The Aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s Murder

Posted on September 14, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 13, 2025

I wish I could speak to Matt Robinson, the father of the alleged assassin who killed Charlie Kirk. I suggested to a friend, yesterday, that having to turn his son in to law enforcement must have been a hellish decision. My friend responded that not turning him in would be immoral and un-American. I imagine that Matt Robinson was desperately trying to save his son’s life, knowing that if Tyler Robinson didn’t turn himself in, he would almost certainly be killed by law enforcement, or worse, by some revenge-seeking vigilante.

Statements from the accused assassin suggest that he designed and customized his own sniper weapon. By all accounts, Matt Robinson created a family culture that celebrated gun ownership. I wonder if dad knew what his son was doing. Given his son’s proclivity for political rhetoric on social media, how could he not have known his son had gone off the rails? I’m sure that’s what his lawyer will claim. Only a seriously disturbed individual would go to all the trouble Tyler Robinson is alleged to have done to kill Kirk.

If the public and the media allow this event to go down the way President Trump and his hate-mongering Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller are spinning it, we might as well throw in the towel if we care about the future of the United States. Someone has to draw a line  in sand about the lies and the Fascist narrative they’re putting out, daily. Before anyone had any idea who the shooter was, both Trump and Miller were posting on social media that the radical left was responsible, and Elon Musk tweeted on X that the left supports murder.

The truth, we now know, is that Tyler Robinson was even more right-wing and White Supremacist than Charlie Kirk. Robinson had written that Kirk’s platform was not “pro-White enough.” But that didn’t stop Miller from posting a new diatribe claiming that the left, whoever they are, despised everything good, beautiful and righteous, including everyone of faith. Historian Heather Richardson correctly identified Miller’s hate-filled rants as pure totalitarian tactics that right-wing extremists have been using since the days of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and his chief strategist and consigliere, Roy Cohn, who taught Trump everything he knows about skirting the law and the Constitution.

It’s what authoritarian leaders do when they want to overthrow the established order. They lie and distort, hitting us with so many false narratives on every front, they hope the public will either buy into their spin or simply burn out and bury their heads in the sand. Americans have been sitting idly for nearly eight months, as Trump and his lackeys have routinely and consistently violated the rights of Americans, mistreated immigrants and refugees seeking asylum, and fired political rivals from key government positions.

We’ve watched as Trump daily acted to usurp power from Congress and so badly managed the two wars he pledged to end on Day One of his presidency, that Israel’s ongoing genocidal actions have left it without allies, other than the United States, and Trump’s constantly being outplayed by Vladimir Putin has severely weakened NATO. Trump’s latest post on his own social media platform declared that he would only place harsh sanctions on Russia after every other NATO nation took the same action. But there was nothing reasonable in that post. Trump understands perfectly well, that two of his heroes, Hungarian President Viktor Orban and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, both NATO members, will never take such an adversarial position against Russia. The only thing Trump intends to accomplish is splitting NATO and challenging the mutual defense clause in Article 5 of its charter.

The one place we can all make a stand is here at home. Trump will attempt to make Charlie Kirk a martyr in his quest to turn America into a Christian, white male-dominated nation in which women and nonwhites have no rights, in other words, dragging America back to the eighteenth century. The idea that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a tool of the Radical Left is thoroughly debunked by the accused’s own writings, but the extremists driving Trump would rather focus on the fact that Tyler Robinson lived with a trans-gender individual, as if that were proof of the Left’s complicity in destroying America.

What may be worse is the response of huge entities like the National Football League and the New York Yankees, who have decided to hold moments of silence in honor of Kirk’s memory. Did any of them feel it necessary to declare silence to honor the school children who were also shot on the day Kirk was, or to honor the victims of the Minnesota legislative murders? Or when Congresswoman Gabi Giffords took a bullet in the head addressing a crowd in Tucson?

Charlie Kirk has been elevated in death to a position he doesn’t deserve. It’s a travesty of justice and common sense, and it’s extremely dangerous to our national identity.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Two High School Kids and a Right-Wing Extremist

Posted on September 12, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 11, 2025

What do two high school students in Evergreen Colorado and right-wing extremist Charlie Kirk have in common? They were all shot on Wednesday, September 9, 2025. Kirk was killed, one of the students is still on the critical list, and the other is recovering. The first thing that struck me about these incidents was the level of attention they received – from every source.

Kirk’s assassination has knocked Gaza, Ukraine, Russia’s incursions into Poland’s airspace, and Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein out of out the public’s eye for three days. The attempted murder of two innocent high school kids was barely mentioned. Our divisive President, who thrives on chaos and discord declared Kirk’s murder to be an act of war, unsubtly encouraging his own supporters to fight back, as he is always prone to doing. Of the two kids lying in hospitals in Colorado, Trump said not a word.

I cannot and will not approach this with politically correct euphemisms and pep talks about American values. Governor Spencer Cox of Utah, where Kirk was assassinated, gave one of those beautifully uplifting speeches politicians always resort to when they have nothing constructive to say. But words like love and unity, in that context, are utterly meaningless.

We’re not supposed to say things like this in the face of insane gun violence, but Charlie Kirk did not stand for love, unity, or inclusion. He was dedicated to the hateful, divisive, exclusionary, rhetoric of Project 2025, which Donald Trump is allowing to drive his presidency. Kirk, who advised his cult-like followers to accept gun violence in schools as a necessary consquence of our “God-given Second Amendment,” succumbed to his own false logic.

Kirk blamed the America’s problem with race relations on Martin Luther King. He decried the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as destructive to our White Christian nation, worried, publicly about flying on airplanes with black pilots, and referred to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor as an incompetent affirmative action hire. He advocated public execution for transgender Americans. His views on anti-Semitism were simply weird. While on one hand, he believed there was a cabal of Jews engaged in a conspiracy to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants, he was an Islamophobe who praised Israel’s genocidal treatment of Gaza.

I would put a question to everyone who reads this. Who would you rather stand in support of, an extremist with the same despicable views as Stephen Miller whose entire career has been about espousing views that two-thirds of America disavowed or two kids whose only crimes were showing up for school on Wednesday? Would you prefer Charlie Kirk’s view that the best form of gun control is to arm every American, or the view that sensible gun control laws are essential to our survival?

As much as I despise everything Charlie Kirk stood for, and I believe the cult-like Turning Point he founded is toxic for our national discourse, I despise wanton gun violence more. And if it’s not yet clear, I despise all the attention Kirk’s assassination continues to receive, while no one is lowering their flags to honor the children who were shot.

Let us not get caught up in typical MAGA nonsense over this. I’m guessing that the suspect in custody in Utah, who King Donald has already pronounced guilty of Kirk’s murder, will turn out to be a nut case, like the mentally challenged individual who took a shot at Trump last year. I find it fascinating that when some lunatic shoots up a school, every MAGA politician is quick to blame mental illness – after all, guns aren’t inherently evil, the problem is all the crazy people who own them. But when equally crazy people shoot at Trump and Kirk, they represent sinister forces of the radical left and the deep state.

Like everything else about the MAGA movement, the issues of guns and political violence have been distorted beyond recognition to suit the ideologues who are only in it for the power and wealth it brings them. I support the Second Amendment and its original purpose: to be able to raise a popular militia for defense and to enable individuals to defend their families against tyranny. Is it beyond ironic, that the very president who craves autocratic power and those who support him unconditionally also agree with Charlie Kirk that every American should be armed, when both the assassination attempt on Trump and the successful murder of Kirk could only have been accomplished with high end sniper rifles?

I will mourn and sympathize with the families of every child who has been shot in school and all those lost in mass shootings like the one that took nearly sixty lives in Las Vegas, but I refuse to mourn the loss of Charlie Kirk and the hateful things he preached.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A New World Order?

Posted on August 31, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 31, 2025

Recent polls show that a vast majority of Americans, much larger than the landslide victory Trump claims to have won, do not like the way the second Trump administration is attempting to remake America. The level of fear and uncertainty he has created now exceeds the angst we felt over Vietnam and Watergate. It is as high today as it was on December 7, 1941, when our Pacific fleet lay in ruins in Honolulu. At the time, the most beloved, trusted president we’ve ever had, Franklin Roosevelt, assured us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.

It was a great pep talk, but it was wrong, and it’s even more wrong, today. What we have to fear from Trump is the loss of everything our country has stood for, and everything that implies. Serious economists, both in America and other countries, deplore the idea of a world economy driven by tariffs. The only people who like them are the billionaires and corporate CEO’s who profit from them. The people driving this, notably Trump’s EOMB Director, Russell Vought, a primary architect of Project 2025, care only about their own wealth and power.

While Trump continued to lie and spin, taking advantage of the reality that it would take months for the real negative impact of his tariff war to be obvious, things got worse every day. Anyone who wasn’t a rabid MAGA follower knew from the start that prices would skyrocket, and everyone except the billionaires who were enriched by tariffs would be footing the bill. That’s already showing up on our grocery shelves and our Amazon accounts, and it terrifies Trump so much, he fired the person in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that is charged with monitoring and measuring inflation.

It’s a typical authoritarian tactic. If the facts contradict the lies of the administration, change the facts. If you don’t like the result of a highly sophisticated statistical analysis, rig the numbers to conform to your lies. It’s one of the principle ways dictators stay in power.

Regardless of the constant lies streaming from the White House, anyone with eyes and ears understands what’s happening. The power grabs, the attacks on science, on medical research, on public health policy, and our most prominent universities. The dismantling of public broadcasting, the disdain for attempts to protect our planet, the willingness to invade any state or city that voted against Trump and control it with active duty military, and yesterday, killing the development of wind farms that would have provided stable, non-polluting energy for two New England states that had the temerity to vote for Trump’s opponent.

We could talk about Trump’s obvious desire for Russia to destroy and occupy all of Ukraine. We could mention his willingness to destroy Gaza instead of supporting a sustainable solution that would not be condemned by our allies and adversaries alike. We could point to the continual breakdown and weakening of our alliances, but you’ve heard that for months, and most of us continue to cower in the shadows hoping all this will go away.

If all of the above hasn’t moved Democrats, Independents, and what remains of principled Republicans to united opposition, or to inspire someone other than Gavin Newsom to grab the reins of leadership, today’s horrific events might. Open any news website today, and you’ll see a perfect example of how a leader who bases decisions on strength rather than the weakness of an insecure narcissist behaves.

Trump’s imitation of a world-dominating strong man looks pathetic compared to the way Chinese President Xi Jinping seized the moment. Rather than be intimidated by Trump’s threats, Xi simply ignored him and played for time as he laid plans for his own version of a new world order run by real strong men who care more about strengthening their countries than gratifying their egos. Xi is hosting a summit in Tianjin, China whose intent is to nullify Trump and create a mutually beneficial economic bloc that excludes and greatly weakens the United States.

The summit is Xi and Vladimir Putin’s push to enlist like-minded autocrats throughout Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East to unite in opposition against Trump, and by implication, us. Look at who will be there: North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Myanmar’s Min Aung Hlaing, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic, and Slovakia’s Robert Fico. The biggest prize is Indian Prime Minister Modi, who has been courted by every administration since George W. Bush’s, and whom Trump hurt with a punishing tariff that appears to be the result of Trump’s chaos.

Why would he signal to the world that he supports Putin’s war against Ukraine, and then alienate the world’s largest democracy by punishing them for buying Russian oil? Add to the mix Iran, Pakistan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and what could emerge this week is a formidable anti-American bloc of nations united against us.

Since Trump has also gone out of his way to alienate Europe, Canada, and Mexico, where does that leave America’s role in international trade? Look at how much of what you purchase every day comes from a country that Trump has alienated and what those things will cost a year from now.

If that’s not horrifying enough, don’t forget that Trump publicly and transparently made it clear that he intends to rig the 2026 midterm elections, and if he can’t assure a MAGA victory, he’ll find a pretext to cancel them. The Supreme Court has shown no inclination to stop him.

If not now, America, when? It may already be too late, but every day without serious, organized, opposition leadership  pushes us closer to the tipping point.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Right and Responsibility to Vote

Posted on August 28, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 28, 2025

Every American has known for weeks (and many of us for much longer) that Donald Trump is openly attempting to rig the 2026 mid-term elections by demanding that red states engage in the most extreme gerrymandering. Even more disturbing, however, is the revelation that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose only qualification for the job is being an extremist right-wing sycophant, is now the point man on attempting to reverse the Nineteenth Amendment – the one that guaranteed women the right to vote.

When Trump told evangelists in 2024 that he would “fix things so good” they wouldn’t ever have to vote again, it was his typical incoherent wording designed to be taken as either a threat, a reassurance, or just rambling nonsense. But it would be dangerously naïve after what we’ve seen in Trump 2.0 to believe anything other than that it implied the coup-like power grab, as described in Project 2025 which is driving this administration. What Trump, and the Heritage Society that drafted the Plan meant, was that we should return to the eighteenth century in which only white males who owned land could be trusted to vote.

Wake up, America. That is the reality we face. Trump and his fascist extremist followers are attempting to undermine the basic principles on which our country was founded. Nothing is more fundamental to the survival and health of a democratic nation than the right to vote. If we, the citizens of the United States, no matter our gender, our age, or our social values allow MAGA extremists to rig elections and the Supreme Court doesn’t stop them, we’re done as the nation we thought we were. You think that’s not possible? That’s what the leaders of the Soviet Union thought right up until the day it ceased to exist.

If you’re as old as I am, there’s a great temptation to say, the hell with it. It’s our children’s problem now. My father’s generation fought World War 2; my generation fought in and against the Vietnam war, and my kids’ generation allowed itself to be misled into devastating wars in the Middle East, both of which diminished our country. We spent a decade in Vietnam and two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan, thirty years of humiliation and defeat because of misguided leadership. If we cede responsibility for our future to our children and grandchildren, we must do it in the context of a cautionary tale.

For me, that caution is really a conflict between what I absolutely believe and a growing realization that I might be wrong. I absolutely believe that every American citizen older then eighteen has the right and expectation that their vote be counted with the same weight as everyone else’s.  If you don’t agree with that basic principle, you ought to be the ones ICE is deporting. I would never make such a radical statement if I didn’t believe it, but I also recognize that it’s overly simplistic.

For decades, we’ve debated voting rights, swinging in every possible direction. As a nation, we appeared to decry restricting votes of women, people of color, virtually anyone who wasn’t male and white. We fought against literacy tests and rules that made millions of votes less important than others – that’s the express purpose of gerrymandering. When they can’t stop you from voting, they rig the vote count so your vote is wasted if you’re on the wrong team. But having declared all that, I’m beginning to wonder if that highly progressive view isn’t seriously flawed.

What it leaves out is that voting is not only a right, but a responsibility. And part of that responsibility is assuring that we understand what we’re voting for. Far too many Americans live in the fantasy world of social media, or are too lazy to look beyond what the influencers running our media want them to think. And that makes them nothing but fodder for the Trump chaos machine. I am shocked at the ignorant nonsense I hear many people spout these days. It demonstrates, clearly, that the destruction of truth and facts this administration is so good at is working. So, all you Americans who are still working for a living and raising families, or all of you younger people not yet sure where the future will take you, make damn sure you know what you’re voting for if you expect to live in a country that respects your rights as defined in our Declaration of Independence and our Consitution.

If you don’t take this seriously, maybe we’ll have to introduce some real qualifications to be eligible to vote. The issue isn’t literacy or citizenship, it’s responsibility. If the spectacle of a three-hour long televised Cabinet meeting scripted to allow everyone not named Donald Trump to kiss Trump’s ass before the entire world doesn’t nauseate you, I suggest that you self-deport from the voting booth next year. You’re not qualified to determine the future of our country.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s Happening. Does Anyone Care?

Posted on August 23, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 23, 2025

As a lifelong reader and writer of science fiction and other futurist genres, I’ve always been fascinated by the interplay between predictive fiction and reality. Sometimes the futurists get it right, sometimes they don’t. Sinclair Lewis warned America in 1935 that the country was not immune to Fascism and authoritarianism in his classic novel, It Can’t Happen Here. Thus, on February 20 1939, six months before the German Blitzkrieg of Poland, 20,000 American Nazis calling themselves the German American Bund staged a “pro-Americanism” rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The good news about the rally was the 100,000 real pro-Americans who protested the rally.

I’m certain the ratio of five Americans who prefer our Constitution and democracy to each one who supports Trump’s right-wing power grab still applies today, except that no one is fighting back in an effective way. More and more, people who might be in a posiiton to save our democracy are instead looking out for their own self-interest, hoping the MAGA wave will pass them by.

Futurists in the 1990s began warning of the dangers of an unregulated Internet and the rise of “news” organizations outside the aegis of the Federal Communications Commission. The consistent predictions made by dozens of outstanding writers was that the first casualty would be truth. When anyone can purchase a web domain or create a podcast and say anything they please regardless of facts or truth, and there’s no fair witness fact-checking, they predicted chaos will reign and the forces of darkness will inevitably win.

In 1985, novelist Margaret Atwood published A Handmaid’s Tale, which warned of the possibility of a successful, extremist, white male dominated “Christian” revolution. When I read it, my first reaction was that Ms. Atwood should have stuck to subjects she understood. Her novel suggested America could go from what it was in 1985 to a police state that controlled every American institution, in which women had the same rights blacks had prior to the first Civil War (that is, they were the property of men,) in less than a decade. How could she have expected her readers to believe something so absurd?

Ms. Atwood had the advantage of a fictional pretext, that somehow, except for a very few, women had become incapable of having children. As portrayed in both the book and the television adaptation of it, the second Civil War that followed left most of the country in ruins except New England, which became a Christian, Fascist oligarchy, with the United States in exile residing in Toronto. (Oh, Canada!) Until Trump’s second term began, no one could have convinced me that it could happen here, but I probably would have said the same about Sinclair Lewis’ warning, had I been alive in 1935.

I must apologize to Ms. Atwood. Her prediction looks less absurd every day as Trump continues to attack everything most Americans hold dear, and there is no indication that the right-wing dominated Supreme Court will do anything to stop him. To all Americans who have allowed themselves to become numb to Trump and MAGA, despite the obvious lies and incompetence that define this administration, I say, WAKE UP NOW. Do you want your grandchildren, especially those sweet little girls you bounce on your knee living in a world designed by Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, and horror stories penned by George Orwell and Margaret Atwood?

I didn’t believe it, even after Trump won and selected the authors of Project 2025 and sycophants who would do anything for a taste of power to run our government. I didn’t believe it when Elon Musk took his chain saw to government agencies that violated the precepts of Project 2025 under the false guise of attacking fraud and abuse. But when ICE started looking like Hitler’s Gestapo, and the best the loyal opposition could do were marathon sit-ins in the House and Senate, when Trump sanctioned Benjamin Netanyahu’s complete destruction of Gaza and continued his public one-sided romance with Vladimir Putin, causing the EU and NATO to break with America, I got scared. For the first time in my life, (I was born during World War 2,) I am pessimistic about the future of our country.

I applaud California Governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker for standing up to Trump’s attempt to steal the mid-term elections, but those two, alone, cannot defeat MAGA. Where the hell are the leaders sworn to uphold the Constitution?

If you’ve ever visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and seen the photos on the walls of Nazi troops marching through the Dutch capital, hold on to the horror you felt at that moment. It will be happening in DC within weeks, and if we believe our sociopathic president, in Chicago and Los Angeles soon after. If that’s not enough to make you scream, I give up!

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

An Issue Worth Fighting For

Posted on August 4, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 4, 2025

Texas law empowers the Governor, Greg Abbott, to remove legislators from office if it can be proved that they willfully abandoned their office, thus forfeiting carrying out their responsibilities. In 2021, when the Republican dominated legislature tried to amend the Texas’s election laws to make it more difficult for Democratic-leaning groups to vote, the Democrats in the legislature staged a walkout. The intent was to assure that there would not be a quorum when the Republicans attempted to force the changes through.

At the time, the Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton wrote an opinion addressing how much power the Governor actually had in such cases. “While Paxton said it was beyond the scope of his office to say whether any one lawmaker’s quorum break constituted abandonment of office, he underscored that courts have a right to make that determination and remove public officials.” When Abbott threatened the Democrats with everything from being removed from office to being arrested and tried as felons, his only legal justification was Paxton’s 2021 opinion. As Paxton suggested, if the Democrats and Abbott both stay on their present course the result will be an extended court battle.

It’s unclear which way the Supreme Court would rule, but what is more predictable, is that by tying the issue up in court, the Democrats might achieve what Trump did in 2024. More than ninety felony convictions against Trump disappeared, simply because his delaying tactics caused time to run out. The Republicans knew that if Trump won the election, he would never have to face the consequences of those convictions.

There’s also a clock ticking on the Texas legislature’s attempts to redistrict the state to take five seats away from Democrats. Legislative sessions don’t last forever, and even in Texas, the legislature is bound by laws and rules. What I take from all this is that finally, the Democrats found an issue worth going all out to fight over, and it certainly is that. If states are permitted to change their voting maps at the behest of a power-crazed president, there will be no hope of preserving our Constitution and democracy.

What happened that resulted in the Democrats showing some real backbone? Who was behind it? It almost sounded like someone grabbed the reins of leadership and took control, a concept many of us doubted would ever come to fruition.

On April 28 at the annual gathering of Democrats in New Hampshire, Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois gave a rousing speech rallying Democrats to fight back against Trump before it was too late. Pritzker was powerful and eloquent. He sounded like exactly the leader Democrats needed, and I applauded him here, under the rather optimistic title, “Democrats Finally Have the Leader They Desparately Need.” But Pritzker stayed under the radar after that, and I assumed, incorrectly, I hope, that it was because he was Jewish. With Trump stirring up every racist, bigot, White Supremacist, and just haters in general, I didn’t think having a Jew leading the party would work. Sometimes, it’s good to be wrong.

Pritzker has been quietly working behind the scenes, doing the one thing that was essential to oppose Trump. He was strategizing, organizing, and putting all of his energy into crating a formidable opposition. Pritzker is a billionaire who profits from Trump’s autocratic policies as much as Trump’s billionaire friends and sycophants. But Pritzker clearly cares more about the future of the United States and the values it was built on than enriching himself further. That’s enough for me. I’m all in on J. B. Pritzker, now that it’s clear that he provided the impetus and security needed to enable Texas Democrats to fight back.

Pritzker brought a planeload of them to Illinois, where he pledged to do everything in his power to protect them. Along with California Governor Gavin Newsom, Pritzker said everything is on the table for this fight. When you’re under constant siege, it’s essential to pick your battles and preserve your resources. Newsom called the redistricting issue existential, meaning it’s a red line Democrats must not permit Republicans to cross.

The walkout by Democratic Texas legislators happened as part of an effort by several Democratic Governors, led by Pritzker and Newsom. The good news in all this is that the walkout was not a one-off desperate last stand. It was organized by prominent Democrats from all over the country, and that should give all of us hope, and when we add New York and New Jersey, the Democrats have state legislatures of their own capapble of yielding far more political benefit than Texas. The only question is whether the blue states should follow Texas down the rabbit hole of extreme gerrymandering.

If you take one thing away from this, it should be that the Democrats are not leaderless. They’re just quiet about it. And I permanently withdraw any objection to J. B. Pritzker grabbing the reins and guiding his party and the nation into 2026 and 2028.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Leadership

Posted on August 3, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 3, 2025

There are many reasons Donald Trump has become as powerful as he is. Historians will go on and on about how American values have evolved since Vietnam, how the American Dream my generation and the next were sold somehow came to represent nothing but wokeness, whatever the hell that is. But the primary reason Donald Trump wins is that he has an uncanny knack for wielding his own brand of leadership based on lies, threats, chaos, the deliberate obfuscation of truth, and intimidation.

Leadership comes in many forms. Trump’s is the most despicable. By any definition, the lack of honesty, and the willingness to use any unscrupulous tactic to win is not a leadership style designed to improve our country or the lives of most of its citizens. Trump is the ultimate panderer – he’ll promise anything to anyone to get their money and vote, but in the end, there’s only thing we can predict about his actions: if something enriches him personally or increases his power, he’ll do it. If it doesn’t, everything becomes a transactional bargaining chip.

How does he get away with it? He possesses a dark, sinister form of charisma. Love him or hate him, it’s as effective as the serpent in the Garden of Eden. We live in a nation of gross financial inequalities, which means millions of people feel left out, angry, disenfranchised. Trump taps into their anger and frustration, and in more subtle ways, the bigotry and xenophobia that always lie just below the surface when people are hurting. He promises to punish those responsible, and the constant din of lies and nightmarish fantasies works, primarily, because there’s no one effectively fighting back.

If you ask why Trump keeps getting away with dismantling our government, our basic values, and the safety net nearly half of us depend on, the answer is simple. The roughly sixty percent of Americans who disapprove of Trump  have no leadership.

Currently, 72,500,000 Americans receive financial assistance, (welfare,) 67,300,000 Americans receive Medicare benefits, 69,000,0000 receive Social Security checks, 78,382,000 are on Medicaid, and 24,200,000 Americans get their health insurance through Obamacare. Every penny of that is at risk as long as Trump controls the Congress and the courts.

There’s considerable overlap in those numbers, but the overall picture is that if Trump’s crusade toward oligarchic autocracy succeeds, half our country will suffer direct harm, and if his efforts to apply extreme redistricting to ensure controlling Congress succeed, our right to vote will become meaningless. The one person who constantly charges that elections are rigged, is now the Rigger-in-Chief. Again, the question millions of people are asking is why no one is standing up to him.

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker has been the one prominent Democrat who has had the courage to consistently speak out and fight back. He warned, yesterday, that people and institutions that bend the knee to Trump will be remembered for their complicity in the undermining of America, like all the collaborators who enabled Germany’s occupation of Europe during World War 2.

Booker is right. The Democratic Party is failing us, badly, and the fact that they will surely be vilified by future historians does nothing to ease the pain of watching America sink into the sunset. Trump is anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-enlightenment. He only understands a world in which the strongest, fittest, and most merciless survive, and he wants to lead the United States into a backward-looking combination of Fascism and Feudalism. He would bring back slavery if he could.

In the face of all this horror, where are the leaders among the Democrats? Booker has his own brand of charisma. He’s eloquent, smart, and consistent in arguing against the loss of our values. He’s one of four Democrats who have spoken out loudly, attempting to rally his party, but they all have similar flaws, politically. Booker is black, not very black, but black enough. J. B. Pritzker and Josh Shapiro are Jewish, and Gavin Newsom is…well, Gavin Nesom. None of them command a national constituency.

Trump has created so much hate and fear, the reality is that non-whites, women, Jews, Muslims, and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like a white, male, Christian is unelectable, nationally. How twisted, but predictable is it that the man Pope Francis criticized in 2016 for possessing no Christian values now says he wants America to become a Christian nation run by right-wing zealots?

In 2008, a relatively unknown, charismatic black man espousing love and inclusion capitalized on the failures of George W. Bush’s administration and appeared to win over the hearts of America. Barack Obama came out of the blue, with a message that is the polar opposite of Trump’s, and he won, twice. Bill Clinton, also relatively unknown in 1992 did the same thing. The key to saving us is leadership based on positive charisma, commitment, and caring about people. Isn’t there anyone left in America who possesses those qualities?

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Whole Ballgame

Posted on July 28, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 28, 2025

I hope with all my heart that the dark fantasy I published yesterday under the title The 2026 Midterm Elections never comes to pass, though if I didn’t think it was possible, I wouldn’t have written it. Horror fantasies aside, the significance of the 2026 midterm elections cannot be overemphasized.

An Op Ed in today’s New  York Times says it better than I ever could. The author, Frank Bruni, is a Professor of Journalism at the University of North Carolina. His title is November 2026 is Everything. His basic argument is beautifully summed up in one paragraph: “We can’t let any of the political anomalies, Beltway melodramas, sweeping generalities and other chum for cable television news distract from what I’m increasingly convinced is the whole ballgame for America’s future: Democrats’ wresting control of at least one chamber of Congress.”

Professor Bruni hit the nail on the head, and if Americans don’t wake up soon, Trump will successfully have transformed America into a Fascist oligarchy with himself as autocrat by the end of his term. If you’re reading this, I strongly urge you to click on the Op Ed link and read Bruni’s less than ten minute column.

Bruni reminds us that the road to recapturing the Senate is very steep for Democrats. Winning the Senate next year, with only a third of the seats in play would imply a nationwide, blanket rejection of Trump’s actions. Not likely, but the best possible outcome if it should occur.

The focus is on the House of Representatives. In Trump’s first term, the midterms cost the  Republicans forty House seats, but Bruni reiterates the warnings of others, like James Carville. Republicans would never win control of the House if the election were fair, according to national polls that suggest seventy percent of Independent voters disapprove of Trump’s heavy-handed disregard of laws and standards of behavior. But House elections haven’t been fair since Newt Gingrich taught Republicans about gerrymandering.

Both sides do it – if one side does, the other is obligated to, or risk being wiped out – but Republicans made an art form out of it. We’ve talked about Wisconsin, where Republicans won sixty-one percent of the seats in the legislature with only forty-nine percent of the votes, but Bruni cited Texas, whose legislature presently contains twenty-five Republicans and twelve Democrats due to gerrymandering. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has already caved in to Trump’s demand to re-write the districts again to eliminate at least one other Democratic seat. That’s really all it takes to rig the election, because the Supreme Court has chosen to look the other way on even the most egregious gerrymandering cases.

Bruni also warned that, “Anyone who appreciates the threat that an unbowed, unrestrained Trump poses must be relentlessly, obsessively focused on the rare congressional districts — maybe about 20 of them, maybe several more — that are truly up for grabs.” If that describes you, and you wish to contribute to someone’s campaign fund, be smart. Search out the races where your contribution can do the most good, wait until after the primaries, and imagine a million other people doing the same thing. That appears to be the only thing that will stop Trump from destroying the America we know.

However, says Bruni, because the Republicans have likely already squeezed out every gerrymandered vote, and the Democrats haven’t, they could greatly increase their chances of winning in November 2026 if they applied the Republicans’ tactics as effectively as they did. Bruni said making such a recommendation made him heartsick. Me too, because gerrymandering is the equivalent of robbing millions of people of their right to vote.

It can’t be repeated enough times. While Americans watch Trump’s antics on television, some cheering, but the great majority in terrified dismay, the Republicans who wrote Project 2025 are amassing their forces and their money to destroy the government more than two-thirds of us want and support. It’s nothing less than a coup, and it will succeed if we don’t start fighting back now.

Bruni concluded with some truly frightening facts. The Republicans have already 1.4 billion dollars to support candidates in the midterms. And worse, “while there are 13 House Democrats who represent districts that Trump won in 2024 and that might be prime opportunities for Republican pickups, there are only three House Republicans who represent districts that Kamala Harris won in 2024.”

Are you afraid enough to get involved, yet?

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The 2026 Midterm  Elections

Posted on July 27, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 27, 2025

The United States of America is in serious trouble, far more than it was on December 8, 1941, when our Pacific fleet lay at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean; far more than after our ignominious withdrawal from Viet Nam and Watergate, and far more than after our disastrous twenty year war in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Trump continues to implement Russell Vought’s Project 2025 agenda, trampling over decades of laws, treaties, and our Constitution, the Supreme Court has demonstrated that it will not stop him from dismantling our government as Vought, the Director of the Executive Office of Management and Budget, demands. Vought has repeatedly use his position to nullify acts of Congress he disagreed with in violation of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which requires the Executive Branch to faithfully carry out all measures passed by Congress and signed by the President.

Neither Congress nor the Democratic Party has shown any sign of having either the will or the courage to fight to save our democracy. Every Republican in Congress has either shown themselves to be craven cowards, interested only in their own next election, or they have decided to throw in the towel. Once you’ve admitted defeat and succumbed as Senator Thom Tillis has, it’s too late to start telling the truth about Trump and expect to be taken seriously. Remember Jeff Flake, Adam Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney?

There is not a single Democrat, anywhere, willing to commit them self to leading their party back from the self-destruction of 2024. JB Pritzker’s attempt to rouse Democrats to action in New Hampshire fell on deaf ears. The best Democrats in Congress could come up with was a long filibuster by New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, and a 25-hour speech by House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, both of which were nothing more than admissions of defeat.

As Trump’s popularity drops deeper into the thirties, and his hold on Republicans in the House and Senate weakens, the same greed and cowardice that enbabled Trump to keep them in line, will undermine his administration, because history has proved that when a president’s approval rating sinks, the midterm elections exact a stiff price. It’s beginning to look like the midterms are our last hope to stop Trump, and Vought and his co-conspirators understand that.

Some people I know think we’ve already lost, that when Trump told evangelists in 2024 that he would fix everything so they’d never have to vote again, he was signaling his intention to either rig or void future elections. As determined as the MAGA crew is to cling to power, even I couldn’t imagine how they could pull that off…until now.

In 1974, the Johnson administration solidified our commitment to the Vietnam War by faking an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, claiming American naval vessels had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. In 2003, the Bush administration, including the highly respected Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell deceived the nation and the world with faked intelligence about caches of nuclear, chemical, and biological “Weapons of Mass Destruction” to satisfy Americans’ demands that we find and punish the perpetrators of nine-eleven. The falsified intelligence justified attacking Iraq, drawing us into that disastrous conflict. In both instances, our intelligence services were completely compromised, and those administrations were benign compared to Trump 2.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of nine-eleven is September 11, 2026, thirty-three days before the election. Over Labor Day weekend, MAGA influencers will begin leaking intelligence that terrorist organizations are planning to attack American installations around the world, and we’ll be reminded constantly of how terrorists love symbolic acts and dates. Trump will be asked about them, and he will bluster incoherently, warning of hidden terror cells and suitcase nukes planted all over the United States and Europe.

He’ll do what he always does, calling anyone who disagrees with him a traitor, and create so much chaos that as usual, truth is the first casualty. He will accuse Iran of being behind it and spread crazy fears that Iran is planning an all-out war to destroy Israel and dominate the Middle East. He will threaten Iran with total destruction, using words specifically tailored to enrage their governing body. The rhetoric will ramp up as September 11 nears, reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and with all that noise, and Trump throwing gasoline on the fire, a few carefully choreographed provocations orchestrated by the Hegseth-Gabbard-Miller brain trust will result in incidents that will be branded as terrorist attacks and blown out of proportion.  

Having brought the country to the brink of a major war, Trump will announce that terrorist groups have infiltrated our social media and election infrastructure. He will declare a State of Emergency and implement martial law, then issue an Executive Order suspending the midterm elections for the duration of the emergency.

That sounds insane, but no more so than what Trump has been doing during his six months in office.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Extortion

Posted on July 24, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 24, 2025

Donald Trump has often been accused of behaving like a gangster. The charge has considerable credibility. His association with organized crime figures in the 1980s and ’90s, including learning how to defy laws and courts at the feet of their shared consigliere, Roy Cohn, is well documented in photographs and interviews. For people who remain skeptical about the kinds of people Trump considers friends, the current, scandal over Jeffrey Epstein, should be convincing.

Epstein was as much a criminal as John Gotte and the other Gambino crime family thugs Trump hung out with in New York nightclubs. In many ways, he was worse. His crimes were premeditated, predatory assaults on women designed to provide perverted, salacious entertainment to wealthy elites whose moral standards were comparable to Trump’s – that is, they all, including Trump, have none.

Ever since Epstein became a political football, rumors have flown about how close he and Trump were, but yesterday, a slew of interviews showed up in the news media, confirming that Trump and Epstein were “best friends” for as long as twenty years. Stacey Williams, a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, told CNN that during the several months she was Epstein’s girlfriend, the only person he ever referred to as a friend was Trump, and in her words, “They were very close and they were up to no good.”

There’s much more, but today, that stuff is just for background. The real issue is that Trump’s tendency to act like a gangster has dominated the first six months of his presidency, and nothing makes the point better than the extortion game he’s playing with some of America’s finest universities. Today, the White House announced that Columbia University agreed to pay a $200 million fine for failing to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism.

Since the day he was inaugurated, Trump has blown every dog whistle he could find. He turned ICE loose on millions of innocent Hispanics under the guise of ridding the country of murderers, rapists, drug smugglers, and sex traffickers who Barack Obama and Joe Biden allowed into our country. He made a show of firing top-ranked African Americans wherever he finds them, claiming they were only hired because they were black and were basically incompetent. He encourages Israel, whose Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has the same lack of respect for laws and human decency as Trump, to continue his campaign of genocide against two million Palestinians in Gaza.

Does that sound like a man who cares about discrimination and stamping out hate? He cares as much about anti-Semitism as he does about all the Ukrainian and Russian soldiers whose deaths he pretends to lament, while giving the nod to Vladimir Putin to go on killing as many as possible. To Trump, anti-Semitism is just another tool of extortion.

The war in Gaza caused many pro-Palestinian groups to demonstrate on American campuses. Elite universities like Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, and Northwestern, who have always bent over backwards in defense of the free speech of minorities, allowed the demonstrations to continue, and they became a thorn in the side of the Trump administration, which would have preferred not to draw attention to its willingness to enable the complete destruction of Gaza.

This is not about Hamas, the criminal, terrorist organization that started the war by killing over 2,000 innocent Israelis and a number of foreigner nationals who happened to be in Israel at the time. This is not a debate on how far Israel should be allowed to go in retaliation and to protect its citizens in the future. This is about Donald Trump seizing on a hot button issue and twisting it for his own purposes.

The $200 million dollar fine Columbia agreed to pay was, plain and simple, an extortion payment motivated entirely by Trump’s need to satisfy his base after running in 2024 on an anti-woke agenda. Declaring war on progressive-leaning universities to end diversity and curtail free speech was an essential part of Project 2025. What we see playing out in broad daylight is the mugging of our American democracy.

I’m a Columbia graduate. I would point out that my class (of 1964) was over 80% Jewish, something that raised the hackles of the real purveyors of anti-Semitism. The notion that Columbia, Harvard, and the others are anti-Semitic is pure nonsense. Did Columbia handle the Palestinian protests well? No, they were embarrassingly inept, but the idea that their poor management was part of an organized scheme to harm Jewish students is absurd.

Columbia’s crime, as we alumni are making clear to their administrators, was bending the knee to Trump to protect the $1.4 billion in federal research grants Trump had taken hostage. If you wake up one day soon wondering where your rights disappeared to, mark this date as one that accelerated the process. It’s one of our generation’s Days of Infamy, every bit as damaging to the United States and what it stands for as Pearl Harbor was.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment