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Joe Conason

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund.

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Even When Bobby Kennedy Is Right, He's Totally Wrong

The publication last week of a new and innovative report on the causes of colorectal cancer could not be more timely, coming as it does when Americans are debating whether what we eat is killing us prematurely — and whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" slogan should qualify him to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services, with control over the government's critical scientific and medical research.

At first glance that study — published December 10 by a team of doctors and scientists affiliated with the University of South Florida and the Tampa General Hospital Cancer Institute — appeared to confirm Kennedy's charge that seed oils such as those derived from corn, canola (rapeseed) and sunflowers are causing an epidemic of chronic illness, from heart disease and cancer to obesity. Its findings showed excessive amounts of those oils in tumor samples from dozens of patients — and indicated that gut inflammation by those substances encourages colon cancer, now the second-highest cause of cancer deaths and a rapidly increasing disease among younger people under 50.

"We don't know the full effects of these ultraprocessed foods on our body, but we do know that that's a major thing that's changed from 1950 onward," said Dr. Timothy Yeatman, one of the study's lead authors, speaking toScientific American. "Young people today, particularly rural and impoverished people, are being exposed to more of these processed foods than anybody else because they're cheap and they're in all the fast-food restaurants."

Yet if this suggests that Kennedy is right about the dangers of ultra-processed foods, the arrival of the colon cancer study also proved that he is absolutely wrong about the agencies that he will oversee if confirmed by the U.S. Senate. His standard indictment of the National Institutes of Health, for instance, is that its staff and its output have been "captured" by the food industry; it must be razed to the ground before it can be reformed.

Shooting from the hip as usual, Kennedy has warned that his reorganization of the medical science agencies will be not just swift but instantaneous, with no time wasted actually learning about them and their personnel. "We need to act fast," he said recently. "So that on January 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave."

That would be too bad, because the University of South Florida team delving into the perils of highly processed seed oil products has been awarded a five-year, $3 million NIH grant — likely approved by the same people Kennedy is now threatening. Going "wild," as President-elect Donald Trump promised he would let Kennedy do, will throw the agency into chaos and probably curtail the kind of valuable research these scientists sponsor.

How ironic -- and telling -- that a study supporting one of Kennedy's ideas is being supported by an agency he is seeking to disrupt and perhaps destroy. He has also floated the idea of a "moratorium" on NIH research into infectious diseases, as if we need no longer worry about the flu, meningitis, coronavirus or the many other medical threats ailing the world.

Unlike Kennedy, the scientists who produced the colon cancer study have been careful not to oversell its meaning. They are not claiming to have proved that all seed oils are too dangerous for human consumption, which previous studies show is unlikely, and they are definitely not urging McDonald's to use beef tallow in making french fries — a shift that would horrify cardiologists, who understand how saturated fats clog veins and arteries.

The Trump gang is bored by the nuances and variables that guide real science, which is why they despise its qualified practitioners and lionize a fraud like Bobby Kennedy. They love the sensational nonsense spread by charlatans like him, even if it kills hundreds of thousands of innocents, as it did during the pandemic. It's a proven method of sucking votes and money from gullible rubes.

Meanwhile, we learned this week that one of Kennedy's top advisers is a lawyer who has sought to halt distribution of the polio vaccine — an insane effort that might even worry Trump, if he hears about it. So before Senate Republicans let Kennedy go wild, maybe they will think about how his bizarre notions could bring harm to their children and grandchildren. Unlike Kennedy, they might want to aim before they start firing.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

To Qualify For Trump's Cabinet, Grifting Is The Essential Credential

The trait most broadly shared by Donald Trump's nominees to top Cabinet posts is an utter lack of fitness for their prospective jobs. Most appear to be afflicted with negative attributes that would automatically disqualify them not only from these highly sensitive government positions but even from much less senior jobs in any normal administration. In that respect, they strongly resemble Trump himself.

Many of them share another outstanding characteristic with the president-elect. They are, like him, relentless grifters who keep monetizing their celebrity on the far right by ripping off the MAGA faithful with overpriced merchandise and other scams.

While right-wing scamming has a long history that can be traced back to the '50s Red Scare, Trump is the modern master of the craft. His persona as business genius always reeked of fakery, while his profiteering extended from the gross exploitation of his "charitable" foundation to multilevel marketing rip-offs and the "Trump University" real estate seminar swindle. More recently he deployed the "big lie" and false advertising to deceive his followers into sending hundreds of millions of dollars to his super PAC.

And during this year's presidential campaign, he roped credulous fans into buying hideous gold sneakers, tacky watches, autographed Bibles, junk digital images, souvenir coins and an array of similar junk. The man embraces avarice (and bad taste) with a zeal that any other head of state would consider shameful.

But such degraded behavior is now standard on the Republican right.

Lately the grifting career of Pete Hegseth, Trump's troubled choice for defense secretary, has come under scrutiny in The New Yorker and other outlets. As a "veteran's advocate" (who actually advocated severe cuts to the Veterans Administration), Hegseth ran nonprofit organizations that evidently squandered millions of dollars to subsidize his drunken partying and philandering, without achieving any of their supposed objectives. He drove at least one of those outfits into near-bankruptcy before its sponsors finally ousted him.

Less notorious yet equally unedifying were the enterprises fronted by Tulsi Gabbard, who spent tens of thousands of dollars donated to her Defend Freedom political action committee on bulk purchases of her recent book For Love of Country, boosting it onto The New York Times bestseller list. Mother Jones reports that Gabbard founded another outfit, a nonprofit called We Must Protect, which sucked in almost $128,000, ostensibly to aid victims of the Maui wildfires — and spent scarcely a third of that amount on grants to the unfortunate Hawaiians. She also ran a couple of PACs that took in hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they devoted to candidates or causes, with their cash mostly going to Gabbard aides and consultants.

Then there's Kash Patel, the conspiracy theorist and former congressional aide named by Trump to run the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which he has vowed to use as an instrument of vengeance against Democratic officeholders and other Trump "enemies." Patel has closely mimicked the classic Trump hustles by developing his own MAGA fanbase, mainly by using his tax-exempt "Kash Foundation" to promote himself and his partisan crusades. The online publicity subsidized by the foundation has enabled him to market "America First" branded clothing, a line of K$H wines, and a nutritional supplement that promises to "detox" anyone who has been vaccinated against COVID-19. (Not surprisingly, as revealed by menswear writer Derek Guy, the ultra-patriotic t-shirts hawked by Patel are manufactured in Central America and Haiti.)

Back in the day, at least a few conservatives were repulsed by this kind of hucksterism, which they saw as demeaning to their party. During the 2016 presidential primaries, Marco Rubio mocked the fakery of "Trump University," highlighted its cheating of veterans and seniors, and denounced Trump himself, declaring that the GOP "cannot allow a con artist to become the Republican nominee for president of the United States."

Rubio's indignation expired long ago — and since then, of course, he has transformed himself into a sycophant who will soon be confirmed as the con artist's secretary of state. Endorsing the con — and, indeed, practicing the con — is the most important credential to hold office as a Republican, and it will be for the next four years.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Saudi Lobbyist Escorting Hegseth On Hill As He Pleads To Save Nomination

While Pete Hegseth scampers around Capitol Hill – desperately pleading for votes to confirm him as defense secretary, despite his thin resume and ample scandals -- it’s easy to spot a white-maned wing man trailing just behind him. That would be Norm Coleman, the last Republican senator from Hegseth’s home state of Minnesota.

Beyond partisan loyalty and shared roots, Coleman has a powerful commercial interest in who oversees the US military and its mammoth budget. He happens to be one of the principal Washington lobbyists for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and, perhaps not coincidentally, a top fundraiser of dark money for GOP campaigns. And he also chairs the Republican Jewish Coalition, another dark-money outfit that spends millions backing GOP candidates with campaign ads centered around Jewish community concerns.

With this extraordinary network of political warchests and secretive donors behind him, Coleman exerts enormous influence over Republicans in Washington. He was a founder of the Congressional Leadership Fund SuperPAC, which he continues to chair, and also oversees the American Action Network, a tax-exempt “social welfare” group that uses tax-exempt donations from undisclosed donors to support GOP campaigns (as boasted by his bio on the website of his lobbying law firm, Hogan Lovells). Those two outfits, backed by tens of millions of dark-money dollars in every cycle, are wings of a single organization with a shared office and staff based only a block from the White House.

Despite Coleman’s longstanding service to the Saudi dictatorship, a spokeman for CLF has insisted that none of its funding comes from foreign donors. But as disclosed in a 2022 report by Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, both AAN and CLF have promoted Saudi interests here. Between 2021 and 2022, those outlets reported that “Coleman wrote over 1,000 emails to House and Senate staffers…as part of his paid work for Saudi Arabia. Coleman and several of his law firm colleagues are registered as foreign agents of the Kingdom,” which pays well over $2 million a year to Hogan Lovells. The former Minnesota senator was among very few public figures willing to defend the Saudi regime publicly after the gruesome killing of Washington Post columnist and democracy crusader Jamal Khashoggi inside its consulate.

Should Hegseth prevail in his confirmation struggle, the Saudis and their premier lobbyist will enjoy renewed influence in the Pentagon and US decisions about weapons sales and America’s military posture toward Iran and other states in the Gulf region. But that would only reinforce the close and potentially corrupt ties between Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman and the Trump family, on whom he has lavished enormous sums of money through the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which gave a $2 billion investment deal to Jared Kushner and has a lucrative deal with the Trump Organization to promote its LIV golf consortium.

Trump’s Saudi grifting is even more open and brazen than Coleman’s conflicted lobbying setup. When the president-elect and his entourage attended an Ultimate Fighting Championship match at Madison Square Garden on November 17 in a post-election celebration, Yasir al-Rumayyan, the head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, was seated right next to him.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Nominated For FBI Director, Patel Is Just A Standard Issue MAGA Con Man

For organized criminal gangs and foreign espionage agents operating in this country, their most cherished daydream would be to cripple the law enforcement agency dedicated to curtailing them – namely, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Ranked among those enemies of the rule of law, of course, are many of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s closest associates -- who are, like him, convicted felons -- from Roger Stone and Mike Flynn to Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon, always whining about the agency that arrested and arraigned them.

Now, with the announced appointment of Kashyap Patel as FBI director, Trump aims to realize their fantasy of ultimate vengeance against law enforcement. Like so many Trump appointees to top government posts, Patel has a resume devoid of any qualifcations for this position, one of the most sensitive and vital in the US government.

He has no comprehension of how to protect the nation from foreign adversaries or domestic threats and has scarcely even pretended that will be his purpose. Instead, he has repeatedly threatened to misdirect national security resources against “the enemies within” – anyone who has dared to hold Trump accountable.

Patel will be sent into the FBI headquarters to dismiss its key personnel, dismantle its infrastructure, and induce fear in its ranks – all of which can only impede its mission. The potential consequences for the United States are so dire as to raise once again the question of where Trump’s true allegiance lies – and who truly directs his actions.

The director-designate is a clownish figure who has made a business of prostrating himself to Trump every day in the most ostentatious style, often by concocting and advancing conspiracy claims that bolster the MAGA cause. He is also a former Justice Department attorney with an empty record, who has falsely asserted that he led the federal prosecution of a Benghazi terrorist – when the public record shows he had no role in the case at all.

He has associated himself with the most reprehensible cult propaganda campaigns, ranging beyond Trump’s fraudulent claims of 2020 election fraud and into the poisonous QAnon mythology that accuses prominent Democrats and Hollywood figures of such perversions as child sex trafficking and cannibalism.

In other words, Kash Patel is a standard-issue MAGA con man. He also appears to be a small-time grifter, again like so many around Trump. Two years ago he registered a tax-exempt nonprofit called the Kash Foundation, which outlined its grandiose mission on its website: “The foundation focuses on providing legal support for whistleblowers and media accountability; filling gaps in mainstream media coverage and educating the public on critical issues; providing assistance to veterans, active duty service members, and law enforcement; and providing scholarships and tuition grants for higher education.”

The Kash Foundation’s latest IRS return is an amusing document, which reveals that “interested parties” have sucked in more of those tax-exempt revenues than any supposed charitable beneficiaries. Looking over the website, the true purpose of the foundation seems obvious: to promote Kash Patel and his profile on the far right. Or as a spokeswoman put it, “The foundation turned the tables on the adversity faced by Kash due to disinformation and media targeting, transforming it into a force for good .The Kash Foundation’s latest IRS return is an amusing document, which reveals that “interested parties” have sucked in more of those tax-exempt revenues than any supposed charitable beneficiaries.

With annual receipts of around $1.2 million, the foundation claims to have given $5000 grants to nonprofits benefiting the homeless in Nevada, church women in Virginia, and Air Force special operations veterans, and another $157,000 in direct cash grants to 50 unnamed individuals. But the big winner is a director of the foundation who also runs a media consulting business – and glommed more than $275,000 for “marketing services” and merchandise.

In misusing a charitable foundation to promote himself, Patel is mimicking his idol, who created a template for that kind of avaricious abuse with the Trump Foundation – eventually shut down by New York state authorities, fined $2 million, and forced to disgorge its remaining assets to actual charities. As FBI director he would provide a sore example for the attorneys general in every state, whose duties usually include oversight of charities.

Patel’s appointment is a raised middle finger to every honest law enforcement official in this country, including every man or woman who ever served in the FBI or the Justice Department, and a looming menace to the nation’s security at home and abroad. As with the aborted appointment of Matt Gaetz, it’s an insult requires Senate Republicans overcome their usual cowardice to fulfill their constitutional oath.

Keep in mind that President Biden did precisely the opposite when he entered the White House in January 2021. Biden kept FBI Director Christopher Wray -- a lifelong Republican appointed by Trump -- as a sign that he intended to maintain the federal justice system's integrity. He didn't oust Wray to replace him with a Democrat, let alone a sycophantic stooge from his own political entourage.

No one should doubt Trump’s determination to install his lackey in this critical post. He already tried to place Patel in the FBI leadership during the final months of 2020 – but Bill Barr angrily rebuffed that outrage and Trump retreated. In his 2022 memoir, the former attorney general noted that "Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world's preeminent law enforcement agency.”

That is why the criminals and spies who surround Trump are applauding so loudly.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

How Donald Trump Corrupted Pam Bondi

Newspaper profiles of Pamela Bondi — subbed in as President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for U.S. attorney general following the scandalous implosion of Matt Gaetz — often describe her with a phrase like "longtime loyalist."

The former Florida attorney general's unwavering fealty to him dates back to September 2013, when a political committee supporting her reelection campaign received a $25,000 check from the Trump Foundation. And the story behind that check foreshadows four more years of exceptionally corrupt administration, when the first felon returns to the White House. It is a tale that revolves around two of the most notorious scams pursued by the president-elect during his career as a "successful businessman," namely the Trump Foundation and Trump University.

Rather than an institution of higher learning, Trump U was a for-profit real-estate seminar that promised easy wealth to the suckers who paid huge sums to learn the Donald's investment secrets and received no instruction of any value whatsoever in return. Over the years before Bondi got that Trump check, thousands of defrauded consumers had complained to her office, demanding action.

And just three weeks earlier, then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman finally had announced the filing of a massive fraud case on behalf of New Yorkers ripped off by Trump University. According to Tristan Snell, the assistant attorney general handling the case, they hoped Florida would join New York's lawsuit "because it opened up the possibility that, if needed, we could pursue additional witnesses and documents" in the Sunshine State, where subpoenas would require Bondi's assistance.

Evidently that possibility also occurred to someone in the Trump Organization. Four days after the dramatic New York filing, Trump executive assistant Rhona Graff sent an email to the Bondi campaign finance director, seeking details of how to make a donation. Made out to "And Justice For All," the ironically named Bondi PAC, that donation arrived by mail on Sept. 13, 2013, along with a note signed by Trump that misspelled the candidate's name as "Biondi" and declared, "Dear Pam, You are the greatest!"

The check was drawn on the Trump Foundation — a tax-exempt nonprofit organization prohibited from giving money to political campaigns or partisan committees. That was merely one of many examples of Trump's abuse of his foundation's tax-exempt status.

You may have surmised by this point that the Florida attorney general blew off her New York colleagues in seeking justice for the Trump U victims. Snell recalls that after sending the case documents to Tallahassee, "we never heard from the Florida AG's office again."

None of that hindered the legal team led by Snell — one of very few officials ever to hold Trump accountable — from winning a $25 million settlement from the Trump Organization after the 2016 election. The proceeds reimbursed Trump's victims for roughly 80% of what they had lost. Two years after he coughed up that punishing payment, the New York attorney general's office came after the Trump Foundation again, charging that its charitable activities were nonexistent and that its expenditures benefited Trump himself.

In the humiliating conclusion of that lawsuit, his lawyers agreed their client would shut down the foundation and pay the remaining millions in its accounts to bona fide charities.

So egregious were the depredations of Trump U that Republicans felt obliged to condemn its swindling. The National Review ran a scathing investigative report headlined "Yes, Trump University Was a Massive Scam." Sen. Marco Rubio, then a Trump rival, denounced Trump U as a "con job," and warned that "we cannot allow a con artist to become the Republican nominee for president of the United States." (The Florida senator's more recent sycophancy has now earned Rubio the opportunity to become secretary of state.)

Every Republican senator who votes to confirm Bondi as the nation's attorney general knows the saga of Trump University. As Snell sardonically asks, "Did Trump just happen to want to make a donation to Bondi a mere four days after the New York AG's case was filed? Really?"

He goes on to demand that journalists and senators interrogate Bondi about this scandal — and explore its implications for her integrity, her subservience to the president, and her ability to carry out the attorney general's duties.

"We need to make sure this full story gets told — and any profile of Bondi or analysis of her nomination that does not include this story is itself another example of corrupt complicity." Nobody, in the mainstream media or the United States Senate, should be able to claim they did not know.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Will The Senate Save Us From Trump's Cabinet Of Horrors?

Among the sharpest conservative opponents of fascism is George T. Conway III. During a Nov. 14 appearance on CNN, the attorney and activist offered this pithy description of Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Gaetz and Bobby Kennedy, the worst nominees (so far) to Donald Trump's cabinet:

"If you were seeking to destroy the country, the Gabbard, Gaetz, and RFK Jr. picks were exactly the ones you'd make. And that's not surprising. Because Trump is a malignant narcissist, and malignant narcissists, subconsciously or consciously, do seek to destroy." (I should note here that Conway is a friend who wrote the foreword to my most recent book, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.)

There may be even more sinister explanations for what Trump is doing — he appears subservient to a hostile foreign power — but Conway's warning about the potential impact of his bizarre choices is no exaggeration. Many Americans, probably including the ignorant and arrogant Trump, have little idea what the major federal agencies do or why maintaining their operations is so essential to protecting our families, livelihoods, and security. They may be about to find out the very hardest way.

As many observers have noted, it is difficult to imagine a more absurd appointee than Gaetz to head the Department of Justice, which has jurisdiction over the FBI as well. He has no relevant experience whatsoever, except as an investigative target.

Like his master Trump, former Florida Rep. Gaetz publicly vowed vengeance on the FBI for daring to probe his alleged crimes, which ranged from drug offenses and theft of campaign funds to the sexual trafficking of teenage girls. But the nation's premier law enforcement agency has responsibilities that range far beyond probing the misconduct of a sleazy congressman. While Gaetz, Trump and many of their cronies may be perfectly content to disrupt the FBI's probes of public corruption, thus leaving them unmolested, the rest of us would surely suffer if it is no longer able to investigate violent gangs, prevent terrorist bombings and cyberattacks, and maintain a counterintelligence cordon against enemy spies (although that would surely gratify those Trump fans in the Kremlin).

The thugs, traffickers, and spies apprehended by the FBI are prosecuted by DOJ attorneys, either in Washington or by U.S. attorneys around the country, whose operations certainly need no interference from the likes of Gaetz or anyone whom he might choose as his underlings.

So when Gaetz proclaims his desire to dismantle the FBI and DOJ, he may have his own petty reasons — but the impact of this clown on the rule of law, public order and Americans' ability to conduct our lives in peace and security could be devastating.

In certain ways Gabbard resembles Gaetz. She too is a peculiar and discredited figure with no discernible ability to perform the role assigned her by Trump, overseeing the world's largest and most vital intelligence network. That network includes the CIA, the National Security Agency, the intelligence divisions of the armed forces, and the FBI (which she can assist Gaetz in wrecking). She is a veteran and a former member of Congress, but perhaps just as important is her pedigree as an acolyte of a destructive cult that spun off from the Hare Krishna organization.

Worse still, she has repeatedly demonstrated her allegiance to some of this era's bloodiest dictators — not just Vladimir Putin, whose propaganda about Ukraine she tried to spread, but Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian despot, mass murderer, and Russian client, to whom she provided similar assistance. Russian state television, which has often garlanded Gabbard with favorable coverage, is celebrating her appointment — but allied intelligence agencies around the world are being forced to reconsider their ties with American counterparts, potentially crippling our capacity to obtain information vital to U.S. national security.

Kennedy, the conspiracy monger and anti-vax profiteer, presents a different kind of menace to our future. He is a proved and inveterate liar, who now claims he isn't an opponent of vaccination when there are hours of video and other indisputable records confirming that fact. More than once he has sat stone-faced while someone played that proof in his presence, and then continued to lie.

Should he actually be confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, with jurisdiction over such agencies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health, the likely damage he will inflict on our health and safety is incalculable. We know what he is capable of doing — what he yearns to do — because he has left a legacy of human wreckage over the past two decades. His campaign against vaccinations during the COVID-19 pandemic helped to foster the fears that left millions vulnerable and eventually dead. Although Kennedy alone cannot be held accountable for those excess deaths, as statisticians call them, he definitely did his worst.

We may somehow avoid another pandemic, despite the imminent threat from bird flu, but Kennedy's anti-science ideology could soon bring on an epidemic of measles, if he can get the vaccination rate low enough. He and his anti-vax cronies achieved that deadly goal in Samoa several years ago — with lethal consequences for dozens of little children. If he can scale that campaign here, the toll could be in the tens of thousands.

Bobby also seemingly aims to increase tooth decay among children by doing away with water fluoridation. He plans to undermine our decades-long effort to cure cancer and other modern plagues with a mad eight-year "moratorium" on scientific research. He has a roster of likeminded kooks he wants to name to top positions in the federal health agencies — and it's mostly comprised of far-right quacks, discredited academics and supplement grifters, with a couple of neo-Nazis sprinkled among them. If he is confirmed, he will bring this rogue's gallery with him.

What stands between our country and the national wreckage portended by these abominable Trump appointees is the U.S. Senate. There is no more important function outlined in the Constitution for that deliberative body, and there has never been a more urgent need for senators to stand up and protect the nation. There are only a handful of Republicans with the courage, integrity and wisdom to stop this catastrophic process — but only a handful need to act. Nothing less than the fate of the nation is at stake.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Kremlin Sends Trump Congratulations -- And A Thinly Veiled Threat

As Donald Trump prepares to dismantle American national security – already badly compromised by his first White House stint – his allies in the Kremlin haven’t hesitated to remind the incoming president of his “obligations” to them.

Certainly Vladimir Putin is thrilled by the notion of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a 37 year-old Fox News commentator with a checkered background, or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose scant qualifications include little more than her skill in shooting a puppy. These are ultra-partisan hacks who will do whatever Trump orders.

But who will be telling Trump what to do?

On Russian TV’s most watched network, the hosts of a popular show immediately “congratulated” Trump on his victory by broadcasting images of his wife Melania in the nude that appeared in GQ magazine decades ago. Propaganda presenter Yevgeny Popov smirked as introduced the explicit photos, noting that in one shot, the future Mrs. Trump was “only wearing her underwear, lying on a blue carpet with the United States seal, as though the editors of the men’s magazine knew something in advance about the future of their model.” His co-host Olga Skabeeva ostentatiously suppressed a cackle.

Evidently Vladimir Putin didn’t think that message of domination was sufficiently clear, because on November 11 his top aide Nikolai Patrushev made the following remark to a Moscow newspaper:

“To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations,” Patrushev told the business daily Kommersant in response to a question about whether the outcome of the presidential election would bode well for Russia. “As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them” -- rather than any fleeting campaign promises or an oath to defend the United States against hostile foreign powers.

The Kremlin news agency Tass then made certain to distribute Patrushev’s statement globally.

But to make certain that Trump got the point, Patrushev went out of his way to raise an even more sensitive subject. “We know of two cases of attempts on his life during the election campaign,” said the Putin aide. “In general, throughout the history of the United States, attempts have been made on the lives of presidents and candidates regularly—more than 20 times. Four U.S. presidents have died at the hands of assassins while in office. Therefore, it is extremely important for U.S. intelligence agencies to prevent a repetition of such cases.”

By the way, acording to the Wall Street Journal, it was Patrushev – like Putin, a former Russian intelligence officer – who oversaw the aircraft explosion that killed rebellious Kremlin warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin in the summer of 2023.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

No, Donald Trump Didn't Win This Election By A 'Landslide'

As the tallying of votes approaches finality, with no happy outcome for Democrats, the triumphal narrative proclaimed by Republican cheerleaders needs correction. There was no MAGA “landslide” on Election Night – unless, like so many other aspects of American life, we have decided to diminish what that term has always meant historically.

Donald Trump appears to have won the popular vote by just over two percent, according to the latest numbers published by the Cook Political Report, which netted him 312 electoral votes. While that represented a big improvement on Trump’s weak record in presidential runs (and certainly warrants deep Democratic introspection), it was far from anything that could be defined as a landslide. In California, where Kamala Harris won the state with nearly 60 percent, there are still more than three million votes yet to be tallied..

So let's nudge the Republicans and their media cheerleaders back toward reality.

The last time that a Republican presidential candidate achieved what we have traditionally called a landslide was in 1988, when George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis by eight percent of the popular vote and won more than 400 electoral votes. Ronald Reagan notched two landslide victories: the first in 1980, when he beat incumbent Jimmy Carter by more than nine percent in the popular vote and nabbed 489 electoral votes (although Carter was hobbled by the third-party candidacy of John Anderson, who got nearly seven percent); and the second four years later, when he crushed Walter Mondale with nearly 59 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except the Democrat’s Minnesota home.

And let’s not forget Richard Nixon’s similar trouncing of George McGovern in 1972, when the Republican won 520 electoral votes and 61 percent of the popular vote. (Tricky Dick resigned in disgrace two years later when after revelations about his cheating in that election and numerous other crimes.) Democrats have won big too, notably in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson won 486 electoral votes and more than 61 percent. The last Democratic victory that approached a landslide came in 1996, when Bill Clinton won reelection with 379 electoral votes and came in nine points ahead in the popular vote against the incumbent Bush (who also had to contend with self-funding third-party gadfly Ross Perot).

So no, Trump’s roughly two percentage points do not place him in that category. It’s scarcely more than half as big as President Joe Biden’s margin in 2020, which the MAGA Republicans have repeatedly insisted was no victory at all. Democrats are far more gracious losers (and winners) than the Trump Republicans, who don’t hesitate to threaten and employ violence when they don’t get their way. (Notice how all the pre-election claims of “fraud” suddenly vanish when they win?)

Whatever the final numbers say, this election was assuredly disastrous for the Democrats, the nation, and the world. The damage has only just begun and the recovery remains distant and uncertain. Yet there many signs that the Republican narrative is too simple and simply wrong – from the Senate races that Democrats won in four of the five battleground states to the ballot initiatives where Republican ideologues were defeated on paid family leave, private school vouchers, and especially abortion rights.

The other cliché that Republicans keep repeating as they yammer about their pseudo- landslide is “mandate.” But having lied about their intentions, pretending to disown the authoritarian Project 2025 agenda that they now openly embrace, they have no mandate.

Meet 'Jack D. Ripper,' Trump's New Health Czar

Over the few days since Donald Trump's election victory, America has gotten a foretaste of the wreckage likely to ensue when he returns to the White House. His promise to endow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with plenary authority over health and food regulation — and to let him "go wild" — shows once more how little Trump really cares about anyone or anything but himself.

As Trump and his associates surely know, Bobby has no qualifications whatsoever to direct or oversee any federal health office, no matter how small, let alone a major agency like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration. Their corrupt deal with the anti-vaccine activist — who has made millions from his attacks on public health — was premised solely on his sycophantic endorsement of Trump and his perceived influence on the crackpot segment of the American electorate.

So confident is Kennedy of Trump's unconditional support that he has already announced his first policy directive, effective on Jan. 21, 2025: an attempt to curtail the municipal fluoridation of American water that has been in continuous effect in most places for decades. Cities and counties dose their water with tiny amounts of fluoride, a naturally occurring substance, because study after study has proved that it prevents dental decay in children, who are saved from the grave health impacts not only of rotting teeth but the infections and disabilities that can follow.

Yet Kennedy somehow has come to believe fluoride is a poison that must be removed from water systems immediately. Perhaps he was influenced the John Birch Society, which has promoted the idea that fluoridation is part of a left-wing plot against Americans since the '50s. (Stanley Kubrick satirized this nonsense in his 1964 film "Dr. Strangelove," which featured a rant by the fanatical right-wing Gen. Jack D. Ripper, justifying a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union that will end the world: "Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?")

Although it's true that excessive consumption of fluoride can lead to ill effects, the levels of fluoridation in U.S. water systems are nowhere near such levels. That's why the American Dental Association and every other health authority have long supported fluoridation policy.

Whatever the source of his bizarre misapprehensions, Kennedy will sooner or later have to confront the simple fact that the scientific evidence shatters his baseless speculations, as it has on so many occasions. The most recent study of fluoridation's impact on human beings, and especially young children, comes from the University of Alberta in Canada. It was produced in the context of a decade-long debate in Calgary, that province's largest city, over whether to restore fluoride to its water supply after removing the chemical in 2011.

Published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health last February, the study of thousands of children in the cities of Calgary (with non-fluoridated water) and Edmonton (where water is fluoridated) showed that lack of fluoride had serious adverse effects on children's health. It had led to thousands of children suffering tooth decay so severe that they needed surgical care under general anesthesia, which is perilous for young kids and led to lasting impact on their health, schooling and emotional well-being.

Of course, the likeliest victims of Kennedy's conspiracy-mongering are the poor — including many lower-income Americans who voted for Trump at his urging. Should he succeed in outlawing fluoridation in water systems, it is poor children whose teeth will rot and whose lives will be blighted. More affluent and educated families will be able to provide fluoride treatment for their kids to save them from Bobby's destructive obsession.

The idea that such a radical scheme would go into effect on the first day of a new administration, without due process or reasoned consideration, is exactly the kind of maladministration we can expect from Trump. We've seen it before, after all.

But before any such anti-fluoridation scheme proceeds, perhaps someone should demand that Kennedy uphold his recent vow to restore our public health agencies to "their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science"-- instead of allowing him to impose his wacky views about fluoride on the entire country, without any study or evaluation.

Naming a health czar who parrots the superstitions of "Jack D. Ripper " is a bad omen of Trump's intentions. We're about to find out how far the new administration will veer into chaos, how much human misery this president will cause on a whim. The prospects are not reassuring.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

A Steep Learning Curve Awaits Voters Who Vested Their Hopes In Trump

With Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House, the nightmare threat posed by him and his fascistic movement will all too soon become America’s waking reality. How the nation descended into this political abyss will no doubt inspire angry debate, but here is one response to this electoral disaster: We aren’t going anywhere and will continue to stand for the Constitution, the rule of law, and the principles of democracy and decency that endure even under aspiring tyrants.

Trump certainly aspires to tyranny, as he has repeatedly warned us, during the 2024 campaign and many times before. We can hope that his vow to use military force against opponents and dissenters and his openly expressed urge to arrest and harm his political adversaries is merely bluster, as his supporters insist. Many voters said they didn’t believe he would carry out those menacing promises, although his most fervent supporters evidently anticipate a campaign of vengeance with glee. Should he attempt such measures, he can expect fierce resistance in the courts and on the streets – and perhaps from military officers who have been trained to uphold constitutional values.

It remains astonishing that tens of millions of our fellow citizens have chosen to be led by a convicted felon -- described bluntly as a fascist by former members of his own cabinet and the military leaders who served under him – who calls his own country a hellhole and incessantly conjures racism, misogyny, division, and hatred to advance himself. What do those voters really want and expect from Trump?

Whatever they may want, what they are likely to get from him is probably not going to make them happy. Should he implement his reckless tariff scheme, much of which he can direct without Congressional approval, the nation’s economy will crater -- and the inflation that so irked consumers is certain to soar. If he tears down the Affordable Care Act, without the alternative plan he has failed to propose for almost ten years, the nation’s health care system will lurch into chaos -- and many of his followers and their families will be left to suffer. And if he orders the mass detention and deportation of migrants, then many actual citizens of Latino origin – a plurality of whom helped him win this election – are likely to be endangered.

Appointing conspiracy kook Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health czar or awarding control of the federal budget to Elon Musk are scenarios designed to conclude in disaster. Kennedy's idea of making America "healthy again" would risk the return of lethal childhood diseases we had conquered, including polio and measles; Musk' notion of cutting a third of federal spending would sink the economy and impoverish the middle class. But maybe their fans must find all this out the hard way.

It is going to be a steep learning curve for anyone who expects Trump to make their lives better.

And those grim possibilities are merely the most obviously ruinous potential consequences of this election. We must expect the worst, from federal surveillance of women’s pregnancies to government attacks on the First Amendment. A profound sense of buyer’s remorse may be in store for Trump voters.

In the meantime, however, we must take whatever encouragement is to be found in these mostly dismal results – abortion protections won at the ballot box in several states, for instance – and must demand, both of ourselves and our elected officials, the courage to stand up against this would-be dictator’s excesses. This election has left us with no other choice.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

The Grift That May Cost Trump The Election

If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win the White House on November 5, the Democrats may owe their triumph to the notorious character flaw that plagues the Republican Party of Donald Trump: an irresistible urge to grift.

In an election likely to be determined by a very narrow proportion of votes in a few states, the difference between winning and losing could very well depend on what politicians have long referred to by the initials "GOTV" — getting out the vote — a process that involves calling people at home, knocking on their doors, letting them know how and where to vote, and perhaps even providing transportation to the polling place. It is a complex, demanding and essential campaign function that requires literally tens of millions of individual interactions to be orchestrated with exceptional attention to detail. To perform those tasks poorly (or not at all) can transform incipient victory into certain defeat.

It is also a potentially expensive element of a national election, even when most of the job is undertaken by volunteers. That's where the opportunities for grifting arose in this cycle, after members of the Trump gang realized his campaign's field operations would attract big money from wealthy supporters. And at the forefront of the would-be chiselers in the 2024 campaign was Charlie Kirk, the aging leader of the MAGA movement's youth organization, Turning Point USA. (Kirk's personally profitable stewardship of Turning Point is examined in my new book, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.)

While the "ground game" for a Republican presidential ticket has been traditionally overseen by the Republican National Committee, Kirk used his close connections with the Trump family, especially Don Jr., to seize effective control of the party apparatus. (No doubt the president's eldest son was grateful to Turning Point for bulk buying copies of his book "Triggered.") He succeeded in pushing out RNC chair Ronna McDaniel and promoting his Turning Point PAC as the Trump campaign's principal field operation. He also persuaded Trump to install daughter-in-law Lara Trump, with no discernible credentials, as RNC chair so she could fire the competent RNC staff -- and advance his fortunes. He announced he would raise $108 million to "chase every vote" in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.

The wholesale abandonment of McDaniel's extensive election planning provoked deep skepticism among veteran GOP operatives. They saw no reason why Kirk would need so much cash to get out the vote in three states — or why anyone should invest in his dubious project. They noted that Turning Point's previous election organizing efforts in Arizona's elections in 2022 had not ended well: Every Republican running statewide that year lost.

But Turning Point's lousy midterm results didn't discourage Trump, who was drawn to Kirk's emphasis on turning out "low-propensity" far-right MAGA base voters, rather than seeking to persuade the unaffiliated or undecided. That strategy has lately devolved into a crusade for the support of alienated young men, who may or may not actually show up at the polls. How Kirk plans to motivate them is unclear.

Not long after McDaniel's ouster, Kirk and his allies began to pressure state and local Republican officials to shift their voter outreach and canvassing programs onto a new platform — an app marketed by Superfeed Technologies, a private firm that happens to be owned by Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point USA's chief operating officer. Just to keep it all in the family, Kirk's mother-in-law sits on the Superfeed board of directors.

Now perhaps this web of conflict and profit is all perfectly legitimate. And maybe the Superfeed app and Kirk's ambitious vote-herding plan will prove to be a brilliant success. But election experts told the Associated Press in early October that they doubt Turning Point can mobilize enough new or infrequent Trump voters to affect the outcome. They pointed out that record numbers of voters cast ballots in 2016 and 2020, which doesn't leave a large share of likely voters to be organized.

Another sign of weakness is that Turning Point has turned over its outreach campaign in Michigan, which reportedly collapsed, to Elon Musk's America PAC. The Musk effort has suffered from its own widely mocked technical glitches and flaws — including a scam that allowed its employees to falsify their canvassing records.

Contrast all that sleaze with the Harris-Walz campaign, bolstered by tens or even hundreds of thousands of unpaid volunteers. They are motivated not by love of money but love of country.

We don't know which side will win yet — but we already know who deserves to win.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

When Republicans Warn Us About Their Ruinous Agenda, Better Believe Them

It’s a lesson that we all should have learned many years ago: When Republicans tell you what they mean to inflict on you and your family, better believe them.

The most painful example in recent years of the public’s failure to comprehend what was coming -- despite dozens of announcements -- is the Republican right's successful assault on reproductive freedom. Donald Trump loudly and repeatedly promised a majority of Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, as did the Republican senators who confirmed them. And still many Americans seemed to be surprised when the high court ripped down principle and precedent to undo that fundamental right.

Now, in the final days of this election campaign, we are hearing from Republicans (and their billionaire masters) what they plan to do if Trump returns to the White House. They have a sweeping agenda to impoverish the middle class while pursuing power and privilege for themselves.

House Speaker Mike Johnson just issued a clear warning that they still yearn to cripple America's health care system in the name of their "free market" utopia. While he and Trump both deny that they will try again (for the 62^nd time!) to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Johnson vowed that “health care is going to be a big part of the agenda” should Republicans win – and that their aim will be “massive reform” that “takes a blowtorch to the regulatory state.” This blather portends the end of the reforms that protect people with pre-existing conditions and allow the young to get coverage on their family’s insurance until age 26. Neither those nor other crucial ACA protections would survive those massive changes that neither Trump nor Johnson will specify before the election.

And that’s merely the opening gambit in the Trump Republican scheme to ruin their fellow Americans.

The far-right financiers surrounding Trump have realized that his obsession with tariffs can be repurposed to line their own pockets – so they’re suddenly eager to abandon the principles of free trade they once cherished. For billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, the tariff scheme is attractive simply as a form of regressive taxation, siphoning hundreds of billions of dollars from ordinary consumers in the form of far higher prices. Those tariff revenues could replace the proceeds of the progressive income tax – which the rich hate to pay -- while shifting the burden onto middle-class and poor families.

But Musk has even more nasty surprises in store, as he recently suggested on his X social media platform. He has invested vast sums – upward of $75 million or more – in Trump’s campaign, for which he expects to be named reichsmarshall of "government efficiency,” with unaccountable power to slash programs and fire employees. The world’ richest man breezily advised middle-class Americans that we should expect to suffer “hardship” in the early days of a Trump presidency, owing to the enormous cuts and layoffs he will dictate. (Of course he also promises a “sustained recovery” in the wake of economic disaster, although historically that isn’t how things work out under Republican administrations. You can look it up.)

According to Musk, his objective in a Trump regime would be to cut $2 trillion from future spending – even as Trump has promises trillions more in tax cuts for the billionaires. How does that math work? It doesn’t work at all unless, as J.D. Vance recently confided to a podcast host, Musk’s “government efficiency commission” sharply reduces Social Security and Medicare payments. “I’ve spoken with Elon a little bit about [the task force],” said the Republican vice presidential nominee. “And the thing that’s complicated about this, man, is it’s going to look much different in, say, the Department of Defense versus Social Security.”

We know Trump won’t cut defense spending, which he has always sought to increase with his Space Force and other boondoggles. The only alternative will be enormous cuts in Social Security and Medicare, which account for about $2 trillion in spending annually.

Optimists may imagine that Musk, who no doubt considers himself a “stable genius,” will come up with new ways to save trillions without harming the American people or the economy. Unfortunately his record as an executive is not reassuring. Upon purchasing Twitter (later renamed “X”), he dismissed about 80 percent of the staff and turned the site into a haven for neo-Nazis and the other extremists and conspiracy theories he apparently admires. The company's market value has never recovered and his investment has roughly the same value as if he had put a blowtorch to $44 billion in cash.

The truth about Musk as a businessman is that his profits have depended heavily on government subsidies from the beginning.

But that arrangement can still prop him up, so long as he and his cronies control the government. Musk, Thiel and the rest of the MAGA billionaires will tell you they are backing Trump because they want to “kill the woke mind virus” or “protect freedom” or some such cliched piffle. In fact they are driving a campaign to further enrich and empower themselves – and the rest of us are just road kill.

How Bobby Kennedy's Speech At Garden Rally Echoed His Grandfather's Disgrace

The shocking hate rally hosted by Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden fully vindicated every parallel drawn to the pro-Nazi rally held at the old Garden in February 1939. The racist rhetoric, the ugly threats, the parody of Americanism and Christianity, all echoed that historic tableau of traitors pretending to be patriots. At long last, we got a chance to see Trump’s purloined “America First” slogan in its proper frame – as the watchword that Hitler’s agents in this country used to launder their isolationist movement against Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Up there on the dais stood Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., making ridiculous promises on behalf of Trump, with whom he has consummated a corrupt political bargain. Then he asked in his trademark rasp, “Don’t you want a president who’s gonna put America first?”

What Kennedy meant when he repeated the old slogan was not immediately clear, but the context was perfectly plain. Bobby is a grandson of Joseph P. Kennedy, the defeatist, isolationist, and antisemitic ambassador to the United Kingdom who undermined America’s will to resist Hitler in the 1930s, declaring that democracy was dead in England and soon would be dead here as well. When Joe Kennedy resigned as ambassador, the America First movement -- always in close communication with Hitler’s spies in the United States -- immediately invited him to head their organization.

After the war John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and the rest of their family spent decades trying to rectify this tainted legacy. And now comes Bobby Jr. to revive the worst of those memories at the Garden, while promoting a revisionist version of his uncle’s presidency that justifies his own acquiescence to Russian aggression in Ukraine.

The disgraced nephew would erase JFK’s unforgettable vow in his 1961 inaugural address: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Like Trump, Bobby would abandon our friends and placate our enemies, with no concern whatsoever for the survival and success of liberty.

He has made a defining choice by aligning himself with fascism and the enemies of this republic. His honorable family, whose members have done so much to serve their country, has rejected that treachery and shunned Bobby’s perfidious campaign.

Much more than the Kennedy reputation is at stake, and they know it.

Donald Trump, Elon Musk And The Hideous Campaign Of Hate

Long before Donald Trump declared he would run for president, his first political adviser articulated the central idea that has come to define both candidate and campaign.

"Hate is a stronger motivator than love," said Roger Stone in 2008 — and that corrosive outlook is obviously what still drives the Watergate-vintage dirty trickster and pardoned felon (although he now claims to be a born-again "Christian"). It is also what drives the man whose political persona Stone created.

The Trump campaign, and the MAGA movement at its core, embodies a malevolent spirit of hostility that endangers democracy, domestic tranquility and the very future of the nation. Both the candidate and his surrogates persistently spew out a noxious fog of deception and demonization, aimed at dehumanizing vulnerable populations that cannot fight back.

Sounding like a dollar-store knockoff of Hitler, Trump keeps intensifying his racist rants against migrants and minorities he describes as genetically inferior and predisposed to criminal conduct, from eating other people's pets to slitting the throats of young women. He has commenced a tour of cities supposedly overrun by these dark-skinned marauders, even as the local Republican officials have begged him to desist from his absurd lies and violent instigation.

But almost as toxic, and perhaps even more bizarre, is the Trump campaign's lurid, clamorous barrage of advertising aimed at trans people. So far, the Republicans and their allies have spent roughly $30 million on ads that aim to conflate trans people with murderers — and persuading them that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is devoted to advancing the interests of those trans killers above all else. While it is true that Harris has supported gender-affirming health care, including for prisoners, it is also true that the federal prison system under Trump provided that same care — as the law requires.

But what is so weird — how else to put it? — about the Trump anti-trans crusade is its hidden underwriter. Behind the spending on much of the MAGA hate propaganda, especially the messages dehumanizing trans people, is none other than billionaire troll Elon Musk. Hatred is a more powerful motivator than love for a twisted character like Musk too, even when the object of that revulsion is his own child.

Now Musk, a pompous proponent of "conservative family values," has often bragged about littering the world with his offspring, possibly too many to identify. But what we know for certain is that he has a trans daughter who has changed her name to Vivian Wilson and successfully petitioned the courts to dissociate herself from her cruel father.

Rarely present for Vivian when she was growing up, Musk has gone so far as to proclaim that his erstwhile son is "dead, killed by the woke mind virus," and mock his child publicly for being "gay and slightly autistic" from an early age. Vivian says Musk knows nothing about her and has lied about being "tricked" into approving the medical treatment she insists saved her life.

It is worth noting here that this same notorious troll, who has reportedly financed millions of dollars' worth of anti-immigrant vitriol online and on the airwaves, is himself a migrant from South Africa via Canada — and has collected more money from government, both state and federal, than any 10 million working-class noncitizens. His reintroduction of Nazism, white supremacy and outrageous conspiracies and falsehoods on his social media platform X makes him a far greater menace to American communities than those who have crossed the southern border to escape violence and seek a better life for their kids. Before the mass deportation begins, perhaps we could have a more selective approach.

Ugliness and grievance suffuse the Trump movement. They are as visible as a pustulent sore, not only in the would-be president's threatening rhetoric but in the aggressive thrust of his backers. Trump's social poison protrudes in different directions, always exposing the internalized fury of those around him, from his adviser Stephen Miller's desire to destroy immigrant families, to JD Vance's undisguised anger at the women who remind him of his errant mother, to Musk's festering grudge against his daughter.

An American political campaign, especially for the presidency, would normally seek to promote a vision of the future, an inspiring call to patriotism, or even a platform of policies and proposals. What Trump and his coterie of billionaires offer instead is incitement and the prospect of bloodshed, all so they can profit and loot the Treasury at will. What they are delivering already is a hellscape of hatred — just as Stone so gleefully warned us.

As Trump Scapegoats Jews, Nazi Infestation Of MAGA Is Impossible To Ignore

How unsurprising is it that former President Donald Trump appeared recently at an event supposedly devoted to opposing antisemitism — and proceeded to deliver a speech dripping with antisemitic innuendo and contempt for American Jews?

Like so much of what Trump says and does, his remarks at the "Combating Antisemitism" affair in Washington, D.C., expressed a bitter grievance. He resents the fact that Jewish voters in the United States remain overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, which means only a minority of them vote for him. He bluntly argued that his support for Israel's right-wing and bloodstained government somehow entitles him to Jewish votes, even though many Jews are critical of Israeli policy and political leadership.

Hours later, at an event for Israeli Americans, he expanded on the same themes but went much further, seeking to scapegoat the entire Jewish community for the electoral failure he now fears:

"If I don't win this election, and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens, because at 40%, that means 60% of the people are voting for the enemy ..."

Aside from his noxious description of his political rivals as "the enemy," Trump's attempt to blame Jews in advance for a Republican defeat at the polls is both absurd and sinister. Absurd because Jews are a tiny fraction of the electorate, mostly concentrated in states where he has no chance to win anyway. Sinister because the MAGA movement that Trump has spawned is crawling with neo-Nazis, white nationalists and antisemites who are already primed to spread hatred of Jews and other forms of racism.

And he knows it.

Trump's political rise over the past decade has seen the mainstreaming of every extremist ideology on the right — a category that encompasses antisemitism along with racism, homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia and the violent antagonism toward immigrants that he and his vice presidential nominee JD Vance now encourage routinely. As the Republican Party moved sharply rightward under Trump's leadership, the most vicious hatemongers have sprung up to proclaim their bigotry loudly, while proudly identifying as MAGA.

The latest mortifying episode involves Mark Robinson, the GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina, a pious moralist whose raunchy online persona was suddenly exposed by a CNN investigative team. Much of what Robinson wrote on the "Nude Africa" porn site is too scandalous to be recounted on television, including his sexual encounters with his sister-in-law. What could be reported in full were his viciously bigoted screeds. "I am a black Nazi," he wrote, declaring his admiration for Hitler and the genocidal murderer's autobiography, "Mein Kampf."

But here's the problem for Republicans and especially Trump, who endorsed this weirdo fulsomely while comparing him favorably to Martin Luther King Jr.: Unlike Robinson's strange sexual preoccupations, his antisemitism was no secret. He openly posted anti-Jewish and conspiratorial material on social media for many years, and refused to disown or apologize for those offenses. And by now nobody should be shocked that Trump and the MAGA Republicans, including his media claque, have lionized a Black Nazi.

The proliferation of white nationalist and Nazi-adjacent personalities at the highest levels of the Republican Party, directly attributed to MAGA and Trump, is pervasive. Candace Owens, a commentator dismissed from a right-wing website for her antisemitic ravings, was recently invited to headline a campaign fundraiser with Donald Trump Jr. Jack Posobiec, a right-wing operative repeatedly promoted by Trump, has collaborated with neo-Nazis and distributed antisemitic posts on social media. Wendy Rogers, an Arizona GOP state senator, just recently posted Nazi song lyrics on X, which was only her latest antisemitic emission.

The list goes on, including the nasty little pro-Hitler podcaster Nick Fuentes, who dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, as well as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the "Jewish space lasers" conspiracy theorist.

And then there's Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and close Trump confidant, who not long ago aired a show with a pseudo-historian whose work aims at absolving the Third Reich of responsibility for the Holocaust and whitewashing Hitler (who merely sought "an acceptable solution to the Jewish question.") Carlson, long a fan favorite of neo-Nazis here and abroad, approvingly echoed the recitation of revisionist lies.

This is a sickening phenomenon from which most Republicans — and too many in the media — have long averted their eyes. Trump may be the most reliable ally of the far right in Israel, but he represents a growing danger to American Jews.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. He is the author of several books including two New York Times bestsellers. His new book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Exploiting Fear Is What Trump, Vance And Their Fascist Mob Do

Of all the falsehoods, evasions and plainly loony remarks by former President Donald Trump during his ill-fated debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, perhaps it was to be expected that his ridiculous lie about the endangered pets of Springfield, Ohio, would go super viral.

While the Republican candidate declared himself the winner "by a lot" (a claim rejected even by many of his supporters), the internet was aflame with hundreds of mocking memes and several music videos that sampled his glowering image and tone of menace as he said, "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there."

Harris couldn't restrain herself from laughing — and it was impossible not to join her.

While some of us are still laughing, the intention behind that indictment of Haitian immigrants by Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, wasn't funny but deeply sinister. The only conceivable reason to spread that ugly myth, like so many of wild delusions promoted by politicians like Trump and Vance, is to demonize defenseless people, enrage gullible conservatives, and harvest money or votes or both in the process.

By now this industry of profiting from invented grievances is very familiar, having been refined in countless varieties by the generations of right-wing grifters who paved the way for Trump. Decades ago they began by promoting paranoia about communism and civil rights, initially by direct mail, and always with the most outlandish tales: of "barefoot" African soldiers just over the southern border, waiting to invade at the order of the United Nations; of public school teachers indoctrinating children to accept cannibalism and "wife-swapping"; of unions forcing firefighters to let houses burn down. None of these canards bore the slightest resemblance to truth — yet they induced millions of people to mail checks to crooked political entrepreneurs.

The only difference between then and now is that the Trump campaign expects to profit from its lies via email and credit cards rather than mailed checks. Trump and Vance care just as little for the truth as those direct-mail shysters, unashamed to keep repeating the lie even as the mayor of Springfield, the city's police chief and the very Republican governor of Ohio have sought to explain that there has been not a single case of a Haitian immigrant eating anybody's cat.

Vance claims that his office has received "many" such complaints from local residents, but he doesn't seem to have forwarded them to any authorities. (It's probably safe to assume he's lying about that too.) The smirking senator doesn't care whether the stories are true. He just wants to fan the flames of fury.

It is true, as local and state officials have hastened to note, that the huge influx of migrants to Springfield and the surrounding counties has created real difficulties. Some are cultural and some are simply due to overburdened systems and infrastructure. Local governments had no opportunity to prepare — and they assuredly need much more assistance than they have gotten from the federal government, which created the problem with good intentions and inadequate foresight.

Meanwhile the lie that Trump and Vance are openly attempting to exploit was first advanced by a neo-Nazi cult called "Blood Tribe" that invaded Springfield weeks ago and actually marched through town with guns and swastika banners. In recent days, MAGA gangsters have issued a series of anonymous bomb and shooting threats that forced hospitals and schools to close.

But what is so impressive - and inspires hope for our country - is how many of the citizens of Springfield have rejected the racist hysteria and instead worked to make the best of this challenge, despite the hardships, even as opportunistic politicians and other bigots keep doing what they always do.

Trump and Vance have nothing to offer except antagonism, panic, and potential violence. But Springfield's employers have provided jobs and found the Haitians to be valuable and diligent workers; clergy have welcomed Haitian families into their churches; and the city and county frontline workers, in social services and public safety, have stepped up with compassion.

Even a man who lost his son to a traffic accident caused by a reckless Haitian driver last year has set aside his grief to admonish those who have misused his son's death to incite fear and hate. At a recent city commission meeting, Nathan Clark invoked the memory of his late son. "Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible." He named Vance and Trump, among others, saying, "They have spoken my son's name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now."

It will only stop when the reprehensible exploitation is no longer profitable.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

'Russia Russia Russia' Isn't A Hoax -- And Putin's Stooges Aren't 'Victims'

Years before former President Donald Trump seized upon the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, he insistently promoted another supersized falsehood — namely that charges of Russian interference in the 2016 election were "a hoax." His minions in the media, from Fox News down to the lowliest web trolls, have incessantly parroted that lie despite the volumes of evidence uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee's bipartisan investigation and the special counsel probe by Robert Mueller.

But now a fresh indictment released by the Justice Department shows that the Kremlin conspiracy to rig U.S. elections in favor of the Republican Party is not a liberal myth but a live threat — and that several of the most prominent MAGA media voices denouncing the "hoax" were themselves on the Russian payroll, taking big money. The charges lodged against Russia Today employees Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva include money laundering, conspiracy and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The indictment describes in detail, with supporting documents translated from Russian, how Kremlin consultants and employees of RT, the state media outlet, directed at least $10 million in funding to a shadowy Tennessee firm known as Tenet Media.

Working under direct control of the Russians were Lauren Chen, a Canadian far-right YouTube "influencer" who also worked for Glenn Beck's BlazeTV, and her husband Liam Donovan. Chen and Donovan launched Tenet and hired major right-wing personalities such as Tim Pool, host of "Timcast," Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, a former Buzzfeed reporter fired for plagiarism, and Lauren Southern, a white nationalist also from Canada.

The idea was to draw their millions of online followers into an audience for streaming Tenet videos — and the company paid them each hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of them, identified in the indictment as "Commentator-1" and most likely either Johnson or Pool, received $400,000 per month for producing four videos.

Of far more significance than the gamy individuals who joined up with Tenet was the company's deeper purpose, as outlined by the Russians in a document reproduced as part of the indictment. Their project's top "objectives" as the election year approached were to target voters in swing states, Hispanic and Jewish voters, and "residents of conservative states" who usually vote Republican, and to move them toward pro-Russian viewpoints about the war in Ukraine, while undermining confidence in President Joe Biden and promoting discontent over the economy and culture, especially among white Americans.

Its stated "goal" was to "secure victory of U.S. Political Party A candidate" — which meant to elect Trump as president.

In short, federal investigators caught "Russia, Russia, Russia" — as a mocking Trump likes to say — interfering yet again to prop up his campaign. And just as word of the indictment broke, the Republican presidential nominee reiterated his promise to sell out Ukraine for a "peace" plan as soon as he wins election, even before he enters the White House. What Russia spent on Tenet would be pocket change compared with that return on investment.

Although the indictment depicts Rubin and Pool as ignorant of their sponsorship by the Russian government, and presumably duped by the cover story of a "Belgian investor" who didn't actually exist, none of them seemed too curious about who was financing this mysterious windfall. They apparently never imagined that spouting Russian propaganda against Ukraine, as all of them consistently did, might have attracted Kremlin sponsorship. Chen and Donovan evidently knew the venture was subsidized by Russian funds, routed through Mideast banks.

Indeed, Rubin, Johnson and Pool immediately declared they are innocent "victims" of the Russian scheme, defrauded into serving as Kremlin stooges. But they have also suggested, along with a chorus of right-wing defenders on Fox and elsewhere, that the indictment is actually a conspiracy by the Justice Department to censor "conservatives" and frighten gullible voters with "dirty tricks."

So which is it? The ugly truth is that the American Right, deeply compromised by the Kremlin connections of its leader Trump, doesn't care that he or its own media networks have been penetrated by a hostile foreign power. They are happy to take Russian money, or at least are untroubled when others grab those rubles — just as "conservatives" were once content to secretly accept illicit millions from the Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon or, for that matter, from agents of the German government during the years before World War II.

There are lots of terms to define these acts and attitudes — some legalistic, others defamatory. But none of those descriptions would include "patriotic."

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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