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As Darkness Looms, Here's A Reason For Hope (And Laughter)

As Darkness Looms, Here's A Reason For Hope (And Laughter)

There is no metaphor for what is about to happen in Washington, D.C If we erased every threat, every lie, every theft, every crime, every con, even the inexplicably self-satisfied look on his face as he bopped awkwardly to “YMCA” at that town hall with Kristi Noem last fall, nothing, and I mean nothing, could have prepared us for the gigantic national ignominy of having a felon and rapist take the oath of office under the dome of the Capitol he had his hordes trash four years ago nearly to the day in his attempted coup.

We have reached a nadir when the only comparison to this moment that seems even marginally adequate is the shelling of Ft. Sumter by a Confederate battery that began the Civil War, which in addition to costing the lives of 600,000 American citizens, cleaved this country in ways that persist to this very day.

Lamentations by Democrats filled online spaces this morning – doom and gloom and finger-pointing and regret and anger – the eleventy-seven stages of grief that follow a political loss. But I’m going to ask you a question now that I hope will aid you in dealing with the hideous display of the inauguration and the chest-beating war dance of outrage and illegality that will be the executive orders he has promised and will certainly follow.

Have you cried, in public or in private, at the seemingly unbearable tragedy of a political loss previously in your life? I have. It was years ago. The candidate and the office at stake don’t matter, but it happened, and it was real, and my tears shocked me. What was I doing crying because one of our good guys lost to one of their bad guys? It had happened before, and it would happen again, and in the interim, the good guy would win other offices, so what was the big deal? Elections are baked into our national politics and way of life. Somebody wins, which means somebody else has to lose. That’s the way the game of politics is played.

The tragedy of the particular political loss that happened years ago came and went, along with many, many others that have happened since then. Bad things came to pass, like wars and preventable deaths from disease and poverty, but good things happened, too, like advances in civil rights and the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the expansion of health insurance to tens of millions who had never had it. Life went on.

Is this time really so different that our despair should be so deep, our sense of doom so complete?

My answer is no, and to understand why, I point you to what just happened with Trump’s big plan to execute immigration raids in Chicago later this week. It was reported that the plans for the raid “leaked,” so they have been put on hold, which is code for cancelled, at least for now.

But that is not what happened at all, and what did happen is illustrative of why there is hope even at this dark moment. It seems that Trump’s “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, was at a political party in Chicago last month and was bragging about the immigration enforcement the new Trump administration was planning, as ever, for “day one." Homan told the assembled Republican fat cats that it would begin “right here” in Chicago because the city had lots of immigrants and Trump and his minions had a bone to pick with the mayor, who they claimed had turned Chicago into a “sanctuary city.” The raids were promoted on right wing social media as part of Trump’s “shock and awe” plans for Inauguration Day.

Oh, how the arrogant and incompetent work their magic, let us count the ways!

Here is what you don’t do if you want to carry out something you’re calling a “raid.” You don’t advertise what you’re going to do in advance, because then it’s not a surprise. You don’t include the online right wing in your planning, because they’re a bunch of loudmouths and what they say is right out there for everyone to read. Which means if you’re an immigrant, and you’re in Chicago, and you read there’s going to be a raid on Tuesday, you might consider taking a quick trip to Rockford or maybe Cedar Rapids and cool your heels for a while.

Trump has not even been inaugurated. He doesn’t run the Department of Homeland Security or Immigration and Customs Enforcement yet. The people working in those departments report to Biden administration officials, who still occupy their offices and pull down federal paychecks.

Let’s consider this: Trump has been flapping his jaws about how much he hates the federal workforce and how he wants to fire people wholesale and replace them with his loyalist hacks. So, do you think there might be some federal employees in the agencies associated with immigration enforcement who are not looking forward to the reign of Tom Homan and Kristi Noem, she of the nervously-smiling-through-the-“YMCA”-dance-along? Do you think that some of these federal employees, over whom Trump does not yet have authority, might have helped to leak the Homan plans for the Chicago raids?

See how this works? If you want to do stuff like Trump has been bragging he’ll do, such as disassemble whole sections of the federal government and cut not billions but trillions from the budgets that pay for the jobs of people Trump has promised to fire, you had better have your shit together, because there are a lot more of them than there are of you, and many of these federal employees Trump is so disdainful of love their jobs and count on their paychecks to pay their mortgages and their kids’ college tuitions.

It goes beyond the misbegotten immigration raid. Take Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who has made no secret of his disrespect for the service of women and gay people in our military. The first thing Hegseth is going to have to do when he sits down at his big desk on the E-Ring of the Pentagon is deal with the severe recruitment problem the Army, Navy, and Air Force are having. The point being, you can’t have an effective military if you don’t have the warm bodies to fill the ranks. So, whatchagonna do, Petey boy? With holes in the ranks of serving troops already, you’re going to drive women and gays and trans soldiers out of the service because they get the message you think they aren’t up to the task of being what you insist on calling “warriors,” without a reason beyond your own Christian Nationalist prejudice.

That makes a hell of a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

Trump’s people just aren’t very good at the job of being avenging assholes for Donald Trump. I read today that a total of 19 former Fox News hosts, contributors, staffers, on-air commentators and executives will be filling jobs in the new Trump administration. They aren’t even in office yet, and already like Hegseth, they are well-endowed with the useful qualities of arrogance and ignorance and incompetence, and already they are alienating the people who actually run the operations of the government they are taking control of and will seek to bend to their will.

We have a tendency to look at Trump and the politics of Trumpism as if it happens in a vacuum. We are accustomed to listening to Trump make pronouncements as if the words coming out of his mouth are actions. You need look no further than Trump’s campaign promises to deport “ten million” immigrants, “the largest deportations in this country’s history.” Even today, there was a story about Trump bragging that he will deport more immigrants than Eisenhower. Who knew that was even a thing, and yet there he is, with more words, more bragging, and of course, more lies.

Above all, remember the lies. Lies are his oxygen. He can’t breathe without lying, and so a lot of what we will see and hear from Trump in the coming days will simply be lies. He will issue executive orders that are lies, things that cannot be done by executive fiat, things that will immediately come under fire from administrative challenges and lawsuits, things that have no meaning, such as “shutting down” the windmills and “ending” electric cars. Even “drill baby drill” is already imperiled: the Biden administration put up leases in the arctic for auction, and there were no takers. Nobody wants to drill for oil up there at a time when drilling down here is at record levels.

Things are not good in this country of ours with Donald Trump on his way into office. We would be a lot better off if that were not the case. It’s not that despair isn’t an option. There is nothing wrong with a little hand-wringing at a time like this.

But think of it as if you are Muhammed Ali. Do you remember what he would do in the ring just after the bell rang? He would skip around, shaking his arms at his sides from the shoulders, seemingly defenseless, until his opponent would do something stupid, like taking a shot at Ali. His left would flash upwards, then again, then a right, and punches would connect and it was a fight.

We’re in the arm-shaking stage. The fight begins tomorrow. Get ready to be hit and to hit back. This is politics. We’re good at it. We’re fighters. We’re Democrats. It’s what we came for.

Trump, Hegseth And The Triumph Of The MAGA Idiocracy

Trump, Hegseth And The Triumph Of The MAGA Idiocracy

How do you deal with a nomination like the odious Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense? I’m not going to take the time and space to run through the many reasons he is the wrong person for the job. They are manifest and obvious every time he shows his face or opens his mouth.

That appears to be the point with Donald Trump’s decision to appoint him. It’s as if Trump is waving a red flag at the establishment, or somebody anyway, telling the D.C. old guard and everybody else that they’ve run things long enough, so now we’re going to try something really different: the raw, unfettered, incompetence of norm-busting ugliness. There is simply nothing right about Hegseth, not his lack of experience, not his criminal attitude about women, not the insta-Christian nationalism he has deployed as a kind of parachute to save himself by embracing the worst instincts and lies of the far right.

Trump is known to be furious with the Pentagon for its recalcitrance at the end of his last term in office. Neither Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley nor Defense Secretary Mark Esper would countenance his insane plans to put active duty troops on the street to face down American citizens who, along with providing the troops’ paychecks, were exercising their constitutional right to protest the killing of George Floyd.

What Trump wanted from the military was to use it for his own purposes, and anyone who got in his way he saw as not loyal to him and his agenda of grievance, if it can be called that. Trump’s attitude about the military was a version of what good is an army if you can’t do something with it. Previous presidents – George W. Bush comes to mind – have put this attitude to work starting wars that should never have been for reasons that couldn’t stand even a glance of scrutiny.

With Trump, of course, it was personal. Why waste his soldiers and guns and tanks on some country halfway across the world when he could use them right here in the exercise of a coup-in-place? That’s the way other dictators have done it over the years, and we know how much Trump admires dictators.

So, angry at a military establishment he sees as insubordinate to his sense of self as Supreme Ruler Over All, Trump just decided to take a well-coiffed Fox News yapper and blow the whole thing up and see what happens.

It would be one thing if the only people watching were his MAGA base, who have been eating up Hegseth and his simple-minded posturing like a family bucket of KFC chicken. Were you watching yesterday during the hearing when half the room erupted in applause for Hegseth and started shouting “USA! USA!”? It was like a scene from the movie Idiocracy when a crowd of morons starts cheering because that’s what they’re supposed to do, MAGAs gone wild with delight because they think they’re being treated to the downfall of everything they think they hate about Washington and the establishment. That the “establishment” is this country’s military, which in another day conservatives embraced as reflexively as this crowd opposes our soldiers who have stood fast for the Constitution, is one of the great ironies of my lifetime.

But it isn’t just the MAGA mob watching that abomination of a hearing. It is the whole world, a world that knows all too well what happens when you throw a stink-bomb like Hegseth into the midst of what can only be called the world order. Because that’s what is happening. Trump isn’t just blowing up the Pentagon. He wants to blow up NATO, he wants to blow up our trade alliances, he wants to blow up everything that came before him put in place by anyone not named “Trump.” Europeans and our other allies around the world know what will come to pass if you throw away 75 years of carefully crafted mutual defense: more countries than Ukraine may begin to fall to fascism and force; people and institutions and whole countries will die.

The satisfaction among the MAGA faithful in the hearing room of the Senate Armed Services Committee was right out in the open. Hegseth is a dreamboat to this strain of American idiocracy. He has the “look,” he has the attitude, he wears the ill-fitting suit of the requisite anti-woke, anti-DEI, anti-woman, anti-rational right-wing male as if he’s a contestant for Mr. America, or these days perhaps a “hero” inside the “cage” at one of these fake mixed martial arts macho battles.

It’s so obvious that the whole thing is fake, it’s hard to believe the MAGA faithful don’t see it too. But they don’t. Apparently, neither do the Republican senators whose charge it is to “advise and consent” so that disasters-in-the-open like Hegseth don’t happen.

But they cower in fear of Trump, because that’s what you do if you’re a Republican today, and they will put their stamp of approval on this manifestly unqualified, incompetent TV-ready hand puppet Trump wants over there across the river at the Pentagon so he can call him up and tell him to do things that no other secretary of defense in our history would ever do.

It is obvious there is nothing Democrats can do to stop this trainwreck. Standing athwart the tracks and yelling “NO!” will not work. Trump and the Republicans have the votes, and they are going to have their way with Washington D.C. come hell or high water, and unless I miss my guess, an actual flood of downtown Washington is probably among the disasters that will befall us before Trump’s four years are over.

What is next, you may wonder? Well, we have endured this sort of madness before: Vietnam was a truly horrible misuse of American military might, and that included, in Richard Nixon’s attempts to fight the anti-war movement, huge abuses of civil rights, privacy, and real weaponization of the Department of Justice and FBI against those Nixon considered enemies. The misbegotten war on Iraq and the trip we took through the graveyard of empires that is Afghanistan were almost as bad. Young American men and women lost their lives once again in pursuit of policies that never had a chance of success and so should never have been pursued in the first place.

After the deluge comes the clean-up, I’m afraid. Trump’s abuse of our military with the likes of Hegseth leading the way will cause a huge correction to take place at some point in the future, and we will begin again. As happens in Washington, no one will pay for this madness. Look at Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, the “architects” of the lies that begat the invasion of Iraq. Do you see them paying a price? They have sinecures at the evergreen think tanks that populate the banks of the Potomac. Even Dick Cheney has achieved a nearly inexplicable hero status simply because he opposed Trump and stood up for whatever passed for the “old values” of the Republican Party Trump has turned to ashes. But you need to remember that it was Cheney who oversaw the whole Iraq disaster and in the process went after Joe Wilson for telling the truth when he took the job of investigating Iraq’s so-called WMDs and ended his wife Valerie Plame’s CIA career in the process.

That it has always been difficult to find good guys in Washington does not excuse the fact that Trump is fully in mid-stride in placing actual bad guys everywhere he can, and he’s giving them the triggers to set off bombs every time he picks up the phone and demands “loyalty” from these fools who would not recognize real allegiance and dedication to duty if it came from one of their own children.

The one glimmer of hope I see is that these people always end up doing to themselves what they think they are doing to others. There is no place from which incompetence can rise. It just stays where it is as the consequences ripple out and do their damage. The MAGA functionaries Trump is planting like deadly nightshades all over Washington can’t save themselves by suddenly learning to do the right thing, because they don’t know what the right thing is. And Trump isn’t going to save them, because everything that happens from here on out will be somebody else’s fault, not his.

Get ready for finger-pointing and blame. There’s going to be a lot of it coming, and oh, how much fun it’s going to be to watch Trump and his MAGA faithful eat their own.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

When The Far Right Gets What It Wants (And Feels Swindled)

When The Far Right Gets What It Wants (And Feels Swindled)

Here’s the problem with taking power: It’s up to you to run the thing that you are taking over. That is what Donald Trump and his followers and hangers on and cronies and fellow travelers face as we tick off the days until January 20. It isn’t even Day One yet, with Trump’s massively advertised plan to turn everything inside out with the stroke of his pen on a series of executive orders, and already the swamp-weasels are chewing on each other’s tails.

Have you been watching whatever is going on with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy? The two of them, having billionaire-bulldozed their way into Trump’s inner circle, have discovered that it’s filled with fools and ignoramuses. And oh, my goodness! Who’s that over there in the mirror? Why it’s us!

It seems that the two billionaire geniuses failed to notify Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and the MAGA faithful of their plan to continue running their own personal Department of Immigration for the Following People. We’re talking here of the H-1B visa program which allows employers to hire skilled foreign workers, supposedly when their skills are not available in the American workforce.

According to CNN, Musk’s Tesla corporation has sought and received permission to hire more than 2,000 foreign workers under the H-1B program, and so have two of his other businesses, X and Neuralink. According to the Department of Labor, in 2023 alone, Trump requested and received H-2B visas for non-skilled workers that included seven hotel desk clerks, 17 housekeeping cleaners, 53 waiters and waitresses, 24 cooks, five first-line supervisors of food preparation and serving workers, and five bartenders.

Just couldn’t find any locals in Florida to change beds, swab out toilets, check-in guests, and prepare rubber chicken dinners at Mar-a-Lago.

So, Musk is all in with the H-1B program, posting this on X on Friday: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

Let’s leave aside for the moment Musk’s plagiaristic usage of Trumpian “likes of which” language and his obvious elitist contempt for those attempting to read what he wrote and have a look at the fallout.

Miller and Bannon and Laura Loomer and a rather large smattering of what passes for the MAGA intelligentsia acted dumbstruck. What happened to what we might call “the whole immigration thing?” The idea that it’s time to “close the borders” and “hire American” and “America First” and practically every other slogan Trump ran on?

Trash heap of history, apparently.

So, now we know they’re against immigration but for it when it comes to exploiting low skilled and highly skilled foreign workers both for their personal companies and the companies of their cronies. What else is on the menu?

They’re against shipping jobs off to Mexico and Indonesia and India and Pakistan except when their friends own the companies doing the out-sourcing. They’re against vaccinations except for themselves and their children. They’re against the NIH and egghead scientists except when they come down with diseases like pancreatic cancer for which there are now designer mRNA vaccines that can be customized for individual patients who can afford them. They’re against women in combat until they need female soldiers to question and search female prisoners of war and gain intelligence from women in Muslim countries who are forbidden from even speaking with a man who is not their husband.

And of course they’re against abortion, except when an inconvenient pregnancy crops up in their own lives. Take for example arch-conservative Rep. Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee, who pressured his mistress to get an abortion and arranged and paid for two abortions for his wife, according to transcripts from his divorce proceedings…according to the wife who had the two abortions.

It's only the beginning. Just wait until Trump gets going on “drill, baby, drill” on public lands. There will be whining and pissing and moaning and even lawsuits from right-wing billionaires whose zillion dollar ranches back up on national forests and public grazing lands. Trump’s plans to cancel tax credits for electric cars and solar panels are already running up against…you guessed it…Elon Musk, who sells electric cars and batteries that store power produced by home solar panels.

The entire Trump plan for his second presidency is based on cancelling fairness – in employment, college admissions, distribution of funds for disaster relief and basic programs like agriculture subsidies, school breakfasts and lunches, healthcare, and that’s just for starters. They’ve got Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in their gunsights, too.

What happens when fairness goes out the door? Why, it’s replaced with cronyism, payoffs, nepotism, corruption right up to and including bribery and blackmail. Remember how Trump burned through cabinet secretary scandals in the opening months and years of his first term? Buckle your seatbelts. The crew he has nominated this time are a whole new category of horror-story.

We’re in for quite a ride.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.


Musk Aiming For A Trillion Dollars -- And One-Party Rule Over America

Musk Aiming For A Trillion Dollars -- And One-Party Rule Over America

Since Donald Trump won the presidency on November 5, we have begun to see what Elon Musk’s $277 million investment in Trump has gotten him.

He is a permanent fixture at Mar-a-Lago, reportedly dining with Trump when he entertained Washington Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Musk joined Trump in his first phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy after Trump won. Musk was with Trump when he joined French President Emmanuel Macron for the ceremonial reopening of Notre Dame. Musk and Trump had a private meeting with Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni at the Élysée Palace after a black-tie dinner held by Macron to celebrate the reopening of Notre Dame. In Germany, Musk has endorsed the far-right party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, saying on Friday, “Only the AfD can save Germany.” Musk recently wrote on X that in Great Britain, “civil war is inevitable,” and is reportedly considering financing far-right Nigel Farage and his Reform UK Party.

Musk refuses to answer questions about how many times he has spoken with Vladimir Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, and he has not been forthcoming about his private communications with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Musk does billions in business in China through his ownership of Tesla. He builds fully half his Tesla automobiles in China, some for the Chinese market, others for export to the U.S.

And of course, in recent weeks we have seen Musk’s influence over U.S. politics. He fired off more than 150 lie-filled posts on X to get the bipartisan deal for funding the government shut down. Trump and Vice President Vance ran behind Musk, following his lead in the collapse of that deal.

Musk and Trump unsuccessfully combined their energies trying to get Speaker MikeJohnson’s “Plan B” deal to pass, and got together again to finally push the House to pass “Plan C,” essentially the same deal as “Plan B” but without the suspension of the debt limit.

There has been a lot of noise from Democrats about “President Musk," as it was unclear just who was pushing who. Musk at one point even advocated shutting down the government completely until Trump is inaugurated on January 20, saying that “no law” should be passed until he takes office.

During Musk’s frantic display of his political power this week, he reminded wavering Republicans that he could fund primary challengers against them if they didn’t vote the way Musk and Trump told them to. Melanie Zanona of Punchbowl News, appearing on Alex Witt’s show on MSNBC, pointed out that “it was something like 170 Republicans who voted for the final [budget] bill," quoting one Republican who voted against it saying, “Well, guess what? Trump can't primary all of us.”

That particular Republican missed the point entirely. It was not Trump but Musk threatening to primary Republicans who didn’t follow orders. And therein lies the tale of our country’s political life, folks. Elon Musk is worth, at last count, 431 billion dollars. The first story speculating that Musk could surpass $1 trillion in net worth within the next few years was published after Trump won the election in November.

Musk’s $277 million in the last few months of Trump’s campaign was like a pizza order for him. He could have easily put a billion dollars behind Trump through Trump’s Save America Pac and various other campaign funding scams. According to Opensecrets.org, a non-profit that tracks campaign spending, in 2024, about $16 billion was spent in total for all federal campaigns for office, including the presidential campaign and those for Senate and all the seats in the House.

There is no “average” for the amounts spent for seats in the Senate and the House, but suffice to say that running for Senate is one hell of a lot more expensive. The most expensive races for the Senate in 2024 were in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the totals spent by both parties were $308 million in Ohio and $240 million in Pennsylvania. The most expensive House races in New York, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona averaged around $25 to $27 million total spent by both parties in each state. Further down in federal campaign spending, about $2.3 million total between the parties was spent in New Jersey and New Mexico Senate races; the spending for House races in Michigan and Wisconsin was about $1 million in each race by both parties.

You can see that the spending totals are all over the place, but just taking the House races in Michigan and Wisconsin as an example, Elon Musk wouldn’t have any problem at all going into a Republican’s primary campaign for the House in either state and putting his finger on the scale.

Musk has enough money to buy the House and the Senate paying retail prices. He’s already shown what he can do for a Republican running for president, and he wasn’t even trying, coming into the Trump campaign late in the game and spending most of his money in just two states. Imagine what he could do if he decided to fund entire campaigns, including primary and general elections.

A million here, a couple hundred million there…Musk probably spends more in a year on his fleet of private planes than a half-dozen seats in the House and a few in the Senate would cost him, because remember, he would only be supporting candidates for one party: the Republican Party.

The privatization of our national defense has been going on for years, and with Elon Musk, in some areas, it is almost complete. Musk already owns most of NASA’s space launches and an incredibly important part of the Department of Defense satellite communications capability with his more than 4,000 satellites in his Starlink network,. He is in the process of deploying what could be the largest satellite surveillance network in the world. He has shown that he can put his finger on the scale of a war, too, when he shut down Ukraine’s access to Starlink over Crimea early in the war.

Russia and China became allies in May of this year, signing a joint statement in opposition to the U.S. and pledging a “new era” of cooperation on nuclear and financial matters. And we have no idea what Musk has talked about with either Putin or Xi Jinping. He won’t tell us, but I think it’s safe to conclude that he has told his friend Donald Trump.

Musk has shown that he is friendly with one-party rule countries like China and Russia, and his political interests in this country involve just one party, the Republicans. I think it may be time to ask ourselves if the United States government is in danger of becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Elon Inc.

What do you think?

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Bipartisan Rejection Of Trump/Musk Budget Leaves Congress In Chaos

Bipartisan Rejection Of Trump/Musk Budget Leaves Congress In Chaos

The vote was 235 to 174, not even close to the two-thirds majority necessary under the special provision under which Speaker MIKE Johnson had brought the bill to the House floor. Dozens of Republicans joined Democrats in rejecting the bill, most of them because the bill included a two-year suspension of the debt ceiling Trump had demanded for his support.

The two-year lifting of the debt ceiling would have allowed Trump to run up the deficit to levels “never seen before,” as he is fond of saying, during his first years in office. When he takes off the last two years of his term to play golf, the debt ceiling would have been reimposed. But what would he care? Trump and his pals, including Elon Musk, would have their tax cuts that will balloon the deficit and send inflation into the stratosphere.

Congress still faces the midnight Friday deadline to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government. If they don’t, much of the government will be furloughed over the Christmas holidays, with TSA agents, air traffic controllers, and the nation’s military all forced to work without pay, at least until the new Congress is sworn in on January 3 and returns to “work.” The administrator of the Transportation Security Administration said this afternoon that a government shutdown would lead to longer lines at airports over the holidays.

Elon Musk is probably doing the YMCA dance in celebration. Musk had recommended shutting down the government completely until Trump is inaugurated on January 20. There are no TSA lines for people who fly on private aircraft such as Musk’s fleet of Gulfstreams.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Matt Gaetz

Gaetz Ethics Report To Be Released -- So Mattie-Poo Threw A Tantrum

Just in time for Christmas…or maybe New Years…there will be an extra-special present under the tree for followers of the many, many, many sex scandals of our favorite Florida ex-Congressman, Matt Gaetz. CNN reported today that the House Ethics Committee voted earlier this month to release the ethics report on Senor Sexcapade.

The report is supposed to be made public after the House casts its final vote before Christmas, which may come later this week…if Speaker Johnson can get off his knees from praying that Donald Trump will leave him the fuck alone and let him get a Continuing Resolution passed, a deal that has been in the works for weeks and was scheduled to be voted on by Friday.

But noooooooo. The newly-hatched Terrible Awful Disgusting Out-of-Control Duo of Donald Trump and Elon Musk today decided that the Johnson bill should be killed and were crowing on social media by this evening that the compromise negotiated between Republicans and Democrats to extend funding for the government until March was dead. Trump also threw in a demand that the debt ceiling be raised in early January so it would happen on “Joe Biden’s watch” according to reports late today.

In the middle of all this, with a government shutdown looming and two days to pass something new to avert the United States government being closed over the Christmas holidays, came the news that the gooey details on Matt Gaetz uncovered by the Ethics Committee will be made public. Gaetz resigned from Congress in mid-November in a bid to keep the House ethics report from being released and muddy up the already churning waters of his impending Senate confirmation to be the next Attorney General.

Gaetz withdrew his nomination when whispers about what might be revealed in the ethics report began spreading through Capitol Hill. This left Gaetz totally dangling, without his seat in the House that might have given him more power to influence the Republican members of the ethics committee.

So, what did Matt do yesterday? Why, he took to X to whine about how unfair it all is, that’s what he did. “I was charged with nothing: FULLY EXONERATED. Not even a campaign finance violation. And the people investigating me hated me.”

“The very ‘witnesses’ DOJ deemed not-credible were assembled by House Ethics to repeat their claims absent any cross-examination or challenge from me or my attorneys. I’ve had no chance to ever confront any accusers. I’ve never been charged. I’ve never been sued. Instead, House Ethics will reportedly post a report online that I have no opportunity to debate or rebut as a former member of the body.”

That would be the “DOJ” Gaetz had been tapped to head up as Attorney General, at least until he wasn’t.

But Gaetz had an explanation, or a plea, or an excuse, or a something anyway, that he apparently thought will soften the blow when the report comes out. It seems that a more youthful version of the same twisted sicko he is today did some bad things he now wishes he hadn’t done.

“In my single days, I often sent funds to women I dated - even some I never dated but who asked.”

Did he ever. The Washington Post reported in late November that the House Ethics Committee had seen Venmo records showing that Gaetz had paid “more than $10,000 to two women who testified before the committee.” That would be the “witnesses” Gaetz found it necessary to put in quotes in his X post today. “Some payments were for sex, the witnesses testified to the committee,” the Post reported.

But let’s listen to the whining still emanating from Gaetz’ post on X:

“I dated several of these women for years. I NEVER had sexual contact with someone under 18. Any claim that I have would be destroyed in court -- which is why no such claim was ever made in court.”

Gaetz had plenty of opportunities to take the claims against him to court – with a lawsuit for defamation – but for some reason known only to Mattie-poo, he didn’t. Gee, I wonder why? Here’s Gaetz with his big wrap up, as of this morning:

“My 30’s were an era of working very hard – and playing hard too. It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”

Got that? Probably? Gaetz was walking around the floor of the House showing porno party-pics and bragging about his sexual conquests, apparently right up until he tied the knot.

A 2021 report on Wonkette gives you an idea of the probably playing hard that was going on, even in Gaetz’s office on Capitol Hill:

“A Hill source sent The Daily Beast a photo of a trash bin outside Gaetz’s office as lawmakers cleared out their offices at the end of a recent session. At the top of the heap was an empty Costco-size box of "Bareskin" Trojan condoms.”

Late this afternoon, Newsweek reported that Gaetz is “threatening to ‘expose’ the supposed ‘me too’ settlements of his former colleagues after the House Ethics Committee voted to release a report on its investigation of sexual misconduct accusations.”

At least one person is coming to his aid: Marjorie Taylor Greene. She released this statement late today: “If Congress is going to release one ethics report, they should release them all. I want to see the Epstein list. I want to see the details of the slush fund for sexual misconduct by members of Congress and Senators. I want to see it all.”

I don’t know for sure, so I’m going to just take a wild guess here, but I rather doubt there are many in the Republican Caucus in the House who “want to see it all.”

It’s the “all” about Gaetz himself that promises to be a thrill-ride if and when the ethics report finally sees the light of day. The House committee apparently took testimony from one witness who saw Gaetz having sex with a 17-year-old girl against the side of a pool table at a party. The committee heard more testimony that Gaetz was partial to drugs such as cocaine and ecstasy and used them with women whom he was paying for sex.

But not to worry: Gaetz assures us he was just “dating” the women to whom he “sent funds.”

Let us not forget that this man who has been credibly accused of having sex with an underage girl, paying for sex with women he flew to the Bahamas, and using drugs with prostitutes was nominated by Donald Trump to be the chief law enforcement officer in the land.

I guess the way things are going, we’ll have plenty of time to read the Ethics Committee report when the government is shut down over Christmas on the orders of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, because, you know, two civilians can just shut down the government anytime they want with the Republican Party in control of the House.

Oh, boy, are we in for a treat when Trump moves into the White House and Republicans are in control of both houses of Congress and Elon Musk is floating around Washington D.C. in a cloud of Ketamine helping decide what kind of a country we’re going to have.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Middle East War

Why Trump Will Wield Superpower Status In The New Middle East

While the Biden administration hasn’t been able to turn the tide for Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression, it has had better luck further south in the Middle East. Donald Trump will inherit the results of President Joe Biden’s support of Israel’s war on Hezbollah in Lebanon, its throttling of Syria’s military capability since rebels marched into Damascus ten days ago, and the damage Israel did to Iran’s military and its weapons manufacturing capabilities when it struck Iran in late October.

In less than two months, Israel has completely upset the balance of power in the Middle East, and it has done it from the air using stealth technology developed and deployed by the United States. Israel used stealth jets when it took out Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and much of Hezbollah’s top command at the militant group’s headquarters in the south of Beirut on September 28. Israeli stealth jets were used when they launched hundreds of strikes on Hezbollah military targets, knocking out all of its rocket sites that threatened the north of Israel.

But most importantly, Israel used both stand-off guided missiles fired from Iraqi airspace and heavier munitions dropped by U.S.-manufactured F-35 and F-15 jets when it retaliated against Iran for firing nearly 200 missiles at Israel on October 1 of this year. Israel used at least 100 jet aircraft to strike Iranian military targets in the first such attack on Iran by Israel in the history of the conflict between the two adversaries.

According to the Pentagon, the Israeli strikes on Iran crippled its missile manufacturing factories to such an extent that it will take Iran at least a year before they can begin producing missiles again. Israel struck other Iranian weapons facilities as well, including its drone manufacturing plants. Iran has been a major supplier of both missiles and drones to Russia in its war on Ukraine.

According to CNN and other news sources, Israel was able to destroy all of Iran’s S-300 Russian-supplied air defense batteries. “Israel now has broader aerial freedom of operation in Iran,” Israel’s military spokesman Daniel Hagari told the press after the Israeli strike on Iran.

What this means, without saying it out loud, is that Israel can now strike Iran with impunity, anytime, and anywhere it wants. Iran is blind to Israel’s use of stealth attack bombers and because its air defenses have been largely destroyed, unable to prevent another strike by air from Israel for the foreseeable future. Stephen Bryen, a former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Trade Security Policy, who writes a Substack column entitled “Weapons and Strategy,” put it this way: “Israel used the F-35, which is a stealth fighter, to knock out Iran’s air defenses. That enabled F-15s to go in and destroy other targets – because now the Iranians couldn’t fight back.”

According to reports by CNN and The Guardian, Israel refrained from hitting Iran’s oil infrastructure and its nuclear facilities…at least for now.

For all of the more than 40 years of the existence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Israel and Iran have largely fought a shadow war, with Iran using proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas to attack Israel. With Hamas and Hezbollah at least for the time being largely destroyed and Iran’s military capability to launch a counterstrike damaged, Israel has emerged as the sole superpower in the Middle East.

CNN quoted Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, saying that Iran fears that “if they don’t do something now Israel will start treating Iran as they did with Syria, which means every once in a while, the Israelis will strike.”

Speaking of which, Israel is estimated to have struck more than 500 military targets inside Syria since rebels ousted the government of Bashar al-Assad on December 8. The attacks appear to be continuing. Israel has continued its attacks most recently with a massive strike on Syria’s weapons storage facility near the coastal city of Tartous, where Russia maintained a naval base until moving all of its ships from the port after the fall of Assad.

Russia is said to be “in talks” with the nascent regime that is in the process of establishing a government in Syria. “We are in contact with representatives of the forces that are currently in control of the situation in the country, and all of this will be determined in the course of dialogue,” Dimitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman told reporters in a call from Moscow earlier today.

If that doesn’t sound like a realignment of power in the Middle East, I don’t know what is. The government of Russia’s client-state, Syria, gone. Russia’s ally, Iran, severely damaged by Israeli airstrikes. Russia’s terror proxy, Hezbollah, nearly destroyed. Meanwhile, Israel is talking about establishing settlements in the territory it occupies in the Golan heights, and there is nobody who can tell them to stop.

What Donald Trump will do with the situation he inherits in the Middle East is not known, although he has made no secret of his willingness, even eagerness, to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. With Putin in a stalemate in Ukraine and his forces pushed out of Syria, if Netanyahu remains in power in Israel, and Trump takes power in this country, there won’t be a balance of power in the Middle East anymore. Donald Trump, for better or worse, will be in the driver’s seat.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.


Polio, Measles And The Trump-Kennedy Quackfest

Polio, Measles And The Trump-Kennedy Quackfest

Oh, boy, here we go with the Trump lie-o-rama on vaccines and healthcare. The New York Times reported this morning that Aaron Siri, identified as “Kennedy’s lawyer,” has petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio and Hepatitis B vaccines. Siri is further identified as helping Kennedy “pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration.” In that capacity, Siri has been interviewing prospective hires by asking them their opinions on vaccines.

Kennedy is said to want Siri to serve as the Health and Human Services Department general counsel, the top lawyer for the agency. Siri has sued to stop a requirement for children to get flu vaccines in New York City schools. He sued the state of Mississippi successfully to get a religious exemption from the state requirement that children be vaccinated to attend school. He sued in multiple states to stop requirements for the COVID vaccine.

So, the guy who has filed repeated lawsuits to have vaccines withdrawn from use, and to stop requirements that vaccines be administered for school children, will be in charge of defending the FDA and HHS against such lawsuits in the future. That’s like inviting the fox inside the chicken house and providing the fox with a file with which to sharpen his teeth while he guards the chickens.

You see, after nearly seven decades of saving lives and preventing paralysis with the polio vaccine alone, not to mention saving the lives of countless babies with the rubella vaccine and other vaccines regularly given infants, it will now be the correct thing in the Department of Health and Human Services to question whether vaccines have been effective in saving the lives of children.

Because, of course, opinions are equal to facts and evidence in the utterly upside-down scientific world of the new Trump administration. Siri has filed petitions and lawsuits on behalf of a group of vaccine skeptics called the Informed Consent Action Network, which believes in something called “medical freedom.”

"I love Aaron Siri,” Kennedy said recently on a podcast hosted by yet another vaccine skeptic. “There’s nobody who’s been a greater asset to the medical freedom movement than him.” Siri has either sued or filed petitions with the FDA to stop or suspend the use of 13 vaccines regularly given to children including vaccines that prevent tetanus, diphtheria, polio, and hepatitis A, according to the Times.

Trump, in his recent interview with Time Magazine for its cover story, said he wants Kennedy to “do some very serious testing” of vaccines. It goes without saying that all vaccines in use in the United States today have been tested again and again for safety and efficacy. “We’ll see the numbers,” Trump told Time, speaking of the prospective testing he wants Kennedy to do on vaccines. “A lot of people think a lot of different things. And at the end of the studies that we’re doing, and we’re going all out, we’re going to know what’s good and what’s not good. We will know for sure what’s good and what’s not good.”

Trump was asked by Time if his administration could cancel some vaccines. Here is the sum total of his response: “It could if I think it’s dangerous, if I think they are not beneficial, but I don’t think it’s going to be very controversial in the end.”

So, there it is, folks. Donald Trump is going to cut through all controversy that doesn’t exist in the medical community about vaccines that have been tested and proven safe, because he alone will make all future scientific medical determinations about what should be used and what shouldn’t. The standard for the FDA and the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services will be what Donald Trump himself thinks is “good” or “not good.”

Allow me to interject some personal experience here as a kind of reality check. I recently went to the Gagnon Cardiac Institute of the Morristown, New Jersey hospital to have a stent inserted in one of the veins of my heart. This is not the first time I have undergone serious medical procedures. I had a heart bypass in 2010 and a spinal fusion in 1999.

All those procedures had one thing in common: when you walk through the doors of an American hospital for surgery or for any other serious medical procedures or care, that is it. You’re in there to be treated with whatever they’ve got. You had the choice of which doctor to treat you and which hospital you want the procedure done, but after that, inside the hospital, you’re going to get whatever they’ve got. You don’t choose the drug to relax you. You don’t choose which needle to use for your drip. You don’t choose the equipment they will use, which probe they’re going to send up your femoral artery or which scalpel will cut into the muscles of your back or which clamp they’ll use to shut off the blood flow where they’re working. If you need something to speed up or slow down your metabolism during surgery, you don’t choose that drug. You don’t even choose the brand of the blood pressure cuff that’s on your arm or the method by which they monitor your heart rhythms and breathing.

A hospital is not a marketplace. They don’t have racks of medical equipment like products in a Target store when you go into surgery. They don’t wake you up to ask you whether you’d like this anti-Afib drug or that one if your heart rhythm goes haywire.

This whole thing of “medical freedom” is a fiction that ends when you get out of your car and walk into a hospital and ask the people in an emergency room to save your life. If you fucked up and listened to Bobby Kennedy and Aaron Siri or Donald Trump and decided not to get a COVID shot, and you’re in a critical care unit and you’re being hooked up to a ventilator because your lungs have ceased to function, they don’t ask you why you neglected to get vaccinated. They just treat you. They don’t ask you which heart drugs you want them to inject into your IV connection, or what brand of tube you want them to insert through your chest to drain your chest cavity of fluids. They just do it, and if you survive and several days later can walk out of the hospital, you thank them. You don’t argue with them about which drugs or procedures or equipment they used to save your life.

We live in a country with the most expensive health care in the world, but because our federal government requires everything to be tested before it’s used, whatever they put into your body is safe. The FDA tests vaccines and drugs and medical equipment like ventilators and surgical gear like heart probes and whatever they shove up your ass to look around in your colon to make sure you don’t have cancer. The government has requirements that the hospitals you use meet certain cleanliness standards. That’s why the floors you’re pushed down on a gurney are shiny, and there isn’t any dust or germs that can blow up onto your body and get into your surgical suite and infect you when they open you up or stick a probe into you.

We should be thanking our lucky stars that we have a Department of Health and Human Services and an FDA to keep us safe, and the National Institutes of Health to study diseases and cures and preventatives for disease.

Donald Trump is appointing a person who has, during his lifetime, and during the lifetimes of his wives and his children, made use of our excellent hospitals and their excellent standards of care. He has benefitted from the vaccines that he was given after he was born and as a child when they were required for him to attend grade school and high school and college.

Vaccines probably saved Kennedy’s life, but because he’s a privileged, narcissistic monster who, the evidence tells us, cares for himself but not for others who would benefit from the same vaccines that probably saved his life, this country is likely to enter a new level of the spread of disease and infection that could be avoided if the people of this country had not elected an equally privileged and narcissistic monster as their president.

These monsters have already caused the deaths of women from bans on emergency care for problem pregnancies and other healthcare denials related to bans on abortion, all of which was done in the face of medical evidence of their necessity to save lives of women and newborns. Now Trump and his chosen crew of quacks will be in charge of the very federal departments that have successfully, until now at least, ensured the safety and efficacy of vaccines, drugs, medical equipment and hospitals, and they are set to drive our entire medical system into the same ditch they drove women’s reproductive healthcare.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Snark Won't Save Us From Trump And His Grifting Henchmen

Snark Won't Save Us From Trump And His Grifting Henchmen

Put on your slicker and turn up your hood, because I’m about to rain on the commentariat parade that has spent the day stomping on Kimberly Guilfoyle, she of the recent break-up with Donald Trump Jr. and subsequent appointment to be our ambassador to the birthplace of Democracy, the country of Greece. Substack columns and Democratic-leaning blogs have had what we used to call a field day making fun of Guilfoyle herself and the supposition that Don Jr. went to his father and asked him to give her something to do that would take her as far away as possible from Palm Beach and Washington D.C.

“Greece begs Guilfoyle to stay in U.S. We can hear her from here,” Andy Borowitz said on Substack, where he now publishes. “So he breaks up with her and ships her off to Greece? I smell a Hallmark Movie” read one post on X.

It’s hard to resist being snarky about Guilfoyle when Trump’s announcement of her appointment includes absurd praise of her “extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect,” when the sum total of her actual experience is having been the host of a Fox News talk show. Guilfoyle expressed her thanks on Instagram say, “As ambassador, I look forward to delivering on the Trump agenda, supporting our Greek allies, and ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity.”

Evan Hurst writing on Wonkette, in a withering take-down of Guilfoyle’s appointment, wrote, “Thank God, our long-running war against Greece is coming to an end!”

I confess that my own tastes in commentary often run to snark and ridicule of political figures with whom I disagree and of whom I am contemptuous. Kimberly Guilfoyle is one such figure. Others have recently included Kash Patel, Matt Gaetz, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and many, many more. Each are laughable in their own unique ways, and I have launched snarky arrows at each of them repeatedly.

An absurd character such as Guilfoyle is far too easy of a target, but she and others like her are what Donald Trump is giving us.

In the election of Donald Trump to a second term in the White House, we have reached a point where snark and ridicule, while fun, are reaching their limits. Some of Trump’s appointments have indeed been laughable. Others, however, are sinister and represent threats to the way that this country has traditionally been governed: with a seriousness of purpose that measures up to the task at hand, no matter the department of government or the issues faced here and abroad.

Donald Trump was not that kind of president in his first term, and he shows every sign of going even more outside the norms of American governance this time around. In fact, with his appointments of right-wing bomb throwers and business cronies, Trump appears to be systematically forming a government that he will systematically loot for his own monetary advantage. He has appointed billionaires to oversee and regulate industries and sectors of the economy in which they hold major investments. Trump and his sons recently established their own crypto trading firm, World Liberty Financial, in which a Chinese crypto entrepreneur has invested $30 million, of which $20 million is estimated will accrue to Donald Trump personally, given the structure of his ownership in the business. Trump’s other son, Eric, has made no secret of his father’s interest in allowing crypto to be traded virtually without regulation, and plans have even been announced to have the U.S. Treasury create a so-called “strategic reserve” of crypto currencies in the amount of $100 billion or more. Investment by the U.S. government in anything is sure to send its value up, this increasing the value of whatever Trump’s crypto holdings are.

The chances for insider trading are off the charts with Trump’s appointment of Paul Atkins as Securities and Exchange Commissioner. Atkins is the CEO of a consulting business that has large crypto clients and is known to be an advocate for what Trump, in his appointment message, called “digital assets.”

“Digital assets,” for those keeping score, are what you get when you take real dollars that you can deposit in banks and use to buy things like food and cars and houses, and instead you buy a so-called “wallet” which contains nothing more than bits of code that is secret, the access to which is secret, the value of which is secret, and which is valued by a market with few boundaries or rules that protect investors against fraud and abuses like ponzi schemes. This description of what crypto amounts to is snarky, but the potential damage to what crypto can do to our economy and to the people who buy its bits and “wallets” is real.

Let us sum up our situation this way: the political and economic and humanitarian life of this nation is already in deep peril, and Donald Trump has not even been inaugurated yet. Snark can help us deal with what we face, but it isn’t going to save us from a man with no morals and criminally defective judgement who will soon have our nuclear codes in the room with him at all times. We can make fun of his hair and makeup, we can speak of the absurdity of his lies, we can point to his conflicts of interest and his obvious greed, we can make a list of the crimes he has already committed and been indicted for and been convicted of, but we must take seriously this man and his array of compatriots and fellow travelers and co-conspirators in the schemes we know he has in mind to carry out over the four years of his presidency. And I will never be able to resist the snark that will flow like the current of the Delaware River every time I consider the fools and knaves who have been thrust upon us.

We will soon live in a time when Donald Trump and his MAGA followers have their hands on the levers of power. We can deploy snark and ridicule to help us untangle ourselves from the dilemma Democracy has given us, but just making ourselves feel good is not enough. Facts leave bite marks. Reason deployed in the service of good has moral and practical power. This is not the end of history. It is the beginning of a profound struggle to ensure that the ideals upon which this country was founded, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, will not perish from this earth.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.


Christopher Wray

Why Wray's Capitulation To Trump Is So Damaging To The Rule Of Law

The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced today that he will resign from the bureau in advance of Donald Trump taking office on January 20. He made the announcement at an emotional town hall with FBI employees in the building his proposed successor, Kash “I’m kissing your ass as fast as I can boss” Patel has sworn to close down and turn into a “museum of the deep state,” whatever the hell that is.

Wray’s resignation is a complete capitulation to a man his own agency established was a felon many times over. Wray’s FBI provided the agents who, under court order, searched Trump’s resort/hotel/residence, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach Florida, where Trump stored hundreds of classified documents in a bathroom and ballroom open to the public, as well as in a basement storage room that was so poorly-secured that a Department of Justice official, having inspected the room, ordered that the door be secured with a padlock.

Wray’s FBI agents were also involved in the investigation of the events surrounding the January 6 assault on the Capitol and Trump’s attempt to delay and overturn the certification of the 2020 election by the Congress. Using evidence accumulated by the FBI, the Department of Justice empaneled two grand juries in Washington D.C. which brought indictments of the former president for violating at least three federal crimes, including his attempt to use falsified electoral ballots to confuse and delay the certification of actual, legal electoral ballots by the Congress.

Evidence gathered by the FBI, including video surveillance tapes and interviews with Mar-a-Lago employees, was used to indict Trump for obstruction of justice when he instructed his employees to conceal classified documents from the FBI and order the destruction of other evidence, chiefly video tapes of Trump employees moving boxes of classified documents from one room to another before the FBI searched the premises in August of 2022.

The classified document indictments were dismissed by Trump’s hand-puppet, Florida Judge Eileen Cannon, in July of this year on a discredited and demonstrably false legal theory that Special Counsel Jack Smith had been illegally appointed. Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland under a provision of Department of Justice policy that has been used multiple times in the past, including during Watergate and the investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal. No court has ever found the appointment of a Special Counsel to be outside the bounds of established DOJ procedure and law.

Special Counsel Smith filed a motion in late November to dismiss the charges against Trump for plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, acting in accordance with DOJ policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted for violating federal crimes. Since Trump was elected on November 5 and will be inaugurated on January 20, Smith concluded that Trump will soon be a sitting president and thus cannot face indictment. In his motion to dismiss, however, Smith noted that the prohibition of indicting Trump as a sitting president “is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind.”

Wray’s resignation sets a distressing precedent for any future investigations of federal crimes committed by senior government officials or powerful and wealthy public figures. Trump and his mouthpieces have wielded a battering ram of public criticism of Wray and FBI agents, accusing them of violating the law in the manner by which they went about investigating Trump’s January 6 actions and his removal of classified documents from the White House. Trump made Wray and the FBI an issue throughout his campaign for the White House, claiming falsely that he had been singled out for investigation and prosecution by an “out of control” DOJ and FBI.

At least three grand juries heard evidence of crimes Trump committed in the January 6 and classified documents cases and returned indictments based on that evidence.

Multiple Trump associates have pleaded guilty in cases involving the January 6 plot to overturn the election, including at least three of Trump’s attorneys, two of whom were charged with facilitating the fake elector scheme. Trump associates, including his attorneys, still face state indictments in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Trump has sworn to pardon the insurgents convicted of crimes on January 6, including more than 100 charged with violence against police officers. He will not be able to pardon his associates and lawyers who face indictments for committing state crimes.

Trump had appointed one of his chief lackeys, Patel, to serve as the replacement of Wray after he fired the FBI Director. That Wray has said he will resign before being fired is a total capitulation to Donald Trump’s wringing the last meaning from the rule of law in this country, which has held, since the signing of the Constitution, that no one is above the law. Trump’s Supreme Court destroyed that long-time American principle by ruling that Trump, and any other president, is absolutely immune from prosecution for crimes they commit as part of their “official duties” and presumed immune from crimes committed during unofficial acts while in office.

In addition, the Supreme Court found that evidence of crimes resulting from Trump’s conversations with government officials, such as employees of the DOJ, cannot be used to prove that such crimes were committed. One Supreme Court justice pointed out that evidence of bribery would be inadmissible if Trump used a government employee to collect a bribe.

That is how total the disintegration of the rule of law has become, because Donald Trump was able to appoint three of the arch-conservative justices on the Supreme Court who have carried out his will in the immunity decision and in others. The resignation of Christopher Wray is yet another nail in the coffin of our system of laws and Constitutional norms. By resigning even before Trump fired him, Wray will not be present as head of the FBI between now and January 20 to help protect the agency to which he has given his professional life.

Trump has screamed at his rallies and given interviews denouncing the FBI and the DOJ as parts of the so-called “deep state” and vowed to wreak retribution on the people who work there. Wray could use the time before Trump takes office to give speeches defending his agency and the FBI agents who have worked under him and followed his orders to carry out the investigation of Trump and others for breaking the law. While Wray cannot do anything to stop Trump from indicting the FBI agents who have worked under him, he could stand up to Trump and tell the world that his FBI agents are innocent men and women and were only doing their duty and following their oaths to support and defend the Constitution.

Wray’s resignation is like leaving a wounded comrade on the battlefield and running for cover. Maybe Wray can use his status as a former FBI director to help raise money to pay the lawyers that will be needed to defend the agents who worked under him when they searched Mar-a-Lago and found hundreds of classified documents. Trump has sworn to prosecute those agents, and Kash “I’ll follow any order you give me” Patel has said he will use the FBI to carry out retribution against any “enemy” Trump points him at.

This is a sad day for the FBI and for this country. If more government officials act the way Christopher Wray acted today, we will have many, many sad days ahead of us. This is the way that great nations fall: when people give in to authoritarian despots before they are even under their rule.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

How Israel Exploited Ukraine's War To Defeat Hezbollah And Oust Assad

How Israel Exploited Ukraine's War To Defeat Hezbollah And Oust Assad

When Syrian rebel forces stormed into Damascus and toppled Bashar al Assad over the weekend, sending him fleeing to Moscow, it wasn’t clear how things would shake out, beyond the celebrating of Syrians who had finally unyoked themselves from Assad’s dictatorial rule.

But today a picture is emerging, and it’s not one that anyone expected even a few months ago. Recall that Israel initiated its war on Hezbollah back in September with the so-called “pager attack,” when pagers carried by Hezbollah fighters were remotely detonated across Lebanon, killing 37 and injuring hundreds. The pager explosions were followed quickly by exploding two-way radios used by Hezbollah. Two days later, Israel hit Hezbollah targets across Lebanon in hundreds of airstrikes.

The attacks soon moved north to include a suburb of Beirut where Hezbollah headquarters was located, and less than a week later, Israel killed Hassan Nasrallah as he was meeting with top Hezbollah leaders. Then Israel sent ground forces into Lebanon for the first time in years, telling the world it was going to create a buffer zone to prevent Hezbollah from sending rockets into Northern Israel.

Seemingly within a few weeks, a shooting war had broken out between Israel and Hezbollah, and Israel – much more heavily armed, with a larger army and its air force – was winning.

What was going on with Israel’s sudden flurry of attacks on Hezbollah? Israel still had its hands full in Gaza, where Hamas held more than 100 hostages and fighting in the streets still raged, with Israel continuing its brutal bombardment, claiming it was targeting Hamas targets. This was the two-front war Israel was said to want to avoid when they first attacked Gaza after the murderous assault by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Did Israel have enough soldiers and ammunition to fight on two fronts?

It emerged in September and October of this year that yes, Israel did. What is now clear is that Benjamin Netanyahu and his military commanders had made a calculation that the war in Ukraine had so sapped the Russian army and used up so much of its arsenal of weapons that Hezbollah and its Syrian allies, backed by Moscow, would not be able to be resupplied with Russian rockets and artillery. Iran was busy supplying the Houthi rebels in Yemen and backing Shiite militants in Iraq. September was the moment Israel chose to strike.

It is at least possible that Israel knew in September of the strength of the Syrian rebels in the north, and maybe even that they planned to attack Aleppo in late November. Israel’s Mossad intelligence service was able find and target the top leadership of Hezbollah within a matter of days after Israel had launched its first attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon in September, so it’s reasonable to think that Mossad had a handle on the Syrian rebels, too.

For their part, Syrian rebels had watched Hezbollah get decimated by Israel in September and October. By November, they knew Assad would not be able to call on Hezbollah to help put down another rebellion in Aleppo and Idlib. November was the worst month for Russia, Syria’s other key ally. In its nearly three-year war against Ukraine, Russia suffered more than 45,000 casualties in that month alone, and as many as 125,000 total since September of this year. Estimates of Russian losses since the beginning of the war exceeded one million for the first time in November.

Russia wouldn’t be coming to the rescue of Assad, either.

On November 30, with Hezbollah in tatters and Russia back on its heels in Ukraine, Syrian rebels struck Aleppo and started their ten-day push to Damascus. Reports from Syria say that after initial opposition from Assad’s army in the north, there hasn’t been much fighting as Syrian rebels took Idlib and then Hama and then Homs and yesterday, Damascus.

Do you want to know who was sitting back with a big shit-eating grin on his face as Assad’s private jet left for Moscow? Bibi Netanyahu.

Having crippled Hezbollah and occupied a strip of Southern Lebanon, Netanyahu was in position to take advantage of the chaos in Syria. On Sunday, he made his move. Netanyahu ordered Israeli forces to occupy the buffer zone between Syria and the Golan heights, the strip of Syrian territory Israel captured and occupied in the Six Day War in 1967. The New York Times reported on Sunday evening that Israeli tanks moved into the U.N. overseen buffer zone, and Israeli ground forces took control of the summit of Mt. Hermon, on the border between Syria and Lebanon. Al Jazeera reports that Israeli forces have moved past the Golan Heights buffer zone into several small towns in Syria, telling residents that they “do not intend to harm” villagers in the area.

Rebel leaders in Syria ordered the Syrian government ministries to stay in place so they can function while a new government is formed. Nobody knows at this point how that will happen and whether the various factions that control parts of Syria can settle their differences and compromise on a coalition government.

Meanwhile, in Israel, villages in the north near the border with Lebanon have been repopulated after having been evacuated when Hezbollah was launching constant rocket attacks into Israel last summer. Some leaders in Israel are already talking about the fall of Assad marking the moment in the Middle East when a new realignment of powers may be possible. Some sort of deal with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states may be back on the table, with Iran and Russia seen to be severely weakened by Assad’s fall.

If, as per usual, the Middle East reverts to type, a return to chaos is not far in the distance. But for the moment, Assad is gone and there’s a new sheriff in town, and his name is Bibi Netanyahu. Look for Bibi at the Big Table in the main dining room at Mar a Lago sometime between now and January 20. Donald Trump likes to have his picture taken with a winner, and right now, Netanyahu is looking like one.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Kamala Harris

For Democrats, There Can Be No More Playing Nice Guy

Let me tell you how badly wrong I was about the presidential race back on August 6. It was the day that Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Putting Walz on the ticket as the Democrats’ choice to be Vice President didn’t raise any problems. He ticked off a whole list of boxes – he’d been a teacher and a football coach; he came from the middle of the country; he was not too far to the left for centrists or too close to the center for progressives; he was amiable and folksy and thought to be a good contrast up against Mr. Yalie Double-speak, J.D. Vance.

To make the formal introduction of Walz, the Harris campaign held a rally in a key city of a key state, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Democrats needed to carry Pennsylvania if they were to win in November, so it was a smart move. Tracy and I watched the rally. We were excited by the Walz pick and by the contrast between the Democrats’ joyful celebration and the typical “grim” Trump rally, as I described it.

After watching the rally, I sat down and wrote a column I titled, “The political power of the smile.” I celebrated the “enthusiasm and delight” on display in Philadelphia that night. “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz reminded Democrats who they are,” I wrote rapturously. “Empathy is energy. Humor is energy. Dedication to freedom and justice is energy. Being willing to fight for what you believe is energy.”

All of that is true, as far as it went. But what I failed to see then was that Democrats had followed their choice of a nice guy in 2020 with another choice of someone nice to run as their candidate this year. Kamala Harris’ smile, on display everywhere she went, was genuine. So was Tim Walz’s jolly demeanor.

But voters didn’t want someone nice to take command of an economy and a country they saw as failing them. What was the right-track/wrong-track polling figure for this presidential race? Exit polls on election day revealed that about 70 percent of voters thought that the country was “on the wrong track.” Two-thirds felt the same way in September polls. People don’t care how nice you are when they’re hurting. They wanted someone who had an attitude that was as sour as they were feeling, and they went for him on election day.

If they want to win, Democrats have nominated their last nice guy candidate for president. Donald Trump went out there on the stump and spent months calling Democrats “enemies,” “evil,” “dangerous,” “radical leftists,” “communists,” “Marxists,” “the enemy within.” He did it over and over and over. Kamala Harris called Trump “increasingly unstable and unhinged,” and told voters that “A second Trump term is a huge risk for America.”

That’s about the worst she came up with. I’m not saying Harris should have matched Trump like a couple of kindergartners on the playground calling each other names and saying “I’m rubber and you’re glue.” But if you stand there and let your opponent call you ridiculous shit like “communist” and “Marxist” without at least pointing out how desperate it sounds, you’re just letting him embed those words in the minds of voters using sheer repetition.

During the debate, instead of turning toward Trump and calling him a liar to his face every time he opened his mouth and a lie came out, Harris relied on the tried and true Democratic tactic of countering his lies with rational argument. When Trump said he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban, instead of laughing in his face and turning to the camera and telling the audience they had just heard the man who appointed the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade tell the fifty-seven thousandth and possibly biggest and worst lie of his career, Harris listed some examples of disastrous outcomes women had faced when seeking care for troubled pregnancies in states with abortion bans. When Trump said Democrats support “execution” of babies after they are born, instead of calling Trump a damn liar, Harris waited for one of the moderators to correct him with the statement, “there is no state in which it’s legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

I sat there watching that debate and kept asking out loud, “why doesn’t she call him a liar?” as she missed opportunity after opportunity to call out his lies. I kept waiting for her to say something like, “That’s just bullshit, Donald. Stop insulting the American people.” I waited in vain.

I don’t care who the Republicans nominate for president next time, we can’t have a Democrat up there who isn’t willing to stand up and tell people “he’s full of shit” every time the Republican says something that is full of shit.

And while I’m at it, no Democrat should ever again counter some line of racist or xenophobic or sexist cant from a Republican with the lame denial, “that is not who we are.” You don’t respond to racist garbage with a denial. You respond by calling out the racism and asking them, “is that what you teach your children?” Democrats should deploy shame as a political tactic far more than they have for the last dozen years. It works, especially when it’s repeated again and again.

I’m not trying to do an autopsy on the Harris campaign, and I’m not saying that she should have tried to “out-Trump” Donald Trump. Let Republicans do that to each other the next time they have a primary. But Democrats need to convince people that we get how they’re feeling and why. People need to know that we are aware of the problems that they face in their lives, and that we can deal with them. People don’t want to know about plans. Publishing “white papers” with lists of policies doesn’t do it. Telling people that you have a “plan” that’s going to solve this or that problem is a dead end. They’ve heard too many plans.

Trying to tell people that inflation is down, even when it is down, when they can’t afford their rent or are paying more for gas to get to work than they are for lunch is an insult to their intelligence. Citing all the figures in the world that show reduced crossings of immigrants at the border doesn’t work. Even though it was true, telling people that immigrants pay taxes and contribute to the economy and that immigrants are not taking their jobs didn’t mean anything, because voters weren’t concerned with numbers, they were responding to the boogey-man word “immigrant,” not to facts.

And whatever Democrats do from now on, don’t try to find a solution to any problem in the United States Congress, unless by some miracle, you get control of both houses. Republicans learned from the masters, Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell, that it’s hard as hell to get anything done with legislation, but the easiest thing in the world is stopping the opposing party from enjoying the tiniest victory.

Gingrich and McConnell were fucking obstructionist assholes, but we know their names, don’t we? Is it too much to ask for Democrats to have a few obstructionist assholes in our arsenal of political talent? Gingrich used to be called a “bomb-thrower.” Where the fuck are our bomb-throwers?

My old friend Joe Klein wrote a column a few days ago he called "On Strength." It’s nominally about the idea that Biden’s pardon of his son was, if you’ll pardon the expression, unpardonable. Klein says he’s known Biden for 37 years and always found him to be “a really good politician, which is high praise in my book.” Klein follows that rather faint praise with, “Biden was the sort of quarterback that football players call a ‘game manager’ as opposed to a game-changer. He was reliable. He wasn’t dynamic. He certainly wasn’t charismatic.”

Klein goes on to say that he doesn’t think Kamala could have won the election, even “with a full running start because we are talking about the passive, sensitive, recumbent DNA of the Democratic Party here,” as opposed to “its exact opposite, a lucky con-man, who raised his fist above his blood-spattered face with the American flag flapping in the background on a sunny summer day in Pennsylvania—if an image can win an election, that may have been it.”

What Klein says about Biden between the lines is that he has always been a nice guy, a kind of perfect exemplar of the nice political party into which he was born and that rewarded his decades of loyalty with a presidency for which he was too nice and too late.

Politics ain’t paintball, a game where somebody gets hit by an exploding glob of paint and there’s a blue stain on their shirt and they’re out of the game. After eight long, miserable years of Donald Trump, the game doesn’t even have any rules anymore. If we haven’t learned by now that this Republican Party plays for keeps, it’s on us, not them, because they’ve been out in the open about it at least since Donald Trump arrived and started shooting people in the middle of Fifth Avenue and asking, “What are you going to do about it?”

That’s the question for Democrats, isn’t it? What are we going to do to beat this gang of authoritarian thugs who want to shred the Constitution and put tanks and soldiers in our streets? As the old saying goes, nice guys finish last, and we’re at the stage in our history where finishing last means the last of our democratic way of life.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.


Seoul Survivor: Could Martial Law Happen Here?

Seoul Survivor: Could Martial Law Happen Here?

The short answer is: look who the voters of this country, in all of their alleged collective wisdom, elected as the president of the United States. The even shorter answer is, you bet your fucking ass it could happen here with Hitler’s illegitimate son in the White House.

Donald Trump started rattling what could have been our chains since he first took office in 2017. He struts around fluffing his feathers all proud that he didn’t get us involved in a foreign war in his first term, but he came this close to loosing the 82nd Airborne Division on George Floyd protests in 2022, stymied only by a united front at the Pentagon, both military and civilian, who threw down a gauntlet in formalized letters to the troops and messages to each other that the U.S. military would not be engaged in politics. Gen. Mark Milley was the ringleader of this quiet protest, but Secretary of Defense Mark Esper made his feeling clearly enough known that Trump fired him and replaced him with a lapdog and then appointed Kash Patel as his chief of staff to keep an eye on him.

Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1792 during the Floyd protests, and that dastardly law passed by an ancient Congress has been mentioned by an increasingly large collection of his puppets since he was elected last month. The Insurrection Act contains this gem of a paragraph which seemingly gives a president an open-ended ability to do whatever the fuck he wants with our active duty soldiers any time he wants to:

“Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.”

The succeeding paragraph is equally scary:

“The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

It’s followed by two subparagraphs that talk in a rather unfocused way about using the powers of the militia or the armed forces if “the execution of the law” is hindered, or “the course of justice” is “impeded,” or the “equal protection of the law” is obstructed.

You take Donald Trump and put him in the Oval Office with Kash Patel and Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth, or in the event he isn’t confirmed, the equally disgustingly fascist Ron DeSantis, and you tell me that rotting meatball of a brain trust wouldn’t endorse any justification Trump came up with as an excuse to put armed soldiers on the streets if so much as a single brown-skinned shoplifter stole a stick of deodorant from a Target store in Sheboygan.

The Insurrection Act does not, as South Korea’s declaration of martial law did, suspend the Constitution, impose limits on the press or threaten punishment for publishing “fake news,” dismiss the legislature, ban strikes by unions and public gatherings, or ban “political activities.” But see if this doesn’t sound familiar, if not likely, to come from the lips of a certain makeup-caked burger-chomper: The South Korean president cited the “destabilizing force” of a foreign nation with which South Korea shares a border and the possibility of that country causing South Korea to “fall to ruin” under pressures brought to bear by “anti-state forces” within South Korea.

Haven’t we heard the phrase “enemies within” about eleventy-thousand times over the last year? How about “enemies of the people,” identified as members of the dastardly media? Stephen Miller has been calling undocumented immigrants “invaders” for eight years.

A poorly written and ill-defined law, passed in contemplation of being enforced more than two centuries ago, can be made to mean whatever the fuck Trump wants it to mean when he is surrounded by lackeys and “yes sir” men and women, backed up by a Supreme Court that seemingly didn’t even need a hearing to issue its lockstep allee-allee-in-come-free ruling removing Donald Trump of the constraints of the rule of law that have been in force since the signing of the Constitution.

The point I’m making is this: You can use the words Insurrection Act or martial law, it’s the same thing when you put the words “Donald Trump” in the same sentence with either.

In South Korea, the reaction to the imposition of martial law was immediate. Thousands took to the streets. Legislators climbed barricades to get into their capitol to cast a unanimous vote lifting the executive order of martial law. The defiance of the people and lawmakers alike was absolute, total, without question.

Raise your hand if you can see Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mitch McConnell and Jim Jordan and Mike Johnson and the rest of them breaking into the nation’s Capitol to do anything other than vote to add a crown and scepter to the trappings of the Trump presidency. Take one step forward if you think that the governors of Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho or any other red state will be on the phone to the White House telling Trump to get his troops off their states’ soil.

Donald Trump and every one of his MAGA mouthpieces have already referred repeatedly to immigrants coming across the southern border as an “invasion.” The first paragraph of the Insurrection Act spells out the right of any governor to request the president to order active-duty troops into his or her state to “suppress insurrection” within its borders. You tell me how Republican governors are likely to define what is an “insurrection” in their states. Gregg Abbott might drive past a Home Depot and eyeball a clutch of Latino laborers looking for work as “insurrectionists” and pick up his cell phone and call Trump and ask him to turn out the troops to help him suppress it.

Given the results of the election in November and a look at the list of suck-ups and house pets Trump wants to serve in his Cabinet, the short answer, the long answer, every answer is, we are so fucked.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Fed Up With Media's Double Standard Against Democrats? So Am I

Fed Up With Media's Double Standard Against Democrats? So Am I

The Washington Post devoted seven stories to the Biden pardon yesterday. Jeff Tiedrich, in his Substack-which-you-must-immediately-subscribe-to, pointed out that every story on the opening page of the New York Times website yesterday was about Biden’s pardon of his son, all six of them.

The New York Times, in its wisdom, found it necessary to publish the musings of Jeffrey Toobin: “Biden’s Pardon For His Son Dishonored the Office.” Toobin, you will recall, is the former New Yorker writer and CNN talking head who pulled down his tidie-whities for a quick winkie-wankie on a New Yorker/WNYC Radio zoom call.

Toobin was suspended as a CNN commentator for eight months, and then welcomed back into the club, because of course he was! Jeffrey apparently doesn’t think that Donald Trump dishonored the office with his pardons of every single flaming idiot who lied for him during his impeachments and lied their asses off to the FBI, prosecutors, grand juries, the mainstream media and everybody else. No, those were just regular old run of the mill pardons for Trump according to grin-and-yank-it Jeffrey.

Here is Jeff Tiedrich’s take on the morals of the mainstream media:

“here’s a fun double standard to which the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled press hold our political parties:

Democrats must walk a narrow ethical path, and never stray one inch from it. they’re expected to kowtow to every demand the media makes. Joe Biden is expected to run a letter-perfect presidency. Kamala Harris was expected to run a flawless campaign. the slightest deviation, and the media will blow it up into a weeks-long scandal.

Republicans, on the other hand, are given a free pass to do whatever the fuck they want. lie? no problem. cheat? go for it, homies. protect a sex-trafficking predator within their midst? hey, we wrote one strongly-worded editorial. what more can we do?

and then there’s that Very Special Boy himself, Little Donny Convict. he could literally tear the Constitution in pieces and use the shreds to wipe his ass, and the press would just shrug their shoulders. look, that’s just Donny being Donny. it’s just the way it is.”

Biden is supposed to toe some imaginary line drawn by liberal op-ed writers and frightened congress-critters and pearl-clutching newspaper editors, even as Trump promises to pardon insurrectionists convicted of attacking Capitol police, damaging the nation’s Capitol, and attempting to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election.

That makes sense if your head is so far up your ass you can have a conversation with your own tonsils.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.


Kash Patel And The Limitations Of 'Loyalty'

Kash Patel And The Limitations Of 'Loyalty'

What is Donald Trump so afraid of? I ask the question because in the military, it has long been known that only frightened, little men – it has always been men – appoint toadying loyalists to positions under their command. If a frightened little man wants his orders carried out, even when his orders are likely to cause deaths of his compatriots by their idiocy and cravenness, then he must appoint people who will follow his orders unquestioningly. Fellow frightened little men fit that requirement to a T.

All the news stories last night and commentators today on the appointment by Trump of Kash Patel to head the FBI have started out with the proposition that he is a “dangerous” and “shocking” appointment. He is neither. He’s not shocking, because Trump has made it clear over the last two years that he was going to put someone like Patel in the job of FBI Director. He’s not dangerous, because you’ve got to be effective to be dangerous, and Patel hasn’t been effective at anything he’s ever done.

Patel got his start as an aide to Devin Nunes when he was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in 2017. Nunes, with the able help of Patel, fucked up that job by the numbers. He claimed he received classified documents from unnamed sources that would prove that President Obama had “tapped my wires,” as Trump had claimed, and he would show them to the White House. The documents came from two National Security aides in the White House, with whom Nunes met secretly one night in early March of 2017.

Nunes and Patel took the documents, which turned out not to be secret at all, back to the Capitol, where Nunes shared them with the press, and then made a show of taking them to the White House to show them to Trump, whose aides had had them all along. Even Trump toady Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) compared Nunes to the fictional incompetent “Inspector Clouseau.”

Patel stayed with Nunes throughout his comical attempts to prove anything Trump said about “Russia Russia Russia” was true. The problem was, they kept running up against uncomfortable facts. Trump’s campaign aide George Papadopoulos had, in fact, met with Russian agents of the GRU who offered “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. When Nunes traveled to London to meet with MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, the British office of government communications, no one would meet with him. Patel was his aide on all this.

Patel got a job as a counterterrorism specialist on the Trump National Security Council and promptly inserted himself right in the middle of Trump’s botched attempts to use Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas – remember him? – to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to open a fake investigation of Joe Biden that Trump could use against him in the presidential campaign. Patel’s many laughable maneuvers in that clusterfuck are too numerous to go into here, but suffice to say that Patel’s frequent contacts with Giuliani tell you pretty much all you need to know about how effective and successful that scam was.

Patel next popped into public view when Trump appointed him as chief of staff to Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, who replaced Mark Esper in the job after Patel accused him of being disloyal to Trump by refusing to deploy active-duty soldiers to put down George Floyd protests. During Patel’s three months in the Pentagon, he served alongside Ezra Cohen-Watnick, one of the sources who provided Nunes with the fake documents that “proved” Obama had tapped Trump’s “wires.”

While Trump was out of office, Patel was given a job with Trump’s social media company and with one of his superpacs, where he was paid several hundred thousand dollars for what amounted to no-show jobs. Patel also earned money hawking pro-Trump T-shirts and other cheap trash under the company name “K$H.” He also sold pills he claimed would reverse the effects of the COVID vaccine and wrote a series of children’s books that featured the character of “King Donald.”

Okay, Patel is one more grifter in the great panoply of Trump loyalists who have made careers out of their closeness and loyalty to the Great Man, for which he was promoted ever-upward. Every person who has ever had a government job at any level – county, city, state, federal – or in a corporation, has known a Kash Patel, a creepy little briefcase-carrier who’s always currying favor with the boss, and despite any evidence of having skills other than self-promotion and ass-kissing, just keeps getting promoted or shifted job titles that keep him or her employed and in a position where they can serve the interests of the boss.

That’s the point, how common the Kash Patels of the world are, how well known they are to anyone who has a job where they are actually required to produce stuff, whether it’s studies, or plans, or construct roads, or build cars, or come up with ideas for products that will produce income or in government, programs that are successful in what they are intended to do. Sniveling little suck ups like Patel are so prevalent in American life that everyone has had to suffer under them during their professional lives.

So, if you know anything you say to a certain co-worker is going straight into the ear of the boss, you tend to keep your mouth shut about things you don’t want the boss to hear about. If one of these Patel-like suck ups is known for taking credit for ideas he or she didn’t come up with, then ideas of those down in the trenches of the government agency or corporation aren’t shared with that person. If a suck up is known for stabbing others in the back to get his or her way, then people learn not to present their backs in such a way that they will be easily accessed by a knife.

Here is how Patel described, in a recent right-wing podcast interview, what he would do if he was appointed FBI Director: “I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state. And I’d take the seven thousand employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops, go be cops. Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers. What do you need seven thousand people there for? Same thing with DOJ. What are all these people doing here? Looking for the next government promotion.”

There are about 35,000 people who work for the FBI in all kinds of capacities, from field agents to office staff to evidence analysis to legal advisors to certified public accountants involved in investigating financial crimes. It’s a long list of people, many of whom have had long careers in the FBI doing the work of law enforcement, some of it drudge work that isn’t fun to do, but must be done if crimes are to be investigated and criminals are to be caught and put in prison.

Many of these people in the FBI are very smart. Some FBI agents have law degrees. The minimum requirement is a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, accounting, forensic science, and other professional fields. They must have at least two years work experience in some form of law enforcement. Employment in the FBI is highly competitive. Only 20 percent of those seeking jobs with the FBI are accepted to begin the process of meeting employment qualifications. Many are eliminated by failing writing tests, interviews, medical and physical fitness exams, background checks, or field training schooling at the FBI Academy. As few as two to three percent of applicants meet all the requirements and become FBI agents.

My point is, the FBI isn’t a number like Patel’s 7,000. It’s people. They know stuff. They read the newspapers. They watch the news on TV. They are well-informed. When Kash Patel describes them as people who are just “looking for the next government promotion,” they know he is describing himself, not them.

The FBI is full of expert bureaucratic in-fighters. The people who reach positions of leadership are in charge of hundreds of employees under them and budgets in the millions that they have to fight for. Some fight for the FBI budget in Congress, some fight for departmental budgets inside the FBI. They’re not just sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

They see Kash Patel coming, and they’re not going to lie down and take it from this sniveling little fool.

Bureaucrats are experts at delay, obfuscation, dodging orders, putting things off for another day, flooding the zone with paperwork, overloading the system with unmanageable data, creating streams of seemingly important but useless data. You name it, they can do it.

Kash Patel will land at the FBI, and he won’t know whether he’s coming or going. His instinct will be to hire and surround himself with other Trump toadies like Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis, the other Trump National Security Council official who provided Nunes and Patel with the fake secret documents that failed to prove Obama tapped anybody’s “wires,” least of all Donald Trump’s.

The problem with loyalists is their predictability. Patel will lash out without thinking, make assertions that cannot be proven, flaunt conspiracy theories that are dead letters on arrival. The problem is, he will be at the head of an agency that is evidence-based by its very nature, employing thousands of people who have spent their lives being tested in courts of law, where telling a lie can get you put in prison.

Loyalty is not a measure of a person’s worth unless that loyalty is to something greater than oneself. Patel will imitate the man who put him in power. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s a piss-poor way to run a railroad, or the FBI, as the saying goes.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Gaetz And Hegseth Appointments Will Trash American Prestige

Gaetz And Hegseth Appointments Will Trash American Prestige

I get it that Donald Trump wants people who supported him in his cabinet. Every president does. Trump had more than 76 million people, the total number who voted for him, to choose from. Here’s my question: Don’t you think that in that huge pool of supporters, Trump could have found at least two people who have not been accused of sexual offenses to put in the enormously important positions of Secretary of Defense and Attorney General?

But noooooooo! He went with Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz, both of whom have been accused of committing sexual offenses. Gaetz was under investigation for sex trafficking a minor female by the department which he has been appointed to lead. After prosecutors decided not to press federal criminal charges, the House Ethics Committee took up a similar investigation and was prepared to release its findings when the Attorney General appointment gave Gaetz the opportunity to resign from Congress before the Ethics Committee findings came out. Hegseth was accused of sexual assault by a woman to whom he later paid money to keep quiet with a non-disclosure agreement. Hegseth insists the sexual encounter, at a hotel after he gave a speech to a group of Republican women(!), was consensual. Yeah, that’s why he had to pay her off in return for an NDA. Happens all the time.

Naturally, Gaetz and Hegseth deny the accusations of sexual misconduct against them.

But really: Having sex with an underage girl and assaulting a woman in a hotel room after speaking at a political gathering are not on anyone’s list of qualifications for these two important jobs, with the sole exception of a list kept by one person, Donald Trump. He has faced multiple charges of sexual assault and harassment by, according to some counts, as many as 25 women. He was not only an associate but a close personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein, a pedophile who was notorious for holding sex parties with underage girls and inviting his friends to the parties. Trump was adjudicated in a New York court of having committed rape against a woman who sued him for defamation for having denied the charge – not once, but twice – and still faces civil judgements against him in the case.

These three men are disgusting sleazebags who have committed sexual assaults on women who either did not give consent or were too young to consent. In my lifetime, I have known hundreds of men who were either lawyers, as is Gaetz, or members of the military, as is Hegseth, who somehow managed to live their lives without paying for sex, trafficking for the purpose of sex, having sex with an underage girl, or assaulting a woman in a hotel room. Any one of those men I have known would make a better candidate for the august offices to which Hegseth and Gaetz have been appointed by their fellow sex-offender, Donald Trump.

One of the most important principles of leadership in any job is to lead by example. What kind of example does Matt Gaetz set for the Department of Justice as an accused sex trafficker and pedophile? What kind of example does Pete Hegseth set for the Department of Defense as an accused sexual assaulter? The military services under the command of the Secretary of Defense have had serious problems with sexual assault and rape by service members over the decades since women were integrated into all the uniformed services. How are women in uniform going to feel with a man accused of sexual assault in overall command of the military branches in which they serve? Moreover, what will be the effect of Hegseth’s appointment on men who might be tempted to commit a sexual assault or rape on a fellow soldier, sailor, air force member, or Marine? Isn’t it reasonable to assume that at least some men in uniform will look upon the Secretary of Defense as a bro, an offender in arms so to speak, who might not be overly eager to investigate or prosecute members of the military for the offense he has been accused of?

They are all “innocent,” you realize, all those men who have adopted the Trumpian mantra of deny, deny, deny when charged with having committed a sexual assault. Can’t you just see them doubling down on denial now that one sex offender has been appointed to lead them by another sex offender?

What we have with the appointment of Hegseth to lead the Pentagon is a morphing of the ancient “brotherhood of arms” into the brotherhood of sexual assault and rape. What we have with the appointment of Gaetz as Attorney General is the morphing of the Department of Justice into the department of non-prosecution and pardons. Every one of the Jan. 6 felons Trump has promised to pardon after his inauguration was prosecuted by the Department of Justice and found guilty in a federal court of law.

Just ponder for a moment what effect that is going to have on the men and women who did their jobs as DOJ officials and federal prosecutors who worked hard to assemble the evidence of their felonies and present that evidence to the juries of ordinary fellow citizens who convicted them. Think of what those jurors are going to feel now that the man who swore retribution has put Matt Gaetz in charge of the department he will use to enforce retribution against the prosecutors who tried and convicted the January 6 defendants. Should the jurors be afraid that some of that retribution will fall upon them?

You bet your ass.

And now let’s discuss what these two appointments say to the rest of the world. Attorney Generals regularly travel abroad to meet with their counterparts in allied countries to discuss mutual law enforcement agreements such as extradition treaties and cooperation between the DOJ, FBI, and foreign law enforcement agencies. Into rooms at Great Britain’s Ministry of Justice, and France’s Ministère de la Justice and Germany’s Bundesministerium der Justiz and other allied departments of justice will stride no less a figure than the botoxed and blow-dried sex offender Matt Gaetz.

And into Britain’s Ministry of Defense and France’s Ministère des Armées and the German Bundesministerium der Verteidigung will stride an accused sex offender and a man frequently photographed showing off his white supremacist and Christian nationalist tattoos, whose sole qualification for his job appears to be being a weekend host of Fox and Friends.

You can almost hear them laughing and making jokes and coming up with nicknames for these two clowns. It’s being reported that the Gaetz and Hegseth nominations will face what has been described as stiff opposition in the Senate, which will come under Republican control after the first of the year.

If you believe that, I’ve got a pardon for the offense of criminal stupidity I can arrange to sell you.

Hegseth Isn't The First Unqualified Hack To Show Up At The Pentagon

Hegseth Isn't The First Unqualified Hack To Show Up At The Pentagon

The Pentagon sits there across from Washington D.C. on the Potomac River like…well, I’m something of a master of metaphor, and I can’t think of a single thing that it’s like. Its design is said to have been influenced by the location President Roosevelt initially picked for its site. The site was changed, but they kept the shape, in part because it resembled defensive forts constructed to repel sieges during the age of muzzle-loading cannons.

The Pentagon contains some 3.7 million square feet of floor space, including 17.5 miles of corridors, all of it surrounding a 5.1 acre central courtyard, also pentagonal in shape. About 25,000 military and civilian people work in the Pentagon, with about 3,000 people who work in support jobs such as kitchens, cleaning, and maintenance.

Driving past it, or from the air, it doesn’t look that big. But when you walk up to the Pentagon on the ground, the immensity of the place hits you. There are only five above-ground floors, and two basement levels, but it seems bigger than it is. The place fairly buzzes with employees in and out of uniform. Walking into the Pentagon is a singular experience. You immediately feel like an outsider, because you are. Everyone in the building walks and looks like they are on a mission, because they are. The feeling that the whole place is filled with serious business is unavoidable. People walk quickly from place to place. There are ramps between the floors, instead of elevators or stairs, so they can move more efficiently and easily around the building.

The Pentagon was constructed over 16 months just before and during World War II. Because steel was in demand for weapons manufacture, the Pentagon was built with reinforced concrete, using sand dredged from the Potomac. An Indiana limestone façade was put on later. Because of the pressure of preparation for and fighting the war, the five sections of the building were constructed one by one, each of them occupied the moment they were finished.

The Pentagon fairly reeks of very serious missions and money. It’s the place where the nearly one trillion dollar defense budget is planned, put together, and spent. In every year of every administration, Democratic or Republican, pledges are made to bring the defense budget under control, to make the military more efficient and more lethal, and to increase the fighting power of our military.

Serious people have tried to do just that. Robert McNamara was hired away from Ford Motor Company to come to the Pentagon to bring the management and planning and efficiency systems he had developed for Ford during the 1950’s and apply them to the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense. He brought the concept of “systems analysis” to the military. It was a method of breaking down complex problems to their component parts so that the problems could each be understood and undertaken in a more efficient manner. The civilians McNamara brought with him into the Pentagon were known as the “Whiz Kids” because of their propensity to break everything down to numbers that could be added and subtracted and multiplied and divided so that budgets could be managed more efficiently.

McNamara proceeded to oversee our disastrous involvement in the war in Vietnam. The idea of counting the bodies of dead Vietnamese as a measure of success in a war that nearly everyone, beginning with the soldiers on the ground, could see that we were losing, was McNamara’s.

George W. Bush brought Donald Rumsfeld to the Pentagon as his Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld had already been secretary once, under Gerald Ford, so he was thought to have the kind of expertise at running the hugely unwieldy defense establishment that Bush wanted. The list of Rumsfeld’s previous accomplishments and jobs is so long, it would take pages and pages to list them.

Briefly, he had a political life as a four-term congressman, as a representative to NATO, as White House chief of staff, and a business life as chairman and CEO of two major pharmaceutical companies. He also served at various times as an envoy to the Middle East, and on several high-level commissions such as the National Economic Commission and the National Commission on Public Service and on a commission to analyze the threat of ballistic missiles to the United States.

In short, Donald Rumsfeld was a very busy man with an enormous portfolio. In the Bush administration, Rumsfeld oversaw our disastrous invasion of Iraq for no legitimate reason, and he decided to accomplish the invasion with less than a third of the number of troops the generals in the Pentagon told him they needed. Questioned at the beginning of the war by a soldier who wanted to know why he had been riding around in Humvees with canvas sides and roofs that could easily be destroyed with great loss of life by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), Rumsfeld answered, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.”

Nearly 4,500 soldiers were killed in Iraq, and nearly 33,000 were wounded because the United States military was so unprepared for the insurgency that followed our invasion of that country. Rumsfeld left his Pentagon position in 2006 with the war unfinished and on its way to the kind of ignominious pull-out we ended up with in Vietnam.

Into the building of the Pentagon, into the job of Secretary of Defense, soon to oversee nearly three million men and women in uniform and hundreds of thousands more in civilian defense jobs comes Pete Hegseth, a graduate of Princeton and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard who served in the National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan and attained the rank of Major. Since then, he ran briefly for Senate in Minnesota, chaired a conservative veterans group, got involved in politics as a supporter of Donald Trump, and became a Fox News commentator who has appeared on the weekend version of Fox and Friends, among other hosting jobs. He has also written several books for a conservative publisher.

That’s it.

Hegseth has been widely criticized as massively unprepared for the job of Secretary of Defense because he has never run anything bigger than a conservative non-profit and a conservative political action committee that spent less than half the money it raised on candidates it supported.

I remember when my father worked in the Pentagon during the McNamara years. He and his compatriots were not only dismissive of McNamara and his “whiz kids,” they hated them. I have friends who worked as civilians in the Pentagon during the Rumsfeld years. They hated Rumsfeld. Soldiers I got to know in Iraq and Afghanistan hated Rumsfeld for the slap-dash way he got the military into those wars and his dismissive attitude about the fact that they were un-prepared and not adequately equipped for either war. With all the hundreds of billions of dollars in the defense budget, soldiers fighting in Iraq in December of 2003 were still wearing summer uniforms because Rumsfeld and his whiz kid, Paul Wolfowitz, didn’t think the war, which began in March of that year, would last that long.

I can tell you one thing about soldiers and other service members who serve in uniform. In general, they don’t like the civilians who are in charge of what they do and how they do it. There are many reasons for this – uniforms issued for hot weather still being worn in freezing weather is just one. But it goes deeper than that. Soldiers in uniform don’t like decisions that affect them being made for political reasons. That includes wars that were started wrongfully for political reasons, fought wrongfully for political reasons (see also: the body count), and personnel decisions affecting uniformed soldiers for political reasons.

McNamara and Rumsfeld were said to be hugely qualified to be Secretary of Defense. Look what they did, and what happened to them. Hegseth is just barely qualified to sit at one end of the Fox and Friends couch – he would have been sitting on that couch on weekday mornings if Fox thought he was good enough, but they consigned him to the media desert of weekend mornings.

But let’s not hold this against Pete Hegseth. Who knows? Maybe he’ll sweep into the Pentagon and make brilliant decisions about the F-35 fighter program that has consumed billions while providing us with a fighter jet that does not perform the way it was designed and advertised to perform. Maybe Pete Hegseth, who is said to be a fundamentalist Christian nationalist and would like it if the Bible was used as a textbook for the way we run our government, will wake up one morning and go to the Pentagon and look at all those stony faces that pass him in its corridors and decide that he is in way over his head, and unlike McNamara and Rumsfeld, who stayed in their jobs until failure forced them out, he will resign and go back to the couch at Fox and Friends.

And maybe kittens will bark, and pigs will fly.

Right now, in a rather large building on the Potomac River, tens of thousands of men and women are steeling themselves for what is coming their way. They have steeled themselves before when incompetence and political hackdom came through their doors. The building, and the people who work in it, have been around for decades. They survived one Trump administration. I’m sure plans are being made, without the use of systems analysis, to survive another.

We will soon see how things work out at the Pentagon for a man who has a history of appointing cronies and hacks and people he likes from seeing them on teevee to positions of power. “Competence” and “expertise” and “brilliance” didn’t accomplish much before. Now we will see how toadying does.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott.