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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Flailing

Posted on July 23, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 23, 2025

We see things like this all the time – a desperate criminal on the run, surrounded by law enforcement with no place to go, a terrified child caught in one lie too many, a cornered rat. What they all have in common is that their actions are completely unfiltered, emotionally driven, violent, and impulsive. They lash out in every direction, attempting to hurt as many of their perceived persecutors as possible. They’ll say anything about anyone, having long passed the point where truth or facts have meaning.

What’s most interesting about that behavior is that it does nothing to address its root cause. It teaches the child nothing about lying, it teaches the criminal nothing except, possibly, how to not get caught next time. And rats will always behave like rats.

Our president, Donald Trump, who spent his entire life ignoring rules, violating laws, and living like an immoral glutton, isn’t about to change as he approaches eighty. He spends most of his time juggling problems, most of which are of his own making. His stock in trade is creating chaos and obfuscating truth. And his most predictable behavior is accusing everyone else of all the things he’s guilty of. Nothing seems to stop him, not even nearly a hundred felony convictions.

But sometimes, people like Trump go too far, and they drown in their own swamp. The absurd situation surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex criminal who died in his prison cell, and who managed to draw countless celebrities into his schemes, makes this point like nothing else. The idea that with two wars that Trump said he would end the day he took office still raging more violently than ever, the nation is focused on the possibility of another salacious sex scandal, ought to make it clear how much trouble our country is in.

Vladimir Putin is determined to take advantage of the fifty days of grace Trump graciously offered him to destroy as much of Ukraine as he can. Benjamin Netanyahu continues to escalate the destruction of Gaza and its two million civilians. Trump’s personal Gestapo, formerly known as ICE, is steadily ramping up its campaign of terror, mostly against legal U. S. residents, citizens, and green card workers, simply because they’re Hispanic. Only in Trump’s universe would anything related to scum like Epstein trump all that in importance.

Trump’s friendships with people you wouldn’t want within a mile of your wife, sister, or daughter are well documented. He hung out with organized crime figures, prostitutes, and porn stars, and new photos of him and Jeffrey Epstein together show up every day. Undoubtedly, many of the celebrities Epstein solicited were Democrats, and Trump decided that exposing them would help him both win re-election and solidify his grip on power.

But as we’ve seen with Trump, it doesn’t matter whether the things he says are true or they ever come to pass. The chaos and noise he produces completely occupy the news cycles, which effectively silences everyone else’s voice. The only thing that puzzles me and a lot of other people is why he demanded the Epstein files be released when they were as likely to be damaging to Trump as to his enemies.

The answer is that Trump doesn’t think like a normal person. His narcissism causes him to believe he’s invincible, that things that bring down other men can’t touch him. When he ordered the release of the Epstein files, he knew his lapdog Attorney General, Pam Bondi, would attempt to redact anything that might be embarrassing to him before the records were released, and based on what we’ve seen lately, she’d likely get away with it except that it’s Trump’s most rabid supporters who are demanding to see them.

Last week, when Trump and Bondi caved in to pressure from the extreme right faction of MAGA supporters, and ordered grand jury testimony released, they only did it to cool rising tempers that might have hurt Trump. But a Federal judge in Florida denied the request, today. Could it possibly get any crazier? Trump, who is desperate to hide the details of his relationship with Epstein, realized his only play was to order the files released, but that backfired, adding even more fuel to the scandal.

To complete this absurd picture, House Speaker Mike Johnson, under orders from Trump to scuttle any attempt by the House to pass a bill demanding the release of the Epstein files, declared the House to be in recess until after Labor Day.

So – Trump thought he could discredit Democrats by associating them with Epstein, but it turned out that it would all likely splash back on him. As a result, our government is in total stasis, people are being killed by the thousands in Ukraine and Gaza, and hundreds of innocent lives are being destroyed by ICE, every day, while Trump flails ineffectually, resorting to accusing Barack Obama of treason to distract attention.

We used to ask when this kind of thing would ever stop. It won’t until someone knocks Trump off his pedestal.

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Carville and the Midterms

Posted on July 21, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 21, 2025

Thirty-three years ago, when Bill Clinton was running for president, Democratic strategist James Carville burst on the scene. He brought with him an acerbic wit, an unusual talent for political analysis, and a good-old-boy Louisiana drawl. Pearls of wisdom spilled from his mouth, and many people credit him with being a large part of Clinton’s victories.

Ever since then, whenever the Democratic Party seems to have lost its way, like every moment of the last eighteen months, for example, I wait for the master to speak. When he spoke in March, it was to tell Democrats to lay low. Don’t fight Trump’s attempts to destroy the government, just get out of the way and give him enough rope to hang himself. His approval rating will be way down in the 30 by the end of May.

Was he right? It’s July 21st, and the four most recent polls (CBS, Reuters, AP, and CNN) have Trumps approval at 40-42% and his disapproval rating at 54-58%. Carville was wrong. The numbers may look close, but the low forties is where Trump has spent most of his political career. Interestingly, polls on specific issues are far less favorable. More than 60% of Americans disapprove of the way ICE operates – OpEds are beginning to refer to the pseudo-law enforcement agency as America’s Gestapo.

The Big Ugly Bill polls at about the same level, but Trump’s base doesn’t seem to have made the connection between the harm his actions have caused them and Trump himself. It would be absurd, in terms of national priorities, for the Epstein scandal to be the thing that finally convinces his base that Trump lied to them, but it would also be strangely fitting, given Trump’s life-long relationship with sexual predation.

The Democrats may not have intended to lay back and let Trump run amok, but there’s no evidence that the leaderless, lost Dems did anything to slow him down. In March, Carville begged someone, anyone to end the Democrats’ lack of leadership. In today’s New York Times OpEd, he contradicted that, and then in the same piece contradicted his contradiction.

Today, Carville said the Democrats shouldn’t even think about selecting a leader until after the midterm elections, sixteen months from now. Without saying why, he simply stated that any attempt to select one before then would fail. Then, a few paragraphs later, he said, “Until then, we must run unified in opposition to the Republicans to gain as many House seats as possible in the midterms.”

Huh? How can they run in unified opposition when they don’t have a leader? When even Jim Carville doesn’t make sense, the Democrats’ cause is hopeless. Another thing Carville said was that Democrats should start campaigning immediately, and from now until the midterms, the theme should be a single word: Repeal. Repeal the Ugly Orange Bill. Repeal the Trump tax cuts. Repeal the legislation that’s intended to turn ICE loose on an unsuspecting America, even after the overreach and violation of civil rights that they publicly celebrate.

Carville didn’t say it, but I will. With the Supreme Court telling Trump he can do whatever he wants without ever addressing the legality or constitutionality of his actions, and with not a single Democrat able to gain traction with independent or Republican voters, the midterms are our last hope of surviving Trump with our democracy intact. Democratic state legislatures, who have never abused gerrymandering as badly as Republicans have, are now looking at redistricting, to squeeze every possible seat out of the midterms, but that won’t accomplish anything until a charismatic leader emerges.

The last two successful Democrats, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both possessed that quality. Neither had much of a track record relating to national politics or world affairs when they ran for president, but they had a positive version of what Trump has. In a country as polarized as the United States is today, it’s scary to say, but the next charismatic idol who comes along is likely to be our next president.

I have hope for the midterms, based on the way independent voters reacted to Trump in the 2018 midterms. But the MAGA machine is a lot more sophisticated now than it was then. Stephen Miller, who drives the most hateful of Trump’s policies, has moved the culture of lies and disregard for the rule of law to a new level, and the Democrats have so far been totally ineffectual in combating that. How does Carville imagine they’re going to win back the House without coordinated leadership?

Just as I was rallying my own optimism for the midterms, I noticed something that could derail our hopes for them. Fifty-three days before the election, we will commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of nine-eleven. Imagine how Trump and MAGA will use that leading into the midterms. I wonder which Arab countries he’ll decide to bomb to show everyone how tough he is.

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Don’t Believe a Word He Says

Posted on July 8, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 8, 2025

The tragic flooding in Texas that took so many lives, especially those of innocent children at a summer camp, made it clear, yesterday. The disingenuousness of President Trump’s response would be appalling if it weren’t so typical. First it was White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responding to criticisms from meteorologists all over the country that Trump’s cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service had degraded the quality of storm forecasts. Qualified people reported that there are now insufficient staff to launch weather balloons, which are essential for accurate forecasts. A South Florida meteorologist who is a former NWS official has been sounding the warning for months.

Ms. Leavitt, who has a talent for feigning righteous indignation, declared trying to blame Trump for the lack of preparation by local Texas officials was outrageous, asserting that there was no degradation in forecasting capability. You can believe whomever you choose, but my money is on the climate and weather scientists who spent years learning their trade. It turned out that Trump and Elon Musk’s arbitrary slashing hamstrung not only NWS’s ability to forecast, but they seriously curtailed a different NWS service – assuring that local communities under threat of major storms or flooding were notified timely. These things, as we saw in Texas can develop and change drastically in a matter of minutes.

That, apparently, did not happen in the middle of the night in Kerr County, Texas, as flash floods were overwhelming a girls’ summer camp. A day later, federal officials tried to pin the blame on the local sheriff. Aside from the horrible loss of life, this is an indictment of the Trump administration’s whole approach to governing. Slashing and cutting necessary programs, like FEMA, to pay for indefensible tax cuts to billionaires, without having a clue or giving a damn how those cuts might affect or end people’s lives.

But there’s more to be learned from the Texas floods. Trump went on television to deliver a sickeningly saccharine speech, claiming to love the people hurt and killed by the floods. Don’t believe a word he said. I’m sure he cares about how the disaster affects him, but nothing in his character or his history suggests the people’s suffering matters at all to him. It’s an absolute tragedy that 104 lives, mostly children, were lost. But yesterday, EU health officials estimated that the wholesale slaughter of USAID will result in the deaths of more than four million children in third world countries. Do those children have less of a basic right to live because they weren’t born in America?

Whether Trump was unaware of the consequences of killing USAID programs, or he understood perfectly well that he was putting all those children’s life at risk, either way, it makes his phony declaration of love for the people who voted him into office even more nauseating. All he wants is a photo op of him flying around in a helicopter overseeing his flock.

This should be an object lesson. Instead of the National Weather Service, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency, substitute Medicaid, Medicare, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance. Does Trump give a damn how his cuts will impact the seventeen million people who will lose Mediciad benefits, almost all of whom are mothers, children, and blind or disabled individuals? Does he care about the millions of American childen, most of whom live in the red states that supported him who go without food for most of the day? Of course not – they’re not old enough to be bamboozled into voting for him, and not one of them has nine zeros after their name.

Trump also doesn’t care how many Palestinians die from starvation or bombs. His only interest in post-war Gaza seems to be whether he can build golf resorts along the Mediterranean after throwing two million Palestinians out of their homes. And he cares even less about the gradual destruction of Ukraine. His humiliation of the Volodymyr Zelensky was really a declaration that forty-four million Ukrainians are nothing more that trading chips in his quest to win the admiration of Vladimir Putin.

Trump also couldn’t care less about the families and children trying to escape death and tyranny in Central America, as long as he gets to play tough guy with immigration and send out troops, a big step toward turning America into the autocratic police state he craves.

Never forget that you can’t believe a word that comes out of Trump’s mouth. I wonder if he even understands the concept of truth. To him truth is whatever is required for him to get what he wants, no matter how many people suffer for it.

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Trump and the Nobel Peace Prize

Posted on July 5, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 5, 2025

I am both puzzled and flattered by the number of people who ask my opinion about our quixotic, terrifying president. I don’t have any sources of information that they don’t have, and no one from the White House calls me with the latest gossip. I guess it’s just peoples’ mindsets. What I hear most often is, “How did this happen?” or “I never thought this could happen in our country.”

Much of this apparent confusion, the millions of people wandering around with dazed expressions like those deer caught in your headlights, is a direct result of Donald Trump’s deliberate approach to politics, business, and personal relationships. He learned from our most unscrupulous and successful criminals. Lie, cheat, steal, occasionally throw in a truth or two, the overall intention being to create chaos and keep everyone else back on their heels.

“How does he continually get away with it?” I’m asked, and all I can say, is find a good book on human nature. Donald Trump understands some things very well: greed, intimidation, fear, insecurity, and his own narcissistically driven lust for power and dominance. He has an instinct for other people’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and he manipulates them ruthlessly. It helps that he possesses not a shred of moral conscience. He’s a sociopath.

And now, he’s decided that his next achievement will be the Nobel Peace Prize. Let’s examine his second term, so far. His huge push on immigration is insensitive, racist, and downright cruel, with its primary goal having nothing to do with immigrants. Rather, the point is to rally those parts of his base who believe his lies about people who flee here from poverty and tyranny, or those who are too lazy to learn the facts for themselves. To them, he’s a hero. To the rest of us, he’s simply a disgusting human being.

The same goes for his Big Beautiful Bill, which he passed through intimidation by his billionaire friends who want everyone in Congress to believe that their money can defeat them when they run to keep their seats, which only works because they are as craven as Trump himself is. The bill was just another example of trying blow up the established order so his henchmen can rush in and steal what they want while changing the rules to favor them in the future.

About that Peace Prize. This is classic Trump. He has encouraged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do whatever he wanted to in response to the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas. Let me be clear: Hamas is a terrorist organization of the most despicable kind. I have no sympathy for them, and as agents of murder and destruction, they deserve everything they get. But just as the rest of the world doesn’t blame 300 million Americans for Trump, despite the fact that we elected him, we must be cognizant of the death, maiming, and starvation of thousands of civilians in Gaza. Yes, two million Palestinians chose Hamas to lead them, but they were subject to even more hate propaganda than Trump’s base was.

The only reason Trump is in a position to broker a cease fire is that he made Israel totally dependent on being re-supplied as the war ground on. Trump couldn’t care less how many Palestinian children are killed or have the rest of their lives ruined. If he threatens, now, to withhold weaponry that would allow Netanyahu to continue his war, he’ll probably get his ceasefire, but he will also have been the one who allowed the humanitarian catastrophe to get to this point by ignoring everyone else’s pleas for restraint. Trump is as responsible as anyone for creating the disaster that exists today in Gaza, much of which has little to do with Hamas. Threatening to turn off the flow of weapons does not make him a peacemaker.

His actions with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have been far worse. The war has raged for more than three years mostly because Trump has winked at Putin, letting him know that he will do nothing to stop the invasion even if it means the dissolution of NATO, if only Vladimir will show him the love and respect he craves. The destruction of Ukraine’s beautiful cities, the diaspora of millions of innocent civilians fleeing Russian bombs could have been stopped long ago, if Trump cared about anything but himself.

Does this man deserve a Nobel Peace Prize?

What he deserves is to be held accountable for his crimes, among which is the attempted overthrow of our Constitution. Let’s not forget the lengths Trump has gone to to stay in power. His is the most immoral administration of my lifetime, and Trump himself is the most dangerous person on Earth.

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Lies and Other Trumpisms

Posted on June 28, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 28, 2025

There’s an important part of Trump’s repertoire, whose central theme is creating chaos and then swooping onto the scene like a vulture, claiming to be a hero because he cleaned up the mess he created, that’s largely unnoticed. Others have used it, but not even close to the extent that Trump does.

Gerald Ford relished his comical meme of a clumsy oaf who kept tripping over things, despite being in the University of Michigan’s football Hall of Honor. Ronald Reagan liked to pretend he was just an average guy who didn’t know much, because it appealed to people to see a politician who looked like them. George W. Bush did it with his six-shooter-totin’ cowboy approach to diplomacy, also designed to make him look like a regular guy. Dan Quayle did it, dumbing down his intellectual prowess to pretend he was a bumbling idiot when it suited him – do you think he really couldn’t spell “tomatoes?”

In Donald Trump, among other things, we have a president who goes out of his way to look stupid, but don’t be fooled, he’s not. Yesterday was a perfect example. He was making his despicable argument against birthright citizenship, which is nothing more than an attempt to head off the trend that America was in danger of becoming majority non-white. There are some dates that every American who went to school knows as well as their own names. The years 1776, 1812, 1861, 1929, 1941, 1945, and 2001 (nine-eleven) all have enough special significance to Americans that we instantly recall what event each refers to. Does anyone reading this not know that the Civil War ended in 1865? Give him credit – Donald Trump is a well-practiced clown of the most sinister kind, and far better at pretending to be a bumbling idiot than Dan Quayle ever was.

His entire public persona is based on deliberate lies and misdirection. Some of it is intentionally aimed at his base, whom he sees as stupid enough to buy anything he says, not to mention contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to his campaigns that most of them can ill afford, and much of which winds up in Trump’s pockets.

Trump claimed, the other day, that he had just signed a trade deal with China, while failing to mention that it only involved critical rare earth minerals which are vital enough to both countries, they prompted Trump to threaten to steal Greenland from ally Denmark and strong-arm Volodymyr Zelensky to hand Ukraine’s over to the United States in return for defending him against Russia, a tease Trump appears to be reneging on. There is still no deal that addresses broader trade issues with China, like tariffs, supply chains, and taxing American corporations for manufacturing their products in other countries to increase profits.

He has alienated our most stalwart ally, Canada, whose citizens overwhelmingly voted, last week, to abandon trade talks with the Trump administration and seek deals with partners who treat them with respect. He continues to claim that he cares about his base, yet he fights for tariff policies that hurt American farmers, champion a billionaire tax cut that takes money out of his base’s pockets, and treats the elimination of health care for more than ten million Americans as a normal part of doing business.

He very deliberately equates families fleeing tyranny and murder with hardened criminals and drug traffickers. By now, the entire country understands that MAGA is so desperate to ensure that non-white people don’t one-day dominate our elections, they’re willing to arrest innocent, hard-working people who only want a safe place to raise their children and deport those same people back to the horror show they left, while simultaneously causing severe financial harm to millions of small businesses that depend on those people to work.

Trump’s stupid lies, like claiming the fourteenth amendment was intended to assure that babies of freed slaves were citizens, are truly offensive. They imply that Americans have no idea what their Constitution says, although that amendment has been in the spotlight throughout both of his terms as president. It’s an appeal to the anger and frustration of people who struggle every day and need someone to blame. Trump’s message is, “I can do any damn thing I want and no one can touch me.” The dangerous subtext is “so can you.” Have we forgotten January 6, 2021?

Congress has a chance to cut through Trump’s bullshit by stopping his Big Beautiful Bill and passing a new war powers act. People in our government who understand the value of our alliances and mutual defense treaties, including the Joint Chiefs and our senior diplomats, have a chance to reign in the destruction of our image around the world. If someone doesn’t stand up to Trump’s strongman tactics soon, he’ll win, and all of us will lose.

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