Our Gangster President

Posted on October 5, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 5, 2026

Whenever I feel pessimistic about the future of our country and how much damage Donald Trump can do before his power is neutralized by voters, I think back to the 1970s. It was the decade of my thirties, a young husband and father caught up in the Top Secret world of things I can’t discuss. The humiliation and loss of life caused by all the mistakes around the Vietnam War, compounded by the corruption and criminality of President Nixon was my first terrifying reminder of how fragile our Constitution and democracy were.

The integrity of the Republican Senate and the decency of President Ford gave us a reprieve in the mid-70s, but the chaos of the Jimmy Carter administration made things worse. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 had started the world on a path of constantly rising energy prices culminating in the 1979 energy shortage, while inflation had reached 14%, more than four times higher than it’s been through the Biden and Trump years, and interest rates reached a shocking 19%. Apparently, our economy wasn’t any more stable than our foreign policy and governmental ethics.

When the decade ended with the Ayatollahs in power in Iran, our reputation as a respected world power had been severely damaged. It seemed to many that our government was being run by incompetents, and there was a popular notion that the United States would fare better if we let the Mafia run things. Morality and criminality aside, there was a certain dark logic to that idea.

Organized crime families were ruthless and efficient in pursuit of their ambitions. Loyalty in the ranks was brutally enforced, and there was a cult-like, top to bottom structure that kept mob families in line. Moreover, they were largely successful, enriching themselves and evading the law  through bribery, intimidation, and a willingness to destroy anyone who got in their way.

A half century later, Donald Trump brought that whimsical fantasy to life. The government he put together in his second term mirrors the way the major crime families operate in every aspect. The only qualification for the most important jobs in our government is loyalty to a ruthless, sociopathic president whose primary focus is enriching himself, his family, and friends. Anyone who questions that is quickly silenced by the intimidation of an army of sycophants financed by billionaires whose wealth is being rapidly multiplied by Trump, which is exactly how mob families and gangsters operate.

Like gangsters, Trump’s mob routinely ignores laws, issues Executive Orders that are immoral and unconstitutional, and uses the flaws in our legal system to confound their adversaries – that is, decent hard-working Americans. They flood the courts with specious lawsuits, most of which have been rejected, even by the Supreme Court justices Trump put in place because they assured him of their loyalty.

Trump, like the mobsters he emulates, understands that laws are no barrier to criminals whose greed and lust for power know no limits, that unrelenting criminal behavior, though it may ultimately be stopped by our fractured system, can go on stealing from taxpayers and destroying careers and lives of the law-abiding professionals who resist them. Even when they are ultimately defeated, the apparent victory of good over evil is generally Pyrrhic. Corruption goes on, and most of the worst perpetrators are never brought to justice.

Trump, using the outline of Project 2025, has worked to corrupt every engine of government he can lay his hands on, while using Orwellian Doublespeak to accuse his opposition of all the crimes he commits. He turned the Department of Justice and its stepchild, the FBI, into dysfunctional extensions of his own lust for wealth and power. Most Americans now distrust both organizations, and have little faith in the courts’ ability to stop corruption and lawlessness before they do massive damage.

He has turned the Department of Defense and the control of the world’s most lethal military force over to Pete Hegseth, an unqualified incompetent who is attempting to transform the image of our military from the defender of the Free World to a force of mindless, heavily armed warriors whose only credo is Might Makes Right. Hegseth and Trump have spent the past two years creating wars that satisfy their egos, while stripping from our forces much of the diverse leadership that made it what it is.  

Russell Vought, Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, blatantly ignores federal laws and the Constitution, diverting billions of dollars authorized by Congress away from their required legal responsibilities to fund the Project 2025 agenda.  

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s friend and son-in-law, supplanted competent professional diplomats in Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine in which he has steadfastly supported Vladimir Putin and the war in Iran which was a misguided disaster from the start. Witkoff and Kushner used the opportunity to strike business deals for themselves worth billions, while making no progress toward ending hostilities. Both wars have worsened and expanded while they enriched themselves and Trump’s family.

All these things are hallmarks of the way gangsters and organized crime families operate. Americans are finally starting to realize that that’s the only way Trump knows how to function, and that is a primary reason they’re going to defang him in november.

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The Coming Seismic Political Change

Posted on October 3, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, Ocober 3, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson described the situation perfectly, today, in her Letters From an American newsletter. “[T]he crux of the crisis that is driving a seismic political change [is that] it has become crystal clear that Trump never intended to address the real problems he identified. His tariffs, deep tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, extraordinary corruption, multiple vanity projects, and war on Iran are benefiting him, his family, and his cronies. At the same time, the Republicans are, at his direction, slashing the social welfare programs, medical funding, education, infrastructure, and healthcare that used to serve the American people.”

The political change she referred to is emerging on the midterm election scene from every direction. If you’re skeptical of poll numbers, there’s still a ton of convincing evidence that in thirty-one days, American voters will deliver a repudiating defeat to the Republican party that has allowed itself to become a Trump cult. While individual poll numbers might be questioned, an overwhelming trend in those numbers from dozens of reputable pollsters is very believable and reliable as a forecasting tool.

Ever since the primaries, Trump’s overall approval rating has dropped steadily and consistently. The most recent polls suggest that it is now approaching thirty percent, a horrifying number if you’re a Republican incumbent who has been making the wrong choices. Even if you think thirty percent is off by a bit, the trend is unarguable. Trump has mostly lost the support he had in 2024 from Independent voters, Hispanics, and blacks. More and more, two and three-time Trump voters are turning against him because they see that he never had any intention of following up on his promises and his actions throughout his second term have been making life worse for Americans.

Trump hoped that most of the negative impacts of his policies wouldn’t become apparent until after the midterm elections. Many of the draconian cuts to programs millions of Americans depend on are slated to take effect in January. But even before those cuts hit, the combination of Trump’s tariffs, his stalemated war in the Persian Gulf which still threatens to expand into a uncontrollable disaster, the shocking cost of energy, especially diesel fuel, and his focus on vanity projects over things people need to survive have revealed him to be the huckster he is.

The corruption isn’t abating, either. As Trump accepts the reality that the November election will stop most of his initiatives in their tracks, his efforts to enrich himself and his friends and his disregard for laws and standards of ethical conduct now have no guardrails at all. He is eloquently telling all Americans that he intends to do anything he pleases regardless of legality, decency, or basic morality. He has so handicapped our justice system that he’s confident he can sufficiently cripple the legal process that no one can stop him. The Supreme Court decision that granted him full immunity from prosecution for criminal acts while in office and his shameful use of presidential pardons to hold the perpetrators of his illegal acts harmless make it certain that no one and nothing will stop his rapacious behavior. Don’t forget that he pardoned the insurrectionists who threatened the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Look back at what this egocentric monster has done in twenty months in office. He has severely damaged all of the alliances that have kept our adversaries at bay for seventy-five years, weakening NATO to the point where it may not survive as an effective deterrent. He has disrupted the world economy, creating inflationary pressures domestically that forced even his handpicked fed chairman to begin a series of interest rate increases that will extend through 2027. Mortgage rates are now at 7.28%, and the cost of buying and financing almost everything we need rises every month.

My son told me yesterday that he sees diesel prices in the Pacific Northwest as high as $8.60 per gallon. Since a typical semi-truck’s fuel tank holds over 250 gallons, it now costs truckers in that region more than $2,000 per fill-up to fuel the trucks that carry food and manufactured goods to our stores and warehouses. Industry experts tell us it will be a long time, if ever, before those prices return to what we used to think of as normal.

The latest example of Trump’s craven approach to governing is a proposal to end Russia’s aggression in Ukraine that involves a deal to purchase billions of dollars worth of Russian oil and natural gas resources to sweeten the pot for Vladimir Putin, while also providing a massive influx of dollars to the families of Trump, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner. Even the most loyal of Trump’s followers feel the pain, and even the most dimwitted among them realize they’ve been fleeced.

American politics has tremendous inertia. Changes take time, but the unprecedented incompetence and criminality of Trump’s presidency have created a wave of reaction that has the inevitability of a slow-motion avalanche.

Still, change will not happen unless all of us cast our votes, regardless of the intimidation we’re likely to run into at the polls.

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Trump and Xi, Act 4

Posted on September 25, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 25, 2026

Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with the maxim: Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake. When you see your adversary in the process of self-destruction and completely out of touch with reality, all you need do is wait and watch. It’s all about patience and self-restraint, two things for which Chinese President Xi Jinping is well known.

As Xi was arriving in Washington for his fourth summit with Donald Trump, many of our most respected commentators characterized the president in Napoleon’s terms. Xi has his own problems with a struggling domestic economy. China, like the rest of the world is dealing with the disruptive crises Trump has created in his second term – a trade war no one wanted, serious energy shortages caused by Trump’s war against Iran, and internal domestic pressures worsened by fears that AI could undermine his autocratic rule.

China has relatively quietly been expanding its presence in East Asia, increasing its military and economic impact on the region. Allied with North Korea, it is a looming threat to Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan. In addition, its relative stranglehold on the world’s supply of rare earth minerals, resources which the United States desperately needs and severely lacks, and its ability to prop up Russia’s war against Ukraine and an Iranian military that has used China’s technology and equipment to cause massive devastation to American assets in the Persian Gulf region make it clear that Xi is no friend to America.

Xi is a ruthless autocrat and a brilliant tactician who sees, along with most of the rest of the world, that Trump is a weak, failed president who is severely underwater with American voters and who is weeks away from having his political power neutralized by the November election. He can see as clearly as the rest of us that Trump lives in a delusional world, that his major policy initiatives, with the exception of the huge tax cuts he passed to enrich his wealthy supporters are all failing badly. Xi knows Trump is about to become the lamest of ducks and that anything he promises in negotiations is likely to be overturned by a rapidly growing opposition.

He also sees, like the rest of us, that Trump’s behavior on the American political stage and his bizarre lack of restraint internationally seem calculated to weaken America’s standing in the world, as he destroys decades-long alliances and drives long-standing trading partners away from America on which they can no longer allow themselves to be dependent. Given all that, Xi is quite content to abide by Napoleon’s admonition.

Xi pretends to be impressed by the exaggerated pomp and pageantry that accompanies Trump’s over-the-top flattery and his attempts to curry favor and convince the world that he and Xi are buddies. Xi does not reciprocate in any meaningful way, yet Trump keeps embarrassing us and himself with his desperate need to be seen as a world leader of Xi’s stature. Xi knows Trump is failing in every major initiative, and the result is an America that is greatly weakened and the entire western alliance is in such disarray, that China wins in the end just by being a silent observer who assists all of our adversaries behind the scenes.

The only good news for Americans in all this is that Trump’s inept handling of international affairs and foreign policy is dragging down the prospects for MAGA candidates in the midterm elections, making it virtually certain that Democrats will control the House of Representatives, and their prospects for taking a majority in the Senate look more promising than they have in twenty years.

Assuming the Trump administration is forthcoming about what transpired this week, we should soon know if anything significant was agreed to. But it’s difficult to imagine Xi offering Trump anything that leads to an agreement with Iran that doesn’t amount to a total capitulation by Trump. We may get some trade relief if Xi finds it in his interest, but it’s extremely unlikely that Xi will be of any help in convincing Vladimir Putin to end his attacks on Ukraine.

I have no idea what this summit was about. Clearly, Trump in his delusional world believed the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine would have been resolved by now, and it’s even possible, when Xi’s visit was scheduled that he believed he’d be in a favorable position with respect to tariffs and trade. It’s a measure of how incompetent Trump has been in his second term that he couldn’t have been in a weaker position relative to Xi when they met, but by then there was no way to cancel or postpone the trip.

For Americans who didn’t already see reality, Xi’s visit has brought it into focus. Only those sycophants irrevocably tied to Trump and people too heavily invested in his policies to change still have a reason to support him. We’re not out of the woods by any means, though, since the Senate failed to pass a new war powers resolution last night.

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Trump at the UN was the Worst Version of Himself

Posted on September 23, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 23, 2026

If you didn’t believe Donald Trump has brought America to the brink of an existential crisis before yesterday, you should now. His speech to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday could have been written by Vladimir Putin, Adolf Hitler, or Attila, King of the Huns. Addressing the leaders of 191other nations, Trump went far beyond his well-known disdain for the U. N. as ineffectual and unfit to deal with the world’s problems. He openly and shamelessly advocated tearing up the U. N. Charter, which was largely written by the United States in 1945, in the same manner that he has been attempting to undermine the United States Constitution.

In the eyes of the rest of the world Trump is singlehandedly transforming the United States from the shining beacon of hope we grew up believing in to the pariah of the world. If nothing else, he embarrassed himself and all Americans, unapologetically posturing himself as a belligerent dictator who intends to claim all of the western hemisphere as his own territory, echoing Putin’s philosophy that Russia, China, and the United States are the only real powers in the world, and that they have right to dominate their spheres of influence.

He spoke in complete disregard of international law and the basic tenet of the United Nations’ main purposes, to avoid future wars, respect the sovereignty of all nations and of all people regardless of race or nationality. His words were as despicable as he has shown himself to be. He asserted his right to decide whether Iran and its 94 million people should be obliterated if they don’t reach a deal he finds acceptable. He bragged about kidnapping and overthrowing Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro and his efforts to break the government of Cuba. He bragged further about stealing Venezuela’s oil, from which he and his friends will derive huge profits.

Trump has already turned much of the United States government into a kleptocracy, ignoring ethics laws, disregarding human rights, and using the full force of the United States government to profiteer and enrich himself, his family, and his wealthy supporters by hundreds of billions of dollars. And he has ripped the veil off what can only be decsribed as an overall policy of White Male Supremacy, both domestically and throughout the world.

Here at home, he has left no stone unturned in his attempts to control our elections, instigating a war of extreme gerrymandering and unsuccessfully attempting to restrict mail-in voting and suppress the votes of elements of our population that he dislikes. But polls released this morning show that American voters get all that. His overall approval rating among voters is down to an all-time low of 33% with disapproval of his handling of elections, the economy, the wars in Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine, and his foreign policy in general in the lows twenties.

It was no easy feat to become as despised and unpopular as he has made himself among his own people and among all but a handful of national leaders; that may be the single most impressive achievement of his administration. And despite his attempts to rig the midterm elections in his favor, he is facing what could be the most humiliating political disaster faced by an American president since the Civil War.

The redistricting fight he started in Texas and Florida illustrates both his desperation to retain power and his incompetent political analysis. Both were based on his belief that Hispanic voters loved him. Whether or not that was momentarily true in 2024 however, his disgusting anti-Hispanic rhetoric and his using ICE as an unrestricted attack dog against anyone with a brown complexion has changed all that. I expect Republicans to lose most of the seats they think they gained through gerrymandering.

The aspect of all this that I still cannot understand is that despite Trump’s negative image both in the United States and in allied countries, he has still been able to intimidate his former supporters into not speaking out against him. Even as the midterms approach, the only Republicans who are willing to call him out are those who believe they are certain to lose their seats if they don’t. The once proud Conservative GOP has become a collective kennel of craven lapdogs, and we see the same thing happening at the United Nations. Our allies among the attending nations may actually despise Trump more than we do, but not a single one has spoken up criticizing him by name.

Trump has whined that if the Democrats take over Congress, they’ll impeach him. I hope they do as their first agenda item in the next Congress, but removing him from office isn’t quite that easy. It requires sixty-seven votes in the Senate to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors. Most Senators do not cling to Trump’s coattails the way House Speaker Mike Johnson does. The only thing that might prevent his removal from office is the prospect that a Vance administration populated by the same sycophants Trump appointed might be even worse.

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Trump’s Madness is Dangerous

Posted on September 17, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 17, 2026

It’s been a long time coming, but the cult of Trump has finally lost its luster. I wish I believed that the growing rate of defections among Republicans reflected a return to integrity and a realization that unchecked, Donald Trump will destroy our country. But I know better. When they kowtowed to Trump, they were being driven by their own self-interest. They knew that if they didn’t toe the Trump-MAGA line his gangster goons would come after them.

As one Republican told the author of an upcoming book, the harassment begins on Truth Social and rapidly spreads to other social media. The next step, depending on the time of year, is dumping money into support for a primary opponent, which has been extremely effective for Trump. If that doesn’t work they turn to personal threats against both the offender and their family. In the end, if they don’t destroy the person who speaks truth against Trump, they wear them down until they’re isolated and exhausted.

The main difference today is that some Republicans’ self-interest tilts the scales toward risking Trump’s ire because his overall toxicity threatens their re-election, and like any ravenous predator, they can smell his weakness and the flagging support of his base. That suggests that when they finally get the Trump albatross off their backs things aren’t likely to return to a better politics, but that’s something we can worry about later. For now, let us be grateful that Trump’s influence is approaching rock bottom, but that doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.

In fact, he is more dangerous than ever as anyone who observes his irrational daily antics can’t help but notice. The term “cornered rat” seems an apt metaphor. As Trump alienates allies, both nations and people who supported him, as his poll numbers sink to record lows, as the courts consistently rein in his corrupt and illegal actions, and as his incompetence looms larger with every passing day, he feels his power slipping and his mental illness rules him.

With the wars he promised to end on day one raging more intensely than ever, and with his own war of choice with Iran completely beyond his control, he has created chaos in the world’s economy. He has upended decades-long trade relationships, he threatens treaties and alliances that have prevented the world from being destroyed by nuclear war, he has driven the world to a global energy crisis, and he makes insane threats that endanger us all.

Today, Trump has been ranting about destroying Iran completely, demolishing the Kennedy Center if they don’t put his name on it, the disloyalty of the Supreme Court Justices he put in place, and the betrayal of his hand-picked Fed Chief, Kevin Warsh, who chose the economic security of the United States over Trump’s insistence on lowering interest rates in the face of rising inflation. All this in one day!

Today, three-term Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, a Cuban-American who represents Miami’s Cuban and Central American communities lashed out at Trump’s immigration policy and his refusal to require ICE to respect the rights of her constituents. Ms. Salazar wasn’t defending herself against a likely defeat in November, either. Her statements reeked uncomfortably of principle and integrity, if you’re Trump.

Also today, House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose actions in the past twenty months make it clear that he will never oppose Trump, no matter how dangerous he becomes, chose to send the House home until after the election. The sudden decision was obviously intended to prevent the House from taking up the articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth submitted yesterday by Thomas Massie (R, KY) who in another apparent outbreak of conscience and principle has committed himself to forcing the release of all the remaining Epstein Files, and has had his Congressional career ended by Trump. Massie is amassing bipartisan signatures that he intends to use in the post-election lame duck session to expose the details of Trump’s relationship with Epstein.

All that is encouraging. Trump has alienated and scared so many people, it’s all finally coming home to roost, but is it happening in time to insulate us from Trump’s madness and incompetence? When Trump threatened to obliterate Iran, I wondered if he might actually be serious this time. We know that our armed forces are already dangerously low on strategic weapons, and the defensive missiles that protected Israel and Ukraine so well are now running out. Kyiv is being destroyed by Russia as are American bases in the Gulf states and those states’ oil infrastructure, by Iranian attacks assisted by Russia. We also know that Trump will not order a massive ground assault on Iran.

Where does that leave him? The horrific logical conclusion is that Trump might actually be considering using nuclear weapons. How else could he obliterate Iran? And if he is, with Congress dismissed until after the election, who’s left to stop Trump? There will be no further war powers resolutions for at least two months, and we certainly cannot depend on Pete Hegseth to stop Trump from starting a nuclear war.

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A Vote for Election Integrity

Posted on September 15, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 15, 2026

Sitting on my deck on a windless morning, I felt a sudden breeze, although the trees around me remained still. I didn’t know what caused it until I turned on the news. Even then, I wasn’t sure – was it the wake left by dodged bullets or a collective sigh of relief from the 250 million Americans who feared Trump would totally undermine our Constitution?

We can debate which aspect of our so-called democracy is most critical, but with the midterm elections rapidly approaching, the consensus among Americans who feared for our future was that the prize should go to voting rights. Whatever a failed or corrupt president might accomplish during their term, the final line of defense of our democracy has always lain with voters.

Much of the frustration felt by the vast majority of American voters, this year, was about the courts. The Republican controlled Senate, led by Mitch McConnell (R, KY) spent the last two decades packing federal appellate benches with Conservative judges, although that term, which once focused on fiscal conservatism, evolved into MAGA loyalty to Trump. The lower courts remained more balanced, politically, an odd observation in itself, since courts are supposed to be insulated from politics.

Two lower courts ruled that Trump’s attempts to control elections by limiting mail-in voting were likely unconstitutional and blocked his efforts to weaponize the U. S. Postal Service to assure that he maintained his majorities in Congress, and when the Justice Department, which was already weaponized by Trump to shut down dissent, sued thirty states to obtain voters records to screen them looking for non-citizens, the courts shut down twenty-three of them. The remaining seven are still pending.

Those were positive results for people who support our Constitution, but we couldn’t relax, despite the seemingly unanimous responses opposing Trump’s actions, because in the end, our fate lay in the hands of the Supreme Court, which contained a six to three majority of Justices thought to be Trump loyalists. The Court had already issued stunning decisions which left predictions in limbo.

After overturning Roe v Wade, reversing fifty years of precedent in 2022, the Court seemed poised to move ahead with a MAGA-oriented agenda, but in Trump’s second term, their decisions went in both directions. They declared Trump’s tariffs illegal but removed limits on campaign financing. They temporarily stopped his attempts to end birthright citizenship but issued mixed rulings on the president’s authority to remove officials in Executive Branch agencies and the Federal Reserve and gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act. They issued mixed rulings in immigration cases and gerrymandering of election districts and declined to review whether the president violated the War Powers Act when he attacked Iran without Congressional approval.

Given all that, despite the vast majority of legal analysts believing that Trump’s attempts to limit mail-in voting were illegal, no one was willing to predict whether the Court would find some pretext to allow his plan to continue. Recent surveys found that a majority of Americans distrusted the Supreme Court, and only a third of us approved of its recent performance. Until they ruled, yesterday, that Trump’s mail-in voting plan could not proceed to affect the 2026 midterms, the integrity of the elections remained in jeopardy.

Today, we can be fairly confident that the midterm elections are safe from Trump’s meddling, and recent polling virtually guarantees that Trump will lose his House majority by a wide margin. His Senate majority, which seemed secure a few months ago, now also appears to be in jeopardy, and will probably be decided based on how much money Elon Musk and the Trump’s PACs pour into the defense of Republican candidates.

There is no question that Trump’s attempts to rig elections and scream foul whenever he loses one will continue unabated. The next target will be the 2028 presidential election, which will be critical to the survival of the MAGA movement with Trump no longer at the helm and his popularity fading rapidly. We’re far from out of the woods with respect to elections, but the Court regained a measure of respect this week. Except for Justices Alito and Thomas, both of whom have profited substantially from Trump’s presidency, the rest of the Court seems inclined to prevent Trump from undermining the Constitution.

The battle for the midterms is far from over, however. The Democrats have given us little reason to be confident that they can provide a unified approach to governing if they win. While it’s natural that Trump’s attempts at autocracy and oligarchic control would strengthen Progressives, many of us who oppose MAGA are also concerned by the Socialist label Progressives have adopted. We worry about the clearly anti-Semitic views of candidates like Abdul Al-Sayed, the Democrat running for one of Minnesota’s Senate seats, and the views of New York mayor Zohran Mamdami.

The last thing America needs is more divisiveness, but I’m not confident Democrats can deliver on their promise to unite the country in a positive direction. If they don’t get their act together, we could still lose the fight to protect our future from Trump.

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Trump’s Naming Obsession

Posted on September 8, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 8, 2026

Donald Trump’s obsession with naming everything he can get away with after himself has now reached almost comical heights. My first reaction to hearing that he issued an Executive Order renaming Lake Ontario, Lake America was to laugh. My second was to ask how he imagines he has the right to do such a thing.

His thin legal justification is an 1890 law that gives American presidents the power to require federal agencies to use uniform names for places, bodies of water, even mountains, even though there is no federal agency that calls Lake Ontario by any other name. Thus Alaska’s Mount Denali, the tallest mountain in North America is once again Mount McKinley, consistent with Trump’s disdain for all nations whose people are predominantly non-white. (What we colloquially refer to as “Indian tribes” possess inherent sovereignty under two-hundred year old Supreme Court rulings and relate to the U. S. Government as sovereign-to-sovereign.)

Trump thinks he’s insulting Canada by attempting to change Lake Ontario to Lake America, but that too is a slur against native Americans. Its original name comes from the word Ontari’io which means beautiful lake in the language of the Iroquoi Nation. The Lake wasn’t named for the Canadian province; the province was named for the lake. Trump also thinks he’s insulting Canada by referring to its Prime Minister as “Governor Carney” as if Canada were nothing more than a fifty-first state, but Carney is a true statesman who doesn’t take Trump’s bait.

While American presidents can legally order maps altered in federal databasess and documents, they have no authority over what other countries name things. I was on a cruise in the Caribbean in March 2025, shortly after Trump declared that the Gulf of Mexico was now the Gulf of America. When passengers noticed that maps displayed on the ship already read “Gulf of America” their typical reaction was shock and anger, at both Trump and Google, who immediately revised their map software to reflect Trump’s Executive Order, despite there being no legal requirement that private companies follow it. Apple has similarly revised its maps. I checked Google Maps this morning, and you’ll be relieved to know that the area between Arizona and Texas is still called “New Mexico.”

If you’re wondering whether there’s an rational basis for renaming Lake Ontario, Trump’s is based, of all things, on geometry, though I seriously doubt that the concepts of volume and surface area mean anything to him. He claims that since the deepest part of Lake Ontario is on the U. S. side of the border, more than half of the lake’s volume is American water, but one could as reasonably argue that since most of the lake’s surface area is on the Canadian side, it belongs to Canada.

This renaming nonsense apparently means more to Trump than any of the major debacles that resulted from his policies. As Trump himself said a few days ago, if he doesn’t establish a legacy of plastering his name on everything he can, no one else will after he’s gone. He said that seriously, as if it were a sound justification for his obsession, when the reality is that when Trump is gone, the great majority of Americans will try to forget he ever existed.

Trump’s approval ratings, which are at an all-time low, reflect Americans’ growing concern over the president’s priorities. As Kimberly Wehle wrote in The Hill, it’s interesting that after all his missteps, the attempt to rename Lake Ontario seems to have had the greatest effect of turning the American public against him. Maybe that’s because it’s such an incredibly petty thing to do, even his supporters shake their heads wondering why he wastes his time on it, much less prioritizing it over things like his incompetent handling of the war in Iraq.

Ms Wehle noted that beyond the death and destruction caused by the war, with no noticeable progress toward its stated goal of assuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, Americans are more upset over Lake Ontario than they are over “the 66,000 people currently in immigration detention camps, over 70 percent of whom have no criminal convictions; the roughly 0.2 to 0.4-point rise in inflation due to Trump’s ongoing tariffs; his    astonishingly corrupt pay-to-play engagements with ultra-wealthy individuals, corporations, special interests, and foreign governments; his recent lowering of standards for FBI recruits to tolerate stealing, the hiring of sex workers, and even bestiality; the appearance of his name over 38,000 times in the Epstein files, which still have not been released in their entirety despite a congressional mandate; and the staggering wealth Trump and his unelected family members have accumulated since he retook office.”

I can’t explain why, but messing with Lake Ontario seems to have struck a nerve in most of us more than most of Trump’s other clownish antics did. It certainly did with me. I don’t understand it, but anything that makes people realize his power must be neutralized in November has to be a good thing.

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The Supreme Court and Mail-in Voting

Posted on September 6, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 6, 2026

I am not a lawyer – let’s get that out of the way quickly. But I can read English, and on the subject of elections, a fourth grader can understand everything our Constitution says about them. Here’s what Article 1, Sections 4, known as the Elections Clause, says  about Congressional elections, specifically the 2026 midterm elections:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

That’s everything the Constitution has to say about elections. Except for the archaic spelling of “choosing,” it’s pretty simple to understand.

The first thing to note about the Elections Clause is that it explicitly omits the Executive Branch of our government; that is, the Constitution grants no role to the President and Cabinet in how our elections are conducted. But there is more to say about the role of Congress.

The Committee on House Administration, part of the House of Representatives which is controlled by Republicans, says about Congress’s role:

Republicans [!!] believe that every eligible voter who wants to vote must be able to do so, and all lawful votes must be counted according to state law. Through an examination of history, precedent, the Framers’ words, debates concerning ratification, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution itself, this document explains the constitutional division of power envisioned by the Framers between the States and the federal government with respect to election administration. Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution explains that the States have the primary authority over election administration, the “times, places, and manner of holding elections”. Conversely, the Constitution grants the Congress a purely secondary role to alter or create election laws only in the extreme cases of invasion, legislative neglect, or obstinate refusal to pass election laws (emphasis added.)

In case there’s a fourth-grader in your home who doesn’t get it, the last sentence makes it clear that Congress’s role in elections is only authorized in the case of extreme circumstances. As far as the Constitution is concerned, states have full authority to determine how and when elections of House Members and Senators are conducted.

Are there exceptions? One thing that has been discussed in the media, given Donald Trump’s obvious attempts to change the election process in a desperate bid to retain his majorities in Congress is that a president may at any time declare a State of Emergency that grants them special powers beyond those explicitly granted in the Constitution. The President does not require prior approval from Congress or any other body to declare an emergency, but the National Emergencies Act places restrictions on those special powers.

My friendly AI summarizes those restrictions as follows:

The president cannot suspend the Constitution, delay elections, or ignore basic civil rights.

The president must notify Congress immediately, and the Congress may vote to end the Emergency by joint resolution or by vetoing the president’s rejection of that vote.

Courts may block emergency declarations if the president exceeds his authority or breaks existing laws.

It should be a great relief to all Americans that presidents cannot delay elections on their own authority, but can they alter them? That’s the only apparently gray area in this discussion. The pattern we have seen repeatedly during Trump 2.0’s administration is that Trump issues wild Executive Orders (he’s issued 277 in twenty months) on scores of subjects, regardless of whether they are legal or constitutional and dares objectors to invoke the courts. Thus, our future as a democratic republic depends on how the Supreme Court rules on these challenges, specifically, on Trump’s request for an immediate ruling on his attempt to restrict mail-in voting.

We have seen the court duck ruling on the legality or constitutionality of Trump’s orders, most recently in the case of construction of his ballroom. The court is very skillful at finding technicalities around issuing such rulings when it suits their convenience. But before this action is taken, let’s be clear. It’s obvious from all of the above, that the court could only reasonably grant such authority to Trump if he were able to prove his claims that mail-in voting is rife with fraud. He made that argument to federal courts with regard to the 2020 election 64 times and lost all but one, which turned on an administrative technicality in the Pennsylvania election.

If the Supreme Court, which had a 33% approval rating in July’s Gallup polling retains any integrity, it seems almost impossible that Trump can prevail on mail-in voting. If the Court finds a way to enable such a gross violation of the Constitution which could deprive millions of Americans of the right to vote, we can kiss our so-called democracy goodbye.

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Mail-in Ballots

Posted on September 2, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 2, 2026

If there is one sure way to undermine a democratic republic it is to rig elections. We mocked fake elections in other countries for decades. Does anyone take elections in Russia seriously? In 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has served as either president or prime minister since 2000 won re-election with 88% of the vote. In the opinion of virtually every international watchdog organization, the Russian election system is merely a front for autocracy, as Russia imprisons or kills Putin’s political rivals and outlaws dissenting opinions.

If Donald Trump is allowed to decide who can vote in American elections and who cannot in 2026 or 2028, that is precisely to path we will be going down. Trump has already shown no restraint in going after political rivals simply because they disagree with him. He routinely threatens imprisonment or death to people like Nancy Pelosi, James Comey, and John Bolton, and use the Justic Department as his personal legal attack dog. Moreover, Trump has demonstrated conclusively that the threats he makes, while often irrational and over the top, are to be taken seriously. They’re not just political machinations, but intents to seriously harm his opponents.

In spite of consistent findings by state election officials and independent audits that there is virtually no fraud connected to voting my mail, and that errors identified are trivial in number, Trump continues to push his narrative that mail-in voting must be curtailed according to rules that benefit his MAGA movement. In the 2024 election won by Trump, nearly a third (30.3%) of votes were cast by mail, with a number of states (Oregon, Washington, Utah, and Colorado) topping 90% of votes cast by mail. The percentages are also very high in Hawaii, California, and Nevada.

Trump wants us to believe that since six of those seven states are blue, they must be rigging elections against him, which aligns perfectly with his oft-voiced narcissistic notion that he couldn’t possibly lose a fair election because he is so beloved. Polls consistently show, however, that Americans have soured on Trump, with his approval rating dropping to the low thirties, and as Americans become more aware of the negative consequences of his failed war with Iran and his wrong-headed trade wars, the decline in his popularity continues weekly. A man as desperate for power and adulation as Trump knows only one way to react to that: lie, cheat, and steal.

Last March, Trump ordered the US Postal Service to screen all requests by states to mail ballots to voters against flawed and incomplete government citizenship records. That aside, the requirement would have required development of a massive, complex new IT system. USPS began that development in June, and last week a federal judge put the effort on hold, although there is no indication that USPS is abiding by that order. It’s worth noting, too, that the Constitution bestows full authority over elections to the states, and the role of the postal service is only to deliver the mail, not to decide who gets to receive things mailed to them.

And now we have a whistle blower report from within USPS that the whole process “is a shit show” likely to result in catastrophic failure that could disenfranchise millions of American voters. The report describes the system as rushed, incomplete, and untested and predicts that it will result in a disastrously flawed election result. I don’t know who the whistle blower is or how credible they are, but after thirty-seven years of government employment and many more as a government contractor, I can attest to the likelihood that the whistle blower report is valid.

For one thing, any IT professional worth their salt knows that a project this complex cannot be rushed. The IT industry has well-documented standards and procedures for such massive undetrtakings, and every project I was connected with over roughly fifty years followed them. They require an orderly progression of planning, testing, and approval steps, without which failure is a near certainty.

I can also attest to the risks a potential government whistle blower takes when they publicly stand against their agency. It’s not something anyone does lightly, and it’s not something done by cranks. Whistle blowers are often the last line of defense against disaster, as Daniel Elsberg proved when he released the Pentagon Papers that showed three administrations had been lying to Americans about the Vietnam conflict. We all know how that ended.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D, CN) has written to USPS Director David Steiner demanding a response to the whistle blower’s report, and election officials in several states have declared that even if the USPS system worked and was found to be constitutional, it is too late in the election process to implement its requirements. Let us hope that the Supreme Court will recognize what a disaster Trump’s order to USPS actually is, and how badly it can damage our entire election process. If this “shit show” is allowed to move forward, it will give Trump what he needs to do what he really wants to: declare a national emergency that authorizes him to take control of the election away from the states. If that happens we can say goodbye to our republic.

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The Complete Failure of Trump 2.0

Posted on August 28, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 28, 2026

Respected journalist Stephen Erlanger said it clearly and succinctly in this morning’s New York Times. “The Trump administration has replaced its military war [in Iran] with an economic one, but the result is likely to be no different … with a lack of American clarity about goals, a decline in American credibility and a strategic defeat.” Powerful as those words are, they mask details that are far more damning.

Whether or not there was a credible justification for starting a war with Iran, its planning and execution have been a disaster for the United States, the Middle East, and the world. The over the top war mentality of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that played directly into Donald Trump’s delusions of grandeur will surely be noted by historians who document this debacle as a dangerous inflection point in the history of our country.

I was an optimist about America all my life, at least the first eighty-one years of it, even through the Nixon Watergate years and the wrong-headed twenty-year conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the last two years, Trump has demonstrated how fragile our super-power status really is. He has undermined our credibility as the most powerful military force in the world, the standard-bearer for world peace and international cooperation, and as a nation that keeps its commitments to its allies.

Combine that with his very obvious corruption and his attempts to undermine the principles on which our nation was founded, and we have a modern day version of the Roman Emperor Nero. The parallels with Nero are striking. As the last emperor of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty which presaged the fall of the Roman empire Nero was primarily known as a tyrant with many of the same narcissistic tendencies as Trump. It’s not clear whether Nero actually fiddled as Rome burned, but that legacy isn’t far from the truth.

The Great Fire that destroyed most of Rome in 64 AD, was alleged to have been started by Nero himself to clear space for the magnificent palace he intended to build for himself. Sounds scarily like Trump’s ballroom fantasy and his attempts to turn the White House into a Mad Hatter’s playground. To deflect blame for the fire, Nero began a terrible persecution of Christians whom he blamed for all of Rome’s ills. Doesn’t that sound very much like Trump’s defamation of all immigrants as rapists and murderers and the brutal way in which ICE, at Trump’s direction, has violated their civil rights, even many who have been hard-working American citizens for decades? And Nero’s well-documented debauchery smells like Trump’s desperate attempts to hide his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.

Nero also apparently thought nothing of squandering Rome’s resources to enrich himself and his friends, which is a frightening metaphor for Trump’s overall performance in office. To take a few examples, he has wasted billions of dollars worth of military hardware and high-tech weaponry, drastically reducing our strategic readiness around the world. By now, most of us understand that the prosecution of his Iran war had more to do with Trump’s ego and mental illness than any rational attempt to solve the problem of the danger Iran poses to the world. As a result, we have a Navy that is drowning in the mess he created. The tragic and embarrassing spectacle of an aircraft carrier filled with thousands of highly trained military personnel and equipment that is so bankrupt it can’t feed its own people and a naval force teetering on insolvency illuminates the incompetence of the administration.

But that is hardly their only failure in foreign policy and security. The madness of Trump’s two-year non-shooting war against our longest standing and most reliable ally, Canada, may be the most damaging thing Trump has done over the long run, assuming his out of control war with Iran doesn’t result in upsetting the entire western alliance. His lies and exaggerations about Canada ripping us off since World War 2, while once simply offensive, have forced a neighbor on whom we depend for energy and mineral resources that are essential to our economy and security to  look elsewhere for reliable partners. That has not only weakened us in North America, but shown the world in the clearest possible terms that America cannot be relied on.

The problem goes way beyond Trump, although he is its principal catalyst and perpetrator. What Trump exposed to the world is the fundamental flaw of our once vaunted democratic process. His obsessive drive toward autocracy and his gangster-like control of the MAGA movement have shown that our two-party system is unsustainable. If a venal minority like MAGA supported by greedy billionaires can overwhelm our governing process every four years, our allies cannot rely on treaties or trade relationships and our adversaries can count on the fact that if they simply have patience, something Xi Jinping and China have in abundance, a system like ours is terribly vulnerable to self-destruction.

That’s the path Trump has us on. If his hand-picked Supreme Court allows him to disrupt the November election and Republicans in Congress don’t find the courage and integrity to remove him from office, I shudder at what America will look like by the end of his term.

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