Michigan fake elector scheme, as are Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and Jenna Ellis.

Last August, 19 people were charged in Georgia in a RICO indictment alleging they conspired in an elaborate scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state. Those charged include Trump, Giuliani, Meadows, Ellis, Chesebro, Sidney “The Kraken” Powell, former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, the aforementioned Michael Roman, and David Shafer, Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party. Several have pleaded guilty and are cooperating with prosecutors, including Powell, Chesebro, and Ellis.

Six Republican fake electors were charged last December with felony forgery and “uttering a forged instrument” in Nevada. The felonies could result in prison terms from one to five years.

Ten top Republicans in Wisconsin may face indictment in the fake elector scheme in that state. Attorney General Josh Kaul will not “confirm or deny” there is an investigation of the fake electors in Wisconsin, but rumors are running rampant that Wisconsin may join the four other battleground states that have charged people in the wide-ranging scheme that was engineered out of the Oval Office by Donald Trump.

So that’s 58 members of the Republican Party who are facing felony indictments for their loyalty to Donald Trump. Experts in election law say it is unlikely that fake Republican electors from Pennsylvania and New Mexico will be indicted because the elector documents they signed were crafted to be used only if they ended up being recognized as “duly elected and qualified as electors” in their states. Because their loyalty to Trump was technically conditional, they will probably avoid being charged and facing prison like their Republican brethren in other states.

Poison. Nixon was poison to the people who worked for him and were loyal to him, and so was Trump, and so is Trump today. The chief financial officer of his company, the Trump Organization, is currently serving time on Rikers Island in New York for falsifying documents and lying for Trump.

We haven’t even counted the more than one thousand Trump loyalists who have been arrested and charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol that Trump fomented on Jan. 6. Several hundred of the insurrectionists have been convicted and are serving time in jail.

Trump has promised to pardon the January 6 “hostages,” as he calls them, but that can only happen if he is elected in November. It’s up to us to make sure that doesn’t happen.

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Taylor Mouth Makes Another Empty Threat

Marjorie Taylor Mouth Makes Another Empty Threat

I’m absolutely double-positive it won’t surprise you to learn that America’s favorite poster-person for bluster, blowhardiness and bong-bouncy-bunk went on Fox News on Sunday and made a threat. Amazingly, she didn’t threaten to expose alleged corruption by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by quoting a Russian think-tank bot-factory known as Strategic Culture Foundation, as she did last November. Rather, the Congressperson from North Georgia made her eleventy-zillionth threat to oust the Speaker of the House from her own party, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), using the Motion to Vacate she filed last month. She told Fox viewers she wanted to return to her House district to “listen to voters” before acting, however.

MTM is upset with Speaker Johnson because he engineered the passage of a $91 billion supplemental aid package that included $61 billion in aid to Ukraine by teaming up with Democrats to get it passed, thus violating the Republican Party’s Thirteenth Commandment, don’t do anything Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin don’t tell you to do. The Mouth from the South has been all talk and no action when it comes to the Motion to Vacate she filed in late March.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), the Congressman from the Bamboo Fiber Ballot state, joined Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie in sponsoring The Mouth’s motion to rid the Republican conference of its Speaker. Some Republican allies of Speaker Johnson have offered to put forth a change in the rule that allows a single member to force a vote to vacate the speakership, but Johnson has brushed off the offer, seeming to challenge the Mouth to go ahead with her threat. She hasn’t taken him up on it, however.

With three Republican sponsors, the Motion to Vacate the Speakership will pass if every Democrat votes to join them, giving Republicans the rare opportunity to throw the House of Representatives into chaos for the third time in two years.

House Democratic leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is unlikely to allow that to happen, however, and is reportedly rubbing his hands together with glee as he calculates what price he will exact from puppet Speaker Johnson in the coming weeks and months. With the word “bipartisan” having returned to the Washington D.C. lexicon thanks to Marjorie Taylor Mouth, anything could happen.

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

With Passage Of Aid Bill, It's Ukraine 1, Putin Republicans 0

With Passage Of Aid Bill, It's Ukraine 1, Putin Republicans 0

That whisper of wind you heard through the budding leaves on trees this afternoon was a sigh of relief from soldiers on the front lines in Luhansk and Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia as the House of Representatives overcame its Putin wing and passed the $95 billion aid package which included $61 billion in aid to Ukraine.

There hasn’t been a Ukrainian aid bill passed by the House since December of 2022, a little less than a year after Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine began. The Biden administration began asking for this aid package for Ukraine last August, but because Donald Trump told them to, House Republicans have been sitting on their hands and refusing to pass it.

Ukraine’s situation on the ground has reached crisis proportions, with some units along the 600-mile front lines in the east and south of the country completely out of howitzer ammunition with which to counter constant Russian bombardments. Ukraine has also begun to run out of missiles and ammunition for its air defenses, leaving some armored units defenseless against a resurgence in Russian air power and attacks by unmanned suicide drones.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an interview with PBS News Hour this week, said that the lack of artillery ammunition has left his country outgunned by Russian forces ten to one. “Can we hold our ground? No. In any case, with these statistics, they will be pushing us back every day.”

Ukraine recently suffered the loss of the industrial town of Avdiivka, just west of Donetsk, and is being hammered all along the front lines. Russian artillery and rocket strikes flattened the town in the same way they did in Bakhmut earlier in the war.

NATO allies have kept up their support for Ukraine in the absence of U.S. aid, with Denmark donating its entire stock of 155 mm artillery rounds to Ukraine. But European aid alone has not been enough to stop recent changes in Russian strategy brought on by the lack of aid from the United States. Russia has taken advantage of Ukraine’s weakened air defenses and has begun hammering population centers with heavy “glide bombs” dropped from Russian jets that only months ago Russia was reluctant to use in Ukrainian airspace because of its air defenses.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) told reporters on Wednesday, “I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we’ve gotten.” This is possibly the first time that a Republican politician has stood up and said he believes the American intelligence community since then- President Trump told a news conference in Helsinki, Finland, that he believed Russian intelligence over his own FBI and CIA. That Johnson had to be dragged kicking and screaming into this admission says all anyone needs to know about who Joe Biden is dealing with as he tries to provide leadership for America’s foreign policy around the world. Republicans, led by Trump, have disparaged and lied about U.S. intelligence abilities for nearly a decade now.

Why bother having a CIA, DIA or NSA if you’re not going to pay attention to the intelligence they provide? Much of it these days is so-called “signals intelligence” gathered by satellite surveillance and electronic eavesdropping on enemy communications. Because of civilian satellite companies like Maxar Technologies, at least some of U.S. intelligence is backed up publicly and we can see it for ourselves. Much of it hardly needs expert analysis. We were able to follow the fall of Bakhmut in real time in some of the satellite photos provided by Maxar.

But Vladimir Putin has enough supporters among House Republicans, including such leading lights as Marjorie Taylor Greene, that Donald Trump has been able to stymie aid to Ukraine for almost a year. Now that military assistance from the U.S. will begin flowing again, Ukraine has a chance to counter the Russian summer offensive that is expected to begin as early as June.

Even though a temporary victory has been won against the Putin wing of the Republican Party, I’m afraid we’re in yet another “can you even imagine” moment with the political party that used to call itself “the party of Lincoln.” With six months to go before elections in the fall, there is no doubt in my mind that we’ll be unable to imagine the garbage that will emerge from the mouth of Donald Trump and his Russia-friendly acolytes.

Watch this space.

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Sununu Was The 'Last Reasonable Republican' -- And Now He's Not

Sununu Was The 'Last Reasonable Republican' -- And Now He's Not

Namby, meet pamby. I’m talking, naturally, of Chris Sununu, governor of New Hampshire, who slithered into a Zoom call on This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday to explain why he will be voting for Donald Trump for president come November. Not because Trump doesn’t have any responsibility for the attempted coup and attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He does. Sununu thinks that all the insurrectionists “must be held accountable and prosecuted.” Except one: the man he’s voting for in November.

Watching him answering the questions of Stephanopoulos was like watching something with more legs than two crawl out from beneath a wet rock on a rainy day. Sununu, who supported Nikki Haley in the primary until she dropped out, doesn’t see anything wrong with now supporting Donald Trump for president. To explain why, he attacked the “wokeness, the fact that folks in Washington, liberal elites in Washington, want to stand on the shoulders of hard-working American families that built this country, that defended this country, and tell them how to live their lives.” Apparently, Sununu has recognized that sounding exactly like Marjorie Taylor Greene will help you as a Republican in America, even up there in the Granite State.

Stephanopoulos should have asked Sununu just what he meant by that statement. Telling people how to live their lives isn’t “woke,” it is part of the business of government. If you earn money, you pay taxes. If you form a company and the company earns money, you pay corporate taxes. If your company is publicly traded, so individual American citizens can invest in it, can give you money so that you can spend it to help your company earn more money, you must register that company with the SEC, you cannot spend your investors’ money on yourself and your own lifestyle, and you must return some of the profits you earn to your investors. If you drive on Interstate highways, you must follow the speed limit. If you manufacture cars, you must install seat belts and airbags in those cars to keep safe the people who drive them. If you buy a firearm at a firearms store, you must pass a background check to make sure that you are not a felon with no right to buy or own a firearm.

Sununu has learned the lesson all Republicans have learned, that it is not necessary to make sense and to tell the truth. When asked by Stephanopoulos if he indeed believed “that a president who contributed to an insurrection should be president again,” Sununu was ready with a lie: “As does 51 percent of America, George. I mean, really.”

Trump lost the election of 2020, 51.3 percent of the vote for Biden, 46.9 percent for Trump. He lost the electoral college by 74 electoral votes. Here is how Sununu explained what happened in the last election: “I hate the election denialism of 2020. Nobody wants to be talking about that in 2024. I think all of that was absolutely terrible, but what people are going to be voting for, what I -- what -- the reason I’m supporting not just the president, but the Republican administration. That's what this is.”

Stephanopoulos didn’t ask him how it is that the “nobody” Sununu identifies as not wanting to talk about election denialism does not include the man he says he’s voting for, Donald Trump, who has made denying the truth of the 2020 election the centerpiece of his campaign.

Listen to Sununu, until now considered one of the so-called reasonable Republicans, as he summed up why he’s voting for Trump: “States rights come first, individual rights come first, parents rights come first.” That’s the Trumpian Republican Kool-Aid right there in a single sentence. That is the reasoning behind the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe and created the nightmare women are facing in states exercising their “states rights” around the country. That is the rhetorical sewer from which the book bans and Black history denialism has emerged over the last several years.

And it’s coming out of the mouth of Chris Sununu. Sununu said previously that Trump should drop out of the race if he is convicted of a crime. Does he think that now? “No, no, no, of course not. That is not to be expected at all. There is clearly politics to bear in some of these cases, that is undeniable. The average American just says it’s more of reality TV in prosecution of him at this point. He plays that victim card very, very well. His poll numbers only go up with this stuff. So, to think of this as some kind of deal breaker, again, I’ll go back to where I started, that people are saying, yep, if he’s convicted, I’m walking away. That’s just not going to happen. If he’s going to be the standard bearer of it, we’ll take it if we have to. That’s how badly Americans want a culture change.”

Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and Mike Pence are the only two prominent Republicans who are not named Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger who have announced they will not vote for Donald Trump, and only Kinzinger has said he will instead vote for Joe Biden.

And to think that these are the reasonable Republicans among us.

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

History And Terror In The Skies Over Israel

History And Terror In The Skies Over Israel

Iran has launched a swarm of missile and drone strikes on Israel from Iranian territory, marking a significant military escalation between the two nations. Israel and Iran have been engaged in a so-called shadow war for decades, with Iranian proxies like Hezbollah rocketing Israel from Lebanon and Syria, and Israel retaliating by launching air strikes on Hezbollah missile sites. Israel has also launched strikes on Iranian targets in other countries, most recently an airstrike on part of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, which killed several top Iranian “advisers” to its military, including Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior officer in Iran’s Quds Force, an espionage and paramilitary arm of Iran’s army.

After the strike on part of its embassy in Damascus on April 2, Iran announced that it would retaliate against Israel. Tonight, that retaliation began at just before 2 a.m. Israeli time, as Iran launched what appears to be a sustained missile attack on Jerusalem. CNN and MSNBC are showing images of multiple explosions in the skies over Jerusalem. It’s hard to make out what’s happening, but it looks like Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system is hitting multiple Iranian missiles, causing showers of missile shrapnel, some of it on fire, to cascade down on Jerusalem and the surrounding area.

Israel has scrambled its fighter jets, which are circling above Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and some of the fighters appear to be engaging Iranian targets, which could include Iranian cruise missiles flying at relatively low altitude and Iranian ballistic missiles arcing down from high altitudes. Air raid sirens have sounded all over the Jerusalem area sending Israelis into air raid shelters.

Iran announced earlier that they have also launched a drone attack on Israel. Drones fly much slower than cruise and ballistic missiles, so they are not expected to reach Israeli airspace until later. The United States has announced that our military forces have shot down some of the Iranian drones, probably from U.S. military sites in northern Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. It is about 1,000 miles from the areas of western Iran where its missile bases may be located to eastern Israel, such as Jerusalem.

Israel just announced that Iran launched more than 200 missiles of various kinds at Israel. Iran has apparently launched its missiles in a coordinated fashion, so that they arrived in Israel airspace in a swarm. It takes about two hours for a cruise missile to travel from Iran to Israel, but only 12 minutes for a ballistic missile to fly the same distance. From what I could see on CNN, it appeared that Iran had succeeded in achieving its aims of swarming Israel’s Iron Dome air defense. Israel has not announced how many Iranian missiles got through its defenses, but an IDF spokesman said Israel intercepted “the vast majority” of Iran’s missiles.

There have been no reports of Hezbollah launching its missiles on targets in Israel in coordination with the Iranian attack. However, Hezbollah announced earlier this evening that its forces had launched missiles at an Israeli barracks in the Golan Heights at about midnight Israel time. Hezbollah is known to have thousands of ground-to-ground missiles along the border with Israel. Their missiles can reach Haifa and other cities in northern Israel. Israel has part of its Iron Dome missile defense system defending northern Israel, but Hezbollah has enough ground-to-ground missiles that it, too, could launch a swarm attack on Israel.

Israel has closed its Ben Gurion Airport and other airports in the country and banned gatherings of more than 1,000 citizens. Israel put a deadline of 48 hours on the closures, but that could change. Airspace in Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq is closed, according to Flightradar24, a website that tracks flights of aircraft around the world in real time.

President Biden met tonight with his national security team in the White House Situation Room. Biden put out a statement that U.S. support for Israel is “ironclad.”

The danger of an attack of this size anywhere in the Middle East, but especially by Iran on Israel, is that hostilities could spread rapidly around the region. There is a possibility that Israel will launch a missile or air attack on targets in Iran, including its missile launch sites and command and control centers. That has not happened yet, however.

Air raid sirens have gone silent in Israel at this hour, according to the New York Times.

At a rally in Pennsylvania tonight, Donald Trump announced his support for Israel, claiming it was under attack “because we show great weakness.”

Trump provided no explanation how “weakness” in the United States could affect the actions of the Iranian regime in Tehran, 6,300 miles away, or what that “weakness” might consist of. House Republicans have held up for months the passage of a bill that would fund support for our ally, Ukraine, which is running out of ammunition and other supplies in its war against Russian aggression. The bill is being held up in part on the orders of Trump himself, who has told aides he does not want President Biden to have a legislative victory during the campaign for president.

There’s showing some weakness for 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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

No Place To Hide: The Abject Panic Of The 'Pro-Lifers'

No Place To Hide: The Abject Panic Of The 'Pro-Lifers'

Donald Trump just hates the issue of abortion. It’s messy. It’s nasty. It deals with women’s stuff down there, the part he has always just wanted to grab and then brag about. The big problem with abortion for Trump has been that that he has never wanted to take a position on it. When he said he would appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade, all he wanted to do was take the votes of the MAGA masses and move on.

The stickiness of abortion as an issue has never been as clear as it is right now with the Alabama Supreme Court essentially declaring that life begins at conception and applying that principle to IVF, and the Arizona Supreme Court concluding that they’re happy breathing life into an anti-abortion law that was written before Arizona was even a state.

The Arizona law was like those some states, mainly in the South, have on the books that make adultery illegal or forbid women or Black people from signing contracts or holding a bank account. The Republicans are like, yeah, sure, we know those ancient statutes are still around, but we’d rather just ignore them and move on, because we’re only trying to turn the clock back to the 1950’s, not the 1860’s.

But these two Supreme Courts blew the lid off the pro-life movement’s decades-long wish to seem reasonable and exposed the anti-abortion movement for what it has always been. It’s why they came up with the name “pro-life” rather than “anti-abortion.” They were trying to make it seem like they didn’t just want to ban women from getting an abortion; what really concerned them were the babies.

But even that was a lie. Babies, once they are born, never interested them. They want women either on the birthing table or at the sink scrubbing those pots and pans. In Texas, the desire to control women was so strong that the legislature wrote a law turning women’s neighbors into spies and giving them the power to sue women who had abortions as well as any person who helped or enabled women to abort a pregnancy after six weeks.

Watching the Republican Party, and especially its Maximum Leader, Donald Trump, try to tap dance around these two state Supreme Courts is providing us with some welcome opportunities for schadenfreude. You almost have to feel sorry for the poor fools serving on the Supreme Court of Alabama, with nine Republican justices either elected or appointed by Republican Governor Kay Ivey. They have got to be sitting there today thinking, wait a minute! What just happened? I just did what my party expected me to do, in fact, what they put me on the court to do! And now they’re getting roasted for it.

The analogy that pundits have seized to describe the current moment for Republicans is the proverbial dog who caught the proverbial car. What does the dog do now? Well, it turns out that what the dog does is look wildly around for a way to dislodge the car from its jaws, the car being the Dobbs decision and its rapid fall-out around the nation, all those anti-abortion laws that sprang to life in state after state, some of them truly draconian. The stories of women’s lives being endangered by the new anti-abortion laws have proliferated, including the one about the 10 year old girl in Ohio who was raped and had to travel out of state for an abortion because Ohio didn’t have an exception for rape or incest, even for a little girl.

All those Republican legislators and governors are sitting there today patting themselves on the back congratulating each other because they did what they were elected to do. And now comes the scrambling, not to fix the ugly laws they passed, but to repair the damage they know they’re going to suffer at the ballot box.

Donald Trump, bless his black heart, is leading the way. Look at this nonsense he posted on Truth Social today:

Trump is so panicked, so afraid of actually taking a position that would have any real meaning and effect, he is reprising his wishful thinking that the whole thing has been solved by the return of control of laws on abortion to the states. Well, here’s a state, asshole, and it’s a battleground state, Arizona, and what’s he calling for as a “remedy?” Exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother which aren’t in the 1864 nightmare of a law the Arizona Supreme Court just put back on the books. Boy, that’ll get it done, huh?

This kind of reshuffling of the deck of cards isn’t going to work, especially with an amendment enshrining the right to abortion in the Arizona constitution expected to be on the November ballot…along with the name of Donald Trump, the dog trying to get that damn car out of his mouth who is running for president.

If you want to see some professional-level reshuffling, allow me to recommend the David French op-ed published in the New York Times on Thursday. Here we have one of the preeminent pro-life intellectuals lamenting the fact that his movement doesn’t have a political party to call its own anymore, because Alabama Republicans quickly did an about-face on IVF after the Supreme Court shut it down in that state. Of course, legalizing IVF necessitates the destruction of fertilized embryos, which are, according to French, unborn children, and “the unborn child must not be intentionally killed.”

French, of course, is supposed to be one of the New York Times' “reasonable” conservatives, in this case, the “reasonable” pro-life one, who assures us elsewhere in his thousand-plus-word lament that he has been pro-life for “my entire adult life,” and defends his movement against charges that what it’s doing is seeking to control women’s lives, French assures us he has “never seen a desire for subjugation and control” in the pro-life movement.

Well, thank goodness for that. We all feel so much better now.

What French and the rest of them are doing is backing and filling now that the nation’s Supreme Court and the supreme courts of two states have dug the gigantic abyss they’re staring into. They’re trying to say, gee, we didn’t mean for this whole thing to go that far! We thought we’d throw these exceptions into the anti-abortion laws and that would take care of it for us! We didn’t know there would be this stuff like women going into sepsis! What the hell is sepsis, anyway?

This is what happens when men write laws about women’s bodies they don’t understand any better than the Chief Pussy-Grabber does. The thing that for decades they had treated like a simple issue to garner votes has turned out to be more complicated than they thought. If you want every embryo to be a little person, there are consequences, and as they discovered in Alabama, consequences demand compromises. As David French now whines, compromises are not pure and simple, they involve moral choices you once thought were easy and clean and now discover are messy and icky.

The dogs who caught the car are not happy. Boo fucking hoo.

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Why Are We Doing Less For Ukraine's Defense Than Tiny Denmark?

Why Are We Doing Less For Ukraine's Defense Than Tiny Denmark?

A little under two months ago, tiny Denmark – with a population less than that of New York City and a GDP of $400 billion – committed its “entire artillery” to Ukraine. “The Ukrainians are asking us for ammunition now. Artillery now. From the Danish side, we decided to donate our entire artillery,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told the Munich Security Conference on February 18.

How did we, the richest, most powerful nation in the world, become the country that is turning its back on Ukraine? I’m using the royal “we” here, but you know who I’m talking about: the Republican Party, led by Donald Trump, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, who ordered House Republicans not to bring up for a vote the Senate’s $95 billion aid package for Ukraine and Israel, which has been moldering on Capitol Hill for nearly two months since the Senate passed it on a bipartisan vote of 70 to 29. Trump was said not to want a bipartisan victory for Biden in an election year, so he picked up the phone and called his poodles in the House and killed a potential deal to bring the Senate bill to the floor where it was expected to pass.

Look at this headline in Sunday’s print edition of the New York Times: “Low on Ammunition, Ukraine Is Ill Equipped to Stop Russian Push.” The story describes a 155 mm howitzer position in Eastern Ukraine where Russia has recently made gains on the ground. The crew of the howitzer had a stock of 33 rounds of ammunition when they received an order to fire on a target. Moments later, they had 16 rounds left. “Artillery decides battles,” said Capt. Vladyslav Slominsky, the commander of the battery with the howitzer that was down to only 16 rounds of ammunition. “Who has more wins.”

The artillery is a proud branch in the United States military. They call their branch “The Queen of Battle” because of the firepower that can be brought to bear on the enemy at a moment’s notice. The war that Ukraine has fought against Russia since the 600 mile front line settled into existence late in 2022 has been almost exclusively an artillery war fought with 155 mm howitzers and HIMARS ground-to-ground rockets.

The Russians have more artillery pieces, more rockets, more tanks, and more soldiers, but Ukraine has hung onto the territory they hold, including the parts they took back from Russian forces near Kharkiv and Kherson earlier in the war. Ukraine’s artillery is said to be more accurate and efficient than Russia’s, which wasted tens of thousands of shells firing wildly into the flat agricultural fields of Eastern Ukraine early in 2023 after the front lines stalemated.

Once Russia began its campaign to take individual towns in Eastern Ukraine such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka, their artillery became more accurate. Given small towns as targets, Russian artillery sat back and simply flattened the towns with tens of thousands of artillery rounds, eventually leaving Ukrainian forces no place left to defend, so they pulled back. Now Russia has claimed to have taken the tiny village of Vodayne, about five miles east of Donetsk and a few miles south of Avdiivka. Tactically, it is yet another redoubt that Ukraine had hung onto as the country continues to defend its eastern flank. Strategically, it is not large enough to be significant.

What is significant, however, is why the village was lost: dwindling ammunition stocks.

The Times quoted Swedish military analyst Johan Norberg saying, “You cannot expect people to fight without ammunition.” But you don’t have to interview an expert to know that armies without bullets cease to be armies and turn into targets.

Vladimir Putin knows this like he knows his own name. Even Donald Trump has seen enough gangster movies to know that when you run out of ammo, you get killed. That’s probably why Trump has leaned on House Republicans not to pass the Ukraine aid bill. If Ukraine runs out of ammunition, and Russia starts winning its war on Ukraine, it will make Trump’s pal Putin happy, and the Russian victories will happen on Joe Biden’s watch. In politics, that is called a win-win.

But it’s a lose-lose not only for Ukraine, but for America’s standing in the world as a bulwark against the kind of totalitarian aggression Russia has brought to bear on its neighbor. Russia could not assert its influence over Ukraine by installing puppet presidents like Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian politician Paul Manafort helped to put in power in 2010. Yanukovych proceeded to loot Ukraine by installing cronies from the region of eastern Ukraine with a large Russian-speaking population, the Donbas. Nearly 50 percent of the economic development budget for the entirety of Ukraine went to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions under Yanukovych.

When he was overthrown in 2014, Putin invaded and occupied Crimea and probably began his plans to militarily invade and seize all of Ukraine. Yanukovych, naturally, fled to Russia, where he still resides. And Paul Manafort, who ran Trump’s campaign in 2016, is said to be in talks to take a prominent position in the current Trump campaign.

What has stood between Putin’s ambitions and Ukraine’s existence is the United States and NATO. Now Donald Trump appears to be running on a platform of turning Ukraine over to Putin and getting the United States out of the NATO alliance, which just last week celebrated its 75th anniversary.

How did we get here? How is it that this corrupt man facing four separate criminal indictments in three different jurisdictions has been able to nearly singlehandedly stymie this country’s ability to help the rest of NATO defeat Putin’s fascistic attempt to take over Ukraine? Why do these Republicans even bother to run for Congress, unless all they really want to do is follow the orders of this man who is weakening the United States with every breath he takes?

What has happened to us? Who are we?

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Exit The Execrable John Eastman, Disgraced And Soon To Be Disbarred

Exit The Execrable John Eastman, Disgraced And Soon To Be Disbarred

It happened in California last Wednesday. After presiding over a 35-day trial, State Bar Court Hearing Judge Yvette D. Roland found that John Eastman should be disbarred from practicing law. Eastman, who also faces multiple criminal charges in the Georgia RICO case for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election, is suspended from the practice of law awaiting a determination of the case by the California Supreme Court, which has final jurisdiction in matters concerning the California bar. If the Supreme Court upholds the hearing court judge’s decision, Eastman will also be fined $10,000 and ordered to pay court costs associated with his trial for disbarment.

Eastman was one of the primary actors in Donald Trump’s conspiracy to overturn the election of 2020. Eastman caught Trump’s attention in August of that year when he wrote an op-ed piece for Newsweek falsely asserting that Kamala Harris was ineligible under the Constitution to serve as Vice President because her parents were not citizens at the time of her birth. Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, was Senator from California and had been in office for more than three years at the time of Eastman’s article.

Eastman was roundly denounced by practically every Constitutional scholar in the country for his assertion of Harris’ ineligibility, but got a positive reaction from Jenna Ellis, a Trump campaign adviser who would go on to join Eastman as a defendant in the Georgia RICO case. Ellis pleaded guilty to one felony count in Georgia last October and faces disbarment in Colorado due to her guilty plea. Rudy Giuliani has had his law license suspended in New York, and Sidney “The Kraken” Powell was sanctioned in Michigan for filing specious lawsuits challenging the election results in that state.

Ellis arranged for Eastman to meet with the Trump campaign just before election day. He stayed in touch with Ellis, and in December, Trump asked him to represent him in the Supreme Court challenge of the election results filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton. In his brief to the Supreme Court, Eastman asserted that it was not necessary for Trump to prove that “fraud occurred,” only that the election results “materially deviated” from what state lawmakers had intended. Eastman added, challenging the actions of state officials who ran the 2020 election in four battleground states, “By failing to follow the rule of law, these officials put our nation's belief in elected self-government at risk.”

Two days after the Texas lawsuit was filed, the Supreme Court refused to hear it.

Eastman wasn’t finished, however. Later in December, he wrote a now infamous memo to Trump asserting that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the right to reject electoral ballots from certain battleground states, or to delay the certification of those ballots by returning them to the states. This became the final strategy employed by Trump as the meeting of Congress on January 6 approached. Eastman met with Trump and Pence in the Oval Office and told Pence he could reject ballots and adjourn the certification process in favor of giving battleground states the opportunity to investigate so-called electoral fraud.

On the morning of January 6, Eastman gave an unhinged speech at the Trump rally on the Ellipse, falsely asserting that voting machines had “hidden folders” that awarded votes that had been cast for Trump to Joe Biden. He told the crowd that he was “demanding” that Pence delay the certification of ballots that afternoon so states could “investigate” fraud.

The decision disbarring Eastman is 128 pages long and goes into every detail of Eastman’s failed and lie-filled attempts to overturn the election. The decision states that Eastman was aware that many of the claims he made in his speech on the Ellipse were lies and accused him of “ostrich-like behavior” in ignoring facts that proved there were no “hidden” ballots in Georgia.

“Eastman ignored readily available evidence demonstrating that his statements were false and willfully made intentionally false statements at the Save America rally at the Ellipse,” it says. The decision also blows holes in Eastman’s theories about Pence’s ability to disallow electoral votes and delay the certification procedures.

Eastman pursued his attempt to disrupt the certification of the election after he had left the stage at the Trump rally. That afternoon, as the crowd swarmed the Capitol and Vice President Pence was forced to leave his post presiding over the Senate’s work, Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Jacob, emailed Eastman, “thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.”

At 2:25 p.m., as Jacob stood with Pence at the secret location Pence had been evacuated to in a garage under the Capitol, Eastman emailed Jacob, “My bullshit, seriously? The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so the American people can see for themselves what happened.”

Eastman emailed Jacob again at 6:09 p.m., and again at 9:44 p.m., even “after the electoral count had resumed,” according to the California decision disbarring Eastman. “I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations, as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here,” Eastman wrote.

The court found that there had been no “illegal activity” and that in nearly all cases, Eastman knew this or ignored easily available evidence. “Upon consideration of the totality of the facts, the court finds weighty circumstantial evidence demonstrating a collaborative effort between Eastman and President Trump to impede the counting of elector votes on January 6, 2021, as articulated in Eastman’s memos,” the judge wrote. “The evidence clearly and convincingly proves that Eastman and President Trump entered into an agreement to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress by unlawfully having Vice President Pence reject or delay the counting of electoral votes on January 6, 2021.”

The judge’s decision in disbarring Eastman does not bode well for his chances facing charges in the RICO case in Georgia. The judge considered some of the same lies Eastman is charged with telling in Georgia, including the lie that “suitcases of ballots” had been removed from “under a table” and included in the Georgia count.

“The State Farm Arena investigation revealed, as early as December 5, 2020, that there were no ballots ‘hidden’ under a table,” the judge found. “Moreover, Eastman acknowledges that Georgia law did not require public viewing of ballot canvassing at the State Farm Arena,” another lie that Eastman had told. Noting that Eastman had not viewed a video that was available of the activities in the State Farm Arena, the judge found Eastman guilty of “willful blindness” of the facts.

Eastman was also accused of knowingly including false evidence of fraud in a lawsuit he filed against Republican Gov. Brian Kemp seeking to overturn the Georgia election results. The judge found that a footnote to the lawsuit that Eastman included seeking to “distance Trump from the allegations” in the lawsuit “demonstrates knowledge of the falsity of the allegations, otherwise such a footnote would not be needed.”

The disbarment decision goes on like that, page after deadly page. Without a license to practice law, or for that matter to represent any clients, Eastman is going to have a hard time finding the money to pay the fine and court costs assessed against him. When Eastman billed the Trump campaign for the legal services he provided during the coup attempt, including his phony Pence memo and lawsuits filled with lies that he filed on the campaign’s behalf, Trump refused to pay him.

With his disbarment in effect and the record of evidence in the case available to Fani Willis and her Georgia prosecutors, ever the Trump sycophant, loyal to the end, Eastman has vowed to fight the charges he faces in Georgia. Good luck with 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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

DeSantis and Haley

Primaries Over, But Anti-Trump Republican Vote Is Alive And Kicking

While we were all parsing the idiocy of Judge Aileen Cannon, presidential primary votes were being counted in several states around the nation this week. Okay, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump wrapped up enough delegates to secure their nominations last week, so turnout was probably not that great. But an argument could be made that the results of primaries that don’t really matter tell us more than results of primaries that do. Once the nomination is in the bag for candidates, it’s their hard core supporters who turn out to vote in the rest of the primaries.

So how did Republican nominee Donald Trump do? I don’t think you’re going to be surprised to hear that his support among Republican primary voters is still sagging, and in the states where comparisons can be made to his 2020 results – recall that many Republican primaries and caucuses were canceled because of COVID in 2020 – his support is lagging.

Let’s take Illinois and Florida, both of which managed to hold 2020 primaries. Yesterday in Illinois, Trump received 80 percent of the vote against Haley’s 14 percent and DeSantis with 2.8. In Florida, which Trump now calls his home state, Trump got 81 percent yesterday, while Haley pulled down 14 percent. The state’s governor, DeSantis, got 3.7 percent of the vote.

But that’s not the news that should have their numbers scaring Trump. In 2020, Trump won 96 percent of the Illinois primary vote, and in Florida, he won 94 percent. So, he’s running 16 points behind his 2020 numbers in Illinois and 13 percent behind his 2020 total in Florida. His lagging numbers don’t count in solidly Democratic Illinois, which Biden will carry easily in November.

But folks, Haley and De Santis aren’t even running anymore, and between them they managed to get 17.7 percent of the primary vote in Florida.

In Kansas, it was worse. Trump won 75.5 percent of the vote. Haley won 16 percent, and get this, 5.2 percent of Kansas Republicans voted for none of the names shown, which was also an option on the Kansas ballot.

In Arizona, a state Biden won in a tight race in 2020, Trump is also in big trouble. Trump won 77.9 percent of the vote, while Haley and DeSantis, neither of whom campaigned in the state or had campaign operations there, combined to get 20 percent of Arizona Republicans to vote against Trump.

We are looking at a significant anti-Trump vote, and it’s among Republicans. Arizona is a battleground state this year, as it was in 2020, so every vote is going to count. And Donald Trump can’t even convince 20 percent of Republicans to vote for him in the primary.

In Georgia, another battleground state that went to Biden by a slim margin in 2020, Trump managed 84.5 percent of the vote in the primary last week, while 13.2 percent of Republican voters decided they would vote for someone whose campaign for president isn’t even operating anymore – Nikki Haley.

Trump’s numbers were terrible in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire while Haley was still running. In both states Trump lost over 40 percent of the vote to Haley, and in South Carolina, he lost about the same percentage to her again.

That the anti-Trump Republican vote is still hanging on even after he’s become the nominee means that a significant percentage of Republicans are sending a message to the man who’s going to be asking them to turn out for him in November. At least some of them have already made up their minds they won’t vote for him in November, which means they probably won’t turn out to vote at all, so they’re lost to him. But it’s the rest of what the pundits are calling “the Haley voters” who have got to worry Trump the most. They are probably prepared to hold their noses and vote for Trump in November, but if something happens between now and then that bothers them, like a loss in a criminal trial in New York or some sort of sweating, babbling breakdown at a rally even the New York Times will be forced to put on its front page, Trump is bound to lose more of those voters.

In a presidential race that one pundit after another is saying will come down to several hundred thousand voters in a few states, there isn’t any way these primary vote totals are good news for the Donald Trump for president campaign.

Trump is being reminded week after week that he can lose this election. His fund raising is sick and getting sicker. He’s facing multiple felony counts in multiple jurisdictions. His rally rants are getting weirder and wilder.

It’s starting to get to him. Watch this space.

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Stephen Miller's Latest Loony Claims Of Trump's Immunity From Prosecution

Stephen Miller's Latest Loony Claims Of Trump's Immunity From Prosecution

You’re going to love this: the latest brief in the Mar-a-Lago documents case came from Stephen Miller. Yes, that Stephen Miller, the one who came up with the plan of ripping babies out of the arms of their mothers at the Southern Border. He still defends it as a good idea and has given interviews saying there are plans to repeat the policy of breaking up families if Trump is elected in November.

Miller has another wonderful idea this time -- that it was just fine for Donald Trump to leave the White House in 2021 taking a truckload of top-secret documents with him, because they were Trump’s secrets, not the government’s. Miller’s right-wing legal operation, the America First Legal Foundation – old Stevie just can’t get away from those intimations of the Nazi era, can he? – filed a friend of the court brief with Judge Aileen Cannon down in Florida supporting Trump’s position that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) allows him to do whatever the hell he wants to with his White House papers.

The PRA allows no such thing. The act, passed by Congress after the criminal presidency of Richard Nixon, requires every president to turn over all papers deriving from his time in office to the National Archives. Miller’s little nest of right-wing legal mice say the PRA doesn’t apply to Donald Trump because, well, because Donald Trump says so.

It's a little more complicated than that, but not by much. Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a reply brief to Miller’s 28 pages of legal blatherings. Leaving aside its signature page and certificate of service, Smith’s reply brief is all of five pages long. Smith uses a single word to describe the three contentions of Miller’s legal arguments: Wrong.

Reading the Special Counsel’s brief, you can feel him wearying of replying to Trump’s blizzard of filings in the cases Smith has against him in Washington and Florida. Trump’s basic position, backed up most recently by his loyal underling Miller, is this: Yeah, I did it, but you can’t get me because I’m Donald Trump.

Miller’s brief supporting Trump takes the utterly absurd position that the charges against him in the Mar a Lago case must be dropped because they all derive from a criminal referral by the National Archives, which spent 18 months practically begging Trump to turn over his trove of secrets before they called the FBI. Miller’s legal brief says the National Archives can’t call the FBI because all they are is a records depository and don’t have the statutory authority to report a crime. According to Miller’s MAGA theory, the National Archives needs a “regulation” to be allowed to pick up the phone and report a crime.

Smith, with Job-like patience, points out that if Miller is right, that means if a thief enters the National Archives and starts waving a gun around, it would be impermissible for the Archives to call the cops. Smith’s brief points Judge Cannon to the fact that the National Archives, as an entity of the federal government, has an inspector general on its staff, and by federal regulation, all inspector generals are “required to report expeditiously to the Attorney General whenever the Inspector General has reasonable grounds to believe there has been a violation of Federal criminal law.”

The Special Counsel has had to file response after response to motions made by Donald Trump to dismiss charges against him, and every one of those motions takes the same position. Yeah, he did it, but this is why you can’t go after him. He’s immune from prosecution. The prosecution is “selective and vindictive.” Because everybody else got away with it, so should Trump.

Trump is accused in the Mar-a-Lago case of removing important national security information from the White House and failing to secure it by storing top-secret papers, including some that contained secrets about nuclear weapons, in places like a bathroom and a ballroom. But that’s okay, according to Trump’s lawyers, because according to yet another case against Trump, “the President’s actions do not fall beyond the outer perimeter of official responsibility merely because they are unlawful or taken for a forbidden purpose.”

Judge Tanya Chutkan had it right when she dismissed Trump’s first claim of absolute immunity. What he wants is a get of out jail free card. Reelecting Trump will give him a whole pocketful. Every time he holds a rally, he promises to free “the January 6 hostages” with presidential pardons.

That’s bad enough, but what we’ve really got to be afraid of is his promise to turn around and put his enemies in jail. At his rallies, “lock her up” has turned into a chant of “lock them up.”

Remember, we are 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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Russian Witness Against Biden Received $600K From 'Trump Associates'

Russian Witness Against Biden Received $600K From 'Trump Associates'

I’ll bet you didn’t know that it is possible in this great big world of ours to live a comfortable life being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing basically nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly, but the money you get is unattached to normal stuff we are all familiar with like a job, complete with job-related duties and office hours and a W-2 and maybe even a job title. The money can thus be described by what it is not, which is aboveboard and visible. Instead, this kind of money often ends up in the kinds of accounts said to be “controlled” by you or others, which is to say, accounts which may not, and often do not, have your name on them.

We could describe this kind of money, then, as free floating. It’s just out there. Your function in life, if you are a man like our friend the lying Russian agent and Republican witness Alexander Smirnov, is to make sure that some of it becomes “controlled” by you.

The Guardian published a fascinating story on Thursday in which it connected money paid to Smirnov to firms connected to what the paper called “Trump associates.” It’s not a small amount of free-floating money, either. It’s $600,000, and according to The Guardian, it was paid to Smirnov by a company called Economic Transformation Technologies (ETT) back in 2020, the same year he began his career as a witness against the family of Joe Biden by lying to the FBI.

There’s got to be a whole industry that just has a bunch of people sitting in an office somewhere coming up with company names like Economic Transformation Technologies and selling them to people, almost always men, who are setting up businesses and need something to call them. Note the “ies” on the end of the word “Technology” in the company title. That sort of clever twist – that it isn’t just one technology we’re talking about, but several, maybe even many – is what you’re paying for.

Now why would ETT want to pay $600,000 dollars to a person who has been described as a “criminal, fixer and agent” who has two passports and ends up having connections to Russian intelligence agencies? Six hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, but in the world of people who traffic in information about, among others, Russian oligarchs, Ukrainian energy companies, and British holding companies with interests in Dubai and elsewhere, maybe it isn’t. Smirnov, when he was arrested recently, was described to the judge considering whether or not to give him bail, as “having access” to as much as $6 million, three million of which was said to be held in accounts “controlled by” his girlfriend.

See where we’re going here? We’re already in the world of accounts “controlled by” people “connected to” other people, and in the case of Smirnov, not by any kind of legal instrument you and I would be familiar with, such as a marriage license that would give you access to the money “controlled” by another person, but simply a “girlfriend” legally unattached to Smirnov but who, according to the Department of Justice, was simply holding as much as $3 million, so Smirnov could have access to it.

Do you live in that world? I’ll bet not. I’ll bet that you have a bank account with your name on it. Maybe it also has your wife’s name on it, and maybe you and she have a joint savings account, or a joint account with a securities brokerage, and I’ll bet you and she have your names on the title and registration of a car – maybe even two cars – and your names are on the title and mortgage of a house or condo or on the lease for an apartment.

But not Smirnov, recipient of $600,000 from a company controlled by people connected to Donald Trump. Smirnov is one of those among us with access to some of the floating-around money that’s out there, money that comes from somewhere and goes somewhere but it isn’t clear why, or how, or through what sort of financial instrument or arrangement.

It would help us if we knew something about the company that arranged to transfer the $600,000 to Smirnov, wouldn’t it? Maybe if we knew what the company does, how it makes money, what its business is, we could better understand why Economic Transformation Technologies decided it would be a good idea to pay, or transfer to, a man who is and has been a fixer and a criminal and an informant and an agent for foreign powers such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. So, let’s ask ETT what kind of company it is.

On its website, ETT tells us this about what the company does: “ETT’s state-of-the-art platform utilizes advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Data Science, Lexicon Management, and many other workflows in an extremely secure environment, the ETT Platform creates the ‘holy grail’ of Real-Time, Predictive, and Meaningful Data through more than 1,600 APIs - making it one the world most momentous and timely platforms. As a final point, ETT set up the chess board to bring in top notch executives from those sectors to help implement its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘New Age’ technologies.”

If that sounds like a word-salad put together, complete with misspelled words, by the kind of boiler room that probably generated the name of the company, well, I agree with you. What they appear to have done is watch some cable TV and read a few newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and maybe even paid attention to a technology site or two, and they came up with a list of buzz words describing what others are doing in what we might call the “technology sector,” and then they threw in a phrase approximating a mission statement, the wonderful sounds-like-it-was-written-by-a-speaker-of-a-second-language, “…implement its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘New Age’ technologies.”

I mean, really. If this is what passes for corporate-speak today, woe be unto the world of corporations in general and this one, ETT, in particular.

The Guardian describes the man at the helm of ETT, an American by the name of Christopher Condon, as a one-third shareholder in something called ETT Investment Holding Limited in London, because of course he is, London being the epicenter of all things international when it comes to finance and moving money around. The connections go on, to one Farooq Arjomand, described by The Guardian as “a former chairman and current board member of Damac Properties in Dubai who is also listed as an adviser on ETT’s American website.” And from Farooq, and Dubai, it’s just a short hop and a jump and what do you know, we’re in a Trump branded property in Dubai that paid our former president $5 million in 2017, and the only reason we know about the $5 million is because Trump was elected president in 2016 and had to fill out an FEC financial statement for the first year he was in the White House as a federal employee, 2017.

See what happened there? Donald Trump, for all his carefully curated reputation as a billionaire, which we now know is about as solid as a pile of melting snow along a random roadside, was one of those free-floating-money guys, out there in business-world-land, grabbing $5 million here and a few hundred thousand there and making his own private decisions about how, or whether, he would report the money as income. And then, in 2015, he decided to run for president and what do you know, he was elected and had to start filling out stuff like FEC forms, where it’s not so easy to attribute or even hide money.

While in office, Donald Trump became addicted to perks like Air Force One, on which he repeatedly flew down to Mar a Lago or over to Bedminster to play a round of golf and then flew back. So, he decided after losing the White House to Joe Biden in 2020 that he would like to go back to flying around on Air Force One and decided to run for election again. To this end, he enlisted a gaggle of half-wits in the House of Representatives to engender an impeachment of his rival, President Biden, and they began casting about for “evidence” that “the Biden crime family” had committed the same sort of crimes the Trump crime family had committed.

And out of a crack in a condo in Las Vegas slithered a sneaky snake called Alexander Smirnov to whisper in the ear of his FBI handlers – because of course a fixer/criminal/agent like Smirnov would have handlers – that Joe Biden and his son Hunter took bribes from a company called Burisma in Ukraine. The half-wits in Congress, having failed to come up with any other “evidence” of crimes, glommed onto Smirnov’s assertion of criminal wrongdoing by the Bidens, and off they went.

At least until it emerged that the FBI discovered they had been lied to by Smirnov and charged him with committing several serious crimes, and the whole house of cards of the impeachment investigation began to crumble.

The problem with houses of cards when they fall is that they have to land somewhere, and where the particular card with Smirnov’s name on it landed is a connection right back to Donald Trump, who in 2020 with a tightly contested race against Joe Biden on his mind was looking around for “dirt” on Joe Biden. Friends of Trump’s found Alexander Smirnov slithering out of cracks in Las Vegas, so they threw six hundred grand his way and thus began his years-long construction of the Burisma lie that has now landed him in pre-trial detention awaiting trial on charges of lying to the FBI and generally being a criminal/fixer/agent for foreign powers, including Putin’s Russia.

Funny how that keeps happening with Donald Trump, isn’t it? In 2016, it was yet another itinerant floating-money Russian intelligence-connected guy named Joseph Mifsud, who in Rome spied an eager-beaver young “adviser” to Donald Trump’s campaign named George Papadopoulos and started romancing him by coming up with a Russian honeypot he introduced to young George as “Putin’s niece,” and a Russian think tank executive who was actually an agent for the FSB, and bingo! All of a sudden there is dirt on offer in the form of Hillary’s emails!

The emails, once revealed by the Russian FSB through WikiLeaks, contained nothing criminal or even mildly interesting, but that didn’t matter. They gave Trump something he could yell at his rallies, along with “lock her up,” and that beat Hillary in November, and he won the presidency.

Now, please take your seats and fasten your seat belts because we’re coming in for a landing. The Guardian story delves deeper and deeper into the connections between Smirnov and Dubai guys and a Pakistani-American and a bunch of companies that include a “blank check company” called BurTech Acquisition Group which is connected to Digital World, another “blank check company” that becomes associated with Donald Trump’s Truth Social in a merger that, after problems with the SEC are resolved, may “garner Trump as much as $4 billion in shares.”

The whole thing circles back to ETT and the $600,000 it paid to Smirnov in 2020, which the Wall Street Journal discovered was “in exchange for a stake in an Israel-based crypto trading platform, called Bitoftrade, [that] Smirnov was working on launching.”

You just knew crypto had to be in there somewhere, didn’t you?

But still we’re stuck with the mystery of ETT, the company we’re told is in the business of “implement[ing] its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘New Age’ technologies.” Where the hell did ETT come from in the first place, you may ask?

The Guardian figured that out, too. Turns out ETT used to be called Pandora Venture Capital Corp, which was registered in Florida by a Ukrainian-American called Boris Nayflish, who is – you’re going to love this – the ex-husband of Alexander Smirnov’s current “partner,” Diana Lavrenyuk, she of the $3 million that the Department of Justice told a judge that Smirnov “has access to,” because of course he does.

The old hippie phrase comes to mind: what goes around comes around. In the world of free-floating money and blank-check companies and outfits that describe themselves as implementing visions of love and social impact through “new age” technologies, one of the truths of this particular new age is that when it comes to Donald Trump, what goes around keeps coming around to Russian intelligence and fixer/criminals like Alexander Smirnov.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have now landed. Feel free to use your electronic devices, and welcome to the world of sneaky snakey Donald Trump’s America.

Georgia Judge: Trump Did It, But That's OK Because Oaths Don't Really Matter

Georgia Judge: Trump Did It, But That's OK Because Oaths Don't Really Matter

As if we had not been reminded before, the dismissal of six charges against defendants in the Georgia RICO case reminds us once again that the whole notion of taking an oath to support and defend the Constitution, including state constitutions, has apparently become a nullity in modern times. According to the judge in Georgia, if you’re required to take an oath, it’s just a ceremony, not an actual requirement to uphold the law – the law being the Constitution of the United States or the Constitution of Georgia.

Defendants in the Georgia racketeering case, who include Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Mark Meadows among others, were charged with 41 counts of violating Georgia’s law in that they “knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Donald Trump.” The judge in the case, Scott McAfee of Fulton Superior Court, has now dismissed six of those counts, not because the defendants didn’t take the actions they are charged with, but because those actions were not illegal enough. The judge found that the charges filed by the grand jury in Georgia did not spell out with adequate specificity why those actions were illegal.

All six charges relate to actions taken by the defendants to “solicit” various Georgia officials to violate their oaths of office. For example, Trump and Meadows called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and solicited him to “unlawfully influence the certified election returns.” Multiple defendants “solicited elected members of the Georgia Senate to violate their oaths of office on December 30, 2020, by requesting or importuning them to unlawfully appoint presidential electors.” Giuliani solicited members of the Georgia House of Representatives by “requesting or importuning them to unlawfully appoint presidential electors.”

You will note in the quotes from the indictment that the word “unlawfully” appears in each count of the indictment the judge dismissed. He’s not saying that what the defendants asked the Georgia officials to do was lawful, therefore the charges must be dismissed. No, he’s figured out a clever way around that. The judge is saying the charges must be dismissed because they don’t spell out how the illegal acts they were being asked to commit violated their oaths.

The law in Georgia prohibits any public officer from “willfully and intentionally violating the terms of his or her oath as prescribed by law.” The judge is saying that all the Georgia officials took their oaths of office, but Fani Willis’ grand jury has failed to spell out how what they were being asked to do violated those oaths. To illustrate the problem, as he sees it, the judge even favorably cites a case in Georgia where a conviction of a police officer was reversed “when a police officer’s oath did not expressly include a provision to uphold state law.” In another case, charges were dismissed in a drug possession case because the specific drug and its quantity were not specified.

Got that? In Georgia, you can swear to defend and protect the state Constitution, but that oath, at least in the case of the police officer in question, does not require you to “uphold state law.”

That this would utterly negate the whole idea of taking an oath doesn’t seem to have occurred to Judge McAfee, but moving on…

To sum up as briefly and bluntly as I can, the charges against Trump and the rest of them have been dismissed because the indictment against them does not spell out precisely how “unlawfully” doing something like appointing fake electors or “finding” enough votes for Trump to overturn the election violates the oaths of the Georgia officials being asked to commit those acts, even though the acts themselves are, as per the judge’s order dismissing the indictments, “unlawful.”

The judge took pains to point out that the United States Constitution “contains hundreds of clauses, any one of which can be the subject of a lifetime’s study,” so his message to Fani Willis is, get studying. If you want a new charge against Trump and his pals to stick, you’re going to have to find a clause they urged a Georgia official to violate.

The Supreme Court has been up to the same sort of thing in the series of decisions it has handed down eviscerating laws against the bribery of public officials. Their theory is that bribery hasn’t taken place, and thus the law hasn’t been broken, unless the person soliciting the public official to favor their interests by giving them a bribe spelled out in complete sentences what it is they want the official to do. For example, if a gangster is buying off a judge to find someone not guilty, it’s not enough for you to be the brother of the defendant and sit down with the judge and hand him money across the table. You’ve got to open your mouth and say the words: here’s some money to let my brother off.

This is the kind of double-reverse triple-salchow legal squiggling Donald Trump wants to use to beat the charges against him in Georgia. He’s not saying that he didn’t do it. He did. He’s not saying that what he did wasn't illegal. It was. He’s saying that it didn’t amount to causing others to violate their oaths in the exact same manner he was violating his.

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Revealed: Boxes Of Documents We Didn't Know Trump Took To Bedminster

Revealed: Boxes Of Documents We Didn't Know Trump Took To Bedminster

It was a big night for CNN, out with a story about document boxes being loaded onto a Trump plane bound for Bedminster, New Jersey, on the same day the Department of Justice showed up to receive a folder of top secret documents from a Trump lawyer who certified they were the only secret documents she and lawyer Evan Corcoran could find.

According to an interview by CNN with former Trump valet Brian Butler, referred to six times in the classified documents indictment as “Trump Employee #5,” the boxes were loaded onto the Trump plane on June 3, 2022, as Trump’s lawyers, Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran, were meeting with Jay Bratt, the prosecutor from the Department of Justice in charge of the classified documents case. Christina Bobb famously signed a certification to the DOJ that a “diligent search” had been conducted at Mar-a-Lago, and that the 31 documents being handed over that day were the sum total of all the classified documents that had been found.

Two months later, in August, FBI agents would execute a search warrant and discover more than 100 additional top secret documents in Trump’s private office, including several marked with the highest classification, “Top Secret/SCI,” or “Top Secret – Secure Compartmented Information.”

Former valet Butler told CNN that he was surprised to get a phone call from Trump’s “body man,” Walt Nauta, on June 3, asking if he could borrow one of Butler’s Cadillac Escalade SUV’s to help carry material to the West Palm Beach airport to be loaded onto a Trump airplane. Butler was told that Trump and his family were flying to Bedminster for the summer that day. Butler told CNN he was not usually called upon to move luggage to the private Trump jet and thought it was also unusual that Nauta asked for the favor “in a guarded way,” CNN reported.

Butler used his own SUV to carry Trump family luggage to the airport, while Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, both of whom were indicted with Trump, used the Escalade he had loaned to Nauta to move the rest of the material. “They were the boxes that were in the indictment, the white bankers boxes. That’s what I remember loading,” Butler told CNN.

Butler described his relationship with Nauta as “best friends,” at least until questions about the classified documents found by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago began coming up. Butler told CNN that on one of the frequent “nightly walks” he took with Nauta around their neighborhood in West Palm Beach, Nauta told him that he, Nauta, Butler, and De Oliveira were “all dirty” when it came to the boxes they had moved around inside of Mar-a-Lago and to the Trump airplane on June 3. De Oliveira repeatedly urged Butler to sign up with the same attorney Trump had provided to himself and Nauta, but Butler demurred, choosing instead to hire a former U.S. Attorney in Florida, Jeffrey Sloman. Butler met “repeatedly” with prosecutors for the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith, according to CNN.

In one interview, Butler told prosecutors about a time he was driving Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt and his chief of staff in the Spring of 2021 when he heard Pratt talking about secrets of U.S. and Russian nuclear submarines he had heard from Trump while he was visiting Mar-a-Lago. Pratt was a paid member of the Trump club at the time. It was on May 6, 2021, that the National Archives first formally requested that Trump turn over any and all classified and non-classified documents Trump had removed from the White House when he left office. On May 8, the British newspaper, the Daily Mail, had a photographer at the West Palm Beach airport who took photographs of Trump boarding a private jet to fly to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The photographs show several Trump aides loading a half dozen or more bankers boxes of documents into the jet.

On July 21, 2021, just two months later, Trump showed a top secret military “plan of attack” on Iran to an interviewer who was working on a book with Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. The interview took place at the Trump golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Before Butler signed with his own private attorney, he was witness to two conversations between Trump and De Oliveira when Trump asked De Oliveira, “Are we good?” After one conversation De Oliveira had with Trump on the phone in the presence of Butler, he said Trump had promised to get him a lawyer. In another conversation Butler recounted to prosecutors, Nauta asked him “to make sure Carlos (De Oliveira) is good.” Butler told CNN that he twice assured Nauta that De Oliveira was “loyal and wouldn’t do anything to hurt his relationship with Trump.” It was after that conversation that Butler decided to get his own lawyer and broke contact with the two men who ended up being indicted with Trump.

Based on the new CNN report, we now know that boxes of documents were moved from Mar-a-Lago to Bedminster twice – once in May of 2021 immediately after the National Archives had requested that Trump turn over documents he took from the White House, and again in June of 2022, on the very day the DOJ had shown up at Mar-a-Lago to take possession of what they were told were all the classified documents being held there.

What happened to the classified documents Trump took with him to Bedminster is not known. It is also unknown why the FBI never searched the Trump New Jersey golf club.

Trump has recently filed motions to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago indictments based on spurious claims of “absolute immunity” and an entire made-up claim that the Presidential Records Act permitted him to possess classified documents. Special Counsel Smith has opposed both motions. The judge in the case, whose previous decisions in the case have been overturned twice by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, has yet to rule on the Trump motions to dismiss.

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Trump's Supreme Court States The Obvious: He Owns Them

Trump's Supreme Court States The Obvious: He Owns Them

Yesterday morning the Supreme Court ruled on the Colorado case striking Donald Trump from its election ballot because, as the Colorado Supreme Court held, he is an insurrectionist as defined under paragraph 3 of the 14th Amendment. As expected, they threw the case out, effectively deciding for Trump and against Colorado. The decision was interpreted as a huge win for Trump practically everywhere: “A massive victory for Trump” screamed CNN; “The U.S. Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a major victory,” chorused Reuters.

Donald Trump himself, like the megalomaniac he is, cruised over to his social media lie-factory and yelled from whatever rooftop it’s under, “BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!”

The vote on the court was 9-0, meaning that all nine justices voted for Trump’s position that a single state, Colorado, cannot throw a candidate off its ballot under the 14th Amendment. The decision for the court as a whole was unsigned, but there were two concurrences disagreeing with the decision on a somewhat less than subtle ground we’ll get to in a moment.

One of them, written by Justice Amy Comey Barrett of all people, uttered the quiet part out loud. She openly said what the whole court wouldn’t – that the case was so terrifying, they just pushed it off their desks. “In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”

She may as well have begun with “Oh, my goodness!”

You have to wonder what it would take to shock this Supreme Court into taking action -- maybe a decision by a court in a state like Alabama ruling that in some circumstances it’s okay to murder Black people in cold blood?

I guess what Justice Barrett said was a version of Bush v. Gore, another “politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election,” when the Supreme Court told the world they didn’t really mean it as they installed George W. Bush as president even though Al Gore was ahead in the vote count. Remember how, having injected themselves into the election, the Supreme Court said that’s not what they were doing by trying to limit the damage when it held that the case was not to set a precedent? That was like saying, “Oh, that body over there with democracy on its forehead? Whatever you do, don’t pay attention to that.” Barrett’s concurrence did something of the same thing. She said she agreed with the result of the decision – her favorite president gets to stay on the ballot – but not with the, uh, methodology of how the majority got there.

What the five justices in the majority did was this: they, and the rest of the court for that matter, utterly ignored the finding by the Colorado Supreme Court that Donald Trump had committed insurrection. How could they do that when the whole purpose of paragraph 3 of the 14th Amendment was to deal with the results of the insurrection which had just taken place, namely the Civil War? Well, the Supreme Court said it’s not our job to enforce the 14th Amendment. That’s up to Congress.

Which is like saying, oh, we’ll just leave that problem up to the snarling pack of rabid dogs over there. They’ll get together and do it for us.

To call this position taken by the court bullshit isn’t sufficient. It’s a gigantic, muciferous, glob of a lie. Besides dealing with the scourge of insurrection, the 14th Amendment was written after the Civil War to confer citizenship rights on former slaves and to ensure that the Southern states, which had treated them like property, afforded former slaves and every other citizen “equal protection under the laws.” Brown v. Board of Ed is just one example of when the Supreme Court enforced the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal rights under the law, and many, many other similar cases have addressed the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment without the help, if it could be called that, of Congress.

So, why is the court at this juncture pointing over there across First Street on Capitol Hill and saying, in effect, “it’s their problem"? Because they know the Congress can’t get itself together to keep the fucking government open by passing a budget, much less address the issue of the damn insurrection that took place right there in front of them and forced them from their offices and chambers and left five dead.

Donald Trump did that, and the three justices on the court appointed by him, along with the other three Republican justices in his thrall, will not be the ones who uphold the law in the Constitution which so clearly disqualifies him from holding a federal office. They’re scared of offending Trump and his violent followers. Why, if they did that, it might interrupt the vacation they’re planning this summer at one billionaire’s Adirondack camp or another billionaire’s salmon fishing stream.

I have become accustomed to reading these appeals court decisions. Hell, it has become a major part of my job. But I have trouble finding the words to describe what a profile in cowardice this Supreme Court decision is. If they use this decision as precedent and continue washing their hands of enforcing the 14th Amendment, it spells the end of equal enforcement of the laws in this country. To leave enforcement of basic rights up to the Congress is to disavow the responsibility the Supreme Court took upon itself in Marbury v. Madison to be the final arbiter of what the Constitution says and what the law means. Leaving those decisions up to the band of yahoos who are running things in the nation’s legislature is like asking the thieves who just robbed the bank to toss us a few pennies as they divide up their ill-gotten gains.

This decision negating the insurrection clause in the 14th Amendment, raises the question of whether the three post-Civil War amendments -- ending slavery, conferring the right to vote, and ensuring equal protection of the laws without regard to race, creed, or national origin -- will have any force at all in the coming years. The Supreme Court already eviscerated the rights of Black people to vote with Shelby County v. Holder. What is next on the right-wing agenda? Allowing segregated schools? Enforced labor for immigrants seeking citizenship?

Steel yourselves. I’m afraid this is just the beginning.

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Joe Biden

To Win, Democrats Should Stop Talking Down -- And Start Speaking Up

Schmaltz. That, and generosity, and a dollop of out loud love for the good old U.S.A. That’s what the Democrats should use this year as we campaign for offices from the White House to the Senate and House to positions in state and local governments around the country.

People are sick and tired of being depressed about everything from you-know-who – we’ll get to him in a minute – to the wars overseas to the “situation at the border” as it is referred to euphemistically these days, to what many of us see as the ongoing threat to our democracy. I’m not saying we should put it all aside and paste smiles on our faces and push feelgoodism as a platform, but I have to tell you that I sure do wish that “It’s morning in America” wasn’t already taken, because that’s exactly the kind of schmaltz I’m talking about.

I agree that this is the most important election in our lifetimes. I just don’t think we need to hear that every five minutes between now and November. What we need to do is start acting like it is and not use that phrase with each other so much. I think independents and undecideds – there are more than a few of them out there – understand that they’re being talked down to by that kind of rhetoric. It sounds like we think they don’t know the election is important, and even if some of them don’t think the situation is as desperate as we do, we shouldn’t act like they need to be led to water to get a drink. Frantic is not a good look for a political party that got 80 million votes in the last presidential election and won the popular vote in three of the last four.

It doesn’t work for us to sound as negative and pessimistic as the other side. Trump’s rally speeches are filled with the words “carnage” and “chaos.” He talks about crime as a scourge at a time when violent crime is going down everywhere, especially in big cities, and blames it on Democrats when the one place violent crime is actually increasing is in rural, mostly red parts of the country. On Saturday, he gave yet another unhinged speech at a rally in North Carolina telling his crowd that Biden is the one who is “engaged in a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.” He is pushing the idea that Biden is “the real threat to democracy” as a major theme of his campaign.

Here's the problem we face: Sure, he has flipped the script. He’s doing that thing of accusing the other side of exactly what he’s guilty of. But it doesn’t work for us to constantly be making the case that he is the one who’s guilty, even though he is. He is cranking up the paranoia of the right-wing, as if it needed to be any higher, but we can’t counter with paranoia of our own.

It doesn’t work to sound like him, to say the things he’s saying. We have to be different. We need to draw distinctions between Republicans and us, not sound like them. Donald Trump and Republicans are running as the party of pessimism. We need to be positive. We need to affirm the essential goodness of people.

Americans want to think better of themselves and of each other. That includes our own base voters, but I think it’s especially true of independents and swing voters who are looking for a reason to vote for rather than against all the time. Teagan Goddard of Political Wire dug an interesting number out of the depths of that New York Times/Siena poll that had Trump ahead of Biden that everyone is flapping their hands about. Among the 19 percent of voters polled who disapprove of both candidates, pressed to pick one or the other, Biden beat Trump 45 to 33 percent.

See? They are the pox-on-both-your-houses people who are mad at both parties because the choice this time is the same as it was in 2020. But why is Biden more appealing to them than Trump by such a wide margin? I think they’re tired of Trump’s pessimism and negativity. Say what you will about Joe Biden, but that man does not come across as down on everything the way Trump does, and that aspect of him comes across clearly. Trump is angry about everything. Biden just isn’t.

If anything, Joe Biden comes across as calm and collected. The way he responded to that disaster with the aid convoy in Gaza is a perfect example. He ordered food and other supplies to be airdropped into Gaza, and 24 hours later, it was happening. It’s decisive. It’s positive. And it’s working.

Every other day, there’s another story about the trouble the Biden campaign has had with convincing people that he has accomplished more than any president in 20 years. You know the drill. All the good numbers are up. All the bad ones are down. The infrastructure bill. Student loan forgiveness. On and on.

If specifics aren’t working, then I say promote pride. America is the greatest country in the world. As a people, we are generous and outgoing and forgiving. We work hard. We love our families. When disaster strikes, we take care of each other.

Americans don’t want to wake up every day and be told how terrible things are, how insoluble problems like immigration and the border are, and I don’t think they want to be told over and over how evil those on the other side are. Sure, we have our problems – poverty and racism and xenophobia and sexism – but on the whole, we are a good people. This is a good country. Americans want to feel good about ourselves and each other. I’m not saying if they go low, we go high. We’re going to have to fight and fight hard to win this year. But part of our job is to give people a reason to vote for us as much as against the other side. If that means vote for the nice guy, not the asshole, then we should say it.

Nice is better than nasty. Positive is better than negative. Sanity is better than crazy. Pride is better than paranoia. It’s a clear choice, and we should run on 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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

What Biden Must Do Now To Curb Israel In Gaza And Protect Innocent Civilians

What Biden Must Do Now To Curb Israel In Gaza And Protect Innocent Civilians

If there is one military phrase I have gotten tired of over the last 20 years or so it is “boots on the ground.” Foreign policy poo-bahs call for boots on the ground every time they want to flap their hawk wings over a conflict they want us engaged in or an area of the world they think we should pay more attention to…as if having more than 140 separate American military installations and outposts around the world, each full of boots on the ground, isn’t enough.

But the truth is, we don’t need to order up a military response to flex our foreign policy muscles. We don’t need boots on the ground when we’ve got the kind of power that allows us to bigfoot problems we see a solution to when everything else isn’t working.

President Joe Biden has apparently finally had enough of Israel’s increasingly callous disregard for the lives of Gazan civilians. Today he announced that the U.S. will soon begin air-dropping food aid and medical supplies to starving Palestinians in Gaza. Biden should have airdropped aid back when we were trying to get Israel to go along with the opening of the border checkpoint between Gaza and Egypt early in the war. He should have done the same thing when stories began to come out of Gaza that hospitals were running out of basic supplies like saline drips, oxygen, bandages, painkillers and antibiotics.

What set Biden off was the still unfolding story of the incident around a small convoy of aid trucks in Gaza City. Early Thursday morning, while it was still dark, a crowd described as in the thousands mobbed several aid trucks even before the trucks came to a stop. Gazan health officials reported that more than 100 civilians were killed. How those deaths occurred is disputed, with Gazan officials saying that several Israeli tanks opened fire on the crowd, and Israeli military officials saying the deaths occurred when the crowd surged toward the trucks as they came to a stop.

Late on Friday, the New York Times released drone footage of part of the incident obtained from the Israeli military. The footage appears to have been shot with an infrared camera, so it is blurry, and the images of human beings appear as dark figures against a bright background, as in a photo negative. The Times reported that the drone videos “do not fully explain the sequence of events. Videos show panic, including people ducking for cover and taking food from trucks.”

The trucks arrive in a line, well-spaced from one another. On a road running parallel to the trucks are several Israeli armored vehicles. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of figures rush toward the trucks and gather around them in thick knots of people. Then something happens, and people begin to scatter. A few can be seen falling to the ground and crawling toward cover.

Reporting by the Times from inside Gaza quoted witnesses saying they had not seen anyone trampled to death by the crowd but had seen multiple people with gunshot wounds. The Times reported from Israel that “Israeli military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, acknowledged that Israeli troops had opened fire ‘when a mob moved in a manner which endangered them’ without giving details.”

The drone video footage does not show the crowd attacking the Israeli armored vehicles. It is worth noting that had the armored vehicles come under fire, their armor would have protected them from bullets fired by small arms.

A doctor at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City said 150 wounded and 12 who had died were brought to the hospital. He said 95 percent of them had gunshot wounds. A doctor interviewed on the scene in Gaza said he had seen “dozens of people with gunshot wounds but also people who appeared to have died in a stampede or to have been hit by aid trucks,” according to the Times.

This is another incident that has happened in the fog of war since Israel began its attacks in Gaza in October. The bombing of a Gaza hospital early in the war was another example, with Israeli and Gazan officials disputing whether the bomb that hit a parking lot on hospital grounds was an Israeli missile or a Hamas missile that was shot out of the sky by Israeli air defenses.

Unless there is better drone footage that Israel has not released, or somehow reports of wounded and dead in Gazan hospitals can be confirmed independently, we’ll probably never know the exact details of what happened on Thursday in Gaza City, but from what we know right now, it doesn’t look good for Israel. That part of Gaza was said to be cleared of Hamas fighters and demilitarized two or three months ago. It seems unlikely that Israeli armored vehicles could have come under an attack sufficiently threatening that they would have the need to shoot into a crowd of civilians trying to get food supplies from aid trucks.

This is why Biden’s announcement of air drops of food and medical aid is absolutely the right thing to do at this point. The U.S. has been trying to get Israel to open points along its border with Gaza so that aid could be trucked in from inside Israel in addition to the aid that has come in through Egypt, but Israel has resisted these U.S. efforts.

But what is Netanyahu going to do? Have his air force shoot down U.S. C-130’s dropping pallets of food and medical supplies into Gaza? The other thing the U.S. could do that we haven’t done is move aid directly into Gaza from the sea. The Times reported that creating a makeshift port on the Gaza coast has been considered, but “setting up such a facility in a secure way presents a challenge, officials said. The United States would not use American troops to build the temporary facility or use American amphibious landing craft.”

The reason for this sort of equivocation is Pentagon fears of having U.S. troops in an active combat zone even if they are only engaged in work that would help to supply humanitarian aid. But this is where bigfooting comes in. Biden could tell Netanyahu that’s what we’re going to do and threaten to withdraw military aid and the U.S. vote in the U.N. Security Council if Israel will not agree to allow the construction of a temporary supply port on the Gazan coast without Israeli interference.

Biden is going to have to bring the situation in Gaza under control sooner rather than later. He needs to take strong action to bring about a cease fire, and even before that happens, he should be seen making decisive moves to help Gaza’s civilian population with food and medical aid.

We are the biggest, most powerful country in the world, and we are Israel’s strongest ally. That gives us power that we have not yet brought to bear to end the war in Gaza. Air drops of aid to Gazan civilians is a good first step, but that’s all it is.

We need to do more, and we need to do it now. If President Biden wants to draw a bright line between his foreign policy goals and Trump’s avowed isolationism and support of Russia, now is the time, and the disaster in Gaza is the place.

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

We Have No Choice But Beating Trump On Election Day -- And We Surely Can

We Have No Choice But Beating Trump On Election Day -- And We Surely Can

Well, the big news is that after a couple of days of even more expert analysis, nothing’s going to save us. Certainly not the Supreme Court. They’re in the tank for Donald Trump, full stop. It doesn’t matter which way they will eventually rule on his claim of absolute immunity, hell, it doesn’t even matter whether they’ll rule at all. They’re going to toss the 14th Amendment’s insurrectionist ban in the garbage, and then they’re going to dilly dally until presidential immunity is a moot point.

But even if the Supreme Court were to hurry up the case and rule against Trump’s claim of immunity, that wouldn’t save us, either. Even Jack Smith getting a conviction before Election Day wouldn’t save us.

Donald Trump has to be beaten at the ballot box, and beaten badly, and we can do it.

Trump’s performance in the Republican primaries so far has been abysmal. In three of the primaries, 40 percent of the voters in his own party didn’t vote for him. In the fourth, about 30 percent didn’t want him. Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, and significant numbers of Republican voters have rejected him every chance they’ve gotten. This can’t be emphasized enough. Those were Republican votes he didn’t get.

Every time you read a story about Trump, the political pundits are saying he has remade the Republican Party in his own image, he’s turned it into the MAGA party, he owns the party’s base. Really? Trump wasn’t running against Joe Biden in those primaries. With the likes of Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley on the primary ballot, Trump didn’t have an opponent that anybody in his party thought could actually win the nomination. Those weren’t votes for DeSantis or Haley as much as they were protest votes against Trump.

I’m not making an argument that those Republicans who voted against Trump in the primaries are going to vote for Biden in November. A few of them might, and most of them will vote for the Republican nominee, who will be Donald Trump, because that’s what Republicans do. But some of them are going to stay home.

That means Donald Trump is beatable. It won’t be easy, it will be closer than it should be, but he is not going to get as large a share of the popular vote as he got last time.

Sure, the MAGA people love him, they buy the red hats and they fly the flags from their pickup trucks and some of them turn out for his rallies. But not as many as in 2020, and certainly not as many as in 2016.

He’s bleeding. His fund raising is in the basement. A massive percentage of the money he’s raised through Super Pacs has gone to pay for his legal defense in the trials he has already faced and lost in New York and will face again in three weeks, and to the lawyers he’s hired to file the flurry of appeals briefs they’ve been cranking out. The New York Times reported last week that Trump committees had spent $50 million on legal expenses last year, “and those costs are likely to balloon as he prepares for potential trials this year.”

Why isn’t this a bigger story? Why has so much of the political coverage of Trump emphasized how he “trounced” his opponents in the primaries, when he lost between 30 and 40 percent of the vote in each of them? Reading the coverage of Joe Biden’s win in Michigan, you’d have thought that 80 percent of the vote was a loss, and a 13 percent vote for “uncommitted” was a disaster. President Obama got an 11 percent uncommitted vote when he was running for reelection. Where was that number in the mainstream coverage of the Michigan primary?

The Washington Post reported on Thursday that an analysis of Republican primary results showed that “voters 65 or older were the age group most likely to support Trump in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. They made up more than a third of his voters, increasing from a quarter eight years ago.” How is that good news for Donald Trump? It’s not.

I’m going to keep reporting on Trump’s legal woes because it’s an important story and because I just love it that he is finally being held to account for at least some of the crimes he has committed. But what I’m going to be paying the most attention to is the nuts and bolts of beating his sorry ass in November.

We can do it. The first thing we’ve got to do is get over the idea that this is somehow a different country than it has been because Donald Trump is running for president again. It’s not. He’s not a superman. Owning a corrupt Supreme Court does not give him the political power to win an election that depends on the votes of American citizens.

With abortion and IVF scaring the shit out of voters all over the country, we know we’ve got the issues. We know there are more of us than there are of them. What we’ve got to do is turn out and vote.

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.