Total War

Posted on July 21, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 21, 2026

New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall quoted George Washington University political historian Matthew Dallek’s summary of the Trump administration this morning. If you’re wondering why we’re involved in a war that’s spinning out of control and our economy is spiraling downward while your cost of living is spiraling upward, Dallek’s response explains: “Governing via conspiracy theories, personal whim and wish-casting, Trump has taken his place as the most consistently inept president of this century…the administration’s culture is dominated by incompetence.”

How else can we explain initiating a war with a highly sophisticated, determined enemy (Iran is nothing like Venezuela) with no real game plan except bombing military assets and expecting complete surrender in a month? How else can we explain ignored intelligence estimates that predicted Iran would use the Strait of Hormuz as a weapon that would affect the entire global economy? How else can we explain that the war Trump claimed was a total victory in April is escalating daily and dangerously approaching a point of no return?

Dallek simply stated what most of us understood from the start. Governing according to the whims of a dangerously incompetent narcissist couldn’t possibly lead to anything good, and so far, it has cost us seventeen lives and more than 400 injuries to American military personnel. It has cost us a complete disaffection from Europe and NATO, strengthened Russia’s position in Ukraine, and seriousy hurt farmers and Americans who had to pay for Trump’s ego-generated, illegal tariffs.

After embarrassing himself and every American who was watching at the World Cup medal ceremony and having Iran, whose military Trump claimed had been destroyed, declare it is now involved in “total war” with the United States, a frustrated Trump lashed out (again) at Canada, the staunchest ally we’ve had for over a century. This time Trump’s claims go beyond the absurd to the ridiculous. He’s imposing a 50% tariff on Canada because smoke from wildfires in northern Ontario is polluting American cities with “filthy air.”

As Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford responded, when American wildfires spread clouds of smoke across North America, Canada responded by sending hundreds of firefighters, aircraft, and other firefighting equipment to help extinguish them. Global News reported that Canada assisted in fighting the California wildfires in 2020and 2025 and in 2000, when fires raged from Texas to Montana, Canada sent more than 1,200 personnel to assist.

This is madness of the worst kind. Trump continues to undermine everything he touches, and America is weaker for it every day he remains in office. Things got much worse, today, when Iran activated its Houthi allies in Yemen to blockade the southern approach to the Red Sea. The move was directly intended to hurt Saudi Arabia, a sometime ally of the United States which is a sworn enemy of the Iranian regime – the enemy of my enemy is my friend?

But a look at a map of the Red Sea reveals something far more ominous. A successful blockade of the Red Sea would effectively shut down the Suez Canal, affecting worldwide shipping, reducing the global flow of oil by an additional seven percent, and severely damaging Egypt’s economy. It also threatens to involve all the countries that border the Red Sea in Trump’s war with Iran. That makes seventeen nations that could all be firing drones and missiles at each other within days.

All of this is the result of Trump’s incompetent decision making and leadership. He has repeatedly said he has the power to do anything he wants as president, which means he will continue to run amok until someone or something stops him. The body best positioned to do that is the United States Senate, which has two golden opportunities before it. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asserted that the U. S. military will run out of funding for the war in August, and they’re asking the Senate to approve an additional $87 billion to fund continued the escalation.

Republican Senators have two opportunities to demonstrate that they care more about the American people and our declining relationships with the rest of the world than loyalty to an insane president with autocratic ambitions. They can refuse to fund the war unless Trump abides by his constitutional responsibilities to obtain Congressional approval and they can revisit the War Powers Resolution they passed and then revoked when Trump called key Senators traitors.

If the Senate fails to do its job and impose limits on Trump’s war powers (the Supreme Court has already curtailed his authority to levy tariffs) the consequences for all Americans could be dire. As the Iran war expands and becomes more dangerous, Trump’s prospects for the midterm elections worsen. As his desperation grows, what will he do next? Declare a state of emergency and cancel the election?

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An Insane President and a Cowardly Congress

Posted on July 20, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 20, 2026

It must be clear by now to everyone who isn’t being criminally enriched by Trump and his cronies that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the United States and the world. Until now, the potential nightmare scenario of the Trump administration’s legacy has been shrouded in rhetoric, opinion, and bluster. But Trump appears to be heading down a road we all feared he would take, and only bold, immediate action by Congress can avert a global catastrophe.

Trump’s very obvious mental illness is on display in his conduct of the Iran war. Only a narcissistic incompetent could have let himself be drawn into a war with no endgame by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a war Netanyahu unsuccessfully attempted to sell to Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Those presidents rejected it because they believed their intelligence experts that its intended goals were unachievable, and that if prosecuted, it could easily spiral out of control.

Instead, the Obama administration in concert with nearly twenty other nations negotiated a deal with Iran to stop their production of enriched uranium, which if allowed to continue, would have created an untenable threat of nuclear war. That threat exists even more so today as Iran’s hardliners and Trump’s need to win at any cost are expanding the war. Not for the first time, Trump is crossing the line defining war crimes as he orders attacks on water supplies and power plants in a region where those things are necessary to the survival of millions of civilians.

Add that to his relentless pursuit of a coup that would replace our republic with a fascist oligarchy, and subjugate the rights of women and people of color, and the threat to America’s future is undeniable. The 100,000 people who booed Trump at yesterday’s World Cup final got that, and the entire world saw and heard their response on live television. Knowing Trump’s ego as we do, he had to have left Met Life stadium humiliated and enraged, more determined than ever to compromise the midterm elections, so he can retain power.

Consider this irony. When Iran’s counterstrikes against American assets in our allied countries in the Persian Gulf region killed three American service people, Trump and his equally irrational Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, treated their deaths as a call to more violent military action, as though Iran had committed an unthinkable war crime. But when Trump’s Gestapo-like police force, ICE, killed three innocent civilians on the streets of American cities, Trump referred to those deaths as just rewards for criminal acts committed by illegal aliens, despite the fact that all three were innocent victims of Trump’s push toward white supremacy.

Here’s another. The war began as the United States and Israel launched unprovoked strikes against Iran despite both nations’ security professionals’ assessments that Iran presented no immediate threat to its neighbors, and by all acounts from international inspectors, Iran was abiding by the deal it agreed to more than ten years ago. We were told the conflict would last four to six weeks, the evil Iranian regime would be overthrown by its citizens, and Iran would no longer be a threat. The reality is that as we approach the five month anniversary of the intial strikes against Iran, the war appears to be expanding beyond anyone’s control. And instead of involving three nations, it has now ensnared nine more: Lebanon, Jordan, Qatar, Oman, the UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Beyond that, the assets of several European nations in the region and the world’s energy supply are under threat.

The war in Iran has enabled Russia to increase its attacks throughout Ukraine, and only the staunch support of NATO, without America’s assistance, has enabled Ukraine to hold its own and strike back at the aggressor in its home territory. Our already seriously depleted supply of weapons is being further reduced by the current strikes in Iran, with the threat of a ground war looming. The real benefactor of Trump’s madness is China, who will come out of this in a strategically stronger position with respect to the rest of the world.

The time has come when the MAGA cowards in the Senate must act to avoid what can only be devastating harm to America’s economy and long-term security. The War Powers Resolution must be passed now to stop this war before Trump destroys everything. Serious conservatives in both houses of Congress must face up to their responsibility as their counterparts did in 1974. Trump fears he will be impeached if Democrats take over the Congress in November, but if there is any integrity left in the Republican Party, it is they who must inform Trump that his days of autocratic rule are over.

Only Trump’s own party can remove him from office, and the time has come to seriously consider that. The nation, all of us, cannot afford to wait and hope everything will work out. It won’t as long as Trump is in charge, and we’re all at risk.

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The Unraveling of Trump II

Posted on July 13, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 12, 2026

We’re watching Trump Administration II unravel before our eyes. President Donald Trump, whose principal governing philosophy is extracting personal profit and power from the chaos he is adept at creating, is slowly drowning in a different kind of chaos. Most of it is of his own making, but the difference is that this chaos was unintentional. This time, it’s the natural consequence of Trump’s incompetent decisions and planning.

It’s interesting, too, that Trump and his idol, Vladimir Putin both appear to be succumbing to their own overreach and errors in strategic planning. Both started wars they believed would be walks in the park. In 2022 when Putin massed huge armies along Ukraine’s border with Russia and Belarus, he believed Ukraine and Kyiv would fall within days. When Trump let his ego be seduced into attacking Iran, he announced, repeatedly, that the conflict would last four to six weeks and would obliterate Iran’s capability to develop a nuclear weapon.

Both seriously underestimated their enemy and largely for the same reason. They both surrounded themselves with yes people and advisors who understood disagreeing with the boss could be fatal. Shooting the messenger when you don’t like the message is a leadership style that invariably self-destructs.

Putin’s and Trump’s failures have striking things in common. Both overestimated their military’s ability to achieve their stated objectives and seriously underestimated the punishment their adversaries  were willing to absorb to preserve their sovereignty. But perhaps  the most shocking similarity was that both the Russian and American military advisors totally failed to anticipate the role of drones, which turned out to be assets both Iran and Ukraine have successfully used to hold back and in many important ways, defeat their much larger and more powerful opponents.

Drones have become the “David’s slingshots” in their war against world superpowers, and both Trump and Putin are paying a heavy price for their mistakes. Ukraine estimates that Russia has lost almost 1.5 million combatants and  more than 620,000 units of military equipment, including everything from naval ships to artillery to missiles. The American military publication Stars and Stripes, supports these estimates, and points out that Russian losses in Ukraine over four years are eight times as great as American losses in Vietnam in twice that time.

American personnel losses in the Iran War remain extremely low because to date, Trump has eschewed a ground invasion of places like Kharg Island. But both Ukrainian and Iranian drone and missile attacks have been quite effective in destroying billions of dollars worth of military infrastructure and oil refining capabilities. When the full cost of Trump’s invasion of Iran are tallied, including the dangerous dilution of American precision weaponry, the shock to our economy will be enormous, further dividing us politically, as warring American political factions compete for scarce dollars. There is no way we can re-build our military assets and maintain our social safety net without reversing the Trump tax cuts. The resulting political strife will weaken the United States’ standing as a world power and hurt millions of Americans, most of whom opposed this war from the outset.

With fifteen weeks to go before our midterm elections, the loss of Senator Lindsey Graham and the indefinite absence of Senator Mitch McConnell, combined with Trump’s alienation of four key Republican Senators has effectively taken away his Senate majority. That means he has virtually no chance of getting his voter suppression bill passed into law, and as he ramps up hostilities in Iran, with no ability to prevent the war from escalating out of control, it becomes far more likely that Congress will unite in a new war powers resolution that forces him to get approval from Congress to continue the war.

With much of the oil refining capacity in Russia and the Gulf states damaged by the two wars, any hope of gas prices coming down, even if oil prices don’t rise precipitously is also vanishing. And with China showing signs of needing to increase its oil imports, the increased demand can only have an upward impact on prices. And what’s Trump’s answer? He wants to build new coal plants and he plans to extort a fee of twenty percent of the value of every ship’s cargo for the American Navy to escort them through the Strait of Hormuz, after declaring that the Strait was an international waterway, and ships of every nation should be able to freely use it.

Given all that, Americans are asking what we got out of the war with Iran. To date, the answer is: NOTHING. A better question is how much we’ve lost, and the answer in terms of both dollars and America’s standing around the world is staggeringly. Trump knows he will be impeached if he loses his majorities in Congress. What he may not realize, is that his own party may determine that their survival depends on removing him from office, too.

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Trump is Losing His Mind

Posted on July 10, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 10, 2026

We don’t need influencers and pundits to tell us. We can see with our own eyes, hear with our ears. Everyone here and around the world can see Trump’s mental illness turning him into the kind of irrational monster who can do serious damage to everything around him. That he is Commander in Chief of the world’s most lethal military makes that far worse.

He is obsessed with power and driven by greed that has led to corruption by a president on a scale we’ve never seen before, not to mention shocking incompetence, incoherence, and a complete disregard for the needs of the American people. What little confidence I had in Congress in 2025 has sunk to frightening levels, because there are only two lawful ways to stop this maniac from destroying everything we’ve spent 250 years building, If you ever wondered how great civilizations die, we’re watching it now in excruciating slow motion.

History taught us that most great civilizations die because of rot from within. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians, and every other civilization that dominated its region probably thought they would last forever. I believed that about America for most of my 83 years. The first time I doubted was when things looked grim after Vietnam and Watergate. For a while, it looked like Richard Nixon’s lust for power might undo us, but when faced with the obvious reality of a president out of control and apparently going mad in the White House, we were saved because the people sworn to uphold the Constitution had enough integrity to act, no matter what the consequences.

Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned in protest when Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox who was investigating the Watergate cover-up. When it became clear that Nixon had became dangerously dysfunctional, his own party prepared articles of impeachment and said he’d be convicted if he didn’t resign. Honor, integrity, and placing the good of the nation ahead of self-interest saved us in 1974.

 

When Nixon was losing his mind in the White House, General Alexander Haig was installed as his Chief of Staff to serve as a firewall between Nixon and everyone else. It was the political equivalent of creating an isolation ward to avoid the spread of a deadly disease. If Haig were in the White House today, he would immediately confiscate Trump’s computer and shut down Truth Social. The entire world is desperately searching for an off-ramp to the Iran war, but Trump keeps undermining all of them. And his imbecilic comment at the NATO summit that Russia attempting to destroy Ukraine is Europe’s problem, not ours because “we have an ocean” illustrates how dangerous he has become.

I’ve taken several intensive seminars on negotiating techniques. I never heard anyone suggest that when you’re trying desperately to get out of a war you’re losing and never should have started, that it’s a good idea to call the negotiators on the other side scum, or assert that you don’t intend to speak with them again. The only kind of off-ramp that can lead to is a wider, more dangerous war that runs the risk of becoming nuclear.

An equally inept but less impactful decision by our off-the-wall president was his decision to not sign the strongly bipartisan housing bill, which might have put a dent in voters’ anger over Trump re-igniting inflation instead of bringing prices down as he promised. The decision was nonsensical and spiteful, since the law will take effect tonight without his signature. Given Trump’s obsession with controlling the outcome of the midterm elections by any means possible, he just obliterated any chance to claim he reduced voters’ cost of living. Would a sane president do that just to express his anger at the Senate for not passing his voter suppression bill?

I and many others have been writing things like this since January 2017 when Trump was first inaugurated. But the problem we face today is that Senators like Mitch McConnell have been quietly packing federal courts with right-wing extremist judges for twenty years, and Trump has been enriching his friends and key members of Congress with crypto and insider trading tips. That kind of outright bribery combined with his threats against any sitting Congressperson who fails to obey him shows how vulnerable an open democratic republic like ours is. With money, threats, and the encouragement of neo-Nazi militia groups ready to take up arms in open rebellion if the election goes badly, it’s easy to see how a determined, relatively small minority can bring down even a nation like the United States.

Instead of Eliot Richardson, we have loyalist and sycophant Todd Blanche leading the Justice Department. And instead of Senator Barry Goldwater, who authored The Conscience of a Conservative, we have John Thune who lacks the courage and backbone to take Trump on. And those two lawful ways to rid ourselves of the Trump nightmare? Impeachment requires a convincing defeat for the MAGA Republicans in the House, and a few Republican Senators to grow a pair and remember what they were elected to do. If that fails we’d have to depend on Vice President J. D. Vance and Trump’s corrupt Cabinet to exercise the 25th Amendment.

This is a time when Americans need to shut down their Facebook and X feeds and think for themselves. Is this what you want for your children and grandchildren?

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Winners and Losers and Donald Trump

Posted on July 7, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 7, 2026

Athletics can teach us a lot about human nature and the almost indefinable qualities that distinguish winners from losers. Anyone who follows team sports has probably experienced one of those rare moments when an entire team is “in the zone” together. Watching the results of that synergy is among the most exciting and inspiring things we ever get to see, a group of very talented people all performing optimally, the resulting whole far exceeding the sum of its parts.

The 1969 miracle New York Mets and the 1980 U. S. Men’s Olympic hockey team come to mind as prime examples. So do the U. S. Women’s Soccer teams that won four world cup championships. Did those teams perform over their heads or did they simply achieve the collective mental state that seemed to approach telepathy and enhance everyone’s performance?

The thing about being in the zone is that while it’s an incredibly powerful if impossible to define phenomenon, it’s also extremely fragile. Every coach knows that. When a team is flying high we all jump on the bandwagon expecting them to overachieve, and if nothing breaks that spell, they often do. But sometimes, all it takes is one critical, unexpected thing to go wrong, and the team that has been functioning like a well-oiled machine disintegrates into a disorganized rabble of wasted talent.

One of the most memorable examples occurred in the 1986 World Series. With the Los Angeles Dodgers poised to clinch the Series victory in the bottom of the tenth inning of game six, a shocking, unforced error by the usually reliable Bill Buckner allowed the Mets to achieve yet another miracle, come-from-behind victory. With their mojo shattered, the Dodgers never stood a chance in game seven.

Is that what happened to the U. S. Men’s soccer team in Seattle last night, or was it something else? We’ll hear a lot from shocked fans and sports analysts about that. I’m no expert in soccer, to which my years of coaching kids’ soccer will attest, but I’m certain that I know more about the rules and tactics of the game than Donald Trump does. His typical arrogance, asserting to the media that he didn’t think the play by U. S. star striker Folarin Balogun that earned him a red card was a foul demonstrated a couple of things: Trump’s ignorance and his ability to create a catastrophe that affected millions (maybe billions) of people just by opening his mouth.

Trump’s remark was both absurd and inappropriate, but when has that ever stopped him? Of course a foul was committed. We all saw it. The issue was whether it was intentional with intent to injure Balugon’s Bosnian opponent. Almost everyone who witnessed the play in slow motion replays, which seems to be about half of all the humans on Earth, thought it wasn’t, but the only person who really mattered, the FIFA referee, thought it was.

Referees often make bad calls, but teams and fans live with them. We moan and complain about the injustice. We move on, as do the affected athletes, but Trump, in his bull-in-a-china-shop style could not. Just as he has used the power of his office to corrupt almost everything he touched, he used it to corrupt something soccer fans around the world held sacred.

FIFA’s struggles with its own arrogance and corruption are well known, but the players who train incessantly for world cup play know that going in. The American team, which had been riding their own high throughout the tournament, were working hard to adjust to having to play a powerful Belgian team without Balugon. Many expert commentators, understanding “the zone” phenomenon still gave them a chance of winning…until Trump put his thumb on the scale.

Trump loves to create chaos. He believes his ability to throw wrenches into the works is one of his most effective talents, and he never cares much about the collateral damage he causes as long as he gets his way. He got his way this time, easily turning FIFA president Gianni Infantino to the dark side as he has many others.

This time, the collateral damage was huge. He infuriated the entire soccer world and placed our men’s team in an untenable situation. The person on the hot seat was their coach, Mauricio Ponchitino. I feel for him more than anyone. If he played Balugon in the match against powerhouse Belgium, the outcome would forever be stained by Trump’s involvement. If he benched Balugon, which I believe he should have done, he would have upset millions of American soccer fans, but he would have preserved the integrity of the team’s reputation.

Beyond that, I believe the team would have risen to the level of play they had displayed throughout the tournament. Americans and their athletic idols have always thrived on being underdogs, and playing competitively with a revamped lineup would have earned Ponchitino and his team the respect of the entire world. Instead, the controversy broke the magical bubble and killed the zone effect. The result was a team of individual stars who seemed completely out of sync with each other. Their disarray was embarrassing and painful to watch, but it wasn’t the fault of Balugon, his teammates, or his coach. The blame for this debacle lies entirely with Donald Trump.

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A Terrible Week in Trump’s America

Posted on July 6, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 6, 2026

I have to believe that not only Americans, but people everywhere who have admired America in the past spent the week cringing, maybe even shedding a tear for what Trump is turning this country into. He made an embarrassing mockery of our nation’s 250 anniversary. Everything he did was crass, vulgar, and entirely self-serving. And since our national celebration was to have been centered around the White House and our national mall, the dominant images were:

  • the algae-clogged reflection pool, which was incompetently repaired by a Trump-favored no-bid contactor who charged the government nearly ten times more than they bid, and has now been given a second one to repair the damage they did. I wonder if they’ll get a third contract if they screw this one up. (Maybe they’re onto something.)
  • the missing East Wing of the White House which Trump illegally demolitioned
  • the former rose garden, now paved over for another Trump vanity project
  • the disgusting papier mache arch, made even more horrifying watching it deteriorate like a rotting corpse
  • the remaining traces of the martial arts caged fights that were Trump’s birthday present to himself (paid for by tax dollars.)

Then there was the national state fair for which Trump illegally transferred funds donated to support the nonpartisan Independence celebration that Trump tried to co-opt. But when entertainers who’d signed up withdrew claiming they’d been misled into thinking they would be part of the real celebration, and it was clear that Trump was using it to further divide the nation, the strangest thing happened. No one showed up. When the crowd-size-obsessed Trump viewed aerial footage of the mall he was so furious, he deleted the images from all White House communications.

I and many of you are old enough to remember our nation’s bicentennial celebration of July 4,1976. The president was the very conservative Gerald Ford – I mean a real conservative who cared more about the Constitution and the general welfare of every American than his own enrichment. Ford was inclusive, asking the country to come together to recover from the damage done by Vietnam. Ford’s address to the nation that day was made before a million people at Independence Hall, Philadelphia. His message stressed three things: the need to preserve our self-government, protecting our personal freedoms, and national unity.

Compare that to what Trump did. He went to Mount Rushmore where he projected an image of himself next to the faces of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt, which are carved into the mountainside. Trump, who isn’t fit to kiss their feet, announced to the world that he was the greatest president of all time, after which he attempted to paint successful Democratic Socialist candidates as Communists trying to destroy our country. It’s notable that people are finally getting wise to Trump. Most people, hearing him try to outdo the disgraced Senator Joseph McCarthy, yawned, understanding that this was just another example of his desperation over the midterm elections.

When Trump reprised his rant over the Save America Act, he was perhaps more honest than he intended. He said that if the Act, which is intended to suppress the votes of people who disapprove of him, wasn’t passed they would lose the presidency forever. In typical tortured Trump logic, what he meant was that MAGA Republicans could only win another election if he was able to rig it.

Destroying America’s celebration wasn’t enough for Trump. He had to stick his corrupt nose into America’s chances in the World Cup soccer matches. In the Americans’ win over Bosnia-Herzegovina, their star striker, Folarin Balogun was given a red card for stomping on the ankle of an opposing player. That meant Balogun left the game with almost forty minutes remaining in the second half forcing his teamto play a man short, and was banned from playing in today’s match against Belgium.

Most of us who watched the game, and most commentators thought the red card ruling was overly harsh. Slow-motion replays showed the contact was clearly accidental, and certainly not with intent to injure. But FIFA referees are generally unassailable, and the call stood.

Today, Trump is bragging that it was his intervention with FIFA that got the call reversed, for which he expected to be cheered by all Americans. Instead, most of us are sickened by Trump’s intervention. Whether the original call was wrong Trump’s action assured that if America defeats Belgium and moves on in the tournament, their success will be tinged by what most of the world is outraged over.

Trump’s intervention was the worst possible thing he could do to the reputation of the U. S. Men’s Soccer team. If they go on to win the World Cup, their victory will have the stink of cheating and political corruption, although the team itself had nothing to do with Trump’s action. England suffered the loss of one its starters due to receiving a red card in its defeat of Mexico. If England accepts its fate without a challenge, anything the Americans achieve will be forever tainted.

The only good news in all this is that our incompetent, demented president seems to have expended all of his good will with American voters. As he heads to the NATO summit where his feet will be held to the coals over his failure to support Ukraine and his attacks on Iran which cost Europe dearly, I have never been more embarrassed for our nation.

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Trump’s Corruption and Conflicts of Interest

Posted on July 3, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zerndell, July 3, 2026

As we celebrate our 250th Fourth of July, we seem to be traversing a long, slow inflection, one which I believe historians will view as the transition from Trump/MAGA mania back to common sense and respect for our laws and Constitution. It’s fair to say that the great majority of Americans are shocked that it’s taken this long.

But cults are hard to stamp out, and this one, sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and a weird coalition of racists, xenophobes, poorly educated people who’ve been left behind by everyone else’s prosperity, and of course the greedy billionaires who wish to create an American oligarchy may be as hard to recover from as the cult of greed that made slavery acceptable. Killing that one almost destroyed our country.

That we’re at this juncture points to the massive fraud and corruption of the president, his family, and his hangers-on who hope to scoop up the coins he tosses to maintain their loyalty. Even the dimmest of Trump’s supporters are smart enough to realize something’s wrong when alarm bells are going off all around them, and they’re getting louder and more frequent.

Trump’s Iran war made it harder for people to live their lives without falling into debt, as millions were still struggling to adapt to the theft of their health care benefits by the MAGA Congress that needed its money to assure billionaires could avoid paying ttaxes. As lie after lie is obliterated by facts and what we can all see with our own eyes, now that it has been revealed that Trump’s corruption added more than $2.4 billion dollars to his personal wealth, everyone who has to live on hamburger instead of steak feels it personally.

After eighteen months of the most corrupt administration anyone can remember and Trump’s total focus on rigging the midterm election and completing his vastly unpopular vanity projects, his base is beginning to crumble. Trump has been stealing hundreds of millions of dollars directly from his most loyal supporters with his cries of being victimized by witch hunts and appeals for donations, but this week’s legally required disclosure of Trump’s 2025 income has produced dead silence from his base.

If you wonder why the same people who’ve been drinking his Kool-Aid and cheering everything he did since 2015 are now either silent or quietly backing away, maybe it’s because of what Trump told a New York Times reporter last January. When asked how he responds to accusations of corruption and conflicts of interest, he said, “I found out that nobody cared.” The most shocking thing about that statement was that it was true. I doubt that Trump has ever spoken more truthfully. When I heard it, I immediately translated it from Trump speech to basic English: “as long as no one’s watching, I’m going to steal everything I can lay my hands on.”

Another thing that’s coming clear that should have been obvious when MAGA’s Project 2025 was released, was that the entire focus of Trump’s second term has been an attempt at a bloodless coup. Not that millions of lives wouldn’t have been lost as a result of the madness of RFK Junior’s health decrees, the inability to obtain health care for more than twenty million American families, and a FEMA so decimated by firings that it cannot respond to most natural disasters – but we only notice civilian casualties when they’re riddled with bullets fired by an authoritarian regime suppressing open rebellion.

The only places where people still march in lockstep to Trump’s orders are those where he has been able to install loyalists in positions from which they can’t be easily removed. Everywhere else, the cracks are widening, and once his base realizes how they’ve been had, when they hear Trump brag, as he did yesterday, that he’s always been great at making money, so why stop now, when they can’t pay to repair the truck their job depends on, they’re going to wake up with anger that will not be assuaged by Trump’s smooth talking. And I doubt that his base believes making money is the same thing as theft and grift.

Think about how his base will react when they learn that Trump’s $2.4 billion in income, most of which arose from serious conflicts of interest, was enough to pay for the Obamacare cost sharing subsidies he canceled. The subsidies’ total cost to the government was $1,100 per recipient, so Trump’s very questionable income alone could have paid to restore the health premium subsidy to more than two / million Americans. Think about what that says about the massive scale of Trump’s corruption.

I don’t know how to assign a dollar value to my vote, but apparently, with the Supreme Court’s help, we’re about to learn that MAGA billionaires (and one newly minted trillionaire) are about to spend the operating budget of a small city to try to buy it. Even the MAGA base has to be outraged.

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A Very Dangerous Time for America

Posted on June 29, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 29, 2026

The next four months are going to be stressful and dangerous for America. Regardless of anything he says, President Trump is desperate to control the midterm elections which are now eighteen weeks away. If he maintains his majorities in Congress, he will be able to do irreversible damage to our country. If he doesn’t he will be a frustrated, angry lame duck, but he might be even more dangerous, then. If the midterms change the balance of power in Congress, we’re in for two years of tantrums and specious lawsuits over rigged elections.

Trump’s mental illness is on display daily. The more he loses the worse that will get, and the Supreme Court, today, handed him a stinging loss, upholding state laws that allow mail-in ballots to be counted after election day as long as they’re postmarked on time. They also refused to void a five million dollar judgment against him for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, and they’re widely expected to deny Trump’s claim that would overturn the 14th Amendment guarantee that anyone born in the United States is a citizen.

The fact that the Senate pulled back its vote on the War Powers Resolution means that nothing is restraining Trump’s erratic behavior and postings on social media. His latest threat to annihilate Iran is another of his childish rants. They only make negotiations more difficult – have you ever tried to reason with a five-year-old having a tantrum? If an equitable peace agreement is ever reached it will be because the negotiators on both sides tune Trump out. None of his attempts to intimidate Iran have had any effect, because they know the war is extremely unpopular among American voters, as is Trump himself.

It’s hard for diplomats, legislators, and average Americans to predict what might happen next when our president’s words rarely have anything to do with reality. By now we’re used to the lies, insults, and delusional fantasies, but all that accomplishes is teaching us it’s best to ignore him. When people ask me to predict what he’ll do next, I usually say it’s impossible to know because Trump is driven by his ego, his greed, and his rage that everyone hasn’t fallen worshipfully in line whenever he speaks. At this moment, it’s harder than usual.

The problem is that Trump’s desperation to hold onto and increase his power is obvious to everyone, everywhere. The Congress knows, Iran knows, our Gulf allies know, and Israel knows. So do Europe, Russia, and China. And then there’s damage to our economy and the price of gas.

Iran seems to believe Trump would never resort to restarting the war, as do many home-grown pundits. They reason that only a quarter of us supported it from the outset, and the frightening speed at which we are dissipating our military resources makes any kind of massive assault irresponsible, not least because it’s now clear to everyone that only a D-Day style ground invasion or the use of a nuclear weapon can achieve Trump’s goals. Common sense would argue that neither of those has any chance of occurring, but when was the last time anything Trump did conformed with common sense?

The problem I see is that Trump has truly painted himself into a corner with no clear way out. His own party screams that he’s sabotaging the November election by focusing on a lost war and a series of vanity projects, but they’ve been doing that for months with no effect. My question is what is more likely to push Trump over the edge and down the rabbit hole, giving up his ego-driven need to dominate everyone and act rationally or being defied by an enemy he despises and seriously underestimated.

In the game of outrageous rants and threats, Iran’s are more credible. Their attacks on our bases in the Gulf States continue and our allies in the region fear the destruction of their oil wealth. The whole region is basically mercenary, pledging allegiance to the highest bidder. My fear is that in the end, Trump’s rage at being constantly outmaneuvered may eventually drown out all the other crazy voices in his head.

We know how he loves to order the military into battle, and it wouldn’t surprise me if one day he simply cracks and orders an all-out assault on Iran. If that happens, who’s going to stand in his way? Every senior military officer knows that if they do anything but march in lockstep, Pete Hegseth with simply fire them. And even if the Senate realizes their error and quickly reverses themselves, once the fighting re-starts in earnest it will be too little too late. The only way to stop him at that point would be to exercise the 25th amendment, but that takes time, and in the midst of total warfare anything could happen.

It’s really hard to see how anything good can come of this.

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Days of Reckoning

Posted on June 22, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 21, 2026,

The concept of a day of reckoning is universal in Judeo-Christian and Islamic cultures. We’re taught since childhood, and we grow up believing that we will eventually be held accountable for our actions.

It hasn’t always turned out that way, however. Donald Trump is especially adept at stymying the legal process. He was convicted of ninety-four felonies prior to the 2024 election, but armed with the Supreme Court decision that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted for pretty much anything, there’s no doubt that a principal reason he ran again was to avoid sentences being imposed on him.

The courts held all that in abeyance during the 2024 election campaign, and Trump spent a fortune on lawyers skilled at delaying legal proceedings. If he could delay them until after the election and he won, he could use (misuse?) the Department of Justice to quash all his indictments and convictions, and that is exactly what happened.

No doubt, Trump feels invincible. He has a captive majority in both houses of Congress and a Supreme Court that will not get in his way unless he commits egregious constitutional violations like his tariff policy. Trump advocates the idea that it’s better to apologize than ask permission, though in fact he never does either. He knows the adage that possession is nine tenths of the law and he uses it constantly.

The philosophy of Project 2025 was for Trump to attack relentlessly on all fronts whether his actions were legal or not and dare everyone else to stop him. That worked very well for him until the Court’s decision on tariffs, but that defeat didn’t deter him at all. The assaults on voting rights, immigrants, and the social net that tens of millions of Americans depend on, including health care and food stamps, continue unabated. And with the skyrocketing costs of the Iran war, that will only get worse.

In Trump’s mind, assuring that wealthy Americans pay no taxes and rebuilding the capabilities of our military are much higher priorities than the basic needs of American citizens. Given his track record throughout his life, does anyone doubt that in the four plus months until the midterm elections he will pull every dirty trick and underhanded stunt he can to maintain his Congressional majorities? As time grows tighter, he can jam up both his opposition and the courts.

It’s clear to everyone but his most rabid supporters, and many of them too, that Trump is becoming more unhinged and irrational every day. What kind of leader posts the nonsense he does on social media in the midst of negotiations to end a dangerous and costly war? What kind of leader ignores his expert advisors and allows his actions to be completely dominated by his ego and mental illness?

It’s extremely clear that as of today, the winners of Trump’s Iran War were Iran, China, and Russia; the losers: the United States and, by far, Israel, which has squandered whatever good will it had with Europe and seriously eroded American support. It’s also extremely clear that Trump has severely hurt our economy and most of the established trade and economic policies world-wide.

He is despised by a large majority of Americans, and he is mocked by most national leaders while they praise and appease him to his face. His administration doesn’t even make an effort to hide either its corruption or its pre-occupation with things like the reflecting pool and Trump’s lust to have the biggest ballrooms and the tallest arches in the world, while plastering his name on every building and institution he can get away with.

The question for Congress and American voters is simple. With the election approaching fast and the certainty that Trump will create all the chaos he can before then, can his day of reckoning be delayed any longer? Can our republic and Constitution survive anything but an immediate all-out effort to stop him before he can do any more damage?

How do we do that? First, all the millions of Americans who are burned out on Trump’s antics need to grow a pair and re-engage. Not doing so is exactly what Trump wants, it’s how he wins. If you live in a swing district currently held by a Republican, or even if you don’t, focus on one that is and make a lot of noise at town halls, on social media, and by communicating directly with your representative’s Chief of Staff. Make it crystal clear that if they continue to choose blind loyalty to Trump and party over their constituents, they will be fired on election day.

Write to news outlets, call in to talk radio shows, interact with influential podcast hosts. Exercise your right to free speech and guarantee your right to vote while you still have them. Every day we delay joining the final battle for control of Congress, and by implication, to control and muzzle Trump, increases the chances that the 2026 election will be the last real election we ever participate in.

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Obama vs Trump : Class vs Crass

Posted on June 19, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 19, 2026

The opening of the Obama Presidential Center, yesterday, was in stark contrast to the daily spectacle of our current president going mad in the White House. It was the Obamas (Michele and Barack) at their best and classiest. They never mentioned Donald Trump, instead relying on media commentators to remind their audiences that Trump wasn’t invited, although Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Biden and their wives were highly visible in the crowd.

I was ambivalent about Obama’s presidency. When the former president burst on the scene as a relatively unknown, highly charismatic orator, I was conflicted. He was obviously brilliant, but I fundamentally don’t trust charisma. As Trump showed us, it can be negatively hypnotic like a cobra’s, leading to things like cults and MAGA. Except for his career-making keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, Obama was a complete stranger in 2008. It wasn’t until John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate that I decided to vote for Obama. 

When he won, I like millions of other Americans felt a surprising elation. It wasn’t about  Obama as much it was the sense that by electing him, America had demonstrated we had matured as a nation. In a single populous wave of inclusiveness, we compensated for decades of slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and racism in general. Unfortunately, that turned out to be only an illusion, as the forces of darkness and exclusionism simply went underground to prepare for the coup that Trump has spent his second term attempting to execute.

I thought some of Obama’s policies as president were mistaken, but the one thing he always got right was preaching love instead of hate, equal opportunity instead of elitism, courtesy and empathy over profanity and tone-deafness. Obama’s was an honorable presidency that treated opposing voices with respect and gentility. He never accused Republicans of either treason or stupidity, never openly molested or disrespected women.

One of the happiest experiences of my life was watching the victory celebration in Grant Park in Chicago after the 2008 election. There was no ego on display, no obsession with crowd sizes, no accusing everyone else of cheating. And after all the verbal abuse Obama has taken from Trump, the most impressive thing about yesterday was that the celebration of the Obama Presidential Center was as classy, positive, and inclusive as the 2008 celebration at Grant Park.

It was a reminder of what we always thought of as presidential dignity, of which there has been no sign in Trump’s White House. Where Trump is obsessed with the word “I,” Obama stresses “We.” While Trump goes out of his way to make enemies so he can play the martyr game, Obama always talks about cooperating and working together. It’s not a coincidence that on the same day as the Obama celebration, a poll was released showing that 57% of Americans view Obama favorably while only 30% have a positive view of Trump.

This is one of those moments when I imagine how historians will view this period twenty years from now. I can hear them all screaming, “How the Hell could America have let this happen? How could we have allowed this egomaniac to completely upend our way of life while running the most corrupt, incompetent administration anyone can remember?”

There are signs that yesterday’s Obama celebration is part of a changing trend, that Americans have had enough of hate-mongering and  divisiveness, of the barely hidden racism and misogyny that characterizes the Trump administration. The massive celebration in New York on the same day that brought literally millions of New Yorkers of every race, color, gender, and religion together to share in the joy of the NBA Knick’s victory was another sign that we’ve had enough of the lies, crudeness, and self-serving policies intended to further enrich Trump and his supporters while average Americans struggle to pay for health care, energy, rent, and food.

We’ve seen the same trend in special elections around the country in which MAGA Republicans have been repeatedly upset by Democrats. Trump continues to hold enormous sway among his own party, but even when the candidates he backed in the primaries won, turnout was low, while voters in Democratic primaries showed excitement and eagerness. Trump and his supporters have set the stage for a historic repudiation in the midterm elections, but that’s only half the game.

To defeat Trumpism, the Democrats are going have to convince people that they can do a better job of governing. They have to present a unified message of hope and inclusion, something they have failed at miserably during the last few cycles. Victory for the great majority of the American people is there for the taking if the Democrats can stop bickering among themselves and prove to Americans that they can be trusted to put the people’s needs first.

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