Misprison of a Felony

Posted on December 21, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 21, 2025

I never saw or heard the word “misprison” until I asked Google, “Is failure to report a crime a criminal act?” It turns out that there’s a federal statute that addresses that question directly. 18 U.S. Code § 4 defines misprison as concealing a felony and not making it known to authorities. It is a felony under federal law punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both. This arcane, nine-letter word might have the power to bring down the Trump administration.

I believe in karma. Live a life devoid of morality – lying, cheating, and stealing your way through every venture – and one day, the universe will make you pay, and leaders of powerful nations are not immune. The piper always gets paid in the end, whether it’s Adolf Hitler putting a bullet in his own head or Richard Nixon ending his presidency in disgrace.

When former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, backed by the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party and extreme right-wing organizations like the Heritage Society, created the political creature known as Donald Trump, it was an act of hubris. The intent was to elevate the views of a minority of Americans who rejected the fundamental concept of equal opportunity that underpinned our Constitution. They also rejected Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the foundational federal legislation that guaranteed racial equality, social security and a safety net for elderly, disabled, or impoverished Americans that defined the America we all grew up in.

But reversing ninety years of progressive maturation required silencing the majority of Americans who believed in that version of America. In an alleged democracy, that could only be accomplished by skewing elections through extreme gerrymandering and investing billions of dollars in broadcast and social media to mislead voters and create an alternate reality in which only white, Christian males would be empowered. Like many such movements throughout history, it worked for a while, and we are in the midst of the most corrupt, power-grabbing, anti-democratic administration in our history.

We are living through a patient, relentless coup funded by right-wing billionaires who want to tear up our Constitution and replace it with an oligarchy of sociopaths like Trump. Most of the country spent 2025 despairing of the future. The MAGA wave appeared to have the inexorable inevitability of a slow-motion avalanche, made worse by fears that the Supreme Court had been compromised by the same extremist dollars that put Trump in power.

Two-thirds of Americans fear that the MAGA juggernaut can’t be stopped. but our friends at the Heritage Society misjudged the situation. Enter Jeffrey Epstein, who built an empire based on sex-trafficking and sexually abusing women, including underage girls. Either Ailes and his friends at Heritage failed to realize the extent of Trump’s involvement with Epstein, or their arrogance convinced them that once in power they were invincible. Who could blame them after the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity for every despicable crime he committed in office?

Yesterday, the Department of Justice failed to meet the requirements of the November 19, 2025 law, which was passed with every member of the House of Representatives except one voting “Aye.” It required the release of literally every file and piece of information related to Epstein and everyone associated with his prosecution and conviction. The Trump administration is now involved in a coverup of horrific crimes that make Watergate look like a schoolyard brawl. The network of powerful, wealthy people who took part in these craven acts is desperate to hide their past actions.

Nixon might have gotten away with Watergate if not for the integrity of James McCord and the eighteen minutes erased from the Whtie House surveillance recordings. America dodged a potentially fatal bullet when Nixon resigned. The question we face today is whether Trump will, too. I believe his sycophants have seriously miscalculated. They believe that if they can prevent any evidence that Trump was directly involved in Epstein’s crimes from being released, the furor will die down before the midterm elections. They’re wrong.

An essential part of Trump’s base, without whom he never would have been elected are evangelists and other Christians (and non-Christians) who are strongly rooted in basic morality. They forgave his profane, amoral character because he promised to stack the courts with judges who would end abortion. They forgave misogyny, greed, and sociopathy. They will not forgive sex trafficking or pedophilia in any form, which brings us back to the idea of misprison.

Whether or not there is evidence that Trump was directly involved with those acts, he is almost certainly guilty of misprison of Epstein’s felonies. For decades, he was someone with a loud public voice who could have blown the whistle on Epstein’s activities. Instead, he has done and is still doing everything possible to distance himself from them and pretend he was never involved. It reminds me of the way H. G. Wells ended his novel, War of the Worlds. Just when all seems lost, and it appears that the invading Martians will destroy human civilization, they are defeated by microscopic organisms that Wells was happy to have his readers interpret as being saved by God.

Trump has lied to and misled religious Americans for ten years. He’ll live to regret that.

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When Will the Madness End?

Posted on December 16, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December, 16, 2025,

It’s been easy, these last eleven months, to blame Donald Trump for all the hate and divisiveness that has torn our country apart, but we also need to open our eyes and look clearly at how Americans have changed. Trump couldn’t have gotten where he is unless average Americans supported him. Most fair-minded people decry gerrymandering, but as awful as that practice is, it only affects legislative elections stratified by local districts. It has little or no effect on presidential elections. The two elections Trump won weren’t rigged. He was elected president, twice, simply because more Americans voted for him than either of the two women he defeated.

As even most of Trump’s supporters acknowledge that he’s not a very nice guy, and they cringe at the things that come out of his mouth and his social media postings, we keep asking, how could a narcissistic sociopath who is driven solely by greed and lust for power have become president twice? How could such a basically hateful, dishonest person be chosen to govern the most powerful country on the planet? How could the most powerful person in the world be someone who has no regard for truth, morality, or the people he claims to care so much about?

One conclusion is that the apparent enlightenment we attributed to American voters who elected a black president in 2008 was an illusion, a complete misreading of voters reacting to the serious blunders of the George W. Bush administration that dragged us into an unwinnable twenty-year war against radical Islam. It turned out that America hadn’t grown up, after all. The hatemongers, white supremacists, and greed-driven billionaire elitists simply went silent. Barack Obama’s election was a wake-up call for those who hated everything about FDR’s New Deal, who feared that their wealth might be used to fund a national health care system, and who believed only white males who masquerade as Christians are qualified to lead.

A combination of immigration and racially uneven birth rates would soon turn America into a majority non-white nation. To the closet bigots and ignorant Americans who soaked up MAGA’s venomous rhetoric, to intellectually lazy Americans who defaulted to right-wing influencers and bots in their social media rather that pursue facts, to everyone who were terrified by the notion that America was readily to governed by a progressive woman, regardless of her color, this was a catastrophe that had to be nipped in the bud. It took Trump’s cobra-like charisma to bring home the truth about how decadent we’d become.

That decadence now threatens to become the undoing of our republic, and time is running out for our currently leaderless opposition to right the ship. With growing evidence that we cannot rely on the Supreme Court to preserve the fundamental principles of our Constitution, and Trump’s power grabs expanding every day, the salvation of our democracy is once again in the hands of “we, the people.” With a Cabinet filled with sycophants, and a Congress populated by individuals who care more about Trump’s power to unseat them than the oath they took to protect the Constitution, the only thing that can stop this juggernaut of hate and self-destruction is the voice of the people.

That voice is obviously turning against Trump. The polls suggest that he has completely lost touch with non-aligned voters, and even among those who voted for him twice, his approval ratings are seriously underwater. Most Americans are horrified watching ICE evolve into a Gestapo-like secret police force, by an incompetent Secretary of Defense ordering attacks on civilian boats in international waters without consideration for the rule of law. We cringe at the way immigrant families are being destroyed and look the other way as federal troops marching through our cities begins to seem normal.

Trump is desperate approaching next year’s midterm elections. He has openly made it known that if he can’t guarantee maintaining a majority in Congress by gerrymandering and intimidation, he will find a way to nullify or cancel the 2026 election. If that is allowed to happen, the nation we thought we were growing up in is doomed.

Donald Trump is a very sick man and a very dangerous one, and it has fallen to us, the 350 million Americans who own this country to take him down before he destroys it. Lately, the winds of change have been getting stronger. Republicans in Congress are beginning to realize that every day, they look more like Putin’s Duma, a legislative body filled with invisible people who do nothing but rubber-stamp everything their autocratic leader demands.

They have a chance, this week, as Trump and his DOJ fight desperately to hide the president’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking and pedophilia, to stand up for what’s right. Trump is not invincible. All it takes is courage to end this madness. If they lack what it takes, it will be up to us, democracy’s last line of defense, next November, to replace them with people who will.

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The Undoing of a Wannabe Autocrat

Posted on November 20, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 20, 2025

I recently had an opportunity to hear a couple of political historians speak about autocratic-leaning leaders and how to deal with them. After studying the rise and fall of autocrats, they found that autocrats inevitably failed, and they all committed the same basic errors that led to their undoing. One can argue that the Internet, influencer bots, and an environment that allows anyone to say anything they want to without fear of retribution might yield a different result, today, but they concluded that Donald Trump is committing every error that destroyed people like him in the past.

Chief among them is the need to be surrounded by sycophants, and its dangerous corollary, a tendency to shoot messengers who deliver bad news. A close second is treating loyalty as a one-way street: autocrats who turn on supporters and colleagues at the first hint of disloyalty, creating a black and white world of allies and enemies. In the autocrat’s eyes, no one else exists. Anyone who does not consistently deliver unquestioned loyalty is an enemy.

The idea of wannabe dictators surrounding themselves with advisors who are terrified of telling them anything they don’t want to hear has long been a component of conventional wisdom, but that doesn’t seem to prevent them from making the same error again and again. They forget that people whose loyalty depends on a reign of terror are not their friends. That Trump behaves this way without exception is one of his most predictable and unpopular attributes. Even his loyal supporters cringe at the obvious, constant lies, distortions, fantasies, and slander that issue from his mouth and keyboard.

It has been reliably reported ever since Trump took power again, that the appearance of unified, unbreakable support was an illusion held together by threats and innuendos. We hear from journalists and insiders that Trump is roundly despised and viewed as crazy and irresponsible by a significant majority of Congress and foreign leaders. A situation like that is unstable, one in which resentment, anger, and frustration fester and grow. It’s worsened by the success of Trump’s divide-and-conquer politics, and an insider network that detects every hint of disloyalty, which is defined as anything that doesn’t follow the party line of talking points verbatim. Pressure builds, with the ranks of the disgruntled ever increasing, with secret pockets of resistance waiting to pounce at the first sign of a crack the leader’s invincibility.

Another typical failure is tone-deafness. Trump is hardly a new phenomenon. All wannabe autocrats are insufferably narcissistic, which is another way of saying they are sociopaths incapable of feeling empathy. No matter how clever and charismatic they are, their failure to understand how other people feel, and their need to see every decision as binary (you’re either with us or against us, as George W. Bush told the Arab world after nine-eleven,) invariably blinds them to what ultimately takes them down.

We’re seeing that happening before our eyes, today. What looked like a solid wall of rabid followers and supporters is fracturing, because Trump is incapable of understanding what he’s doing wrong, and his advisors, who have tied their own political futures to him, won’t tell him the truth. Do you wonder, why his loyalists defend his lies, accept his support of genocide in Gaza and buy his false notion that he has any influence over Vladimir Putin when it’s obvious that Putin mocks and manipulates him? Do you wonder why they allow him to pursue his racist, misogynist policies and destroy the lives of immigrants families whether they are American citizens or illegals fleeing from oppression, but somehow the Epstein files scandal completely changed the narrative?

The explanation is simple, so obvious it’s shocking that Trump and his advisors didn’t see it until it was too late. Trump panders to everyone, which means he’s lying to most of them. One of his most effective political weapons was pandering to evangelists and other Christians with the promise to end abortion. That was so crucial to their support they were willing to overlook his lack of moral center, his disgusting behavior, and his obvious greed-driven lust for power. But once Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court reversed Rowe v. Wade, there was no longer a single unifying issue that guaranteed their support.

However we might feel about Trump’s base, a large portion of them are devout Christians. What Trump missed is that of all the despicable things he does and supports, the one thing that group will never tolerate is pedophilia. That’s what the Epstein crisis is about, and Trump made another potentially fatal error. I am not suggesting that Trump is guilty of having sex with underage girls. But Trump believes that if there’s no clear evidence of that in the Epstein files, or if there is, that Pam Bondi will find a way to redact it, and therefore, he’s in the clear, but he’s completely missing the point.

Whether Trump is guilty or  not, it’s obvious that his claim that he had no idea what Epstein was doing is a lie. Of course he knew. He knew that Epstein was responsible for a vile network of despicable sex crimes involving children and he did nothing to stop it. A man with Trump’s ego who feels as powerful as he does cannot claim impotence in such matters. He was an influencer, someone people listened to, but he chose to remain silent and God only knows what else. It’s equally obvious that his basic misogyny deafens him to the cries of the victims who demand justice.

These are things for which much of his loyal base will never forgive him once it’s clear that he had a unique opportunity to speak out or report what he knew to law enforcement. When his Christian base asks why he looked the other way, he won’t have an answer.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene

Posted on November 16, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 16, 2025

In a wide-ranging interview on CNN, this morning, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, “humbly apologized” to the American people for her role in the divisive, hateful politics that’s been a hallmark of the MAGA movement. Long one of Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters, to whom she donated, in her words, “millions of my own dollars,” she is now persona non grata with the White House. Greene criticized the president for ignoring his promises to his supporters to lower prices and focus on domestic priorities, saying she told Trump the country would be better off if he left Air Force One parked on the runway at Andrews, and focused on the needs of Americans.

But the issue that caused the split was the Epstein files. Greene believes the victims are entitled to justice and that it’s wrong to allow wealthy, powerful people to get away with sex trafficking and underage rape. She stopped short of accusing Trump of committing such acts himself, but said that given his close friendship with Epstein, the public deserves complete transparency. She suggested that it’s clear that there is a massive coverup underway, but said it’s not clear what that’s about.

Sounding like a converted sinner, she said America needs to come together and stop the hate and divisiveness. As someone who has routinely criticized Greene for her participation in all of Trump’s hate-mongering, I was happy to hear her contrition. If she’s sincere, it could be a major step toward salvaging our democracy from the fascists running Trump’s Cabinet. She said nothing like that, but I have to wonder, now that she’s the victim of Trump’s vitriol, and she believes her life is being threatened indirectly, the same way hate radicalized someone to murder Charlie Kirk, what she really thinks of Trump.

I won’t speculate on whether Greene was being truthful, other than to say she was impressive. Better to let events play out and see. She said she was setting an example for her MAGA colleagues, and since she knew speaking out would make her a target for Trump’s hatred, I believe that. One thing she did not say, however, was that speaking out against Trump, along with people like Thomas Massie (R-KY) is providing cover by setting an example of courage for her Republican House Caucus. It’s a cliché that there’s no truer believer than a convert. It’s also a cliché that unlikely heroes are always waiting in the wings until circumstances bring them to the fore. I’d love to believe that’s what I witnessed, this morning.

If we take Representative Greene at her word, this may be the moment most of us have been waiting for. By any objective measure, the only thing the Trump administration has accomplished was intimidating Congress into passing the overwhelmingly unpopular “Big, Beautiful Bill” that made the massive tax cuts for billionaires permanent while killing or greatly reducing programs that actually help Americans or protect the planet. Historians and political scientists who have studied authoritarian regimes and wannabe dictators like Trump, have understood since day one that he would likely be responsible for his own undoing. The questions were how much permanent damage the nation would suffer until then and whether his attempts to emulate Adolf Hitler had any chance of succeeding. They also understood that the monolith that MAGA seemed to have become was only as strong as its weakest links, and that once dominoes began falling, the movement would be reduced to a bunch of back bench extremists.

There are clear signs that that may be occurring. The 2025 elections, which saw sweeping victories by Democrats and the defeat of every candidate or position Trump supported, was the first indication. The Supreme Court testimony on Trump’s tariffs was another, dispelling the fear that the Court, too, would be intimidated into supporting everything Trump did. And yesterday, the Indiana legislature told Trump that they had no interest in redistricting the state as Trump demanded.

Even the dimmest of Trump’s supporters understand that his claims that foreign countries would pay his tariffs was a lie, as was his promise to end inflation as soon as he took office. And now Trump has to admit it publicly, as he did in his desperate attempt to convince the Court not to rule his tariffs were illegal. His principal defense seemed to be that the Government would have to refund about $200 billion to American companies and individuals who have been paying the tariffs throughout 2025, and that that would create a national security risk. Don’t even bother to seek the logic in that – there isn’t any.

I sense a wave of optimism in my very purple county in Maryland that I haven’t seen since the 2024 election. I feel it too. This nightmare will end with Constitution intact.

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Trump’s Fracturing Base

Posted on November 15, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 15, 2025

A year ago, the Trump-driven MAGA machine felt indomitable. The threats Trump made during the transition from Biden to his second term screamed of a President who intended to flood the zone with policies that would increase presidential power at the expense of every check and balance in our Constitution. His Cabinet would be filled with people from the Heritage Society, who wrote Project 2025, and loyal sycophants who had sworn to support every crazy thing he did.

MAGA cheered. The anarchists in Qanon, if in fact they exist, and every elected official who ever stood up to Trump or supported his impeachments would be targets of what Trump himself referred to as a revenge tour. It was frighteningly similar to the cult-like response of his followers to his loss to Joe Biden in 2020. The blind loyalty of the thousands of people who participated in or abetted the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol seemed fully intact as Trump bragged that he would be a dictator on Day 1 of his second term. It was the fervor usually found in lynch mobs, only this time they were coming after our democracy.

To the groups that comprise MAGA, it sounded wonderful. Under Trump’s leadership they would finally reap the rewards they deserved after being suppressed by radical left media, socialists, communists, and generally, everyone Trump hated, which was equivalent to anyone who dared to oppose him. The Kool Aid they drank convinced them that they were all victims, that their failures or lack of wealth, their failed marriages and dysfunctional children were all the fault of Democrats. It was time to get even.

If they couldn’t kill the bastards, at least they could bankrupt and imprison them. And all those nasty countries who, like China have been undermining our wealth and standing in the world – the U. K., Canada, France, Germany, Denmark, and half of Central and South America – would be punished with tariffs that would result in billions of dollars in MAGA supporters’ wallets. Inflation would be vanquished, wars would be ended, and the world’s most dangerous autocrats, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, would bend the knee to King Donald. The delusional in MAGA viewed it as the second coming, a righteous if totally disingenuous Christian revolution. Too bad, it turned out to be Satan eating their souls and converting them into wealth for Trump and his billionaire friends.

Trump’s base has had ten months to see how his promises turned out. The Democratic sweep in the elections, two weeks ago, showed that virtually every Independent who voted for Trump in 2024, and most of the Hispanic voters who thought Trump might improve their lives, have turned against him. Without them, Trump’s base does not command anything close to a majority.

But what about the True Blue MAGAs? They still needed to feed their families and put gas in their cars, especially since Trump has done his best to trash the electric car market (essentially handing it to China) as well as most renewable energy initiatives, like the wind farm off the coast of New England. New England virtually defines the opposition to Trump – it’s consistently blue all the way down to Virginia. His MAGA base, for all their bravado, don’t want to see their sons and daughters caught up in new wars, and even hard core haters have to be cringing at the sight of Palestinian civilians being killed and starved, and Russia, with Trump’s blessing, virtually destroying Ukraine.

MAGA supporters must wonder how far Trump will go if no one stops him from attacking Venezuelan boats and murdering civilians because they’re suspected of smuggling drugs (the same drugs his former mafia friends got rich selling to addicted Americans) without any regard for international law or due process.

Many in Trump’s base have had enough. Congress is showing signs of re-asserting its Constitutional role, and with the growing scandal around the Epstein files, and the specter of a Sodom and Gomorrah-like cesspool of immorality within their ranks, they’re starting to have buyers’ remorse. Thus, former powerful supporters who voted with Trump nearly 100% of the time signed the discharge petition that would force the release of everything the government knows about who was involved in the trafficking of prostitutes and underage girls, some reportedly as young as junior high schoolers.

People like Kentucky’s Thomas Massie and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene have made it clear that they want the perpetrators revealed and prosecuted, no matter which party they support. Greene asserted that she does not worship Donald Trump, and political observers expect the discharge petition vote, which Trump is frantically attempting to derail, to succeed by a two-to-one margin with over a hundred Republicans defecting.

With the likelihood that the Supreme Court will rule that most of Trump’s tariff decisions were illegal, necessitating the return of all monies collected to the American businesses and individuals who paid them, even Trump’s most loyal followers can see that Emperor Donald is buck naked. Once the bubble of Trump’s invincibility breaks, so will the dominance of MAGA. The threat to our republic is still serious, but the inevitable destruction of our democracy seems far less likely today than it did a few months ago.

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Fire Starters Sometimes Get Burned

Posted on November 14, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 14, 2025

The playbook written by disgraced lawyer and consigliere, Roy Cohn, who died in federal prison, was essentially about starting fires. Fires, among other things, are effective distractions. The more fires you start the more chaos and confusion you create. Start as many fires as you can, so many that your opposition can’t possibly fight them all, and the ones they can will stretch their resources. Create so much confusion that no one can tell truth from fiction, and delay every legal proceeding as long as possible. If innocent people get hurt (or dead) along the way, that only adds to the chaos.

That’s the strategy Cohn used to keep mobsters out of prison for decades and the lesson Donald Trump learned in the 1980s and 90s, when his friends were mafia dons and other criminals like Jeffrey Epstein. Think about it – his friends were murderers, rapists, pedophiles, traffickers, and prostitutes. He was tutored in how to evade inconvenient laws, regulations, and convictions by Cohn, himself. And that strategy is the basic operating plan for Project 2025 which drives everything the current Trump administration does.

But that strategy is not without risk. If the fires they start get out of control, they might burn everything down both physically and metaphorically. More importantly, the more fires they start the more likely they are to get burned, themselves.

Trump started two conflagrations before the election. He claimed his tariffs would make America rich, and all Americans would benefit. As anyone reading this already sees whenever they purchase anything, it’s not working out that way; none of the “deals” Trump claims credit for have done anything to lower prices or put money in average people’s pockets.

The second huge blaze was arresting and deporting immigrants with criminal records. The objective sounded good and righteous, but the execution was something else. Stephen Miller, a Trump sycophant who was never elected to anything, decided that ICE had to fulfill quotas that would result in a million deportations this year. Does anyone believe that besides entering our country illegally, there are a million immigrants living here who are criminals? A thousand? The reality is that nearly all the arrests have been of people with no criminal records. They have torn families, communities, and major cities apart. It’s deliberate, wanton mayhem that is an international embarrassment.

Trump claims he ended seven wars (do you have any idea who was fighting whom?) and would end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza on his first day in office. Nearly ten months later, Gaza is in ruins, because Trump gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check and turned a blind eye to what most of the world, including half of Israel, views as genocide. And after publicly wooing Vladimir Putin like a lovesick teenager, only to have Putin humiliate him repeatedly in front of the entire world, Russia is now pounding Ukraine mercilessly, recklessly killing civilians and destroying vital infrastructure in major cities as winter approaches. When was the last time you heard Trump mention Ukraine?

There were many other blazes aimed at undoing the principles and institutions on which on republic rests. Attacking law firms that Trump perceived as too liberal, extorting major universities to bring their education agendas in line with MAGA philosophy, ignoring court orders, emasculating Congress, using the Justice Department as a tool of political revenge, and threatening the sovereignty of other nations. And presently, bringing the United States to the brink of war with Venezuela and murdering the crews of boats leaving that country without any consideration of laws or due process.

And now the piece de resistance, the growing firestorm over the Epstein files. One fire too many, even for MAGA. Trump attacked and alienated so many people, he’s lost track of who his enemies really are. By courting evangelists and other right-wing extremists with his disingenuous claims of trying to create a white Christian America, Trump lost sight of the fact that many of his supporters include deeply religious people with moral centers, things Trump cannot relate to except as transactional tactics.

Trump badly miscalculated his base’s reaction to pedophilia. The possibility that the Epstein files might implicate Trump in the grooming and rape of underage girls, or that he was fully aware of what Epstein was doing, but chose to look the other way, is something much of his base will not ignore.

The lesson: if you start enough fires, you’ll eventually go up in smoke. The fact that many sources are predicting at least a hundred House Republications intend to vote for full release of the Epstein files over the frantic, desperate demands of the president, and the Senate’s refusal to obey Trump’s order to end the filibuster clearly demonstrate that the Democrats’ waiting game of letting Trump run wild until he hangs himself may be bearing fruit. Trump is not invulnerable.

Perhaps Americans will once again rise up in defense of the values we were raised with and turn Trump into a lame duck before the first year of his term is over. Maybe we really are the good guys, after all. Maybe the sun will rise tomorrow.

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Did Eight Senators Save the Country or Sell It Out?

Posted on November 12, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendelll, November 12, 2025

The eight Democratic Senators who voted with Republicans to end the government shutdown all had heartfelt reasons for their decisions. But they’re politicians, and one thing we can be sure of is that every career politician has prepared a list of excuses for every decision they might have to defend.

Tim Kayne claimed he did it for the many federal workers in Virginia, to assure that Donald Trump cannot fire them during the shutdown. I’m not clear how that benefits those workers, however. If Kayne’s vote helps end the shutdown, the issue is instantly moot.

As a former federal employee, I lived and worked through several shutdowns, including both Ronald Reagan’s draconian attempt to reduce the federal work force and budget, and the Y2K debacle. We faced the same threats every time, but neither I nor any other federal employee lost their job or a single dollar of salary during any of the shutdowns, and people who were supposed to be on leave during that time had that “unused” leave restored to their accounts, even though they didn’t work during the shutdowns. No Congress is going to anger millions of voters of both parties when a simple vote can avoid it.

New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen’s primary issue was Obamacare premium subsidies, without which millions of families will not be able to pay for health insurance. But in the end she decided to accept a pledge from Majority Leader John Thune that the Senate would vote on those subsidies in December rather than hold out for a better deal.

I believe that after saving our democracy from Trump, Americans’ ability to acquire health insurance is presently our nation’s highest priority. As I and many others have noted, the only reason health care wasn’t included the First Amendment is that there wasn’t any real health care in 1789, an oversight long overdue for correction. We’re the only major industrialized nation that doesn’t assure basic health care for all its citizens. Beyond that, I’d ask Senator Shaheen if she trusts that Thune’s promise has merit. Will Republican Senators be free to vote their consciences, or will they be whipped into line by threats from the White House?

Illinois’ Dick Durbin used fully restoring SNAP payments as his excuse, the weakest argument I’ve heard. The courts are already engaged in that battle, ordering the president to direct OMB Director Russell Vought to release the funds already appropriated by Congress. Trump’s defiance of the court’s orders is appalling, but that battle is between Trump and the Judiciary, not Congress. We all decry political decisions that treat child nutrition as acceptable collateral damage, especially in light of Trump’s assertion that he want’s America to be a Christian nation.

Both Shaheen and Durbin are leaving the Senate next year, which many people suggest is why they had the courage to undermine their party’s stand against MAGA principles. Most Americans think standing up to Trump is where they should have invested that courage.  When you’re involved in an existential fight for the future of the republic, after a power-mad president like Trump has created so many hardships for Americans, collateral damage is a foregone conclusion, and any suggestion that the Democrats are responsible for families going hungry is absurd. These Senators were simply wrong.

Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire was another who justified her vote by the need to restore federal food assistance, while Maine’s Angus King thought accepting Thune’s promise of a health care subsidy vote was a better option than using the shutdown as a negotiating tool. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen of Nevada were clearly influenced by the air traffic controller madness which might have potentially crippled holiday air transportation during the holidays, consequently trashing Nevada’s tourist economy. And finally, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman lamented over SNAP payments and federal workers not being paid. Nonsense!

Because the Trump administration has set an example of lack of transparency for the rest of the government, we really don’t know what John Thune promised the Democratic turncoats. It’s no secret that many Republican Senators and nearly 80% of Americans support affordable health care. Will the vote Thune promised be an honest reflection of what every Senator believes, or is the promise as empty as the bigger, better health plan Trump has dangled for ten years, without offering even a rough outline of how it would work?

I believe what drove this compromise was the growing anger and chaos created by flight reductions. That issue hits people where they feel it: disrupted holiday plans, canceled and delayed cargo flights that carry all manner of consumer goods and packages. MAGA can marginalize hungry children and unpaid workers, and they can use deceptive tactics to avoid the transfer of wealth that subsidized health care represents, but make people afraid of flying or prevent timely deliveries of millions of products, and they might have a revolution on their hands.

There is a huge risk that caving to MAGA to end the shutdown may have removed the last major obstacle to implementing Project 2025, and dismantling the safeguards built into our Constitution.

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Voters Still Have a Voice

Posted on November 5, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 5, 2025

The Democrats and everyone else who abhors Trumpism scored a great victory yesterday. It was the best outcome they could have hoped for. It sent a clear message that voters who are not extreme ideologues see through the charade that is Donald Trump. The less clear message is that despite yesterday’s success, this was only one battle, and the challenges of the next twelve months until the 2026 midterm elections are daunting.

Drawing on personal experience, the best way I can describe what Americans who care about preserving our Constitution are facing is that it’s like deciding you need to lose forty pounds after years of abusing your body, and waking up one morning to find that you’ve shed ten pounds. You’re elated until the reality sinks in that you still have thirty stubborn pounds to go.

Virginia has been a purple state since the turn of the century, but Abigail Spanberger won the Governor’s race by fifteen points. That’s the definition of a landslide victory, which in part was a reaction to outgoing Governor Glenn Youngkin’s commitment to MAGA. Does that mean Virginia is now blue? No. It means that Virginia, which is home to 300,000 federal employees and twenty-seven military  bases including the Pentagon, Quantico, and Norfolk, and more than 600,000 veterans are angry about Trump’s attempts to dismantle the federal government and his view of the proper role of the military. It also means independents and moderates of both parties are furious with Republicans’ attempts to make Obamacare so expensive that most of the nearly 400,000 Virginians who rely on health insurance through the Affordable Care Act will not be able to afford the premiums. And then there are those nasty food stamps.

In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill won the governorship by thirteen points, not quite a landslide, but highly significant in that it reversed gains made by Trump in 2024. That’s extremely important, because the 2024 gains in reliably blue New Jersey threw a real scare into fans of democracy. It’s also extremely important that both Sherrill and Spanberger are women who outperformed Kamala Harris’ 2024 results. Does that mean America is ready to embrace a woman as president in 2028? No, but it silences those who are certain a woman can’t win. Not only is Spanberger the first woman ever elected Governor of Virginia, but Ghazala Hashmi, who won the Lieutenant Governor’s race by eleven points is the first Muslim woman to win statewide office in Virginia.

As a former New Yorker, I am as shocked as anyone that Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist Muslim won a mandate-level victory in New York CIty’s mayoral race. One could argue that after the scandals incurred by outgoing mayor Eric Adams and the fact that Mamdani’s strongest opposition came from Andrew Cuomo who resigned as Governor in the midst of a sexual harassment scandal made Mamdani’s victory easy. But that would be naïve.

Mamdani ran a a grass roots campaign that addressed the most important issues New Yorkers have lived with for a century. Most people simply can’t afford to live in New York. The city kept kicking its housing crisis down the road with tactics like rent control, but it was clear to many New Yorkers that the status quo was unsustainable. Whether Mamdani can deliver on promises like affordable housing and free public transportation remains to be seen, but he demonstrated that focusing on those issues wins elections.

To reinforce Mamdani’s victory, Trump threatened that all but the minimum necessary federal assistance will be withheld from New York, including a transit tunnel under the Hudson River that is critical to easing congestion in the city. And since Mamdani’s election was a clear rebuke of Trump, the president immediately posted on Truth Social that the election must have been rigged.

California voters spoke, too. While Trump has made California the symbol of every progressive idea he despises, there has always been a strong minority conservative streak in California politics. While it’s not surprising that voters approved Governor Gavin Newsom’s redistricting map in response to Trump pressuring every red state to maximize gerrymanding for the 2026 election, a margin of victory of two-to-one sends a powerful message. Average Americans, regardless of their politics, are horrified by the way ICE is approaching  our immigration crisis, looking more every day like the embryo of an American Gestapo. And Trump’s use of the military in Los Angeles galvanized California and every other state Trump threatened with military occupation.

Yesterday’s elections were a clear wake up call – to Republicans, that Trump’s autocratic leanings and attacks on our Constitution are not invulnerable, and to Democrats that it’s time to select a charismatic leader and start fighting Trumpism at every turn. They have a long way to go before they can justify feeling optimistic, but there’s no longer any excuse to roll over and play dead.

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Elections (2025 and 2026)

Posted on November 3, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 3, 2025

For several months, there has been growing speculation throughout both social and traditional media about the 2026 midterm elections. Donald Trump, just a few days ago in Asia, was still denying that he lost the 2020 election, and he has launched an all-out campaign demanding that red states gerrymander their voting districts to minimize chances of Democrats winning seats in the House. His trolling about a third term is probably no more than that – Trump is famous for creating chaos by threatening to do outrageous things – but it’s clear that whether or not everything he says can be taken seriously, he is obsessed with elections and landslides that exist only in his mind.

Back in February, when Elon Musk was using a chain saw to hack up federal agencies, Democratic icon James Carville predicted two specific things about tomorrow’s elections. The first was that by November 4th, Trump’s popularity would tank to its lowest levels, and news services, today, reported that his approval rating is twenty-six points under water, (63% disapproval versus 37% approval,) and voters polled said they had more confidence in Democrats to manage our economy by 61% to 39%. Carville’s second prediction, more than eight months ago, was that tomorrow’s gubernatorial election in Virginia would be a powerful refutation of Trump himself and Project 2025.

Virginia has been hovering over the purple line that separates blue and red states for two decades, and outgoing Governor Glen Youngkin was a strong MAGA supporter. Many who oppose MAGA feared that Youngkin’s election in 2022 meant Virginia had swung red again, a warning sign that Trumpism was growing in strength. Carville, who believes elections turn on how average people see their own lives being affected – remember “It’s the Economy, Stupid?” – recognized that northern Virginia is home to about 150,000 federal employees and at least 100,000 veterans who were angry that Trump wasn’t keeping his promises to address veterans’ issues. He predicted a backlash against Trump’s attempt to disassemble the federal government and  ignore the problems of veterans who suffered severe psychological damage in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that a Democratic win in Virginia would be the inflection point that reversed MAGA’s momentum.

It’s not a stretch to say that tomorrow’s elections are a partial referendum on Trump’s second term. Not least is whether California voters will pass Proposition 50 which would temporarily redistrict the state to favor Democrats in response to Trump’s actions. But it’s important to note that the red states who answered Trump’s call needed only to take legislative action to redistrict, while California and other blue states required affirmation from voters. Texas’ redistricting required only the votes of a bright red legislature. Tomorrow, as food stamp recipents struggle to feed their families, we’ll see what voters think.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has mounted the only public Trump resistance campaign in the country, making tomorrow’s vote about the dependence of the state’s economy on immigrants and the likely unconstitutional use of the military in Los Angeles. However the vote goes, it will be difficult to deny that it was really about Trump demonizing every state and city that refuses to bend the knee to him.

There’s no way to tell whether a few victories, tomorrow, including the near-certain win by a socialist Muslim as Mayor iof New York, will turn the tide for Democrats, who have done an excellent imitation of the red carpets Trump likes to walk on all this year. Will a leader other than Newsom emerge who is willing to take up the mantle of defender of our democracy? If the specter of attacking boats in international waters based on unproved suspicions of drug-running, or threatening to invade other countries doesn’t wake up the Democrats, they deserve to go down in flames. The problem is that if they do they might take the entire country with them. As of today, Trump is on record as threatening the sovereignty of Canada, Mexico, Greenland, (and by implication, Denmark,) Venezuela, and Nigeria. The president who brags about ending seven wars no one was even aware of and demanding the Nobel Peace Prize would wantonly start five new ones without the benefit of Congressional approval as the Constitution requires.

In reality, tomorrow’s elections are only a dress rehearsal. Trump, who has no filters and even less respect for the rule of law, will stop at nothing to dominate the midterms. If it looks like he’s going to lose Congress, all indications are that he will find some pretext, some phony emergency and use it as a basis for postponing the midterm elections or using military presence to intimidate voters the way his idol Vladimir Putin does. Far too many Americans fear the country being under martial law by this time next near.

Angry, fearful Americans have been waiting on the sidelines, hoping the Supreme Court would save them from Trump. It’s time to re-engage.

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Our Changing Relationship with Canada

Posted on October 26, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 26, 2025

I have a cherished photograph taken in 1944, of my father and my favorite uncle, looking sharp in their U. S. Army infantry uniforms. I always loved that picture when I was a kid, but there was something I never understood about it until many years later. My uncle was Canadian. Why was he wearing an American army uniform? I naively assumed he had come to the States and enlisted as a romantic, patriotic, not to say courageous gesture, and I grew up believing our solidarity with Canada was unshakable. (I only learned as an adult that my uncle had been born in Brooklyn, but he grew up in Alberta.)

Apparently, most of America felt as I did during and after World War II. Futurists and sci-fi writers in the sixties and seventies frequently predicted that our nations would eventually merge into a single North American confederation, and I was all on board with that notion. It seemed like a match made in heaven. Clichés and silliness aside, in all the times I’ve been in Canada, I literally never met a Canadian who wasn’t “nice.” That includes an RCMP officer who pulled me over for speeding in British Columbia, then spent fifteen minutes helping my wife and me map a scenic route through the Canadian Rockies.

My love affair with Canada grew teeth when my wife and I took a road trip from New York to Quebec and Montreal, in 1966. It flourished, when we moved to the Seattle suburb of Bellevue in 1974, where we frequently engaged with families from Vancouver, BC and many of our neighbors were Canadians who worked for Boeing.

The first chink in that romantic fantasy occurred a few years later, when Washington State and federal officials announced plans to raise Ross Dam, which provided massive amounts of hydroelectric power to Seattle. The problem was that raising the dam would also raise Ross Lake, which would result in flooding a thousand square miles of BC farmland. When Canadians raised the issue, I was appalled at the callous reaction on our side of the border. No one cared.

A lot older and at least a little wiser, I couldn’t believe my ears when Donald Trump, early in his first term, attacked Canada for allegedly trying to bankrupt Wisconsin dairy farmers. Of course, that was typical Trump hyperbole, seizing on an economic competition that had been going on for decades, and turning it into divisive, hate-filled rhetoric. Against Canada, our staunchest and most reliable ally in the world? In his second term, Trump has vilified Canada more than any other nation except China, simply because they wouldn’t accept his ambition to be Emperor of North America.

Trump began this unsolicited fight by claiming Canada has been ripping off the United States since World War II, and he would punish them with tariffs. Then he decided that Canada, a nation comprised of ten provinces and three territories that is rich in critical rare earth minerals, and whose total area is ninety percent of the United States’ should become our fifty-first state.

I have been communicating with Canadian friends during Trump’s tenure, and what they’ve told me surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. It always helps to see the other side’s point of view. While we see Trump’s attacks on Canada the same way as everything else he attacks – one massive extortion game after another – my Canadian friends don’t see it that way. Nearly eighty percent of Canadians want to move their trade relationships away from the U. S. toward Europe and Asia. That didn’t surprise me, but what did was their reason. What Trump accomplished was making Canadians painfully aware of how one-sided their dependency on the United States is, which they now see as a threat to their sovereignty. Even out of the mouth of Donald Trump sometimes comes wisdom, however inadvertently.

Last week, the government of Ontario released a 1987 video of Ronald Reagan explaining to Americans that tariffs are the worst possible way to manage an economy as part of his pitch for open markets, which Republicans pushed hard for the next thirty years. You can watch the speech here: https://nyti.ms/477ySrI. Ontario paid to run the video as a commercial during World Series games between Toronto and Los Angeles. Trump threw a tantrum and slapped an additional ten percent tariff on Canadian products.

The Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992 and 1993. Both times, the American president, first Republican George H. W. Bush, then Democrat Bill Clinton, invited them to visit the White House and both times they accepted. I’m sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to see what happens if Toronto wins this time, or even if they lose. Will Trump let his irrational anger at Canada govern his actions? It would be true to form for him to issue an Executive Order requiring all MLB teams to be based in the United States, just out of spite, one more item in Trump’s politics of the absurd.

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