The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
@LucianKTruscott
Can Anyone Make Sense Of Trump's Senseless Tariffs?

Can Anyone Make Sense Of Trump's Senseless Tariffs?

They started collecting the largest tax ever imposed on the American people while Trump was on Air Force One on his way to a golf tournament in Florida.

Having taken a two-by-four to the global economy from a podium in the soon-to-be-paved-over Rose Garden at the White House, the president of the United States met with certifiable psycho Laura Loomer in the Oval Office and fired six of his employees on the National Security Council on her recommendation because they are disloyal “neo-cons.”

Then he flew to Palm Beach, Florida, where he plans to spend the rest of the week at his resort-club-residence, Mar-a-Lago, either watching multi-millionaires play golf in a Saudi-owned LIV tournament at his Doral Golf Club or playing the game himself. By Monday, Trump will have spent 25 days playing one of his golf courses in Florida at taxpayer expense, a quarter of the time he has been in office during his second term.

All of which makes about as much sense as the wide-ranging and onerous tariffs Trump unilaterally imposed Wednesday on imports from foreign countries, most of them long-time U.S. allies. Stock markets around the world reacted predictably, posting what the Washington Post called “correction territory” losses on Thursday.

Is this just another jaw-dropping day in Trump’s America, or is it something else – specifically, something worse? Is there something to figure out here? Let’s take a stab at it.

Trump told voters last fall that he would impose “big, beautiful tariffs” on what he insisted are “other countries,” despite the fact that like the United States, other countries collect taxes and do not pay them. Tariffs Trump announced yesterday range from 25 percent on our closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, to 10 percent across the board on the rest of the world, with increases approaching 50 percent on goods from China, Vietnam and Cambodia, and approaching 20 percent on members of the European Union. Countries with which Trump is friendly, like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Qatar and his wife’s home country Slovenia, will see increases in the vicinity of 3 percent.

Who will pay? Not the manufacturers of sneakers and t-shirts or the producers of coffee beans or cocoa or bananas or BMW’s and Toyotas or cell phones. The tariffs will be paid by the American companies that import what we want to consume. The tariffs will be paid to customs collectors at the borders when the goods pass into the U.S. The money will be passed along to the U.S. treasury, where technically, as taxes collected by the government, it will become our money as U.S. citizens.

Then it will be deducted from our bank accounts in the form of higher prices passed along by importers like Target and Kroger’s and Walmart and Macy’s and Apple and Google and Ford and General Motors and which use imported parts in automobiles and trucks made to be sold to citizens like you and me.

So, let’s see if we can get this straight. Trump and his chainsaw-wielding cutter Elon Musk insist they want to reduce the size of the United States government by firing employees and cutting outlays for things like school lunches and federal housing support and repairing bridges and conducting research on new medicines and life-saving medical procedures, all of which is supposed to save us money so they can cut taxes.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury, a department of the government, will be taking in what Trump’s sock-puppets claim will be $6 trillion in tariffs on imports, as we pay for those tariffs in the form of higher prices on foodstuffs and clothing and electrical devices we need to communicate with each other and entertain ourselves and cars we need to drive to work so we can earn more money and pay what Trump promises will be lower taxes on our earnings.

Are you seeing the same circular reasoning I’m seeing here? No, it’s not reasoning, it’s an economic system. No, it’s not even that, because a system implies logic, as in one thing leading logically to another, and I see no discernible logic here.

What I can see is money flying out of our bank accounts in the form of income taxes and then more money leaving our wallets in the form of higher prices we pay to make up for the tariffs being paid by the companies importing the stuff we buy from them, at the same time that our smaller government is collecting more money it says will be spent on less public stuff benefitting fewer people who are paying more money into the public coffers.

Trump’s rationale for his scheme of higher tariffs on more imports from more countries is to reindustrialize this country so there is more manufacturing employing more U.S. citizens to make more stuff right here in the U.S.A. At his Rose Garden signing ceremony yesterday, Trump explained that if things are manufactured here, there will be no tariffs on those goods because they will not be imported and come across a border where tariffs are collected, thus we will have a lower trade deficit, which he seems to believe is a terrible thing to have.

But who is going to pay for all the new manufacturing plants? Let’s say you import computer chips, and now you want to make them here, so you need to build a plant where you can employ people to make them. Because you’ve been paying tariffs on your imports, you’ve had to raise prices. Higher prices for your computer chips have led to lower sales, which have produced lower income. The people buying your higher price chips have less money in their bank accounts they could use to buy stock in your company that might provide money for you to build your new plant.

So, the U.S Treasury has all the tariffs you’ve paid on your imports, but because it is a Republican Treasury Department in a Republican government, there are no plans for a Biden-style public spending bill like the Chips and Science Act that provided money not only for research into new technologies but tens of billions in public subsidies for new chip manufacturing plants in the U.S.

So, all that tariff money is sitting there doing nothing to help build new manufacturing plants because in the perfect world of the imaginary free market, the government has no role in private business.

And then there is this part of the “logic” of tariffs: For every plant built in the U.S. that produces goods on which tariffs are not collected, there is less tariff income in the federal treasury, which means that income taxes will have to go up by a corresponding amount to keep the government going, even the alleged smaller government. For every tariff imposed by the U.S., another tariff was imposed by another country to retaliate for the first tariff, and so on and so on and so on.

With the circular logic of Trump’s tariffs complete, the smoothly-functioning system of mostly-free international trade is gone, along with the growing economies of countries all over the world like China and Vietnam, which used to be rural and agricultural but became urban and industrial and added their growing GDP’s to the world’s GDP as countries and people and the world got richer and engaged in more trade, making more money for more people to consume more goods that needed to be manufactured by more plants in more countries.

And then on Wednesday, a man took a Sharpie and scribbled his name, and the system of trade between countries that took nearly 100 years to put together came to a stop. Econ 101 will never be the same.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Donald Trump

Trump Has Begun A New Civil War -- And We Must Stop Surrendering

We are losing the Second Civil War for the Union. Ten thousand were lost at the battle of Heath and Human Services. There were another 10,000 casualties at the battle of USAID. Thirteen hundred souls fell at the battle for the Department of Education. One thousand one hundred and fifty-five scientists have fallen at the battle of the EPA. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered a temporary halt to fighting raging at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, the Interior and Treasury, allowing unions and nonprofits to pick up their wounded from the battlefield during the ceasefire. The Trump administration struck back immediately and appealed the Ninth Circuit decision to the Supreme Court.

Surrenders are happening in Trump’s battles to defeat Union law firms. Two thousand lawyers from the New York firm of Paul Weiss threw down their arms after the firm’s commander, Brad S. Karp, walked into the Oval Office on March 19 and agreed to spend $40 million to support groups of Trump’s choosing if he would stop shooting at Karp's lawyers. Today, another New York firm, Skadden Arps, raised a white flag and threw $100 million at Trump’s feet in what was seen by legal experts as an abject surrender to Trump’s autocratic rule.

Yesterday, Trump added to his articles of Confederation when he issued an executive order calling on the surrender of the Smithsonian Institution, founded in 1846 for “for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men.” From now on, according to Trump, the Smithsonian will be under the control of Vice President JD Vance and will be forbidden from putting on any “exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”

In addition, Trump ordered steps to be taken to restore “public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties” that have been “removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”

You know exactly what that means. They’ve already renamed Fort Benning and Fort Bragg after Confederate generals who lost more battles than they won. Now they’ll send teams of engineers around the country re-erecting statues to Robert E. Lee and General John Bell Hood, who lost more than 7,000 soldiers at the Battle of Franklin. They’ve already made teaching Black history illegal in some school systems and colleges around the country.

Now that Vance is in charge of the Smithsonian, how long do you think it will be until displays about the history of slavery are taken down at the National Museum of African American History and Culture? Do you think the word “feminism” will appear anywhere at all when they build the American Women’s History Museum?

Trump has been losing case after case challenging his executive orders in federal court. He has lost twice in courts of appeals, in Washington D.C. and California, in cases involving the firing of as many as 16,000 federal workers and his invocation of a 200-year-old wartime law when he deported alleged Venezuelan gang members to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador. He can’t win in court, so he has decided to intimidate lawyers and law firms who file and win cases against him. He’s rounding up foreign students from their apartments and dorm rooms and even off the streets for exercising their free speech rights in supporting Palestinian causes. How long before he orders the arrest of citizens for publishing political speech and even historical analysis that anger him?

We’re losing the Civil War that Trump started with his executive orders that effectively secede our federal government from the Union. The red states are already lost, some with abortion bans that don’t even allow exceptions for rape or incest. Advocates for Project 2025 want the Trump administration to use the long-dormant Comstock Act of 1873 to ban the shipment of abortion drugs and even medical equipment across state lines, effectively instituting a kind of passive national ban on abortion. Can a ban on birth control be far behind?

The First and Fifth Amendments are already constrained by Trump’s actions. He fired a cannon at the 14th Amendment with his executive order attempting to ban birthright citizenship. They’ve had their eye on equal protection of the laws since Brown v Board of Education and the Civil Rights laws. They want to bring back the “right of free association” that allowed segregated schools and public facilities in the states that lost what from now on we will have to call the First Civil War.

JD Vance is probably already working on a Smithsonian statue on the Mall for General Elon Musk, the Robert E. Lee of the Second Civil War.

We already know they won’t accept the results of the next presidential election if they don’t win. We are now confronted with this dark question: will our votes be enough to save the Union?

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Why Signalgate -- And Putting Troops At Risk -- Won't Bother Trump

Why Signalgate -- And Putting Troops At Risk -- Won't Bother Trump

Donald Trump’s laissez faire attitude about secrets has been a curiosity about him from early in his first term.

Just three weeks after taking office in 2017, during dinner on a public terrace at Mar-a-Lago with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump took a call on his private cell phone about a North Korea launch of a ballistic missile that broke a U.N. resolution barring the country from testing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. Aides to both men scurried around the table presenting papers and briefing books illuminated by lights from their cell phones as Trump resort members at nearby tables looked on. “A keyboard player crooned in the background,” according to a reporter from CNN who was present.

Jaws dropped all over Washington the next day when news of the Mar-a-Lago public discussion of top secret information became known, but it turned out that Trump was just getting started with his casual attitude about the nation’s secrets.

A few weeks later Trump fired James Comey for insufficient loyalty, and the following day, he invited Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov into the Oval Office – along with a reporter and photographer for Tass, but not anyone from the White House pool – and promptly shared secrets about Israel with the two Russians. Then there was the day he showed plans to attack Iran to a writer at his Bedminster golf club. And of course we can’t forget the boxes of classified materials he had piled practically to the ceiling of a bathroom just off the pool deck at Mar a Lago after leaving office.

But what am I doing going over all this ancient history when over the last two days we've been treated to a brand spanking new example of Trump and his administration’s disdain for secrecy? I'm speaking, of course, of what has been termed Signal-gate -- Jeffrey Goldberg's bombshell revelation that he was included in a supposedly secret text group comprised of Trump’s top national security brain trust plus a smattering of other White House power mongers as they discussed the planning and execution of the recent U.S. attack on Houthi military installations and leaders in Yemen. It's all anyone has been talking about in Washington D.C. for two days -- how could this have happened?

Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging app that comes nowhere near the level of security needed for discussion of top secret military plans and operations such as the Yemen attack. Didn't they know what they were doing? And if they did know, why were they chatting on a cell phone app that their own kids have probably have on their phones? It's being called the biggest breach of national security information in the nation's history. That might be an exaggeration, but it's close. It makes Hillary's emails look like passing notes in junior high.

The White House quickly decided to treat the whole thing as business as usual. First the excuse was that nothing in the chat group was classified. When Goldberg of The Atlantic called their bluff yesterday and released the texts of the war plans he had withheld from his Monday story, the White House sent Karoline Leavitt into the press room to claim that it was just a policy discussion that involved attack plans, not war plans, splitting hairs in the wig they had thrown over the whole thing. Hegseth lied his ass off, they all attacked Goldberg as an unreliable and biased enemy of the president, and nobody got as much as a slap on the wrist, much less being fired.

So what was it? Who are we to believe? Is it a scandal, or isn’t it? Weren't they all just following Donald Trump's lead? He hasn't shown any respect for secrets, so why should they?

It's clear that nobody is going to take a hit over this misuse of a public chat channel to discuss national security information in a way that could have put soldiers, sailors, and airmen at risk. But why?

First of all, Trump doesn't give a shit about the members of “his” military. Remember him asking John Kelly at Arlington Cemetery what was in it for them, as he gazed upon the field of white head stones? He called the war dead in another cemetery in Europe “suckers and losers,” and it is not lost upon him that it was Jeffrey Goldberg who reported that quote. So, when it comes to the security of military operations that if compromised might lead to deaths of Americans, well, for Donald Trump, they're just more suckers and losers to put in cemeteries that won’t be on his travel schedule this time around.

But it goes deeper than that. Or maybe it's even more shallow. He wants the world to know how tough he is. That's why he advertised the attack on Yemen ahead of time. For Donald Trump, making the threat is as important as the attack itself. He didn't care if the Houthis knew the attack was going to happen. They weren't half as important to him as the rest of the world he knew was watching.

Everything to Trump is like selling a condo. That's why he doesn't believe in keeping secrets. How can you sell a condo if you don't put it on the market? It's the opposite of secrecy. It's advertising, it's publicity, it's fame, it's all the stuff that’s been in Trump's DNA since the day he was born. Trump got more power out of being on Page Six in the New York Post than he did from buying the Commodore Hotel, slapping a bunch of reflective glass on it, and calling it the Grand Hyatt, his first real estate deal in Manhattan.

What did Trump do when he wanted to bully NATO? He made them promise to increase their defense budgets. It's always about money. Even the attack on Yemen was about money. Trump's alter-Id, Stephen Miller, was in on the chat group for one reason: if they were going to open up shipping lines that would be used by Europe more than the U.S., “we need to make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return…there needs to be some further economic gain,” Miller wrote on the Signal chat.

And just like a condo sale, you set the price and wait for the market to come to you. When that happens, you jack up the price. That's what he's doing with Ukraine right now, dangling U.S. support and now threats of tariffs to squeeze more out of countries that used to be our allies and now are merely our customers.

Trump isn't upset about the leak of the Signal chat because secrets don't matter. It's not a scandal to him, it's an opportunity. The first thing he had Hegseth do was bully The Atlantic’s Goldberg. Trump treats Putin as an ally and our European friends as if they're enemies. Trump's national security team may have screwed up by using a public chat app to plan a sensitive military operation, but the reporter who found out about it was labeled the bad guy.

To Donald Trump, everything is a deal, and the only thing that matters is how much he can get out of it. To achieve power by making deals, they must be public. That is why he sees keeping secrets as counterproductive. Deals are anti-treaties. It’s not you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. It’s pay me money up front, or I'll stab you in the back.

You can't secretly bully someone. Donald Trump’s makeshift realpolitik is simple: Only suckers make alliances. Winners make deals.

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. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter

Donald Trump

Trump's Ban On 'Enemy' Law Firms Advances A More Efficient Fascism

Donald Trump is in the process of issuing a series of executive orders targeting law firms he doesn’t like. The orders strip partners and employees of the firms of their top-secret security clearances, bar the firms from doing business with the federal government, ban employees of the firms from federal office buildings, ban federal contractors from doing business with the firms, and initiate federal investigations of the firms for hiring and promoting people on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Trump’s first order was against Covington & Burling, a firm that had done legal work for Jack Smith, the Special Counsel assigned to investigate Trump for his theft of top-secret national security documents and attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He then went after the Perkins Coie law firm, which the New York Times identifies as being “aligned with Democrats.”

Trump then turned his attention to Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, signing an executive order with the same restrictions on the firm, saying that one of the lawyers for the firm had worked as a prosecutor in New York on the indictment of Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, and that another lawyer had been involved in a lawsuit against January 6 insurrectionists. The order against Paul Weiss similarly forbade the firm from doing business with the federal government, barred any of its clients from federal contracts, and stripped the firm’s access to federal facilities.

The most egregious paragraph in the executive orders against the law firms was the one entitled “Personnel:”

“The heads of all agencies shall, to the extent permitted by law, provide guidance limiting official access from [sic] Federal Government buildings to employees of Perkins Coie when such access would threaten the national security of or otherwise be inconsistent with the interests of the United States. In addition, the heads of all agencies shall provide guidance limiting Government employees acting in their official capacity from engaging with Perkins Coie employees to ensure consistency with the national security and other interests of the United States.”

In essence, what this paragraph does is accuse the law firms’ leadership and employees of disloyalty to the United States, because everything they're being banned from belongs to the United States government. That's where the words “national security” come from. The nation's security is defended by the government. The implication is that if any of the law firms’ employees come in contact with government buildings or personnel, that contact would be a threat to national security, so it must be forbidden.

No evidence is cited for this outrageous allegation. There is nothing in the rest of the language of the executive orders to support why any of the law firms or their employees would be such a threat. Lacking that evidence, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the disloyalty of the law firms and their employees is to Donald Trump, not to the nation. This is just rank unsupported prejudice.

Perkins Coie did not take the ban lying down, immediately suing in federal court on the basis that the executive order was unconstitutional. Judge Beryl Howell issued a temporary restraining order forbidding the enforcement of the executive order. The Trump DOJ then moved in the D.C. Court of Appeals to get the judge disqualified. This was after the Trump administration had filed another appeal trying to disqualify Judge James Boasberg from hearing the case involving the deportation of more than 100 Venezuelan migrants on the basis that they belong to a drug gang.

So not only is Trump banning entire law firms from going into court against the administration, he is attempting to convince the D.C. Court of Appeals to get two well regarded federal judges with long experience banned from hearing cases against Trump and his administration.

What Trump has done is to make it impossible for these law firms to do business with the federal government, to file lawsuits against the federal government, or take clients who had business with the federal government. They must be able to do research, interview witnesses, and gather evidence if they're going to sue the federal government or defend anyone against charges brought by the Department of Justice. So, if you represent, say, Lockheed Martin, you wouldn't have any access to the Pentagon where the company's contracts for the F-35 fighter were written. If you represent a contractor who worked on a naval vessel like an aircraft carrier or a submarine, you wouldn't be able to enter a naval base where those ships are located, or interview anyone involved in the building or contracting for naval vessels.

This is the meat and potatoes of what lawyers do. Take away the right of employees from these law firms to walk into federal buildings, access federal documents, and review documents or interview anyone on any subject involving secrets and national security, and you're taking away the lifeblood of their business.

The Paul Weiss firm quickly made a deal with Trump promising to do $40 million worth of pro bono work for the White House. The White House issued a statement saying that the firm had “acknowledged the wrongdoing of its former partner Mark Pomerantz,” and had committed to ending its program of diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring and promotion.

In other words, the Paul Weiss law firm caved into Trump's demands so that security clearances held by its employees could be retained and the business the firm and its clients do with the federal government would not be damaged.

What Trump is doing with his assault on major law firms by executive order smacks of what Adolf Hitler did in the 1930s when he brought the entire legal profession and judicial system of Germany to heel by barring Jewish lawyers and judges from the German courts and forbidding Jewish lawyers from doing business with the German government.

This is from an article published by the Federal Bar Association titled “Lawyers and Bar Associations Play a Vital Role in Preserving the Rule of Law: A Study of How Hitler Perverted Germany’s Judicial System Highlights the Importance of Lawyers.”

“Hitler’s early decree stripping Jewish lawyers and judges of their professional capacities marked an early step in the decline from liberty to dictatorship. According to research conducted by the German Federal Bar and documented in its exhibit, “Lawyers without Rights: Jewish Lawyers under the Third Reich,” Hitler’s 1933 decree barring Jewish lawyers and judges from German courts did not trigger any formal protests or objections from non-Jewish lawyers or judges. There were many respected bar associations in Germany, but they did not oppose this action.”

The only difference here is that Trump is not starting with a religious minority, but with a minority of law firms and a minority of judges handling cases against the Trump administration. He knows that if he can knock down one or two big time law firms and manage to bar several of the judges hearing lawsuits against his administration from hearing the cases before them, he will have the entire legal profession and judiciary intimidated into falling in line.

This is the way fascism starts, with the few not the many, but the many are next. Today it's law firms barred from government buildings and judges barred from hearing lawsuits. Tomorrow it could be individual citizens barred from appealing decisions about their taxes or Social Security because Trump doesn't like the political party they belong to or the demonstration they attended or the club they joined in college. Today it's alleged drug dealers rounded up without charges and banned from the country.

Tomorrow it could be you and me.

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. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter


Trump's Incredibly Inept Attempt To Destroy Our Government Is Losing In Court

Trump's Incredibly Inept Attempt To Destroy Our Government Is Losing In Court

If you’re anything like I am, you have probably spent a considerable amount of time over the past two months trying to figure out what these dull fuckers think they’re doing. I won’t take your time providing a full list of what they’ve done since Trump sat down in the Oval Office on inauguration night and started signing executive orders, but let us at least review the last week’s events.

Last weekend, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security set forth to deport about 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang. They have managed to get themselves hung up on violating a judge’s order to stop the deportation. It has been revealed that some of those deported were not gang members. They have refused to provide a list of the deportees. Lawyers for the Department of Justice have refused to answer the judge’s questions on grounds of “national security” and plan to invoke something called the “state secret privilege” in denying information about the deportation flights and handling of deportees, which were covered nearly door-to-door by Fox News.

A federal judge ruled that the closure of the United States Agency for International Development and firing of thousands of federal workers employed there was “likely unconstitutional” and ordered the government to reinstate them and give them access to their USAID email accounts and access to official information that will enable them to do their jobs.

Another federal judge ordered the Social Security Administration not to allow Elon Musk and his team of rat-fuckers to access the private information of millions of Social Security recipients, including their SS numbers, drivers license numbers, ages, and addresses.

Yet another federal judge stopped Trump’s ban of transgender troops at least in part because government orders are not made by “tweets,” and the government does not have any information about how many transgender individuals serve in the U.S. military, so the government does not know who would be affected by the ban. The Pentagon tried to change the definition of the ban from “transgender” to “people with symptoms of gender dysphoria.” The judge was not buying the attempted change in the ban, telling the Pentagon lawyer, “The policy’s impact is the same. This is still a ban on transgender service members.”

White House adviser and known immigration paranoid Stephen Miller, who is descended from a family of Belarussian Jewish immigrants, denounced the court decisions that have failed to go Trump’s way as “the insane edicts of radical rogue judges,” and multiple articles of impeachment have been filed against judges who have ruled against Trump by radical, rogue House Republicans, who drew a rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts.

And then, over the last 24 hours, we have been treated to what appears to be one of the great Department of Defense clusterfucks of the last 50 years. Elon Musk was apparently scheduled to get an ultra-top secret briefing at the Pentagon today that would have taken place in the equally ultra-top secret ”tank,” about US plans to defend the island of Taiwan in the event of an attack by the Chinese military.

My old friend and West Point history professor Terrence Goggin wrote on his Substack today an excellent analysis of what actually happened. Goggin thinks an order came down from the White House to give Musk the top secret briefing and the Pentagon was sufficiently disturbed by the idea of sharing such top secret information with a civilian who had nowhere near the clearance to hear it, that news of the briefing was deliberately leaked to the New York Times, which promptly published it on the front page. Once the unusual, to put it mildly, information about Musk’s special briefing was made public, it was cancelled, and the White House and Musk scrambled to come up with another excuse for his Pentagon visit.

Goggin’s informed speculation is that what we witnessed was the Pentagon's way of disobeying a presidential order without appearing to, and of course without ruffling Trump’s hair-sprayed feathers. He may be right, or the whole thing may have been a gigantic mistake made by a bunch of nonmilitary trained amateurs, but either way, exactly nobody in the whole mess -- not Trump, not his aides, not Hegseth, and not his aides, and certainly not Elon Musk -- evidenced even a smidgen of competence or knowledge of and respect for national security.

So, what's really going on here? Trump and Miller and Musk and the various Republican maniacs who surround them are clearly trying to disassemble what they have called the deep state. Hell, they advertised as much when they told a thousand lies during the campaign that they had nothing to do with Project 2025, which they have followed almost to the letter since Inauguration Day.

But given all that planning, don't you think that they'd be able to execute their plan a little better? They've had not months but years to have lawyers scrutinize every move they planned to make sure it would pass at least minimal legal muster, not to mention that their plans would fall within the outer bounds of constitutionality. Not only has it that not happened, they haven't even come close. Which is why we've been hearing the chorus of complaints about judges, some of whom have been Democratic appointees, but just as many have come from Republican presidents.

Sure, the rank incompetence stands out, as does the quicksand of lawlessness the whole mess floats on. You can tell that they're even getting nervous about their bought and paid for Supreme Court when you begin hearing not just mutterings but squawks of outrage about Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Roberts, both of whom have been reliable votes for Republicans until now.

Is it just that they're going too far too fast? The whole enterprise is beginning to show cracks of excess and madness that are getting wider seemingly by the day. They couldn’t even get rid of a bunch of heavily tattooed drug gang members without fucking the whole thing up, and their attempt to let Elon in on state secrets that he could turn over to his Chinese friends and use to stuff a few extra 100 billion in his pockets was so ham-handed it looked like a Three Stooges skit.

You would think that long-time aspirants to fascism would be more practiced with their tiny fists wrapped tightly around the levers of power, wouldn't you? They’re as dangerous as a cornered wolverine, but smart wolverines don’t allow themselves to get backed into corners of courthouses by people wearing long black robes.

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. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter

Jeff Bezos

The Big Lie Jeff Bezos Tells About The 'Free Market'

There is no one on the face of this earth who depends more on the largesse of the American taxpayer than zillionaire Jeff Bezos. The man who famously, or infamously, announced last month that Washington Post editorial policy will henceforth be “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” ships about 1.6 million Amazon packages a day using taxpayer-built roads and skies controlled by the taxpayer-built and financed FAA air control system.

The same goes for every other billionaire whose products move on the public highways and local road systems. There is not a mile of the interstate highway system that wasn’t built with public monies, usually 90 percent federal tax dollars with 10 percent provided by the states through which the ribbons of asphalt and concrete pass. Those roads are maintained and kept safe with gas taxes Americans pay when they put fuel their cars. You will note, Jeff, that the federal and state surcharges on gasoline aren’t donations freely contributed by happy drivers. They are the thing you libertarians say you hate so much: taxes that have made you very, very rich.

Without taxpayer dollars, all those trucks carrying Bezos’ profits would be bumping along dirt roads getting stuck in the mud and skidding into ditches. The pilots of the cargo planes carrying Amazon boxes would be arguing with each other about who gets to take off first and which plane gets to fly which azimuth at what altitude from Chicago to Reno or Kansas City to Fort Lauderdale. Two or three mid-air collisions later, and people would be left to line up at Walmart to buy their boxer shorts and bras from Vietnam and Bangladesh, shipped to the store on the same taxpayer-funded roads used by Bezos’ trucks.

The iron in the trucks’ diesel engines, the aluminum sides of the trailers and the shipping containers filled with washing machines and refrigerators? All of it trucked from steel and aluminum producers to factories and from there to Home Depot or Lowes or Best Buy, so the wealthy men who own those stores, -- and they’re all men – pull down their millions and billions courtesy of, you guessed it, the American taxpayer they are all so contemptuous of because they don’t have the crooked accountants and off-shore tax shelters enjoyed by Trump and Bezos and their golfing buddies.

I could go on with the tax breaks local governments give Bezos and Amazon to get them to build minimum-wage warehouses in their fading towns and counties, with a reminder that every tax break given a corporation or billionaire is paid for by higher taxes on real estate and residents of those towns and counties.

But you get the picture. Bezos is the recipient of an especially egregious free ride on the infrastructure and systems built over the last hundred years or so that have made this country such a wonderful place to accumulate wealth. Billionaires like Bezos act as if our highway system and air control system was put there just for their companies to exploit and provide them with profits. Not only that, their political party, the Republican Party, has constructed a political church out of the lie that it’s time to cut taxes and forget upkeep of old infrastructure and building new bridges and roads. We’ve got ours, so fuck the rest of you.

That’s the thing about money. You get enough of it, and you can turn ideology into profit and profit into pain for all those suckers running down warehouse corridors trying to fill package delivery quotas by pissing in Coke cans and water bottles. Add some cosmetic surgery, a few personal trainers, and a 417-foot yacht, and you’ve got the new American dream, man, abs and all.

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. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.



Thanks, Chief Justice! How Trump Plans To Defy Court Orders With Impunity

Thanks, Chief Justice! How Trump Plans To Defy Court Orders With Impunity

Easy: He’s going to use John Roberts’ gift of presidential immunity and his power to issue pardons granted by the Constitution.

Friends, we have arrived at a place that I think it's safe to say the founders never contemplated. Donald Trump has crafted for himself a form of absolute rule by twisting the rule of law the founders thought they were writing into the Constitution. The rule of law establishes a set of boundaries outlining what is permissible and what is not for our government. The Constitution sets it up this way: the Congress passes bills; the president signs the bills into law and is sworn to make sure that the laws are faithfully executed; the courts interpret the laws and either uphold or overturn them.

We should have been paying closer attention on the night of January 20th when Trump pardoned the nearly 1,600 insurrectionists who were convicted of committing crimes in his name on January the 6th, 2021. What Trump did with the stroke of a pen amounted to what his so-called border czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News this morning: “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”

He was talking about the administration’s open defiance of a federal judge’s court order on Saturday night that attempted to stop the deportation of more than 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members. Judge James E. Boasberg told the lawyer for the Department of Justice if the alleged gang members were being deported by plane, that the planes should be turned around and the deportees returned to American soil until he could sort out whether Trump's actions under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 are legal.

In a hearing late this afternoon, the DOJ lawyer refused repeatedly to answer questions from the judge about the deportation flights on Saturday night, saying he wasn't authorized to reveal details because of national security.

The movement of the Venezuelan migrants, whose heads were shaved and were attired in white pajama-like shorts and shirts, was all over Fox News and other conservative outlets almost in real time, and clips of the deportees being loaded onto and taken out of planes were shown repeatedly on television news today. So, the national security claim of the DOJ lawyer was bogus on its face, because the Trump administration made no attempt whatsoever to hide what it was doing or how.

Judge Boasberg gave the DOJ lawyer until noon tomorrow to come up with an answer to one of the judge’s questions that the lawyer refused to respond to today, namely what time on Saturday that the Department of Justice believes the judge’s order went into effect. Establishing that time is necessary for the judge to determine whether the Trump administration defied his order, which would subject anyone involved in the defiance to a contempt citation by the judge.

There was a bunch of back and forth between the judge and the DOJ lawyer this afternoon, with the lawyer asserting that the judge’s order only went into effect when he put it in writing, and not when he issued it orally from the bench earlier.

None of this is ad hoc. Trump clearly set out to defy the order of this judge, and he will defy any others he disagrees with. White House officials have told reporters that they want this case or another one to end up before the Supreme Court, where they think they will win.

It is apparent that Trump plans to take the position that the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity allows him to do anything he wants so long as it is an official presidential act. Trump will contend that anyone acting on his orders is protected by his presidential immunity, and if any court, including the Supreme Court, says otherwise, Trump will pardon anyone who is found to have broken the law or is declared in contempt of court. In an authoritarian state, contempt for the law comes down from the top, and that is exactly where we find ourselves today.

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. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.



Cui Bono? How Trump Is Dismantling Our National Security Institutions

Cui Bono? How Trump Is Dismantling Our National Security Institutions

I keep reading this story that's going around about a former KGB officer from Kazakhstan who wrote on Facebook that Trump was recruited as a Russian asset during a visit to Moscow in1987. An entire substructure of facts and rumors and speculation has swirled around Trump and Russia ever since the day in Florida in 2016 that Trump uttered his infamous “Russia if you're listening” remark at a press conference urging Russia to look into, you guessed it, Hillary's emails.

Then there was the Mueller Report that, while failing to come up with a provable conspiracy between Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign, certainly established that Trump was the beneficiary of an all-out effort by Russia to aid in his election. Mueller was even able to indict Russian intelligence officers and civilians working for the Russian government who either interfered actively in the election for Trump or aided him by flooding social media with fake news and Russian propaganda.

But you don't have to go back to the Mueller Report or take the time out of your day to peruse the Steele dossier to ask yourself these questions: What the hell is Trump doing now, and who benefits? The Latin phrase for “who benefits,” cui bono, should probably be engraved on his headstone right beneath his name when the time comes, because of the executive orders that he issues practically every time he opens his mouth.

Most recently, on Friday, Trump issued an executive order cancelling all funding for the US Agency for Global Media, which the Washington Post describes as “the parent agency of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio and TV Marti, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and the Open Technology Fund, which works to circumvent internet censorship.” The White House press release explaining its defunding of the Voice of America alleged that VOA has been spreading lies and “radical propaganda.”

The Post reports that the “VOA and its affiliates reach 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week,” including countries with regimes that severely limit the access of their own populations to media that is not under the control of their governments, like China, Russia, Iran, Hungary, Belarus, Cuba, and Venezuela. The current VOA director, Michael J. Abramowitz, posted on Saturday on Facebook, “I learned this morning that virtually the entire staff of Voice of America — more than 1300 journalists, producers and support staff — has been placed on administrative leave today. So have I.”

According to Max Boot, a conservative columnist for the Post, Abramowitz was until last year the president of a thing called Freedom House, which Boot identifies as “one of the oldest and most respected human rights organizations in the world.” Freedom House is among a constellation of organizations that had their funding either eliminated or severely cut when Trump had his henchman, Elon Musk, go after the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Among the other groups that were defenestrated at the same time was the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-governmental organization that is funded privately and in part by an act of Congress. The NED runs the Network of Democracy Research Institutes, the Journal of Democracy, the World Movement for Democracy, the Center for International Media Assistance. If those groups sound like they might be CIA fronts, it's because in addition to their do-gooder work for democracy around the world, they are.

USAID has also been used by the CIA as a front for gathering intelligence internationally. Certainly, USAID has done a lot of good around the world, feeding people who are starving in nations in the midst of civil war, working to prevent AIDS and treat AIDS patients with drugs that poor nations cannot provide for their citizens, and digging wells in arid regions where there is no clean water.

That's the thing about doing good works: when you hand out food to people who are hungry and drugs to people who suffer from disease and provide them with water that doesn’t make them sick, they tend to be willing to tell you things they wouldn't otherwise reveal to strangers. So, the CIA has used some USAID workers as both informal and formal intelligence agents over the years.

The NED has been used in much the same way. They've sent people to democracy conferences and meetings of groups promoting democracy in foreign nations where democracy is in its infancy or endangered. They make friends with people working for NGO's and for domestic political organizations. That's the way you collect intelligence. You make friends. You get people to talk to you. You talk to people who have been places where Americans aren't welcome. You make friends with people who live in dangerous areas where Americans working for our government simply don't want to go. Doing all of this, you gather information, rumors, names of people who might be working for countries unfriendly to us, like Russia and China, who are doing the same thing we are doing -- using front organizations to gather information for their own purposes.

This kind of stuff has been going on for decades and virtually defines the way the Cold War was fought between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and '60s and '70s and '80s. The U.S. used fronts like the National Student Association to gather information from countries in Eastern Europe and from countries in Asia that did business with China when we had no diplomatic relations with that country. A decent case could be made that at least in part we won the Cold War with the Soviet Union with some of the front organizations funded by and run by the CIA back in the day.

We're still gathering information about Russia and China and what they're doing not only in their own countries but overseas and in countries over which they seek influence. The VOA not only provided information through its broadcasts to countries with despotic regimes, reporters from the VOA gathered information that they didn't put on the air but shared with American intelligence agencies that were interested in what they knew about what was going on in countries not friendly to the United States.

Here is a story about how the gears in the intelligence business turn overseas. In the late 70s, I became friendly with a man in the movie business who ran a company that provided something called film completion bonds to motion picture companies. Nearly every movie that's made is a separate corporation, even if it's funded by one of the major studios, but especially if its funding comes from a consortium of various sources like wealthy individuals, film institutes from foreign countries, and other sources. People are reluctant to invest in movies unless there is some kind of guarantee that the movie they've put money into will get made. A film completion bond is a form of insurance that that will happen. The typical bond insures that at least one print of the movie will be made and shown in at least one motion picture theater for paying customers.

My friend's name was Sidney Kaufman, and he had a very interesting background. He had been a White House liaison to the OSS during World War II, and after the war in Europe he continued to work in intelligence gathering through his connections with the film industry in European countries. During that time, he got to know the two men who produced the first nine James Bond movies, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. The office in New York he let me use actually belonged to Broccoli and Saltzman. Through Kaufman, I learned how those two guys who owned the James Bond franchise made so much money.

The Bond movies did extremely well in this country of course, but it was overseas where the big money was, because they were huge there. The problem was foreign distribution, which was known to be a total scam. The way it worked was, you sold the rights to show a film in a foreign country, for which you received an advance payment against a percentage of the box office sales. The problem was that they lied about how much money they took in from your film, and there was no way to prove their lies so you could collect your money.

Broccoli and Saltzman had intelligence contacts with the Mossad in Israel. They made a deal with the Mossad to use its agents to surveil movie theaters when the first James Bond movie opened overseas. The agents would position themselves outside box offices and use one of those little thumb clickers to count the number of people who walked into showings of the film. This was done in cities all over Europe, India, Japan -- anywhere the James Bond films were showing, which was everywhere. When it came time for Broccoli and Saltzman to collect their percentage of the box office totals, the foreign distributors of course lied to them about how many tickets they had sold.

But Broccoli and Saltzman had actual figures from individual movie theaters, courtesy of the Mossad, and they could use those figures to extrapolate by the number of theaters owned by the distributors and determine estimated totals of their box office take. They demanded their money, and the foreign distributors laughed at them, until Broccoli and Saltzman told them they owned the entire James Bond film franchise and they would be making many more movies, and those distributors wouldn't get even one of them unless they paid up now.

They paid, and Broccoli and Saltzman got rich, and the Mossad got its cut too.

Take the motion picture theater box office receipts, and substitute information, and insert for Mossad the people working for USAID and the NED and the World Movement for Democracy and the Center for International Media Assistance, and all the rest of the quasi-autonomous non-governmental and yet very much governmental organizations used by the CIA, and you get a pretty good picture of how intelligence gathering works, or has worked, at least until Donald Trump and Elon Musk came along and started disassembling these elaborate networks that have been used for information gathering and influencing foreign governments for decades.

Cui bono? Do you think for a moment that Vladimir Putin's Russia has retired any of its non-governmental intelligence gathering networks? They haven't even tried to hide the assistance they provided to Trump in his election campaign last year. In fact, one of Putin's pals was quoted saying that Trump owes them: "To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” That little jewel of a quote came from Nikolai Patrushev, a member of Putin’s inner circle and former Secretary of the Russian Security Council.

So, who benefits from Trump's deconstruction of these U.S. intelligence networks, both official and non-official? We know he put a certifiable loon in charge of U.S. intelligence overall as head of the national office of intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who has been unapologetic about her admiration for both Russia and Vladimir Putin, and her belief that there's absolutely nothing wrong with Russia's invasion of its neighbor, Ukraine.

There is something of a question in my mind about how much Trump really understands about the damage he's done to American intelligence by doing away with USAID and the NED and now the VOA and the rest of our foreign broadcasting networks like Radio Liberty. But it doesn't really matter what he knows because the damage he's done is right there for everyone to see. They took the name of USAID off its headquarters building, for crying out loud. Certainly the thousands of USAID employees here in the United States and overseas who have been fired are not benefiting from Trump and Musk and their tossing away of decade after decade of good works that has done around the world.

What you might call the secret history of the secret history of the way the United States collects intelligence is not widely known in this country, but you can be sure of one thing: it is known to Vladimir Putin and his henchmen in Russia, and it is known to Xi Jinping in China, and it's known to the other countries who are, if not our enemies, at least very much not our friends.

Cui bono? Not you and me and our fellow citizens, but I'd be willing to bet that Donald Trump has figured out a way to fatten his own wallet from all the damage he has done to the foreign policy and national security interests of this country.

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. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter

Goodbye, Experience And Wisdom: America Will Miss You

Goodbye, Experience And Wisdom: America Will Miss You

I well remember what it felt like to be 27 years old. Boy, was I a hot shot. I was coming off as a series of real scoops and victories writing for The Village Voice newspaper in New York City. As the saying goes, I was making a name for myself. I had spent a year on the Bebe Rebozo beat of the Watergate story which had recently ended in the resignation and final disgrace of Richard Nixon. I'm not saying that anything I wrote contributed to that grand event, but just being a part of it felt like being a witness to history.

At the same time I was covering Nixon’s gangster pal Rebozo in Florida, I was returning to New York to write a series of stories for the Voice about a scandal in the city buildings department. Scams involving empty apartment buildings on the Lower East Side had corrupted building inspectors and real estate paper pushers up to and including the city's Buildings Commissioner. I'd been after him for more than a year, and although he was never criminally indicted, he had been forced to resign, and my stories had gotten me on the Channel 5 10:00 news again and again.

It was heady stuff. The Village Voice had been bought by New York magazine that year, and the paper’s new editor, Clay Felker, somehow came up with the idea that there was going to be a war in the Middle East and decided to send me over there to Israel to cover it. See what I mean about riding high? By the fall of 1974, it felt like nothing could stop me.

I needed a passport to make the trip overseas, so I went up to Rockefeller Center to the passport office and filled out my application. There was only one problem: I didn't have a birth certificate proving that I was a United States citizen. I had been born in Japan right after World War II, and the army of occupation wasn't prepared with stuff like birth certificates for American babies born overseas in what had been a war zone only two years before. What I did have was a Defense Department medical discharge form from the field hospital in which I had been born. It had my mother's name on it, and her date of admission, and then further down on the form it had the discharge order for her and for me, describing yours truly as an infant child and giving my name.

I stood at the passport counter in Rockefeller Center arguing with the clerk, explaining how and why I didn't have an official birth certificate, but he wasn't buying it. It was looking like I wasn't going to be able to get a passport without some sort of intervention by a member of Congress or the like, and I didn't have the time to organize such an influence campaign before the war Felker had assigned me to cover was expected to begin.

Just then a guy passed by behind the counter and overheard our argument. He told the clerk I was working with to hold on for a minute and called loudly into a back room, “Hey Herman, get out here. I've got something I want you to see.” A man in his 60s appeared wearing one of those green plastic eye shades and garters around his shirt sleeves above the elbows like a character out of a movie from the 40s.

He took my Department of Defense hospital discharge form and studied it for a moment. “I haven't seen one of these in 20 years,” he said. He pointed to my name at the bottom of the form. “Is this you?” I said yes, and he turned to the clerk and explained to him why the form was valid as a proof of birth, pointing out that I had not been admitted, but I was being discharged, proving that I had been born in the interim.

He told the clerk he would handle my passport application, lifted one of those pass throughs in the counter and took me to an office in the back, and within a half hour, I walked out with my passport, and the next day I was on a plane to the Middle East.

That guy had both experience and wisdom. He knew what a DD Form 204, or whatever it was, looked like, and he knew what it meant. That guy, and people like him in departments across the government, along with their experience and wisdom are what is being lost every day in Washington DC right now, as Elon Musk and his people, some of whom are quite literally teenagers, wreak their havoc on the bureaucracy they call the deep state. You damn right it's deep, and in the case of passport offices, it really is the state, as in State Department.

The damage goes even deeper, with reports that Musk and Trump plan to slash the Social Security Administration (SSA) workforce by 12 percent, some 7,000 federal employees, and close offices around the country. Former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley told Rolling Stone today that the “cuts will result in widespread failures, including checks not being distributed to some of the 73 million Americans who receive Social Security benefits.” Closures of local offices will make it more difficult for people to apply for benefits and to get problems solved when they come up.

Musk is cutting this important and essential part of our government the same way he went after the workforce at Twitter when he took over that company, firing people willy nilly and then rehiring them when systems started to fail and parts of Twitter shut down.

But of course Social Security isn't Twitter. It's a lifeline for senior citizens, especially those with no other retirement income, for whom a missed check could mean not making the rent or eating. The same is true for other parts of the government. There are reports that the chaos created by Musk and his teams of tech wizards has left farmers unable to plan for the amount of seeds they'll need for planting, or even the kinds of crops that they should plant this year. Farmers, being famously unable to count on the weather, depend on local Department of Agriculture offices to help them apply for loans and other programs that cover crop losses from extreme weather and other problems farmers face as a matter of course in their business.

You don't have to get dirt on your boots, or even wear boots, to understand this stuff. The workers in the federal government who help the elderly with their Social Security are not themselves old, nor are Agriculture Department field offices staffed by people who are farmers. They are instead office workers, the people that Steve Bannon, and Elon Musk, and Stephen Miller, and the rest of the right-wing maniacs denigrate as part of the bureaucracy they call bloated, and that Trump continually lies is full of people who don't even show up for work but collect paychecks nevertheless.

It's hard to put into words how dangerous what is happening every day in Washington, D.C. is right now. Reporters are getting quotes from people who have been laid off and are worried about making their mortgages, and there have been reports of food aid to foreign countries rotting in warehouses because of Trump's suspension of foreign aid and wholesale firings of workers for USAID both here in the United States and overseas.

Cuts in the FDA and the National Institutes of Health are already affecting programs to track the spread of disease, and they have even gone after offices that plan for the eventuality of new disease outbreaks including pandemics. And that doesn't even address the fact that one of Trump's first executive orders was to pull this country out of the World Health Organization which is involved in disease prevention and health care all over the world.

Expertise and experience and the wisdom that comes with both is being thrown out with the trash every day by Elon Musk and Donald Trump and the rest of these fools who apparently think they will never need help in their own lives. Musk is even said to want to cut the number of air traffic controllers working for the FAA. You would think that with the amount of time he and Trump and their pals spend flying in private planes and now, government aircraft as well, that they would be hiring instead of firing the people charged with keeping air travel safe.

Saturday Night Live has done a fantastic job with their cold openings featuring Mike Meyers as Musk, James Austin Johnson as Trump, and Marcello Hernández as a whimpering Rubio. However, nobody ever did but noooooooo better than John Belushi, and boy do we need him now.

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. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter

Why I'm Not Commenting Every Time Trump And His Stooges Troll Us

Why I'm Not Commenting Every Time Trump And His Stooges Troll Us

Donald Trump sure has been spending a lot of time trolling the libs and throwing red meat to his base. That's what most of the executive orders were about, that's what his appointment of Elon Musk as Capo de Tutti Capo Destructamundo amounted to, and that's what nearly every one of his cabinet appointments were.

Now he's engaged in rolling out a daily menu of outrages guaranteed to get under the skin of Democrats and liberals. Yesterday he appointed Walt Nauta to the Board of Visitors of the Naval Academy, essentially the group of officials who meet quarterly to oversee the Academy. Nauta is Trump’s former body man whose main job during his last term was to respond with a Diet Coke every time Trump pressed the special red button on his desk.

You will also remember Nauta as one of those indicted along with Trump in the classified documents case for having hidden a stash of Trump's secrets from lawyers for the DOJ when they showed up at Mar a Lago to seize stolen documents from him. Nauta served in the Navy for 20 years as a steward’s mate, essentially a servant on a naval vessel for the ship's officers. Trump also appointed to the Board of Visitors Sean Spicer, his former and very short-lived press spokesman who went on to an equally short-lived television career on Dancing with the Stars.

These are of course not serious appointments, although I guess a case could be made for a former enlisted man to be appointed to oversee the Naval Academy, since most of those who have served in that position have been corporate presidents or other so-called “distinguished” Americans from positions of wealth and privilege. The same sort of backhanded logic would apply to Spicer whose time as White House spokesman was marred by lies he regularly told on orders from Trump. Why shouldn't the world's top liar have one of his sub-liars represent him on one of the Academy’s Boards of Visitors?

It was also announced that Trump has appointed Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host, to the board of the Kennedy Center, along with the anchor of one of the shows on Fox Business, Maria Bartiromo, who happened to interview Trump on a show that ran this morning. Outrage among the major domos of the D.C. art scene was immediate and predictable. But again, why shouldn't Trump be able to appoint whoever he wants to the Kennedy Center, even if they are people whose taste we might consider questionable or nonexistent? The jokes flew online today about who might now receive Kennedy Center honors. Billy Joel and Joan Baez and Philip Glass have had their turns. Shouldn’t rank mediocrity be celebrated along with greatness? Why not Kid Rock and Ted Nugent and Jeff Foxworthy?

There's nothing but upside for Trump trolling us every chance he gets. His base loves it, we hate it, and there's no good way for us to complain about it without looking like elitist snobs, which is exactly the way he wants us to look. So, I'm going to try not to rise to the bait of his trolling, although I'm sure there will be times when I can't resist. The truly bad stuff he's doing to Ukraine, to the NIH and the CDC and USAID is already costing lives, and that's where our attention and efforts should be. He's a master at distraction, but it won't work if we refuse to pay attention.

So, I'm not going to comment on this shit from Trump. Mostly anyway.

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. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Musk And Trump Have Already Imposed The MAGA Coup d'Etat

Musk And Trump Have Already Imposed The MAGA Coup d'Etat

Elon Musk had a lunch with Republican Senators on Wednesday, followed by a meeting with House Republicans in the evening to discuss concerns the lawmakers had with complaints they've been getting from constituents about some of Musk’s cuts to government programs they hadn’t seen coming. Musk handled the situation by giving out his phone number and telling Republicans they could call him with any complaints they had about what his DOGE team has been doing out of sight of the public.

The Washington Post reported on the two meetings between Musk and Republicans as if they are the normal course of business in this new era when the Congress, given the power of the purse in Article I of the Constitution, has sat back and watched an unelected multi-billionaire seize their constitutional authority and do with it what he wants.

Listen to this little gem.“Some senators were given Musk’s phone number during Wednesday’s meeting, and the entrepreneur said he would ‘create a system where members of Congress can call some central group’ to get problematic cuts reversed quickly,” the Post reported yesterday. “Musk told members of the House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee that he would set up a similar line of communication for them to reach his team,” the Post story continued in matter of fact prose, as if meetings between billionaires and lawmakers to hash out what to do with the public monies have been happening since the Republic's founding.

Okay, let's take a moment and examine what's going on here. First of all, the meetings Musk had yesterday were with Republicans only. The Post used the title “House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee” as if this thing had existed forever, and it is just an acceptable fact of life in the new Washington D.C. that the committee has only Republican members, or at least that only Republicans matter on Capitol Hill, and certainly only Republicans rate a meeting with the wizard behind the curtain that is running things these days.

The Post also reported that Musk “urged Congress to codify the cuts his group is making unilaterally, telling lawmakers that he realized that the cuts are not permanent if they are not made into law.” The Yale Law School-educated senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, was good enough to confirm Musk’s understanding of constitutional law, telling the Post, “He said unless Congress takes action on this, none of it is permanent.”

Got that? Hawley had to be told by Elon Musk, not Article I of the Constitution, that the Congress has the power to appropriate money and establish the departments of government that are authorized to spend the citizens’ taxpayer dollars in ways that the Congress directs. Boy, am I glad that good old fist-in-the-air Hawley got at least that much straightened out before Musk moves forward with the rest of the disassembly of the government which Hawley's branch nominally controls by providing the funds to run it.

Rather than make his changes by what we might quaintly call regular order, Donald Trump with his addiction to chaos decided that he would take apart all at once the government he was elected to head as the executive. He could have taken his time and done it by proposing legislation to eliminate the Department of Education, as it was reported yesterday that he intends to do by executive order, or put forth legislation to change the number of people employed by the Department of Veterans Affairs, rather than just have Musk and his teenage ninja warriors do it for him with a post on Musk’s social media site X announcing firings of 80,000 VA employees.

What Trump has done is to essentially launch a coup to seize control of the government by administrative fiat with a series of executive orders and utterly illegal closures of entire governmental departments like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being treated by the media and by Congress as a fait accompli, even though a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order, backed up by the Supreme Court, ordering the reinstatement of all the foreign aid monies that USAID and other departments administered according to laws passed by Congress.

So, what we're confronted with is an ongoing administrative coup that is being challenged by lawsuits, and at least in some cases stopped by court decisions. In the meantime, the toothless Republicans in Congress who have turned over their constitutional responsibilities to an unelected civilian, have begun hearing from their constituents that they are not all-in with the firing of the guy down the street who has worked for 15 years at the VA, or the closure of the Social Security office that has answered their questions and handled their complaints since the day they turned 65 and became eligible for the meager benefits they spent their working lives earning the right to receive.

The Washington Post quoted a couple of congressmembers and senators expressing reluctance to go along with Elon Musk’s plan for them to codify in law the raping he is doing to the federal government and its employees. Here is where that quaint idea about regular order comes into play. The way Congress operates when it is not frozen by Republican fear of and obeisance to their dear leader Donald Trump is to bring forth bills, and put them through the process of hearings by relevant committees, during which public testimony can be heard and debate can be engaged in before the bills come to the floor of the House and the Senate for votes.

Here's the problem with that old-fashioned way of doing things: The votes taken by members of the House and the Senate would put Republicans on the record as having voted to, say, slash the budget of the VA, or eliminate the Department of Education that was providing funding for rural schools in their districts as well as the money to fund educational programs and facilities for disabled children. Who wants to take those votes?

We're starting to get the answer to that question with yesterday's story in the Post reporting on Republicans basically getting down on their knees and begging the richest man in the world to tell them what he's doing with the money they appropriated to pay for things like agricultural subsidies, Social Security offices, VA hospitals, and Medicaid, a federal program which the New York Times reports covers 70 million of our fellow citizens.

These are not small matters. The money that Trump and Musk are ripping out of the National Institute for Health, the CDC, the FDA, and the Department of Agriculture is our tax dollars that we paid to the IRS so that responsible custodians would take care that our money went to pay for programs that we voted for by electing our representatives to Congress to do our bidding.

This process of electing people to the congressional and executive branches of our government is what the founders wrote into the Constitution to carry out the will of the people. Remember that old phrase we learned in junior high, that ours is “a government of the people, for the people, and by the people?” Well, those words no longer describe our government so long as Elon Musk is running amok in Washington D.C. carrying out the executive orders of Donald Trump. That's why we're starting to hear reports of people saying, “Hey, I didn't vote for that!”

No, they didn't vote for a lot of the stuff that's being done in their name, and that's what a coup is: a small number of people seizing power that wasn't given to them by the democratic process that is supposed to run things in this country. The Republican Party in the person of members of the House and the Senate is sitting by while Trump and Musk shred the Constitution they all swore on a Bible to uphold and defend when they took the offices they were elected to. Unless and until these spineless Republicans decide to uphold their oaths and do their jobs, the coup will continue to erode our representative democracy and turn this country into an authoritarian dictatorship. That's where we're at in the the alleged United States of America on March 7, 2025.

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. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com -- from which this is reprinted with permission -- and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Follow The Money: How His Million-Dollar Mar-A-Lago Dinners Enrich Trump

Follow The Money: How His Million-Dollar Mar-A-Lago Dinners Enrich Trump

The fluttering you are hearing in early March of this year is not the wings of finches and sparrows and chickadees returning to your bird feeder after a long winter away from the cold. It is instead the sound of millions of dollars flying into the pockets of Donald Trump, who Wired magazine reports is holding so-called “candlelight dinners” for groups at the low low price of $1 million per head. If instead you want a private audience over burned steaks and limp fries with the president of the United States, you have to plunk down five million bucks, a tasty opportunity that is being signed up for by “business leaders,” according to Wired.

It's notable that these pay-to-play repasts are not being held in the White House -- which is after all a public building owned by the American taxpayer and not an event space that you can rent out at will -- either because they didn't pass the smell test of the White House counsel's office or it would be too unseemly even for the loosey-goosey standards of the Trump White House.

Instead, the chummy private dinners are being held at Trump's club/resort/residence in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago. The fluttering bucks are not going directly into the pocket of the renowned grifter and cheapskate, but rather taking a detour into something called MAGA Inc., described by Wired as “a super PAC that supported Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.” What a campaign super PAC is doing still operating in the public sphere after the election is over is unknown. Sources told Wired that the money is “all going to the library.” If your reaction to that little nugget is Library? What fucking library? you're not alone.

The money Trump rakes in from the suckers who think they're buying access, when what they're actually getting is rubber chicken, will pass through the Byzantine accounts of one of the several Trump super PACs that came into being as he planned his return to the Oval Office. He might skim some off as admin charges, or he might make use of the capacious pockets of his sons and daughters whom he “hired” to work in various capacities in his reelection effort, who then passed their paychecks directly into the Trump Organization.

But it's a certainty that a massive quantity of dough he takes in will be charged as rent for space in Mar-a-Lago, and thence be transmitted directly to Trump himself as sole owner of that garish galump-zone squatting in tattered splendor between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Worth Lagoon.

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. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com -- from which this is reprinted with permission -- and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Worse Than You Thought: Trump Is Shaking Down Zelensky For Billions

Worse Than You Thought: Trump Is Shaking Down Zelensky For Billions

Over the weekend I tried to think of another time in our history when our president publicly excoriated one of our allies for his losses on the battlefield in an ongoing war, in fact telling him that his country was losing. Not only could I not think of it happening in our own country, I couldn't think of a time when such a thing happened in the rest of the world.

I'm speaking of the disgusting display in the Oval Office last Friday when Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, whose professed belief in the Christian religion might lead you to think that he would have some sensitivity to the idea of being charitable to others, sat there surrounded by Republican sycophants and the stenographers of the national media, and laid into the beleaguered president of Ukraine as if he were not an ally but an enemy of the United States. I'm not going to quote from the lies and Russian propaganda repeated by the president and his vice president, because that's what they want us to do. The mainstream media called the televised event an ambush, and although I was reluctant to agree with them at the time it happened, I have since come around in the way I look at it.

The audience for the invective they hurled wasn’t President Volodymyr Zelensky, its putative target. It was instead Vladimir Putin, thousands of miles away, and the MAGA faithful watching their televisions, perma-tuned to Fox News. They weren't trying to get the president of Ukraine to go along with their insane fantasies, other than Trump's obsession with making a “deal” for Ukraine’s rare metal treasures.

Trump was back at it on Monday, with a full court press on Zelensky to come back to the table. He had his national security adviser, Mike Waltz on Fox News telling Zelensky to “express regret” in order to get back on Trump's good side. "The American people's patience is not unlimited, their wallets are not unlimited, and our stockpiles and munitions are not unlimited," Waltz threatened. "So the time to talk is now."

Trump himself chaired a meeting at the White House with Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and of course his lap puppy Vance, where he decided to “suspend” military aid to Ukraine. He also held a press availability to personally put pressure on Zelensky. After what we saw in the Oval Office on Friday, it seemed a turn around for Trump. He went on and on about how terrible it is that tens of thousands, no “hundreds of thousands of boys” are dying over there. Trump has made no secret of his affection and closeness to Vladimir Putin. He could pick up the phone tonight and call Putin and put the pressure where it belongs, on the president of Russia who has prosecuted three years of aggression against Ukraine, and urge him to stop the killing.

We know that Trump doesn't give a shit how many “boys” are dying in Ukraine. So, what does he care about?

Somebody has whispered in Trump's ear about Ukraine’s riches in rare metals. We don't know who did the whispering -- it could have been Elon Musk, or Sam Altman, both of whom have billions in holdings in their artificial intelligence companies, xAI and OpenAI, but somebody did. Bloomberg, whose business it is to pay attention to business, not international relations or wars, got it right on Trump's recent statements about Ukraine: “Trump Doesn’t Think Ukraine Minerals Deal is Dead.”

Don't you think that's a little peculiar? The Oval Office clusterfuck on Friday and the White House meeting today were supposedly about ending the war in Ukraine. But two days later a different picture has emerged. Ending that war isn’t about stopping the violence and the body count of “dead boys” Trump professes to be so concerned about. It's about the mineral deal with Ukraine.

Trillions will be made on the rare earth minerals essential for the next growth spurt in technology, artificial intelligence, and Trump wants a piece of the action. His credo, for the entirety of his life, has been: What's in it for me? He has made it clear he realizes that he made a mistake the first time around as president. He didn't take enough for himself. He's not going to make that mistake this time. The president is not subject to the ethics rules that control everyone else in the government, and his Supreme Court has given him a get out of jail free card to do whatever he wants while he's in office.

Trump wants a deal with Zelensky for the rights to Ukraine's rare earth minerals. Not only will such a deal put billions in the pockets of his buddies Musk and Altman, he has clearly figured a way to put billions in his own pockets. Probably the only person who understands why Trump is trying so hard to end the war in Ukraine is the man who started it, his pal Putin, who knows only too well the riches that have existed under the ground across his border in Ukraine. He wants them as badly as Trump does, which is why he hasn't just thrown up his arms and said let's get this thing over with.

It's why he is spending the lives of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of billions in military equipment that he's running out of to take incrementally smaller and smaller pieces of the Donbass in what are beginning to look like the waning days of the war. Why else sacrifice so much blood and treasure for such small gains?

Like every other war in history, it turns out that this one is all about money. If Putin were to take Ukraine, he would have yet another natural resource to sell on the world market. Natural resources are the entirety of Russia's economy. Their oil and gas is increasingly more difficult to extract, but Putin knows that all you have to do to get rare minerals is dig them out of the ground.

Both Trump and Putin are avaricious to the bottoms of their black little souls. Putin built himself a 200,000 square foot mansion in Crimea, and he has made himself president for life of Russia. Donald Trump just announced that he wants to build a ballroom “just like Mar-a-Lago” in the White House, and has been dangling the possibility of running for a third term in front of his MAGA faithful every chance he gets.

Donald Trump's favorite thing about being president is that walk he takes across the South Lawn of the White House to his waiting helicopter that takes him to his waiting Air Force One that flies him down to Mar-a-Lago to play golf and bathe in the adulation of his club members who gather around him on the patio as he chows down on his well-done steak and quaffs Diet Coke. Lately he permitted someone to leak his impatience with the progress Boeing is making to supply him with a new Air Force One. He is reportedly toying with the idea of buying a used gold-plated aircraft from Qatar or some other gulf state and retrofitting it into an Air Force One more befitting the potentate he sees himself as.

Trump is even reported to take informal polls of those flying with him to Florida asking them which aircraft they like better: his own gold-plated 757 he calls Trump Force One, or the plain vanilla craft supplied to him by the federal government, Air Force One. His minions vote reliably for his garish private plane.

Trump is in love with with the trappings of office because they don’t cost him a cent, and as ever, he's obsessed with measuring who has the biggest dick in billions.

It turns out that the real reason Trump and Vance belittled and pressured Zelensky on Friday was so that Donald Trump can get even richer than he already is. His anger at the president of Ukraine isn't that he wasn't obsequious enough, although that would have helped, but that he won't agree to a deal fast enough.

I told you it was worse than you thought.

With Trump And RFK Jr., America Faces A Deadly Outbreak Of Disease And Lies

With Trump And RFK Jr., America Faces A Deadly Outbreak Of Disease And Lies

In case you wondered about those empty desks around you at work or why your regular checkout person at the supermarket is missing, we're going through the worst flu season in 15 years, according to the Associated Press, NPR, the National Geographic, and NBC News. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) -- yes, amazingly, their doors are still open -- estimates that as many as 19,000 have died from the flu this season, with 86 of that number being children. There have been at least 900,000 hospitalizations from the flu. Both flu figures have been worse than COVID over this winter.

With flu hospitalizations and deaths at record numbers, it's reasonable to ask what's being done about it other than checking people into emergency rooms and preparing bodies for burial. You could find your answer yesterday in the White House, where Donald “I like my numbers low” Trump held his first cabinet meeting. Remember that one from the early days of COVID?

A few cases had been logged on the West Coast, most of them coming in on flights from China, when it was reported that the deadly virus had broken out on a cruise ship. The number of cases that had been listed so far was something like 15, so Trump ordered the cruise ship to be held at the dock with nobody allowed to debark. “I like my numbers low,” Trump announced, as if keeping people from crossing a gangplank meant that they didn't have to be counted.

A reporter asked the new Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., about the outbreak of measles in western Texas, entirely among unvaccinated children and adults. Kennedy proceeded to tell a string of lies about the number of cases, explaining away hospitalizations for reasons of quarantine, and telling an outright lie about the number who have been hospitalized.

The question could have been about the recent outbreak in severe flu cases, and similar lies would have fallen out of Kennedy's mouth. He lied to the Senate when he was up for confirmation, telling them that he would abide by CDC vaccination guidelines. Two days after he took office, Kennedy ordered that the guidelines be “investigated.”

On Thursday, Kennedy ordered the cancellation of an FDA meeting of a vaccine advisory panel, without explanation. The panel meets every January or February to recommend the flu strains that will be covered by next year's shot. Without the panel's recommendation, drug manufacturers can't start making the flu vaccine. Litjen Tan, co-chair of the flu shot advocacy group the National Adult and Influenza Immunization Summit, told NBC News that manufacturers can wait until late March for the FDA to pick the flu strain for next year, but no longer. Delaying the meeting of the vaccine advisory panel pretty much ensures that the flu vaccine for next fall’s season will not be ready by July or August as it usually is.

Convincing people to get vaccinated is always a struggle, especially after the entirely ginned-up controversy over the COVID vaccine that has infected our politics for the last four years. The number of people vaccinated for the flu this season is seven percent lower than last year, reflecting the vaccine hesitancy that has grown recently. About 45 percent of Americans received the vaccine this season.

Tracy and I were two of them, and glad I was when I was taken to the emergency room in early January suffering the worst symptoms I had ever experienced. Lying in bed at home that night, I couldn't move my arms or legs and thought that I had suffered a stroke or even something worse. It wasn't until the EMT's got here and checked me that a stroke was ruled out. I was astonished when I was got to the emergency room and had a blood test to learn that I had this year's virulent strain of the flu. During my five day stay in the hospital, I learned that people my age with pre-existing conditions were much more likely to die when they hadn't been vaccinated.

More than a hundred deaths from measles, a disease that had been all but eradicated before the anti-vaxxers started spreading their lies about the MMR vaccine. RFK Jr. and his misleadingly-named Children's Defense Fund were among the chief spreaders of the lies about the vaccine that had made measles a thing of the past until they came along. Now Kennedy has predictably started in on the flu vaccine, an entirely non-controversial yearly step taken by many to protect themselves from a seemingly ordinary disease that can kill adults and maim children with brain conditions like encephalitis.

We should have learned last time around what happens when you allow prevaricators and profiteers anywhere near the health of Americans. Remember when Trump put his nephew Jared Kushner in charge of the distribution of hospital scrubs, surgical masks, and even ventilators, and we learned that they were basically auctioning off lifesaving equipment to the highest bidder? Remember when Trump got behind Ivermectin, a veterinary heartworm drug, as a cure for COVID? Just wait. The next thing we're going to be hearing is that the CDC has ordered a study of Ivermectin to test its efficacy as a cure for measles and the flu.

People were dying in the flu ward in the hospital where I was being treated. I would say that I was lucky I wasn't one of them, but luck had nothing to do with it. I got vaccinated, and Tracy didn't listen to me when I told her that calling 911 wasn’t necessary. I spent five days in the hospital and the rest of the month of January recovering from the worst illness I've contracted since I had pneumonia at age 18. I had never been hospitalized for anything other than surgery or a lesser invasive procedure like a stent since the two weeks I spent hospitalized with pneumonia more than five decades ago.

The one good thing that came out of Elon Musk bouncing around the White House cabinet room like a crazed Muppet and RFK Jr. being hit with a question about measles is that their lies were well covered. The news was packed with stories about Kennedy’s measles lies and Musk’s lies about the firings of USAID experts on Ebola during an ongoing outbreak in Africa. It's the one advantage to rule by knaves and buffoons: They're bound to take out their dicks and stomp on them often enough that their lies get noticed.

In the meantime, people will die, just as they did when Trump was driving this country into the ditch during COVID, and now he’s got help from the odious RFK Jr.

Here we go again.

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 -- from which this is reprinted with permission -- and follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.


DOGE With Guns: Blackwater Boss Wants $25 Billion For Army Of Deportation Goons

DOGE With Guns: Blackwater Boss Wants $25 Billion For Army Of Deportation Goons

Politico reported yesterday:

A group of prominent military contractors, including former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, has pitched the Trump White House on a proposal to carry out mass deportations through a network of “processing camps” on military bases, a private fleet of 100 planes, and a “small army” of private citizens empowered to make arrests.

The blueprint — laid out in a 26-page document President Donald Trump’s advisers received before the inauguration — carries an estimated price tag of $25 billion and recommends a range of aggressive tactics to rapidly deport 12 million people before the 2026 midterms.

Okay dear readers, let's leave aside for the moment the obvious grenades concealed in this hare-brained, off-the-surface-of-this-fucking-planet Muskian idea. And let’s ignore that it comes from multimillionaire cowboy Erik Prince, brother of the odious and ignorant Betsy DeVos, the last machete-wielding dim bulb Trump put in charge of the Department of Education in his first term. Let's forget for the time being the criminal record of Blackwater in Iraq, where its contractors in 2007 killed 17 Iraqis and wounded 20 in the infamous Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad; four were convicted of murder and of course later pardoned by Donald Trump.

Instead, let’s do the White House a favor: We will assume that Trump decides to go along with the Erik Prince proposal on the theory that he applies to everything he does as president of the United States, which is figure out right up front how much he can skim from every billion-dollar contract he eyeballs coming down the pike for him to sign.

So let's do the cuckoo clock calculations for this crackers-among-the-synapses plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants who, as of this date, haven't even been located yet. Prince says give me $25 billion and I'll round them up and get them all on planes for Guantanamo or someplace anyway before the midterm elections.

The first math we’ll do is calculate the number of days between now and election day on November 3, 2025, so that we can get started figuring out how many people Erik Prince and his camo cowboys would have to round up every day: 616 days to go. That means every single day they would have to locate, arrest, detain, notify of their rights under relevant immigration law, schedule a hearing before an immigration judge, and then carry out the deportation order for 19,480 undocumented immigrants – if, in fact, they can get a judge to issue such an order. That would be 811 potential deportees every hour, which works out to about 14 human beings a minute.

Prince's proposal contemplates hiring 2,000 attorneys and paralegals just to screen the detained undocumented immigrants before they would be referred to another gang of 2,000 attorneys and paralegals that would represent them. Prince proposes a novel solution to the incredible number of deportees they would have to handle every day: mass deportation hearings. How those would be conducted with even a modicum of due process isn’t explained in the $25 billion Prince proposal, because of course it isn't. There wouldn't be any due process, so they would lose the very first challenge to the whole fucking thing that made it before a judge. And then multiply that out, with more judges and more hearings, and you can see about how successful the entire Erik Prince cowboy clusterfuck is likely to be.

But math and the details and the law and the due process and the hearings don't even scratch the surface of what is truly troubling about Prince’s $25 billion boondoggle.

According to Politico, Prince is proposing a kind of DOGE with guns: “Prince suggests deputizing 10,000 private citizens, including military veterans, former law enforcement officials and retired ICE and CBP officers, giving them expedited training and the same federal law enforcement powers of immigration officials.” Got that? He's going to run a want ad for 10,000 yahoos and issue them 10,000 sets of full camo; 10,000 bulletproof vests, each of which can cost upwards of $700 to $800; 10,000 AR-15 full-automatic rifles costing about $1500 each, because Prince’s yahoos aren't gonna put up with namby pamby semi-auto models, don'tcha know; and they'll of course need 10,000 pairs of Oakley S1 Ballistic Shocktube Tactical Sunglasses at $233 a pop, because what self-respecting Blackwater camo-cowboy would settle for anything less?

You already know from what happened with Blackwater in Iraq what's going to happen on the streets of the good old USA. People are going to get shot by trigger-happy Blackwater hired guns. Most of them will be undocumented immigrants, but it's a virtual certainty that ordinary citizens will be caught up the chaos of arresting and detaining nearly 20,000 people per day.

Prince has assured the Trump White House that there's nothing to worry about. He says they've already got 49 airplanes lined up to carry out the deportations. Let's see…at 19,480 per day, that's 397 deportees per flight. Even the latest version of the Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner holds only 300 to 330 passengers, so unless Erik Prince has managed to lay his hands on a bunch of 747’s and A380’s, he's telling a lie to the Trump White House about how many people he can manage to fly out of the country every day, at least until he comes up with the rest of his 100-plane “fleet.”

But hey! The whole fucking thing is one gigantic scam-o-rama to put megabucks in the pockets of Erik Prince and whoever else he decides to spread the wealth around to.

Does the name Donald Trump sound like a likely candidate?

Not to worry. Co-cowboys like Steve Bannon are already on the case, recommending that Trump jump on the Prince plan. “People want this stood up quickly, and understand the government is always very slow to do things,” Bannon informed Politico, excavating a nugget from his deep store of right-wing political wisdom.

See? We're already halfway there. Steve Bannon gets to say military shit like “stood up” as he's dishing out his expert advice to the White House. That's almost as good as strapping on a vest and grabbing a full-auto AR15 and putting on your $233 Ballistic Shocktube Tactical Sunglasses and getting out there in the street and arresting a few undocumented immigrants yourself, isn't it Stevie?

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.

Discrimination, Merit And The Restoration Of 'White Boy DEI'

Discrimination, Merit And The Restoration Of 'White Boy DEI'

Are you aware of how badly white men are discriminated against and put upon in this country? The only people who suffer an equivalent amount of discrimination are Christians, specifically white Christians, even more specifically white young male Christians. We learned this from our bearded white male Christian Vice President who spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference about how upset he is that “the culture,” as he calls it, hasn’t been fair to the cohort of Americans he comes from and represents, not only as the Vice President, but as a Christian.

JD Vance is very worried about the souls of young white men. You know the ones he's talking about, the young men who have suffered so much discrimination because of their gender and the color of their skin. They have been denied entrance to their chosen Ivy League schools because of affirmative action, and oh how those DEI programs and feminists and gays and lesbians and transsexuals and people of color have made it harder for them to get hired for the good jobs that their dads and grandfathers had back in the day! Vance wants to turn the clock back to the time in this country when young white men didn't have to put up with all that crap, because in those days, they benefitted from white boy DEI.

But no longer, Vance told his adoring audience at CPAC: “Our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge, that you should try to cast aside your family, that you should suppress what makes you a man in the first place. Don’t allow this broke culture to send you a message that you are a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends, or because you’re competitive. The cultural message…and the president’s and mine is the exact opposite…is, it wants to turn everybody, male or female, into androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same, and act the same. We actually think God made male and female for a purpose, and we want you guys to thrive as young men and as young women and we're going to help with our public policy to help you do that.”

And what's the public policy that JD Vance sees coming from the Trump administration? “Whether it's fighting for the unborn or fighting for peace and security for our citizens, I want us to be the kind of society where my kids can grow up to be virtuous young Christians, of course, and that is what our public policy is trying to do, creating the space where moms and dads can raise their children to believe the things that I do.”

What public policy does JD Vance want our government to push?

“I believe the fundamental tenet of the Christian faith is that the Son of God became man, He died, and then He raised himself from the dead,” Vance explained. “I think one lesson that flows from that is that we shouldn’t fear death. Of course, death is a very bad thing, but there are much more terrible things than just losing one’s life. Importantly, you could lose one’s soul.”

Over there across the river at the Pentagon where people have jobs that actually cost them their lives in war, they've got some white boy DEI going on too. Trump fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Q. Brown, who is African American, and replaced him with Air Force Lt. Gen. John Dan “Razin” Caine, who not only has one less star than Brown but is retired. He is, however, white, and as Trump gushed, “is right out of central casting.” A few minutes later, Secretary of Defense Hegseth fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of the Navy, who had the misfortune of being the first woman appointed to be Chief of Naval Operations. Trump had already fired Admiral Linda Fagan, the chief of the Coast Guard, on his second day in office. She was evicted from her quarters with three hours notice.

“Making our military great again means destroying wokeness and firing the generals that promoted it,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN.), a Senate Armed Services Committee member, posted on X. “We must refocus on lethality.”

They don't care about lethality. What they care about is reversing woke with good old fashioned white boy DEI.

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.

Tears For Fears: Our Allies Recall An America That Didn't Promote Nazism

Tears For Fears: Our Allies Recall An America That Didn't Promote Nazism

The Munich Security Conference may as well have been held in the infamous Berlin suburb of Wannsee given the way that our sterling Vice President stepped into the shoes of Reinhardt Heydrich as he told the assembled European security officials that his boss Donald Trump had come up with a solution to what he might as well have called the Ukraine Question: sell 40 million people off to Trump's murderous pal, Vladimir Putin, let him order a great big Bucha and be done with them.

Reports from the conference said the attendees were in shock as Vance told them that they couldn't count on the United States to stand by its NATO treaty obligations in defense of its European allies. Vance might just as well have called out “so long Article 5” to his stunned audience on his way out the door.

It was left to the Security Conference chairman, Christophe Heusgen, to try to make sense of what had just happened. Calling what he had heard from United States spokesmen a “European nightmare,” Heusgen lamented that “This conference started as a transatlantic conference, but after the speech by Vice President Vance on Friday, we must fear that our common value base is not so common anymore.” His voice breaking, the conference chairman could no longer continue. Beginning to cry, he walked away from the podium and embraced his wife in the front row of the audience. The conference attendees, who had begun applauding as Heugsen broke down in tears, fell silent.

Let me tell you why the tears of the Munich Security Conference Chairman did not shock me. It's because Europe is littered from North to South and East to West with the remnants and memories of the war that began 85 years ago and left not a town, not a street, not a building, not a human being untouched by the horrors wreaked upon a continent by one man with his insane prejudices and his army.

We all know of the American cemeteries filled with the white crosses and Stars of David that marked the graves of our fallen and the monuments that commemorate their valor. Our armies crossed an ocean to help conquer the Nazi hordes which sent millions to their deaths in concentration camps and killed millions more with bombs and rockets and artillery and machine guns and rifles. Millions of words have been written trying to make sense of what the Nazis did to the human beings and countries with whom they shared a continent and a history.

But the people who lived through that terrible time and suffered its bloody depredations -- the parents and grandparents of Christoph Heugsen and the other people who listened in abject horror to JD Vance and his threats and lies and the conference attendees themselves -- are all too aware of what happened to their relatives and their towns and their villages not so very long ago.

If you travel outside the typical tourist destinations like Paris and Amsterdam and Brussels and Rome, you will find more than the ruined castles and aqueducts and cathedrals of hundreds and even thousands of years ago. In the tiny village of St. Julien de Crempse in France's Dordogne region, you will find a monument with 45 names of men and boys who were massacred by Nazi soldiers in retaliation for an attack by the resistance on a supply train that was headed north to help reinforce Nazi defenders preparing for the invasion that would later occur at Normandy. A few miles to the north and west, in the town of Mussidan on one of its back streets near the railroad tracks and across from a small bar where men from the town drink beers and glasses of wine when they get off work, you will find another small monument to yet another massacre carried out by the Nazis in retaliation for yet another action by the resistance.

To the south and east of Bergerac, in a small village called Villefranche-du-Perigord, there is another monument commemorating yet another Nazi massacre, and in the nearby village of Mazeyrolles stands a small monument to those who were murdered by the Nazis at a time when drawing a breath as a French man or boy over the age of 10 was considered a crime by the Nazi occupiers.

One day in 1996 when we were driving down the road that ran alongside the Dordogne River on our way to lunch at a favorite restaurant in the next town, we were stopped by the outstretched white gloved hand of a uniformed Gendarme. As traffic piled up behind us, a bus pulled into view from the other direction and disgorged a band wearing French military uniforms. Carrying its instruments, the band marched into the field between the road and the river.

Shortly afterwards, two black Citroen cars pulled off the road across from us. Several Gendarmes wearing their distinctive caps and neatly pressed uniforms and white gloves helped three old men from the cars. They were wearing berets and black suit jackets with rows of medals adorning their chests. Walking with canes and moving very slowly, the old men made their way across the field and stood near the band. They were joined by several civilians wearing suits and ties, as a color guard marched onto the field and stood at attention next to them.

The color guard presented arms and dipped the French Tricolor as the band struck up "La Marseillaise.” One of the old men saluted. The others placed their hands over their hearts. When the band had finished playing the French National Anthem, the civilian officials handed each of the old men a bouquet of flowers which they ceremoniously placed on the ground against a small concrete obelisk. The French civilian officials shook hands with each of the old men, and they stood around talking for a moment, and then the Gendarmes escorted the old men back to the Citroen cars, and they drove away.

The color guard and the band marched back to the bus and put away their instruments and weapons and flags, and the bus pulled away. The civilian officials got into some other cars and they drove away. Only then did the Gendarme directing traffic allow us to proceed.

Driving back from lunch, we stopped along the roadside and walked into the field to have a look at the obelisk that had been the focus of the events we had witnessed earlier. I couldn't read the worn French inscription, so later that afternoon, I stopped at the Gendarme headquarters to ask them what the ceremony had been about. The desk sergeant went into the back and returned with one of the more senior officers who had been in attendance at the ceremony. He spoke a little English, and I spoke enough French to understand that the ceremony was to commemorate the landing by parachute of the first American OSS agent in that part of France. The old men had been members of the Maquis resistance, and one of them had been the escort who took the OSS man to a nearby farm where he had been hidden. He was there to train the resistance in methods of sabotage that would be used against the Nazi occupiers.

The same ceremony was held in the same field at the obelisk monument on the same day every year, and each time the old men from the resistance were honored for their service to France, and the role played by the Americans in helping to defeat the Nazis was remembered.

That is why the behavior and words of the American Vice President at the Munich Security Conference drew tears. Everyone at the Munich Security Conference knew that in walking away from NATO and taking the side of Russia against Ukraine, Donald Trump and JD Vance had dishonored the legacy and memory of those who had fought the Nazis and stood fast against the Soviet threat during the Cold War, and since then against the same totalitarianism represented by Vladimir Putin who is waging the first war of aggression on European soil since the terrible days of World War II.

Memory is not an academic exercise for our allies in Europe. It's an open wound that will never heal so long as Donald Trump is the President of the United States that is still remembered for having dropped an OSS agent into a field in Southern France to help the Maquis resistance defeat the Nazis.

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.